Sunday Snapshot: Positano

After a bus ride around hairpin turns, honking cars, and motorcycle riders with death wishes, we pulled into Positano, Italy.



Positano is a city clinging to a hill, the houses and buildings all breathtakingly perched on a hill that crashes into the Mediterranean.



We went with an idea of relaxation, and after scaling a fence to find a small trail, we found ourselves at a mostly-deserted beach. We rented a chair and changed into our swimsuits and hung out in the warm sun.





We laid in the sun and dipped our toes in the (freezing) Mediterranean for several hours, making the most relaxing day of our trip to Italy.

Six Word Saturday: Update on Last Night

Good friends and too much wine!

Bad Haiku Friday: Visiting Friends and Visiting Haiku-er

Visiting old friends
Promises of fun and laughs
And probably wine

Special Guest Star Haiku: Hal's Haiku Friday
(Hal busted this out as I was sitting here.)

Hal took the day off
But he has errands to do
May as well have worked

What I'm watching...

I got into a discussion about the TV shows I like to watch this week with my friend Joanna. I also talked about TV with my friend Rosemary today. I thought I would let YOU all know what I'm watching, too.

Weekly shows I love to watch (currently on):

1. Flash Forward
It's fun and creepy and Joseph Fiennes is hot. However, the more I look at him, the less hot I think he, objectively, should be (due to the physical dimensions of his face). BUT! This does not let me think that he is less hot than I originally thought he was (I'm not sure that makes any sense). Anyway, I've been looking for a creepy end of the world show since Jericho went off the air. I never got into Lost for whatever reason, but like this a lot. And it's not only because Joseph Fiennes is hot. The story is interesting and I'm enjoying the suspense. I hope people don't get bored with the "not knowing" and the show explodes and gets canceled on a cliffhanger at the end of the first season, resulting in a fan uprising and a reinstatement of the show for a second season, after which it gets canceled again (I am SO still bitter about Jericho).

2. Glee
One of my colleagues says that only women and gay men like Glee. I don't know if this is true, but I am a woman and I love it. It is so. much. fun. I love the musical numbers and I like how silly and campy the whole thing is. Matthew Morrison is adorable and fun to watch sing and dance. Jane Lynch is ridiculously funny -- I loved her in Boston Legal, and I really love her here.

Shows I watch often, but not on a real schedule (alternate title: I like to watch people buy houses):

1. House Hunters
I wish Susan Whang was my friend. That is all.

2. Designers Challenge or Color Splash
I wish I had $50,000 to remodel my kitchen. Or bedroom. Or family room. In fact, I just wish I owned my own kitchen, bedroom, or family room.
Alternatively, I would love David Bromstad to make over a room for me. He seems like so much fun.

3. Property Virgins or My First Place
I wish I hadn't owned a house so I could go on Property Virgins and I could hang out with Sandra Rinomato. This show gets extra points because they filmed several in Cincinnati. More extra points because I felt like we were more informed about house buying than a lot of the people on the show.

4. Gilmore Girls
Obviously.

5. Any number of Food Network shows
I enjoy food. I like the challenges, including Iron Chef and Chopped. I also love Ace of Cakes and anything Alton.

Weekly shows I love to watch (not currently on):
1. Secret Life of the American Teenager
Sigh. You just can't turn away from the train wreck. It also helps that every Monday night, Megan B. and I have a "date" online to chat through the show. Perhaps she and I will try to live blog one when it comes back in January.

2. Greek
Hal and I caught onto this show this season. It's adorable. I really like it a lot. Also, since Boston Legal is now off the air and I can no longer have an inappropriate TV crush on James Spader, I have transferring the inappropriate crush to Cappie (Scott Michael Foster).

In summary, I really need a cable provider who will allow me to pay for only the channels I want. That would be: the basic networks, ABC Fam, HGTV, Food Network, and some channel that plays UK basketball. That's all I ask for.

What are you watching?

The Whirr

As I've tried to go to sleep this week, it has hit me.

My brain has been whirring.

I don't really know how to describe it. When I can gesture, I spin my finger around like the "she's crazy" gesture that is so common. I make a noise that sounds like the whirr. (Come to think of it, I bet I look totally nuts.)

It's like I lay down to sleep and all of my brain synapses start to fire on an accelerated scale.

It's that time in the semester, folks.

What's the state of affairs?

My pedagogy class has two major projects due. My qualitative class has a major project. My health class has a project as well, along with written homework, which makes up a little bit for the lack of major-ness of the project. I have an experiment to get off the ground. And my research assistant job is constant work.

I love doing projects. I love doing research. I am simply too busy and too fired up about it all to sleep.

So when I try, it starts. The whirring.

My brain working overdrive.

So I stumble out of bed and do some work. It's silly to toss and turn when I could get some stuff done, right?

The whirr is slated to be relieved in the middle of December. It won't stop a moment too soon. I am a person who likes her sleep.

M-W

If you are in ever a need to know the meaning of a word, you go to a dictionary. These interesting books also help you with spelling, part of speech, and sometimes even origin.

Oftentimes the book will give the phonetic pronunciation of the word, in squiggles and lines and backwards e's that no one understands.

The internets have changed the dictionary forever.

On M-W.com, Merriam-Webster, those divine dictionary divas, have banded their forces of good together to create a world wide web of word wonder. The info is all there -- the definition, the spelling, the phonetic pronunciation, the word type.

But yes, oh yes, there is something much grander.

