There are certain singers whose voices soothe me so much I immediately feel better. Karen Carpenter (it goes without saying)...Stevie Nicks (even when she's not always the best enunciator, she still sounds so wonderfully wise and weary)...Carole King (Tapestry is an album that definitely makes a rainy day better)...Tina Turner.

Tina Turner has always struck me as a classy lady and one who is at peace with herself. She once said her greatest beauty secret was being happy inside.

Her voice is so natural, her singing both exceptionally controlled and often very mellow ("Better Be Good To Me" is a favorite and shows off her range quite well), I just peace out. Plus...I don't why exactly, but I bet she'd be a really neat person to share a cup of tea with sometime.

Growl is definitely well-named. I have no business drinking this, but I didn't sleep last night and needed some caffeine. Little did I know just one of these little guys is worth four cups of regular coffee.

It depends on the individual, of course, but I would not recommend this drink. My anxiety, which can be off the charts anyway, is really high right now, my heart is beating extra hard and I feel more than my normal kooky. Plus, the taste (the one I got is called Sweet Vanilla) is on the yucky side (as if it didn't finish brewing and there are still coffee grounds in it.)

As the day went on, I only felt worse and I didn't like how extra-worried and hyper it made me. Well, "made me" isn't the best of choice of words since I'm, of course, responsible for my own behavior but I still felt so completely off that I did not like it all. I even felt a bit mean inside, like the "growl" stood for monstrous. Again, that's my fault, but I think it's best to avoid anything that doesn't agree with you. I don't want to be mean, I want to be nice and I don't think I was today.

So now I'm sipping Sleepy Time Celestial Seasons (it is so relaxing!) and hoping to be a better person tomorrow. I really need to switch all the way to tea.

Honestly, I have such mixed feelings about Flannery O'Connor.

On the one hand, the woman could write short stories unlike anything else around...and often about things she had no personal experience with...on the other, her feelings on gay people (though to be as fair as possible, I'll add that she felt any love not directly tied to God was "perverse") and civil rights (little as we know about those feelings) make me cringe a lot. (When a friend of hers spoke of being committed to the civil rights movement, O'Connor responded by telling her racist jokes.)

Her recently published A Prayer Journal shows a woman of devout faith, yet it is this kind of faith (that comes from a woman of such narrow, sanctimonious and often prejudiced views) that confuses me. How can someone who writes:

I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside. I am mediocre of spirit but there is hope. I am at least of the spirit and that means alive.

be the same woman who would react to a friend's news that way? Be someone so judgmental of others who do not share her beliefs?

I often feel so mixed up and torn with guilt inside when I find out a writer I once truly enjoyed is not whom I thought she (or he) was.

Of course, it's still easier and different with people you can easily put away (i.e. authors, musicians, actors or actresses) but what do you when people in your own life feel a way that appalls you? Then, it's not so easy to put down a book or turn off a song, especially if you like them before you learn of their views...

For more from Flannery O'Connor's A Prayer Journal, you can read here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/my-dear-god

from moviefanatic.com

Seeing L.T. Smith's newest novel released sooner than expected, I couldn't hit one click on Amazon fast enough. As I have with her previous novels, I got a bit giddy with how hilarious and deep down good Still Life is, both in style (the language is a character all its own) and story (a complex roller coaster of a ride, always pulling you in.)

No one gets the wonders of emotion and "does she or does she not like me?" like L.T. Smith does. And the vulnerability of her main characters is very touching and a huge bonus. They can also be adorable without being precious and their self-doubt rings so true it can be absolutely heart-breaking.

You want to quietly scream at Jess (the center of Still Life): "You're an idiot; can't you see she likes you?" Then you remember what it's like to think (even know) that you could never be liked back by that special someone...and, of course, there's the simple fact it's fiction (where chances are much higher unrequited love will turn out to be very much requited) and the reader is able to step back and see things differently than the characters do.

Besides the sweetness of it all, there's the uncomfortably relatable, where you feel like L.T. Smith knows exactly how you feel and you know immediately she just gets it, gets that horrible and beautiful jumbled mess of liking someone a lot:

"I wanted to not feel the way I did, wanted to not like Diana Sullivan as much as I did. I really wanted to hate her, even just dislike her intensely, but it wouldn't come....I felt as if I should fill the void, but I couldn't drag anything from the depths to help me out. I was nervous, apprehensive, expectant, yet not. The silence seemed to drag and drag, and I was as useful as a chocolate teapot. I wanted to blurt out that I liked her--just so she'd know. No strings."

"No strings." That part is my favorite. If only you could tell someone how you really feel, just say it once (and quickly), then that would be it. No strings, not a single one, would be attached.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Still Life, though I would have loved the opportunity to have a geeky bookworm type (coke bottle glasses and all) be the object of someone's love and lust. There's a rather comedic moment in the beginning of Still Life when Jess Taylor thinks the voice that enchants her from the other side of the room belongs to a woman who looks exactly like Professor Sybil Trelawney from the Harry Potter movies.

Because of my own hang-ups about how looks are portrayed in books, film and even pop music, I actually felt a flicker of hope that finally a character in a romance novel is non-traditionally attractive and might actually have physical character to her face. Not only does she turn out to not be the woman with the wonderful voice, Jess is relieved to discover the voice belongs to Diana Sullivan, whom she refers to as "gorgeous" several times throughout the book.

But Diana, thanks to a writer who always sees beneath the surface of things, turns out to be far more than a pretty face and the reader gets a funny and delightfully endearing love story full of see-sawing emotions that give it a painful and poignant rawness. L.T. Smith's characters have a philosophy of love (*see below) that makes one sigh extra hard, which is absolutely everything you could want until you have to return to reality after finishing the last page.

*"If I had to choose between the erotically charged encounter we had shared the previous evening and the one I was now experiencing curled up on the chest of the woman I was falling for, I would have been hard pushed. Cuddling was delicious intoxicating, but in the most ethereal way imaginable. I believed I had waited all my life to experience that feeling. I was home. This being together was home. She was home. My home."

Love is not a competition. Honestly, it's not. Even, when I started middle school and began realizing a little more as each year went on that I was as bad at pairing off as I was at being picked for teams in gym class, I didn't think of love (or the kids' version of it anyway) as something some people were better at than others. 

By high school I had begun to understand why it didn't bother me so much that boys didn't seek me out for dates. I even began to think of my non-popularity, my ability to both stand out as a geek and disappear into thin air as a non-datable, as the perfect cover.

No one would wonder why I didn't go out with boys because it was so perfectly obvious...the shy bookworm with big hair and out-of-fashion clothes would of course be home on Friday and Saturday nights reading her brains out while Chopin played on the stereo. Even my own parents wouldn't think to question why I wasn't interested in a social life. My sister had one big enough for the both of us.

As I grew older and college became so much more socially comfortable and likable than any previous levels of my education, there were different reasons for my not dating. I wanted to, for the first time in my life, but I had to pretend to myself I didn't.

Coming out where I went to college was most certainly not an option, especially not a safe one and most definitely not in the late 80s, and the only girl I really liked, a wildly eccentric and kind girl who had a thing for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, juggling and setting Walt Whitman to music, mostly just patted me on the head and called me "sweet." She would go on, as a straight woman, to champion gay causes years down the road, but at that time I had no clue if I would lose her friendship or not by confiding I had a crush on her.

I cherished our discussions after English class two days a week and then spent the rest of my time trying my best to like boys anyway. I met a guy who liked Roger Whittaker albums and bow ties. He was nice enough and I found his steps out of time charming, but my heart wasn't in it. When he started going out with my friend the next month, it didn't hurt at all. I went back to being the girl with the big hair and crazy clothes and read in my dorm all weekend long.

For all of my twenties I would try and make myself like the men who occasionally asked me out on dates. I did it to please my parents and to put forth one last ditch effort (again and again) to be as normal as possible. I wanted normalcy and my parents' love more than what my heart really wanted: a deep and meaningful relationship with someone kind and smart and passionate about books and music, who just happened to also be a girl.

Sometimes it feels like things come full circle...in my late 30s I couldn't stand faking my way through my personal life so I went to a singles group for gay women and when that didn't work tried the personals. It was like middle school again, only this time I did care I was un-datable and that things like "the third date rule" were deal-breakers and statements like "What do you mean you're old-fashioned? Lesbian can't be conservative and religious" abounded right and left. I would rather be alone than give in to some skewed dating 101 philosophy I didn't believe in.

Once again, minus the big hair and crazy clothes, I find myself home on weekend nights reading books and listening to music. And as before I don't really mind at all...because they might not be everyone's definition of love, but for me, right now at least, books and music are...because love isn't a competition, it's about finding what makes you happy, even if it isn't always a person.