10 Books That Stayed with Me

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More on books! Two in a month! See, I’m doing better!

Not long ago, Erin posted one of those tag-people things on Facebook where you were supposed to list ten books that had stayed with you in some way. I thought about it, but then decided to write about those ten books here instead. I didn’t just want to list them but also say WHY they stayed with me. So here we go!

Anne of Green Gablesand its sequels by LM Montgomery

This was the absolute first book I thought of. When I was about five, my grandparents gave me the Anne series and my dad read all of them out loud to us until we finished them. I actually have three different copies of Anne of Green Gables, one of which is illustrated.

There’s so much to love about these books. There are so many wonderful characters and I always did identify with Anne—like her, I’m very imaginative, sometimes oversensitive, and have a tendency to get into awkward situations. They’re funny, they’re sad, they’re sweet, and eventually they’re pretty romantic, too. (Gilbert Blythe is one of my literary crushes.) Christiana Krump and I decided that one day we’d go to Prince Edward Island, where LM Montgomery is from and where these books take place, and I will hold her to that!

The Harry Potterbooks by JK Rowling

Not the most original choice, I know, but these books do mean something to me. I think what I marvel at the most when I re-read these books is how thoroughly and completely JK Rowling imagined this world. It’s just so wonderfully detailed. And—I feel like there’s no way to say this without it sounding cheesy, but I’ll try—despite the darkness in the books, especially the later ones, and the deaths of so many characters, I find these books more uplifting than sad and more about love driving out hate than just good-over-evil. The summer the last book came out, I was struggling with a lot of personal things, but the anticipation of Deathly Hallows coming out was one thing keeping me going.

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Jane Gilman

I probably recommend this book more than any other and it might be my most frequently re-read book. I talked about it in this post and I honestly think any girl would like it. It’s funny and incredibly easy to relate to—and also, all feminist writers should take lessons from Susan Jane Gilman. She manages to make her feminist views clear without coming off as obnoxious or preachy, and the title is actually a reference to how she caved on wearing a traditional white wedding dress, then decided that it might be the most subversive thing she could do.

Joy School by Elizabeth Berg

I love this book so much. I love Elizabeth Berg in general, but this was the first book I read by her. It’s the second in a series of books about a thirteen-year-old girl named Katie in the early 1960s, although you can read the books out of order and not miss anything. (Yes, I’d love it even if I didn’t share a name with the main character.) Katie’s mother has died, her father is distant and sometimes angry, she’s trying to make friends at a new school, and she’s in love with a man who’s much older—and married. She’s just such a sweet, funny, lovable character and Berg’s writing style is so heartfelt and unpretentious.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

As annoying as Jonathan Franzen is as a person, he is a brilliant writer. I first read this book shortly after it was published in 2001 and have re-read it several times since. Every time, I pick up on some little detail or nuance that I didn’t before. It’s about a family originally from the fictional Midwestern city of St. Jude whose septuagenarian matriarch, Enid, hopes to reunite everyone for Christmas. Enid’s husband, Alfred, is struggling with Parkinson’s disease and other health problems. Their three adult children, Gary, Chip, and Denise, all have different versions of unhappiness in their lives. Gary is a husband and father denying, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he’s clinically depressed. Chip, after being fired from his job as a college professor for sleeping with a student, goes to Lithuania to defraud American investors. And Denise is a chef who sleeps with her boss…after she’s already started sleeping with his wife. I think what I love the most is how real the characters feel. They’re often difficult and unlikeable, but you identify with them nevertheless. I hope one day I’m half as good a writer as Franzen with none of the snobbery.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

My first few years out of college, when I was still getting used to the 9-5 office life, I really started to like any fiction that was about work. This book, which is written in first person plural and about an advertising agency facing layoffs, was something I really connected with—particularly referring to what the office’s collective “we” thinks and does and feels. It’s probably something that will have the most appeal to someone who does work in an office, but I think most people can identify with the strange camaraderie that develops in the workplace—some people you like, some people you don’t really like but form a weird bond with anyway, and the way workplaces facing tough times go through everything together.

The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker

I’ve written about this book before because the whole concept of it stuck with me so strongly. One of the main characters, Mary Beth, is a song reader. People come to her and tell her the songs that have been stuck in their heads, and the lines in particular that have been sticking out for them. By making sense of why those songs are there, she can make sense of what’s going on in their lives. But when the secrets she reveals through the songs turn ugly, a greater realization comes about: the only person whose subconscious Mary Beth will not explore is her own. As she sinks slowly into a depression, secrets about Mary Beth and her family come to light, and they must learn how to deal with them. The novel takes place in a small Missouri town in the early 1980s and is narrated by Mary Beth’s teenage sister, Leeann.

This book is a rarity: a lyrically written book with an interesting premise and very compelling characters but an equally compelling plot as well. The people Tucker writes about seem very real and she fleshes them out nicely. But although there are no car chases or murder mysteries, the plot is full of surprises and always keeps you guessing. I didn’t want to put it down. I think this is particularly admirable because Tucker could, conceivably, have taken her unusual premise and done something really simplistic with it, like tack on a mystery or a romance. But her approach is more subtle, and ultimately more rewarding. In the end, this book isn’t really about song reading, but about family, love, forgiveness, redemption, legacy, the weight of guilt, and the necessity of knowing and loving oneself.

To Kill a Mockingbirdby Harper Lee

You’ve almost definitely read this—I mean, who didn’t in freshman English class? But this is one high school English class book that I will gladly re-read on my own. Atticus Finch is just such a fantastic character and it’s such a wonderful, moving story.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

I sometimes feel like my life didn’t really begin until college. Nothing interesting had ever happened to me, and there was just so little that I knew about the world beyond my personal experience until then. This popular young adult novel, which I first read between my freshman and sophomore years of college, stuck with me partly because it made me reflect on a lot of things that had happened over the previous year. It’s about a quiet high school freshman named Charlie making new friends and learning how to come out of his shell and participate more in life. It says more about where I was in life when I read it than it does about the book, I think, but it might be the most thought-provoking thing I’ve ever read.

Twenty-Something Essays by Twenty-Something Writers

My first year out of college, I just stumbled across this book and bought it. Now I re-read it almost as much as Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress. As the title suggests, it is a book of essays written by authors in their twenties. Two of them, both excellent, are written by BC grads (Marisa McCarthy and Luke Mullins). Mary Beth Ellis writes about her struggle with OCD. Eula Biss, taking a cue from Joan Didion, writes about the tribulations and loneliness of living in New York City. Emma Black writes about her first year teaching elementary school. Katherine Dykstra’s essay is about volunteering with low-income children while also writing an article about a luxury hotel. Elrena Evans writes about having a baby during grad school. Eli James, in one of the funniest essays, writes about trying to find a drummer for his band. Mary Kate Frank writes about the indignity of having to move back in with her parents after a series of bad decisions. Joey Franklin, in the winning essay, writes about working at Wendy’s while finishing school and taking care of a young son. Jennifer Glaser’s essay about losing her boyfriend to leukemia is heartbreaking. Kathleen Rooney, a graduate of the Emerson MFA program, writes about her career as an artist’s model.

And those are just some of the great essays in this book. It’s a great compilation of a wide variety of twenty-something experiences, and when I finished it I remember feeling like I’d made a lot of new friends. I hoped that Random House, who sponsored the essay contest, would run it again so I could submit something, but they never did.

 

Books of 2013

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I don’t know why I always let so much time go by between my book posts. I am constantly reading- almost never leave the house without a book, in fact.

I read 42 books this year—which might be a lot for some people, but I’m feeling like a slacker after learning that Kirsti read 168. Yeesh! After seeing Schindler’s List, I became really interested in the true story behind it and read a lot of books on the subject. I also read some books on theology, and there were some books I re-read, among them The Book Thief, Olive Kitteridge, and The Imperfectionists. Some books I disliked (really didn’t like Death Comes to Pemberley), but there were many others I loved. Here are the highlights:

Hyperbole and a Halfby Allie Brosh

Allie Brosh is my favorite blogger of all time. She’s hilarious and super-talented and seems like such a cool person. She also took an extended break from the Internet due to severe depression, so I was happy when she emerged upon publication of her book. I’m thrilled that this book has been so successful and even more thrilled that her depression is now under control.

Anyway, the book is about half stories from her blog and half new content. Among the highlights of the new content are one new story about finding a letter she wrote to her future self as a child and another about her mom taking her and her sister into the woods when they were kids and getting lost. We also learn more about the Helper Dog (Simple Dog gets the most coverage on the blog). One caveat—there’s one story from her blog that was previously unillustrated, and I refuse to read it on the blog or in the book because it’s about a goose getting into her house, which is my worst nightmare. I’m even more scared of geese than Allie is of spiders. So that story might be the funniest one in the whole book, but I will never know.

Anyway, highly recommended. While I was reading it, I spent a couple of days being the crazy person on the T because this book was making me laugh every two seconds.

The Disaster Artistby Greg Sestero

You know of my enormous affection for the glorious, awful wonder that is The Room. This year, Greg Sestero, who played Mark (oh hai Mark), wrote a book with Tom Bissell, who had written about The Room in Vanity Fair. It’s all about how he met Tommy Wiseau and the making of The Room, and it’s just as insane as you think it is. It’s very well-written, so I suspect that Bissell did most of the actual writing, but the memories Sestero supplies are priceless. I can totally imagine Tommy Wiseau saying all the book’s dialogue with his crazy accent. One thing I didn’t expect, though—I actually came away feeling bad for Tommy Wiseau. We still don’t know everything about his background at the end of the book, but we do know that he’s lonely and longs for acceptance. Even so, the book is hilarious and a must-read for anyone who’s seen The Room.

What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

Man, this book unfolded in a way I didn’t expect. It’s a young adult novel that I’d vaguely heard of awhile ago and decided to read based on the eye-catching title. In the late 1940s, fifteen-year-old Evie travels from New York to Palm Beach, Florida with her mother and her stepfather, who recently returned from World War II. Once there, she meets and falls in love with a handsome young soldier who served with her stepfather in Europe. Gradually, secrets start to be revealed, and…you know, I hesitate to say too much else because it’s so unpredictable. Evie is a very sympathetic narrator, and the mood, although it’s two decades earlier, reminded me a bit of Mad Men—lots old-fashioned glamour, but also lots of ugliness lurking beneath the surface.

The Receptionistby Janet Groth

Speaking of Mad Men, I hadn’t even heard of this book until I stumbled across it in the bookstore and noticed a blurb on the front comparing it to Mad Men. Great job, publicity department, because Season 6 of Mad Men had just ended and I was looking for a fix. I found that the description was pretty accurate. Janet was the receptionist at The New Yorker for twenty years and met a lot of interesting people. Is it the most fascinating story in the world? No. But there is lots of literary name-dropping, glimpses into office life in the 1950s and 60s, and an identifiable story about trying to make it in New York as a young woman. It’s actually more about her personal growth than it is about The New Yorker, which is what I liked the most.

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

I’ve read all of Curtis Sittenfeld’s other books, and they’re all very character-driven and episodic, with sections like novellas with large gaps in time between them. This one is completely different—it’s much more plot-driven and has only one straight storyline. It also has an element of magical realism to it that none of her other books have. The narrator, Kate, and her twin sister Violet have had a degree of psychic ability since childhood, but Kate has been trying to put the ability out of her mind as she goes on with life as a stay-at-home mom of young children in St. Louis. Then Violet appears on TV, saying that an earthquake will hit St. Louis on a certain date. In the ensuing media frenzy, Kate feels her own psychic ability returning and reflects back on their sometimes painful childhood.

This book kept me guessing right up until the end. Kate is actually not a very sympathetic character, but the book is still very well-written with a very tight plot.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Bernadette was a respected architect whose greatest accomplishment has been destroyed. Now she’s an agoraphobic wife of a Microsoft bigwig whose life consists of driving her intelligent teenage daughter to and from school, having tasks completed by a virtual assistant in India, and fighting with an obnoxious neighbor. As a reward for perfect grades, she and her husband are taking her daughter Bee on a promised trip to Antarctica, but as stresses in her life accumulate, she disappears before the trip.

Based on the plot, you would think this book would be all dramatic and serious, but it’s actually really funny. It’s mostly told through emails but somehow manages to be full of action despite that. It also takes place in a wealthy Seattle suburb where a lot of people work at Microsoft and the author gets in plenty of digs at that company.

The Fault in Our Starsby John Green

When I was about twelve, I loved Lurlene McDaniel’s sappy novels about teenagers dying of horrible diseases. This book, amazingly, is like John Green took a plot from Lurlene McDaniel and rewrote it so that it was actually a good book. The narrator, Hazel, is a teenage girl with cancer who meets and falls in love with a fellow cancer patient named Augustus. What follows is a plot remarkably free of cliché that involves the two of them planning a trip to the Netherlands to get answers from a crochety old author about the fate of characters in a book they’ve read—but that also involves tragedy.

I read on the T a lot, but this book was only the second one ever to make me cry on public transportation (The Book Thief was the first). John Green is an awesome young adult author—I haven’t read An Abundance of Katherines yet, but I enjoyed Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns. All of his other narrators have been teenage boys, and in this book I discovered that for someone who never was a teenage girl, he writes them very well.

The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan

J. Courtney Sullivan has quickly become one of my favorite authors (and I got to meet her at the Boston Book Festival—she was very nice!). Her previous books Commencement and Maine were great, but I think this one is my favorite. There are five stories involving five characters in very different circumstances: a woman in the 1970s who, after finding love twice, is distraught by her son’s impending divorce; a paramedic in the 1980s who wants to buy his wife a ring despite his financial struggles; a French expatriate in New York in 2003 having doubts about her whirlwind romance with a younger man; a happily partnered but unmarried woman in 2012 attending her cousin’s same-sex wedding; and Frances Gerety, the real-life 1940s copywriter who coined the slogan, “A diamond is forever.” Marriage, weddings, and diamond rings permeate all these stories, but we don’t find out the common thread in them until the end of the book. It’s full of memorable characters, and the true story of Frances is especially interesting. (She was like a real-life Peggy Olson!) I read the whole thing on the plane home from Ireland and absolutely loved it.

Run by Ann Patchett

I have a weakness for books set in Boston. In this one, the widowed former mayor of Boston and his two adopted young adult sons are involved in an accident on a snowy day that ends with a stranger being injured trying to save them. When they find out who the injured woman is…well, I won’t spoil you, but that’s what leads to the rest of the plot, which takes place over twenty-four hours.

This is both a compliment and a criticism of this book: I wanted more. It’s such an interesting set-up, and I read that Ann Patchett had originally intended for it to cover a longer period of time but ended up cutting it down for space purposes. That’s a shame, because most of the flaws stem from not having enough room to expand on things. The characters are all very nice people, but except for the mayor’s biological son, they needed more complexity. I also think it didn’t go deep enough into racial issues (the mayor’s adopted sons, way too obviously named Tip and Teddy, are black while the mayor is white and Irish). But I was completely absorbed in the book when I read it and just wanted more story and more of the characters when it was over. One other thing—I appreciate how it portrays Catholicism as an instrument for good, which is hard to find in fiction.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Poetic language isn’t usually my thing, but this book was so gorgeous and had so much heart and soul go into the writing that it won me over. Short on plot but long on character, description, and contemplation, it’s about a septuagenarian minister in the early 1950s writing to his young son and looking back at his life as he realizes that he may soon die. His articulate words on faith, love, and family moved me and stayed with me for a long time. I think it’s hard to write a main character who’s sympathetic and deeply religious without turning the book into a sermon, but Robinson has managed to do it. I can’t wait to read her book Home, a companion book to Gilead that focuses on some of Gilead’s supporting characters.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

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The first couple of weeks of 2014 have been kind of nuts. If things don’t change, it’s shaping up to be the year of other people losing my stuff.

New Year’s Eve was fun- I went with some friends to the Harpoon Beer Hall. However, the first couple of hours of 2014 sucked because the Harpoon’s coat check? Lost my coat. Someone else must have taken it by accident when they brought it back from the coat check, so they ended up sending me home in a Harpoon sweatshirt. Long walk back to the T on a freezing cold night- it was not fun. They did say they’d pay me back for a new coat, and I’ll take them up on that, but even though I know there are a lot of worse things than this, I’m pissed. I LIKED THAT COAT.

Then the following week I went to San Francisco for my company’s sales meeting. Getting out there was a bit of a mess. The airline delays that week were all over the news. We were supposed to fly out Monday morning, but after that flight was canceled, and the second flight we had booked resulted in us having go back into the terminal where we would have taken the first flight to get our canceled tickets and therefore waiting in a really long line and missing our flight (deep breath), we ended up having to take new flights Tuesday afternoon, arriving in San Francisco Tuesday night and missing a whole day of the conference. I didn’t want to check my bag, but I was in the last boarding group and they pulled the whole we’re-out-of-overhead-space thing (once I was on the plane, I could see that there was actually plenty of room) and made me check my bag, telling me it would be waiting for me at the gate when we landed.

It was not. I didn’t get my bag back until Thursday morning. I’m actually surprised I got it back that soon. I was not very happy during the period of time I didn’t have it.

The actual trip went well. I got to see Jenna and Mikey for the first time in almost a year! I also got an award for making my sales goal, and my flight back was great- I even had an empty seat next to me. (I’m weird and like long plane rides.)

Sooo, things have been busy and occasionally nuts, which is why I’m just getting around to writing this now.

2013! There were some really terrible things that happened this year. My uncle died suddenly in May. There was the marathon bombing and its aftermath in April.

But when 2012 ended, I said I felt like I’d spent a lot of the year in a state of blah. I definitely do not feel that way about 2013. I got shit done this year! As much as I would have liked to? No, definitely not. Dating was one disappointment after another (although I did put forth a lot of effort). I was really inconsistent with sleep, diet, and exercise and therefore am still fat. I never did that open-water swim. But here are some of the things I got done this year:

  • I did a lot more writing, completing several short stories and having one short story accepted for publication. My Grub Street class was a lot of fun.
  • I traveled to Europe for the first time ever and had a fantastic time. England and Ireland were just wonderful.
  • I also went to Marco Island and had another fantastic time lounging on the beach with my friends.
  • Work. This was not the weirdest year of my professional career, but it’s definitely in the top three, for reasons that it would not behoove me to get into on a public blog. Bottom line, though: the year ended with me making 132% of my sales goal and getting a nice bonus, so that was pretty awesome.
  • I did Run to Home Base and the Tufts 10K for Women.
  • And I did all the fun things I talked about here.

So what’s up for 2014?

  • I can’t guarantee that I’ll meet someone, this year or ever. But I will certainly keep trying.
  • I have gotten more involved in my church, and I’d like to continue that.
  • I’m open on where, but I’d like to take another fun vacation.
  • I’m thinking about volunteering as a writing tutor.
  • Finishing a collection of linked short stories I’m working on.
  • Getting more short stories published (or at least trying hard).
  • Making my sales goal again.
  •  Possibly another half-marathon, finally getting to that open water swim, and maybe a triathlon.
  •  More cooking.
  •  More reading (unofficially aiming for a book a week).
  •  More making good use of the Roku.
  •  More fun times with friends.
  •  Hopefully get a cat!

I turn thirty this year, too. Seeing as I’m still single, I don’t really like to think about that, so I won’t. (Wow, I wrote that right after I wrote about getting a cat.)

I’m going to have to move in 2014—my landlady told us awhile ago that she’d be vacating the property to do renovations after our lease is up. So, I hope, by June I will be living alone for the first time.

We’ll see where I am a year from now. Things right now aren’t bad, but I’m still hoping they’ll end up a lot better.

Things I Loved This Year

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I’ll do another post about the events of last year, and I’m going to do some more substantial posts later on books, movies, and TV, at least, but I wanted to do this post on some of the things that I enjoyed the most this year. Without further ado:

Books

October was my book month. Two books I’d been anticipating for a long time were published that month—Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Halfbook and The Disaster Artist, a book about the making of The Room by Greg Sestero, who played Mark. I also attended the Boston Book Festival, where I had conversations with J. Courtney Sullivan, Tom Perrotta, and Hallie Ephron. I read many other wonderful books throughout the year, and I’ll blog about them more in a future entry, but some highlights include John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied, J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Movies

The best movie I saw for the first time this year actually came out twenty years ago—Schindler’s List. I don’t know how I made it to this year without ever having seen this movie. And…wow. I have such a hard time talking about this movie because I’m not sure I can in a way that does it justice. It completely deserves the reputation it has—I will say that. And the very end has me in tears every time. (I’ve seen it quite a few times since I first saw it in August, most recently last night at Erin’s. Yep, our super-fun movie night was with a three-hour movie about the Holocaust.) It also motivated me to learn more about the real story behind it, so I’ve now read several books about Oscar Schindler and the Jews on the list- so many that I could tell where writers got their sources from. And there’s so much more I want to say about this movie that I’m not sure how to say, but just know that it profoundly affected me.

Future entry coming about the movies that actually came out in 2013.

TV

The two TV shows I caught up with this year that I loved the most could not be more opposite. Parks and Recreation is this happy, upbeat show about nice people doing good things. Breaking Bad is a dark, tense show about an increasingly evil guy doing increasingly terrible things. They’re at opposite ends of this TV mood scale, but I loved them both so much- Parks and Rec because it’s funny and sweet and I enjoy all the characters, Breaking Bad because it’s incredibly well-written and acted and basically a masterpiece. (Yes, I’ve seen this clip.)

I also started watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report regularly for the first time. The week of the marathon bombing, I desperately needed something to make me laugh. Previously, I’d only watched these shows sporadically, but after that week I put them both on my DVR. They keep me sane.

Music

I didn’t listen to much new music this year. I did listen to a LOT of U2. I’ve always liked them, but over the summer I started listening to them kind of obsessively and discovered some songs I hadn’t heard before or re-discovered songs I hadn’t listened to enough. As for new music, I enjoyed Sara Bareilles’s The Blessed Unrest, especially her song “I Choose You.”

Theater

Aside from the very welcome news that Les Miserables is coming back to Broadway next year, there was a lot of good theater in my life this year. I traveled to New York to see Lucky Guy on Broadway, which was wonderful and moving and…there’s so much I could say about it and maybe I will in a future post. I saw Wicked for the second time. I saw a local production of Les Mis. I also saw a great play in the fall called The Power of Duff.

Technology

Two devices have massively improved my life this year. I bought a Roku, allowing me to stream Netflix and Hulu on my TV, and it’s been fantastic. (Future post about everything I’ve been watching via Roku.) I also finally caved and got my first smartphone, which was a good decision. I’d always been afraid I’d end up spending too much time online if I had the Internet on my phone, but that hasn’t really happened. Plus, now I know when the bus is coming.

Celebrities

My two biggest celebrity crushes this year are both guys on AMC shows- Jon Hamm and Aaron Paul. It’s kind of interesting- with guys in real life, I’ve never been attracted to good-looking jerks, and I realized this year that even with celebrities, there’s a personality element present with everyone I like. Jon Hamm, I am convinced, is a perfect human being. I could look at him all day, and I think it’s a travesty that he doesn’t have an Emmy yet. But even if, for some strange reason, you’re not into his looks or his acting, you have to love him after this. And this. And this.

Aaron Paul (who does have two well-deserved Emmys), is possibly the most adorable person on the planet. I love him on Breaking Bad, where he played one of my favorite TV characters of all time, but he seems like such a sweet person, too. Read this. And this. And watch this clip of him on The Price Is Right before he was famous, because it’s hilarious. And look at his Twitter and his Instagram, from which I have learned that he really loves his wife and he really loves pizza.

Food
When Pigs Fly bread is the best kind of bread, and it’s awesome when you toast it and spread avocado on it.

Remember that if you take nothing else away from this post.

Happy New Year, all!

Post-Christmas Musings

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I love Christmas so much, and I just had a very nice one with my family.

Even so, I have to be honest- this was the most difficult Christmas season in recent memory.

When I wrote this, I was in the midst of four straight months of happiness. From my trip to Europe until about the beginning of November, almost everything seemed to be going right. My friends were great. Work was great. My writing was great. I’d even lost a bit of weight. (Uh, did not intend for that to sound like Dr. Seuss.) The one thing I didn’t have was a relationship, but I was feeling so terrific that I was like, “Hey, age twenty-nine is awesome! Maybe this is the period where I’m happy and comfortable and love will finally find me!”

But instead, what found me was the most frustrating two months of dating I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve been actively dating for over six years, so I do not say that lightly. That’s what I was feeling when I wrote this…and since then, it’s gotten worse and worse.

And it sounds so dumb, but despite all those great things still being great, and despite knowing that I don’t need a relationship to be happy (since I’ve never been in one, I’d be in trouble if that wasn’t true), being single suddenly seemed like the only thing that mattered.

And as things with dating kept getting worse, so did what I thought of myself. I started remembering every dumb thing I’ve said and done, every friend I’ve ever lost, every unkind thought and deed of mine, every physical flaw on my body—and I started to wonder why anyone would ever want to be with me.

Yeah, I know, that’s just digging myself further into the sadness hole. Pretty much every bit of advice they give you on finding love starts with, “Love yourself.” But you know what? When you’re twenty-nine and not only does no one love you, but no one has ever loved you, loving yourself becomes kind of hard.

When I wrote this, I was realizing it was hard to write about being happy. I didn’t want to sound obnoxious and braggy. But I’m realizing now that it’s hard writing about being sad as well. It’s one thing if you’re grieving someone who died, or if you’re going through a breakup or infertility or something legitimately devastating. And if you’re suffering from depression, people are familiar with that—and I think sometimes, people tend to pathologize sadness and tell you that you should see someone if you’re feeling down, even when you don’t meet the criteria for clinical depression.

But plain old sadness is harder to write about without seeming overdramatic or self-indulgent. I’m not going through anything like grief, and I’m not diagnosably depressed—there’s no anhedonia or feelings of hopelessness, just temporary sadness. Nothing’s changed to make me sad—the problem is that NOTHING has changed. And years of going through the holidays being single when you don’t want to be actually makes it harder, not easier, to go through it again.

I hesitated about writing about something this personal. But here it is, out there for everyone. I’ve been sad. I know it won’t last forever, but it’s still what I’m feeling now, and for those of you who have forgotten what being single feels like, just know that while there might be some people who are perfectly fine with being single around the holidays, even with all the couple-y ness it’s full of—there are also many people who aren’t.

Christmas on Netflix (or Wherever)

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I’ve covered Christmas songs, movies, and blog posts before. But along with movies like Love Actually and It’s a Wonderful Life, around Christmas I like to watch the Christmas episodes of the shows I like. Many of them are on Netflix (which I’ve recently joined, but that’s the subject of another post), and here are the best ones.

Gilmore Girls, “Forgiveness and Stuff”

This might be my favorite episode of Gilmore Girls. At the beginning, due to a misunderstanding in the previous episode, Emily disinvites Lorelai from the Gilmores’ early Christmas party and things between Lorelai and Rory are tense. Lorelai commiserates with Luke in the diner while Rory goes to the party alone. But when Richard collapses at the party and is hospitalized, Luke has to take Lorelai to the hospital, and what follows is…well, forgiveness and stuff. It’s an episode that displays all of the show’s best qualities, and if you don’t already love Luke, and the idea of Luke and Lorelai as a couple, you will after this episode.

The X-Files, “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas”

On Christmas Eve, Mulder and Scully stake out an abandoned house haunted by two sneaky ghosts played by Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin. It strikes a good balance between creepy and funny- although Scully is being uncharacteristically wussy in this episode. (At this point in the show she’d seen all kinds of crazy things, so I don’t know why two fairly harmless ghosts freaked her out so much.) I’ve always wanted to know what Mulder and Scully give each other for presents at the end.

The O.C., “The Best Chrismukkuh Ever” and “The Chrismukk-huh?”

All four seasons of The O.C. had a Chrismukkah episode. The first and last ones are my favorites. (The second one was all right and I disliked the third one.) “The Best Chrismukkah Ever” is about Ryan’s first Christmas/Hanukkah with the Cohens. In the episode, Seth is trying to decide whether to date Summer or Anna, Kirsten and Sandy are dealing with drama relating to Kirsten’s father’s business, and Marissa, dealing poorly with her parents’ divorce, shoplifts and drinks too much, making Ryan’s life miserable in the process. One of the nicest moments is towards the end, when Sandy tells Ryan that he doesn’t have to be the parent with Marissa.

In “The Chrismukk-huh?”  Marissa is mercifully dead and not around to be annoying. Her presence still lingers, though, when a letter she sent just before her death finally reaches Ryan. With the unopened letter in mind, he has an argument with Taylor, with whom he’s on the verge of a relationship, and they both tumble off the roof and end up comatose. (Much like in While You Were Sleeping, no one seems very worried about them—and this time Peter Gallagher is the one waiting for someone to wake up.) In the shared coma dream, there’s an It’s a Wonderful Life-esque world where Ryan never came to Newport. Also, throughout the episode, everyone seems very concerned about the ham they’re going to have for dinner. I feel like it must have been some kind of inside joke or something.

Friends, “The One Where Rachel Quits”

Friends was better with Thanksgiving episodes, but this is an enjoyable Christmas one. Phoebe is horrified when she sees old Christmas trees thrown in the wood cutter and decides she needs to help the trees “fulfill their Christmas destiny.” Meanwhile, Ross accidentally knocks a girl scout (played by Mae Whitman) down the stairs and breaks her leg. He tries selling boxes of Christmas cookies for her in hopes that she’ll win the trip to space camp that she wants.

Seinfeld, “The Strike”

The episode that introduced the world to Festivus. That’s what the episode is most famous for, but George giving people donations in their name to the made-up “Human Fund” (“Money for People”) also cracks me up and is what I think of whenever I hear about donations to charity in someone’s name. Plus the plot about Kramer going back to work because the strike at the bagel place he used to work at has finally ended—the new minimum wage is what they’d demanded twelve years earlier.

Mad Men, “Christmas Waltz”

Although this is a great episode overall, it’s worth watching solely for the lovely scenes between Don and Joan. There’s never been anything romantic between them, and there shouldn’t be, but there’s some very cute flirting going on here as Don takes Joan, who’s upset because her husband beat her to the punch at filing for divorce, out. He’s kinder to Joan than he is to pretty much any other woman ever, and it’s nice to see.

Playlist of the Moment: TV Mix

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I feel like I should have a Christmas playlist for you, but I did that last year. So even though this isn’t seasonally appropriate, I’m sharing one about TV instead. I do love TV, if you haven’t noticed, and I realized that I had a lot of songs in my iTunes that were either TV theme songs or featured on TV shows- sometimes songs that were written for those shows. And here they are, with some explanations.

 

1. Cheers theme song, Gary Portnoy

Despite being a native Bostonian, I have never once seen Cheers. I did once go to the Cheers bar, though.

 

2. “Thank You for Being a Friend” by Andrew Gold- The Golden Girls theme song.

 

3. “Forever” by Jesse and the Rippers, from Full House

Remember this? Beach Boys song Jesse sings at his wedding.

 

4. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air rap

 

5. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? theme song by Rockapella

I would have kicked ass on this show.

 

6. Boy Meets World theme song (the second one)

 

7. X-Files theme song

Twenty years. The show premiered TWENTY YEARS ago.

 

8. Another version of the XF theme

 

9. Cher’s cover of “Walking in Memphis”

From the “Post Modern Prometheus” episode of The X-Files

 

10. “The Scully Song” by Eric D. Snyder

I listened to this at work once and ended up  laughing out loud at my desk

 

11. “David Duchovny” by Bree Sharp

“David Duchovny, why won’t you love me?” might be the best rhyme ever.

 

12. “Scully’s Theme” from the last couple of seasons of The X-Files

 

13. Sex and the City theme (from the movie, but close enough)

 

14. “I’ll Be There for You” by The Rembrandts- Friends theme song

 

15.  “Smelly Cat” medley from Friends

The best of the Phoebe songs.

 

16. “I Don’t Want to Wait” by Paula Cole- Dawson’s Creek theme song

 

17. “Never Saw Blue Like That” by Shawn Colvin, from Dawson’s Creek’s soundtrack

 

18. “Blue” by Angie Hart

I never watched Buffy, but this song, which I like, was on it.

 

19. “Where You Lead” by Carole King and Louise Goffin- Gilmore Girls theme song

 

20. Lorelai’s painting song from Gilmore Girls (she makes it up to convince Luke to let her help paint the diner)

 

21. “Reflecting Light” by Sam Phillips

It was the song playing when Luke and Lorelai first danced at a wedding on Gilmore Girls.

 

22. “Boss of Me” by They Might Be Giants

Theme song to Malcolm in the Middle– ah, a simpler time, one before Bryan Cranston was “the one who knocks.”

 

23. Crystal Bowersox’s cover of “Me and Bobby McGee” from American Idol

This was the last season of the show I watched.

 

24. “California” by Phantom Planet- The O.C.‘s theme song

 

25. “We Used to Be Friends” by The Dandy Warhols- Veronica Mars theme song.

 

26. “It Don’t Matter to the Sun” by Rosie Thomas

I’ve seen Grey’s Anatomy about five times, but this is on the soundtrack.

 

27. “Dunder and Dwightning” by Sweet Diss and the Comebacks

An ode to The Office

 

28. “Let’s Go to The Mall” by Robin Sparkles

I’m totally going to spoil one of my favorite episodes of How I Met Your Mother– “Slap Bet”. At the beginning, Robin refuses to go to the mall with her friends because she doesn’t like malls, but she won’t tell anyone why. Everyone ventures guesses, but we find out in the end that she was a teen pop star in Canada in the 90s who had a hit song called “Let’s Go to the Mall. ” More Robin Sparkles songs pop up on the show as it goes on.

 

29. “Jar of Hearts” by Christina Perri

This song was featured on So You Think You Can Dance before Christina Perri even had a record- it was professionally recorded for the show because a mutual friend shared it with one of the show’s choreographers, who decided to use it. It immediately shot up the iTunes charts and she scored a record deal soon after.

 

30. “Suddenly I See” by KT Tunstall- featured on Ugly Betty

 

31. “Don’t Stop Believing” from Glee

I stopped watching this show awhile ago, but I’ll never stop loving this cover from the pilot.

 

32. “5,000 Candles in the Wind” by MouseRat

This song from Parks and Recreation is in an episode where the town is mourning the death of their beloved miniature horse, Li’l Sebastian. Sample lyric: “And here’s the part that hurts the most/Humans cannot ride a ghost.”

 

33. “Negro y Azul: The Ballad of Heisenberg” by Los Cuates de Sinaloa

One of the weirder Breaking Bad cold opens featured a music video of a Spanish song about Heisenberg, the main character’s drug lord alter-ego.

 

34. “Baby Blue” by Badfinger

Featured on the Breaking Bad finale, very appropriately.

 

35. “Wrong Song” by Connie Britton and Hayden Panetierre

One of my favorite songs from Nashville

 

36. “You’ve Got Time” by Regina Spektor- theme song to Orange Is the New Black

On Love and Deserving

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Warning: herein lie spoilers for the movie The Town, Season 4 of Gilmore Girls, and the novel Driver’s Ed.

I started thinking of all my associations with the words “love” and “deserving” when used together.

Here’s one—this lovely song by Lori McKenna (possibly the subject of a future Katie Recommends):

[spotify id=”spotify:track:0p5x6zmXBjXdQ0bVcvMPhm” width=”300″ height=”380″ /]

Here’s another—the cheesy book and self-help tape Luke listens to on Gilmore Girls (which, laughable as it is, does help him realize that he’s in love with Lorelai). I can’t find the clip where the tape says, “You deserve love,” but here’s another one that includes the tape.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlkGPr5oMR0]

But here’s another, the one I think of most often. A few years ago, I’d just seen the movie The Town and hadn’t really liked it. My biggest issue with it was that when the female lead discovers that the guy she’s been seeing is the same guy who traumatized her by kidnapping her at gunpoint during a bank robbery, she still wants to be with him. I did not buy that for a minute, and shared that thought with some co-workers at lunch one day. One co-worker, who’d seen the movie and liked it, was surprised. “But she loved him!” she said.

“Some people don’t deserve love,” I countered.

And I’ll never forget the look on her face. She looked like I’d slapped her—as if, with an offhand comment about a character in a movie, I’d hurt her personally.

But I meant it when I said it. I really did believe that not everyone deserved love. Everyone deserves to be loved by their parents and families, but does everyone deserve romantic love?

I have a lot of friends who have fallen for lousy guys when they deserve much better. It’s frustrating to see your friends continue to see and to respond to jerks, and my response, more than once, has been that guys like that don’t deserve love. Not that they don’t deserve the love of my awesome friends—that they don’t deserve love, period.

But how far does that theory go? If a fictional bank robber/kidnapper doesn’t deserve love, what about real people? Do murderers deserve love? Rapists? Domestic abusers? Cheaters? Do genocidal dictators deserve love? If you do a terrible thing, should your karmic punishment be the permanent loss of romantic love?

