ikea

"There are not enough words to describe my love for IKEA" - this would be a perfectly adequate blog post on its own. And yet, though its conciseness would convey my seriousness, I have way more to say on the subject of IKEA!love.

1. First, good font choices on signs etc. - everything is easy to read and friendly. (Somehow I missed the recent controversy - I am a much bigger fan of Futura.)
2. The carts at this store run amazingly smoothly (?). It's like ice-skating on a freshly-Zambonied rink, except way LESS DANGEROUS. It's like the carts pull the customers along on a ride through a land of home goods. If I were to create an amusement park, IKEA would be my favorite attraction.
3. I haven't checked it out, but there's a whole place for kids to go play! And there are really good deals on kid-sized meals and the furniture is so much cuter for kids.
4. I could probably talk about any given room in any section of this store for an hour. I will refrain.
5. The IKEA scene in 500 Days of Summer is one of my favorite parts of any movie.
6. I LOVE that there are maps everywhere and arrows on the floor telling you where to go - but also "shortcuts" to different parts of the store. It is so cute. And so organized.
7. The single word product names (most of which are Swedish) are just so fun - but also really useful, because there's no mistaking similar objects (so long as you get the name right).
8. The restaurant serves delicious desserts and decent entrees! There are some great things in there...I highly recommend stopping to eat on your next IKEA visit.
9. Everything is really well explained. Like, why do I have to clear my own table? How do I find my furniture once I've picked it out? And even, from an otherwise somewhat ambiguous entrance, where do I start shopping?
10. It is impossible to leave without getting something that you hadn't anticipated - but this isn't a bad thing. There will be something that you didn't even know that you needed, but once you see it, you feel somehow...complete. Successful. Happy. Now, I'm not really a shopper, but there is something very satisfying about falling in love with a cute product and then instantly obtaining it (as opposed to online shopping or even going to a cute store and expecting to find something cute and then getting it).
11. It's not just consuming - it is an entirely unique experience, and everything is arranged in a way to make me happy. It's easy to understand, but not boring; I can walk through at my own pace and linger in one room for twenty minutes and then skip three entire sections - but it's just laid out so nice and clear that it is way more fun than a regular store. It's like you're supposed to interact with the furniture, test it out and have fun. It's like they took my ideal furniture store right from my brain and created it in a real warehouse, and everything is the way that I want it to be - except they don't have every possible piece of furniture that I would like to buy (if you're looking for something specific but it's not in their catalog you will not have a fun shopping experience). Otherwise...it's just a fantastic place.

That all said, I think that IKEA would be a terrible place to go with someone who you don't know very well because of the overwhelming possibilities for disagreement, from whether a bookshelf is tasteful or not to how long you really need to spend looking at rugs. It's also a really exhausting store. Thankfully, they have food strategically placed at the end of the top floor and right after you check out on the bottom floor, so you really could spend all day in this wonderful world.

rotten tomatoes

In case you didn't realize it already, I actually have pretty good taste when it comes to movies. I like cinematography, I like witty but realistic conversations, I even seek out indie films sometimes. Though there are a lot of silly movies that I enjoy, generally a movie has to blow me away for me to consider it good...and then I will happily rewatch it several times. You could say I'm a film snob - and I'm sure a lot of my friends will agree with this. There are a lot of movies I have refused to pay money to see even though my friends were going to see them:

• No Strings Attached
• Black Swan (this wasn't about the quality of the movie but about my complete lack of interest)
• Killers
• Love Happens
• All About Steve
• The Covenant
• I Am Legend
• Tropic Thunder (saw it on dvd, thought it was okay)
• Charlie Bartlett
• Eclipse (I admit that I saw the others at my sister's request)

I can't just trust one critic to tell me whether a movie is good or not - I want all of them; I want a consensus; I want Rotten Tomatoes. I can generally tell when a movie is going to be good or not, but there are some movies that I really can't judge from their previews. I could say with 100% conviction that Avatar: The Last Airbender was going to be bad last summer, but I still wanted to see it because I really like Shaymalan movies that other people don't like and because it was midnight and because there's really not much else to do in Williamsburg. I didn't need RT to tell me it was bad - I ignored their words of warning. Ironically I found the opposite true of the consensus on Avatar, the blue-person movie - though it received an 83%, I found the movie incredibly boring, exceedingly long and astoundingly overpraised. In general, though, I take Rotten Tomatoes as a definitive authority on the quality of a movie.

