Song of the Moment: “Fireflies”

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Labor Day Weekend, the unofficial end of summer, is coming up— so sad, although I do love autumn as well. It’s a great time of year, though, for this beautiful song, which I acquired from my friend Jenny. I don’t know any other songs by Ron Pope, but after hearing this lovely song, “Fireflies,” I want to check out more of them. It’s a song about two summer lovers having to say goodbye at the end of summer, and the lyrics are just gorgeous, especially the chorus:

Like autumn turns leaves,

The winter will breathe

Cold on our necks,

Snow in our paths.

Wherever she goes,

All that I know about us

Is that beautiful things never last.

That’s why fireflies flash.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm-DhO0BbzY]

Blog Swap!

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I’m participating in 20-something Bloggers’ Blog Swap. My swap partners are Cate and Maureen from What We Covet. Please read my guest post on So You Think You Can Dance over there! Here are Cate and Maureen’s thoughts on summer reading.



As our summer vacations come to an end, we begin to realize what we’re about to lose for the next nine or ten months: warm breezes, Sno Cones, trips to the beach, and free time. Mostly free time, because when you live in North Carolina, those other three things actually come around with some frequency. However, with the loss of our free time, we find ourselves unable to enjoy them.

Above all these, we mourn the departure of our pleasure reading. Below we share our picks for summer reading while we all have just a little more time to indulge our literary fancies.

MAUREEN

Summer is the time for to tackle books that are just too big to fit in between Very Literary Literature, Volume I and Very Literary Literature, Volume II. Right now I’ve been working through George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, a sprawling epic that contains more characters I want to strangle than characters I do not. I have to read as much of it as possible at once because of the innumerable characters and complicated everythings.

I am also a fan of some forms of literature that many people disapprove of–like comics! A season where no elite scholarly types look down their noses at me is the best season, and one in which I may finally catch up on, say, Fullmetal Alchemist. However, it is important to remember to read only one type of comic at a time, because accidentally reading Gunnerkrigg Court from right to left will make it too much trouble for a lazy summer day.

CATE

My first preference is for something that I wouldn’t be forced to read during the school year or that I wouldn’t read in public (I’m looking in your direction, Sweet Valley High). Beyond that, I have only one requirement: that the subject is so engrossing I can’t put the book down. For some people, that’s Dan Brown’s latest code-cracking, scandal-mongering page turner. For me, it’s often one of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series or a biography by Lady Antonia Fraser. Not only did she pen the lovely Marie Antoinette: The Journey (upon which Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette was based), but she has also covered the lives of Mary, Queen of Scots; all six of Henry VIII’s wives; Oliver Cromwell; and others. If you care anything about compelling, well-researched biographies, she’s your girl. When I’m feeling less historically inclined but still want to read non-fiction, I turn to memoirs of current pop-culture fixtures, such as my imaginary husband Scott Weiland’s Not Dead and Not for Sale: The Earthling Papers: A Memoir or James Lipton’s memoir-slash-Hollywood guide book Inside Inside. And on the rare occasions when those books won’t keep me occupied? I always fall back on my trusty trashy romance novels–particularly the ones written by Sabrina Jeffries, of course!

Bio

Maureen and Cate each hold a BFA in Creative Writing from an institution that shall remain nameless in order to protect the innocent who tried to teach them. Their aversion to actual work knows very few bounds, as evidenced by their joint blogging project, What We Covet.

CS&T

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When I was a kid, I never went to camp in the summer. I never visited relatives (they all lived near me in Massachusetts) and I never traveled outside of New England.

All I wanted to do was swim.

When I was six, my family joined a swim and tennis club in my town that was more like a community pool than a country club. C-Town Swim and Tennis Club (CS&T) had an L-shaped, 25-yard pool and a baby pool behind a clubhouse that had a lobby and two bathrooms. There were vending machines, lots of grass, and a four-square court. The tennis courts were located off the driveway.

In a game of word association, it’s the place I associate with both “summer” and “childhood.” I can’t remember what I used to do in the summer before we joined. From the time I was six, every summer was the same. I was at the club every day. I saw the same families every year and the same old friends. I started competitive swimming, the sport that consumed my life in high school, on CS&T’s swim team when I was seven years old and didn’t quit until I was too old to swim on the team anymore. And every year, the swim team was undefeated, like the basketball team in the movie Pleasantville. Actually, CS&T was like Pleasantville in a lot of ways: nothing ever changed, everyone was usually happy, and no one ever wanted to leave.

