my love is bigger than a honda

we just got a new car. it is not a pink cadillac; it is a volkswagen jetta. we have been driving a honda accord for the past three years and it has been just fine, but the VW is much more fun and sporty.

bruce springsteen :: pink cadillac

the king of pop is dead. long live the king.

how crazy is it that michael jackson died yesterday? i mean, i guess he had to go sometime, but he was still quite young. and poor farrah fawcett. his death is totally overshadowing hers.

michael jackson :: don't stop 'till you get enough

american wife: a review

the book for my book club, which meets this evening, is american wife, by curtis sittenfeld. i read her first book, prep a few years ago and did not like it at all. i also did not like american wife for mostly the same reasons.

american wife is a story about a woman who marries a man who becomes president and is loosely based on the life of laura bush and george w. bush. first of all, i am not a fan of george w. bush. second of all, i know next to nothing about laura bush and really never cared to. third of all, knowing that these characters are based on the bushes makes reading the sex scenes really disturbing.

my biggest beef with the book, as with prep, is that sittenfeld spends, like, 500 pages writing about female characters that are totally boring and have nothing going for them. alice blackwell, the laura bush stand-in, is a total cipher. all we know about her is that she likes to read and other than that, she seems to have absolutely no opinions of her own. why do i want to read about a person like that? at least she seems to change a little throughout the book, which is more than i could say for lee, the protagonist in prep.

the other really annoying thing is the writing style. i noticed it more in american wife than in prep but this woman could use an editor! i mean, i don't want every book i read to be hemingwayesque, but this is ridiculous:

"When we reached the Marcus Center, we parked in a lot on Water Street and hurried inside. The ushers were closing the doors of the theater, but we were able to slip in and take our seats as the lights went down. I had never seen The Seagull, and I thought it was quite good--the actress playing Madame Arkadina was superb."

"For Ella's dinner, I made toast with melted mozzarella cheese--pizza toast, we called it, though there was no tomato sauce and its resemblance to pizza was rather fleeting--and for myself, I reheated a leftover burger from the class party and dipped it in Dijon mustard...

who gives a shit? does this further the plot at all? this would be like me telling you a story like this: i called my mother the other day to say hello and i happened to be wearing my hair in a small blue clip that i had purchased at the muji store in paris, in the marais, while on honeymoon, and also argyle socks, and my mother had had half a grapefruit for breakfast and some decaffeinated coffee and was just finishing up the house and garden section of the times.

why why why such detail? if it added up to something, i would have no problem with it, but it's totally useless in this book; she never refers back to half of these things. if this were a mystery novel, it would be entirely red herrings. do not read this book unless you want to slog through 554 pages of crap like this.

lucky, loosed

i have finally decided to end my nearly 7-year relationship with lucky magazine. my subscription ends this month and i am not renewing. i don't think that i'll miss it--i get a lot of other magazines, as is evidenced by the image. and, this month, they have advised me to wear a romper. i have a five-week old child who wouldn't be caught dead in a romper.

friends and family

we had some baby announcements created, which you can see here. in putting together the list of people to send them to, i thought it'd be interesting to see where all of our friends live. that's what these cities are, with the bigger words being the cities with more friends.

we had a baby

last month, we had a baby. or really, i had the baby, via c-section, at the lovely brigham and women's hospital here in boston. i highly recommend the mac and cheese--it was very tasty.

our son's name is asher. we chose it because we liked it and also because we wanted a name that began with "a" to name him after my grandfather, aaron. you can see some photos here. he is adorable, although i am biased. he was born at 8 lbs., 14 oz., and, as of today, four weeks later, weighs 10 lbs., 9 oz. he is growing like crazy because all he does is eat.

which leads me to make the following, perhaps controversial, statement: breastfeeding is extremely boring. like, one of the most boring things i'll probably ever do. not that i mind the time for bonding with asher, except that we're not really bonding because he is too little to know what's going on. i sit on the couch and feed him, usually six-to-eight times per day, at about an hour each session, and oftentimes he won't be full even after an hour.

during the day, i'll try to read a magazine (i recommend something thin, physically not necessarily content-wise, like the new yorker, entertainment weekly, people, because you don't have to worry about folding the magazine) or watch TV. sadly, almost all of my shows have come to an end for the season; i've started recording movies. i have re-watched rear window and vertigo and am in the middle of anatomy of a murder--a bit of a jimmy stewart earnest-ness-a thon. at night, i usually just space out because i don't want to keep him awake longer than necessary.

we aren't afraid of a little formula, but ideally, asher would eat mostly breast milk for the first six months of life. we shall see how long i hold up after i go back to work at the end of july.

it's the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine)

on wednesday morning, at approximately 11:30 AM, i will be in the hospital, allowing my doctor to cut into my abdomen and pull out my baby. this is commonly known as a "cesarean" birth, or "c-section." my parents are coming up tomorrow night and alex's parents will come up on wednesday.

i am nervous for a few reasons--i've never had surgery before, i've never had a baby before. while i know that most of life as i know it will change after he is born, i am ready, and i think that alex is ready, or at least as ready as we will ever be.

REM :: it's the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine)