Most people check off list items. I scritch them. At the grocery store, when I’ve got a dozen things on my list – bananas, strawberries, carrots, celery, cereal, milk, chicken, hamburger, cottage cheese, colby jack, some ice cream and some tortillas – I can’t always keep straight what I’ve already picked up and what I have yet to get. You wouldn’t think it so hard with merely a dozen grocery items, but they’re none of them written in order. I usually write them as I think of them, so the bananas and carrots will come first, followed by hamburger and colby jack with the celery up next… see? No semblance of sense whatsoever. But I try to walk through the grocery aisles as efficiently as possible… which means I don’t pick up groceries in the order they’re listed. So I scritch them out. It’s easier to scritch, you see, because it requires the manual dexterity of an ape. My dexterity diminishes greatly when I’m walking, pushing a shopping cart and trying to manage my purse, all at t

Is it an oxymoron to have completed a Bachelor’s degree without the aid of any all-nighters? There I was, a 4.0 student, walking across the stage of my college’s beautiful chapel (seating 3,000, every one of them filled with sentimental families). Even had the little braids to prove my academic excellence. But I had missed one proud badge of college success: The all-nighter. One of my relatives – Mom, maybe? – said she pulled at least one all-nighter in college to write papers. One of my good friends, another honors student double-majoring in English and history, regularly wrote papers on as little as 3 hours of sleep. I’m nearly certain my college roommate pulled an all-nighter or two while I slumbered. Me, I can remember two nights in my life when I got less than five hours of sleep. Until the evening of the glorious Perseid meteor shower. I kidnapped one of the gals from church and we hightailed it on down to my cousins’ house. My cousins, as you might recall, live on a farm w

Random updates on my life: I’ve finally gotten back into reading. I think I finished no fewer than three books in the last week and have started a fourth. Aren’t you proud of me? The books I’ve finished are Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (as you already knew), Revelations of a Single Woman by Connally Gilliam, and Unfashionable by Tullian Tchividjian. I would recommend them all to different audiences. P&P&Z needs to be read by fun-loving P&P philes. Revelations is a great read for post-college, pre-dating gals like me. And Unfashionable ? Cool for young thinking Christians. The fourth book I’m reading is Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church by D. A. Carson. It’s one of the few books I actually bought without having read it beforehand, and I’m already glad I did. There are so many things I can identify with in the emergent movement, yet I know that I’m not satisfied with their solutions, so I’m anxious to finish it. I’ll probably be reading that later on ton

If you haven’t already guessed by the post title, I finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies this morning. Wow, that made me laugh so much. And I took probably half a dozen double takes when a well-loved (and well-remembered) quote got changed up to fit with the zombie gag: “A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages; she must be well trained in the fighting styles of the Kyoto masters and the modern tactics and weaponry of Europe. And besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions…” See? Spliced in there, brazenly, without the second author batting an eye. I picture him sitting there at his laptop keyboard, gleefully thinking up how many silly zombie references he can cram into the narrative without obliterating the original story entirely. All in all, it was a hilarious book. I did not read it as serious literature, and I