NOT WRITE NOTES

Johnny Cash, putting your life goals in perspective since 1955. Via Gingerhaze.

Welp, it's nearly 2012.  Not sure where the time went, but happy to have had it.  While end-of-year introspection generally leaves me mulling over negatives (an unfortunate but inescapable habit), I have to admit that 2011 was a pretty good year.  If I had made resolutions, the list probably would have looked like this:

1. Get married.
2. Advance professionally.

Done and done.  We had a fun wedding, an amazing honeymoon, and an intimate courthouse ceremony.  I start on Tuesday in a new position at the same nonprofit where I've been working for a few years, and am crossing my fingers that I do a good job and serve the organization well.  Whatever fitness goals I had at the beginning of the year were more or less not met, so that will be a project for a new year. But on the other hand, I ate (and cooked) a lot of amazing food.  2011 was also the year of not one but TWO totally genuine surprise parties (birthday and wedding shower), and of a pretty lovely bachelorette party.  I did a bit of yoga, I read, I watched movies, I spent time with friends.  I acquired a few nice new possessions, and kept an impressive quantity of indoor plants alive.  I survived being a bride and a bridesmaid. I got drunk at a zoo.  I got drunk at a butterfly garden.  I saw family.  I saw  Carhenge.  I drove across the country.  I touched a dolphin, and saw a shark in the wild.  I snuggled my brother's dog.  I gave (and received) a fair number of high-fives.

2012 has me feeling similarly ambitious.  On the slate:

- Read Ulysses
- Read more in general
- Meditate more/take a meditation class
- Record my dreams more frequently
- Write in private journal more
- Blog more regularly, if not more frequently
- Move to a bigger place, preferably one we own, preferably with a yard
- Get a dog?
- Improve aerobic fitness
- Find & go to a new dentist
- Floss
- Drink more water
- Beat Portal 1 and 2

I'm also toying with a year-long project, or series of projects, to keep me engaged and/or trying new things.  The basic idea is to have a theme for each month and to pursue that theme, in whatever way is most appropriate, as consistently as possible, throughout the month.  My early ideas for this were based on different types of deprivation, which has its place for sure, but I'm trying to keep it flexible and also productive.  So far, possibilities include:

- Minimize and when possible eliminate animal-based foods for a month
- Forgo TV for a month
- Avoid online social networking for a month
- Crafting month
- Meditation month (perhaps my own 28-day meditation challenge)
- Journaling (or dream-journaling) every day for a month
- Running month?  (w/ help from the Couch to 5K app)
- Guitar month (note: this would require obtaining a guitar, as the bro has reclaimed his)
- Writing (of the non-journal variety) month

I'm going to start with no-animal-foods for January and see how that goes.  I think it will be really, really hard and involve a lot of peanut butter, hummus, and rice with beans.  Hopefully enough veggies to keep things moving as well.

The worry, of course, is that I am generally much better at making lists and devising projects than I am at following through on them.  E will hopefully help me with motivation, although he's been a pretty hard sell on the whole no-cheese thing so I'll be going that bit alone.  Other than that, I guess all I can do is keep moving and take it day by day.

Happy new year, all!


Annnnd GO.

Favorite Things Friday: YouTube Edition

Happy Friday! Here are some weird and/or amazing things on the internet.  Mostly stolen from friends in real life/Facebook/both.  Thank you friends!

 
 God bless, He-Man. Via Gingerhaze

 
 Amy Sedaris knows what's up.

 
So pretty.



This nonsense song lip-sung by Kermit from Sam & Friends is apparently a traditional (and disturbing) children's song called "A Horse Named Bill." Via io9's collection of lesser-known Henson videos.  (Fun fact: the song was also recorded by Jerry Garcia).

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
"The Nutcracker" Ballet Performance
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Continuing the theme of men without pants (which should be a band name, btw).

If you're already in Community withdrawal.



Rick Perry: douchebag.



And finally: Teddy Bear the talking Porcupine is pro-pumpkin.

Long Time No . . . Whatever (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Holidays)

(TL;DR? Just scroll down and click on the Spotify link!  The xmas music title is not false advertising, promise.)

Christmas and I have not always had an easy relationship. As an atheist Unitarian with one Jewish parent, I have never really been on board for the specific mythology of the holiday, and as a snotty, depressed teenager I wasn’t a big fan of the artificiality and consumerism. (Or so I told myself - in reality I think I was as much trying to manage the weirdly high expectations I still somehow had for the season of cheer.)

In fact, when I was a kid, Hannukah was kind of our big winter family get-together, because my mother’s side of the family had a bunch of cousins with whom to play dreidel and get into mischief. I have very fond memories of the New Jersey Hannukah parties, though looking back at the photos and videos I can see that they were basically just pure chaos with latkes.

Christmas, by comparison, was a quiet holiday celebrated with my father’s parents. It was beautiful and bounteous, to be certain - we got our share of awesome toys, snow and caroling. But I guess the relatively subdued nature of the holiday, combined with the waning of the Hannukah party tradition as we grew older, rendered Christmas susceptible to the charming negativity that I brought to most things I did between ages 13 and 19. Anyone who's known me a while can verify that I could be quite a pill during those years, and at no time was it worse than December (with the possible exception of my birthday, yet another vaguely-defined wintertime celebration filled with unmet and un-meet-able expectations).

In any case, here’s what it took for me to come around on Christmas. 1. Don’t celebrate Christmas one year, and 2. Go to Hawaii. At the same time, if you can swing it. My family spent the last week of December in Hawaii with Jewish relatives about a decade ago now, and it was THE BEST time. We didn’t really do much to celebrate Christmas OR Hannukah that year, because the cousins were all old enough that we didn’t really need to do gifts, and after all Hannukah is a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish religion. I did insist that we eat out Chinese (well, Thai, as it turned out) on Christmas night because, deliciousness, but other than that we were decidedly non-traditional. We spent Christmas morning body-surfing at Makapu’u beach. Listen: it doesn’t get much better than that.

Since then, the whole holiday season has been a different ball game. Once I could embrace the winter holidays as an adult with all the emphasis on what you do and who you’re with - not what you get, or whose religion means what - things started turning around. And once the holidays really felt like a choice instead of an annual obligation, suddenly they were a choice I wanted to make. It didn’t hurt that my parents followed the Jersey snowbird tradition and invested in some Florida real estate a few years ago in preparation for retirement. Ever since, the holidays have been beach-infused, present-free and pretty darn nice.

Because nothing I do is really important unless it has a soundtrack, my holidays now are also pretty music-filled. And because no soundtrack of mine would be complete without some really beautiful, silly, and f-ing weird stuff on it, my christmas music is AWESOME.

Crank it up.



P.S. I recognize that this whole post just REEKS of privilege: “I used to hate the holidays, but now we go to the beach every year and I love them!” For the record, the only way we could visit Hawaii was because we stayed with our relatives there and used airline miles to fly - and it was still a really expensive trip for the family. My parents are actually underwater on the real estate they purchased in FL just before the real estate bubble burst, and on top of that they spend a good chunk of their free time wrangling a variety of totally insane, occasionally non-paying renters. Everyone’s doing okay, and we’re all incredibly lucky. I truly recognize and appreciate the opportunities I have and how they’ve shaped my thoughts, and I also recognize that nothing is as simple as it may seem.