finding love in an iphone app November 30, 2010

Blog World, I have met the love of my life.

It is an iPhone app called SparkRecipes and it completes me.

Yesterday afternoon I was stressing because I hadn’t made my lunches for the week yet, and wanted to go to the grocery store on my way home instead of making a special trip.  Alas, I didn’t have a recipe with me, so I wasn’t sure what I would need to pick up once I arrived at the store.  I was browsing through the App Store on my phone and stumbled across SparkRecipes. 

I downloaded  it for the whopping price of FREE and opened it to a world of healthy, easy, intuitive recipes.  Users submit their recipes, and then other users rate them—which is perfect because you know with one quick glance whether a recipe is yummy or not.  My favorite feature is the search capability: you can search the database by ingredient(s) you have lying around the house (in my case, quinoa). 

It pulls up hundreds of recipes that use the searched ingredient, with the number of stars received right under the title.  When you pick one that sounds good, there is a quick list of ingredients, then directions, then NUTRITION FACTS!!!

So wonderful!  And if you are confused, there is descriptive VIDEO!!!  It’s like your very own Food Network!! 

So I made it to the store last night—withOUT a recipe—and just whipped out my phone and found a highly rated quinoa and black bean salad.  It had the necessary ingredients right there, so I was in and out in under 10 minutes.  (Of course I thought I had cayenne pepper at home, which I didn’t, so I had to make a return trip anyways.  But that’s irrelevant).  The salad was delicious, and as the handy nutrition fact screen tells me, packs 11 grams of protein.  What else do you need in life?  Besides a family of pug puppies and bottomless mojitos, I think nothing.

thanksgiving in a new york minute November 28, 2010

Tonight marks the end of my wonderful New York vacation.  After a grueling 7 hour bus ride home, I’m a little too tired to go into a detailed recap of everything Caitlin and I did.  Instead I’ll just show you with pictures—worth a thousand words anyway, right?

(DISCLAIMER: Although it may LOOK like all Caitlin and I managed to do was eat everything in existence in NY, that’s incorrect.  We did lots of exciting and cultural New York things as well!)

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of remotely connected friends, half foreign and half not.  I handmade some Pilsbury biscuits, and Caitlin (really) handmashed sweet potatoes.

There was also a mini Seahawks reunion– Caitlin, me, and Eric.  Yay swimming!

Eric continues to eat like a swimmer–scarf down two very full plates of food without gaining a single pound.  In his life.  Ever.

On our way to spend Friday shopping for high fashion on Madison Avenue, we found a shrine to Steve Jobs.  Or a not-so-secret entrance into Apple’s cave of wonders, where you can repeatedly drop $500 on new-fangled technology to your hearts’ content.

There were gorgeous Christmas decorations in all the streets!! It was so pretty and very festive.  Since it was Friday, I couldn’t even get mad for seeing Christmas decorations up before Thanksgiving.  I don’t think any metropolitan city decorates itself quite so beautifully as New York.

MY FAVORITE STORE EVER!  Obscenely expensive and with the most decadent window displays I’ve ever seen, Bergdorf’s is like a whole different planet.  Caitlin and I wanted to try on some of the more uber-trendy clothes and take silly pictures, but we were afraid our filthy middle-class fingers touching the designer dresses would cause the snobby saleswomen to faint in horror.  So we just went outside and admired the windows:

Do you have a unicorn that needs to be clothed??  Because it looks like Bergdof Goodman has everything you could possibly need.

A book with images of all the neat window displays of the past 50 years can be bought on the 7th floor–for $550.  I think it might actually be the cheapest thing in the store, too.

After our extensive and fruitless shopping day, we reenergized with cupcakes!

We both agreed that Red Hen cupcakes were not as good as Georgetown Cupcakes or Crumbs’ Bakery, unfortunately.  That didn’t mean that we wouldn’t eat them though!

After our sugar rush, we spent the night watching Gossip Girl and…flossing.  Healthy gums are crucial, people!

We explored some holiday/farmers markets in search of Christmas presents, but were so cold we grabbed some German Gluehwein (yum!) and retreated to Wholefoods.

On our way to the Met, we were treated to some subway entertainment!  These guys were pretty good, doing flips over each other and running up the walls of the train.  It was only when one of them slammed his head on the ceiling of the train that we realized why they were so crazy.

