Wherein I am strongly influenced by my siblings

So, yesterday my twin Kristen calls me and yells at me: "Blog more!" Then she hangs up.

Yeah yeah yeah.

And then today I notice that my sister Jessi is doing NaBloPoMo. And I remembered the days when Kristen used to do NaNoWriMo and, despite how totally nuts that made her (and I hope she isn't doing it this year, no offense twin), how awesome and impressive it was.

SOOOOOOOOooooooOOOO

I caved.



Now, blogging is NOT as cool as writing a novel, even if that novel sucks because you wrote a lot of bad exposition just to get to your word count (the goal for nanowrimo is 50,000 words in a month). But I think it will be nice for me to have some goal here lest I get lost in the weirdness that is solitude and graduate school.

So, how should I begin? It's the beginning of November, I'm listening to They Might Be Giants and watching my cat sleep in an exhausted lump on the couch. Which means it has been a weird beginning of the month so far. Halloween was last night. I got dressed up and met Katy, Jana, and Katy's friend John at Union Square around 8.




There was a giant parade on 6th Avenue that's supposed to be amazing, so we headed over there to check it out. I got some really great pictures. Check them out:





Yeah. As you can see, the closest we got was...still not close enough to see anything. We actually got about five people deep, but still couldn't see anything because we ended up directly behind the Society for Ladies and Gentlemen Seven Feet or Taller with Umbrellas. It was also the most aggressive crowd I've ever been in. At one point we couldn't move for the wall of struggling, pushing people in front of, behind, and surrounding us. It was around this point that some girl (luckily) a few people behind me, who had been freaking out about the crowd, threw up all over her costume. In other words, it was freaking nuts. I'm a little disappointed because it's supposed to be an amazing parade, with all these huge puppets and amazing costumes interspersed with regular drunk people in their store-bought gear. Next year I think I'll walk in the parade, because I am pretty sure that's the only way to get a view.

We followed that up by stopping for dinner at some fancy place in Greenwich Village, and then traipsing around handing out PBRs and drinking Irish Car Bombs all over the Lower East Side. That might be an exaggeration.



After a while I bowed out because I am a little old lady and caught the train back to Astoria with HUNDREDS OF COSTUMED MANIACS JUST STARTING THEIR NIGHT. It was...surreal. Best costumes: a large man, probably late 30s, on the subway, wearing nothing but a giant diaper. Also, a group of people who went as the Super Mario Brothers characters. I saw lots of Mario and Luigis, but this group had Toad, the Princess (yes, in a barely-there-but-yet-reminiscent-of-Mario style dress), and Yoshi too, all huddled together under one umbrella in the rain near the parade.

What does a reasonable person do to follow up all this nonsense? I'm not sure; I clearly can't be reasonable because I'm a grad student. So I went home and studied. For a class. Which is on Tuesday. While coming down from all those Irish Car Bombs. Yeah, I know I have a problem.

This part is for Kristen:
And now I'm making blueberry muffins with streussel!




The goal is to read more for class, finish these muffins (baking, not eating, although I will undoubtedly be muffin-riffic for like a week), and then head over to a Packers bar on the Lower East Side (which is apparently the neighborhood I hang out in all the time now), and watch the Packers beat the heck out of the Vikings.

NOTE!: I just want you to know that I made 11 blueberry streussel muffins. And one chocolate-espressso blueberry cinnamon streussel muffin. I thought that the batter for the last one didn't have any blueberries in it, and I felt sad for it. I was trying to think of what I could add to it when I remembered that Katy, the night before had given me a small chocolate from her work: dark chocolate-espresso. So I fetched it from the pocket of my costume, broke it to bits, stuffed it in the batter and added a dash of cinnamon and the rest of the streussel. As I was eating it this afternoon I realized that there had been one blueberry in the batter, which was now hanging out. It was a weird, delicious experience.

PS: Just so you know, I may officially fail at this one-post-per-day requirement, because I'll be traveling from November 5 through 9 and I may not have internet access. But I guarantee that if this is the case I will write it on paper and post all 5 days upon my return to civilization.