Shallow Materialism at Its Funniest

I stumbled across Mindy Kaling’s blog, Things I Bought That I Love, about a year and a half ago.  At the time, I thought she was just an L.A.-based fashionista with a clever wit disguised as the ravings of a valley girl.  As it turns out, Mindy Kaling is a co-producer and writer of The Office (maybe you’ve heard of it?) and plays Kelly Kapoor on the show.  

After reading a few posts on her blog, I was hooked.  How did she turn a blog that’s supposedly about her favorite recent purchases into a hilarious commentary on life as a single woman in Los Angeles?  I immediately wanted to be her best friend.  Dude, this girl went to Dartmouth…she’s totally smart and funny and has the cutest fashion sense and she’s a bit of a foodie (like me!) AND she wrote the episode of The Office where Michael burns his foot on a George Foreman grill!  Come ON!  I feel so inferior.

Anyway, Mindy has not posted anything new on TIBTIL since April, which totally sucks and I’ve pretty much given up hope that she has even remembered that she has a blog…I’m sure she has better things to do, like write episodes for Emmy-award winning TV shows that everyone talks about the next day at work.  But today I went to her blog to look up a certain post, and I ended up getting lost there for a while, even laughing out loud (like, really loud) a few times.

So, even though I can’t promise there will ever again be any new content, if you like The Office, or funny writing, or pretty things, go to Things I Bought That I Love and wander through her archives for a while.

*Bonus* Here’s a link to a great article she wrote for Marie Claire…

**Rejoice!  The other day, I found out that Mindy just took a few months off and then moved her blog to HERE.  It will take me forever to catch up on all her posts…not that I mind!

Lunch Date

Can I tell you something?  I am really good at making lunch.

But Joy, you ask, I thought you can’t cook?

Well, no.  No I can’t.  Actually, the other day I failed to hard boil eggs.  My lack of cooking experience, minimal common sense, and general clumsiness/spastic moments add up to my hopelessness in the kitchen.  But.  One thing saves my self-esteem in the area of domestic goddess qualifications.  And that is my lunch-making abilities.

Nerd Files, Vol. 4

I’m not sure if I should be embarrassed of this or proud of it, but I just read through a bunch of my old blog posts and they made me laugh.  I think cracking yourself up is possibly a sign of being a nerd, but also it is a sign that at least I’m not bored with my life.  And maybe even more so, that I’m actually starting to like myself.

Bizarro World

Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where Elaine spends some time in “Bizarro world” with flipped versions of Jerry, George, and Kramer?  It’s kind of like opposite world.  What’s up is down, hot is cold, fast is slow, fat is thin (oh God, let me go there).

Well, this week I realized I’m kind of living life as Bizarro Joy right now, or less dramatically, the Norwegian version of myself.  See, it’s been sunny the past few days.  Sure, the temperature has been in the mid-50′s, but the sun has been out, hallelujah!  Saturday I walked down to the lake and sat there in a tank top.  All of the sudden I’m one of those people I used to make fun of at Disneyland: you know, the tourists from Minnesota who wear shorts in December, while us Southern Californians are bundled up in scarves and Ugg boots?  On Monday I looked at the five day forecast and saw that it’s going to be 63 degrees and sunny on Friday, and my first gleeful thought was, “Let’s go swimming!”  

Welcome to Bizarro World.

Withdrawal

I had a dream about Golden Spoon last night.  Seriously not funny.

Surprised By Joy

I just finished the book Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, by C.S. Lewis.  I’ve been chewing on that thing for a month now.  So you have a better idea of what it’s about, the tag line on the back cover is “The intensely intimate and sincere autobiography of a man who thought his way to God.”  

I’ve pretty much been beating myself up over how long it’s taken me to finish this book, but now that I think about it, I don’t really care that much.  Because I HAVE been super busy, you know, like moving to another country and adjusting and preparing for the DTS and all that.  But even more than that, this book is just not a quick read.  It’s not chick lit, friends.  I could read one page and then digest it for the rest of the day.  

Domestic Goddess of the Oregon Trail

Yeah…this is another shallow-content blog.  Lately inspiration and timing haven’t been able to get their ish together.  In the meantime, may I direct you to a site I just discovered?  It’s called The Pioneer Woman, and it’s about this girl who was raised in the suburbs, spent her college years in L.A., and then met and married a cowboy and now lives on a working cattle ranch with their four kids.  

Phoning It In

Hopefully I’ll have some new content tomorrow.  I know you three readers who actually come to this site on purpose, and have not stumbled upon it by googling the phrases “clever facebook status” or “robert downey jr.”, have been waiting with bated breath for a new post.  But I’ve been in the Norwegian wilderness for a few days, and tonight instead of blogging and such, I washed assorted borrowed wool items and holed up in my room to eat rice porridge and watch P.S. I Love You, which I had not yet seen.

Until my next post, check out my pictures of Norway so far on Facebook.

…And We’re Off!

The Discipleship Training School began today, and all week I had this weird nagging feeling of dread, like, “Oh my gosh, life as I know it is over.”  But then I kind of shook myself and was like, “What??  This is the reason I came to Norway in the first place!”  And then I started to get excited.  Because the whole time I’ve been here, I’ve been in a bit of a limbo state, kind of a holding tank before being released into the wild and sometimes murky waters that make up a DTS.  

Some Improvements

When I first got here to Grimerud, I was totally jetlagged but also really psyched when I was shown to my room and discovered that I would have it to myself.  Before I left for Norway, friends asked, “What will your living situation be like?” To which I honestly replied, “I have no idea.”  Meaning, I was fully prepared to sleep in a barracks with 50 other girls on triple bunk beds, or share a shoebox with three other girls.