if a tree falls

Driving Miss Melanie

This weekend, in addition to watching the Nets lose in person,  cleaning the house, walking Gonzo in the park, hosting my lovely grandparents for lunch and cooking porkchops for the first time (people who know my finicky eating habits will think this is hilarious), Joe and I saw Stranger Than Fiction. I really enjoyed it, from both entertainment and literary perspectives.

For those who aren't familiar with the title, the movie starts with the day-to-day activities of a character named Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell. When he starts hearing a voice narrating his deepest thoughts, he consults with a literary professor played by Dustin Hoffman, who devotedly helps him try to determine when, why and how he will die.

Ever the self-inspecting analytical sort, I started to think about how Hoffman's charater's questions to Crick would apply as reflection on one's life. Is your life a comedy or a tragedy? Is it plot-driven or character-driven? To answer the latter, Hoffman's character (professor Jules Hilbert, thanks IMDB) tells Crick to go home and do nothing. If the story is plot-driven, life will happen to him. If it is character-driven, nothing will happen until he makes it happen.

I think that few real people have such simply categorized lives, but it is easy to see how a certain period in one's life can be character or plot driven. For me, these last few weeks and coming months are and will be incredibly character-driven. It is up to me to make things happen, to adapt and perservere and charm. After suffering a few minor setbacks already this morning, it is up to me to pick up, move forward and drive.

On that note, I'm going to reserve the big posting space for posts that have significant meaning or content that I think is worthy of attention. I've joined Twitter to blog smaller thoughts and actions. If you so wish, join too and invite me to become a friend. Thanks for sticking through a time of transition, and drop an e-mail anytime. 

How YOU doin'?

Hello and welcome! If you're coming from Jersey Blogs, or would like to catch up on my coverage of the Sopranos drama in Bloomfield, here are the links:

Milkshake-up

Game On

Thanks for stopping by.

UPDATE: Baristanet has a video of the scene, with interviews of the locals.

Hey....

Previously: I thought that I might never see...

Electronic Pet Peeves

Surprisingly, I'm in a really good mood this morning. I just encountered a few of these gnats in my morning surfing. Here is a list of just a handful of my electronic pet peeves, both rational and not.

• E-mail replies that don't directly answer a pressing question.
• When people call blog posts "blogs." The blog is the site, an entry is a post.
• IM replies like "that's cool" that do nothing to advance the conversation
• Any forward that promises good luck for passing it along to 300 of your closest friends.
• When a site offers an RSS feed and my reader won't accept it.

More about the weekend, the puppy and catching up with friends coming soon.

At least it quelled my reality TV addiction

I have a secret internet habit. It's something that I haven't talked about with friends and family until recently.

The confession: I am an obsessive pregnancy-blog reader.

It's not something that is shameful for me, or even that I'd deny in a one-on-one conversation. But what started as an entertaining aspect of my daily web surfing--the fact that a blogger whose writing I enjoyed was with child--became an obsession of guilty pleasure proportions. After the initial excitement of a birth announcement and a post about the "birth story" (an obligatory post for the ravenous readers like myself who wondered what happened during those three days without posts that came suspiciously close to the woman's due date), I would begin the hunt for a new mommy-to-be.

One friend has expressed concern that this is an early signal from my biological clock. I see it more as an exploration of what could happen when I'm ready for my own spawn in a few years. I'm a natural researcher, and this is a way to explore the emotions, events and reactions leading up to a new family member.

I almost quit my addiction about six months ago, but a couple of friends of bloggers I already read conceived, and I found myself with no fewer than five pregnant bloggers (one with twins). Some I had never read before. I could no longer deny this.

But why should I? There's inherent drama, anticipation and hope for the future. If there's anything to feel guilty about, it's using the lives of strangers as my own entertainment. But isn't that how blogs gain readers? By being entertaining and relatable? It's something I can work toward attaining myself. I just don't have the benefit of automatic content.

Found Online Today

• Ze Frank's awesome election analogy.
• Halloween tampon crafts.
• Dooce's Halloween post is too hilarious.
• Thankfully, Amy put down the book before she peed.
• Naturally, my first comment is from Mom.

...that's where I'm a Viking

I've wanted to start a new blog for some time now, and I suppose now is as good a time as any. Tomorrow I leave for Oslo, capital of Norway, on a business trip. It should be an amazing few days, if I'm not cooped up in the office, so I'll try to post with each day's activities.

Let's do a little free association. What do you think of when you think of Norway?

Yeah, me either. Cold and far away.

But after reading a guidebook and talking to a few people, there is a lot of cool stuff in Oslo. Their history involves Vikings, monarchs with names like Olav and Hans, Henrik Ibsen, the Nobel Prize and tons of reindeer. (One of my fears for the trip is that at some point someone will offer me some Rudolph for dinner.) Recent events in Norway include the theft and recovery of Edvard Munch's "The Scream," the discovery of dinosaur bones and tissue (!) and this awesome wedding. You will not be sorry for clicking on that link, I promise.

Wish me luck. Details to come.