My street had one of its periodic power failures last night, a particularly long one. I wasn’t timing it, but I think it was almost two hours. Annoying at first, as I’d just finished putting hot fudge on my ice cream and by the time I finished lighting candles and came to back to actually eat the ice cream, the fudge had melted it all into a goopy soupy mess. (Which was still very tasty, I must say, but the fudge had lost its hot-fudginess and become lukewarm fudge which is just not the same.)

I lit a bunch of candles, and the cats circled around them and sniffed at them and tried to burn off their whiskers. You would think cats would have some kind of “hey, fire is bad, maybe I should not stick my paw into it” reflex, but mine do not. Fortunately no one actually caught fire. I shudder to think what they’re going to do if I ever manage to move to a house or apartment with a working fireplace.

Anyway, I’d just gotten my monthly shipment of comic books a couple of days earlier, so after eating my ice cream soup I grabbed my flashlight and a blanket and a stack of comics and snuggled up on the sofa to read by flashlight. It felt very much like being a kid sneakily reading after lights-out, except without parents to come in and make me stop. Not that my parents ever minded if I read late. Being online or watching TV late at night were outlawed, but reading late was always okay, as long as I remembered it was my own fault when I was exhausted the next day from lack of sleep. So that’s how I spent last night, reading comics and Ray Bradbury short stories by candlelight and flashlight.

It was really kind of lovely. I almost wish the power went out more often. Though I would prefer if it would refrain from going out when David Cronenberg is on Alias. But I suppose the whims of the power company are not subject to my TV schedule.

I think a priest saw my bra today. This is probably the only time I will ever have a chance to write that sentence, so clearly I must seize the opportunity while it lasts.

My landlords are thinking of selling the house I live in, so a couple of times before they’ve asked if a real estate agent could come in and show potential buyers around my apartment. Which is fine. They give me some advance notice, I make sure the apartment isn’t so messy that the agent might get lost and never find her way out, I put up a big sign reminding them not to let the cats out, and all is well.

But today I got a call at work from my landlord telling me that he had a real estate agent, an architect, and Father Morgan over. (This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, doesn’t it? I get the agent and the architect, but I have no clue why a priest was involved unless maybe he’s one of the potential buyers.) He wanted to show them the apartment and wanted to know if I minded terribly even though he hadn’t given me advance warning this time. I wasn’t going to come home from work to deal with it, but told him that if he could dig up his spare key and do the letting-in and locking-up, that was fine with me, although the place was a bit of a mess.

It was only after I hung up that I remembered I had experienced a minor clothing freakout this morning, which had involved flinging various articles of clothing about the bedroom with reckless abandon. Including several bras and my days-of-the-week underwear. Which I had left lying on the bedroom floor thinking that I’d deal with cleaning up the mess when I got home since I was running late, not realizing that a bunch of strangers were going to wander through my apartment while I was out.

After work I went out to dinner and to run some errands with Len, so by the time I got home they’d long since been and gone. But sure enough there were half the contents of my underwear drawer lying out in plain sight to be seen by the agent, the architect, my landlord, and the priest. I am mostly amused, but also slightly mortified.

Clearly I need to keep up with my apartment cleaning better while this whole house-selling thing is going on, because a few dirty dishes in the sink and a lot of cat toys underfoot are one thing, but I strive for the type of landlord-tenant relationship that does not involve gratuitous displaying of undergarments.

It was snowing when I walked to work this morning, big fluffy wet flakes catching on my scarf and in my hair and my eyes. It wasn’t actually very cold, or maybe it just felt that way because there wasn’t much wind, so I walked slower than usual, catching snowflakes on my tongue. (Although perhaps that was just an excuse to stick my tongue out at the new Starbucks on the corner.)

It made me think of someone I used to be, what feels like a lifetime ago. There was once a boy who loved the way snowflakes would catch in my eyelashes and sparkle there until they melted, while our breath puffed out visible like dragonsmoke and I turned pink and giddy with the cold. We went for long winter walks in the dark, listening to the ice crunching under our boots. We would stop and watch the sideways snowfall thrown into sharp relief by the streetlights, and sometimes we would dance under those streetlights, slipping and almost falling and laughing and breathless.

I don’t think about that time in my life much, but when I do it’s usually to remember the bad things. It’s nice to remember that there were some good times too. I do have a general tendency when thinking about past friendships or relationships to remember the bad more than the good. I suppose in some cases that’s been a bit of a survival mechanism. But it’s not a particularly good way to live your life. I’d like to stop doing that, or at least do that less. Which is not a pending New Year’s resolution, because I don’t make those. Just a general note-to-self.

