Lessons Learned at Powell’s in Portland

This afternoon, after my speaking gig to a group of soon-to-be graduates of the University of Oregon’s journalism program, I decided to take advantage of being in Portland and I headed to one of my favorite places in the city: Powell’s Books.

Now, despite the fact that this bookstore is on my top 10 list of Places You Must Go When In Portland, it has not always been this way. Powell’s Books takes up one city square block and is three stories high. The bookstore is divided up into rooms based on genres and each room is named by a color. Among them are the Gold room is the science fiction/mystery/thriller room, the Orange room is the business/planning room, the Purple room is the religion/language/travel room, and the Blue room it the literature/poetry room. The cases are ten shelves high and are jam-packed with books, sometimes two rows of books on one shelf. Powell’s Books is one of the largest bookstores in the world, having rightly earned the nickname the City of Books.

Unfortunately, because of the sheer enormity of the building, the bookstore had a tendency to scare me as a small child. I didn’t like to go because I was afraid of getting lost - which is not hard to imagine because even grown-ups sometimes lose their way around the building.

But now I have come to appreciate Powell’s selection and as an West Coaster-turned-East Coaster, I also appreciate Powell’s ridiculous good prices. I browsed the bookstore for about an hour with my Peet’s coffee, another love of mine, though it doesn’t rank nearly as high as Powell’s. Though Peet’s does serve as a reason for at least a couple Boston pilgrimages a year, as Boston is the only city on the entire East Coast that has Peet’s Coffee and Tea locations.

I ended up with a selection of about ten books but I knew I couldn’t afford all of them… the total price was over $60 and while that’s a steal, that didn’t necessarily mean my bank account would approve. I wheedled it down to six books for just under $50. My purchases include The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd, because I read The Secret Life of Bees and loved it so I thought I would enjoy her memoir; The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, because I saw the play last summer and loved it, plus it came highly recommended from a couple OCers; The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, which I have been nagged to death to read by several people, plus his other book Friends, Lovers and Chocolate, which is the second in the series after The Sunday Philosophy Club which I finished earlier this year; The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, which is a monster of a book but I’ve heard rave reviews about it so I’m hoping it’ll be worth my while; and finally, The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College, which I’m giving to my younger brother who is graduating from high school on Friday.

This is definitely quite a bit of reading material and I’m not even starting on any of them until I finish Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which I bought a couple months ago but just started reading on the flight out here on Saturday. I’m over sixty pages in so far and I’m really enjoying it.

In the past, I go on the book binges with the intention of devoting a significant amount of time to reading and absorbing the messages and lessons in these books. I have visions of myself curling up in a coffeeshop and reading for several hours, while refilling on cappuccinos and munching on scones. Of course, this never, ever happens. Usually I go through two - maybe three, if I’m lucky - books before craving yet another book binge which leads me with six more books that will sit on my shelf, patiently waiting to be read in a never ending queue of literature.

But I have decided that it is absolutely imperative that I break this trend. For the past few months I have become acutely aware of how much of my life has been devoted to the Internet and the mindless social networks that eat up so much of my time. I’m not even talking about the amount of time I spend on the Internet at work. I’m talking about all the hours and hours I spend glued to a computer screen, which I’m sure is going to cause brain cancer someday. As I zig-zagged through the halls of books, I realized that unless I made some serious changes to my time-management I was going to spend most of my life twittering it away and not actually do or experience anything. I mean, how much life reflection can you do on Facebook anyway?

One of my items on my 101 Things To Do in 1,001 Days is to give up the Internet on the weekends for one month (#92). But I have decided to expand it for the entire summer. It doesn’t hurt that my weekends are already swamped with plans, but adding a few extra weekends to the goal will really help me make the most of the summer before the weather turns so cold your air starts to freeze and your breathe turns into slabs of ice (okay, so that hasn’t actually happened to me, but I’m sure it could!)

Starting today and ending Labor Day weekend, I will not be using the Internet at all during the Saturday and Sunday hours. The only reason I will allow myself to log online is to get directions or look up a phone number in case I am absentminded and forget to do it at work, which, knowing me, is bound to happen. I did this last summer for a little over two months because I was without the Internet or television for six weeks when I moved into my apartment (that was the earliest the cable guy could come and install the equipment in my apartment). This meant I was forced to explore my new surroundings and I really appreciated how it helped me acclimated much faster to where I was. I felt comfortable with New Jersey much faster than I would have had there been an excuse for me to stay inside my apartment.

