Melissa Runs

Sometimes, Melissa runs her legs. Sometimes, she runs her mouth.

Author: melissa (Page 15 of 40)

because I’m bored.

September 17, 2010 / / 0 Comments

This is the Radcliffe 100 best novels list. I’m curious as to how many of these I read.

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
41. Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E.M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand okay I read 3/4 of it and wanted to poke my eyes out so that’s as done with this book as I am going to get.
93. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Summer book loving

August 10, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Apparently everybody and their Mama (well Boots and Savannah) have been putting “books I read this summer” posts and I figured that I am a good little Leming. Here are my books. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I have to admit I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in April but since the third one came out at the beginning of the summer, I will address all of them in one big Lump. Yes, it’s a mystery/thriller which means there is a lot of gory crime. I have to confess that my experience with the criminal justice system has left me a little warped regarding crime. i.e. I’m a lot more unfazed by it than a lot of people. But yes Virginia, there are some gory, creepy violence against women scenes in this book. It starts with a reporter (Mikael Blomkvist) going to jail for libel and an autistic petite computer hacker goth girl (Lisabeth Salander). Somehow they get together to solve this mystery about girl who came up missing. It’s Swedish. There’s lots of real life places and things in it. It’s riveting. ******

***************

The Second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire (Vintage), takes up where the second book ends. This one goes into Salander’s background and we find out how she ended up where she was at the beginning of the first book. We find out who and where her mother and father are. We find out why she is in foster care in the first place. We also find out that she has siblings. It’s all kinds of crazy and riveting.

*************

**********

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest shows where the issues regarding Salander are resolved in an over the top mystery thriller fashion but resolved just the same.

Yes, the books violent. All of the books are violent and people are raping, torturing, and killing other people in all three books. While certain characters have feminist aspects to them, I’m not sure I would call the books themselves feminist. Blomkvist seems to respect women and isn’t threatened by their success or intelligence. At the same time, he sleeps with most of them in the book. While Salander is smart in a typical male field (computer hacking), she also feels insecure about her body and gets breasts implants. While they’re not War and Peace, they’re not nearly as daft as the Twilight series either. I thought there were fascinating and loved them. But I love books like this anyway.

I ended up this summer reading the first three books in the Sookie Stackhouse series: Dead Until Dark , Living Dead in Dallas, and Club Dead . These are the books of which the HBO TV show “TRUE BLOOD” are based. Frankly, I can’t believe someone based a television series off of these books. I can’t believe the author has managed to write ten books based on these characters. The books are merely okay and the first one is pretty gosh darn bad. If I hadn’t heard from multiple sources that they get better, I would have stopped after the first one. I think the author uses the vampire, werewolf, and other mystical creatures as a crutch to avoid character development. Or something. Oh and the descriptions of the clothes bother me. Make the girl fugly why don’t you? ugh. They are mindless and they are entertaining enough that I finished them.

Click: The Magic of Instant Connections is a nonfiction. This book caught my eye because I met a person and it was the stereotypical, “It was like I had known Bucky Chucky my whole life.” It freaked my shit out, actually. I remembered some of the phenomena listed in my social psychology classes from college. The book itself, however, is written in a much less academic style— similar to Blink by Gladwell.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within I like writing and someone recommended this book to me. It was actually recommended by a journaler but the author herself is a poet. It has a lot of writing exercises designed to loosen up and let your writing flow. Some people even call it their “writing practice.” It was a very touchy feely new age type of aesthetic so unless you are into that sort of thing, you might not like it.

Grave Secret This was written by the same author that wrote the Sookie Stackhouse books but I liked it a lot better. I liked the characters better. I liked the plot better. It’s about a twenty something woman whose parents were drug addicts. She got hit by lightning as a teenager and now she can “read the bones of the dead.” This means when she walks across a grave, she will know who the person buried below is and how they died and a myriad of other facts related to the person. Of course, there is a plot of a mysterious death that causes an uproar and shenanigans including two attempts at shooting the “dead reader” herself. Oh and she’s in love and has a relationship with her stepbrother. KINKY MS. HARRIS. KINKY!

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (P.S.) I found this in the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble and took it for a spin. This is the memoir of a woman from the age of 10 to her 30s. Over the years, she becomes bulimic and then her behavior over time slides over into anorexia. Then she relapses on the bulimia. LAther, Rinse, repeat. She talks about her parent’s crazy relationship growing up and all sorts of other possible causes for her condition but it’s more of a stark, no excuses, reminiscing of her sordid past. It was so sordid and scarring that in the afterword, the author mentioned that she relapsed back into anorexia after writing the book. Yeah it’s a downer.

