Guest posting from "The Boy"

Greetings all,

This is The Boy, aka Felicity's beau. While she's gallivanting around sunny Palm Springs, she's asked me to give you all some useful content. And useful it shall be! By the way, for this and future posts, I'll be typing in this rather confident bold font.

Felicity called me yesterday afternoon to tell me she was wearing flip flops by the pool, drinking a fruity drink, and generally not learning much from her conference. Meanwhile, I'm dodging raindrops and selling my plasma on a dreary, gray Saturday afternoon. But I'm not bitter. My parents visited last night and we took in a hilarious show from the Second City touring company. I surprised my Mother with the tickets for her birthday (ain't I a good son?).

Before the show, we had dinner downtown at a not-frequently-visited restaurant, and their special was phenomenal. Guess what, dear reader, I'm going to share the recipe with YOU! I told you this post would be useful.

Get a large red bell pepper, cut it in half and dig out the white fleshy bits and seeds. Fill the pepper with cooked rice and chorizo chunks, onions, and fresh mozarella. Bake until the cheese is melted and the pepper walls go soft. Serve on a bed of soft refried beans, and sprinkle with fresh pico de gallo, cilantro, and ripe avocado chunks.

For a garnish and/or dessert, lightly rub cooking oil on both sides of a tortilla, and sprinkle liberally with cinnamon and some sugar. Cut into slices pizza-style, and bake until crisp. Check out the pics of my leftovers, though there should be more refried beans under the pepper.

Felicity shall return on Monday, upon which she should update you all on how much she missed me these last few days. And so, I sign off.

tell me your name, tell me your story, 'cause i'm into it

I took a poetry workshop my senior year of college and at the end of the semester we all wrote down on little scraps of paper descriptions of each other’s “voices” as writers.

These were the descriptions I got:

Serious and introspective
Honest and strong
Austere, furtive, shy, quiet
Self-aware, resigned to a lot but still going strong
Sad often, somewhat lonely, interesting, real – almost harshly sometimes, sweetly sometimes. Impressively self-aware, sometimes.

And my favorite:

This voice is at the same time introspective and exhibitionist; unapologetic, sincere, and yet slightly inhibited.

That’s me, an inhibited exhibitionist. Really, aren’t most bloggers? What we write can be intensely personal and revealing, but always selectively so. It’s the new Show and Tell.

So welcome to my peepshow. Considering this new blog as a fresh start, I go back and forth about whether to be more or less personal than I used to be.

But I always appreciate a little About Me page on other blogs, knowing that it’s only the Cliffs Notes and that to get any sense of who the person is, I simply have to read their blog.

So a bit more about me. (This was supposed to be after the jump, but I am apparently retarded and haven't mastered that yet, it's late, I'm exhausted and gotta get to bed. Will try to fix when I get back.)

I’m a transplanted Texan who can barely tolerate these harsh Midwestern winters I now live with.

I’m a born and bred Southern girl, but no, I don’t have a Southern accent, thank you very much.

I’m a second-generation Korean American who really doesn’t like kimchi at all, to my mother’s undying dismay. I also suck at math.

I'm a fifth year doctoral candidate who’s mightily struggling to get my Ph.d in psychology. Fantasize about quitting all the time, but I know I won’t. I’m going to finish or die trying.

I'm a food lover, bookworm, audiophile, and hopeless romantic.

I'm shy and introverted in real life, so naturally I bare all, at great length, online.

I do relationship research and in my biggest career fantasies, I’m a freelance writer with a column and a book who serves as a liason between the world of research and everyone else. Like Sex and the City, but empirically driven!

Until my current and best boy, I had a bad habit of dating blondes I went to high school with. I’ve never casually dated, i.e., I’ve never been on a date that didn’t lead to a relationship. A late bloomer, I didn’t date until college. My junior year of college I started dating someone I thought I'd end up with. We dated for five years before breaking up. The end of that relationship prompted me to start my original blog, where I really didn’t hold back much of anything at all. Uncensored angst, boy-craziness, and navel-gazing galore.

Then, only a few months after the breakup, despite swearing to never venture into online dating, I sort of accidentally and half jokingly did so, met someone and fell deeply in love despite my best efforts not to and despite not being sure I was ready to date again.

We’ve been together ever since. I had so much baggage following me from the last relationship that it’s been an ongoing challenge for me to open up, stop holding back, and stop whining about how badly I’ve been burned and how scary love is, blah blah angstcakes.

I’ll always be more than a little neurotic, but the boy makes navigating the ups and downs of love easier than it’s ever been before.

Felicity is not my real name. But as mentioned before, if asked to think of which two fictional characters I resemble, Ally McBeal and Felicity are the first two to come to mind. On any given day, I either embrace this or hate it.

More (or perhaps less, when I have time to edit) when I get back from California

pleased to meet you
hope you'll guess my name
but what's puzzling you
is the nature of my game
-rolling stones

oh frabjous day, callooh callay!

I'm FINALLY getting my iPod, free courtesy of the internet. This news has made me go "squee!", a sound made my friend and officemate A makes when she's especially giddy, such as in response to anything Joss Whedon related or when I got her a Flying Spaghetti Monster t-shirt for her birthday. I often feel like I’m the last person in the world who doesn't have an iPod and that nobody could possibly want one more than me. Happy sigh. More of substance later.

wee paws for station identification*

Willow likes to help me work.

*The punchline to the joke "Why do radio announcers have small hands?"

make me the sweetest dress you can

Unbridled girliness and frivolity ahead. Not for the faint of heart.

I’m on a perilous quest for the perfect dress. My best friend S is getting married in Hawaii (A week in Hawaii with my Boy? I am so unbelievably excited.) and as her sole attendant and maid of honor, I need something special. Initially she chose red as the color for my dress and I was totally psyched, envisioning a fun, sexy, floaty red halter dress, perfect for a Hawaiian wedding. These are hard to find. Living in a small city with limited shopping options doesn’t help.

So I bought this dress. It was on sale, fit well, and the Boy liked it.

But I’ve decided to return it. It’s cute but too casual and definitely doesn’t look as good on me as it does on the model, as I have neither her height nor boobage.

Coveted this dress and was very tempted to buy it on ebay, despite the risks, until I read the description of it as knee-length, with a 26 inch skirt. Knee length, my ass. I’m obviously a midget, since that would come halfway down my calves.

But I also love it in green. I think this would be a super cute bridesmaid dress for my “theoretical” nuptials so the pic gets filed away into my girl porn folder.

And now I’ve come to my senses and agree with S, who suggested black as being both easier to find and a better fit with the wedding party and the flowers, which are red. A red dress and red flowers would look silly. So now I’m in search of the perfect sexy black halter dress.

Maybe something kind of like this, but shorter and of a dressier material. Don’t know if I’m crazy about all that ruching, either. If any of ya’ll have shopping suggestions, feel free to pass them along.

In other news, on Thursday I leave for Palm Springs. California, baby! Palm Springs has an average of 350 clear and sunny days a year. That’s nuts. I’ll be there for five days, ostensibly for a conference, but mostly to sit under palm trees and imbibe fruity beverages. Might rent a car with some of the guys who are going (There aren’t many other female students in my year and area, it’ll be me and half a dozen boys.) and drive up to Joshua Tree, which would be cool. While I’m gone, I’m hoping either or both August and the Boy will guest blog for me. Promises to be fun.

dressmaker, dressmaker,
i'm singing at the hall next saturday night and he'll be there
he's been gone for so long, i want him back again
make me the sweetest dress you can
-neko case

all of these things here are things that disappear

Sometimes I think I’m a bit too much like an Aeolian harp. The tenor of my mood on any given day is such an unpredictable thing and I tend to adhere a little too closely to REM's advice to live my life filled with joy and thunder.

Lately I’d found myself falling out of one pocket of sadness into another, with old ghosts keeping me company. What, me wallow? Always.

A long stretch of grey weather and the preponderance of “old sad bastard music” in my CD collection really haven’t helped. Songs embued with pain that really resonate with me have the power to make me sad even when everything else is fine. Makes the decision of what CD to pop in when I get in the car a little more fraught with danger. So this morning I decided to hell with the sad stuff and popped in Rhett Miller. Smart, sexy, perky pop made all the difference. Singing instead of navel gazing? Rock on.

And a little sunshine goes a long way. The weather today was lovely according to the warped standards of those who live in the Midwest and the long walk to my car was more a nice jaunt than a Siberian death march. Sang some more on the drive home and was happily blinded by the sunset.

I live inside my head a lot. A “rich inner life”, a la Ally Mcbeal. (I once decided that if I was the lovechild of any two fictional TV characters, they would be Ally McBeal and Felicity. Lol. Isn’t that an absolutely horrifying realization?) So it’s almost always impossible to predict what or when some intangible something will bring me down or lift me up, but the older I get, the less I struggle with it and the more I’ve learned to just go with the flow rather than let it pull me under.

she’s got a voice in her head
and she listens every once in a while
-rhett miller

P.S. But Rhett, why oh why would you re-record Singular Girl for your new album? Why? I loved it the way it was. For shame.

god help you if you are a phoenix

and you dare to rise up from the ash…

I’m back. A new blog for a new year. Putting the old blog to rest was painful and not by choice, but an influx of very unwelcome visitors forced my hand. But you know what, I'm excited at having a clean slate, like that ephemeral feeling of giddiness when you start afresh at a new school, head abuzz with grandiose schemes for constructing your new persona. The old blog served its purpose, taking me from beginning to end of a cycle as one relationship ended and a new one began. I have different things to write about now. But don't worry, for any of my handful of old readers who have followed me here, wherever I am, introspection and a little angst can't be too far behind.

Here's to new beginnings.