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.

Road Rules

So, a week later I'm feeling a bit better and am ready to tackle the world again.  Kind of.  Well, the world as seen whizzing past a car window at the very least.  Today my brother and I set off for adventure (i.e. Pittsburgh), on the first leg of our cross-country road trip.  (Background: the bro is moving to Hawaii, with his car, which is shipping out of San Diego - so that's our destination.)  On this leg we gave a friend a lift to the 'burgh, in return for some pretty posh overnight accomodations upon arrival.  Seriously - I'm writing this from one of their two guest rooms, in an antique-y brass bed on the third floor of an undeniably gorgeous house.  A cat is balled up and sleeping on the bench next to me.  AND I have Wifi.  Life could be worse.

Preliminary thoughts on road-tripping:

- So far, popular conversation topics include: things that our parents do that we don't like, sci-fi television shows, what we are listening to (or what we are listening to next)

- The Pennsylvania turnpike is always just as scary as I remember it being.  And I didn't make up that they force trucks to drive in the left lane in certain sections. Because having zero shoulder on dark windy roads the mountains of Pennsylvania wasn't scary enough on its own, apparently.

- The tuna sub at Wawa is superior to the tuna sub at Sheetz.

- Combos has a special limited edition Buffalo wings flavor

- I am just as bad at reading in the car as I ever used to be. 

- Coconut water: available

Daylight Savings Mind

Day three of rain here in DC, and it’s getting darker every morning. Just as it did during the deluge in mid-September, this kind of weather spurs a particularly powerful impulse to contemplate every mistake I’ve ever made and catalog every failure in my life. Sometimes I literally make lists. SUPER healthy, I know.

Things aren’t even that bad. I’m keeping busy, spending time with friends and family, seeing shows, planning a big trip at the end of the month, taking small steps professionally . . . opening my mail, watering the plants, reading the news . . . all sorts of semi-adult and reasonably functional stuff going on around here. But I gotta admit, brain-wise, the ol’ belfry seems to be filling up with bat guano. And while I KNOW that (to torture the metaphor) said guano may be valuable for its properties as a fertilizer, that doesn’t make it superfun to have in my brain where normal, happy thoughts should be. PLUS as it turns out mining bat guano is really bad for bat populations, so there’s that.

In conclusion, shut up brain, shut up your face.

Right now I’m pinning a lot of brain-clearing hopes on the end of daylight savings time. Anything that makes my first hour of consciousness each day a little more sun-filled is a pretty good plan in my book, and who doesn’t like an extra hour of sleep now and then? It’s like a mini-snow day, a reminder of forces beyond my own little life. Natural phenomena really have a pretty profound impact on my mood. I'm pretty sure my brain chemistry changes substantially every time I take a walk at lunchtime or stop to smell a flower on my way home from work.*

Probably this means that I should be outside more or something CRAZY like that. Maybe if the f-ing rain ever stops. Tonight I’m going to see 50/50 because I really enjoy snotting all over myself in public apparently, and if all goes as planned tomorrow will find me gnawing on a turkey leg while watching some jousting in bumfuck Maryland. That’s outdoors, right?

And the sun just came out, for a moment anyway. Schizo weather. I’ll take what I can get.

See you on the other side! Hopefully at a post-5-pm-sundown happy hour, because that extra light in the morning always comes at a price. Weather jerks.



*If you’re in the Dupont area, there’s still one dumbass magnolia flowering over by the Brookings Institute. You have to climb up on a wall in heels and will probably spill pollen all over yourself, but it’s worth it.

*And in other news, I have officially become my grandmother.

Wonderful

Last weekend I travelled to the Twin Cities for a good friend's wedding.  My bridesmaidly duties for the weekend involved being the first person in line at a liquor store at 10 am on a Friday morning for mimosa ingredients, drinking said mimosas in a hot tub at 10:30 am, rocking a fab orange dress with these amazing shoes,

getting a manicure that only resulted in minor toe-thumb, and valiantly not crying through a very exciting, well-planned and love-filled day.  Also dancing to Men Without Hats played by a swing band, eating mashed potatoes out of a martini glass and enjoying a pretty gorgeous sunset over the Mississippi. 

I was also newly acquainted with this touching My Morning Jacket song




and reacquainted with this lovely, lovely Mary Oliver poem.

Coming Home

When we're driving, in the dark,
on the long road
to Provincetown, which lies empty
for miles, when we're weary,
when the buildings
and the scrub pines lose
their familiar look,
I imagine us rising
from the speeding car,
I imagine us seeing
everything from another place — the top
of one of the pale dunes
or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea —
and what we see is the world
that cannot cherish us
but which we cherish,
and what we see is our life
moving like that,
along the dark edges
of everything — the headlights
like lanterns
sweeping the blackness —
believing in a thousand
fragile and unprovable things,
looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping
barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me.


Happy marriage, C&J. Couldn't be happier for you two.

Favorite Things Tuesday?

Go listen to Oh Sister, a new/previously unreleased song from Neutral Milk Hotel. Perfect counterpoint to Two Headed Boy, my #1 favorite NMH song. Box set coming soon.

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Picture via webecoist

Tiny Houses!  Field Papers has been dreaming about them and Prince of Petworth found them.  So clean, bright, beautiful and efficient!  Too bad I would cover them with clothes and empanada wrappers immediately.