M-W will PRONOUNCE THE WORD FOR YOU.

*crickets*

OK, perhaps that's not very exciting on its face. But think of the possibilities.

This site may or may not include "bad" words. Curse words! Things that would get you detention!

I may or may not have played some of those "bad" words in my day. I, along with others, may or may not have played them really late at night at the college newspaper. There may or may not have been loud speakers involved.

"What, Emily? You don't like the entertainment page? My computer has something to say to you--"

Computer: Mother$*@!#^

It's also possible that we constructed our own phrases by playing two computers off each other. A favorite word of some of my friends was, ahem, "Ass clown." (Pardon me, I'm quoting.) It is possible that two computers side by side could mimic the saying of this particular compound word by having one computer say, well, "Ass," and the other one saying "Clown," making up for the fact that the particular combination of the two was not in the dictionary (not that I would know).

We laughed and laughed. Well, you know, we may or may not have laughed and laughed at these things.

(Let's be honest, I may or may not have looked at the site and played some of the words while writing this blog. And still laughed and laughed. It's possible I'm 12.)

Of course this all would have happened after deadline really late at night. If it happened at all. And I'm not saying it did. But if it did happen, it was pretty freaking funny -- or, well, would have been pretty freaking funny. If it happened. Which it may or may not have.

I'm going to get retroactively fired from the paper. Sigh.

The Creek*

On January 20, 1998, my life changed forever.

I turned on the WB and fell completely in love with a floppy haired, cargo short wearing, movie-loving, sappy, sappy, sappy boy named Dawson. He and, more importantly, a little show called Dawson's Creek.

I joke now that I used to watch it every week in high school and cry. Perhaps, and this is confession time, perhaps that isn't so far from the truth. I watched the show faithfully and related WAY. TOO. MUCH. to the characters and outlandish situations in which the characters found themselves. And maybe, just maybe, that resulted in some emoting.

I was a sophomore in high school when the show started -- the characters were sophomores. Like Joey Potter, I had a crush on my good guy friend, and he was clueless (well, he wasn't clueless in my case, just not reciprocating!). Like Dawson, I loved movies and wanted to move to Hollywood and make it big when I grew up. Unlike Pacey, I did not have an affair with my high school English teacher. I knew Andie McPhee was coming -- I had a feeling that the show was going to add a blonde girl into the regular rotation. I was bitter it couldn't have been me.

My friend Brandon and I watched the show week after week, sometimes over the phone and sometimes in person. He often taped the show for me if I couldn't watch it live. On a VHS. I have these VHS's floating around my parents' house; in an era before TiVo and DVR and Internet TV, this was the only way to catch those all-important shows.

This love transcended high school. In college, I remember coming home from watching an intense episode to find my roommate Heather sitting on her bed with a tear-streaked face. Dawson's dad had died in a most tragic way that evening. In what was one of the silliest ways to kill off a character, he had a car accident because, while driving, he reached down to retrieve a scoop of ice cream that fell off his ice cream cone. "Mitch died because of an ice cream cone!" Heather cried. "It's sooooo sad!"

I have met so many guys that have confessed, sometimes shamefully, a secret love for the show. So don't think that this passion is just a girl thing.

Brandon and I watched the series finale together, days before I left for a summer working in Florida.

Joey didn't end up with Dawson, and I was DEVASTATED. I was 20 years old and had lived for five years fostering the hope that my two characters were going to choose each other. We end with Joey picking freaking Pacey, and my dreams were crushed. (But let's be honest, Katie Holmes isn't known for her romantic choices, now, is she?)

I was fully and utterly invested in this series. I liked its silliness, its dirty talk, its movie shout outs -- my favorite occurs in season 1 when Pacey (Josh Jackson, who played Charlie in The Mighty Ducks) said, "No way! Emilio Estavez! He was in those Duck movies, remember? God, those were classics, so funny." (Side note: I have determined that I was so loyal to Dawson because I was still bitter at Josh Jackson for The Mighty Ducks, where I liked Adam Banks better.)

Tomorrow, the complete series comes out on DVD. I currently own each individual season. I watched a huge chunk of them when I first moved to Bloomington and had no cable.

So I have all the seasons.

But who doesn't need the COMPLETE set?!

I started quite a debate about this over on my facebook page the other day. I asked for help in convincing Hal that I needed the complete set. As for why Hal doesn't think I need this, I am unsure. He has seen at least one episode (because I forced him to watch the series finale on DVD with me) and he confessed to even liking it a little bit. On Facebook, I got 13 unique responses (Including one from Hal saying, "No. Call me dream killer."), 11 out of the 13 of them offering support for my buying this set.

In perhaps the best tip, my friend Megan (a different Megan than the skinny jeans opinionista) sent me a gorgeous picture. She said, "Not buying the set will make Dawson cry. Print this out and hang it all over the house to drive the point home with Hal!"

This is the picture she included:



What's a girl to do? I made it my Facebook profile picture.

I even have a call out to James Van Der Beek himself. I, ahem, follow him on Twitter, and I asked him for ideas on how to convince my husband that I needed both the complete set and the individual seasons. Currently, I have not heard back from Van Der Beek, but believe me, if I do, I will keep you all informed.

So what do you think? Does anyone else think fondly upon their days in Capeside? Anyone want to fight about the Joey/Pacey match?

You'll find me in the basement, sniffling and watching some reruns.

*Obviously, the title "The Creek" refers to the show that Dawson ends up making in Hollywood in the series finale. Seriously, I would watch it.