I could go on for days about all my memories of that place. The day I started swim team and was so tired that I collapsed, exhausted, into bed at home, ready to quit. My first ribbon when I was eight, for twelfth place at championships, which I was incredibly proud of. Draping towels over picnic tables and playing house with my friend Caroline in between swim team and swim lessons when we were little. (We usually pretended we were orphans who would get rescued by a rich old lady—we must have been reading the Samantha books in the American Girl series too much.) Playing games with friends over on the grass—I can still hear everybody screaming, “Witchy Witchy, are you coming out tonight?” Staying up all night in a tent at the club sleepover. Going out for ice cream with Andrea, my favorite lifeguard, whom I worshipped. Celebrating my ninth birthday at the club on a cloudy day and having the whole pool to ourselves. Spending all season trying to learn how to dive with Andrea when I was nine only to get the hang of it on the day of championships. Winning my first medal, for fourth place, at championships when I was eleven. Watching my dad win the cannonball contest at the club’s annual Family Day. Running away from Caroline as she tried to wipe her egg-smeared hands off on me after the egg we were using in the egg toss on Family Day broke all over her. Participating in skits at the club pep rally before championships. Going on a cruise of the Boston Harbor Islands with older kids on the swim team. “Catching” the little kids in the six-and-under age group, who only swam to the halfway point of the pool in meets and needed older kids there to help them when they finished. Going to Canobie Lake Park on a club-sponsored trip. Taking pictures in the deep end with an underwater camera. Celebrating my fifteenth birthday with a surprise party my friends threw for me at the club. Baby-sitting for CS&T families. Winning my first “Most Improved” trophy when I was fifteen. Taking a lifeguarding course with a bunch of friends when I was sixteen. Working at the club for four years when I was in college and becoming one of those lifeguards I had idolized.

You get the idea. As Josh, who was the teacher in that first swim lesson of mine twenty years ago (wow…twenty years ago?), says, it’s a special place. And he should know. He was a member as a child and joined the maintenance staff when he was fourteen. He became a lifeguard, then head coach, and until last year, when he was promoted to dean at the high school where he was previously a teacher, the club’s manager.

This summer, there are all sorts of things I’ve wanted to do. I made a list of everything I wanted to do this summer and have made good progress on it. I’ve also made a “Bucket List” of things I want to accomplish in my life and a list of places I want to travel. I’m amazed at how different I am now from that kid who just wanted to swim. As a child, I didn’t care about seeing the world. I didn’t want to travel when I had all I wanted right in my hometown. Why, I thought, would I want to spend my summer doing anything other than what I already knew I loved?

I’m twenty-seven now and don’t know what my future holds. I am, as my blog title indicates, a struggling single twenty-something who doesn’t yet, and may never, have the husband, kids, and house in the Boston suburbs that I so want. But if I ever do have kids, what I had with CS&T is what I want for them. Not necessarily the specifics of the way I used to spend my summers, but I hope that my hypothetical future children will be so happy with what they have that they can’t imagine that anything else could be better.

As for me, I’m working on getting myself to that place in my current life. Stay tuned.

Katie Recommends: Maine

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How has it been this long since I’ve written about books?! It’s certainly not because I haven’t been reading—I’ve read quite a few books since my last post about them. So, time to remedy that by doing a Katie Recommends about books.

Maine is J. Courtney Sullivan’s second novel—the first was Commencement, which I’ve already written about. Like Commencement, this book alternates between four different viewpoints, but this time, they’re the voices of four different women in different generations of the same Irish Catholic family: the alcoholic octogenarian matriarch, the outspoken family black sheep, the desperate housewife lamenting the current state of her family, and the thirty-two-year-old unexpectedly pregnant by her immature boyfriend. As the book continues, we learn a lot about the family backstory and what makes these women the way they are. Meanwhile, family conflicts play out as these four women convene at their family vacation house in Maine.

On a personal note, I loved the recognition I found in a lot of things—I have vacationed several times on the southern coast of Maine and knew a lot of the places they referred to, and I’m also from a large, Irish Catholic, Bostonian family. Little things made me laugh, too, like the obituaries being referred to as the “Irish sports page” (my Irish great-grandmother apparently used to pick up the paper and say, “Let’s see who’s dead now.”). But even if you don’t have that personal connection, the characters are very easy to relate to, and there’s both a lot of humor and some very emotional moments.

Usually when I do a “Katie Recommends” post, I throw in some things that I don’t like, but it’s been so long since I’ve written about books that I’m just going to stick with the best books I’ve read. So, for other books I’ve been reading lately:

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

I read a positive review for this book in the Globe, put it on my Goodreads “To Read” list, and kind of forgot about it until I was running out of ideas for what to read. So I bought this book last year before I went to Aruba along with three others, and this was the last one I read. My expectations weren’t that high, but oh.my.God. This book is amazing. It’s about three siblings from Nebraska who lost their mother, Hope, as children. Hope, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, disappeared when she was swept up in a tornado. The siblings are now in their thirties. Larken is an overweight professor struggling with fear and unrequited love. Gaelan is a promiscuous TV weatherman whose relationships are all very superficial. Bonnie is a quirky townie who works odd jobs and searches the garbage left behind after storms. When their father is killed by lightning, they travel back to their Welsh-American hometown of Emlyn Springs, Nebraska to observe old Welsh funeral customs and confront the truth about their mother’s disappearance, which we learn about through Hope’s old diary entries. The characters are so sympathetic and real, and the writing is just lovely. There are some wonderful lines in which Kallos gives us insight to the minds of the dead: what they see, what they want, what they feel.



Broken For You by Stephanie Kallos

Since I loved Sing Them Home so much, of course I had to read Stephanie Kallos’s first book, Broken For You. Both books are very warm, sad, and occasionally funny, with quirky, imperfect, lovable characters. This one is about Margaret, a divorced septuagenarian dying of brain cancer who decides to take a boarder into her Seattle mansion. Wanda, a young stage manager reeling from a difficult breakup, answers the ad, and moves in not knowing about Margaret’s illness. Both women have heartache in their past: Margaret’s divorce followed the death of her son, and her house is haunted by the ghost of her difficult mother. Wanda was abandoned by her parents as a child and is secretly trying to track down the boyfriend who broke her heart. Margaret also struggles with the knowledge that the beautiful antique china she owns was stolen by her father from European Jewish families during World War II—until she responds by breaking the china with Wanda, who then turns it into beautiful mosaic art. While I did like Sing Them Home better—this book’s plot relies a bit too much on coincidence—it’s still a beautiful, highly enjoyable novel. I can’t wait for Stephanie Kallos to write another book.



The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst

This is Carolyn Parkhurst’s third novel. I’ve read the other two, and this one makes her 3 for 3 with me. In fact, I like this one even better than The Dogs of Babel and Lost and Found. The protagonist, Octavia Frost, is a middle-aged novelist whose latest project is a book that rewrites all of the last chapters of her novels so that they no longer end tragically or reveal the pieces of her life, which has included the deaths of her husband and young daughter years ago in an accident, that have found their way into the books. As she’s about to turn in her final draft, she hears on the news that her estranged son, a famous rock star, has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. As she sets out to reconnect with the son she hasn’t spoken to in years, she discovers a lot of secrets about his life and starts to piece together how and why the murder happened. This book not only has a very original, suspenseful plot, but also includes the final chapters of Octavia’s books, both the original and rewritten versions. A lot of them sound like really good books—I kind of hope that Carolyn Parkhurst writes them for real!

