#weekly ramblings

[sorrygoldfish]

ask me about...

(week of 7/20)

Another week another scattering of flyers into the winds of tumblr to give people a look at what I'm up to and hopefully get a look at their fllyers in return. I just want to add a little note of appreciation for the other people who have started doing this regularly or semi-regularly. It's cool to see what else we have in common besides Dragon Age and get recipe ideas and book recommendations and reasons to laugh. You're all really great. As per ush, not tagging any additional people specifically but if you see this it's an open invitation to yap at me and yap about yourself.

...what I'm reading (books): Still The Mountain in the Sea for @slothquisitor's book club, which is less than a week away! I can't wait! My progress is slow with this one though. Big chunky paragraphs of sciencey stuff are oil to the water of my ADHD brain.

I also tabled Two Women Living Together for a bit to read We Dance Upon Demons by Vaishnavi Patel on my work computer. A reproductive health care worker in Chicago who gets mysterious powers after touching an artifact at the Art Institute? Sign me up. (It also caught my eye because I keep meaning to read Kaikeyi by the same author and forgetting about it.)

...what I'm reading (fic): Still just trying to keep up with @gatesofminrathous's Everything and Nothing to Lose (BLACKWALL CLIFFHANGER AHHH), @genjyoandgojyoandhakkai's Three of Crows, and @slothquisitor's I Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dust. Really need to clear the schedule to binge more of @thewyvernrising's Shadows of Divinity too.

...what I'm listening to: I listened to the Enya album A Day Without Rain (got the CD at a garage sale somewhere) like three times in a row while I was meal prepping yesterday. My mom got the album when I was a teenager and she would put it on while she cooked dinner sometimes, and now it's 26 years later and yeah, she had the right idea. It's a perfect vibe. Also time is a weird soup.

...what I'm watching: It was a busy week, so my IWTV/TVL progress is only creeping along. I also watched Scream 7, which was pretty bad but in an enjoyable way for a casual lover of the Scream franchise. Like I had a great time watching it even though I called who the killer was way early, ya know? OH and I finished the final season of The Bear and man it got me right in the feels. (@juniper-and-dragonthorn did you finish it what did you think??)

...what I'm eating: This panzanella recipe, courtesy of the sebastianospdx IG (I added little mozzarella balls and measured with my heart on the dressing ingredients):

...what I'm working on: Kinda sorta a Monday the 13th sequel with @dags-over-caravans, kinda sorta It All Comes Back, kinda thinking about oooh what if I wrote a couple little things for Harding Week??

...what I'm doing to touch grass: I touched SO much grass this weekend. Hiking in the gorge, swimming in the Sandy River, paddleboarding around Blue Lake. Summer in the PNW is the fucking best (until wildfire season really pops off but shhhh).

...what's making me laugh: JIMOTHY.

...what's giving me hope: Also Jimothy.

...what's so true to me right now: Just like this prompt, I stole this week's answer from Caleb Hearon's podcast. On an episode awhile ago, (I want to say it was with Matteo Lane) he talked about hating society's current crusade of certainty. As in, we have so much information at our fingertips now that we want to know everything about an experience in advance--we look up restaurant menus, parking info, movie reviews, concert set lists, etc etc etc before deciding if something is worth our time. It encourages a kind of optimization and overthinking that's personally really bad for my brain chemistry, like it feeds into my anxiety instead of calming it. So I've slowly started to just let myself... go places. Let myself start books with zero expectations. Let myself drive somewhere and explore. It feels pretty nice.

Ok that's it for this week, let the yaps commence!

[loopstagirl]

Now July has hit, I’m deciding no more excuses. I’ve got to get the set amount of work done that I target myself each day and I’ve got to make it to the gym when I say I am going to go. I have abso…

[littlesati]

[awsm-hair-danderson-blog]

On blind love and love the blinder

Hey guys! So I’m back again for the weekly ramblings, If you’ve read my earlier posts then you should know that I’m reading The Bone Clocks by David Mitchel (the author of Cloud Atlas just incase your curious). I know I know, “I can’t believe your still reading that book!” but sadly time is in short supply lately. Not to mention that though I am making rather slow progress, I am finding at least two or so hours a week to read (about 60 or so pages) so no worries guys! Ill be talking about a new book in no time. Anyways, back to this week’s adventures. If you recall, last time I posted I was half way through the fourth chapter. Well, guess what! I finished it! And with plenty of questions left unanswered if I may say so. In case you’ve never read any of his books, David Mitchel has a fond habit of making REALLY BIG THINGS HAPPEN and then suddenly switching points of view, in effect leaving that really big thing completely irrelevant until much later on in the book. In the second half of the chapter, a character who I first thought of as being heartless and shallow really goes through some tough emotional times that point out just how human he actually is. He fights through love, grief, fear, etc. all the while trying to find out what his place is in the literary world. Now usually, I’m so transfixed with how the characters relate to the MAIN-main character Holly, that I feel like I’ve missed a lot of small and important details. I feel like Mitchell may be trying to say so much more and I’m just missing it. Then again, maybe this is just a story bred to be interesting. Who knows? Regardless, what I’m trying to say is that I focused on this characters personal experience more so than I did that of the others. To understand to whole you must first understand the parts (unless your Plato that is). While looking at his story, I couldn’t help but notice the shocking amount of times he had the idea of love chewed up and spit out right in-front of him. His wife, his friend, his kids, his father, everybody he has ever tried to love has pushed him away! In some ways its kind of understandable why his character was such an asshole! I mean the only times he wasn’t was when he was given somebody to care about. On of the big things that this really got me thinking about, was can we ever be not good enough/too good for love? I know that that’s somewhat of a strange question, but I mean think about it. How many times have you heard people say, “love is blind”? I personally know that I’ve heard it a million different times before. The real question though is whether or not it actually is. I mean in this chapter the narrator struggles at one point with how the person he loved must look at him and see how old and ragged he is becoming. Perhaps if this drove her away they did not really love eachother? OR, what if its more along the lines that the fact that since their love wasn’t true she was capable of seeing those things about him. Perhaps love isn’t blind, but it makes us blind! Its when were not really in love that those class boundaries set themselves up and we feel that we are above or below somebody. I feel that its important for us to think about these things as our modern society is very much defined by what we think of as love. We become so in love with one thing to the point where we lose track of the other things that we love like the character in this latest chapter. Perhaps if we could learn how love really works, whether or not it is the blind one, or the blinder, then we could help to solve so many of the personal problems that plague us. After all, what is the world but what we perceive it to be. Then again, this is all just speculation. What do you think?

