for carrying hummus to your mouth ...

MAKING FOODS

chai rice pudding: this smelled like it would be so good, but it was pretty medium. although easy enough to make: chai tea bags in soy milk, cook rice, add apples ... blah blah blah.


sesame won tons: THESE ARE SO DARN GOOD! won tons as a hummus vessel. won ton wrappers sprinkeld in seasame seeds, paprika, garlic powder and salt. super addictive.


tofu custard: this was my go to dessert last year, i ripped it out again this year: firm silken tofu, powdered sugar, food processed, chilled, slathered in fruit.

MOVIES
Trans-Siberian [Blu-ray] 2008: two precious bible-thumping iowans travel on the transiberian railroad and become amazingly adept at killing people and drug muling.

The Princess Diaries : i'm going to start a tumblr blog and fill it with deep thoughts about the crap i watch on saturday nights. this movie gave me hope that someday i'll find out that my real dad was a prince and that my hair and eyebrows will form a union and work together for the greater good. annnnd ... i got teary at the end.
Bridget Jones's Diary : this is a stunningly accurate representation of what my mid-20s were like. instead of the age old "i'm totally carrie. ... no you're samantha" debate, i'm going to silence people by saying i was bridget.

BOOK READING
Let the Right One In: A Novel by john ajvide lindqvist: I read an interview with Stephenie Meyer, writer of the Twilight series, where she said something about how she had taken liberties with the classic vampire story because she was writing fiction and there are no hard-fast rules about what vampires can or cannot do. So she did things like make their skin glimmer in the sunlight.
This is a laughable about of liberty — not to mention creativity — considering what John Ajvide Lindqvist has done with the vampire of this novel.

full review here-ish.

How It Ended: New and Collected Stories jay mcinerney: In Jay McInerney's world, men are writers with varying degrees of success. They are married to women who are pregnant, which may or may not stall their philandering. The wife typically knows what's up and either ignores it, aborts the child or asks the man to have his fairly healthy cat put to sleep as contrition. There is typically a back story salted with cocaine residue and lapsed catholicism. His newer stories always reference 9/11 in some capacity.

In Jay McInerney's world, no one leaves New York City. Maybe a character spent time in China modeling or teaching English, or maybe there was a stint in Los Angeles. But home is Manhattan, and now that McInerney has gotten older, he'll concede to characters with suburban address. But never the main characters.

"How It Ended: New And Collected Stories" reads a bit like a posthumous compilation. It is a mix of snippets of his old stuff -- including pieces from "Bright Lights, Big City," "Brightness Falls," and "Model Behavior." This is fun and feels like reading an old yearbook. It has been years since I've read any of his novels, and it was a nice reminder of whats-so-big-about-McInerney. [Namely, that he writes about a time and place that I'd love to vacation in: New York City. 1980s. Writer cliques.]

full review will be here-ish. [unless jodi fires me]

READING THE INTERNET
god, futbol kills me. this time, he travels the streets of argentina with a friend who has bought salami from a street vendor.

The salami stank to high heaven. It was a peculiar smell; sweaty feet combined with damp cardboard, with a touch of cheese that must have latched on inside the peddler’s basket. It was gross, but tolerable. Almost intriguing, I would say.