I have low cholesterol.

Yes, it's nice to have low cholesterol, I suppose, though I'm not really sure what cholesterol is or what it does. All I know is it's apparently supposed to be low, and mine is. Why? Sure, I exercise, try to eat right. But mostly it's because I'm the poster child for Cheerios.
I love Cheerios so much. Especially Honey Nut Cheerios. I think they might actually be laced with an illegal and addictive substance. I think I don't care. Cheerios are the best breakfast cereal slash afternoon munchie slash midnight snack ever. Those toddlers with their tupperware ain't got nothin' on me. Assuming I could prove that my cholesterol before my Cheerios addiction was quite high, I could be to Cheerios what Jared is to Subway.

If you are not a Cheerios connoisseur or something equally difficult to spell, you are missing out. Cheerios comes in a delightful variety of flavors. In order of my personal favorite to the, uh, not as good:

1. Honey Nut Cheerios. The Cheerio to which all other Cheerios aspire.
2. Frosted Cheerios. I'm a sucker for the sugar coating. Sorry, dentists.
3. Multi-Grain Cheerios. Slightly sweetened and oh so yummy.
4. Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. I like these better dry than with milk.
5. TIE: Regular Cheerios and Berry Burst Cheerios. Both good. Depends on my mood.
6. Yogurt Burst Cheerios. I was highly disappointed in these. Cheerios, you can do better.
7. Fruity Cheerios. I actually haven't tried these because I suspect they're pretty much smaller versions of Froot Loops, which I can do without.

And what's this? As I'm looking on the Cheerios website, I'm seeing a new flavor! Cheerios Crunch! Looks like it's time for a grocery run.

The only thing missing from the Cheerios repertoire is a Chocolate Cheerios. C'mon, guys. Hop on the bandwagon. There's Chocolate Honey Bunches of Oats (awesome), Chocolate Special K (meh), Chocolate Chex (pretty good). Where's Chocolate Cheerios?

On the other hand, it's probably good they don't exist. Those poor toddlers are probably sick enough of me stealing their finger food.

An oxymoron? No!

For decades it was considered negative to be nerdy. Pocket protectors, taped glasses, pegged pants--these are not images of ourselves we want anyone to see. (Not that I have any. Okay, except for the pegged pants.) But no more! It is indeed possible to be nerdy and beautiful! That is, if you're a CD of choral music.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am probably the biggest choir nerd on the planet, so it should come as no surprise to you that I have finally included some choral music on this blog. In fact, you're probably more surprised that it took so long. Anyway, I've been listening to Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeternalately, and I think you should, too.

Lauridsen is a modern composer, but don't let the word "modern" scare you (it usually scares me--echoes of horrible atonal music dance in my ears). He writes incredibly lush, tight harmonies that are an absolute joy to hear. They give me goosebumps. And yes, I'm a nerd. But the music on this CD, particularly the Lux Aeterna set and "O Magnum Mysterium" (my personal favorite), is very, very beautiful.

It's all performed by a professional British choir called Polyphony, and they are very good. Sometimes the tenors go a little crazy, but they're tenors--it's what they do. We can forgive them. And sometimes I feel like they're just singing the notes. They do this very well--they always sound good--but sometimes I wish there was a little more...emotion. A little more ebb and flow in the musical line. This is particularly noticeable to me in "O Nata Lux," part of Lux Aeterna, but I could just be prejudiced because I know and love another recording of that piece.

Anyway, overall this is a very, very good CD and any lover of good music should check it out. Join the nerdy side. It's nice here.

Omigosh! There's plot!!

You may recall that I, uh, kind of ragged on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. Just a little bit. I said that her work for juveniles was, um, juvenile. Go figure. But mostly, I complained that there was not enough plot for the length of the book. (Just thinking of it makes me go, "Ugggh.")

Well, not so with Meyer's first book for adults, The Host.This book is about 600 pages long, and believe it or not, has almost 600 pages of plot! I know! I couldn't believe it either! On page one, you are immersed into the story and have to swim around for a while before you even quite know what's going on. It's great. And then, guess what? Stuff keeps happening!!

I felt like the book bogged down a little in the second third as it sets up the fairly predictable love story (no spoiler there, really--you can see it coming a mile away), but Meyer's style flows so well and is so easy to read that this isn't too much of a drawback. There are several descriptions of the main character's feelings toward another character, ala Twilight, but unlike in Twilight where these make up 90% of the book, here it's only something like 15%. However, like Twilight, the book is still totally clean.

I won't tell you what the book is about, because half the fun is discovering it as you read (unless you read the blurb, which probably gives everything away anyway), but I will tell you not to be scared by the designation of "science fiction." There are aliens and spaceships and references to deep space and other planets. But this is not hard-core science fiction at all. In fact, you could easily forget it's science fiction at all and just become involved in the (cliche ahead) human-ness of it all.

In short, this book is so much better than Twilight that I hope Ms. Meyer writes more for adults in the future!

When I grow up, I'm going to be Audra McDonald.

Of course, there are a few problems with that plan, but darn it if I'm not going to try.

If you haven't heard of Audra McDonald and you 1) like good singers and/or 2) like musical theater and/or 3) appreciate good music, you are missing out. Allow me to enlighten you with a review of one of her many contributions to the music scene: Build a Bridge.

This album, released in 2006, features songs by artists as diverse as Burt Bacharach, John Mayer, Neil Young, and Randy Newman, all performed to perfection by Audra McDonald. Her solo voice is impressive in not only its physical range (she's got the high notes and the low notes, all the time), but also its emotional expression. For example, she sings "Bein' Green" (yes, Kermit's song) with such heart that you feel like important life decisions are being made, and follows it with "Tom Cat Goodbye," where the anger toward a cheating husband is very clear, and then changes to "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," which is so forlorn that you wonder how she made it through the recording.

Yeah--this album not so much for the depressed. It's extremely mellow. Which isn't a bad thing--not at all. It's just a fact. If you're already feeling really mellow and you simply must listen to this album, then I suggest you put "Wonderful You" on repeat, because it is a very happy, peppy song. In fact, it almost seems out of place on this album filled with heart-wrenching pieces. It's kind of a breath of fresh air.

I love this album even though it has such a sad tone. Audra McDonald's voice is endlessly listenable. Do yourself a favor and check her out.

A Brief Hiatus

Not that I post all that regularly anyway, or that there's that many people reading this thing, but I thought I'd let you know that there most definitely won't be any posts until probably July, because I am going on a much anticipated trip. I'm keeping all my extra wittiness here for a while:



Don't steal it while I'm gone! I don't have that much to begin with.

In no particular order...

...here are some reasons you should not waste your time with this movie.Which, of course, begs the question as to why I'm posting a "BUY ME!" link to it, but, well, to each his own. On to the list!

1. It stars Hayden Christensen. If you don't remember, he's the guy that played Anakin Skywalker. And---spoiler---he turns into Darth Vader! And oh yeah, he's a crummy actor.

2. It's based "100%" off a young adult novel. Which would be fine, except by "100%" the director actually means ".001%." An understandable mistake, really: decimal points and percentages are hard!

3. It's very low on a precious little commodity that some people like to call "plot."

4. Samuel L. Jackson's hair looks really stupid.

5. There's nobody to like in this movie. Nobody to root for. Everybody is a scuzzbucket, even though the main character claims that he's "different." He's, um, not.

6. It's only 83 minutes long, which could definitely be a plus. Some movies are too overgrown for their own good (yes, Narnia 1, I'm talking about you). But this movie coulda used about an extra half hour to, say, develop the characters or the storyline or something. Anything.

7. According to one of the special features, the creative team (I'm tempted to use quotation marks around both of those words) created an entire mythology for these characters and the world, which they feel informed the work. In the same feature, an actor playing one of the lead roles said, "I'd really like to know my character's story." Which leads to the conclusion that the aforementioned mythology did not, in fact, inform anyone of anything. (Least of all the audience.)

And the last reason that comes to mind as to why you should not bother with this film:

8. It sucks.

I kind of feel...guilty.

You know those things you're supposed to like? Or respect? Or find interesting, or whatever? Because they deal with Very Important things? And then you feel guilty if you don't, I dunno, appreciate them? Like, for example, say you read The Diary of Anne Frank and you don't think it was all that amazing. Or you see the original canvas of Van Gogh's Starry Night in a museum, and you are unmoved. You don't necessarily not like these things, you just...aren't that impressed.

That's how I feel about Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. I really feel like I should be incredibly moved by it. After all, it's about a horrific event (the civil war in Sierra Leone), and its author was a boy soldier who witnessed and participated in terrifying activities, and the author is the same age as me, so you'd think I'd compare my life to his and be a little bit awed and a little bit scared and a whole lot grateful.

And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit of all of those things. There were times in this book that I stopped and thought, "I could never do that," followed by, "...could I?" Followed by, "I hope I never have to find out." So yeah, there's definitely some visceral response going on there. But, I dunno. The book's just not that great.

I feel really guilty saying that. I feel like I should be praising this book from the rooftops just because of the topic. I feel like I'm somehow less of a human being because I wasn't deeply moved by Beah's experiences. I wanted to like this book a lot. I really did. I just...didn't. Mostly it's because of the writing itself. My dad is fond of saying, "His English is much better than my [enter language of choice here]," when hearing people speak for whom English is a second language. And certainly, Beah's English is quite good. But it's just so...accurate. It doesn't sparkle. It has no life. To use a tried and true English Nerd phrase, it doesn't show, it tells. It's extremely dull to read because there's no interesting language use. Sometimes you might as well be reading a textbook.

I'm not completely un-recommending this book (is that a word? It is now), because the events it describes are certainly worth learning about, and the opportunity to do so from someone who lived through them is, for lack of a better word, important. But I can't wholeheartedly recommend it because, frankly, it's just not well-written.

Okay, I feel guilty. I'm going to go crawl under a rock now.