[soompi]

Weekly Ramblings: Idols Are Not Superheroes

The last couple weeks have been pretty miserable for most of the Soompi team. We pretty much had everyone on the team get sick with something or another. You name it, someone on the team probably caught it. A few of us are still a bit sick but we shall persevere. But this got me thinking, what about idols? They seem to get sick quite a bit and yet I don’t think it’s discussed enough. So for this…

View On WordPress

[dubaihello-blog]

Weekly Ramblings

Hi friends! We are back from a long weekend in Sri Lanka (and what most of our new Sri Lankan friends proclaimed as the world's shortest trip to their beautiful country - post to come!). Wanted to share a few thoughts on this Monday afternoon:

We are LUCKY. Lee will post more about what we saw on our trip but I couldn't feel more grateful for being born into a nice family in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

The 40s (100s) are overrated. Am ready for the "cool" fall temps in the 80s and 90s. Walking by the outdoor cafes makes me antsy for al fresco dining without sweating my face off.

Eating in public during daylight is NOT overrated. After concealing bottles of water in the car and not eating out for a month during the day, it feels so luxurious to get a coffee and drink it in the car or eat lunch at any restaurant I want!

Happy Monday, pals! Stay tuned for the update from Lee on Sri Lanka shortly. 

[thehype92-blog-blog]

Week 2 NFL Ramblings

I will start writing more often I promise.... Yes, I know it is a simple statement to make and something that nobody can hold me by but it will happen starting today. At least once a week I will post an NFL Ramblings, not necessarily about every outcome of that week but about something I observed or failed to and hopefully it will be Bill Simmons-like, or is Simmonsian? Or some other abbreviation I haven't thought of, maybe Simmonite, I must put more thought into it. And this week’s post is going to be about one specific thing actually inspired by something I heard Simmons say. 

Should the Colts tank to get Andrew Luck?

Wait you must be saying to yourself, your going to write a Simmons-like article that should be around 10,000 words, if you want to stay true to form, on that one topic? And my answer to you internet is yes.

This is multifaceted (big words will be used buy a dictionary) argument and I believe I will be taking a controversial stance here when I say they should tank to get Luck. There are two reasons to this argument, the first is that Peyton Manning is getting old; he is 34 and growing older by the day. The second is by all accounts Manning isn't coming back until Week 10 at the earliest and by then I am confident that the Colts will either be 0-10 or 1-9 and if the Colts organization is smart, which for the premise of this article we must assume they are, they won't bring Manning back only to have a slightly better losing record and chance him getting hurt again.

But TheHype you’re saying to yourself why do the Colts care about Manning being injured if they are just going to replace him with Andrew Luck anyway. The answer is simple they need Manning to be the starting Quarterback next year while he mentors Luck on the bench. I personally would want Luck to sit for two years and then have Manning retire but I realize it would be unrealistic for a number one pick to sit two years and wasting all that money. 

The question becomes where will Manning go after Luck becomes starting QB, and my suggestion is simple. I say keep him, not as a Quarterback but as the Offensive Coordinator. Let us be honest Manning was basically there OC as it was often taking the reins in himself and no huddling, calling plays at the line, etcetera, and at the same time he has more leadership on that team then Jim Caldwell will ever have so might as well stick him a position of leadership while continuing to mentor Luck. And lets be honest whoever the Colts Offensive Coordinator is now can't be that good based on the performance I have seen from the Colts first two games this season anyway so might as well replace him.

Now this all balances on the single question that you should be dying is asked (if not it is okay you are just a little slower than everybody else is, but your special that is why you ride the shorter bus) will Peyton agree to this. And my tentative answer is yes, Peyton has played with Colts his entire career and I doubt he has any desire to move around to different teams, especially after his prime, a la Donovan Mcnabb. Manning's number one goal is winning for his team  he has stated in several mediums that anything that can help his team win he will do so if Peyton sees Andrew Luck who by all accounts is the next Peyton Manning, will he walk away?

But what do I know I have never had to walk away from millions of guaranteed dollars, and as much as we want to put athletes on a pedestal and expect them to do the right thing for the team, most of us if we had to decide between our team being better or millions of dollars, would probably choose the latter. I would not be surprised if that is what Peyton did. But no matter what choice Peyton does choose I will remember him as one of the greatest Quarterbacks of all time and if everything breaks down like I have written and Luck breaks all the records that Peyton posted I will also remember him as the greatest mentor to a Quarterback of all time hands down no questions asked.

So there is my argument and yes I know this isn't nearly as long as a Simmons article and you may be angered by this but at that point my question to you is, do you really have time to read 5,000 words. Didn't think so.