my first crush:

I have vivid memories of discussing my love for Uncle Jessie with other little leotard-clad girls while waiting in the vault line at gymnastics. I was six years old. John Stamos, you have aged so well.

Thank you, People of Glee, for making this happen. Have Mercy!

(Quick-- watch this video before it gets yanked off the internet like all the other clips I share.)

hooliganism

Afternoons are fading fast and spookfest is coming this weekend. I so wish I was a 15 year old boy this Halloween. Instead I'm a 26 year old grad student who has this first painting by Christopher St. Leger as her desktop background. No biggie until I pass my laptop off to the Head of Mental Health Services in VB to use for her power point presentation at a seminar I'm helping host. Maybe it doesn't matter, she probably didn't notice. But then another woman I met from Social Services told one of my classmates that she met Ruthie Weiglein on Friday and "she's such a precious little girl."

Crap, I seriously need a professional makeover. And some sweet custom business cards. But really, what angry teenager wouldn't dig a therapist with these paintings in her office? Or at least looked like a teenager herself? Aye Dios...

Room

This past weekend Tommy and I drove from VB to Ikea in Potomac Mills and then on to Charlottesville. Despite the fact that I have never been able to choose a song on an iPod without immediately getting carsick, I shouldered through and read this book on the entire car ride. I couldn't stop.

I really don't know how to describe it without giving away many of the details that I wished I didn't know when I picked up the book. Instead, I'll give you one of the quotes on the back cover:

"Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness. Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days."

-Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry

I cannot stop thinking about this book, it's characters and their story. If you've read it and want to discuss it, let's do so please.