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore

This must have been an incredibly difficult book to write. It’s a comedic book that follows the life of Jesus Christ from childhood to crucifixion from the perspective of his made-up best friend that stays pretty close to the Bible story. And somehow, it’s funny and irreverent but also respectful of Christianity and the historical Jesus. A lot of the plot concentrates on the years before Jesus starts his ministry, of which the Bible says nothing. According to this book, Jesus spent those years traveling through Asia meeting the three kings who came to the manger where he was born. Biff’s personality can get a little irritating at times—he has a tendency to act like a 1st-century frat boy—but overall this was a fun, hilarious read.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Normally, very poetic language doesn’t do much for me, but the language used in this book is just gorgeous. Which is strange, because it’s a book about five sisters who all kill themselves. It’s written in the collective “we,” similar to Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End or Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” as the young boys of the town describe the sheltered but fascinating Lisbon sisters, aged 13-17, who become all the more mysterious and beautiful to them after the youngest sister takes her own life. The title pretty much gives away the tragic nature of the story, but it’s a wonderful book that manages to make the story beautiful without romanticizing suicide.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I’ve had a bad run of luck with Pulitzer Prize winners—didn’t like The Road or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was meh on Tinkers and March, and liked but didn’t love Olive Kitteridge. But Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer in 2003? This I loved. It takes some serious talent to create an epic family saga with sympathetic and unforgettable characters that’s centered around consentual incest and intersexuality. Narrated like a Greek tragedy (it even starts out, “Tell me, O Muse,”) by Cal/Callie, a young man with a rare form of intersexuality that caused him to appear and be raised as a female during his childhood, it follows Cal’s grandparents as they immigrate to Michigan from Greece and start a family, all while hiding the secret of how their relationship began. This is just an amazingly well-written book—I can’t wait for Eugenides’s next novel.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Kyley gave me this book for my birthday, and it is HILARIOUS. It takes place in 1960s New Orleans and follows Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, oddly-dressed thirty-year-old man who lives with his long-suffering mother and, despite his master’s degree and tendency to use multisyllabic words, is oblivious to the way the world works and will bellow at and berate anyone who gets in his way. After a car accident that puts his mother in debt, he is forced to go out and find a job and, in doing so, meets some quirky characters almost as crazy as he, plus causes a lot of chaos.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I read this book just in time for the movie, which I’m planning on seeing. I know everyone and their second cousin’s dog has read this book, but you know what? Usually when a book becomes that popular, it’s because a lot of people liked it. And I am one of them. It’s narrated in different chapters by Skeeter, a white, struggling, single, twenty-something writer (like me!) in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi (or not so much like me at all), and two black maids, Aibileen and Minny. After discovering that the maid who raised her has left, which her family refuses to talk about, and rapidly tiring of her racist housewife friends, Skeeter gets the idea to interview the maids in Jackson for an anonymous book detailing their experiences. Although the maids are risking their jobs and even their lives as civil rights-era violence spreads through Mississippi, they decide that their stories need to be told. While the book certainly isn’t perfect, the characters are very well-written and the plot is, to use a cliché, a page-turner, with a lot of humor thrown into a story with serious subject matter.

Song of the Moment: Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

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A couple of years ago at work, we did a CD exchange where we made mix CDs for people in our group and ended up with five new CDs of our own. One coworker in my group included the Indigo Girls’ cover of Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” and there was one line in particular that stood out to me: “I thank the Lord for the people I have found.” I’ve loved Elton John since I was a kid, and I have over forty of his songs on my iPod, but I didn’t have this one. So I listened to his version, discovered that it was even better (and that it was in the movie Almost Famous, which I saw a long time ago and had forgotten about), and promptly bought it.

The speaker in this song lives in New York City, where I’ve never lived, but the idea in the song, of being overwhelmed and disappointed with where you are in life but still finding hope and inspiration from the people in your life, really resonated with me. I’ve felt that way a lot of times throughout my twenties—that even when things were crazy and upsetting, there were always people to hang onto—“I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you.” And I have been feeling very grateful lately for the people I have found. So this Song of the Moment is for all of you.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tRgYfQ48A0]

Fifteen Years of Melodrama

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Today I turn 27, which Jill and Rebekah have called the “scary age.” I am now officially in my late twenties, which is so weird. And it sounds so much older- maybe it’s the extra syllable. I look around at the company I’ve been working at for four years, where I was one of the youngest people when I started working here, and realize that I no longer fall into that category, not by a long shot. I am still single and still struggling, but will only be a twenty-something for three more years.


Before I made public my desire to spew generational angst, I wrote my feelings down the old-fashioned way: diaries and journals. Sometimes they had locks, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I wrote “Dear Diary,” sometimes I called my diary a name like Anne Frank called her diary Kitty, and sometimes I didn’t call it anything. Sometimes I wrote every day, sometimes I caught up later, sometimes I waited until I had some kind of deep thought and then wrote about it. In elementary school, if no significant events occurred that day (and to be clear, significant events included having pizza for dinner, getting a video from the video store, and going to the pool), I wrote, “Nothing happened.”


I’m about to move to a new apartment in the same area, and as I was moving, I found all the old diaries and journals that I saved. It’s funny looking through them now and seeing what was so important to me back then. I was so melodramatic- everything from not being allowed to carry a backpack between classes to the results of Making the Band sent me into a tizzy.


So I thought that I would summarize the fifteen years before SSTS by sharing with you one bit of overreaction for each year. Without further ado:


Age 21: Really funny in retrospect
“Editing jobs for recent college grads also don’t pay much. I read somewhere that it’s actually better to get a job in sales or marketing or something at a publishing company and switch over to editing later. Unfortunately, not only would sales or marketing bore me, I would suck at them. Like I said, my people skills leave a lot to be desired.”
(I did, of course, end up landing one of those low-paying editing jobs, but I’ve also worked in marketing and am now hoping to move into sales and then a higher marketing position eventually. Go figure.)


Age 20: Emo-Katie
“Sometimes I feel completely crazy and sometimes I feel like the sanest person in the world. Sometimes I’m totally comfortable with myself and sometimes I think there are a million things wrong with me that I need to fix.

I think I missed out on a lot of the anxieties that people have their freshman year of college, and I’m making up for that now. I don’t know where I’m going or what I want. I feel like this T-shirt Jon has: ‘I’m Confused…Wait, Maybe I’m Not!’”


Age 19: Not the holiday most people would romanticize
 “I wish we could go back to April Fool’s Day. We were all so happy then.”


Age 18: Mortal sins committed against me on AIM
“Around the time I started to realize that BQ didn’t like me, I noticed that she didn’t have me on her buddy list. I asked her if she had my screen name and she said yes. But she didn’t have many people on there, so I didn’t care too much. I only IM’ed her I think twice, both times in response to away messages saying she was upset or sick. Not long after that, I noticed that she wasn’t online anymore, but she was on C’s computer. So I figured she made it so only people on her buddy list could view her info, which is a pretty bitchy thing to do in itself. But last week I noticed that while she didn’t show up under (first screen name), she did show up under (second screen name). So you know what she did? She blocked me. SHE FUCKING BLOCKED ME!!!!! THAT FUCKING BITCH!!!!!!!!”
(Remember when life revolved around AIM? Getting blocked on AIM was the ultimate insult–even worse than being defriended on Facebook. This girl BQ (Bitch Queen) had done plenty of bitchy things away from the computer, but for some reason blocking me on AIM was what sent me over the edge.)


Age 17: College application angst
“Nothing makes me stand out. I’m not good at swimming–I couldn’t even make sectionals– I don’t have A’s in all my classes, my class rank is only 18, I’m not president of Student Council or editor-in-chief of the Voice or the yearbook, I haven’t had a lead in any of the plays or even a big part, I’m not a National Merit Semifinalist. Even my essay wasn’t that great.”


Age 16: The woes of junior year
“I have a ton of homework, AND the musical, AND track starts next week. And my English teacher is really pissing me off. She grades so hard and I’M DOING SO BAD! Plus, I have other things to worry about. Like studying for SATs, and looking for colleges, and looking for a summer job, and trying to get my writing published. I have like no time for fun anymore. Life is sooo stressful!”
(I’ll cut myself some slack on this one because junior year of high school was, honestly, pretty jam-packed. I don’t know how I ever made it through high school doing everything I was doing.)


Age 15: Reality TV angst
“THEY ANNOUNCED THE O-TOWN MEMBERS ON MAKING THE BAND!!! And one of them is Ikaika!! I can’t believe it! He’s never even there! How could he be in the band! And Bryan and Mike didn’t make it!??? I thought Mike was the one guy who was definitely in!…At least Ashley Parker Angel made it. I looove him.”
(If you don’t remember, the first Making the Band was about the making of the boy band O-Town, singers of such brilliant lines as “I’ve had the rest of you now I want the best of you, it’s time for show and tell.” For the record, Ashley was hot and Ikaika was a whiny bitch.)


Age 14: Honors class snobbery
“I really hate my health class. With honors classes you’re in with mostly nice kids. Even chorus has mostly nice kids. But in classes like gym and health, you’re thrown in with all kinds of kids. And my health class is the worst. It’s full of juvenile delinquents and druggies- how ironic. My only real friend in the class is S. I mean, there are a few nice kids in my class, but for the most part, it’s all druggies and jerks.”


Age 13: The first “horrible, tragic thing” was probably a B+
“But another horrible, tragic thing has happened. I suppose it’s not as bad as war or death or even flunking a course, but it is such a disappointment! We can’t go on the Spanish field trip. I was wicked looking forward to it, but it’s on the same day as another field trip. It wicked stinks.”
(I notice in these diaries that I used to say “wicked,” in the Bostonian sense, a lot more when I was younger. However, here I’m completely misusing the word.)


