In Celebration of My Return to Nerd-dom

Except, who am I kidding?, I never stopped being a nerd.

This post is a prelude to one I have in the works, with the temporary title, "Most epically bad glasses ever."

When I was sixteen I decided I was so ugly I would do anything short of robbing a bank to improve myself. My first step was getting rid of the huge, nasty, obnoxious glasses I had worn under protest since first grade. No, I did not get contacts (my family couldn't afford the kind of contacts I needed and I didn't have a job yet). I just stopped wearing the glasses. The other kids I knew always thought my parents were so authoritarian. Nope. I doubt they ever forced me to do anything (irrelevant tangent: when I was seventeen, I asked them to give me a curfew). And in high school they don't give you a yellow dot for leaving your glasses at home, so there were no negative repercussions to this decision. There were, however, plenty of positives. People, myself included, began to see that my appearance was rather more than tolerable.

Vanity wins every time.

However, recently I discovered that I would need to foray back into the vision-enhanced world. I just said hello to functional depth perception, and it just so happens that this occurred just shy of two years after my graduation from library school.What better way to celebrate librarianship than by purchasing a pair of hipster glasses?

Now, where's my frumpy cardigan?

Joyeux Noel

This Thanksgiving was a little weird. It seemed that there was so much to do every day the entire week, what with baking pies and trying to spend as much time as possible with my nephews, who were in town but stayed at their other aunt's house. I think I will never be their favorite aunt, because their other one is just so cool, and she has a trampoline, and she has other kids for them to play with. Much cooler than a waffle maker and a rocket launcher.

But, favorite or not, this little man is awesome.

And this one.

Oh, and these two.

When they left, I was sad. And very tired. I went to bed around 5:30 pm and didn't get up until nearly 10:30 the next morning. Then I didn't feel like doing anything, and even if I did, there isn't much to do on holiday weekends when you don't have family around, so I watched a Christmas movie. I have lots of favorite Christmas movies, and here they are in no particular order:

* Love, Actually

* Mickey's Christmas Carol

* Miracle on 34th Street

* It's a Wonderful Life

* Joyeux Noel

We love the French. They always make such depressing profound films. I hate French films, except when I love them. And I love Joyeux Noel. It think it is well nigh impossible not to love a story where music dissolves fear and hatred and gives grieving young men a chance to figure out that the person they thought was their worst enemy was just a friend in disguise. Instead of writing a silly review of it, I'm just going to link to the song in the credits, which doesn't do the rest of the story justice entirely, but is a very sweet song regardless.

Stuff

The real reason I don't get my hair cut more than twice a year: it's embarrassing when every woman in the salon talks for the entire hour about how they wish their hair was as awesome as mine. And I was really hoping to avoid the extra attention this time, because the girl who cut my hair the last time I went was right there, and I had someone else. They never like it when you do that, but she was booked solid when I called, and the girl today did a better job.

Here's a photo for your visual enlightenment. I'm sure you can tell as clearly as I can that this is a superior haircut.

On another note, I dreamed last night that I bought a pair of boots so audacious my imagination broke. This is difficult, because every time I go to the shoe store and look in the clearance section for big feet, there are some pretty darned audacious shoes. It's like they think just because we're tall we want both lots of attention and lots of potential to biff it. And shoes that couldn't possibly go with anyone's professional wardrobe (the less said about possible professional wardrobes some of these shoes would go with the better). Some of these shoes are so tall it's difficult to wear them and accelerate while driving. Wait, though. In my case maybe that's a good thing.

The ones in my dream were patriotic boots, and they morphed as I put them on. It was a long, grueling process, but by the end, they were slick and shiny red and blue, up to mid-thigh, with slits down the middle so they could show enough skin to be all three patriotic colors. They had buttons and laces and zippers and hooks, and the heels were something like six or seven inches. In the dream it was too appalling to laugh, but now I find it very diverting. Butter my butt and call me a biscuit.

And, to change the subject yet again, it is getting down to the wire with my annual reading list. Less than two months to go, and my "To Read" list is still longer than my "Already Read" list. Unless you count all the books I've re-read this year, which is up to at least 17.

I'm trying to finish Beau Geste. This is because at one point I met a really nice guy who said it was his favorite book. This experience may have enabled me to give him a list of a dozen books I think he might like, including The Four Feathers, The Last of the Mohicans, and maybe even Dracula. I imagine he has already read Lord of the Rings. Some guys have a thing for action/adventure books that may or may not be well-written. I can't explain it, but it doesn't bother me unless they make fun of me for reading The Brontes. You take your life in your hands if you say anything derogatory about Jane Eyre in front of me.