Circadian Rhythms

Life moves in cycles. A high energy week gives birth to lots of blog posts, creating new hobbies like "perfectionist packing," and coming up with exciting activities along the road. Those weeks usually give way to great weekends, then onwards to horrifically exhausted weeks. This is one of those weeks.

NOLA was a blast (and maybe I'll manage some real content on it in a day or so), but this week I'm crashing at 9:30pm and crawling out of bed at 6:45am. We have two crappy hotels this week too, which makes life just all the more depressing after the FABULOUS Westin in NOLA (yay hotwire!). My presenter has made it known that she likes finding fun things along the way, but there's just no way I want to "find" anything for her. Two reasons: 1. Pure exhaustion on my part and 2. She's about as interesting as a doorknob and has made some vaguely racist/classist comments. Basically, coming off of last week were I had a real connection with my presenter and had an amazing time, I'm just not interested in putting in any more time and effort with this lady than I have to. So it's time to get dinner alone, curl up with a good book, and recoup some of my introvert energies.

P.S. Yay for Tom Robbins and the ubiquity of book stores on the road. I'm only 10 pages into "Jitterbug Perfume" and I'm already amused.

The Never-Ending List of Hobbies

While I’m not doing NaNo this year, I think I still feel the need to get more things written down lately, and thus the reopening of the blog. This job can sap all of the will to live out of me, but there are enough things that I get joy out of that I should be able to manage--if I can find space in my suitcases. This week, I’ve got my moleskine, my three books (novel, self-help, poetry), my knitting project, my computer, my art kit, and my sewing kit just in case I lose my coat buttons. Really, that should be enough to keep me occupied for two weeks, especially considering I want to go out and see the places that I’m going (not so much Akron, but you get the idea). It’s almost too much to bring, but in a way it’s better to have all of these options so that I don’t end up completely absorbed into TV or the internet, or TV on the internet (damn you Hulu).

This week I have an added excitement--an art presenter. I’m really considering sitting in on his seminar, and tomorrow (Thursday) would be the day to do it. I have no paperwork to do, I’m at SERESC, and we’re not exactly in downtown Manchester (the only other place I would go would be to Target, and I really don’t need to fill my suitcase any more than I already have). I really like painting and getting some color down on paper and although sketching isn’t really my thing, I want to see what the seminar covers. I’ve never sat in on a full seminar, or even really sat in on even part of one. I think it’s time to change that up.

Otherwise, in hobby land...

• I’ve only finished one book this year, a book from the clearance rack of Half-Priced Books: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. It was an interesting and easy read. Now I’m on to a similar clearance find: The Shipping News.
• I’m toting along a (lightweight) poetry book in the hopes that I will get around to reading and writing a bit more than prose. Expect that instead of NaNo, I’m going to think of a different challenge involving poetry, probably for December
• My Knitting is going along fine so far since getting restarted back into it. I finished with a scarf before the BER year started, and now I’m working with a yarn I got in New Zealand. It’s merino and possum and a lovely, soft, deep black scarf is finding its way out of the ball. I’m working with a real pattern this time, a lace called “Branching Out” and I’m on ravelry. I should get going on some christmas gifts though... and put this one aside until those are finished.
• TV is way too captivating... I have been sucked into Hulu and trying to keep up with the following shows: HIMYM, Big Bang Theory, House, Gossip Girl, Castle, ANTM, Glee, Grey’s Anatomy, Flash Forward, Fringe, The Mentalist, The Office, and 30Rock (thank god Psych went on hiatus). This is ridiculous. Even subtracting out commercials and reducing them 20/40 minute standards, this amounts to over 440 minutes, or over 7.5 hours a week when they are all showing. There are clear winners for what I watch over anything else (Castle, Glee, The Mentalist [due to CBS’s draconian internet posting rules]), what I hurry to catch up on (The Office, Gossip Girl), and what has been going by the wayside (Fringe, 30Rock). In theory, I have an hour to watch every day right? Well, the first 5 show on Monday, then two on Wednesday, and all the rest on Thursday. It’s like one massive tempting block of TV every couple of days... and not much else gets done sometimes.

So that’s what I carry around for entertainment purposes. Add in the yoga mat, resistance band, tennis shoes and swimsuit all curled up and stowed in my checked bag and you’re looking at WAY too many hobbies and not enough time to do them all. When they said I was going to have free time with this job, I took them too much at their word.

A Book List to End All Book Lists...

I don't know that this is comprehensive or even a good list, but it's a compilation of multiple lists I found online along with suggestions and books I've wanted to read for a while. I went by the criteria of "Have I heard of it before?" to slice off some of the chaff, then tried to get a swath of women writers and some international writers (sadly few of each really...) and I tried to cut down on repeat authors. Faulkner, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Lawrence could probably fill a list all on their own if some of the "100 best" editors online had their way. I personally banned Joyce and Fitzgerald (Except for The Great Gatsby, out of guilt) due to taste reasons, and my personal opinion that Ulysses and Fitzgerald's books are greatly overblown. So here it is, a list to start pulling from, in no partiular order:

1. The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
2. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
5. The Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
6. 1984 (George Orwell)
7. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
8. Lolita (Vladmir Nabokov)
9. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
10. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
11. A Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
12. Animal Farm (George Orwell)
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemmingway)
14. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
15. One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
16. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald – begrudgingly)
17. Slauterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
18. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
19. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemmingway)
20. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
21. Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
22. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
23. A Room with a View (EM Forster)
24. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
25. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)
26. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence)
27. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
28. My Antonia (Willa Cather)
29. In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)
30. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
31. Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)
32. Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe)
33. Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
34. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
35. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
36. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
37. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias (Gertrude Stein)
38. The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
39. The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer)
40. Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
41. The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells)
42. Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
43. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
44. Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)
45. Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
46. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
47. The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
48. The Inferno (Dante Alighieri)
49. The Richest Man in Babylon (George Samuel Clason)
50. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
51. The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
52. Moby Dick (Herman Mellville)
53. Peter Pan (J.M. Barie)
54. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
55. All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)
56. A Town like Alice (Neil Shute)
57. The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
58. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
59. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
60. Circle of Friends (Maeve Binchy)
61. Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)
62. The Agony and the Ecstasy (Irving Stone)
63. Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
64. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
65. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
66. The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
67. The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)
68. The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
69. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
70. Madam Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
71. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
72. The Shipping News (E. Annie Proulx)
73. Little Women (Lousia May Alcott)
74. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
75. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
76. The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank)
77. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
78. The Illiad & The Odessey (Homer)
79. Middlemarch (George Elliot)
80. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
81. An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
82. Tess of the D’ubervillies (Thomas Hardy)
83. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
84. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
85. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
86. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
87. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Attwood)
88. Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
89. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbra Kingsolver)
90. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder)
91. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
92. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
93. Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
94. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
95. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carrol)
96. The tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu)
97. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
98. The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
99. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing)
100. The Trial (Franz Kafka)

Please, Let me know in the comments if I've duplicated a book, left out a priceless gem, or listed a book that is completely not worth my time. For most of these, I am going by hearsay since I've only read a select few. But, that's another one off the list at least!