About a month ago, on a Sunday, I got this great email from J. describing her Sunday morning ritual in Buenos Aires. After getting up and making coffee, J. goes to this bakery around the corner from her place and comes back with a selection of delicious pastries for her roommates and for herself. Then she eats them while reading the New York times and the BBC online. Sounds so relaxing... (Also, on a related note: I am happy to say my Sunday blues ended last December. Ever since January my Sundays have been much better. Probably mostly because I felt (feel) more comfortable/used to things here and I wasn't dreading the beginning of the week the same way I did for most of the fall.) J.'s email read to me like one of my favourite columns in the Sunday New York Times which I discovered about a year and a half ago and have read consistently every Sunday since called "Sunday Routine". The column features a different well-known New Yorker (occasionally they live in other parts of NY state but most usually live in New York City) describing their typical Sunday routine. Here are links to three of my favourite ones: Moby's: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/nyregion/28routine.html; some person I'd never heard of but I like what he said, I think mostly because he sounds different from me, and cool, interesting & fun: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/nyregion/05routine.html?ref=sundayroutine; the last one is Ruth Reichl's - the food writer and former editor of Gourmet http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregion/22routine.html?ref=sundayroutine I especially liked all of these ones because their Sundays sound great, and I like how they work in stories about other people in their lives. I would love to be featured in one of these but my Sundays are usually pretty boring. This whole past year they've mostly consisted of doing homework, going on the internet, sometimes talking on the phone, and sometimes going for a run. Even last year when I wasn't in school, and thus had the potential for more interesting Sundays, I'd usually leave some of my planning for Monday's classes until Sunday and so would spend part of the day working. Hopefully at some point in the future my Sundays will be more fun and interesting, and more worthy of a Sunday routine article.
I think the main reason I like "Sunday Routine" so much is because I love reading about other people's lives. For that same reason, I also really like interviews. I rarely watch talk shows but the few times I've watched Oprah I have been really impressed with her questioning skills. (Obviously not surprising given she is super successful for a reason...) A few years after his infamous couch jumping on her show, Oprah interviewed Tom Cruise at his house in Colorado (see picture below). Although I can't remember any of Oprah's specific questions or Tom Cruise's specific answers, I do remember thinking her line and method of questioning was phenomenal. I hope to be able to emulate her one day, and hopefully getting to interview clients will be a large component of all of my future jobs. I very much enjoyed all the interviews of Chilean exiles I did for my undergrad thesis. I tape recorded all of them, and then I'd get up very early and sit in my little kitchen in my Hilgard apt playing back all the tapes and trying to write my thesis. It was interesting to me to hear myself on those tapes because other than when I asked the questions, I could regularly hear myself saying little things like "yeah", "of course", and "that must have been awful" etc. while my interviewee spoke. I was glad I had done that because it made it seem more like a conversation and less like a formal interview. And also because I think it's important for the interviewer to react to what the person answering the questions is saying.
As much as I love asking questions, I like answering them too. Back when I was 20 and more vain (haha) I used to think it would be really cool to be the star of a Vogue photo shoot. I imagined myself wearing fancy haute couture dresses and lots of make up, kind of like Kate Moss in the pictures below. Now, however, 7 years older and much less vain, I'd choose to be the subject of something like Sunday Routine or interviewed on "This American Life." Here's to hoping that maybe one day my interview wish will come true.
Ah, I loved this one! "YOU HAVE ASPERGER’S? No. I just like to pretend I do. It makes me sound more interesting." still laughing at that quote! Never knew of this column... it's so cool!
ReplyDeleteAnd this line made me sad: "one of her parting shots was having her tell me she never liked my pancakes. I thought that was very cruel. Insult my sexual prowess, my intellect, but not my pancakes."
Hope your wishes come true!