StrengthsFinder 2.0: From the Author of the Bestseller Wellbeing This is mainly a career type book. You buy it to get access to this online personality quiz and then use the book to examine the results. It was helpful but NOT THAT HELPFUL! So there. boo yaa

Day 2: Listy fresh, slacker stale: More things about me than you ever wanted to know, an introduction

August 8, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Day two of the 31 Day Blog challenge said “Make a list post” Well I do list quite a bit. Of course, considering that it’s two in the morning, I am cheating and redoing my “about me” with this list. So yeah. cheating

Oh yeah I also agreed to do this flashback thing. Yeah It’s already August 5th. Yeah I should be writing SOMETHING every day. Yeah I should be on day 5 by my own …

No wouldas, couldas, shouldas. I’m writing now.

So this is the “about me” list. Or something. It’s more of an outline.. err.. something. Or Multiple Lists. yeah yeah. Complete with some flashbacks. How about that!!! I am multi-talented. Okay, I’m full of crap, but let’s go with it.

Oh and I think the official Secret in the Sauce Blogger challenge is on day 25 or something like that. But I’m going the distance. I’m
Oh wait. here we go. Let’s call the an introduction. YEAH.

  1. I am a female
  2. I am thirty something
  3. My name really is Melissa
  4. My friend Jennifer from college used to call me “merlisserrrrr” and sometimes I have taken that as an “internet name”
  5. I’m tall
  6. I am fat but I used to be thin and I am determined to be thin again. Or well thinner than I am now
  7. I stress eat sugary stuff. I’m thinking if I can conquer that I should be thinner than I am now even if I am seriously wondering about my metabolism.
  8. I like running. I even like running now with me being all fat and junk.
  9. I like yoga, too
  10. my favorite color is purple.
  11. I like both cats and dogs. I can’t really say which I like more because they both have their charms.
  12. I have completed two half marathons.
  13. I’m a native Arkansan.
  14. I lived in Washington DC for 5 1/2. Not the area but the actual District of Columbia.
  15. I once went to Kenya to help build a school.
  16. I really really really really want to go back to Africa.
  17. I also really want to finish a marathon before I die.
  18. I like lists. In fact, I have a rather long extensive bucket list.
  19. I started going gray very early in life and had a noticeable gray streak by the age of 34.
  20. My grandfather was one of 14 kids.
  21. My father was one of six kids. They’re all opinionated as hell. Oh the family fueds.
  22. My Mom’s mom grows cotton. Or rather rents out her land so others can grow cotton and soybeans. Sometimes they grow corn on it. She hates that.
  23. The highlight of 2010 so far is seeing Conan O’Brien and hanging out with my friend Tiffany, who let me crash at her house since i don’t live in Tulsa.
  24. The low point of 2010 so far is when my dear friend Angela, whom I’ve known since Kindergarten, died.
  25. I’m an attorney
  26. I’m a solo practitioner, which means I have my own office.
  27. I like that alright. I am not too keen on the small town I am living in right now.
  28. I am looking for a new opportunity (job…etc. right now)
  29. I have one much larger yet younger brother
  30. As a kid, I played piano and did so well I went to college with a piano scholarship
  31. I put on my own recital my senior year of high school. I played five different songs from the five major “musical eras” all by memory.
  32. Let’s pad this list, shall we? The songs were (1) Prelude and Fugue No. 2 by J.S. Bach from his Well Tempered Clavier (2) Sonata Op. 27 No. 2 (“Moonlight” sonata) by Ludwig van Beethoven (3)Impromptu in A flat Op. 29 by Frederique Chopin (4)La Fille aux Deveux de Lin by Claude Debussy and (5) Second dance from ” Tres danzas argentinas” by Alberto Ginastera
  33. I’m single
  34. I’m an abysmal failure when it comes to Romantic relationships
  35. I like to read
  36. Three of my favorite books are “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabakov; “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner; and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by John Berendt
  37. I like to watch movies
  38. Three of my favorite movies are Splendor in the Grass, Bring It On, and Pan’s Labrynth
  39. I choose Diet Dr. Pepper over Pepsi or Coke
  40. I drink so much Diet Dr. Pepper that I predict I will die from whatever health complications result from drinking too much Diet Dr. Pepper
  41. My favorite bookstore is Kramerbooks in Washington DC
  42. I love Indian food so much that if it were a man, I’d marry him without a prenup. (that’s love y’all)
  43. I do not cook very well. More likely than not, I will burn something. I’m great at burning food.
  44. I am currently listening to “Caramel” by Suzanne Vega
  45. The last book I read was Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (P.S.)
  46. I spent the summer of 2000 in New York. It was an experience of a lifetime.
  47. Those car decals that depict “Calvin” from Calvin and Hobbes peeing something really annoy the crap out of me. I will think less of you if you have one.
  48. Also, I hate “GIT R DONE” HATE IT!
  49. I attended President Clinton’s second Inauguration
  50. I’ve seen Aretha Franklin perform Live (DO THIS!!!)
  51. The day of my first law school exam, someone burglarized my apartment.
  52. I’m a crime magnet, apparently.
  53. Car stolen!
  54. Car broken into!
  55. Car hit by a drunk driver! (okay sideswiped)
  56. Dog not on a leash killed my cat attempting to eat it. (bad Rottweiller)
  57. Sexual assault (okay that one is not nearly as amusing)
  58. Some would say that is all karma for working in criminal defense
  59. I like cheese. A LOT!
  60. I also like chicken mole
  61. I think Veronica Mars should have never been cancelled.
  62. I think the Sookie Stackhouse books are overrated.
  63. Sometimes I think I am the posterchild for this article.
  64. I love playing games — like Scrabble and that Mafia Wars game on facebook
  65. By the way, Facebook has kept me sane living in the crazy small town
  66. I first discovered people writing about themselves online via Pamela Ribon when she had an online journal called Squishy
  67. I was a psychology major in college. Well I started out a music major.
  68. I was either going to be a criminal profiler or a jury consultant.
  69. I ended up just being a lawyer instead.
  70. I’m a twitter fiend. I love that stupid little thing. I’ve met some great people on there too.
  71. And I’m now tired of doing this list so I’m going to quit.

Ah a new challenge

July 31, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I was surfing around on the net and found the SITS girls and thought I would look around. They are doing the 31 day ProBlogger challenge. (oh wait, the actual link to the 31 day ProBlogger Challenge is here) I thought I would play along.

Day One: Write an elevator pitch.

An elevator pitch is supposed to help others understand the blog as well as “draw them in.” Eh, I’m not sure I care if people read or not. Okay I care a little bit or I’d be doing this in a moleskin book. then again I do have friends in a lot of places.

Okay here we go.

I’m a thirty-something single lawyer, runner, food and animal lover with a penchant for self improvement as well as running her mouth as well as her legs and this blog is where I leave my notes.

The only problem with that is that even though I’m a lawyer, I rarely, if ever, write about the law on here. There are attorney client privilege concerns and there are also concerns that someone will find my post via google and by the time he or she finds it, it will no longer be good law. That bothers me.

But a person’s job does give a hint as to a person’s soul. It shows an interest. It implies a certain level of intellectualism and intelligence. (okay now I’m expecting flames of antecdotes of the “idiot lawyer” that you or YOU may know).

Hrm…. but I missed the point where I like to read books and watch fancy pants and trashy movies. Or that I have perfectionism streak which leads to angst and insecurity.

One woman’s outlet to prevent killing and maiming the world at large. Hee. that makes me sound absofuckinglutely nuts. It’s dangerous. people will wonder if I will find their physical address via their IP address and hack them to bits.

Okay probably not.

Gosh this is hard.

“This blog is like a bulletin board where I put all thoughts on it like post-it notes”

heh. yeah but it’s close to another blog’s tagline.

A thirty something attorney with a wide variety of interests who likes to run her legs as well as her mouth.

Eh that’s going to be it.

Well I run my mouth as well as my legs. There you go.

Wordless Wednesday

July 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

NAACP

My NAACP membership card

ripples

July 22, 2010 / / 0 Comments

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

I’ve been through some bad shit in my life. The kind of shit that causes me to wake up in the middle of the night screaming, drenched in sweat. After the shit, I have been absolutely positively unable to have more than two alcoholic drinks in a public place at one time. I am vigilant about locking my doors and when I lived alone, I would lock the door to my bedroom as well as the outside door.

Sometimes its’ really bad but I am able to work, I went to law school, and have done some pretty awesome things so for all practical purposes, I haven’t let it control my life but there are some marks. My grades could have been higher or I could have… well… that is pointless really.

So when I read this letter from the advice column “Dear Sugar,” I cried like a girl.

You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.

It was a letter from a woman who miscarried her baby. It was a girl. It’s a year since it happened and she is still not over it. Sometimes, I wonder if I have ran far enough. Sometimes I wonder if I have healed enough or if I am at a point of “better.” It’s been real hard to admit that a little pain over “the shit” is still going to be there. I have the psychological equivalent of a bad knee. Sometimes it’s just going to hurt and that’s the way it is. Sometimes I wonder if that attitude is just me giving up. Sometimes I’m just tired of it being there like a monkey on my back. Sometimes I just want to stab my brain with a butter knife and hope I hit it.

For many years, I ignored “the shit” and went all bad ass with the “I’m not going to let this affect my life.” That worked for a while but like running on a sprained ankle, eventually it just gives out. And that’s what happened to me. One day, it was like the pain had just built up over time and then by the time, I just couldn’t take it anymore, it had become this big insurmountable thing that was smothering me.

So I have cried and screamed and begged and pleaded with God, Buddha, the devil, and any other deity, god, or goddess that I thought would listen. I wrote in my journal and talked to a therapist. Over time, it goes less and less. I guess it’s doable now but I can still have someone say something or read a blog post and be taken back in time. When this happens, I end up spending a night crying in my bed until exhaustion takes over.

So reading that post reminded me of how far I’ve come and how far I have to go. Oh and I cried like a baby.

Weekend

July 20, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Do you know what lawyers love to talk about when they go on a retreat?

Restaurants, video games, and trashy TV.

the shack

July 19, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Shed and flowers

Coloring all over the place

July 14, 2010 / / 1 Comment

A while back, a couple of my Little Rock twitter friends wrote about race after reading a startling statistic about Arkansas. I wasn’t as surprised as I should have been. See, in what will be the ultimate cliche of all time, my friend who died a couple of months ago, Angela, was black.

october2007 034

There’s a picture of her at her daughter Alexis’s birthday in 2007. Crap, I can’t believe that was almost three years ago. Even more crap, I can’t believe my friend is dead. Well I’ve known . . . knew Angela since we were in kindergarten and we became good friends in high school. That’s a lot of years.

She wasn’t my only ethnic minority friend. I’m not even sure how many I have. I have enough that I would have to think about it to actually give a number. My first boyfriend’s parents came here from India and he was first generation. I’m not quite sure how I got to be so comfortable around different races other than to say that my single Aunt had a Laverne and Shirley type roommate situation with this black lady named Debra when I was growing up. Actually Debra is back at my Aunt’s house but apparently sometime during the late 80s, early 90s, Debra got married and moved out. Maybe I’m just easy going. I don’t know. I know for high school purposes most of the other white kids in my smart kid classes were also members of the country club and that added an interesting little twist to the whole small town social seven circles of hell known as high school cliques.

I do know that racism is alive and well. I saw what happened to my friend when she was in the running to be valedictorian. It was ugly and obvious. Ethnic students are given lower grades by white teachers, even if it is the exact same paper as the experiment in the link did. That study has been replicated so many times. I’ve heard all of the statistics about black people going to jail more than whites.

I’ve also seen what it does to individual people. I’ve seen the unfairness. I’ve seen how it slowly sinks in and how some people become bitter. some people become sad and yet others just quit trying altogether.

I don’t quite understand it. It’s something that should be so easy and yet it seems so hard. If you don’t know somebody, you don’t know somebody and assuming things about someone you don’t know is stupid. Why be mean to people you don’t know? Why go around assuming someone is lazy or stupid or anything because of their appearance? Putting other people down as a means to feel better about yourself is desperate and sad.

I wish I had some deep meaning prose that would inspire but I don’t. Others have done it better in other venues. People just want to be liked and appreciated. They want to be loved for who they are deep down underneath all the bullshit.

G20 protest shenanigans.

July 10, 2010 / / 1 Comment

You’re sexy
you’re Cute
take off your riot suit.

Now that’s a way to protest.

« Older posts Newer posts »
Sometimes Melissa runs her legs. Sometimes, Melissa runs her mouth.

”"

© 2024 Melissa Runs

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑

WordPress Web Hosting