DScottGRRL

wow.

one percent milk is miles and miles ahead of fat free in terms of taste and texture.

i’ve been depriving myself for a lo-ong time.

Technorati Tags: milk, one percent, fat free

what do you get when you put kanye, nobel peace price physicists, a pumpkin competition, and dakota fanning all into an SNL skit?

genius

Technorati Tags: kanye, saturday night live, dakota fanning, nobel peace prize, pumpkin

Weren’t you just dying to know what mischief I’m getting up to at any given moment of the day?

Blame it on my inner extrovert.

I twittered for about five minutes before I got bored.

If you have never heard of Twitter, it’s basically a page that you update with what you’re doing on real-time basis. You can have twitter friends and follow their life stream and stuff.

Kind of like the status feature on facebook, which I absolutely adore.

The constraints of having to come up with a “Danielle is… ” statement for every emotion, activity, etc, is, actually quite freeing. I like to come up with nonsensical ones for fun. Push the envelope, right? Embrace the challenge.

Danielle is the trouble this is.

Technorati Tags: twitter, facebook

I don’t care about your political proclivities, musical tendencies, or predilection (or not) for the green.*

Just do the world a favour and listen to some Bob.

Think about it.

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all listened to a little Bob every day?

I had to drive up to Malibu this morning at the ass crack of dawn (7AM) and was driving the boyfriend’s car. Once NPR cut out (ahhh those canyon roads) I turned on the CD player and there was Bob ready to ease me into the morning.

Positive vibrations indeed.

What could be better than driving up the PCH, blue waves to your left, sun rising in the sky, and… some Bob. (reference picture on top taken with my phone at a traffic light)

It was almost trance-like in its power to soothe the mind and spirit.

Like yoga without the exertion.

I highly recommend it.

Do the world–and yourself–a favour.

Listen to some Bob.

*P.S. proclivity and predilection are two of my favouritw words and I’m tickled I got to use them both in one sentence

Technorati Tags: Bob Marley, positive vibrations, Malibu, NPR, yoga

Once upon a time I used to be a yellow mini.

Yellow!!

But then… the real world happened. And somehow all of the yellow mini-ness got sucked out of me and I ended up being…

a black volvo.

Black….

What happened to happy, giddy, fun-loving Dan?

I’ll tell you what.

Work happened.

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I’ve always wanted to go to therapy.

Maybe there were a few times when I actually felt something was wrong and needed “professional help,” but for the most part, I just liked the idea of having someone’s undivided attention while I talk about myself for an hour.

Self-obsessed much? Probably not more than anyone else, I reckon.

So I’m taking this Behavior class (I heart school), which, while not at all therapy, has gotten me on this self-improvement kick that has been, I think, quite a positive thing.

Much like my Two Weeks to a Breakthrough phase, one of the self-help tenants is to broadcast the things you’re trying to work on so that your peeps can call you out when you start flaking.

So I’ve come up with three blog-related goals for the rest of 2007. And in any case, blogging is kind of like therapy.

1. I will post at least 3x a week.
2. I will start writing book reviews.
3. I will not go over to the dark side and become one of those angry, bitter bloggers whose only purpose is to bitch about the world and “tell it like it is.” That’s not me. I just want to write pretty things. That’s all.

If you can come up with another two that you can possibly conceive of me achieving, go for it.

FYI: You’ll probably see a post like this everytime I start back posting after a break.. wait! that’s self-defeatist! There will be no more breaks. Ha ha! Take that, negative thought.

But hey seriously, if I falter every now and again, don’t hate. Britney can have a “comeback” every week, and goddamit so can I.

Technorati Tags: therapy, britney, goals, self-improvement

You can imagine my excitement when I realized there was a Caribbean restaurant* less than four blocks from my house.

Ecstatic!

Hmmm….

Well who tell me to expect that they’d act like a normal business and be open at normal hours?

First of all, their website says they’re open from 11 AM to 4 PM, Monday to Saturday. If you want to come after 4PM you have to make a reservation otherwise they shut down.

Okay… a little hokey, but I’m all about work/life balance so I’ll go with it.

So the boyfriend and I (see his crazy lunar eclipse pic here) went last Saturday at 12:30. I was jumping up and down I was so happy.

Ehhhrrrrttttt.

CLOSED.

We ended up getting KFC. It was deliciously gross and all I can say is that I really miss home.

I digress: Trinidad has the bess KFC ever. it’s actually one of the “local delicacies” you have to have when you go.

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The farther I get physically from my family, the stronger my need to be a part of it; the undeniable need to connect.

People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this was too great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel—before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him it was as if he had always been.

Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slighlty noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

~ Zadie Smith, On Beauty.

There’s something so delicious about re-reading one of your favourite books and finding new passages that excite you by their ability to get it so unbelievably right.

It’s summer. I do a lot of re-reading in the summer. In less than a week I’ll have some really heavy reading to contend with so I’m hanging on to these few precious moments of do-nothingness I have left (decadence!).

So… on siblings.

The instance of the above passage is when a sister and two brothers fortuitously bounce into each other at a bus-stop in Boston. Entirely unplanned and ridiculously serendipitous.

Once we grew up and moved out, my dad would always get a kick out of that the three of us being together, wherever we were, even if he and mums weren’t there. I didn’t get it then. I do now.

It’s funny, the less I see of them–and now that I’m in LA it’s considerably less–the more I’m amazed by the wall of love I run into whenever we’re together.

To paraphrase, I most definitely do not consider the if or how or why of loving my brothers. But it is absolute and unfailing and… so comforting. And now that they’re having kids, I can feel it in the wall of love that hits me (no words) to be in the presence of these newest blood members. A love like they were always there. I’m botching it up. She said it better:

They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

How comforting not to need words (and the three of us all have a bit of the over-explainer in us), to know that words are superfluous to the flow of understanding that comes from a shared history.

I think I’m going to extend this to my cousins. By virtue of our age gaps, I spent as much time with my eleventy first cousins (four in particular) as I did with my brothers. We’re not as close as we used to be, which makes me kind of sad.

But it still hits me so profoundly to be with them, to know that in the deepest, most true sense that they understand it all, that they “get it.”

To feel the pull of blood.

Technorati Tags: zadie smith, on beauty, siblings, brothers, cousins, blood, family, love, reading

~ do you know… this is the first t-shirt I have with words on it? It’s not that I don’t like them, I like them on other people. But I’ve always felt like that isn’t me. I don’t do t-shirts with words.

~ oh yeah? Well this is the first t-shirt I have with an asymetrical design on it.

~ We’re in LA now.

~ hmmm…

Technorati Tags: graphic tees, rvca, ruca

I know, I know, a controversial topic.

Whatever.

There are a lot of things about the church and religion in general that irk me, and for the most part I choose not to discuss them because well, people will believe what they want to believe, and I don’t know that there’s a really good defense to, “It’s what I believe, so there.”

It’s like me and cats.

I believe that cats possess mystical, unearthly powers and that if I lock eyes with them bad, unspeakable things will happen to me.

They might possess my soul.

They are evil, malicious creatures capable of committing terrible acts and I am paralyzed with fear when one so much as comes within my line of sight.

It’s what I believe.

So there.

You see? 100% irrefutable.

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