But this maybe isn't the most logical approach. The percentage that RT gives is of the critics who saw the movie who thought it was, in a choice between acceptable and unacceptable, passingly fair. You have to read the reviews to know if they thought it was actually good. PSA: Rotten Tomatoes does not highlight the average rating of a movie, though it does provide this information; it merely highlights the percent of critics who gave it a positive review. And that's the problem - the movies with high percentages appeal to the widest range of critics, so it's kind of like an estimated likelihood that you will find the movie decent. That is simply not good enough for me. I don't want to spend $11 and two hours on something that I have a 30% chance of deeming a total waste. Let's look at what I mean.

So, really, this is saying that 97% of critics liked the movie but that its actual grade is 84%. Similarly, 92% of regular people liked it but its grade from audiences is 88%. (There is also the question of response bias here, in that only people with strong opinions took the time to rate the movie at all...but my feeling here is that you shouldn't go see this movie unless you already like Harry Potter and also won't be surprised if they completely mangle the plot, so really the RT score doesn't matter.)

That said, RT is a tool that you can use, and it's a very useful one given that it has so many critics' input, but you still have to use your own judgment when deciding what category a movie belongs in: opening night must-see, acceptable diversion of time and money if the opportunity arises, worth the wait for dvd, maybe okay if it's on tv in three years or avoid like the plague. If I want to see a movie based on its previews, it still has to get at least a 75% approval rating before I'll go, with few exceptions. Sometimes RT is most helpful in deciding between similar movies - like Green Lantern vs. Captain America. Obviously if both got great reviews I would have seen them both...and I probably would have seen Captain America anyway given my interest in The Avengers...but I saved myself from disappointment by not seeing Green Lantern, which I had high hopes for before the reviews started coming out.

I've found that it's good to find one or two critics who have a similar sensibility toward movies as yourself and follow their advice, since every person has a different definition of "good movie." I trust Roger Ebert's opinion like no other - I have disagreed with probably three of his reviews ever, though I clearly don't have the time to see all of the movies that he likes. But I respect his opinion a lot and have been glad to see that he takes movies for what they are and judges them based on criteria within their genres: he notes, for example, that a movie targeted toward young adults does a good job of relating to that generation.

Also, sometimes I have found myself forced into seeing a movie with friends. I always stand against what I consider to be a bad movie - but there is also a point where you should just give in and suspend your inner, raging critic for the sake of maintaining a social life and not being a total elitist. And sometimes it's fun to go and see a movie that you haven't read anything about, even though I am usually a fan of reading spoilers and speculations (perhaps why I loved Lost, Harry Potter, etc. as the stories were unfolding. Also, I would really like to know who wins The Glee Project and not have to wait two weeks).

Fun facts to leave you with: instead of going to senior homecoming, I saw Eagle Eye...and instead of going to senior prom I saw Star Trek in IMAX. I maintain that these were much more enjoyable experiences than my alternatives and that I totally optimized my utility. No regrets.

morbid interests

I am finally the owner of a Turbie Twist. I have been intrigued by these since I learned of their existence some 12 years ago, in the days of my long hair. For those of you who didn't know me back then, I grew my hair to the point where I could sit on it if I really tried and then would get it trimmed like two inches and repeat this process ad naseum, or until I was 16. Then I had moderately long hair which I always considered short until this March when I got it cut at a length which I consider extremely short and other people consider normal.

Anyway, this product is magical. It cuts my hair-drying time down significantly which is impressive given that my hair is so short now that it only takes about a half hour to dry (as opposed to 1.5ish hours).

But I realized that I have a lot of morbid interests, which you might also call obsessions. Ok, a morbid interest should relate to death, and I don't really like when other people use this term casually, but I think it's fair. These obsessions start off as pure loathing and as my attention is drawn to them I just want to see more of them so that I can dislike them even more...and eventually I grow to love them.

