Bookish Gardener

Audblogged!

Alicia at TwilightCafé has audblogged my "50 things" post. (Props to Tvindy for the audio blogging meme, which you can learn more about here.) After frequenting each other's comments sections for so long, it is very cool to get to hear Alicia's voice...and an honor that she chose this post and gave it such a lovely reading. Thank you, Alicia.

50 things

I like this new blog meme from Gideon Strauss: list 50 things you love. For my list, I've deliberately excluded matters of the altar and the hearth (as I do, or at least strive to, love them with all my heart, all my soul and all my mind). I've also tried to name specific things rather than specific genres of things, but have left out a bunch of things for which I display my affection all too regularly on this blog. Finally, this should really be called "50 things I love today", as I'm sure the list would be different tomorrow. The list, then—off the top of my head, and in no particular order:
· Darkest, barely sweetened chocolate
· Pink, double, fragrant peonies
· Houses of Parliament: Monet as Turner
· Mikey and Nicky: Elaine May as Cassavetes
· Dave Lambert’s scatting on “Walkin’” at Newport ‘63
· Hank Jones and everything about him
· Chuck Jones’ “To Beep or Not to Beep”
· Chicken with string beans and black bean sauce at Hunan (I left my tastebuds in San Francisco)
· Sea bass dim sum at Yank Sing (ditto)
· The vanity plate on a VW beetle (same color as mine—blue) that I’ve seen twice in the last week: “BUGURU”
· The color blue, and the colors that sing when paired with it: orange and magenta
· Hearing Steely Dan’s “Lunch with Gina” in the grocery store
· Spiders
· Elephants
· Bratwurst
· Five-year-olds singing “Simple Gifts”
· A perfectly whacked long drive
· Raptors
· The final scene of “Baby Boom”
· Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 28
· Parliament’s “Flashlight”
· Endlessly refilled restaurant brewed unsweetened iced tea
· Plainsong
· Cello and acoustic bass
· Cooking Thanksgiving dinner
· The scene where Julia leaves Charles in Brideshead Revisited
· Holiday weekends’ Twilight Zone marathons
· Shaping kneaded bread dough after its first rise
· Floating face up in the pool while staring at blue skies with clouds
· Reading while eating/eating while reading
· Space shuttle on Tetris
· Spring fever
· Big brimmed garden hats
· Pulling the whole taproot
· The first sign of successful germination
· The first cup of coffee, when brewed by someone else
· Newly cut hair
· Used book and record shopping
· The first hour after childbirth
· Barehanded gardening
· The eagle pose asana
· Crunchy foods
· Rare-to-raw fish and beef
· The underdog
· A good stogie (don’t get excited…it’s been almost a decade)
· Bourbon (ditto)
· A clean house (when courtesy of someone else)
· My late father’s handwriting
· Playing the drum in your own school band…just kidding…Old falling down farmhouses
· The “click” of “Save this post”

For entertainment purposes only.

I've got a million things to do on this damp, gray morning. There's only one thing to do, then: waste some time having some mindless, useless fun. This is a skill well-honed over my adult life, starting with my days as an undergraduate in the seventies, where I would typically put off, say, writing a paper on the Emile (translated from the French by "Ravelstein") by doing my natal chart by hand, revealing sun and Mars in Libra, rising sign and Venus in Virgo, and moon in Capricorn. (The astrological profile didn't say, but should have said: "You believe that you have gone grocery shopping when you come home with a pint of Haagen Dazs, the current issue of Vogue, and a box of Meow Mix. You have too many books, and you need to do the dishes.")

Advances in technology into this new millennium have now provided us with ever more efficient means of procrastination. So...what do the personality quizzes say this morning? (Except for the final quiz below, these are all courtesy of Quizilla.)

80's song: I'm "When Doves Cry" by Prince. (The rest of the field: Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams"; AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long"; Nena's "99 Red Balloons"; and RunDMC's "It's Tricky".) Yeah, I can live with this.

Japanese name: My name is Ichi ("the one with wisdom"). A few complaints: this particular quiz doesn't show the other alternatives; and the name is written in hiragana (one of the two Japanese phonetic "alphabets") rather than kanji (the Chinese character equivalent). The kanji would have given some interesting insight into the meaning of the name (I'm not quite willing to take "the one with wisdom" on faith). As it is, "ichi" is cognate with the character for the Japanese number one. Which, to think about it, may fit as I'm the oldest daughter of four children, which makes me a "maht-ttal" in Korean--a special term for the first child, if the child is female. It's also cognate with the character for "sun" or "day", which sorta fits with my middle name ("Myong" in Korean, "Akira" in Japanese), which is the Chinese character consisting of the character for "sun" next to the character for "moon". Whoa, Nellie...starting to channel Amaravati here.

Personality disorder: I have an avoidant personality. (The rest of the field: paranoid; histrionic; obsessive compulsive; narcissistic; anti-social; schizoid; schizotypal; dependent; borderline.) Whew, I guess.

Mythological form: I am the phoenix. (The rest of the field: goddess; angel; vampire; unicorn; gargoyle; dragon; elfin; gryphon; demon.) Spot-on! The symbol of my alma mater.

Author's fiction: Flannery O'Connor wrote my book. (The rest of the field: Anne Rice; Dorothy Parker; Ernest Hemingway; Jane Austen; William Gibson; William Faulkner; Robert Heinlein.) This is, hands down, my favorite result.

And finally...although I fully intend that this blog be a politics- and current-events-free zone, Colby Cosh's recent infliction of a typically elegant, and mortal, blow to the popular "Political Compass" quiz renders the quiz, in my view, now safe "for entertainment purposes only". For what it's worth, then, I show up close to the center, in the lower right-hand quadrant. My avoidant personality is pleased to see that I do not share this quadrant with any globally known figures.

Back to work, then. (Sigh.)