Category: Sunday Night Conversations

Friday Links

Karen1 Comment

1. I haven’t posted a Sunday night conversation with my friend in a long time because we’ve gotten out of that Sunday night call habit and into a monthly dinner habit, and it’s just too hard to write all his sayings down in a restaurant. But we talked this week and he’s still a source of quotable quotes.

I was telling him about the Glacier trip and how nice it was to just sit on a rock at the edge of the river and not think, and he said,

“Oh I know the joy of escaping your worries and your own psyche…I should write a book about it.”

[pause]

“But it would be a short book, because I haven’t been able to do it, really.”

2. Maybe not the most scholarly, but this was an interesting piece about textiles in Viking culture.

3. Via Kottke, a deeply informative story about who’s actually using “food stamps” and what they buy. Being picky about what I eat, being able to cook decently healthy meals, being able to shop when I want–it’s a luxury.

Sunday Night Conversation

Karen

(Remember this series?)

I was talking to my best friend about a movie he’d seen, Tokyo Story, and he was raving about it. I must not have seemed properly enthused because he said,

“You can look it up. It got great ratings on DMV–you know, that movie place where people who have to air their likes and dislikes on the interent go.”

 

…and that is my new favorite description of IMDB.

Sunday Night Conversation: Italics Edition

Karen

There is no one like my best friend for Saligner-esque italics, except maybe Salinger. Case in point: him describing how the cleaners are getting his shirt collars pressed with folds and creases:

“It’s obviously done with careless abandon in some stupid machine.”

 

Conversations By Text

Karen

My technophobe best friend–he of the Sunday Night Conversations–recently got an iPhone and now has taken a pro-texting stance. That means we can check in with each other all the time now and I get gems like this:

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(To be fair, I was checking in with him after he went through dental implant surgery with just local anesthesia, not general. I think I’d be saying, “We’re all animals,” in that case, too.)

Sunday Night Conversations: Italics and Self-image

Karen

My best friend and I still talk every week, and he’s still a source of deeply quotable quotes. Last night’s call included meaningful italics and a nihilist’s approach to personal beauty. So a good week, really.

First, the italics:

Me: “Have I told you that I want tattoos? Sean, I want tattoos.”
Him, in the verbal expression of an eye roll: “Oh, great. That’s really great news, Karen.”

Later in the conversation I told him that I was thinking whatever “looks” I had were more due to youth than actual looks and that they were fading along with my youth:

Him: “Well, it’s regrettable that you’re older, but examine the options.”
Me:  “‘Examine the options‘?”
Him: “Well, yes. If you weren’t getting older, you’d be dead. That’s the inevitable alternative.”

Sunday Night Conversations

Karen1 Comment

Last night’s weekly call with my best friend was particularly quotable. We talked about me moving on (“you and the dead-horse-ex-beating thing…”) and he shared his feelings about a recent visit to Hot Topic:

“It’s like going with someone to the marshlands to look at frogs and tadpoles: it’s alien terrain where I have nothing at stake.”

Sunday Night Conversations

Karen1 Comment

My best friend is not the Outdoor Type, and because I’ve known him for 13 years he remembers when I wasn’t, either. So this was extra-hilarious to me:

Me: “I went up to Snowbird for yoga Saturday and near the top of the canyon I see something big climbing up the bank above the road and it has a bushy tan and gray tail and I realize it’s a coyote. I’ve never seen one in Utah before!”

Him: “Are you sure it wasn’t a raccoon?”

Me: “…”

Him: “I know you took your animal tracking class, but how can you be sure?”

 

Tuesday Night Conversation

Karen

My best friend was out of town on a buying trip so we missed our Sunday night call. Apparently he had to go register his vehicle after he landed yesterday afternoon, which led to this sentence:

“…and as I was walking into the DMV, I thought, ‘This is going to be irrevocably damaging to my psyche.'”

I’m definitely going to to start using that line.

Sunday Night Conversations, Part Whatever: The Zombie Apocalypse

Karen1 Comment
My best friend and I were discussing current events and the rash of gruesome “zombie-like” attacks fueled by the drug “bath salts” came up. And he said:

 “As a purveyor of beautiful bath salts, I have to think, ‘Is this something else for me to worry about?'”

I tried to explain that the drug in question was not made of actual bath salts and that people were using the term with quotation marks around it, and he came back with:

“Zombies are not scrupulous in their use of quotation marks, Karen.”

 And those are words to live by. 

Sunday Night Conversations: The Right Word

Karen

Here’s some advice about word choice, as given out by my best friend last night:

“I watched The Universe last night and they were describing things like the scale of our solar system and the speed of light. And that’s the time to use the word “awesome”–not when someone refills the ice in your water.”