We went to the Met to see the ancient Egyptian artifacts and Jan Goussard’s Renaissance exhibit.  However, we got completely and utterly lost in the Asian art exhibit for FORTY MINUTES, and the only way we could get out was to climb and climb and climb millions of stairs.

To complete our classy day, we dropped into a diner near Caitlin’s apartment called the Mansion.  (Is that not the most aptly named diner in all of New York?  Think of all the conversations– “Just headed up to the Mansion tonight;” “Oh yeah, everyone at the Mansion knows me;” “You can just pick up from the Mansion, please.”  It’s ingenious.)  The Mansion was amazing–everything a diner should be.  I had a garden sandwich with a fried egg, and Caitlin had an egg sandwich with a pile of steak fries.

This morning we went to a cutle little French/Belgium cafe called Le Pain Quotiden (a chain, I think), where we suffered the consequences of ordering the wrong things.  I sampled a horrendous vegetable juice medley, and Caitlin had an overdressed Asian tofu salad.  Thanks to Caitlin’s evident creativity, we were able to turn our disappointing breakfast into a Christmas tree.

But then we got more cupcakes!  Which got ride of the nasty pureed veggie taste in my mouth and made me feel way better.

So there was a whirlwind summary of my 4 days in NYC–sorry for the overwhelming amount of pictures.  What did you do this Thanksgiving?  Did you find any good Black Friday deals?

giving thanks November 24, 2010

Happy (early) Thanksgiving!! 

Tonight I’m headed off to New York City.  I have chosen the infamous Megabus as my method of transportation, mainly for the dirt cheap $54 round trip fare, but also because it’s a double decker bus (!!) with free internet (!!).  I may be sending live updates about my Megabus journey using their free internet, so brace yourselves.  

Google Maps tells me that it is a 227 mile, 4hr 40min haul to the Big Apple, which seems bad enough.  Combine this with the fact that I’m leaving at 6:30pm on the busiest day of travel in the US from a city which experiences a mass exodus of commuters everyday anyways….and I might be lucky if I make it to NYC before 1 am.  Again, be ready for those live updates. 

I’m staying with BFF Caitlin in her glam Upper East Side apartment, and we’ll be eating dinner tomorrow night at one of her new friends’ glam Midtown apartments.  We’ve been signed up to bring sweet potatoes and rolls, so if you have any wild and exciting sweet potato recipes, feel free to share.  

Other things I plan to do on my first official vacation:

• Take a crazy cab ride—hopefully escape with my life.
• Hang out with Caitlin’s crazy French roommate—I’m thinking Tibo but with WAY less English.  Is that possible?
• Black Friday shopping!!!  I plan on returning to DC with a totally chic, designer, straight-off-the-runway wardrobe and no money.
• Participate in the Macy’s Day Parade!  And by participate, I mean watch on TV in Caitlin’s apartment.   

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year.  In the past, I’ve only looked forward to it because it meant getting away from an empty Charlottesville and painful swim practices, but now that I am retired, I can truly appreciate the spirit of giving thanks for things we are lucky to have and people we are privileged to know.  I enjoy spending time with people without the expectations and letdowns of gift giving, which, while often gratifying, can take away from the simple pleasure of being with family.  While I am not making it all the way home to my family this year, I will be with close friends in an exciting place.  

What are your plans for Thanksgiving?  What is your favorite part of the holiday?   

q & a November 19, 2010

How many hours of work can be spent in meetings?

Eight.  Eight hours of meetings.  EIGHT.

 

What did I eat for lunch today?

Nothing.  Because I had EIGHT hours of meetings.

 

How am I feeling today?

Crabby. Miserable.  Distraught.  Grumpy.  Because I didn’t eat anything.  Because I had EIGHT HOURS OF MEETINGS.

more politics & less prose November 13, 2010

This afternoon I made my first trip to the infamous DC bookstore Politics & Prose, a hotspot where intellectuals and politically savvy middle age men gather and debate current events.  I woke up this morning to an achingly beautiful day, but could not muster the energy to compose a sightseeing agenda.  I knew I needed to get outside and savor the clear sky and calm air, so I merged an errand with an exploratory adventure: visit Politics & Prose and find my dad a birthday present.

I decided to walk instead of metro, so I donned some comfortable shoes (Uggs) and a fuzzy scarf (bright pink) and headed out.  Just being outside put me into a wonderful mood, and I made a big effort to look at my surroundings as I walked instead of the sidewalk under my feet.  It’s about 2 miles from my apartment to the bookstore, and I stretched it out to 45 minutes.  I stopped frequently to look at and document Fall’s brave last stand against winter, leaves blazing in the sun and trying desperately to stay on their trees.

