Labor Day Weekend already???

I can't believe that it's Labor Day weekend already... where did the summer go??? I'm so bummed... summer is hands-down my favorite time of the year! Fall's nice too, but to me, it's just a reminder that winter is around the corner, and I... hate... winter. I really do. I hate being cold (I have a really low cold tolerance, seriously... it gets to the point where I'm physically nauseous sometimes from being cold), and I hate ice and snow and all the gray blah weather and the fact that it's dark by 5 p.m. I hate all of it. I leave my apartment as little as possible in the winter... work and the gym... that's it! My roommate jokes that I should move to California, and believe me, I've thought about it more than once!

Does anyone have any fun and exciting Labor Day weekend plans? I don't really, although I have a four-day weekend!!! Yay! I'm not really doing much of anything though. Tomorrow I'll probably hit the gym in the morning, and then I have to pick up my new reading glasses from the optometrist (they're so cute... I'll post a pic tomorrow!), and go to Wal-Mart, probably do laundry and read, and I might bake some banana muffins. We'll see! My sister is probably coming up this weekend for one more sisters' summer slumber party before she has to go back to school (not that we won't get together during the year, of course, but she'll be a lot busier with school and work and all that fun teenager stuff, haha) and we might go see The Rocker. On Sunday I have exciting plans to sit on the couch and watch the Season 2 marathon of Mad Men. And no plans on Monday! Maybe the gym for a small workout, and definitely reading and relaxing!

Speaking of reading, I finished Two Little Girls in Blue last night. I told you it would be an extremely fast read! Mary Higgins Clark's books are always fast reads and always a bit on the predictable side. I liked it. I pretty much figured out how the story was going to play out, so there were no surprises, but it was a decent book. So I picked a new book to read from the No Book Left Behind Box, and at first, I picked Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel. But I thumbed through it and decided not to read it- it just didn't really look like a book I'd be that into. So I picked again, and selected this!

Bitch, by Elizabeth Wurtzel (she also wrote Prozac Nation, which I've never read, but is supposed to be very good). I picked this up at the last used book sale I went to a few months ago. Here's a synopsis of the book from goodreads:

Elizabeth Wurtzel, an ex-rock critic for The New Yorker, won controversial fame with her bestselling 1994 memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, which described how Prozac saved the precocious Harvard grad from suicide. Her second book, Bitch is a celebration of the defiant, rock & roll spirit of self-destructive women through the ages: Delilah, Amy Fisher, Princess Di, and hundreds more (including the awesomely reckless Wurtzel). There is no comprehensible central line of argument, perhaps because the author did her exhaustive research and writing on a speedy Kerouacesque drug binge that, by her own admission, sent her to rehab upon the book's conclusion. But Wurtzel has the remains of a fine mind: her insights are often sharp, sometimes bitchy, and always shameless as she zooms in a very few pages from The Oresteia to O.J. to her first crush on a fictional character (Heathcliff) to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Richard Pryor, Chrissie Hynde, Leaving Las Vegas, Gone with the Wind, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Schindler's List, Oliver!, Carousel, and Andrea Dworkin. Most pop culture pundits incline to grandiose blather, but Wurtzel is punchy, and her quotes are more often apt than pretentious. Bitch is like a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in a library, with frequent rampages through the film and music archives. Like rock music, Wurtzel's prose style lives for the moment. She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11.

I love sociology books, and I love womens' studies, so this is right up my alley! I've already read about 30 pages. You can definitely tell it's an older book, because it's a little outdated- in the first 30 pages alone, it talks about Courtney Love, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt's breakup (I had completely forgotten they ever dated!), and Hillary Clinton in her pre-Senator days- but the key message of women and society will be the same. Here are some quotes from the book that have stuck with me so far:

*"I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself; that is, quite simply, the bitch philosophy, and it seems particularly refreshing in the face of all the contortions women are taught to put ourselves through."

*"In all likelihood, the only man who will ever like me just as I am will probably need to believe I'm somebody else at first."

*"What if you want to be large in a world that would have you be small, diminished?"

*"I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who run too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated, the ones who are so intriguing that new men fall in love with them every day."

I could go on and on just from the first few pages that I read. This is probably going to be a pretty empowering book. Go women!!!!

I tried something new for dinner: Vegetarian Sloppy Joe!

This was soooo good! I combined 1/2 package of Boca Ground Burger crumbles, 1 tablespoon relish, 1 tablespoon Trader Joe's BBQ sauce, and some chopped onion in a pan, then topped on a Matthew's All-Natural English muffin. Along with my latest obsession, steamed broccoli with melted reduced fat Colby Jack, and a side salad and pineapple... very tasty! This is definitely a repeat dish! Good thing I have more Boca crumbles in the freezer!!!

Okay, off to watch the last ep of Mad Men and then rel-ax!!!