sometimesmary

art (painting, papier machet, figurines, etc.), music (guitar), lit (fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry), and stuff (cooking, post cards, paper with good texture, letters, animal pens, bright colors, interior design, shoes, bags, more shoes, more bags, ethnic patterns, beads, bean bags, lanterns, boxes, wooden frames, candles, incense, pretty bottles, silver, wooden book stands, funky book ends, fire spinning, notebooks, journals, sushi, peppermint, African Lovebirds, Penguins, bright sun, gray afternoons, beaches, saying: "ice-shaken double-shot vanilla" and being understood, smell of books, paint and coffee, Edmund Fry, etc.)

new age, meditative, metal, rock, alternative, classical, indie, accoustic, etc. (Animal Collective, the Balanescu Quartet, Feist, Kronos Quartet, Stephane Pompougnac, Sufjan Stevens, Julie Doiron, Mirah, Dealership, Heather Nova, Cynthia Alexander, Dido, Philip Glass, Live, REM, DMB, PJ Harvey, Portishead, Carina Round, The Pixies, T-Rex, Nirvana, Frank Zappa, Ravi Shankar, etc.)

"Gardens in the Dunes"&"Almanac of the Dead" Leslie Marmon Silko, "One Writer's Beginnings" Welty, "The God of Small Things" Arundhati Roy, "Mrs. Dalloway" Virginia Woolf, "Ariel", "Colossus", "The Bell Jar" Sylvia Plath, "The Art of Fiction" David Lodge, "Sophie's World" Jostein Gaarder, "Life Before Man" Margaret Atwood, "Metamorphosis" Franz Kafka, "White Oleander" Janet Fitch, "Marya : A Life" Joyce Carol Oates, "The Making of a Poem" Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, "By the River Piedra, I Sat Down and Wept" Paolo Coelho, "The Golden Notebook" Doris Lessing, "Magnificent Spinster" Sarton, "A Passionate Patience" (edited by Ricardo M. de Ungria), "Poems and Parables" Abad, "White Iris" Louise Gluck, "Blue Iris: Poems and Essays" and "Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse" Mary Oliver, "Birthday Letters" & "Tales from Ovid" Ted Hughes, "Fear of Flying" & "Sappho's Leap" Erica Jong, "Leaves of Grass" Whitman, "Cien Sonetos de Amor" Neruda, etc

Big Fish, Schindler's List, The Piano, The Pianist, American Beauty, The Hours, Billy Elliot, Under the Tuscan Sun, My House In Umbria, Chocolat, In Good Company, Madagascar, Love Actually, Dead Poets Society, As Good As It Gets, Something's Got To Give, The Virgin Suicides, Happy Feet, etc.

Lonely Planet, Nigella Bites, The Naked Chef, Oliver's Twist, Forever Floyd, Myth Busters, The Most Extreme, Globe Trekker, Discovery Travel and Living, Forever Summer With Nigella, Planet Food, Incredible India, National Geographic, Seinfeld (now we still have re-runs), Frasier, Six Feet Under, Carnivale, etc.

Neurotic; a cross between a panda (poor eyesight and short attention span) and a penguin (temperamental, monogamous to a fault); loves to write; loves to read; loves to eat chocolates and smoke; has poor health; a hedonist; is likely to die soon, but, hey--carpe diem...