Hopefully by the end of the summer I will have regained a bit more of a sense of self instead of relying so much on other people’s lives to provide entertainment. I shouldn’t have a constant feeling of watching the Real World. I need to be out there. I hope you’ll join me.

One-Fifth

Last Saturday, I watched Number Twenty on my 101 movies in 1,001 days challenge. That means I am one-fifth of the way done with that challenge and I still have more than two years until the challenge is over. Although two years sounds like a long time, if you look at my list, you’ll see that there is a lot of other stuff on my list that I still need to finish!

I finally got around to updating my NYC Restaurant list, though I’m pretty sure I’m leaving one or two out. There is also a Thai place I went to in Queens with Scott and Jon but I don’t remember what it’s called (Scott! Help!). It was yummy, too. The 101 movie list is still sorely outdated as I have way too much catching up to do, and with all those movie links to do… it might take me awhile. I also have three movies from Netflicks waiting for me at home.

As far as the other items on my list, we all know that I’m now going to London. Then there’s the upcoming CWD conference (one goal is to go to a CWD conference once a year) and I have more blogger meet-ups planned throughout the summer. I might actually reach my goal of meeting ten bloggers by Labor Day! I’ve also found a church that I like, so I’m two weeks into my (at least) six month stint there. I’ve also begun downloading the sermons from my old church, Imago Dei Community Church, off of iTunes and I’m about a month into that.

I would love to hear suggestions from you at home about what I should work on next or how to accomplish them. Do you know of a cool art gallery (#36) or restaurant in NYC (#42) I should check out? How about a place to get a massage (#20)? Are you a diabetes blogger who is in the NYC area who wants to meet me? Just send me an email (#5). If anyone want to surprise me with tickets to the NYC Ballet (#40) or a live taping of a TV show (#47), hook a sister up!

As you can see, I’ll definitely need the next two years to get everything done. But it sure is fun!

A Weekend? Don’t Mind If I Do…

It’s Friday.

It’s sunny.

And it’s seventy-frickin’-degress!

I am sitting in my little cubicle at work decked out in a white skirt, purple flower-patterned blouse and my adorable ribbon-adorned silver flats. I’m totally rocking the summer look right now and it feels so good. Summer is taking it’s sweet time showing up here on the East Coast, so I’m very appreciative of some summer lovin’.

It’s also supposed to be nice and toasty (not burnt toasty, nice toasty), which is perfect because I’m heading into Manhattan early tomorrow morning for a workshop for young professionals and that whole “quarter-life” crisis crap. Hopefully I’ll learn something useful, or at least meet some people who also have no idea what they’re doing (yay!) and then of course I have the entire afternoon to enjoy myself in Manhattan. Might try to knock a couple more things off my 101 Things list, because I’m been slacking on that a little bit lately. Should sign myself up for a museum or visit an art gallery or something. Granted, I have more than two years left to go before this thing is over with and that seems like a long time, but before you know it, I’ll be twenty-five and still have eighty-six things left to do.

And well, crap.

On Sunday, I’m driving all of twenty miles to see my dad’s cousins in Edison. My great-aunt is in town for Passover, and while I’m not Jewish so I’m not going to Passover, it’ll be nice to see her and my cousins. We’re going for Indian food, which is the perfect thing to do in Edison because I think ninety percent of the restaurants in Edison are Indian restaurants. Don’t ask me why, but it’s true. If you want good Indian food, go to Edison, NJ.

Hopefully the weather is nice where you are too so we can all enjoy our weekend!

Almost Spring.

I decided to splurge this afternoon and I went to Starbucks.

When I got there, I stood at the cash register, stared at the menu and went “Hmmm.”

“What are you looking for?” the barista (a boy) asked.

“I don’t know…”

“Hot or cold?”

“I don’t know…” Pause. “Usually I decide by the temperature outside but today it’s right in the middle where you could go either way.”

I decided on a Chai Frappuccino (yum!) and a low-fat Cinnamon Swirl cake (yumyum!) which I decided was an excellent choice.

It’s probably upper 50s right now, so it’s not exactly warm outside, but it’s also not the friggid 20 degree weather that I came to know and despise during my first East Coast winter. It’s sunny, giving the illusion that spring is here.

I used to know that it was spring in Oregon when it was sunny one day, then rained for three days, then was sunny for a day, then rained for another three days… If you’re wondering what winter is like in Oregon, it just rains. No sun. We’re like the CNN of rain. All rain, all the time.

In completely unrelated news, I watched the movie Once this weekend.

So, the story behind watching this movie is that for the past four or five weeks, I have been seeing this movie title everywhere. I first heard about it when Bernard recommended it to me during out Diabetes OC Movie and Book List challenge. Then I saw Kerri talk about it on Twitter, and I think Karen talked about it on Twitter.

And then people who I didn’t really know started talking about it on Twitter and mentioning it on their blog.

And I thought to myself, “OK! OK! I’ll watch it!”

It was too late to get it off Netflix, so I actually went to the brick-and-mortar Hollywood video to check it out on DVD. I curled up on my (red!) couch with a bowl of popcorn (yumyumyum!) and was thoroughly entertained for the hour and a half. It was really a delightful little movie that I understood perfectly thanks to a little thing called English subtitles. No really. Even in a movie that’s in English, you can put it on English subtitles. It really works wonders for my comprehension. I put closed captioning on television sometimes too, especially for shows with heavy dialogue like The West Wing. Makes my head spin. But I digress.

Anyway, I decided it’s like a musical but without the dancing and the songs actually fit in context. So I guess that means it’s absolutely nothing like a musical.

You should watch it. Let me know what you think.

Eight in ‘08

8 Things I’m Passionate About.
1. Photography.
2. God.
3. Traveling.
4. Family.
5. Friends.
6. Writing.
7. Diabetes advocacy.
8. Social justice.

8 Things I Want to Do Before I Die.
1. Visit Israel.
2. Become a mother.
3. Become a grandmother.
4. Have a shotglass from every state and every country in the world.
5. Finish at 1,001 Things in 1,001 Days Challenge.
6. Have a wing of a museum named after me (I thought up this when I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was 15 and I still think it would be pretty cool!).
7. Learn to speak with a proper English accent.
8. Be at my goal weight and maintain it.

8 Things I Say Often.
1. “Good morning!”
2. “Uh… what?” Or sometimes, “Uh… who?” especially when my boss and/or co-workers discuss 80s and early 90s pop culture for which I was either not born and/or not culturally aware.
3. “I’m tired…”
4. “You’re going to Twitter that, aren’t you?”
5. “What’s up?”
6. “Oh my God…”
7. “Awesome.”
8. “See ya.”

8 Books I’ve Read Recently.
1. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
2. The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke by Suze Orman
3. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
4. The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith
5. part of How to Date Men by Janis Spindel

Parts of two of books, which I have not continued - not because they were bad but because I just stopped reading them. I have a really hard time with reading these days, mostly because I have fallen out of the habit of reading. I just don’t carve out the time like I used to and when I do, I feel like stopping rather quickly. It took me almost a month to read Eat, Pray, Love when it takes most people just a few days. That’s why I put reading 1,001 books on my Challenge list, but obviously I’m not doing such a hot job with that one.

8 Songs I Could Listen to Over and Over.
1. Porcelain - Moby
2. Almost Lover - A Fine Frenzy
3. pretty much anything by Madonna, especially late 80s/early 90s to mid 90s Madonna, which is what got me hooked on her to begin with.
4. Let Go - Frou Frou
5. Faster Kill, Pussycat - Paul Oakenfold featuring Brittany Murphy (yes, *that* Brittany Murphy)
6. Marcella Behind Liquid Blue Eyes - Dahlia (you owe it to yourself to listen to Dahlia at least once)
7. Clark Gable - The Postal Service (but really anything by The Postal Service)
8. Breathe (2 a.m.) - Anna Nalick

8 Things That Attract Me to My Best Friends.
1. They are completely different from me.
2. They are brilliant and brave.
3. They are hilarious.
4. They don’t pay any attention to the diabetes, unless it’s absolutely necessary.
5. They understand the importance of certain traditions that no one else does (namely, Candy Houses).
6. They challenge me to think outside my box.
7. They know how to have a good time, and they know how to get me to have a good time, too!
8. They listen.

People I Think Should Do Crazy 8s.
1. Everyone reading this, duh.

The DOC Movie and Book List

For the past hour and a half, I have been working on the list of recommendations for books and movies that quite a few of my fellow bloggers and readers suggested a few weeks ago. Amy asked me to compile it as a full list, so I finally got around to do that tonight. You can view the entire list of movies and books that the OC recommended to me by clicking on the link above.
I listed the movies by category and linked them to their IMDB page so you can get more information. I also listed all the books, but I didn’t do it by category because, well, that would have taken frickin’ forever.  I also linked them to their page on Amazon.

Yes, that’s a lot of links.

Yes, that took a lot of time.

And yes, I better see a hell of a lot of outclicks coming from the page in the next few days, okay?

I also didn’t bother to list who recommended what because I figured that would have just made things more cluttered. Instead, I linked to the two posts where people posted their suggestions, so if you’re wondering who recommended what, well, you know how hyperlinks work.

I’m more than happy to keep updating the page with more suggestions, so shoot me an email or just leave a comment and I’ll keep updating the page. Oh, and I also included a little comment if I have already read or seen the movie as a kind of mini review.

Hope you find them helpful!

Only 95 to go…

I just finished watching the German drama The Lives of Others. Excellent movie with fantastic acting. It’s the second movie in the past month that has been about the events of a foreign country around the time that I was born - the first being Charlie Wilson’s War which takes place in 1988, just 3 years after I was born, and this movie takes place in East Germany in winter and early spring of 1985, just a few months before I was born. Obviously I don’t remember anything about the state of the world during that time, considering I either was not around or simply too young for it to matter. But I also never learned about any of this school because it always seemed like history focused on the Revolutionary War up through the Vietnam War and then just stopped. It’s like the eighties never even happened, which is probably why, despite the fact it was when I was born, I feel the most disconnected from that time.

I also updated my 1,001 movies page with the snapshot reviews of Amelie and The Lives of Others. They are very brief as I don’t really have the time or desire to dissect and review a movie, but I wanted a way to catelogue the movies I saw and whether or not I liked them and would recommend them to others. So go check out my movies so far. Just click on the 101 Things tab at the top of the page, and then scroll down to the Entertainment section. You can also see my updated lists of my 101 books (though I’ve only read one book so far this year - bad, lazy Allison) and my NYC restaurant-a-month challenge.

Amy asked me a few weeks ago to post an updated list of books and movies that were recommended to me, so I should probably do that sometime soon! I’ll add that to my list… So far, I’ve crossed laundry and the dishes off my list this weekend. Hurrah! Progress!

Okay, it’s after one in the morning and I have my meet-up group lunch at 1pm tomorrow so I should hit the sack. Cheers!

Edit (11:00 a.m.): Bernard emailed me this morning and told me that in my sleep-deprived stupor of posting at 1:30 in the morning I did the math wrong on a couple of things in the post, which I’ve fixed (the title and the name of the tab).

Okay, he didn’t say sleep-deprived stupor, but that was the idea. Anyway, all is fixed, except Headlines is going to be off since that doesn’t change after an edit. Oh well…

A Challenge Update

After work yesterday I drove to Wal-Mart and bought a new Philips DVD player (yes, yes, I know the evils of Wal-Mart but I’m young, broke and they’re cheap). It took twice as long to plug everything in as it would a normal person, but I’m technologically-challenged.

I just wanted to thank everyone for all their suggestions. I have seen quite a few of the suggestions, which I think goes to show the O.C. has great taste in movies. And look at all of you and your foreign flicks - how worldly!

On recommendation from a friend, I went to Hollywood Video last night and checked out some episodes of The Wire. Today, I went back to the video store, but I had forgot to bring the list of DVDs that you all suggested. The only one I could remember off the top of my head was Amelie, which I amazingly have not yet seen despite the two dozen people who recommended it over the years - but they didn’t have it! The one time I actually try to check it and they don’t have it!

Sigh.

So I picked up another disc of The Wire and checked out Little Children, starring Kate Winslet. I remember seeing trailers of it last year  and thinking it looked really interesting. I’ll let you know what I think after I watch it.

