Moonrise Kingdom:

Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson's new movie, looks amazing. I can't wait!

Sh*t Liz Lemon Says:

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I love:

1. Then Again by Diane Keaton ($17)

2. Gnome Container ($68)

3. Cadiz Mug ($10)

4. Miansai rope bracelet ($68)

5. Suede ankle boots ($116)

Happy Weekend:

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What are you up to this weekend? A and I plan on filling our days with books, warm blankets, and great food. If the weather isn't too bad, we might sneak in a bike ride or two. Here's hoping!

New Reads:

Right now, I’m reading Interview with a Vampire by Ann Rice. Yes, it was one of A’s birthday presents, but he’s already read (!) it so I picked it up last night after finishing my previous book.

As this book was written in 1976, most of you have probably read it. But on the off chance you haven’t, here is the basic plot summary:

"The time is now. We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks -- as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead...

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently... carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir -- young, romantic, cultivated-- to a great Louisiana plantation, and was introduced by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless" life... learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings... to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him...

We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire -- all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child -- and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of sudden, stolen opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court... night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death -- a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below...

We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others life themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their futures can be...

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imaginings... to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them into the doors of the Theatre des Vampires, the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within... to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled...

In an unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, loyalty and treachery, as vampires are created, destroyed, avenged, and "remade", as vampire worlds are summoned up in all their evil and frightening enchantment -- the sensuous power, the profound feeling, the wit and verisimilitude of Ann Rice's narrative announce a literary imagination of the first order."

It’s odd and a complete departure from what I usually read, but I’m hoping to get some exposure to the sci-fi/fantasy genre (or attempting, at least). So far, it’s interesting to me.

So, if you’re keeping count, this is the 4^th out of the 56 books that I pledged to read this year. So far, the list reads as follows:

1. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? By Mindy Kaling
2. Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume by Jennifer O’Connell
3. The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray
4. Interview with a Vampire by Ann Rice

30 Rock:

It's here. It's finally here. The season 6 premiere of 30 Rock. Tonight at 8/7 C on NBC. Watch it. It's going to be fabulous

New Reads:

For Christmas, Andrew got me a copy of Mindy Kaling’s (you know her, the Indian girl from the Office and blogger on theconcernsofmindykaling.com) new book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns).

Like Tina Fey’s BossyPants, this book is funny. Really funny. While I didn’t like it as much as I liked BossyPants (I don’t like Mindy Kaling as much as I like Tina Fey – sorry Mindy, no one is better than Tina), it did make me laugh out loud numerous times. And with hilarious memoirs of hilarious women, that’s all you can ask for. I thoroughly enjoy it. I like the conversational writing style. I like the hilarious anecdotes. I like reading about someone who makes up weird stories in her head and has conversations with herself. I like knowing that I am not the only person who does this. And while this doesn’t make me normal by any stretch of the imagination, it means I am not alone. I feel like we could be pretty good friends.

Here’s what the jacket flap has to say:

"Mindy Kaling has lived many lives; the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck-impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence "Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I'll shut up about it?" 

Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages). If so, you've come to the right book, mostly!

In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls. Mindy Kaling really isn't just a Girl Next Door -- not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka."

Some of my favorite parts, the ones I liked so much I had to read out loud to A (who didn’t find them as funny as I did anyway, this must be a girl book), are:

1. Her logic that a song about a "hardworking Vietnamese girl who helps her parents with the franchised Holiday Inn they run, and does homework in the lobby, and Ari, a hardworking Jewish boy who does volunteer work at his grandmother's old-age home" would be more entertaining and realistic than John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane."
2. Her dead-on observation that people think that coolness of a building goes up dramatically if it has at one point been something else: "If Riker's Island ever goes under, I know Andre Balazs will have that place turned into a destination hotel for urban metrosexuals within a month, tops. People will sit in their cell/hotel rooms and say, "You knowa convicted sex offender used to live in this cell, right? The solitary confinement unit will be the honeymoon suite."
3. When talking about The Sound of Music song "So Long, Farewell", and how long it is, she states: "The point is I learned nothing from this experience. Yes, if I'm at a party where I'm not enjoying myself, I will put some cookies in my jacket pocket and leave without saying good-bye. But when I'm having a great time? I like 'em nice and drawn out, Von Trapp-style."

Read it. You’ll laugh. Unless you’re dead inside. It’ll make you want to attempt to get back into the Office (sorry again Mindy, only room for one NBC comedy in my life – 30 Rock). And it’ll make you wish she was your friend too.

2012:

I'm not that big into New Year's resolutions, as mentioned here, but I always try to set some goals for myself to accomplish each year. None of that life-changing crap, just some things I'd like to do or have happen.

So, in 2012, I'd like to:

 

Happy Birthday:

Today is New Year's Day but more importantly, it's Tillie's birthday! She is 4 years old! We're celebrating with a peanut butter carrot cake, birthday cuddles, and lots of hugs and kisses: