Nora Rocket's blog

So sometimes when you see a problem at work, the correct response is to look around, see if anyone else has noticed, and move the fuck on without trying to DO anything. Because Trying to Do Something will precipitate a storm of controversy that goes all the way to the top. The top, I tell you! One minute it's a polite disagreement ("hm, that's odd; this customer said he did receive stock from a damaged shipment that you'd been told did not go out") and the next, it's all "Nora, pls triple check that you are right before we go forward" and "hm, let's loop the editor in chief in on this shipping error" and lots of work for me.

C and S and I arrived at a new-to-me hole-in-the-wall pub in Cambridge at around 11:30 and began to consume mass quantities. And nachos. When the rains came, we retreated from the patio into the bar and said "well, that settles it" and had another round. By the time we began to be a little sensitive about having outlasted multiple rounds of other patrons, the idea came up to go see the 4:15 of the new Angie Jolie shoot 'em up, Wanted.

This is the kind of movie that, upon seeing previews, prompts my ladyfriend and I to turn to each other and start a low, slowly accelerating chant of "brew and view, Brew and View, BREW and VIEW! BREW AND VIEW!!!" Ah, the Brew and View; another thing to miss about Chicago and wonder why exactly there's nothing like it in Boston (in fairness, the theater near my house serves beer, but it's no B&V). There are certain movies that lend themselves so well to this concept that I want to view them at the Brew and View, even though I wouldn't see them in any other circumstance (in a regular theater, at home, on a plane, at a friend's house...). Summer dreck fares especially well paired with beers, G&Ts, and cheap popcorn swiped off the abandoned table of the couple who are not staying for the second feature.

First, a comment: in the UK and former colonies, it's "sport" singular and "maths" plural, whereas in the ol' U.S. of A., it's "math" and "sports." I love that.

And now, Sport.

The Celtics are really sticking it to the Lakers in these closing minutes of the first half of game whatever-it-is.

It's my birthday, and here are ten words about that!

When faced with your transit line being on fire, proceed directly to your second-best option. Do not think, "oh, I'll try something new this time" or "maybe they'll get the shuttle buses sorted out real soonish-like." You shouldn't, and they won't, and you will be either 2 1/2 hours late getting home or an hour late getting to work, rushing to someplace you don't even want to be anyway.

In other,not unrelated news, our Boston exit strategy is shaping up more quickly, which pleases me.

This summer I am getting back on the blog wagon. I hope it's drawn by a team of clydesdales.

I'm also making stuff around the house. I just topped an old desk with a layer of cork and hung 9 small line drawings of the wildflowers of North America.

Oh hell, y'all: the March issue of Saveur is devoted to that miracle lipid, your friend and mine: butter. The tasting notes on 30 different butters forms the centerfold. It is all I can do to refrain from humping this ish; I nearly slept with it under my pillow.

Because I recognize that my words live in the public sphere on this blog, I feel like I should elaborate a bit on white privilege and my thoughts on it. This is precipitated by a small dust-up over my quoting of an alumnus from my college, who, you'll recall from my last post, did not believe in white privilege. He contacted me and, in the resulting minor dust-up, I was able to articulate more of my feelings about the unearned, often unquestioned, power of whiteness. I'm sharing them here, with the full disclosure that I did not change the mind of my interlocutor and I doubt I would be able to: we were at loggerheads at the end of the discussion, with me believing that white privilege exists and him believing that all inequity could be accounted for by racism, and believing, in fact, that the idea of white privilege itself was racist (because it ascribes a characteristic--power--to a race) and appealed to "some people, most of whom have a sheltered, self-absorbed, self-centered view of the world."

I want you to read this article from the Christian Science Monitor, a publication with which I have no beef, before we go on. It's the prerequisite before today's session of "Nora's Bile: Let Me Show You It."

It's short, and I can wait.

Done? How interesting, right? In the vein of Nickeled and Dimed--with its renunciation of one's so-called station to explore how another group lives (or struggles to live)--a young man named Adam Shepard decides to take twenty-five bucks, a rucksack of physical things, and nothing else; leave his home with his parents; and step to "the wrong side of the tracks" in Charleston and "[start] his life from scratch" (sort of) as a homeless man to "test the vivacity of the American Dream."

Right.

Dear Jealousy,

Fuck off. Fuck off fuck offfff.

Warm regards,
Nora.

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inbetween time, ain't we got fun?

In the past month:
-work
-gym
-gamelan
-crappy Monday night TV (I cannot look away, David Caruso! You suck!)
-vacation, both friend and family
-cooking, home and away
-decorating and rearranging
-buying a couch
-Zip car-ing
-movies
-finally finished Anna Karenina (!!)
-freelancing

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From as far back as I can remember up until I was about 18, my dreams were dominated by one enduring image or occurrence: in almost every dream, no matter what the situation was, my eyes would get stuck shut. I'd blink, in the dream, and just wouldn't be able to open them. I could pry them open with my fingers, in the dream, but with the next blink they'd stick again. It's the kind of imagery that *must mean something* but I don't know what it means. The kind of thing that maybe I'd look up in a big ol' dream dictionary if I was in a chain bookstore and had some time to kill.