And in another, totally unrelated note-to-self… Self, next December please remember to look for the results of the Bad Sex Writing awards. They are quite amusing, and will also help break up the year while you wait for the annual Bulwer-Lytton awards.

I don’t remember whether I wrote about last Saturday, but it was a bit of a nightmare. I got stuck downtown in the middle of the annual Christmas Parade, and the buses weren’t running, and I was cold and tired and cranky and had to hide out in a department store to stay warm and waiting for the stupid parade to end.

So far, this Saturday is orders of magnitude better, with the sleeping in and a good book and the lack of screaming parade-goers or department store clerks bombarding me with perfume. Plus, snow! Lots of it! Sometimes the internet makes life awfully convenient. It’s just beautiful out, everything blanketed in inches of fluffy white snow. The trees are especially gorgeous. So I was thinking, hey, I should take some pictures of this. But then I got into an involved internal debate with myself about how that would involve putting on shoes and warm clothing and leaving my nice little blanket cocoon, which I wasn’t really quite ready to do this morning, and by the time I was ready the streets and sidewalks had been cleared and it wasn’t as beautiful anymore. But I just went to look at my daily round of journals, and it turns out that Joel posted pictures already. They’re not exactly what my pictures would be, given that he lives in a whole other part of town, but they’re close enough. Especially those trees. I just love the way bare trees look with inches of snow weighing down their branches.

The cats are displeased, because their favorite morning activity is watching squirrels perched in the tree outside my bedroom window, and the squirrels don’t seem to want to come out to play in snow that would come up over their heads. But I love the first proper snowfall every year, so I’m delighted. I have a firm belief that as long as the first real snowfall still fills me with joy each year, I’ll know that I haven’t become completely old and boring, and I’m definitely feeling the snow joy. So I guess I’ve been saved for at least one more year from having to admit that I am old and boring. But I think that’s all I have to say today, because I’m going to go back to the blanket cocoon with some hot chocolate and read for a while. Or possibly just sit quietly and revel in the extent to which I am not downtown in the middle of a parade right now.

It seems to be the time of year when the end-of-year “best of 2003″ lists come out. I suppose they may have these lists for all sorts of things, but it’s only the ones for books and movies that I pay attention to. And while on the one hand I love dissecting them and arguing about them and finding new things to read and watch, on the other hand I’m finding them a bit depressing.

I’ve done reasonably well in the movie-watching department this year, but I had such grand ambitions for all the reading I was going to do and much of it has fallen by the wayside. I was going to read more classics this year, and more books in translation, and more plays, and none of that really happened. I did get to a few things in those categories — The Iliad, a few Jose Saramago novels, a bit of a Tennesee Williams kick — but not nearly as many as I’d hoped. Or at least I don’t think I did. I know I’ll read at least a couple more books while I’m visiting my parents later this month, so I’m not going to go through the reading log until the end of the month. But then I’m going to put together the master list of things I read this year, and unless I’m forgetting some things I suspect it’s mostly going to be contemporary authors, overwhelmingly white and mostly men, almost entirely written in English, and an awful lot of re-reading to boot.

Which is fine because I love re-reading my old favorite books, but it does cut into time I could be spend reading all the millions of books I haven’t read yet. All of which is brought on by the New York Times notable book list for 2003. I’ve read a small handful of those books, have a couple more on my shelf waiting to be read, have heard of another handful, and the rest I’ve never heard of, but several of them sound really good and have been added to my already very long list of books to read. Even if all writing of new books stopped right now and I did no more re-reading for the rest of my life, I’d still never get to read all the things I want to read. This makes me sad.Why isn’t there a job where I could get paid well just to read exactly what I want to, all day long? Other than being a book critic, for which I am not qualified. Besides, I bet even book critics sometimes have to read books they don’t want to read.

On the less frustrated side of things, I’m pleased to see that I did moderately well with keeping my reading log all year long. I’d never managed to keep one for more than a few weeks before, so I’ve never had a whole year’s worth of reading habits to analyze. And because I am a colossal dork, I am excited about this. I’m considering logging both books and movies for 2004, although that could get rather frightening rather quickly.

And with that I have to end this, because the cats are driving me crazy. I keep thinking that one day I will write a nice polished journal entry that flows smoothly to a coherent well-written tidy ending. But that’s never going to happen as long as I keep writing these things in the evening, with the cats harassing me the entire time because they are convinced it is their dinnertime even though it most emphatically is not.

It’s always a little strange and uncomfortable when a conversation with my mother turns to the subject of my stepfather. Mostly because my relationship with him, while vastly improved since my bratty teenage days, is more than a little strange and uncomfortable itself.

It shouldn’t really be. He’s been as good a father to me as I would allow him to be, though I’ve always kept him at arm’s length, and certainly a million times the father that my biological father ever was. We’ve never had much to say to each other, and there’s been an unfortunate tendency for us to get caught up in our clashing politics or my small teenage rebellions, but he’s a genuinely good person if a bit old-fashioned, and a good father if a bit strict. Things were pretty tempestuous during my adolescence and high school years.

These days we have a congenial enough relationship but we’re not close. We never have been, and I think maybe it’s too late now. Everything is so careful. Every conversation, every action, so precise and tense and delicate as we edge around the minefields, the things I do that he disapproves of, the things he believes that horrify me. Five-minute conversations about the weather and my cats are so exhausting, we never even attempt anything else. Why disturb the relative peace we finally achieved once I moved out to go to college?

So when I’m having an email exchange with my mom and poking a bit of fun at some of the sillier gender-stereotyped beliefs he’s recently expressed, it throws me for a loop when she says something like “You know, even though he has trouble expressing it, he really thinks you and your sister are amazing, your strong beliefs and your backbones and how independent you are. Just amazing. He’s so proud of you both.”

I sit and stare at my computer screen. My eyes sting, and I’m glad my office door is closed. It never occurs to me that he might be proud of me. I don’t really do much that seems worth being proud of, and the things I am proud of about my life are exactly the things I’m pretty sure he doesn’t approve of, the things I don’t talk about when I visit because they’re little things but they’re mine and I don’t want them to be tarnished by his disappointment. So it confuses me, and startles me, and touches me to think he could feel that way about me. That maybe when I wasn’t looking he changed, or I did. That I might be a daughter to be proud of. Amazing, even.

I did the pouring-out-my-heart thing yesterday, so I think today I get to babble mindlessly about TV shows instead.  I seem to have them much on my mind today, because I’ve gotten to watch some dazzlingly good TV in the last couple of days and that’s such a rare treat with all the utter crap out there.

First, last night I watched the first three hours of the Angels in America miniseries. I guess these plays are really well known among people just a little older than I am, but I’m just a little young to have been paying much attention to what was going on in the theater world back in the early 90s. And I’m somewhat up on my queer cinema history, but not so much theater. So somehow I missed this whole thing until just now. Maybe it’s too soon to be dazzled, since I haven’t seen the second half of the miniseries yet, but I just loved the first half. I’ll need to watch it again to really form coherent thoughts on it, but I am definitely full of love for it. (And glad I just got around to watching the Cocteau Beauty and the Beast, or I would have totally missed understanding a big chunk of that dream sequence.) I can’t wait to see the second half next week, and to find copies of the plays somewhere. I had decided that one of my reading goals for next year should be to read more plays (and maybe if I get really adventurous and the local theaters cooperate and show some non-crap, to see some in person), so this will be a good starting place. Unless I get the mass quantities of Tennessee Williams plays on my Christmas list, and then I suppose I will have to work on those first. But I’m definitely going to read these Angels in America plays soon.

And then in other couch-potato news that is making me happy, the Firefly DVD boxed set came out today. It was supposed to be a Christmas present from my mother, but she took pity on me and had it sent to me straightaway, so I have passed most of the evening in a happy Firefly marathon. I loved this show so very much. Why must Fox insist on killing off any good TV it happens to luck into producing, in favor of yet more exploitative crap? I’m also boggling a bit about tonight’s 24, but in deference to a certain person who reads this and refuses to watch 24 until each season is over and can be watched in a marathon weekend, I will boggle silently so as not to ruin any surprises for him. Or more accurately, I will boggle over at the forum instead of here. Also, I will resolve not to say “boggle” again for at least a week after badly overusing it in this paragraph.

So there we have it. Yesterday my ongoing familial trauma, today my pop culture ramblings. Perhaps tomorrow I will even strike a balance of some sort. Or perhaps I will hole up and finish watching those Firefly DVDs instead. We’ll see.

My sister’s acceptance or rejection letter from the college she most wants to go is somewhere in the mail system right now. It could take up to four days to deliver, but it doesn’t have to go too far, so there’s a pretty good chance it could show up tomorrow. She sounds cool as a cucumber, but my mother and I are nervous wrecks.

I’ve probably just forgotten what it was like, but I really don’t remember being nearly this nervous about my own college acceptances. If I was, I don’t know how I got through it, since I was not nearly as collected and poised at that age as she is. (Hell, I’m not nearly as collected and poised now as she is. My sister is at least twice as cool as I will ever be. Possibly three or four times as cool.)

So that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing today, since work is very quiet with all the students holed up taking final exams — just exchanging emails with my mother, trying to figure out when the letter’s likely to arrive. Also discussing whether Bette Davis had giant bug eyes and who on earth decided it was a good idea to make a musical out of Ninotchka, but that was an entirely unrelated conversation.

That’s today, and then I’ll run a couple of errands, and then tonight’s likely to be quiet. I’ve got excruciatingly early clinic duty tomorrow morning, and then the evening should be busy with a Renaissance City Choir concert and dinner at Len’s place. Plus I believe it’ll be his roommate’s birthday, so I suppose there may be birthday drinking or shenanigans of some sort. Even if I squeeze in a nap midday, I’m still likely to be exhausted by tomorrow night. So I’m going to stay home tonight in the hopes that I can get to bed early and get some extra sleep. I think I will put on my cuddly fleece pajamas and order some Indian food and bake some cookies and watch some old movies and generally have a lazy solitary evening.

Wow, I got a bunch of hits from Holidailies just in the last couple of days. Hi, new people! You can find out the basic stuff about who I am here, and I will try to do a slightly more detailed similar thing in the next few days. But not today because I must get this thing written quickly so I can go get some dinner, becuase I am starving.

Moving on: I don’t want to shirk journal-writing duty on only the second day of Holidailies, lest Jette kick my ass or send me nasty email, but I haven’t had a single interesting thing happen all day so there hasn’t been anything much to write about. However, I just traipsed over to my forum to see if any amusing flame wars had broken out in the whole half hour since I’d last checked. Or if there were any new medical emergencies I should know about since half the forum seems to be coming down with horrible ailments and injuries. (I wonder if this is the vengeance of that annoying troll we banned last week?) And lo and behold, it turns out that our gathering has been finalized, and of the two weekends under consideration the planners have picked the weekend that is not my sister’s high school graduation.

So I can go, assuming I can find reasonable plane fare and someone to share the hotel room costs, and I am overjoyed. Which is a little odd, I suppose, given that it’s Las Vegas, which was high on the list of places I was never going to go. And that while I have had nothing but excellent times with the forum people I’ve met offline, there’ve never been dozens of them all at once, and I am bound to get all shy and weirded out. But somehow none of this is bothering me right now, although I’m sure I’ll freak out about it as the date approaches. Right now I am just squee-ing and bouncing about in my chair happily. So hey, forum folks who read this (or Len if you’re insane enough to want to come along), I am in the market for a roommate. I’m pretty quiet and snarky but friendly, won’t have four million people in the room until all hours, can deal quite happily with either smoking or non-smoking accomodations, and will do my best not to relate every topic of conversation back to Buffy.

Everyone else, tell me anything you know about that’s fun to do in Las Vegas other than gambling or getting married, neither of which are really my cup of tea.

I miss my Christmas tree. It’s kind of dumb of me to miss my Christmas tree, since last year was the first year that I even had one of my own. But I loved having my very own tree, and putting it up and decorating it exactly the way I wanted to, and having lots of shiny presents under it, and turning all the living room lights off to admire the sparkly lights shining off the silver bells, and the way the cats sniffed at the pine needles and buried themselves deep within the piles of boxes. I loved that whenever I walked in the front door I would be greeted with that pine tree smell.

It really doesn’t make any sense to have a tree this year. I’ll be spending Christmas with my family, and only Len and the cats would be here to enjoy the tree if I put one up, and none of them particularly care. The cats would drink all the water from the base and when I got back it would just be a dry brown husk of a tree, with no yummy pine smell at all. But I want a tree anyway. I have a little twelve-inch tree that is struggling valiantly to grow in its little pot, but I can’t bring myself to view a tiny little thing like that as a proper tree. So I am having one of those drawn-out internal dialogues where on alternate days I talk myself into or out of having a big tree.

I guess if I do this for long enough, the decision will be made for me because I won’t have time to get a tree since I’ll be on my way to the airport. I should probably learn a better decision-making paradigm at some point.

In other non-tree news, the big excitement of the weekend was my sister’s college letter. She got into her first choice early decision, and much joy ensued. Well, actually she woke me up from a nap to tell me the news, so I don’t think I was properly joyous. But I apologized later when I had woken up and expressed my joy properly. I’m very excited for her. I feel old all of a sudden, though. How on earth can my baby sister be going to college? In my head she’s still about twelve years old, sometimes more like five, and I don’t know how to fathom the notion that she’s about to go off and start her adult life.

It amazes me sometimes, how I can hold so much love and pride and protectiveness and admiration for one person in my heart without exploding. I know when she first came along all those years ago I wasn’ t thrilled about it, and it was a hard adjustment. But in hindsight, I think I can safely say that being a big sister has been easily one of the best and most rewarding things in my life so far. I’m not sure how good I am at it, but I sure do love it. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

What no one tells you when you become a community theatre geek at an early age is that you are making a decision that will scar you for life. And I’m not even talking about the trauma from spending three nights a week for months with the director who really truly believes he’s the next Wim Wenders and his staging of Hello, Dolly! will be a life-altering experience for all who see it. Or the way, a decade later, I still have vivid and disturbing memories of sharing a miniscule dressing room with a mother-daughter pair who wore matching undergarments and fought loudly over their attraction to the same men.

No, what I’m saying here is that no one tells you that even if you are the clumsiest dancer alive the damn choreography will burn itself into your brain cells and embed itself in your leg muscles. It’s been a good seven years since I’ve been in a theater production, but I was involved in them for six years or so before that, and I still find myself doing waltzes around the living room, and grapevining my way from the stove to the refrigerator while making dinner, and doing all manner of silly little kicky dance steps in the basement although I have no idea what they’re called.

This is all a little peculiar but I try not to fret about it too much, as long as no one else is around to observe my ridiculousness. The unfortunate thing I forget is that the buildings on my street are very close to each other. Unless I’ve remembered to close the blinds one set of neighbors can watch me waving my arms dramatically around the kitchen, and the other neighbors have surely seen me practicing my Cinderella curtsy more than once even though I’ll never get another chance to use it. It’s a good thing I am not one of those people who actually enjoys getting to know their neighbors other than the occasional “Hihowareyoubyenow” mumbled awkwardly if we happen to be taking our trash out to the curb at the same time. Because I’m sure that if the neighbors have ever glanced through their windows into mine, they think I am a complete nutcase. And also the worst dancer ever.

The invention of the instant message is a wonderful thing. Well, sometimes it’s annoying, especially since I’ve recently switched to Gaim and haven’t yet gotten around to changing their super-annoying default sound scheme. It sounds like happy little woodland fairies sprinkling pixie dust in my ears every time someone signs online or goes away, and it’s driving me nuts. But sometimes instant messages are a good thing because they allow me to have permanent records of some delightfully goofy conversations.

Like this morning’s:

L: in other news, isn’t cooking at home supposed to be cheaper than eating out?

me: in theory, but it doesn’t work out that way for me. i tend to figure that maybe if you know what you’re doing, and/or if you do it often enough that you have lots of ingredients on hand, it works out cheaper.

L: yeah, that’s what i figured. it cost me $30 to make dinner last night

me: damn grocery stores.

L: i’m thinking that maybe if i get in the habit of cooking often enough i’ll be able to do it more economically. and, you know, if i don’t cook for 4 people every night

Me: hm. i’m tempted to say that you should buy a house, and then you and i can cook together and it will be fun and only for two. but on the other hand, spending eighty thousand dollars so you can save ten bucks on dinner seems a little silly. we’d have to make sure to stay together for like, centuries for the cost to amortize out.

L: heheh me: so i think what we have to do is become undead, *then* buy a house.

L: i like that. it’s very….beetlejuice

me: i’m down with that, except can you not become a baldwin brother in the process? and if we reproduce, can our child not be winona ryder?

L: heh. affirmative on both

I went back and did some math later, though, and I think that ignoring all those little factors like mortgage and rent and house repairs and concentrating solely on dinner savings, if we bought a house now it would have paid for itself sometime around the time we retire. So we won’t even have to become bloodsucking fiends in order to afford groceries in our old age! I’m pretty excited about this. Who says financial planning isn’t fun?

Then again, I just got all misty because Beth’s latest journal entry seems terribly romantic to me, and I think it’s because of the man-eating grizzly bears rather than despite them. So perhaps my ideas about romance and cohabitation are a little skewed anyway, whether or not they’re based on reducing the grocery bill.

I was just sitting down to write a journal entry for the evening when I got a frantic email from my mother, which has now totally broken my concentration. My sister’s sick, scary-sick. She was absolutely fine yesterday and then today she’s running a 106-degree fever and nothing’s bringing it down. I know everyone’s sick right now, but a 106-degree fever is more than your average winter cold and makes me anxious. I don’t like my little sister being that sick when I’m not there. Not that there’s anything I could do about it if I were there. I’m very bad at taking care of sick people, and my mother’s very good at it, so my presence would be not at all helpful. But I still want to be there. If nothing else, I could tell stupid jokes or read to her or something.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I am now worried and have totally lost my journal-writing train of thought. Which is probably just as well. I think I was going to write about today’s hellish shopping experience, and really, does the world need one more online journal entry about the evils of December shopping? No, it does not. So, no real journal entry today. Instead just a few unrelated snippets in an attempt to distract myself while I’m waiting to hear whether they’ve managed to bring her fever down, or whether they’re going to take her to the emergency room.

Snippet 1: My stand mixer’s bowl cracked while I was making mango cream pie tonight. Usually I do not like my appliances breaking, but in this case I am overjoyed. This mixer is inherited from my mother and was purchased when I was in the third grade, so it is very old and battered, but I haven’t felt right about replacing it while it was in okay condition. But now it is broken and I have to get a new mixer anyway, which means — Kitchen-Aid! Shiny red Kitchen-Aid! I’ve been coveting one for years now, and now one will be mine in just a couple of months for my birthday. I may have to rearrange my kitchen just to showcase it as perfectly as possible.

Snippet 2: Usually being the moderator of the pop culture section over at a forum I frequent is a piece of cake, and fun besides with such a smart and snarky bunch of people. But a discussion about politics, racism, and Lord of the Rings is driving me nuts. I’m trying to be a good moderator and enforce spoiler rules, but since I wait to see these movies on DVD and have never read the whole trilogy, I have no earthly clue what happens in the last movie, or what things in the book aren’t in the movies and vice versa. So I have no idea what some of this discussion is even about, much less what might be a spoiler.

There’s an old Far Side cartoon where a man is talking to his dog Ginger and he’s scolding her, but most of the scolding goes right over her head and all she hears is “blah blah Ginger blah blah Ginger, blah blah blah Ginger!” That’s what this conversation is like to me. “Blah blah blah Aragorn, blah blah European imperialism, blah blah blah orcs, blah blah ideals of Christian servitude, blah blah Eowyn, blah blah political subtext, blah blah blah Dunedain.” I begin to suspect that there’s actually a conspiracy, and none of this stuff is even in the movie, everyone’s just making things up to drive me crazy because they know I can’t tell the difference.

Snippet 3: The cast recording for Wicked, the show I saw back in October, just came out. I wasn’t totally wild about the music but I got the recording anyway, because there were a few songs I liked, plus I just like having a collection of recordings of shows I’ve seen. So I’m listening to it, and I’m all moved and weepy and stuff. I can’t figure out whether I was underestimating the music before, or whether I am just having those crazy mood swings that make me think everything is deeply moving and emotional.

I really need to learn not to go all out of control with my baking. I love baking, but was it strictly necessary to bake two mango cream pies, a loaf of cinnamon bread, and a pan of coconut-pecan bars, all this weekend? Especially when I’ll be away from home for most of the week, so I really have to eat all this stuff right away or risk it going bad while I’m gone? At least Len will be here to cat-sit, and I have hope that he will polish off some of the pie. But still, I should learn to time these things better.

That said, these coconut-pecan things are insanely good. Every so often when I’m perusing my Joy of Cooking looking for something new to bake, I look at this recipe but I never actually make it because they’re called “Angel Bars” with the alternate name “Dream Bars,” which is so twee I can barely type it. But this weekend I decided to give them a try, because I am always on the lookout for recipe that will be fun for me to bake, and tasty for me to eat, without being so chocolatey that Len won’t like it. (Which sounds all thoughtful and considerate of his preferences, but really it’s just that I need him to like what I bake because otherwise I will eat it all myself and get really ill.) They are so good. I want to live on them, although first I would like to tinker with the recipe a little because the bottom layer came out too crumbly.

So that’s what I did all weekend. I baked and then I baked and then I baked some more. There was also some errand-running, but it mostly involved hunting down groceries and appliances to be used in my baking process, or Len’s curry-cooking process. I guess we did buy a snow shovel which had nothing to do with food preparation, but that involved a harrowing and soul-crushing trip to Target and I’m trying to block out the whole experience. Last night there was a bit of socializing as the curry and pie were eaten, but I was very tired and I think not much company. Though on the way home I did get into a spirited discussion with Mo and Anna as we tried to plan a New Year’s Eve party.  I’m convinced that for the first New Year’s Eve I spent with Len, we went to a party at Mo’s house. But Mo swears he was in Maine that year. I wonder if it’s possible that there was a party at his house for which he was not actually present? I suppose with Mo nothing is impossible.

The question remains unresolved, but I was amused to note that we all count our years by such means as “The Year I Dropped Out Of College” or “The Year I Broke Up With That Jerk” or “The Year I Got That Tattoo I Kind Of Regret.” I’m always in awe of people who actually remember when things happened without having to resort to these involved debates about which stupid things they did in which year.

Tomorrow I’m off to the parental units’ place for a few days. I may commandeer a spare laptop, but it’s more likely that I just won’t update until I get back. Notify list people will probably get an email update or two, if anyone wants to sign up (or remove yourself from the list) over on the left of the main journal page.

This totally doesn’t count as a real journal entry for today. But I was just super-productive and did a ton of dishes and laundry and even a little vacuuming, so I get to cheat on a journal entry. Besides, I really want to get at least some of the film festival stuff online before I lose my Toronto notebook. I present the complete list of films I saw at the film festival. You may now marvel at either my stupidity, my stamina, or both.

The Movies:

Saturday, Sep. 6: Short films by Jennifer Reeves (Fear of Blushing and He Walked Away) and Pat O’Neill (Let’s Make a Sandwich and Horizontal Boundaries Second Projection.)

Sunday, Sep. 7: Short films by Nathaniel Dorsky (The Visitation), Stan Brakhage (Chinese Series and Stan’s Window), Phil Solomon (Psalm III: Night of the Meek), and a Solomon/Brakhage collaboration (Seasons…).

Monday, Sep. 8: Jesus, Du Weisst (Ulrich Seidl), The Story of the Weeping Camel (Luigi Falorni and Byambasuren Davaa), and The Fog of War (Errol Morris).

Tuesday, Sep. 9: Milwaukee, Minnesota (Allan Mindel), On the Corner (Nathaniel Geary) screened with the short film Sometimes a Voice (Simon Davidson), and At Five in the Afternoon (Samira Makhmalbaf)

Wednesday, Sep. 10: The School of Rock (Richard Linklater) and Coffee & Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch). Then skipped a short film collection because we were bad hooky-playing filmgoers. Plus Jim Jarmusch wouldn’t shut up. (And really, who would want him to?)

Thursday, Sep. 11: Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill) and another short film collection. Short films were: Guest Room (Skander Halim), Animal Nightmares (Peter Lynch), Terminal Venus (Alexandre Franchi), Perfect (Boris Rodriguez), Wildflowers (Geoffrey Uloth), and DNA (Jack Blum).

Friday, Sep. 12: More short films! This batch were: Todd and the Book of Pure Evil (Craig D. Wallace), The Truth About Head (Dale Heslip), Exposures (Matt Sinclair-Foreman), Song of Wreckage (Ryan Redford), Pop Song (Charles Officer), and L’Ultima Notte (Mathieu Guez). Later on, The Corporation (Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott) and Silence Between Two Thoughts (Babak Payami).

Saturday, Sep. 13: Hollywood North (Peter O’Brian), O homem do ano (Jose Fonseca), and The Five Obstructions (Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier)

Huzzah! Internet connectivity! I commandeered the spare family laptop for the length of my visit. Although I’m not so sure it will actually hold out for the length of my visit. This is a sad, sick machine, which periodically emits mournful honks, and/or sits whirring for minutes at a time before deciding whether to actually open up a web browser or display desktop icons. And I am notoriously hard on laptops, so this laptop and I are probably not the best matchup. But it’s just for a few days, so hopefully we will survive each other.

This paragraph is being written half an hour after the above one, and I’ve totally lost my train of thought. My sister and I were called downstairs to remove the netting from the Christmas tree. For some reason that I can no longer figure out, she and I used to think this was the coolest part of putting up the tree. I think maybe we liked the way, depending on where you cut the netting, sometimes all of a sudden you will release a giant tree branch that will come flying out with a whooshing sound. I guess we thought maybe having our eyes poked out would be exciting. After all, it’s not really Christmas unless someone suffers grievous bodily harm.

Anyway, we’ve grown a bit past being overjoyed by plastic netting, but removing it is still our job. So we just went down to do that, which turned out to be much more of an adventure than most years. I always used to be in charge of the top half of the tree and she would be in charge of the bottom half, although she’s almost as tall as I am now so there’s really no reason to do it that way anymore. We’re just creatures of habit. So we started in on our respective tree halves, and then the mishaps started. First she cleared a big chunk of netting, and several giant branches fell to the ground all around the tree with a thud. Apparently the guy at the tree farm bound up the tree before trimming the trunk, so there were several disconnected branches left in the netting, all of which leapt out to attack my sister. They are now scattered haphazardly around the living room floor, and I’m sure any moment the dog will find them and proceed to drool all over them with great joy.