Age 12: Holy overreaction, Batman!
“We’ve got a BIG problem here. The teachers have decided that from now on we won’t be able to carry our backpacks around from class to class with us. Is that unfair or what?”


Age 11: Fuzzy math
“I have mixed feelings today. Half of me wants to shout for joy and half of me wants to cry. And part of me is confused.”


Age 10: People never even solve mysteries
“Books always tell you not to give up, and I’m not going to give up, but I won’t do well. In books, when people say these words, they always turn out not to be true. But in real life…it just doesn’t work that way in real life. Books just aren’t honest. I mean, I love books, but they lie. People never even solve mysteries. Like I said, life isn’t fair.”
(A recurring theme of my childhood– I read so much and always wanted, and in many cases expected, life to turn out the way it did in the books I read.)


Age 9: Let it snow
“Today was the most boring day. We went to Grandma’s. She wasn’t home. We went to a store. It was boring. Then it snowed. At least I can look forward to that.”


Age 8: Poor little Katie- bad haircuts will never stop sucking
“Dear Diary,
Today I went to McDonald’s. Then I got my hair cut. The great hair disaster. I look so stupid. Katie.


Age 7: Sorry, Caroline
“Nobody is any fun anymore. My dad’s on vacation so I can’t play with my friends. L. is on vacation. C’s mom is having an operation. And I hate playing with my dumb sister.”
(Note: when my dad took a week off and we weren’t going anywhere, my parents didn’t want me playing with my friends because they wanted the whole family to do things together. I was not so crazy about that idea.)

And here I am now:



Katie, survivor of a lifetime of angst and melodrama. But of course, some cool stuff occasionally happened to me, too. So I’ll leave you with a record of one of those things:


November 29, 1992
“Dear Diary,
A spaceship landed in my neighborhood. We have proof. I went bike riding. Katie.”

Um.

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It’s mostly my friends who read this blog, but occasionally I get comments from people who find me via some other method- a link on a friend’s blog, my 20-something Bloggers profile, or by Googling something.

That last method is the one I’m really interested in. I remember when I first started this blog, I had a post that mentioned Keith Lockhart, and a surprising number of people found me by Googling “Keith Lockhart’s divorce.” Mostly, people find me by Googling things like “single 20 something blog,” “struggling with being single,” or “books for twenty-something women.” A lot of people have found me by Googling “four-oh-wunk,” or the Sex and the City quote at the top of the blog. I’ve even had people find me by Googling, with quotation marks, “I hate Arrested Development” and “If you like Damages.”

But nothing tops the search that lead someone to me today.

I really don’t want to know.

Um.

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It’s mostly my friends who read this blog, but occasionally I get comments from people who find me via some other method- a link on a friend’s blog, my 20-something Bloggers profile, or by Googling something.

That last method is the one I’m really interested in. I remember when I first started this blog, I had a post that mentioned Keith Lockhart, and a surprising number of people found me by Googling “Keith Lockhart’s divorce.” Mostly, people find me by Googling things like “single 20 something blog,” “struggling with being single,” or “books for twenty-something women.” A lot of people have found me by Googling “four-oh-wunk,” or the Sex and the City quote at the top of the blog. I’ve even had people find me by Googling, with quotation marks, “I hate Arrested Development” and “If you like Damages.”

But nothing tops the search that lead someone to me today.

I really don’t want to know.

Filling Up the Bucket

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Today in “I’m a Moron”: you know that camera cable I was looking for so I could write this post? IT WAS IN MY CAMERA BAG. Duh.

Anyway: two weeks ago, I flew out to Las Vegas for Jon and Steph’s wedding. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I will say that their wedding was lovely. The vows they wrote were very sweet, the decor was beautiful (all in my favorite color, purple!) and the reception was just the right mix of classy and fun. They had appetizers themed after places that were significant to them (i.e. Sam Adams and Fenway Franks for Boston, Bass and mini fish and chips for London, etc.) and table numbers with numbers that had meaning to them. They also gave away flip flops to everyone at the reception for dancing and had both a photo booth and an Elvis impersonator who showed up for one song! Also, it was kind of a weird mix of people at the wedding– a handful of people I knew from college, but many more I didn’t: Jon’s friends from home, Steph’s friends from home, Steph’s friends from when she studied abroad in London, Steph’s friends from when she worked in London for a couple of years, Jon’s work friends in LA, Steph’s work friends in LA, their neighbors in LA…you get the picture. But they were all so much fun! After an awesome bachelorette party, a day spent by the hotel pool (part of it in a rented cabana), and an after-wedding trip to a club in the hotel, I made a lot of new friends. We’re all in a wedding Facebook group now and want to reunite to party again.