• Jeggings. I heard this word and thought, that sounds incredibly stupid. There would be no chance of ever seeing me in faux jeans slash leggings (I'm not really sure at what point either one is pretending to be the other - though I prefer jeans that are like leggings to leggings that look like jeans). Because I found them so ridiculous, I had to try them on. And when I did I fell in love. I love jeans like no other person I know (I actually like sleeping in them) so this wasn't super surprising...basically anything jean is fine with me.
• Boston Red Sox. Ok, I'm still on the fence about how much I hate them, but right now it's kind of getting to the point where I want them to win lots so that I can watch them get this close to being World Series champions and then see them lose...but I also wouldn't super mind if they won because I feel like the devoted fans deserve it...but then there are bandwagon jumpers, so, eh. My feelings toward this franchise aren't nearly as strong as my disgust when the Yankees win, but I would still like to see someone else take the AL east - if the Orioles are out of the question, I still dream of seeing the Blue Jays having a stellar season. One day. In maybe twenty years.
• Canada. Ok, you're thinking, Marisa makes no sense. Why value the Toronto Blue Jays? Well, Canada is yet another of my morbid interests. It's so easy to make fun of but also dangerously easy to pity. It seems like a nice enough country without too many scandals or vindictive policies, and everyone knows Canadians are well-intentioned, like Hufflepuffs! But actually, it has been one of my lifelong dreams to travel to Canada. This may seem really silly - I know it's not so different from here - but I want to use Canadian money and buy Canadian coffee and eat Canadian delicacies like poutine. I am a little bit obsessed with their culture and a lot obsessed with using my passport for something.
• Justin Bieber. You may note that the Biebs is a Canadian. I started off kind of grossed out by the fact that I couldn't tell the difference between his voice and female singers and how little girls were fawning over him. So then I started to ironically listen to his music - you know, how people go to see Twilight just to make fun of it (note: I have done this). It started getting stuck in my head but I still brushed it off; catchy as he may be, I was having none of his tomfoolery. But as you all know by now, after watching the inspirational film Never Say Never, I was a converted belieber. I went home and listened to all of his songs approximately twenty times apiece. I told everyone to see this movie. I started bursting out into song (mostly Baby). I now have a JB sticker on the back of my phone. What is this madness?! I've never got caught by the fangirl crazies before in my life (I was/am immune to boy bands, Aaron Carter and Jesse McCartney). All I can say is that I caught Bieber Fever.
• Sporcle. Some people still haven't heard of this amazing procrastination machine - my advice? Stay away. But if you've already built up an interest in ruining your productivity, by all means, read on! I heard about this site during my senior year of high school, and thankfully I found it a little bit boring after doing the states quiz so it didn't pull down my grades and force the rescission of my college admission. But when I got to college, I realized that this was totally a site made for college kids. And now when I have free time and get tired of Facebook, I harmlessly meander over to Sporcle, thinking I'll teach myself something interesting. Seven and a half hours later I will know all the words to all of the Disney songs and will be able to list the most populated cities in the United States in descending order (this is a true story). Unfortunately, this knowledge will not stay with me forever, and I will continue to have the need to find more quizzes so that I can get in the 99th percentile - because to me the best part of taking these quizzes is seeing how well I do against the rest of the world (ie other bored college students). This really does qualify as a morbid interest, I think, because the more time I spend on Sporcle, the less time I have for real life. And yet...I just can't stop.

blue-ish crush

"Pink" was my first word and consequently my favorite color for several years. I mean, what little girl doesn't love this, the most princess-y color of all? Essentially all of my clothes were some form of pink, maybe partially because I had an older brother who couldn't wear any, but I would consider the percentage of pink outfits to be statistically significant, even as I got older and could pick my own clothing. In the photograph to your right, you will see one of my favorite pictures - I was dressing up for my grandparents' visit and super excited and had a little too much matchy-matchy going on. I didn't discriminate against shades, but the brighter, the better.