Once we’d recovered from that, I realized that the tree was too tall for me to reach the top. Which was actually pretty cool. Christmas trees have never really been the same since I got tall enough to put the decorations at the top. But now that my parents have this new room with a high ceiling they got a bigger tree than usual, so I get to relive the sensation of being a little kid and having the tree seem gigantic. It does pose a problem when trying to remove the netting, though.

I waved my arms around and jumped, to no avail. Giant clump of netting still stuck. Then my sister and I tried to convince ourselves that a giant clump of netting could be considered a tree-topper decoration, since we don’t have an angel or a star anyway. Finally I got onto a stepladder, wobbling madly all the way, but I still couldn’t reach. She saved the day by handing me a roll of wrapping paper, which I wielded like a sword, stretching up to hook the netting and work it free of the branches, laughing the entire time and almost falling off the stepladder twice. We all survived the ordeal, though, and now we have a pretty and good-smelling tree in the living room. If we get really ambitious, it may even have lights and a few ornaments up by this evening. But I suspect we may be going the minimalist tree route this year.

The laptop is honking and whirring suspiciously again. I think I’d better hurry up and get this posted before the laptop swallows it forever in a fit of pique. Nothing terribly exciting is likely to happen for the rest of the day anyway, just lots of lazing about and reading and listening on on the heated debate my sister and mother are having about the revisions needed for her latest English paper.

Tomorrow, out-of-control consumerism, plus possibly a trip to the movie theater to see Big Fish. I’ve never been to the mall on Christmas before. I’m a little afraid, although maybe everyone will stay home and the mall will actually be okay.

I want to write a journal entry. I really do. I feel badly about not being able to update for a few days since the World’s Most Godawful Laptop was driving me crazy and making it not at all worthwhile to even try any serious internet usage.

However, I cannot write a proper journal entry. Because: Readerware! A database of all my books and CDs and videos and comic books! That will let me reorganize my books in accordance with the Dewey Decimal system! Most importantly, a bar code scanner so I don’t have to do it manually! I have spent a great chunk of the day, and intend to spend most of the evening, merrily scanning every bar code I can find into my shiny new software.

This is great fun, but I’m afraid it doesn’t make for scintillating journalling material. That will have to wait. Besides, all I really did while in NJ was try to entertain my half-dead-with-the-monkey-death-flu sister, eat lots of my mom’s yummy cooking, try to get my childhood cat to like me again, have some necessary but boring conversations about investing my inheritance, and then play with all my shiny new Christmas toys. Then last night I came home, unpacked, and flopped on the sofa to recover from the joy of the airport two days after Christmas. This morning, breakfast with a couple of old friends of Len’s, each of whom I had heard a lot about but never actually met since they’ve been out of the state for the past several years. That was fun (and tasty), and I’m pleased to finally have faces and personalities to put with the names.

But then I came home and installed my library database software, and that somehow sucked away my entire day. So of course now I’m going right back to it once I post this. Occasionally I wonder if I should be concerned about the types of things I find deeply entertaining.

This will be a relatively short entry today. I’m deeply engrossed in one of my Christmas books, The Brothers K, and being online or eating breakfast or anything at all just seems like wasted time I could be spending reading this book with which I am in love. Even though it makes no sense for me to be in love with it since it seems to be largely about baseball and religion, two things that bore me completely silly as a general rule but aren’t boring me in this case.

Anyway, today is mostly going to be a reading day until it’s time to have dinner with Len. But it did occur to me that it was the last day of the month and even though I’ve been very bad about my supposed plan to update every day, I might at least make an effort for the last day. So here I am. But even though it seems as if almost everyone else is doing it, I’m not doing an end-of-year review-and-resolutions thing. I’m just not. I hardly ever make resolutions, and when I do, I never keep them. I was very careful not to think of this year’s book log as a resolution, and I did wind up keeping it all year, if a bit sporadically. I’m going to do it again next year, and a movie log too, but it’s not a resolution. It’s a plan. I’m not sure what the difference is, but somehow calling it a plan tricks the circuit in my brain that blows up whenever I think about having a resolution instead of a plan. Sometimes I wonder whether other people have to play weird tricks on their own brains in order to get through the day, or whether that’s just my own personal dysfunction.

So, no end-of-year stuff. I’m turning 25 in a couple of months and while I feel fine about it right now, I suppose I’ll probably have a spontaneous oh-my-god-I’m-halfway-through-my-twenties-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life crisis then. So I’ll save the obsessive overanalysis of my past until then and get it all out of the way at once. I’m efficient like that. Now back to my book. Which is breaking my heart, by the way. If I never update again, it will be because this book broke my heart into a thousand little pieces and I curled up and died. But hopefully not before finishing it.