When I finally got to the purple-awned bookstore, I was thrilled to discover that inside, it was every book-lover’s dream: shelves and shelves filled to bursting with the well known, classic, obscure, nonsensical, whimsical, purposeful, comical, playful, daring, disturbing, mysterious, moving.  It’s a bookstore that is stocked based on its’ owners preferences, not what is most popular or recently released.  There must have been a book in stock to answer any single political question that has ever been or is being asked; one finds herself perusing the shelves and realizing that there are answers to questions she didn’t even know had been asked!  What an overwhelming, exciting feeling.

I spent over an hour wandering around the store, looking at various books that caught my eye.  If I had the money and strength to carry them home, I would have left with no less than 9 books.  I exercised extreme self control, however, and only purchased a hefty non fiction on the 4 Supreme Court Justices active during FDR’s presidency for my father.  As I was checking out, I noticed that a little podium had been set up, with about 25 chairs lined up in front.  I asked the rather unfriendly lady at the cash register who was speaking, and she snarled a name at me before helping the next customer.

The guest happened to be a Dana Millbank, author of Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America.  I decided to stay and watch, since the books’ title included “tea bagging” (hahaha!!) and I had nothing else to do.  (One of the great things about Politics & Prose is that they feature regular appearances and book signings from guest authors–at least one a day, usually.)  I’m not very familiar with Mr. Beck, but I’m liberal and he’s conservative so I’m guessing we wouldn’t get along.  I was more than a little disgusted, however, to watch this Dana Millbank stand up and immediately launch into a thorough bashing of Glenn Beck and everything he stands for.

Since I’ve been home, I’ve done a little more research on Glenn Beck, and as anticipated, I do not like him very much.  He seems like a 7th grade girl who jealously spreads false rumors and disguises personal attacks as impartial exposures that benefit the greater good.  (Last week, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Beck attacked George Soros using rhetoric drenched in anti-Semitism and based on nothing legitimate.)  Dana Millbank’s book examines Beck and seeks to undermine his authority by questioning his “patriotism” and “loyalty” to the United States.  In his talk today, Millbank shared story after story that showed why Beck was a terrible person and has a terrible influence on our country today.

Okay, so great.  Mr. Millbank spent many months gathering these stories, writing them down, editing them, getting them published, and now promoting them.  WHY?!?  Mr. Beck is going to have a radio and TV show no matter what.  His followers are going to follow him no matter what.  Doesn’t Mr. Millbank know how difficult it is to change people’s political opinions?  One measly little book is not going to do that, especially when the title  gives away the authors’ liberal leaning so glaringly that no Republican is going to buy it.

I think this issue epitomizes American politics today.  The US faces a debt so staggering I can’t even wrap my mind around it.  Unemployment is still sky high.  Our education standards are lagging compared to the rest of the West (and East).  The political world is riddled with scandal.  Disgruntled people from every region, every background, every religion, every race want to blow our country up.  And all that voters, politicians, commentators are doing is pointing fingers.

Don’t we have more important things to worry about than undermining Glenn Beck?  Because for every book written about Glenn Beck, another one will be written about Rachel Maddow.  And honestly, that gets us nowhere.  Because no matter what the world thinks of Glenn Back and Rachel Maddow, we still have a trillion dollar debt and unemployed people.  Why don’t we stop arguing about who did what wrong, and just figure out how we’re going to fix it?  Maybe Mr. Millbank could have come up with a viable solution to the gang problem in DC, or spent some time screening print cartridges coming into the US instead of writing his book.  Making conservative Beck look bad doesn’t exactly make liberal Millbank look good– they both just come out looking like 7th grade girls with self-confidence problems and fingers that are quick to point anywhere but themselves.  I’m tired of the degrading and blaming and trash talking that is rampant among politicians today.  WHO CARES THAT JIM BOEHNER IS TAN YEAR ROUND?!?!  Do you?  Because I don’t.  So please stop talking about his glowing skin and tell me what he’s going to do better than Nancy Pelosi to get our country back on the right track.

I have reached the end of my rant.  Thank you for sticking it through.

Politics & Prose is a wonderful bookstore.  Go there instead of a big chain because they have the most phenomenal collection of books and a wonderful series of authors who come in and give little chats.  You can also sit at the adorable coffeeshop downstairs and argue with other patrons about whether Representative Boehner goes to a tanning bed or just uses sunless tanning lotion.

Just kidding.

semicolons November 13, 2010

I was reading my book last night (still Yann Martel), and I stumbled across the most artistic use of semicolons I had ever seen in my life.  I love semicolons–I think they’re like the evil stepsister of the colon, always misused and mistreated, rarely given an opportunity to shine.  In the particular story I’m reading, the outcast main character has been frantically working to build up a fortune so his daughter, the love of his life, can return to society a rich woman.  He has been struggling through 20 years of failure, poverty, and humiliation when his daughter decides to marry her outcast lover and never return to society.  Our main character is devastated; his ceaseless efforts have yielded him nothing but failure.

He looked at his daughter’s attentive face and jumped to his feet, upsetting the chair.

“Do you hear?  I had it all there; so; within reach of my hand.”

Is that not the most brilliant use of semicolons you have ever seen?  Look at the construction: five words in front and behind balanced upon a fulcrum of a single word that carries all the weight and tension of the sentence.  An ordinary writer would have used commas, or perhaps dashes, to surround that fulcrum, but by isolating the “so” with semicolons, it gives the word a real impact.  Their bottom halves curl up like the fingers of two hands raised in frustration, their periods glare like two desperate eyes, and the word held between them shouts with the wretched hopelessness of twenty years that have added up to nothing.  The punctuation of this sentence is deliberate, forceful, and dynamic.  It is absolutely beautiful.

“i do”– dupont style November 11, 2010

Happy Veteran’s Day, blog world!

Perhaps in honor of the people who dedicate their lives to protecting our wonderful country, the world decided to bestow the most beautiful weather upon Washington, DC.  So after sleeping in and making a quick run out to Walmart, I seized the day and wandered down to Dupont.

Dupont Circle is one of my favorite places in DC to spend time, not only because it’s chock full of young people and amazing restaurants, but also because it’s an area where people go to just hang out. There’s a park in the middle of the traffic circle with a beautiful fountain, and it’s always crowded with people eating, reading, talking, and relaxing.  (A lot of homeless people sleep there too, but that’s a little less glamorous.)  On a day like today, where a lot of people were off work and the weather was perfect, Dupont was especially packed.

I started off at SweetGreen, a really neat and adorable make-your-own-salad bar.  It uses all natural products and environmentally-friendly paper products, and is a really sweet little cafe tucked away on Connecticut.  They also have tart frozen yogurt, which is one of hands-down favorite treats.  I got a little cup of yogurt, and then asked the hippie lady who was helping me to just give me her favorite toppings.  I wound up with baked pears, granola, and agave nectar.

I put a compostable lid on my cup and walked the two minutes over to the fountain, where I plopped down and ate it all.  It was DELICIOUS.  There aren’t a lot of ways to screw up tart yogurt, but adding any kind of baked fruit is definitely a way to enhance it.  I had never had agave nectar before, so I found that it was sweet and syrupy, but without the stickiness of honey or the cloying sugar found in most sauces.  The whole concoction screamed “IT’S FALL!!!” and I loved it.  I cracked open my book (Yann Martel’s short story collection titled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios– for more info, READ THIS) and immersed myself in the touchingly sad story.  Every once in a while I would sneak glances around the park in an act of shameless people watching, but unfortunately (fortunately?) it was a pretty normal crowd.

I stayed in Dupont for a few hours, relaxing as the sun warmed my back and a light breeze rustled the orange leaves.  As I was standing up to leave, I turned around and noticed that a young bride, in her wedding dress, had just walked into the park.  I melted with happiness for her, and was simultaneously filled with an outrageous jealousy because getting married in Dupont might be the best idea in the world.  She started taking pictures in front of the fountain, and then all of a sudden JUMPED IN THE WATER!!!

Wait a minute.  What about her dress?! Was she ruining it on purpose??  I was very confused, but I was happy to notice that I was not the only person who had whipped out their camera. One girl next to me was laughing out loud.  And it only went from weird to weirder when the photographer told her to walk under the falling stream of water, stay there, and shake her head from side to side so her hair would swing around.

Is it just me, or is this a bizarre way to get your wedding photos?  The husband wasn’t even in sight!  When the photographer told the bride to sit on the fountain under the water, it just got raunchy.