I’m also thinking about just going and seeing Cloverfield this weekend. Honestly, I’ve never been much for watching scary movies, but there are so many people I know who are threatening to give everything away that if I don’t see it now I might not have much of a reason to see it ever… and then I will once again be the loser who hasn’t seen the latest blockbuster hit.

So I have a bunch of movie recommendations, but I’m a little low on book suggestions? Keep ‘em coming, people! I know you have opinions…

Perfect Timing

I suppose I should be thankful that I made it until the third week of January to get sick. Well, I’m moderately sick, just a sore throat and a bit of a headache. Though after the pain and suffering I went through yesterday it feels a hell of a lot worse. But it’s a three-day weekend (yes, yes, I have Monday off - no need to say anything, I can sense your jealousy from here) giving me ample time to recover from this pseudo-sickness.

I think I might buy a DVD player (finally) if for no other reason than it would be great to just lie around the house, eat my chocolate meringue cookies and not worry about stupid reruns and bad daytime television. Plus, it will give me a chance to work on that 101 movie list I thought was such a great move back in December. Do you realize that 101 movies in 1,001 days roughly translates to 1 movie every 10 days? Don’t even get me started about the 101 books in 1,001 days… I’m still working on the first one!

Any movie and/or book suggestions? I’m desperate.

Slow Changes.

Despite my almost two week hiatus, I haven’t seen much drop in my daily traffic and I even had a spike on the 11th (was I linked somewhere? It was very odd…). The hiatus was nothing intentional, actually, though I have always struggled with coming up with something to write about everyday of the week. Despite my activity in the diabetes community, I actually get quite burned out talking about my own life with diabetes. There have been more pressing worries whirling around in my head and up until this weekend I thought I’d have no respite.

I had pretty intense bout of homesickness this past week, which I think was largely caused with returning from two weeks in Oregon and going right back into my rut routine of long days at work followed by a nonexistent social life.

It was the first time in the seven months since I moved here that I actually thought all of this was a mistake.

And it’s hard to talk about this because I don’t want people to worry about me or ask me a lot of questions or wonder if I’m going to quit my job and move back to Oregon. I’m not, trust me. So I’ve avoided the blog the past ten days because there was nothing else in my head except how sad I was and how much I dread the weekend because it’s so hard.

But slowly (oh so slowly) things are starting to turn around.

For one, I joined Meetup.com, which is a website that helps people find others who share similar interests. I signed up for a New York group for people with type 1, but I haven’t had a chance to go any of the meet-ups because of other obligations. Once New Year’s hit, I signed up for more local groups - a couple groups for young women and a group for people who like to try new restaurants. I’ve only gone to one meet-up so far - a lunch at a Thai restaurant - and I hope to go to more soon.

This past weekend, I worked a bit more on my 101 in 1,001 Days Challenge. On Friday night, I watched Charlie Wilson’s War, which I thought was great, and then on Sunday, Gayle (one of the OC’s many readers) and I went to The Delta Grill in Manhattan for some good New Orleans cooking. Saturday night was Game Night at the practically-waterfront apartment of another friend, with a picture-perfect view of the Manhattan skyline. It was a uniquely busy weekend and a wonderful and much-needed reminder of why I wanted to come here.

But now the week has started again and I’m once again wishing the week would slow down a bit because I have no plans for the weekend other than doing a load of laundry and paying a visit to Trader Joe’s. When people at work would ask me what I did over the weekend, I would reply, “Oh, not much. Did laundry, watched TV. Just hung around.” They would smile and say, “Oh it’s so nice to have quiet weekends.”

I’ve debated over and over again about whether or not I wanted to write about this topic again. It seemed like I had ground the “loneliness” topic into the ground, and this certainly has nothing to do with my diabetes. Diabetes has been rather typical with its up and downs lately and hasn’t really caused any major red alarms in the past couple of weeks. I suppose the relative monotonous drone of diabetes has allowed the loneliness to move into center stage. I almost long for the days when I focused solely on my issues with diabetes.

Well, almost.

I know I’m the one who wanted to move clear across the country, and I am glad that I’m here. I just didn’t realize how hard this was going to be.