This month our MFB hails from a land of mystery...
& purple couches.
She's got that right kind of funny,
& purple couches.
She's got that right kind of funny,
to keep me coming back for more!
Please welcome:
Elise from:
1. Tell us a little about yourself.
I
could totally use my standard line about how I’m a just a girl who
started a blog and happen to like bagels, but how I also like things
that are not bagels. But that’s probably lame and also my about me
section on my blog, so really it’s nothing new and you people are
looking for new. Right? So, about me? I’m in my mid-twenties, live in a super-secret location I call Far North, which is neither clever nor is it very secretive, and I write far too many words to get my point across (fair warning).
I live near most of my family, with whom I have a wonderful
relationship and who have all read my blog at one time or another. Which
is kind of daunting, but is also why I don’t swear as much as I want to
and that’s probably good for me. Umm… I’m not answering this question very well. This is like a job interview. And I’ve been doing a lot of those lately. Because I’m unemployed. Because I quit my terrible job.
That is also top secret. So basically, my “About Me” should just say:
My boring life is top secret, but I would make a terrible spy.
2. What is your favorite lazy day routine?
As I said above, I’m unemployed. Which means that EVERY DAY is Lazy Day.
I’ve been waking up between 10:00 am and noon (which is really bad, I
know, but I’m staying up until 3:00 am, so it’s a normal amount of
sleep… kind of…). Sister and I (oh, heads up: I live with my sister and
she’s also unemployed) usually laze on the couch watching DVDs of
television episodes. When I quit my job, we started with The Office,
moved on to Castle, then the 5th season of Psych. Now I’m introducing her to LOST. She’s a bit of a fraidy
cat, so we’re taking it kind of slow. Somewhere around normal people’s
dinner time, we decide it’s time to shower and get out of our yoga pants
and do something with ourselves. This usually results in us sitting on
the couch in clean(-ish)
yoga pants and wet hair watching more TV and eating ridiculous
concoctions of food, since we can’t be bothered to grocery shop or cook.
Sometimes, we leave the house to wander around Target or go watch TV at
Mom’s house while we eat her food, since she both grocery shops and
cooks. We end up staying up till about 1:30 am, then I read in bed
until way later than I mean to and finally crash. And as much as I love
it, I think I’ll be relieved to get back to work soon.
3. Why/how did you get started blogging?
I’ve
been reading blogs for years. I started by reading a blog by one of my
favorite YA authors, Ally Carter, and then added others over time.
One
day while trolling the archives of Temerity Jane
I
just decided it was time. She was encouraging her readers to become
People Who Comment and then went a step further and encouraged them to
be People Who Blogged. Or something like
that. All I know is, I’ve always been a writer but I didn’t have a good
outlet, I was bored at work, and TJ made me believe I could do it. So
here we are.
4.What is your favorite "Lose Yourself" book of the moment?
I
just finished a book called “A Hopeless Romantic” by Harriet Evans. I
found it at a thrift store the other day and pretty much just bought it
because the cover was pretty and the back blurb wasn’t heavy on the
dramatic vague foreshadowing that some books are prone to. It was
actually pretty good (it probably didn’t need to be a lengthy as it was,
but it was never boring, so I guess it doesn’t matter) and I was
excited to pick it up every time, so
there’s that.I’m also working my
way back through The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares, because she just published
a new book that follows the girls into their adult lives and Sister
said it was really good, but I don’t really remember most of the series.
5. How did you come up with the name of your blog?
Roommate,
my best friend and college Roommate, was visiting shortly after I
started the blog and she was complaining about how she didn’t like cream
cheese. Except she likes it on bagels. “Just not on things that are not bagels.”
We laughed pretty hard at that phrasing and continued to use it the
rest of the trip. Since my blog name was just my penname (which I
thought sounded kind of pretentious) and I had no readers yet, it was
the perfect time to change it. The rest is bagely history.
6. What is you favorite movie of the moment?
Oh,
geez! This is a ridiculously difficult question, to pick only one. I
guess one of the go-to favorites in our house, if there is nothing new
to watch, is The Holiday.
It’s just… wonderful. We never get tired of it.
7. What is your favorite thing to blog?
I
love when I’ve just experienced something out of the ordinary and
ridiculous—like a rude person at the store or the antics my former boss
used to get up to—that I can flip on its head and tell with humor. Because those things rarely feel good when they’re happening.
But if I can make someone else (and myself) laugh about it, it’s a
great way to get perspective. Plus, I love making people laugh.
8. What is your top "sing&dance your heart out" song of the moment?
Well, Sister and I have been yell-singing Hotel California
by the Eagles for the past several days because we heard it on the
radio twice in 24 hours and thought that was weird. But that’s more of a
ridiculous thing that a heart-felt thing. One of the ones I love right
now is
Christina Perri’s Jar of Hearts or Taylor Swift’s Mean. Because that’s kind of where my life is at right now, what with a conniving ladder-snatcher of a coworker and a jerk of a boss.
And now that I’m out of that place, all I can think is, “Who the HELL
do you think you are that you would treat me this way?” So those songs
strike a chord…
9. Link the top 3 favorite blogs you wrote, & tell us what was behind your writing them.
My
post about Satan’s Cat (Sister’s mischievous and possibly evil feline
who likes to wreak havoc on our house and then snuggle as if nothing
happened) entitled
“If You Play Her Meows Backward, There Are Hidden Messages”
was one of my favorites to write. I actually laughed out loud while
typing it (from the bathtub, no less). Plus, it got a ton of traffic thanks to a comment I left on The Bloggess’s Beyonce post I’m also pretty proud of A Letter to My Future Husband Who Is Late, partly because of the response it got and partly because the hopeless romantic side of me hopes
that my future husband will actually read it and find me through it.
Which is ridiculous, especially considering my secret identity, but a
girl can dream! My
third favorite was the hardest to choose, but this one is definitely up
there in the favorites and I’m tired of looking for a better one:
10. Who/what do you want to be when you
"Grow up"?
I
told Mom and Sister the other day that I want to look like Kate from
LOST when I grow up. I don’t necessarily want to BE her, due to the
whole law-breaking thing.
But I’d love to look like her. But who do I
want to be? I don’t have a specific person. But I want to be a great mom
and wife who is
able to organize and balance everything and still have time for a
little fun while also writing via fiction on the side…
Which is completely
realistic, right?
11. Link the top 3 blogs you read.
Your "Daily Must Checks"
The Sarcasm Goddess
And I love Temerity Jane
because she says the things I’m always too polite to say and she says them better than I would anyway and also HAVE YOU SEEN HER BABY?
Amalah
is also all kinds of wonderful and hilarious and, at the same time, is not afraid to talk about the real stuff either and can make you cry using just her words.
But these are only three of the amazing bloggers I read and interact with on a daily basis (okay, so TJ and Amalah are way cooler than me and I would be misrepresenting myself and their coolness if I said that we interacted every day, but they are nice enough to reply to my tweets whenever I get up the courage to talk to them, so this sentence is really about how uncool and awkward I am, not about how they’re above it all because they totally aren’t and I should just stop typing now…) so you should totally check out my blogroll and go read all those guys, too.
12. Describe/show your top "Can't live without" Item
Yoga
pants. Just. Yoga pants. They are the life blood of my laziness and
prevent me from being naked and can you really ask for more than that?
They bring me joy and comfort and do not pinch my ever increasing
waistline, nor do they judge me when I eat an extra scoop of ice cream,
even though I wish my waistline were ever DECREASING. They also
continually remind me that they are not pajama pants (so that I don’t feel guilty about lounging around in them all day), but never
remind me that they are exercise pants (because they know I don’t want
to feel badly about NOT exercising). Yoga pants. Just. Yoga pants.
13. Whats your favorite time of the year?
I
love early summer. Here in the far North, late-May through most of June
is warm and sunny and beautiful and green and fresh and… Just full of hope and promise. They make you forget that July and August will be rainy, that the leaves will be off the trees by the end of September,
and that the snow will last from mid-October until the end of April or
even into May. Those glory days are only about 6 weeks long, but they
are the best time of the year.
Or
maybe Christmas, when I haven’t gotten sick of the snow yet and there’s
food and family and decorations and sweetness. But probably summer.
14. What is something you would like to try in the future of your blog?
I’d love to add more photos. But my point-and-shoot is pretty inadequate and my photography skills are even worse. So that’s probably not going to happen soon. Maybe just posting more regularly? I do well and then I just fall off the Internet for a while. Yes. That. Definitely that.
15. If you could re-live any moment in your life,
when & why?
Oh dear. If we’re talking about re-living just for the sake of re-experiencing, then I’d probably go back to my senior
year of college, when Roommate and I lived in our tiny apartment and
basically had a slumber party every night and I was skinny for the first
time in my life.
But if we’re talking about re-living for the purposes of changing things?
I would probably go back to Junior High and join a sport and care less
about all the drama and the crap and just be me and have fun and choose better friends. But that would still be a pretty terrible time to go back to and I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t been through that, I guess. So let’s just say that I’m content with the here and now.
So there you have it!
Make sure you head on over to her place
& see what else she has to offer!
& don't forget to stop by every Sunday this month
& give YOUR opinions on the
MFB Question of the week!!
