Dial "L" for Listiness

3 jobs I wish I Had In The Summertime Instead Of Working Inside A Blazing Inferno Bakery:

• On-site camerawoman on March of the Penguins II: Revenge of the Penguins
  
• Inventory Control Supervisor at Ben & Jerry’s Headquarters
• US Ambassador to Greenland

3 foods currently comprising 75% of my diet:

• Cottage cheese
• Macadamia nuts. The saltier the better.
• Half-price berries from Fresh & Easy. Mmm, spoilage makes them sweeter

3 Delightful Procrastination Tools:

• Ask Metafilter. I especially enjoy the anonymous questions…other people’s lives are so screwed up.
• So You Think You Can Dance, taped via my computer doohickey. Can I get a ticket on the Hot Tamale Train?!
• Oh No They Didn’t! Surfing and consolidating all of the juiciest celebrity slander.

3 Songs I Can’t Stop Playing:

• The Smiths: William It Was Really Nothing (2 minutes of perfection. This supremely stupid lip-syncing video has me cracking up uncontrollably. Let’s blame it on the late hour and move on.)
• Black Kids: I’m Not Going to Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You (Like if The Cure and the Go! Team had a baby. And yes, I know I’ll be sick of it in a week.)
• The Pixies: Head On (Best played loud in the car. Singing along is encouraged.)

3 Books I’m In the Middle of Reading But Will Most Likely Never Finish:

• Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. The fact that I found this at the bottom of a pile of books under my night table does not bode well for the completion of this masterpiece of postmodern fiction. The fact that I didn’t even remember that I owned it, much less that I read over 100 pages, is perhaps a more damning sign.
• Don DeLillo, Underworld. Pro: It’s DeLillo. Con: It’s 1000 pages of DeLillo.
• Orhan Pamuk, Snow. No “most likely” about this one. After eight months of forcing myself to read this one torturous page at a time, I finally gave in (just 50 pgs from the finish!) and read the ending on Wikipedia. I am now convinced that I’ll never be chosen as a Nobel judge.

That last list got me all riled up and reminded me how much I hated slogging through Snow. To make myself feel better (ie, justified in my loathing) I checked out the Amazon page for Snow, and found some corroborating reviews. Check out some of these brilliant review titles:

• “Did they like it because they're supposed to like it?”
• “pretentious, vacuous, and down right boring”
• “Mud would have been a more apt title because this was like a slog through it”
• “Just Say No to SNOW”
• “What's the reason behind the Nobel Prize?”
• “tedious to the bitter end”
• “Wooden Characters Make for Tortuous Reading”
• “I challenge you to stay awake”
• “Dry as toast”
• “After a certain point, it's unreadable”

And, my personal favorite:

• “Complex novel made me feel stupid”

Morrissey and his pompadour agree: Snow was rubbish!