the peculiarities of a southern christmas.

stella is up from ____________ and judging by the snark she left last night, would you be shocked and amazed to learn we done drank a whole lotta vino tinto? ouch, i say.


so while stella returned from ________ to x to celebrate xmas with her family, inga traveled from x to the south, to celebrate xmas with her family. and a southern christmas is indeed full of peculiarities, esp. for a girl who lives and breathes in x - who is used to snow, vowels that don't linger longer than necessary, and who learned about the civil war rather than the war of northern agression as a wee tot.

among the oddities of a southern christmas:

1. no snow, not even a slight chance of it.
2. the option of eating christmas dinner on the back porch overlooking the fourth fairway.
3. the possibility of seeing an alligator in the pond on the fourth fairway while feasting on christmas dinner on said back porch.
4. lots of christmas decorations on palmettos/palm trees.
5. the opportunity to frolick in tide pools and surf in the days leading up to christmas - and even getting a slight sunkissed look about the cheeks because, really, who packs sunblock for winter vacation unless it involves skiing?
6. the obsession with winter accessories in an area where people really don't need said accessories - every store had an abundance of wool coats, cable knit scarves and hats, thinsulate-lined gloves, heavy boots. on the upside, all of these items were marked down 50%, so score for inga on a fabulous new winter coat!
7. kids running around christmas eve dressed in short sleeves and bare legs.
8. people shopping last minute in flip flops - and not looking stupid or fearing catching colds for having exposed body parts.

yes, a southern christmas is peculiar.

even more peculiar? spending christmas day in airports! thanks to a difference of close to $200 dollars, i flew back to x on the 25. at my first airport stop, myrtle beach, i sat in the bar (yes, the bar - only one, but then again, this particular airport only has 5 gates) and drank a glass of super bad chardonnay. every one - okay, well, the four of us there - was in a good mood, esp. the bartender, as the bar would close up early. she discussed the famous people she'd met on the job - stedman, oprah's boy ("she's got him trained real well"), chris rock, jim mcmahon, and "the guy that done play hercules." there was also a discussion about montel williams and how he's handling his MS "real good."

but the most fun was at the charlotte, north carolina, airport. first of all, it's huge; well, okay, not o'hare or la guardia huge, but pretty big for a small airport. getting from terminal c to b is a bit of a hike. the middle of the airport is essentially a giant foodcourt, complete with piano bar and wooden rocking chairs. my favorite bar, of course, is the stock car cafe, complete with real, live, actual stock cars hanging upside down from the ceiling! sure, the house wine is crap, the cigarette smoke will knock you out, but c'mon - stock car cafe is second none to an actual nascar cafe. it's perfect for some people watching, esp. the guy who wandered in, obviously drawn by the cars, who literally walked the length of the bar four or five times, eyes continuously turned toward the ceiling, a look of, no shit, awe on his face as he contemplated the glory of all things stockcar/nascar. if only i'd had my camera. drat. for this man, trust me when i say, he had a very merry xmas indeed.

tomorrow? spain! viva la spain!

so good to be home...

stella is at inga's house posting to the snarkygirls. we are sinking zat we should meet up in person with the alcoholic drinks on the way to southern america wiss zee cK and lacosta. are zee cK and lacosta up for a march drinky drink? and my "march" we mean the third month of zee year.

on another note, it is nice to be home. yay for pajamas on zee couch wiss vine and vivian.

surely a sign of all that is to come.

countdown to spain? 10 days to go. and, on the cusp of the trip, alarming news: word on the street is that many companies are lobbying to (gasp) forego the daily siesta for fear of spain falling behind in the business world. no more siesta? no! i mean, seriously - this is one of the best things about spain, the forced napping. aside from the wine, the bread, the cheese, the shoes, and the boys (oh, the spanish amigos!), the forced napping is aces. i mean, can a day be better than this - lounging over cafe au lait, walking around town, stopping for more cafe, seeing some picassos and miros, more cafe, hitting a bar for vino tinto and tapas, having a cafe, participating in siesta, having more cafe, going to dinner at 9 or 10 in the evening, drinking a lot of vino tinto, finally going to bed, and getting up to start all over again?

what's the world coming to?

in fun news, while flipping through the rough guide's spanish phrasebook yesterday, i came across this handy tip.

"public toilets...[are] usually marked damas and caballeros, though you may see the more confusing senoritas (women) and senores (men)."

really? senorita and senores are more confusing than damas and caballeros? interesting.

a message for the suburban moms.

friday night oonagh and i ventured out to one of the suburbs and a snappy little wine bistro to see her brother and sister in law play. oonagh's brother and sister in law are cool, hip, beautiful kids from the city. they seriously are the most beautiful couple ever. and talented. they kick ass on stage. seriously. for example, they tend to wear form fitting clothes and gaze smokily at each other while they sing, creating sizzle like nobody's business. their music tends to be smokey and gritty; trust me when i say they kick the shit out of a johnny cash cover, and that isn't easy to do.

so, friday. oonagh and i show up. the last time oonagh showed up at this particular bistro for one of their shows, she imbibed a few too many cosmos and ended up going home with the band, her date left high and dry - this is how the beautiful couple's shows tend to go. but friday - perhaps because it was the first day of hanukkah? - was a bit of a quiet night. sure, the place was packed, but the crowd rather low key. there was a lot of wine drinking. a lot. particularily by the friends - the solidly middle-upper class white bred friends, most of whom are in their forties, the women sporting the suburban blond mom hairdo and expensive, unattractive sweater sets - of the chef/owner. for instance, at one point the chef's good friend kept getting up and asking to play harmonica with the band. ever the savvy band members, the beautiful couple smiled and encouraged it. why not? can't hurt. the first set finishes. we drink with the band during the break. the band gets back up, plays around with tuning up their instruments, begin the first notes of the next set.

and then...suburban mom, chardonnay sloshing in her glass, shouts out to the band - "play some christmas songs! we wanna sing along to some christmas carols!"

uhm. excuse me? the look on oonagh's sister in law's face was priceless - she looked momentarily like a deer in the proverbial headlights.

pardon me? she asked, her heels kicked off, a vodka tonic in her hand. she looked around at the band, all handsome boys in dark rimmed glasses and too small sweaters, part emo, part hot. she looked over at me and oonagh, who stared back, mouths open. christmas carols? christmas carols?

uh, we don't know any christmas carols, she says. there's a moment of stunned silence. drunk suburban mom looks confused. oonagh's brother refuses to make eye contact with anyone, for fear of the laughter than will follow.

no christmas carols? dejected, suburban mom almost looks like she might start crying.

no, no christmas songs.

but the bass player called out hopefully - happy hanukkah, y'all!

seriously. you ask an indie-rock band who has already demurred to the chef/owner's best friend's request to 'jam with the band' to play christmas carols?

this, ladies, is why the suburban moms should be allowed one - and only one - glass of chardonnay.

jezebel stella.

first she abandons us for what, 12 years? she buys a house, goes to florida. and then when she finally finds the time to come back to us to snark, she dare disses fabulous gwen? i mean, okay. i can admit that there's nothing like no doubt's album the singles - 1992-2003. and the writing on the album return of saturn is amazing - but girlfriend had just broken up with hot drummer boy tony! they were still working together and spending all their time together, so of course the writing was raw and wonderful. so maybe gwen's taken a turn toward the sunlight on this album. but, you know. she's happy. she's got a hottie husband and a cutie baby. give her some slack. in a year or two she'll have trauma in her life again, maybe, say gavin will have another love child appear?, and then we can get back to the bathwater and ex-girlfriend and simple kind of life. til then?

lay off the gwen, stella. those are fightin' words.

to ponder and research

i listened to the radio for the first time in a long while tonight on the drive home from the bookstore and heard the state of pop music today. it's sad. i know the love on this site for gwen stefani, but how dull must her life be today to have turned "spiderwebs" and "just a girl" into that yodelling song? have you listened to the lyrics? and immediately after that came fergie (a.k.a., croc lady) with "my humps." c'mon. i'm not even looking to serious singer-songwriter types as comparisons, but it seems that even the flaky pop of yesteryear had some notion that we had more important things to consider than "my lovely lady bumps."

i'm going to think on this. and look up pop song lyrics from the '80s and '90s for contrast with today's top-40 stuff. especially from the ladies.

feel free to assist or rebut.

sorry lacosta, but . . .

Florida sucked.

As Inga indicated covertly, I was in Orlando for a conference last week(end). It blew. Okay, so the weather was lovely, but what with it hovering around 70* in my back yard, it wasn't the temperate getaway it could've been for, say, Inga or our Yankee friends. And, okay, so the resort the conference was at was enormous and swank, but when you're sitting in a hide-a-wall-enclosed "room" listening to tips on using technology to track program assessment trends, the rest of the resort doesn't hold quite the sway it would otherwise do in Orlando in December.

On the suck-side, I got sick, my travelling companion broke her toe, the conference was totally unproductive, our flight home was cancelled, and we drove 70 miles home with a strange man-boy.

Yeah, so we arrived late Friday, and by Saturday morning, I'd been hit by the mucous-bus. Aches, pains, snot, the whole nine yards. Which, we know, makes for a pleasant conference experience. By Sunday, I was realizing the conference would be a bust for anything useful to take back to the classroom, and that morning the woman I'd come with broke her toe by kicking the hotel bed. In my sick and jealous haze, all I could think was that she had a solid excuse to skip sessions that day, but I spent the morning learning that we should organize our classes around a central theme!! to get students involved and grounded in the material. Rocket-fucking-science, y'all. Oh, and I learned that in the next five years, there will be a six-fold increase in the number of students seeking both undergrad and post-graduate degrees online. I can't wait for that flood of highly qualified schmoes to come applying for teaching jobs at brick-and-mortar universities!

By Monday, the sessions were so unbearable that I went to Epcot instead of the conference. Maybe if I'd have felt less shitty, or maybe if I were 8 or 65, or maybe if I hadn't actually been to Europe or Japan, the place would have been more fun. As it stands, I just can't see the draw of crappy reconstructions of famous locales, chosen for their affiliation with marketable animated films, and overpriced shitty food and "souveniers." Why not take the $3000+ you'll spend on a trip to Disney and instead take your family to a/the real Shambles in York or Eiffel Tower or 5-storied pagoda or ziggurats in Morocco or ruins in the Yukatan or fucking anywhere that isn't made of plaster and wire and ugly tourism?!

The worst part of the day came during lunch at a sushiya, where on my right at the counter sat an American family -- father, mother, and daughter. Mom and Pop were eating sushi and rolls; Sissy was eating a hoagie, since an adolescent girl couldn't possibly be expected to try an unfamiliar food. The waitstaff and hostesses at the restaurant didn't speak much English -- obviously Japanese imports meant to be as much part of the xenophilic experience as the sushi itself -- and the American family's waitress misunderstood their question when they asked whether their combination plate came with any more items. She thought they were asking to order more and brought them a menu. At this, they fumed. "Unbelievable." "She can't even speak English." "What are they doing around here." "This is ridiculous." I sat confused, and unlike myself, quiet. The woman left the restaurant on her cell phone expounding loudly that "They don't even speak English here. Go somewhere else." WHAT THE FUCK??!? You've gone someplace to experience the joys of gawking at the foreigners without putting yourself into the position of uncertainty and dis-ease of being the foreigner, yet you're still unwilling to even accommodate the barely limited (and astonishingly competent) language skills of your waitstaff? Blow me.

On a positive note, the couple to my left had a nine-year-old daughter, who ate salmon and tuna sashimi and tuna rolls (but turned down the octopus and yellowfin) happily and eagerly. That father sipped his miso soup straight from the bowl and had happy conversations with his daughter rather than ignoring her or talking down to her. They reassured me about the state of the human beings who become tourists.

THEN, our connecting flight was delayed, and the flight back to home was cancelled at the last minute, so we flew into a nearby city and planned to rent a car to get home. When we finally made it to _____, no rental cars were available. There was, however, a young man who had a reservation but couldn't afford the deposit required for him to actually get the car. We took his reservation, paid for the car, and took him with us back to _____. Nothing to wrap up a crap trip and a weekend full of coughing like an hour-long drive with a potential serial killer.

Oh, and there's a raccoon in the garage.

Prodigal SnarkyGirl

Stella is a bad snarker. She knows. She will make no excuses for her lapsed snarking time, nor will she expect Inga's forgiveness for leaving her alone for so long. All she can do now is try to do better.

Hello All ~ Stella's Snark is returned.

imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. after stalking.

rousing me from sleep this fair morning, npr's story of thames town in shanghai. the best thing about thames town? they've got their own winston churchill statue (the man in front of the tree in the midst of a faux English town square)! the worst thing? apparently most chinese cannot afford to actually live in thames town, thus putting a right good damper on the development's idea of helping to relieve overcrowding in shanghai proper. smart, developers, smart. there apparently is also an italian village in the works, complete with canals. think there's an american village, complete with overweight, video game playing slackers and internet access without restricted search engines and blocked sites?

old skool.

Yes, it's that time of the academic year: the end of the semester and final exams. This, of course, means, some good snark.

For example, I recently, as in just moments ago, received this email: "Inga, I know it's late in the semester, but am I going to pass the course?" This is from a student who has less than stellar attendance for class. So I emailed back that if said student checked our online class stuff, said student would see all his/her grades from the entire semester posted, save for the final project, and could figure out his/her current grade. Assuming, of course, said student is not also skipping math class on a regular basis.

The short answer, of course, is no, said student will not pass the class this semester. And late in the semester? Uhm, final grades are due in mere seconds! Seconds!

And then there's this guy, who is perhaps the dumbest instructor on earth. I can only imagine the kind of wine his students traded in and for what grades, especially since grades sold for between 200 & 2500...or for wine or some alchohol? So, what? 250 gets a D? 2500 an A? A bottle of Boone's Farm a D? A bottle of Rioja Contador Vinos de Benjamin Romeo, 2002, from Spain, at a mere $310 would be what, a C?

So poor Stella. We talked the other morning. It was approximately 3 degrees where Inga was, not counting the windchill. I could not feel my toes. They were numb, despite the wool socks and lined boots. I was huddled in my car with a cup of coffee, buying time, procrastinating getting out into the wind. Poor Stella sounded down.

What's wrong? I asked.
Oh, nothing, I'm packing.
Where are you going?
Well, Stella said, I have to go to a _____________ conference in _________ (insert sunny southern clime here)
Pause.
Where? I asked.
Stella repeated.
And you sound dejected why?
You don't know my boss. She's going, too.
But you're going to _______________. I can't feel my toes! The wind chill puts us in the negatives! My coffee is no longer steaming and I just got it!
Stella sighs. Life sucks.

So poor, poor Stella. In sunny _______________.

Stella sucks. Plus, she's a totally bad snarker.

stella's been feeling like this:

Okay, so between packing up, moving, being without Internet service for days, prepping for and taking the LSAT, painting, and unpacking a few boxes, I've been tired! In the next day or so, I promise to finish the horsemeat/stemcell post, and I'll get back into Snarkyland ASAP. For real.

For now, early to bed!

the snarkadays are upon us.

okay, so here's the dumbest thing i've seen in awhile. seriously? $220 for that? i mean, who would (a) buy it? and (b) wear it?

the most annoying holiday commercial thus far this season? that freaking hallmark card commercial with the mom and her two kids in an airport that's obvious been forced to close due to weather issues. flights are cancelled, the gate area is crowded with grumpy travellers, and the lights in the airport are apparently not working right, making reading impossible. and the cocktail bars in the terminal are apparently closed or out of liquor, thus crowding adults of the legal drinking age & above into the aforementioned crowed gate area. what would obviously make sober grown folks happy with glee and delight in the midst of travel interruption? an annoying ass mom popping open a package containing a toy that plays a grating holiday song over and over and over and over.

uhm, as someone who travels often? hell no. talk about opening up the opportunity to get yourself killed in front of your small children, thus ensuring their holiday nightmares til the day they die - not to mention a lot of expensive therapy.

crowded gate + cancelled flight + no bar in sight + hours upon hours of sitting does not = happy slappy time with a hallmark gift.

but hey! for the first time in like 100 years, the uni is closed today due to snow! and this is in a place where snow in winter is the norm, nothing unusual. score! til, you know, it's time to shovel the driveway.

who else is ready for stella to get back to her snark? excuses, excuses. what? moving into a house is time consuming and a pain? please. i really want stella to get back mostly because of a blog entry draft she has waiting in the queue entitled 'horsemeat and stemcells.' you know that's got to be good.