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Gorgeous and bizarre nudes/landscapes by Spencer Tunick

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Have I mentioned that I'm excited about the new muppet movie yet?  I'm kinda excited.  See you on opening night.  With my muppet shirt on.

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Love this idea for a new punctuation mark indicating friendliness without exclamation points.  Genius!  (Thanks to Helena)

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Sandwich Mondays on the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me blog

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Happy internet trails to you!

Use More Words Part Deux

If you already knew these words: congratulations! You're better than I am.* 

perfidy (n): treachery, though it should mean the opposite - from the phrase per fidem decipere, "to deceive through trust" (the deceive/decipere part was left out of the final word, evidently)
Usage: "She is a woman - much woman. Should her perfidy be less than that of other women?"
found in The Conqueror

jerkwater (adj): contemptibly trivial. Originally described stops on a rural train line, where a train's small boiler had to be refilled often, requiring the crew to "jerk" or draw water from streams.  Also an indie band.
Usage: This jerkwater town doesn't even have an Olive Garden!
found in my new Penguin Classics Crossword Puzzles book**

imprecation (n): curse, malediction
Usage: "There came a whispered imprecation from above Paul and a low voice: 'Call me spawn of a lizard!'"
from Dune by Frank Herbert

garble (v): Okay I knew this one already, but doesn't this word sound like it should be onamatopoetic?  Apparently it originated in nautical trade, referring to the sifting of spices and then the mixing up of spices and then the mixing up of language.  

soupçon (n): small amount, hint, trace. From the French word for suspicion (Isn't that elegant?)
Usage: "Think of it as a real-life King Ralph mixed with a Shakespearean tragedy and a soupçon of Being There."
from Nathan Rabin's review of W. in My Year of Flops

epos (n): alternative word for the noun epic. It's still tied to the specific idea of a body of literature but I think it could have legs if it were tweaked to cover the general concept of "epic-ness" in that word's current usage.
Usage: "Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order."
from Middlemarch by George Eliot

jape (v): to joke, jest. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, jape "took on a slang sense mid-15c. of 'have sex with,' and disappeared from polite usage" prior to being revived with the new innocent usage. 
from my Penguin Classics Crossword Puzzles book again

mondegreen (n): Okay this one's really interesting.  I only looked it up incidentally to find out the lyrics to the Yeasayer song, and found the term mondegreen was coined in 1954 by author Sylvia Wright in Harper's Magazine.  From the Wikipedia article (I can't access the original at Harpers): "When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,

And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual fourth line is 'And laid him on the green.'"  Hence, Wright defined a mondegreen as a word or phrase misheard or misinterpreted due to "near homophony." I could probably venn diagram this concept with malaproprism, but I won't.

Sources:
Online Etymological Dictionary
American Heritage Dictionary
TCM.com
Wikipedia
merriam-webster.com


*For the record, judging me for an imperfect vocabulary when I'm clearly trying to learn more words is like disdaining the fat person sweating it out at the gym.  Which I would be too, if I ever went to the gym.  Anyway, not cool.

**The collection is a neat idea - all the puzzles reference or revolve around Penguin Classic novels.  However, they're generally pretty easy, which is disappointing.

August Mix

 Here's what I was listening to in August.

	Artist	Title	Album	Notes
1	Patrick Wolf	The City	Lupercalia	Song, and album, of the month.
2	Bell	Dialtone	Diamonite	Pump me up / top-side me baby / all around the world.
3	Yeasayer	Madder Red	Odd Blood	Epic passive-aggression.
4	LCD Soundsystem	Losing My Edge	LCD Soundsystem	The kids are coming up from behind.
5	Bell	River	Diamonite	No continent is too grand / that we can't run our fingers over it.
6	Beirut	East Harlem	The Rip Tide	The pleasantly undulating second half of this song makes up for the boring, patronizing first half.
7	Yeasayer	Mondegreen	Odd Blood	Epic coke-fueled paranoia.  How do they make such good songs out of such off-putting ideas?
8	Patrick Wolf	The Future	Lupercalia	You come near / I see my future clear / and a threshhold appears / and I am carrying you over, carrying you over
9	Fleet Foxes	Grown Ocean	Helplessness Blues	Honestly, the video is better.
10	Refreshments	Banditos	Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy	I bet you don't remember that you know this song.
11	Jeff Bridges	Maybe I Missed the Point	Jeff Bridges	Oh Uncle Jeff, stick to letting other people write the songs for you.  Still, the rhythm works.
12	Ella Fitzgerald	Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most	Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!	Promised my first dance / to winter.
13	Kris Macken	The Cool Kids	Marry Me Soundtrack	From this cutesy short film.
14	Sandie Shaw	(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me	The Very Best of Sandy Shaw	I had no idea how old this song is.  So catchy with horns and maracas.
15	Jeff Bridges	Either Way	Jeff Bridges	Okay, so I bought a second Jeff Bridges song anyway.  So sue me.

New music finds courtesy of . . .
All Songs Considered
Miss Moss
Fresh Air
Feministing
Sociological Images

Spotify link coming soon.

Use Their Words: Breakfast Edition

I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music…all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

- Hunter S. Thompson, c/o Lapham's Quarterly

This is a man who understands breakfast pleasure.