Are you a Jessica or Elizabeth? Although I just tested Elizabeth*, I’m quite sure I’m Jade Wu who, Wikipedia informs me, turns trampy and nasty a year after we meet her as a sophomore in Out of Reach, but I digress.
I was just the right age to read Sweet Valley High, that I shall dub The Original Series, and not get into the spin-off series in any great depth. Looking through the list of novels in The Original Series, and surprising myself with what I can remember of general plots, I’m …

I have been reading Cathy Erway’s memoir, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love The Stove, in the strangest places. I read about two-thirds of the memoir over several elliptical sessions at the gym and some of the rest while, fittingly, eating out. And since it was the kind of meal where I could read while eating, it wasn’t a spectacular meal or while with friends.
Based on an unpublished blog entry of mine where I alluded to Erway’s popular blog, Not Eating Out in …

I like tracing the route by which I find myself reading a certain novel. In the case of embarking this year on reading all nine Little House books, a couple of years ago: NPY and I were visiting a friend and–true to my form–I read the titles off the spines of the volumes on her bookshelf. She exhibits a similar whole-series compulsion like I have, with not just the first three Anne books, but all 8. She also had all of the Twilight and/or Harry Potter books. And, what caught …

A Smart Canucks post, “Do we take multiculturalism for granted here in Canada?” (warning: a NSFW image is first thing in that post) alerted me to this seemingly surreal book, a recently published exposé by former Wall Street money manager J.C. Davies, I Got the Fever. Her credentials to write this book include, according to her bio, an undergraduate degree in psychology, a masters degree in public health, and 20 years of dating men of different cultures*. The book purports to cover from her own experiences and interviews with women …

My one-time personal trainer–two sessions came with my gym membership–told me that losing weight is 80% diet changes. That 20% from lifestyle change sounds so minimal it was quite a disincentive for me to go hardcore and hit the gym often. (Yes, I know, physical activity confers bountiful benefits beyond shedding pounds.) I know that something in my brain is wrong that allows me, nay, urges me to eat as much as I can some days. And I’ve never been a dieter or calorie counter: “being on a diet would …

Oh, WordPress, how much do I love thee….? I feel like I’m on some kind of path towards technical/blogging enlightenment and those who have attained it would roll their eyes at me but here are the steps and stories I have identified so far:
Level 1
I was a little slow to the game, hanging on to Blogger for the longest time, reveling in the smallest update they had that was nowhere near the awesomeness WordPress inhererently is. Like so many, I dipped my toes in the WordPress pool with multiple free …

Gee whiz, it looks like I’ve done nothing in 2011 except eating. Partly, that’s because I’ve taken on a more difficult task this  year in terms of reading.
Last year’s reading journey ended up including 11 “Asian-American” novels and a handful of others (like, Year of the Flood and Self-Made Man). This year so far I have finished P.D. James’ Children of Men, a science fiction novel, but otherwise plan on focusing on non-fiction, you know, to make me a better person.
Judging from the way it’s going so far, it’s going to …

Well aren’t group-buying sites like Groupon and Living Social the greatest things these days? This time last year, I was flipping through (and flipping through again) my Entertainment Book, seeing the same-old restaurants, wishing there was something I could use after, of course, using the Tropika coupon.
Group-buying sites have been big winners because of the magical (synergistic?) combination of addiction-creating features. They are “social” by requiring a minimum number of buyers to activate, and then with all the Web 2.0 add-ons to share your sweet purchase on Facebook and Twitter. …

As with a lot of the world, I learned about this novel when the 2010 movie got rave reviews and mentioned the origin of the screenplay. I heard it was a sci fi storyline with low/no tech, so of course it intrigued me to read the novel before watching the movie. A Japanese-British author behind it with Remains of the Day under his belt did not dissuade me at all, quite the contrary.
The story is told from the conversational narrative point-of-view of Kathy H. who is played by Carey Mulligan. I …

The fanciest way to describe what I did at my first job was work in a production environment. My InDesign instructor, who is a real production manager at ICBC,  emphasized how good it looks on a resume to say you worked in “production” if your job had some aspect of it. At my first workplace, we killed so many trees but we were surrounded by cool and fast printers and copiers, a clattering paper-folding machine, punching and binding machines, and an impressive shelf array of paper types, sizes, and other …