I do other things besides whine and navel-gaze, ya know

I do! And here are some of them for your reading enjoyment and edification.

Yes, Please!

I just finished listening to Amy Poehler’s audio book “Yes, Please” and liked it a lot. Tina Fey’s “Bossypants” set the standard and Amy’s work is compared to it a lot (as in “Well, it’s not Bossypants”) but each stands on its own merit. I liked both but for different reasons.

I found Tina to be fascinating but distant – like I was watching a movie about her on a screen in front of me. Amy felt like a best friend talking about her life. She felt closer and more intimate, especially when talking about her divorce from Will Arnette and a trip to Haiti with an amazing group of children’s aid workers. She is clearly passionate about improv and her roots (like Tina’s) are there so she shares much about what her life was like during that time. All in all, an enjoyable listen as she’s a WONDERFUL voice actress.

Breaking Bad

I remember watching the first episode a long time ago and it made me feel sad and chaotic so I turned it off. (I can generate that on my own, yo. Don’t need no television show whipping that shit up!) Still, it’s been lauded as one of the best shows of all time and I really like serial dramas so recently I gave it another shot and this time I was hooked. HOOKED! It is darkly funny (in the way Six Feet Under was) and spellbinding. Watching someone morph from a meek chemistry teacher to a drug kingpin in the space of a year thanks to a terminal cancer diagnosis is fascinating. And sad. And scary. I’m partial to Jesse, his former student who got caught in the maelstrom and watches his whole life flip around at the hands of Walter White. I’m on the last season with about eight episodes to go and am sad to see it end. The show is well deserving of all its Emmy awards.

I bought a keyboard!

I have wanted one for a while (the piano kind, not the computer kind) – what stopped me is Duty saying “you’re buying another thing that you’ll just let collect dust after you play with it for a few days” (I haz a sad because he’s often right about this.) Still, too bad! Every time I hear the opening chords to “I’d Die Without You” by PM Dawn, I long to be able to do that. So, I bit the bullet, decided to barrel right through Duty’s comments and get a keyboard. Woo hoo! It comes today.