Then I realized that there are so many amazing shades of blue, from sky to royal blue, periwinkle to cerulean. I also had an intense love for Cinderella and her blue dress, water Pokemon (their color is obviously blue) and later the Lothlorien elves (their card color is a similar watery-blue). My grandma said that her favorite color was blue and I remember her blue china plates, so now when I think "favorite color: blue," I think of those plates.

I would have another relapse into pure blue, but first...

I made a quilt that was pink, blue and purple (and discovered that purple was the fusion of two of my favorite colors), so I put purple at the top of my list. Pretty soon I got to the stage where I hated red and orange (and still don't really love them). At this point, I adopted green and purple into my revised wheel of acceptable colors. I really liked bright green and purple together, kind of like the Joker? Anyway, then my bedspread was purple, green and blue, and this has characterized my room for a while (between walls, rugs, chairs, blinds, pillows, etc., it's been a veritable explosion of these colors).

Also, note in the above left photo my blue outfit and the blue carabiner watch which I thought was the epitome of cool.

After going to high school and seeing and wearing and designing purple everything (like The Purple Tide), I decided I was just into blue and green, and mostly blue. It was also in high school that I began my obsession with one particular shade - I would call it a medium-dark seafoam green. I really can't describe how much I love this color. It's not quite teal, aqua, aquamarine, mint, turquoise, seafoam, blue or green - but it's kind of all of them. It's...well, it's My Color. When I look at something of this color I just want it to be mine, whether it's a dress or a wall. A wall?! Yes. This was the color of the walls in two of my favorite classrooms - the first, my world history and world religions classroom, whose door could never be opened without creating a wind tunnel (I learned to quickly put away loose papers) and home to many a craft project; the second, the office inside the back room of newspaper, and where I lived for about 50% of senior year. The first was a little bit more green (though she insisted it was blue, I'm pretty sure she just did this to question our sense of reality), and the second was made a little bit darker and adapted to become the theme color for our literary magazine. (The magazine, coincidentally, is gorgeous and probably my favorite design to date.)

And now, my color is "teal." Teal everything. I say teal, but it's really the shade of the magazine that I'm thinking of, and I can't think of a word for it. Basically, though, I have a huge color crush. It's pretty and fun and smart and I can't get enough of it. I like it on the greenish side, not too dark, though sometimes I'll opt for a cyan-ish hue (which is a slightly more blue seafoam). I really just don't like dark teal. It's a fine color, but not my favorite.

I also have a small crush on coral, which has become a very popular color this year, and a kind of rosy pink. I really love this dress by ShopRuche, which tends to have prettier colors than ModCloth - they're more romantic and whimsical, but also tend to be more expensive and have fewer sales. Anyway, the rosy/dusty pink that I like looks best when paired with green and off-white. It's kind of like Sweet Frog colors, but less bright. I guess I like my colors bright but still gentle - like out of a fairy tale.

Since I've already put a lot of work into this post I'm just going to leave you with some photographs of teal-ish things that I love to show you what I mean. You may also consider the background of this blog, which I specifically picked the html hex code for because I love it so much, but I did go for a lighter shade than usual for the purpose of making my blog look inviting.

bike lessons

Until last week, my favorite Never Have I Ever (or I Never if you're playing under a weird name) fact was that I have never ridden a bike without training wheels. This invariably caused 95% of the players to lose a finger. Now I have to come up with a new fact.

I'd like to think that I picked up this skill pretty quickly - last Sunday morning after our church service, Katie took me out and told me to get on a bike and go. After about fifteen minutes of complaining and saying that I was too scared to balance myself and having her hold onto my bike and run beside me, I finally accomplished my goal. We didn't take the scary pathway and I walked my bike through some hills on the first day, but after that I was pretty much set. I didn't get a single scrape or bruise, though I was surprised at how sore one can get. I rode on a couple of different bikes of varying heights and levels of rust/age so I would also assume that my skills are transferable to other times and places. Throughout the rest of the week we rode our bikes to the beach and back, and though I came to a few jarring halts and always dismantled extremely awkwardly and am still not very good at hopping up on curbs without running into things immediately afterward, I would now say that I feel moderately comfortable riding a bike anywhere that is not Williamsburg.