This almost seems like a set-up to a discussion of religion, but my thoughts here aren’t quite so high-minded. Honestly, I’m thinking about myself—someone who has never received romantic love from anyone. Someone who has no firsthand experience with the emotion they sing about in so many songs, that drives the plot of so many of my favorite movies. Someone who, most of the time, tries very hard not to talk too much, in this blog and in real life, about how frustrating my lack of success at dating has been—but someone whose psychic real estate is largely occupied by thoughts on that subject. It’s been getting worse and worse now that I’m twenty-nine and have spent the entirety of my life single and without romantic love. I worry every single day that I will never have the things I want the most—despite trying as hard as I can to meet someone who will help me get those things.

It’s very hard not to wonder what is so wrong with me and to come up with things that are wrong. I am by far the least attractive girl in my group of friends. When I was on vacation in Florida back in August, I had a hard time looking at myself when I was on the beach with three much thinner friends. I’m not getting any younger. And I am, as I’ve mentioned before, not a very nice person, and my success at disguising that fact varies. I’ve always wished I could be one of those people whom EVERYONE likes, but I’ve already failed at that—there are more than a few people who actively dislike me, maybe even hate me, and I have to take responsibility for that. I’m not even sure why I still have any friends at all.

And I guess this has all been a roundabout way to this realization: I’m not always sure that I deserve love. I know nothing productive can come from this way of thinking, but there it is. When trying to find someone has been this discouraging, I find myself thinking—what do I really have to offer a potential boyfriend that no other girl can? With so many awesome single girls out there, why would anyone ever want to be with me? Do I really deserve that kind of love?

Maybe I don’t. But maybe no one does. Because this brings me to my final association with the words “love” and “deserving” –a quote from the young adult novel Driver’s Ed by Caroline B. Cooney. In the book, two teenagers have confessed to stealing a stop sign, which resulted in a fatal accident. At the very end, one of them says to his father that he doesn’t think he deserves love. His father says that he’s right—he doesn’t deserve love:

“That’s the thing about love,” said his father, wrapping a Christmas arm around his son. “Nobody deserves it. Love just is.”

 

I think that might be closer to the truth about love and deserving than anything else.

This Is our F***ing City

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I know I’m a week late on this, but I could not let the occasion of the Red Sox winning the World Series pass by without commenting on it here.

Here’s me after the Sox won in 2004 for the first time in eighty-six years:

I’d just bought the hat that day. It had dawned on me that I didn’t have a Sox hat and I wanted to be wearing one if the Sox won the World Series that night.

And I was wearing it in 2007, and again last week.

The rest of Boston sports I can take or leave (and I still kind of dislike the Patriots), but I love the Red Sox. It’s funny, but I strongly associate the Sox with me creating this blog. I distinctly remember that right around when I started this blog, I was really worried about Jon Lester, who’d just been diagnosed with cancer. Seven years later, he’s been cured, has won the World Series twice, and mostly been a pretty awesome pitcher.

I can’t believe that after such a long drought, we’ve now won three World Series in nine years. And I was thinking how all three wins followed a disappointing year- 2004 was after the disastrous Aaron Boone ALCS of 2003, 2007 was after a year where the Sox fell apart in August and September (right when I started this blog), and this year, it followed the worst year for the Sox in recent memory. Worst to first feels pretty good.

There’s been a lot written about how this championship also happened after the Marathon bombings. I’m kind of hesitant to contribute to that because while sports certainly boost people’s spirits…it’s still just sports, and doesn’t change all that happened last April. But sports do bring people together in both the best and worst of times, and with all the negative things that sports contribute to society, their power to foster togetherness is one big positive.

This is our f***ing city. Until next year, go Sox!

Some Good Things

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It’s been a bit since my last post, and I’ll write about something more interesting pretty soon. Sometimes it’s hard to find things to write about when life is good. Which it is right now, I’m happy to report. Not because of one huge reason (I’m still single, sadly), but lots of things are going right lately. And it can be obnoxious to talk about how great your life is (see this article!), but on a blog about my life, I do want to share what’s going on with me.

So here are some reasons I’ve been happy lately:

-One of my goals for the year was to write more fiction, and I have. A long time ago, I used to try submitting short stories to magazines, but after awhile I just…stopped. Until this year, when I started submitting a couple of stories around. Recently, I found out that one of them was accepted! My short story “Things You Don’t Know I Know about You” is forthcoming in The Sierra Nevada Review, and it will be out in May. Yea!

-I made my sales goal at work, which means I’m getting a bonus in a couple of months.

-I completed a 10K yesterday and got a good time for me! I finished in 53:29, which is a 8:37 pace, faster than I usually run.

-I’ve been better lately about exercising and not eating crap.

-My roommate and I got a better Internet connection. I then joined Netflix, and then I bought a Roku. The Roku has massively improved my life. I’m now catching up with TV shows I should have been watching. Parks and Recreation is now one of my new favorites—I’ll do a post in the near future about everything I’ve been catching up with. Breaking Bad is probably next.

-But I’m not starting Breaking Bad until baseball is over because RED SOX IN THE ALCS WOO!

-It’s fall and the weather is lovely and I recently went apple picking because YEA NEW ENGLAND.

-I’ve picked up a little side project editing college essays for high school kids, and I’m enjoying it.

-The Boston Book Festival is coming up this weekend- I’ve meant to go every other year, but have always been busy. This is the first year I’m making it.

-BC’s football team still isn’t great, but they’re at least better than they were last year.

-I saw a great play called The Power of Duff last weekend. After I see a good play, it makes me want to see [Allie Brosh] ALL the theater! [/Allie Brosh] So maybe there’s more theater for me in the near future.

-Speaking of Allie Brosh, her book is coming out at the end of the month!

-My friends are awesome, although that’s not new.

-My furry friend is also awesome.