Wasting a four-day weekend away

Turkey is settling in my stomach and tryptophan is making me feel slightly dozy, so I'm going to make this quick.

Four-day weekends only come by once in a while and if you have the opportunity to enjoy one (I was in charge of Thanksgiving dinner and I have a magazine to design this weekend, so I'm missing out on that opportunity) you should make the most of it; so here are a few suggestions for things to fill up those 96 glorious hours of freedom.

For your edification:
1. We're busy people these days, so it's hard to sit down and dedicate attention to a fresh novel or series of books if you've only got four days to spare; as a way to work around this and still get some good fiction in, I've recently taken to picking up short story collections. Ryan Boudinot's The Littlest Hitler is incredibly whimsical and sad; William Gibson's Burning Chrome is a standard in SF for reasons which become strikingly obvious once you've read it; and Asimov's I Robot and Robot Dreams are stunning in their imagination - and the best part of all of them is that you can focus completely on individual works of fiction for twenty minutes at a time.

2. Read our magazine. No - seriously; AFLM is an excellent source of material you can immerse yourself in while wading through the world of contemporary fiction without all the pretension. So you can read beautiful new works and not go back to work on Monday reeking of the New Yorker.

For your gratification:
1. If you're in the mood for some retail therapy over your Black Friday weekend skip the mall. Explore your local underground collectives of individual expression - shop local and shop indie; I especially recommend trolling your local used record store. Scan through the cheap used bin - don't buy anything for more than $2.99 - and plan out a few mixed CDs for friends; the funky kinds of things you find in those bins (i.e., the Scream 2 soundtrack, limited print Fastball albums, industrial singles) lead to unique mixes that make great stocking stuffers or driving music. If you're SoCal local, check out Amoeba Records in Hollywood, Rhino Records in Claremont or Chaos Records in Glendora for good deals and pretty decent indie selections.
2. When you're getting over turkey and pie, it's nice to have something that doesn't fit at all with the season: ice cream. Artisan ice cream parlors have been popping up up almost as quickly as gourmet food trucks in SoCal. Check out the violet flavor at Carmela in Pasadena (off Washington and Lake) or the sesame or ginger offerings at Mother Moo Creamery in Sierra Madre (on Kirsting Court) - Mother Moo also offers ice cream making classes, which is something fun and interesting to do if you've spent too much time with your nose in a book recently.

For your utter lack of motivation:
If you're feeling too lazy to get out of the house or bother with reading heavy literary offerings on your days off, check out some web comics. I know I harp on this kind of thing a lot, but there are some really amazing, really clever webcomics out there; Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant frequently deals with literature, language, and history while A Softer World by Joey Comeau and Emily Horne combines lovely photography with almost-poetry, three-line prose about love, art, politics and zombies. Finally XKCD by Randall Munroe is a stick-figure comic with a strong focus on math, science, computing and linguistics humor, though it occasionally features visualization mapping of works like Lord of the Rings or Inception.

So here's hoping that you have a great weekend, get done whatever you need to get done, pig out whenever possible and enjoy whatever you come across.

See you back here on Monday,
Cheers,
-Alli