It was great to see Jon and Steph, whom I hadn’t seen in awhile, again. It was also awesome to spend more time with Christina- after not seeing her for almost two years, I saw her for two separate occasions in one month. We enjoyed staying in a lovely hotel, played some slots, went to a cool aquarium, and ate some great food.

Also, I crossed a couple of items off my bucket list.

You have a bucket list? you’re now saying. Why, yes, I do. Housekeeping detail: if you read this blog in Google Reader or another method that’s not directly on the site, I now have a new design (it was time for a change) and some new pages. One is on me, the other two are on my bucket list and my travel goals.

I first made the bucket list (which includes the travel goals) the summer after college, just a couple of months before I started this blog. I’ve only modified it a bit since then, and I’ve accomplished some of the items on it–living in Davis Square, traveling to places like Philadelphia and San Francisco, etc. Some items on it are totally do-able (taking a Spanish class, joining a book club, spending the whole day reading a novel); others are harder (becoming a best-selling author, attending an award show, owning a boat). The travel goals range from typical (London, Paris, Rome) to more quirky and Katie-specific (Washington Depot, CT, which inspired Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls, and Quechee, VT, where I used to go skiing, in the summer rather than winter). As my life progresses, I will update you on which items have been accomplished.

So, what’s now been crossed off the list? Traveling to Vegas, first of all. But also?

I WENT TO A CELINE DION CONCERT.

…I KNOW. You’re jealous, right? Well, you should be!

Okay, in all seriousness, I know that it’s not a concert most people would make it a life goal to see. She’s not, and never has been, what the cool kids are listening to. Some guy wrote a book about her that’s subtitled “A Journey To the End of Taste.” Ana Gasteyer did a famous parody of her on SNL. Most people roll their eyes at the mere mention of her name.

You know what? I DON’T CARE. I’ve been a huge fan of hers since I was twelve. There is nothing the least bit ironic or guilty-pleasure-ish in my love for her. I genuinely enjoy her music. I love the things she does with her voice. I love almost all of her songs, from “Where Does My Heart Beat Now” to “Taking Chances.” I love that she seems like a genuinely nice person, and that while people sometimes trash her music, I’ve never heard about her doing or saying anything bitchy or controversial– and with her level of fame and the kind of celebrity culture we live in, the press definitely would have jumped on any story about that. I love that she takes her singing seriously, but not herself or what other people are saying about her, as you can see in these videos.

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

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7sTDpAtjEo]

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

And if you don’t believe me? Believe Michelle Collins (thank you, Megan and Rebekah, for introducing me to her brand of hilarity). She will never apologize for her Celine Dion love and neither will I!

The tickets were an early birthday present from my parents. The seats were awesome and did not disappoint. (They didn’t allow photos in the theater, so I have no pictures from the actual concert.) I could see her really well, and she sounded fantastic. She did a lot of covers, which surprised me- it was about half and half her own stuff and covers like Journey’s “Open Arms” and Janice Ian’s “At Seventeen.” One of my favorite songs she did was actually a French song called “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” I don’t speak French at all, but this is a sad love song, and she cried while singing it- it was surprisingly very moving.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxjYv0N6PoQ]

And of course, the finale was “My Heart Will Go On,” a favorite of mine since my days as a Titanic fangirl. It was amazing, and I didn’t stop smiling all the way to the airport.

What’s next to be crossed off the list? I don’t know, but I’m ridiculously glad to have checked these things off my list. What an awesome trip this was.

Song of the Moment: “June Hymn”

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Here’s a preview of a post that’s going to be coming later this year- can’t make it until I have more to post. This year, I have been experimenting by going to churches of different denominations- kind of a smaller scale version of what Suzanne Strempek Shea did for her book Sundays In America. One church I went to, a Vineyard church, had a contemporary Christian band playing during the service, and before the sermon, the pastor had the band play a song by the Decemberists that played into his sermon. It’s a really lovely song, and appropriate for this time of year.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KusWM9AKfZg]