A lot of the thoughts in my head are rooted in frustration. I’ve become so frustrated with so many things in the world right now, ranging from minutia at work to extistential thoughts about the direction of our society. I’ve bitched enough about work lately, so I’ll take on the larger end of that equation now.

Most everywhere I turn — and I say most because I do still see reminders of the good in people — but most everywhere I turn, people are yelling at each other, whether it’s literally yelling out loud and making argumentative comments online or just having negative thoughts or feelings.

Consider what I encountered over the course of a couple hours last week: hatred and bigotry spewed about Muslims and the mosque and Islamic cultural center to be built near ground zero; hatred and bigotry being spewed both by people who attended the Glenn Beck rally and toward people who attended it; snarky comments on blogs that offer posts that criticize or make fun of things or people; my neighbors who continue to bicker about a proposed mental health facility that may be built on the outskirts of our neighborhood and about the homeless shelter that already exists nearby; work colleagues who bicker about the best course of our company — I read about all of that in just one outing on the Internet last week.

It’s made me weary.

Is the hatred, arguing and negativity growing as our society progresses? Or is the negativity granted a greater voice thanks to the Internet and a 24/7 news cycle? Does it really matter one way or the other? Whether or not the negativity is growing, I worry about the kind of long-term effect it’s going to have on us.

I know that we’re capable of love and constructive conversations — even when we don’t agree on something. And I know I’m preaching to the choir here, because all of my readers and the writers of all the blogs I read regularly demonstrate their love and support. But is it possible to spread that kind of love and support that we experience on a micro level to society at large?

Here’s where I begin to feel helpless. I’d like to think that every little step I take in kindness will cause kindness to catch on elsewhere. But it seems like SUCH AN UPHILL BATTLE. It’s great when we treat each other in our blog community with kindness, but does it really ever spread beyond those borders? I’m often scared to practice kindness and acceptance outside my comfort zones because I fear being rebuffed and becoming further frustrated.

So what can we do that works? What can we as a blog community do outside of our blog communities? Outside of our ‘pay it forward’ memes and positive comments on our friends’ blogs? Outside of the comment sections on news stories that we agree with? Outside of our real-life friends who will listen to us and support us no matter what?

What can we do to make the negativity stop?

Danny & Annie from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

The hundred-year-old house that the Modern Love Machine and I bought a few months ago is blessed/cursed with dark-wood trim EVERYWHERE. Blessed because it’s beautiful, old and in great shape. Cursed because dark wood is a huge challenge when it comes to paint choices, furniture colors and lighting. It’s like a fussy old lady — you might want to dismiss it, but it’s loud enough you can’t ignore it. Sure, I could paint it white and make it easier to work with, but even though it’s our house I can’t bring myself to do it. It just seems, I don’t know, disrespectful to the house?

I won’t say every room in the house needed painting, but a few of the color choices were curious in that they were totally dismissive of this beautiful wood. Take, for instance, the room that’s become our home office.

The wood isn’t quite as orangey as it looks there (I couldn’t get around using overhead lighting for this shot), but it definitely has some orange undertones. The floors are even orange-ier. Orangyier? Orangier? Red is great and all, but being in this room made me itchy.

The MLM and I have had a hard time agreeing on paint colors. He likes BRIGHT colors, regardless of the house style. I like bright colors too, but they don’t all work in this house. Red is his favorite color. The room in question is my home office, therefore I won on this project.

So we moved everything into the living room.

And we primed.

And then we painted.

The color is Benjamin Moore’s Marina Grey,** and despite having every trick in the book to try to light this photo properly fail me, it’s gorgeous. A little bluer than I’d expected despite sampling it for a week, but I love it just the same. It’s soothing. It makes the wood trim sing. It works with the red couch. It allowed me to buy the World Market curtains I’d been lusting after for a while. And despite office = work, this room has become my favorite room in the house.

The room doesn’t have any crown molding along the ceiling. The intersection of the 100-year-old, nine-foot plaster walls and ceiling are incredibly uneven. Taping would have been futile. So would one of those edging devices. The only method I could figure out that would work was cutting in, ie. freestyling. Let me assure you, freestyling the top of a nine-foot wall is a BITCH.

I suppose it’s all worth it now that it’s just cool enough for me to throw open the windows and let the breeze do this to entertain me:

Or watch Pennypup do this:

**Read my thoughts on Benjamin Moore’s VOC-free Natura paint at The Greenists.

Meg, the proprietor of APW, posted this video clip about Proposition 8 the other day, and I think it’s very important to watch. Check your predisposed politics at the blog post door. The man being interviewed here is super-conservative attorney Ted Olson, who has argued a fair number of cases in front of the Supreme Court, perhaps most famously George W. Bush v. Al Gore over the results of the 2000 election. He later became Solicitor General under Bush.

Also worth noting is this interview is being aired on Fox, so you probably can assume how this is going to go, right? Well you’re wrong. Olson is one of the attorneys challenging the constitutionality of Prop 8 NOT defending it. His arguments against Prop 8 perhaps are not what you usually hear, either.

It’s a little long but it gets better as he picks up steam.

Here’s a column Olson wrote for Newsweek on the topic if you’re interested in reading more.

Ten years later, there we were together in one place — not all of us — but enough of us for it to feel weird. Not weird in the why-is-my-ex-boyfriend-eating-dinner-in-the-same-restaurant-as-me kind of way but in the why-are-these-people-singing-and-dancing-in-the-middle-of-a-bus,-oh-it’s-a-flash-mob kind of way. Here were all the people we knew in high school, but we were socializing in a very non-high-school grown up kind of way.

The reunion committee planned two specific outings for us — barbecue and beer at a bar on Friday night and a full-on cocktail event with band on Saturday night. Friday night only about a hundred people (out of a class of 500) showed up and it was mostly the people who had come from out of town. But they were people from all different corners of high school life — the jocks, the band geeks, the nerds, the in crowd (I use geeks and nerds with affection as I was one). And yet that night we transcended clicks. We had earnest conversations with each other about jobs and life and how we’d gotten where we were. Sure, I knew what most everyone was doing thanks to Facebook, but to hear them talk about those things I already knew was refreshing. To see that we could come together and forget whatever it was that might have kept us apart during school was amazing.

Many more people came to our Saturday night cocktail affair on Beale Street, and while people still greeted those that they may have only spoke a few words to in high school, everyone seemed to migrate back into their natural high school clicks. And that was OK too. It was understandable that everyone wanted to spend time catching up and having fun with the people who had their backs in high school — I know I didn’t get enough of my HS BFFs in two short days. To know that we could spend so much time apart and still find ways to laugh and enjoy ourselves with our old friends was comforting.

I never once felt anxious about the whole thing, and am here to reassure you younguns who might be grappling with the decision of whether to attend your reunion in the next year or two. From what I’ve read on other blogs and heard from friends older than I, my experience is not unique. If you’re anxious, know that there are people from all heights of the social ladder who feel the same way. If you’re worried about losing interest in the reunion after an hour, pressure an old classmate into going with you to be your safety net. If you feel like you don’t care about your old classmates, know that everyone changes and matures.

It’s really not about your old classmates anyway. It’s about recognizing how you and everyone else have grown and changed while still managing to maintain a sense of who you were as a kid. And it’s about celebrating that paradox and the reassuring feeling that comes from it.

A good friend of mine either heard from a mutual friend that I’ve been struggling or caught up on my life here at The MG or maybe just sensed my struggles, and on cue sent me an e-mail today that said, ‘I hope you know that your job doesn’t define your life. … Sometimes I lose track of that.’

He’s right, and though I do a pretty good job remember that, I lose track sometimes too. Or I just need to constantly remind myself of it to stay grounded.

In that spirit, I want to publicly remind myself what defines my life:

• My amazing family whom I love and who support me. They don’t care what my job is, only that I’m happy and taking care of myself.
• My equally amazing fiance, who is there to support me after every rough day and who has had to do a little more lately to take care of me but has done so without complaint.
• My also equally amazing friends, both in real life and in the blogoworld. You all listen to me whether the news is happy, sad or really not that interesting. Being allowed to vent helps.
• My adorable puppydogs who will smother me in kisses and bad breath at any time of the day or night.
• My faith. I don’t talk about it much here, but there are times that I would be completely lost without it.
• My goals of one day getting back to doing something I can enjoy. I’m working on them little by little, and it feels good to be excited about them.

And to an extent work is a part of the definition of my life, but I think what my friend meant was that work — and especially my struggles at work — do not solely define my life. I do good work most of the time. I mostly enjoy the people I work with. I usually enjoy the work that I do. An occasional mistake, an occasional difficult co-worker and occasionally disliking the work I do does not make up the sum of my life, even if it feels that way sometimes.

So here’s to the things that do define my life, including you Modern Friends. I can honestly say, just thinking about it makes me feel better already.

All of that is to say my 10-year high school reunion is this weekend, and even though I’ve been claiming for several years that Facebook makes reunions irrelevant I’ve still been planning for some time to go. I mean, I didn’t love or hate high school any more than the average student, but I’d still like to gloat about how awesome my life is reminisce and hug a few old friends.

I made this decision, of course, before I found it was taking place in August, one of my hell months at work. And before I found out that I’d have to work up until Friday morning before making the six-hour drive to Memphis and partying Friday night and Saturday night. And then get up early Sunday and make the six-hour return trip only to work that afternoon.

Have I mentioned I’ve been working 12-hour days pretty much six days a week lately?

I’ve noticed on the Facebook event page for the reunion that there are plenty of people NOT coming. And I get that, to an extent. I get that to the extent of living beyond a six hour drive from Memphis, having multiple kids to juggle, having to work, not being able to afford the tickets and not having anywhere to stay.

But I’ve noticed that there are plenty of people who still live in Memphis, don’t have any kids, don’t have to work and can afford the tickets who aren’t coming. And to those people, I say WHAT THE HELL?

I mean, if I can work a trip to see them into my craptastic schedule, the least they can do is SHOW UP, amiright?

Sheesh. The nerve.

BTW, I am proud to announce that I found a cocktail dress for the Saturday evening portion of the reunion for $25 at a local boutique. Looking good on the cheap, FTW!

*This post brought to you by sheer exhaustion.

I spent a week and a half working in NYC in February, and loved every minute of my free time there. I never really did a recap of that week, and I’m not going to now. I do want to share with you the places that I still daydream weekly about because I came to love them so much. That way if you ARE in NYC this weekend, you can visit them and I can live vicariously through you.

I’m conspicuously omitting some of the obvious places like Central Park and the Empire State Building. I’m going to presume you’ve heard of those. I also didn’t do much that required me to be outside for long periods of time because of the million feet of snow on the ground.

Things to See:

• MoMA: Sad day for you that the Tim Burton exhibit that was at MoMA when I was there is no longer, but there’s still plenty of cool and famous works to be seen there.
• High Line: A relatively new addition to NY, the High Line is a linear park (ie walking trail) built on a reclaimed elevated railroad line in Chelsea. It’s a weird little secretesque garden that offers fab views of the West Side and Hudson River.
• The NY Public Library: All libraries are awesome, but beautiful, huge libaries are something to be treasured.
• Times Square in the middle of a weekday night: When I say middle of the night, I’m talking like 2:30 a.m. (take a friend). You’ll be standing in the middle of what is usually the center of the universe when it is nearly deserted.** It’s weirdly spiritual and haunting at the same time. The absence of traffic is especially weird.
• Any NY hood. Just walk around and see how every neighborhood is different from the last. NY feels like no other place on Earth, so it’s best to soak it in.

Things to Eat:

• 202: This is a bistro located inside Nicole Farhi’s clothing and homegoods boutique at Chelsea Market. The brunch is amazing, and you can drool over the wares that will be way too expensive for you to purchase.
• Momofuku Milk: Y’all. I shed tears when I think about how much I crave a return visit to Momofuku Milk. It is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Ice cream treats and baked goodies in a way you’ve never thought of. GO HERE NOW. (I hear the other Momofuku restaurants are awesome as well).
• Gramercy Tavern: I allowed myself one huge food splurge. Gramercy Tavern was it and worth every penny. Everything from the service to the post-meal coffee was done perfectly. Sure, it ain’t cheap, but if you can splurge do it. Go for lunch when the offerings are cheaper and atmosphere less formal.
• Any noodle shop (because we have NOTHING in po-dunk Knoxville): You’ll see them everywhere. If you don’t, an Ollie’s Noodle Shop is a good standard.
• S’MAC: Holy mother of macaroni and cheese, this place offers gourmet flavors of mac and cheese. Don’t think about the calories. Focus on the amazingness of the menu.
• Any place that sells French Macarons: They were supposed to be the next big thing after cupcakes. I don’t think they’re catching on because they’re hard to make. I found a little ice cream shop in Chinatown that sold these little treats, and I was hooked, line and sinker.

Places to Shop:

• Chelsea Market: So many wonderful bodegas and restaurants all under one roof. Puts the Knoxville Market Square farmer’s market to shame (and we have a pretty good farmer’s market).
• Uniqlo. It’s Japan’s take on Old Navy or Gap or what not, and it’s the company’s only store in the U.S. Try to go on a weekday or you’ll be standing in line for a dressing room. But even if there is a line, these clothes are worth it when you see how cheap they are.
• Zabar’s: “The Upper West Side’s Gourmet Epicurean Emporium” one description says. If you like to cook or want to like to cook, wander through the aisles of Zabar’s for inspiration.
• The Strand: If you love books, you might want to take a half day to digest everything the Strand has to offer. They store claims it offers 18 miles of new and used books for the taking.

**At least, this was the case when it was 20 degrees outside. The summertime might be different.

Paul Rudd: Bat Mitzvah DJ from Jewish Forward on Vimeo.

Why oh why was this not MY Bat Mitzvah?

(The simple answer is because I wasn’t a 13-year-old Jewish girl in 1992. The more challenging answer is because life’s not fair.)

And for some reason, I can’t stop watching this: