Penoptic

Tra la! The wilderness years are over! Well, not quite, but I do have a new gig up at Examiner.com writing for their travel section. Could be worse! Check it out here!

While in New York City this past weekend for the Blogs With Balls conference, I had one of the best conversations about cricket I've ever had in my life. Granted, the discussions about cricket that I've had in my life are limited, but I think that's because I usually am trying to get someone to explain the game to me. After a few attempts, I've had to throw up my hands and admit that cricket will never be something that I actually understand. Chock it up to cricket being like baseball played on a 360 degree field and leave it at that. Oh, and it's also the only sport that has meal and sleeping breaks woven into the fabric of the game. Baseball has the seventh inning stretch. Cricket has lunch and tea breaks and a single game can last for days. The discussion in question specifically referred to the attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan on March 3 of this year. Sri Lanka agreed to fill in for the match after India refused to go in the wake of the atta...

I find it rather amusing everybody seems to be going crazy in fear over the swine flu, especially considering that two weeks ago, nobody had ever even heard of it. Not to make fun of a deadly illness, which I know is no laughing matter, but health and government officials seem to get pleasure out of perpetuating this wave of fear. Stay in your homes. Don't go out. Wear a face mask if you do even though we're not really sure how effective face masks are at protecting you from this (did nobody thing that this was a great waste of energy, money, and paper?) Look at this picture from Getty Images. It's laughable. And then, hardly a week after this deadly pandemic is on the loose and spreading internationally in a lock-up-your-children manner, Mexican officials announce that there weren't 176 deaths from the swine flu as originally recorded, but closer to 101 deaths instead. This isn't like an official accidentally counting the same person twice. Discrepancies like thi...

For some reason I'm only tonight watching Center Stage for the very first time. Dear God, how have I lived without something quite this bad in my life? Generally I don't go for the really truly horrible movies. But there's a bit of a scale to these things that it's important to keep in mind. There's the truly bad stuff that just makes you want to gouge your eyes out, of which Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is, to me, the most obvious example. And then there's the kind of horrible that makes you glad you decided not to go into acting, but glad these people didn't so you can sit and point and laugh at them. And Center Stage is the best example of it that I've seen in a while. At least that stars people born in the same decade as me. And now I feel old. I think I'll go watch An Affair To Remember again.

Over the weekend I had brunch with an old family friend. This man and his wife had been my parents' next door neighbors when I was born. I was my parent's first child; this other couple, too, had a child at around the same time I was born, only it was their fourth. Shortly thereafter they moved to the other side of the country and morphed into that ambiguous sort of character of whom your memories are filled entirely by stories relayed and are not at all based in reality, especially when you don't have even a picture to help shape their forms in your mind. These former neighbors of ours stayed this way in my mind, with vague rumblings of 'Young Tommy's playing football at such a school' and so forth, for years. The most significant piece of news that stayed in my mind was that the mother fought breast cancer for more than ten years. So they remained until I applied to a college in their area, 3,000 miles away, and my mother and I decided to go take a tour of the...

I know it's cliched, I know it's the epitome of corny, I know it's so melodramatic that it serves as the basis for two more movies, and who knows how many references within movies (even I don't dare try to calculate that one), but I simply love 'An Affair To Remember.' I love the elegance of Deborah Kerr, who sits and stands so straight--her grandmother used to make her lie on the floor for hours to ensure good posture--yet always seems so comfortable; and of Cary Grant, who manages to look elegant even when he's doing somersaults and cartwheels (if you haven't seen 'Holiday' and 'Monkey Business,' rent them immediately, if only for the acrobatics). The two of them have such excellent chemistry in this film, easily playing off of each other's quick and easy conversation without missing a beat. And I have a soft spot for the back story, too. The writer and director, Leo McCarey, had originally made the film 'Love Affair' with I...

It's amazing how quickly life gets away from you. You set yourself a sack of goals - "This week I will finish reading that book I started two months ago," "I will finally go browsing at Blue Mercury (but not buy anything," "I will call that friend of mine I haven't seen since Christmas," "I will watch that Netflix movie that's been sitting around for a month." All these things you say, and you honestly do intend to follow through with them. But life gets away from you. The daily musts of the world - work, bill paying, groceries, eating those strawberries in the fridge before they go bad - take up so much energy that you forget to complete the goals you set for yourself, whether they be obligations or indulgences. It's sad, but true. I find lately that trying to fit in these things is almost as energy-consuming as getting up in time to catch the bus for work, but generally they seem to have rewards that are just as fulfilling as ea...

Good lord, has it really been over two months? You've got to love the way the time just flies by between Thanksgiving and Single's Awareness Day ... oops, I mean Valentine's Day. Especially when the interim involves, besides the usual holiday festivities, the inauguration of the first African American president in the country. I spent Inauguration Week crashing on a couch in Georgetown. I ended up with no tickets to the main event (I know, cry your tears for me) but that just meant that I got to sit around and sleep in while the rest of the town was freezing in the 20 degree weather. But don't think I got away completely hassle-free; trying to make my train meant that I had to spend more than one hour in a taxi trying to get from Georgetown University to Union Station. That's about five miles. Yeah. An hour. On the other hand, and to quote Helen Fielding, the wilderness years are over! I have employment again! And it pays and everything. And I've gotten back to ...