After scratching my head for a few more minutes, I watched in horror as the girl got out of the fountain, wrapped herself up in a hideous bathrobe, and dragged her beautiful, sopping wet wedding gown across the dirty, cigarette butt covered sidewalk.  I started thinking that maybe the whole production hadn’t been for a real wedding, but a bridal photo shoot instead.  That would explain the MIA hubby and the super  sexy poses.

I ran away from the bride/model/dress destroyer and headed home, thinking about how getting married would probably solve all my life problems (and for the ones that it didn’t, I could just have babies!).

smoothie queen November 7, 2010

Yesterday I bought THIS:

A beautiful, shiny blender!

Today I bought THESE:

Smoothie ingredients!!  Yummmm.  I’ve been on the hunt for something I can eat in the morning that is high protein, but that I actually feel like eating (my body just doesn’t want any food at 6:30 am, apparently).  So I grabbed these things from Whole Foods, threw about 1/2 cup of everything plus an entire banana into my blender, and got THIS:

A smoothie!!  Chocolatey, creamy, peanut buttery, with a hint of banana and TONS of protein.  Hopefully I now won’t have to wolf down my lunch at 10:30 am when my stomach has worked through the measly cinnamon-raisin bagel I’ve been having up to now.

It’s been a beautiful weekend–hope you’re outside taking advantage of it!  Happy Daylight Savings!

2 restaurants, 1 movie, and a funeral November 2, 2010

4 New Things I Experienced This Weekend

1. Pho

BFF Caitlin came to visit me this weekend, and the first thing we did when she came in on Thursday night was to ravage Connecticut Avenue for comfort food.  Caitlin had just ridden 5 hours from New York to see me, so we had a limited amount of time to search before she keeled over from lack of food.  We ended up at Nam Viet, a (obviously) Vietnamese restaurant with kitschy décor and scratchy napkins.  Fall had finally rolled out of bed that morning, and was lowering temperatures with a vengeance, so Caitlin and I both settled on bowls of vegetable noodle soup, or Pho.  Not really knowing what to expect, we were presented with big, steaming tubs of rice noodles, crispy tofu, various soft veggies, and a broth that was salty heaven.  We both dumped in copious amounts of a dark, sweet, plum-like sauce, as well as plenty of the accompanying hot, red, spicy sauce.  The whole thing was SO GOOD.  Like, Caitlin just slurped the soup straight out of the bowl, not even pausing to wipe her running nose and dripping eyes in her haste to fill her stomach with the warm, healthy, tasty broth.  Our Pho experience was so wonderful that we went back again on Sunday—no points for originality on that one, but the food combined with the price ($4.75 for a satisfying bowl!) makes Nam Viet an easy, guilt-free choice.  My recommendation: go check out your nearest Vietnamese restaurant and give their Pho a try!  Make sure to taste their sauces and mix them in for an even more complex broth.

2. Funeral

Frans’ service this weekend was the first funeral I’ve ever been to, and it was so terribly difficult that I hope many more years pass before I experience another one.  I had been planning on attending Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore the Sanity (which was why Caitlin was in town in the first place), but I felt that celebrating Fran’s life and supporting the Crippen family was something I really needed to do.  I arrived at the church in Conshohocken to find that it was standing room only—and only a little at that.  So many people had come in honor of Fran (over a thousand!) that a live feed had been set up in a nearby school auditorium for the people who couldn’t fit into the church.  If there was ever any question regarding the impact Fran had on lives all over the world, or of the true wonderfulness of the Crippen family, it was dismissed by the tremendous amount of love and support that came with the hundreds of people there.  Fran had touched the lives of more people in his 26 years than most people do in 100—and it was a testament to his personality that all of those people came to one final celebration in his honor.

Me & Claire, JockJams party 2008

The service was achingly sad, with all the speakers and readings invoking wave after wave after tears.  My heart hurt the most when I watched the Crippen sisters rise to deliver their gifts to the altar; seeing three backs where there should have been four was so incredibly heartbreaking that I had to look away.  I watched my college coach–a strong, determined, unbending, fierce man–dissolve into tears and lean into his wife for support.  I watched teammate after teammate crumple forward, as a neighboring hand reached out to pat their backs.  And I watched Fran’s grandfather and namesake reach out from the pew where he was sitting and simply rest his hand on the casket, his wrinkled and arthritic fingers stroking the smooth wood gently.

A poem was read by one of the priests, titled The Dash Poem, about how one spends the years in their life, and I began wondering if I was happy with my 22 years.  If I died tomorrow, would I be completely satisfied with the way I lived my life?  What would I want to change?  Who would I say one last goodbye to?  Would I like the way people remembered me?  If I died in 4 years in a way similar to Fran, would a thousand people come to my funeral?

3. Georgetown Cupcake

If you were in DC this weekend, you know that Sunday was GORGEOUS.  Crisp, sunny, calm, and optimistic, it was the type of day that only comes around once a season.  Caitlin and I slept in laaaaate, but finally dragged ourselves out of bed to go explore Georgetown.  We metroed to Foggy Bottom, and thoroughly enjoyed the mile-ish walk.  (However, we kept seeing people on their back from the Marine Corp Marathon, which had been held earlier that morning, most of them with bright medals around their necks and salty sweat crusted on their faces.  As we watched them limp by, we felt increasingly guilty for our lazy morning.)  We wandered along M street, running into Barnes & Noble so Caitlin could use their restroom, Dean & Deluca to oogle their high-end cheese cabinet, Anthropologie because it’s Anthropologie, J.Crew because I needed some work-appropriate flats, and the Annie Creamcheese Vintage Shop because it had the most extravagantly beautiful vintage dresses (I found a 1930s beaded, pleated, flowy masterpiece that I want to get married in).  We also went to Georgetown Cupcake, because Caitlin had seen people with bags on the Mall at the rally on Saturday, and was determined to compare DC cupcakes to those of Crumbs in NYC.  (Read more: A (really, really) sweet surprise).  I didn’t realize this until a few weeks ago, but Georgetown Cupcake is the shop that’s on the TLC show “DC Cupcakes,” so it’s relatively famous–as demonstrated by the HUGE line out the door.  We waited for about 20 minutes (for a cupcake!!!), but luckily the menu had a plethora of options to choose from.

Unfortunately, they don’t offer every flavor on every day.  So, we were there on a Sunday, meaning we had the regular options, plus six that rotate every day.

So while I WANTED salted caramel (“caramel cupcake with a salted caramel-infused buttercream frosting topped with a caramel drizzle”), it was not available that day– I’d have to go back on a Tuesday.  Instead, I settled for a peanut butter fudge cupcake (“valrhona chocolate cupcake with a fudge core topped with a peanut butter frosting and fudge star drizzle“), while Caitlin went for the classic strawberry (“classic madagascar bourbon vanilla cupcake backed with fresh strawberries topped with a fresh strawberry frosting and a fondant heart“).  After shelling out THREE DOLLARS for each cupcake, we snagged a table in the cramped shop and dug in.

While I enjoyed my cupcake (who doesn’t like a good cupcake?!), I felt that the long line plus the high price plus the small size made it nothing exceptional.  The frosting was delicious and a wonderful fluffy consistency, but the cake part was something I could have made myself.  The fudge core was novel (and delicious), but I have trouble paying three dollars for fudge and pb frosting–which my butt doesn’t need anyways.  My recommendation: visit Georgetown Cupcake–once.  Go for the novelty and the whole experience, but definitely check out the menu beforehand to see if the cupcake you want is even offered on the day you’re going.

4. Rocky Horror Picture Show

I borrowed this movie from work friend Michelle so that I would better understand the Rocky Horror episode of Glee (which I still haven’t watched), and finally popped it into my computer last night.  I was not sure what to expect since Melissa told me she hated it and Michelle said the music was good but Andy/Tony told me the Glee version was bad and the cover has cross-dressing men on it, but about 15 minutes into the movie, I decided that I loved it.  It is so over-the-top in its’ costumes and plot and music, but has such a smart undertone of eroticism and sexuality and politics that it appealed to both the analytical and impulsive sides of my brain.  I wasn’t familiar with Tim Curry before but I thought he was wonderful, and Susan Sarandon (yes, she’s in it) played her character perfectly.  It’s a film where you aren’t sure why exactly you like it, since it’s at once repulsive and sexy, but you know that you can’t stop watching it.  Does the world depicted in Rocky Horror really exist somewhere?  I’m sure the answer is yes, but a naive cookie-cutter white girl like me wouldn’t even know the first place to go looking for it.  A movie like this lets me have a quick glimpse into the transvestite world without ever having to get close to it.  My recommendation: watch it.  Even though Halloween has already passed, the movie is a great one to watch at night with a roaring fire going in the background.

That’s all for tonight, Blog World.  Hope you had a wonderful weekend full of clever costumes and oodles of candy.