When I was younger I couldn't wait to ride my bike. I had a nice pink one with stickers on it and probably a basket and of course training wheels. I rode it up and down my sidewalk like a champ. I think my brother pretended to be the newspaper boy for a while, which I obviously found super cool. One day, after envying my brother's Older and More Skilled status, I decided I was ready for the training wheels to come off. I attempted to ride my bike again. It did not work. I decided that I would like my training wheels back on. This was not allowed since I myself had decided that I was ready to be a Big Girl. So then I decided that I was perfectly content with my scooter and roller blades and who needs a bike anyway? My sister didn't have one and I knew I could have a lot of fun roller blading with her around the block (since that's as far as we were allowed to go, living on a busy street as we do).

And that is why I never learned how to ride a bike. When I got to college I thought it might be a useful skill since I could get to classes in less time, and I have a tendency to want to wait until the last second to leave Facebook and go to class. But our campus is very scary for bicyclists and even walkers - with so many loose bricks, I trip approximately three times a week. And my schedule is set up so that I have no quick walks anywhere (my only back-to-back classes are in adjacent rooms). And I still don't own a bike. So really, the only tangible effects that this experience has on my life are that now I have to be more inventive while playing Never Have I Ever and I will most likely force my children to learn how to ride bikes (...and teach them the motto never say never?).

changing of the guard

Today I started the process of packing for school, which inevitably leads to nostalgia and a very messy bed. Somehow I always find new things in my room, and this time was no exception: I discovered some old CD's that I had to add to my iTunes and some old chocolates I had to throw away because they tasted funny. I have to start packing way earlier than everyone else because I know that this is a project requiring at least seven full days, between making lists and looking at old notebooks and doing laundry and listening to exorbitant amounts of irrelevant music and wishing I had more time to read and thinking of all the shows I need to watch and debating the number of headbands that I really need at school and trying to predict whether I will want my boots and coats before Thanksgiving.

It is exhausting, but it is also one of my favorite things in the world, because it also means cleaning and getting rid of old things! I love going through all of my possessions and getting rid of some of them because I feel so much lighter afterwards. I get the fun part of reminiscing but then the awesome part of letting go, and it's great! I have always loved cleaning, probably psychologically because it gives me control of my surroundings. I like everything to have a home and I like everything to be in its home when it's not in use. If someone else's dishes are in the sink my natural instinct is to clean them and put them away and the fact that I'm doing it doesn't bother me, though I may be a little bit peeved that the other person thought it was appropriate to leave them to stink. I may be a somewhat slothful person when it comes to my sleeping habits and my lack of athletic interest, but nothing short of a disaster could keep me from putting away laundry or anything else that isn't in its usual resting place.

A few examples:

• When I was young, one day we all went to the dentist. Of course we brushed our teeth before getting in the car since you don't want to go to the dentist with lunch in your mouth. After my sister brushed her teeth, I brushed mine, and then I noticed that my teeth were not the only things in need of cleaning. My family all sat waiting in the van for me and eventually came up to find that I was scrubbing the toilet because it was filthy and needed to be cleaned right then before I forgot about it.
• It took me four different arrangements to get my Shakespeare plays in the proper order. At first I thought I wanted them alphabetical, and then in order of publication, and then by genre. Right now I am very happy with the way they are lined up - the order that I read the ones that I read and then in order of the urgency of my reading them as determined by my interest and their cultural importance. But once I've read them all maybe I'll want them arranged by color - just so long as there is some determinable reason for them being placed where they are on my shelf. Maybe I secretly fear that someone will accuse me of having no order.
• Last night, I brought my laundry upstairs having already folded it. But disaster got in the way - there were two houseflies buzzing around my closet and a few more in my bathroom. I don't know what interest they had in the rooms conjoined to my sleeping chamber, but I was very distraught and had my mom come up and deal with them (I had contemplated just not brushing my teeth but I felt that would be a bad decision). Finally, I was free to clean my teeth without fearing a fly getting in my toothpaste. But there was still one in my closet, and it being late at night (the fly extermination took a while), I decided that I was ok with my laundry waiting a couple of hours to be put away. When I woke up I was very distraught about the wrinkly nature of some of my dresses, but I considered it worth it.

One of the things that I found in my room this afternoon was my collection of calculator covers. Yes. That is correct. When I got my TI-83 Plus: Silver Edition graphing calculator, my dad also bestowed on me a choice of several different colors of translucent covers. I knew that I had these and I knew where they were, but I had completely forgotten about them over the past year, since my purple cover has become so natural-looking on my calculator. But now that we have a new school year and a lot of math coming my way, I figured it was time to change. I tried on blue, but it looked too normal. I like to pick the color that looks the weirdest and go with that one until I have become so used to it that all of the other colors look strange, like they're somebody else's calculator cover. At that point I can switch again. So now I'm going with black/gray. Although it's not very fun, I don't think I've ever used it so I feel sorry for its neglect. I think I'll be ready to switch it out over Thanksgiving break though.

coffee

Medina thought I should blog about coffee so I am, but lest you think that just anybody can boss me around I will state that I mulled about this topic for quite a while and decided that it would be a worthy post after last week's experiences.

Coffee. It is so addicting. But actually, if I grab coffee on Sunday after slash before slash during church I am guaranteeing that I will also order a coffee from the Grind on Monday afternoon, I will crave it on Tuesday and cave and consume espresso beans, I will drink it on a random Wednesday grind date, I will drink it on Thursday and I will crave it but be strong and resist on Friday because otherwise I won't be able to function without coffee on Saturday morning from Sadler which is decent but by no means a good decision.

I drink coffee not by the cup but by the week. Last week I drank coffee almost every morning (the one I didn't, I went for a sun run and then went to bed super early and got like 11 hours of sleep). If I start I just can't stop myself - it's actually a drug and I actually get withdrawal symptoms if I start and then suddenly stop. These are mostly in the forms of headaches and shaking hands but I imagine that I also become irritable (it's ok, I pass it off as sass).

Sometimes I refrain, thinking I'll be healthy and not addicted to caffeine (this is something I started to do when college started, along with my heroic efforts to go to bed at reasonable times which I think I have done a very admirable job at considering that my body always tells me to stay awake until the sun rises). But once I cave - for whatever reason, be it an upcoming exam that I need all night to study for (by which I mean until 2 because all-nighters for exams are just dumb), or an awkward time before church, or social pressure by meeting people at the Daily Grind - there is a long process during which I struggle to free myself from my subservience to the aromatic delicacy and general college student staple that is coffee.

I drink it with a lot of cream and sugar because growing up I was given a choice between black, bitter Dad-coffee and sweet, milky and slightly cold Mom-coffee. Obviously Mom-coffee won. Once I had to drink black coffee because there was no cream and it was really cold outside and I was volunteering on election day and I ended up drinking seven little styrofoam cups full and my hands shook so hard that I doubt, in retrospect, that I was fit to drive. So you could say that I am now scared of black coffee - but at the time I half-convinced myself that I could get used to drinking it like a man. Considering my inclination for excessively sweet foods (see Cadbury cream eggs, anything with marshmallows, all of my baked goods, real soda, and so on), the fact that I generally use two creamers and at least two packets of sugar should not be a surprise to anyone. This is probably extremely bad for me, so sometimes I'll just get an Italian roast and not add any sugar. Anyway, sometimes I like my coffee cold, but usually only if it was once warm and still has the tiniest bit of residual heat. Iced coffee just loses all of the coffee charm to me. A frappuccino or similar icy blended coffee is ok, but at that point I would just prefer straight-up chocolate because the real appeal of coffee is in its smell. Therefore I only drink iced coffee when I am in serious need of a coffee fix and yet the weather refuses to bend to my whims and cool down into fall already.

And I am very excited for fall because it means that I get to wear jeans again. As much as I love dresses...jeans are where it's at. Jeans and scarves and cardigans and coffee at an appropriate temperature - these are a few of the many, many things coming up so so soon. And it's ok for me to say fall is approaching because now it's August and so we're practically there, never mind the next month and a half.