What’s A Bogey Lowenstein?

Did anyone used to read the T.V. Guide? (Maybe you still do?) I can’t remember seeing one outside of the local grocery store since I was in junior high, but I used to devour that guide whenever my grandparents were babysitting my sister and I, because they had a subscription and we didn’t. Also because my grandparents are awesome, but books in their house? Not something they had in abundance.*

One of my favorite sections of the guide was the “Cheers and Jeers” section, wherein some highfalutin critics of One Thing Or Another would give the proverbial thumbs up! or thumbs down to various television programming and miscellaneous t.v.-related et cetera.

All of that to (take a quick walk down T.V. Guide memory lane, and) say this post is sort of like that, only not written by any highfalutin critics but instead by (you guessed it!) me.

Cheers:

• Acupuncture kicking my headaches’ asses like nothing else has ever threatened to. I’ve had two! (fantastic) sessions in the past two weeks and I have one slated for next Friday. (More on the actual experience and what I think of it soon and very soon, after I brush up on my Eastern Medicine vocab so that I don’t sound like a total idiot.)

• Eating super healthy four days in a row, after which I swear I am craving more! good! food! yes, please!

• On a related aside: I could eat probably eat some semblance of seafood every day for the rest of my life and be a very happy camper while doing it. Perhaps I need to move closer to the ocean, so that one day some young lad can write a book about how I almost caught the biggest fish of my life, but by the time I got it back to the shore there was basically nothing left of my big beautiful fish, because I had trekked too far and was too greedy and prideful for my own good, you see, and isn’t that (situationally) ironic? The young lad could call it The Old Kerri And The Sea.

• My new(ish) assistant who is smart, artistic, loves The Office,  and cracks jokes as much as I do. I hit the coworker jackpot and I’m loving it. (Not the way McDonald’s is “loving it,” because hi, that jingle annoys the Big Macs out of me.)

Jeers:

• Elevators. I know, right? But if you hate elevators as much as I do, you totally know what I’m talking about. I cannot stand them. I hate being in them, hate how smelly and cramped and typically too warm they are, and I hate how every time I get in one me and my elevator companions are seemingly destined to ride down every single floor until finally, two decades and my abandoned sanity later, we arrive at the bottom. Or the top, as it were. (Oh, and hi! hyperbole, but I couldn’t think of a more accurate way to describe my hatred of the large box that shuttles germy people from one floor to another while encouraging them to touch everything and cough on other people.)  And taking the elevator ONE floor? Unless you are physically handicapped, I’m sorry, but I probably just gave you the stink eye.

• Elevator conversation. See above. See also: If there’s one thing I hate more than elevators it’s meaningless small talk. Being genuinely friendly to strangers? Totally awesome, and I love that sort of thing. Talking because you can’t stand to stand in silence for x number of floors, or because you feel like you have to tell me you aren’t feeling well (great!) while you’re standing there coughing, cradling a box of Kleenex in your arms? I would totally vote you off the island. You know, if Survivor rules were a standing premise of daily life.

• The one co-worker I have who I swear is Debbie Downer reincarnated. I’m still waiting for the day I say “Good morning! How are you?” and she doesn’t say something completely negative back to me. I’m not holding my breath. I am trying not to laugh every single time her response wah-wahs me. (If you have never seen that SNL skit you probably can’t picture that “wah-wah” noise, but suffice it to say (you should youtube it because) it’s mostly hilarious.)

• The creepy mannequins who appear to be Old Navy’s go-to advertising gimmick for the Spring season. Memo to Old Navy: they scare EVERYONE. And not in an “Ooh, yikes! I’m so scared I want to run out and buy a hoodie or twelve!” sort of way. More in an, “Um. Did the mannequin’s fingers just break off mid-mannequin-wedding proposal; that’s really creepy!” sort of way.

*Randomly, I called my grandmother over my lunch break to say hello and make sure she was wearing her green, and at some point in the conversation while we were joking about vacations and her inability to take them she said, “You know me, Kerri. I can’t read a book. I mean, the second I would go to sit down with one I would think of twenty things that needed dusting.” And that, in one sentence, is my grandmother. I miss her like a crazy.

** Post title is from one of my favorite movies, and yours, too: 10 Things I Hate About You.

Care to share your Cheers & Jeers?

Story, The First: The Pug Who Moved To California

Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.

Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.

I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?

(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)

(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...

Found

This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.

Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked → Read more...

Shari-Romancing A Stone

They say water changes stone, carving it over time to angles and dimensions in harmony with water’s need to reach the sea; but sometimes, stones change the watercourse instead.

-The lovely and eclectic Shari

On Hoarding

I’m collecting my favorite corners, like the one with the stunning oak tree on display for an entire neighborhood to see, its limbs shading a bustling crosswalk shooting confidence into pedestrians like electric currents of white light, fresh graffiti on a nearby curb: an infinity symbol, black and simple.

I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.

I’m collecting the surprisingly → Read more...