DAY 1 of GIVEAWAY WEEK! Win The Tiger’s Wife: Tell Me Why I Can’t Dress Myself

TRAVELING MARLA IS GIVING SOMETHING AWAY EVERY DAY THIS WEEK!

Easy contest today. You have 4 OPTIONS to enter (in other words, you can have your name in the contest up to 4 times!!). I have a hardcover of The Tiger’s Wife, signed by Tea Obreht for this contest.

But first, I need to ask why it is I don’t seem to know how to dress myself? Last night was my husband’s holiday party for his work. I was very excited to have an opportunity to wear a handmade silk outfit I had made in Hoi An, Vietnam. I had a matching tie made just so Kurt and I could play dress-up together…

Maybe those are the key words right there: “play dress-up.” Because since I am so low maintenance on an daily basis, when it comes to dressing up, I just don’t do it often enough to really know what I’m doing or pay attention. Can I use that as an excuse?

I was excited because we looked so spiffy and bright and kinda’ Christmassy (okay, so at least in terms of wearing bright red). The rest was just, well, Asian-y clothes on the most caucasian-y people you could know.

Thanks to all the training, I’m back down near the weight I was at in Vietnam (I lost quite a bit eating just fruit for 10 days because I saw so freaking hot.) so I was excited that it fit. I wore it proudly all night and got my Howard Wolowitz on by talking about the trip most of the evening, and monopolizing the entire table’s conversation. (Howard Wolowitz is a character from the Big Bang Theory who uses every opportunity to tell people he was on the space station.) Did I mention I went to Vietnam? Okay. So…

It wasn’t until we returned home and I began to undress that I realized my entire outfit had been on backwards all night. Kurt and I both knew it hadn’t “felt right” when we were putting it on (I needed his help with all the weird snaps up the side) and at one point I caught my hooha in the zipper up the front, but it just didn’t occur that all the problems were because it was going on backwards. As I unsnapped and pulled it off me, I saw the tag from the AoBaBa tailor in Hoi An. It was right there, in FRONT of me.

Everything was suddenly clear. The zipper in the silk pants which caught on my hoo-ha I now remembered the seamstress zipping up in BACK of me at the tailor shop. The snaps that kept popping with movements of my arm which hadn’t done that before, were popping because they were snapped up the wrong side and not sitting correctly against my body.

Noooooooo!!!!

Yes.

Yes. That happened. All evening. With my entire outfit. On. Backwards.

Why can’t I dress myself properly?

I WISH DRESSING MYSELF WERE AS EASY AS WINNING THIS BOOK!!!

You can ENTER UP TO 4 TIMES (or you can enter just one way – it’s up to you!)

Option 1: Leave a comment on this post about my dressing incident, or about this book.

Option 2: *Like* and tell Tea Obreht “Thank you for signing a book for the Traveling Marla contest” on her Facebook page.

Option 3: *Like* and tell Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures “Thank you for bringing Tea Obreht to Pittsburgh” on their Facebook page.

Option 4: Get my blog by email. It’s easy. On the right of this page is a little message that says “Get Marla Delivered Daily!” – you can enter your email address there and once a day my new post will arrive in your inbox. (Make sure you tell your spam that I’m real ham though!) Make sure you let me know it’s you, since I don’t know everyone’s email address.  You can tell me privately by emailing me marla at marlasinkdruzgal dot com / I can then go verify it.

DEADLINE: Sunday, 16 December, 2012 at 5PM EST

 

Good luck. I hope somebody really cool (that’s you if you’re reading this blog, right?) wins this book! And remember, it WILL arrive in time for Christmas!

There are other contests already occurring, so I hope you’re entered in those as well. Check out my Contest Page, and come back every day this week because it’s GIVEAWAY WEEK!

Love, Marla

P.S. I can’t describe this book any better than it’s already been done, so enjoy this teaser…

“In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

 

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

 

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.”