The Ride Home

I hate to say that I’m making New Year’s resolutions because that always seems like such an invitation for failure. (A therapist might have a field day with this proof of my rejection of authority going so far as rejecting my own, I know.)

But there are some things that I would like to focus on to improve my state of being, and I suppose this would be a good time to put them in writing. So:

1. Write in a paper journal once per day. One of my friends at work is pursuing a degree in psychology, and we often discuss memory. One such discussion revolved around the connection that is made between the mind and what is written and how the connection is stronger when the writing is done by hand. As in, with a pen or pencil, not on a computer. And so while I also want to blog more often, I’m going to make it a point to jot down at least one paragraph—hell, one sentence even—per day in a journal.




2. Take one picture every day. I’ve attempted Project365 twice before, and each time failed to take a picture every day. I’m going to lower the standards this time even further and allow myself to take every freaking day’s picture with my iPhone if that’s what it takes. No pressure to capture the entire day’s atmosphere in one shot, no post-processing necessary. Just one snapshot per day. Uploaded to Flickr here.




3. Eat healthier. Weight-loss isn’t really a goal here, though I can’t lie and say it wouldn’t be nice. But my main goal here is to get my guts to stop revolting against me, something that was basically cured in my first year being vegetarian. But then I stopped getting my food from a CSA, which inevitably led to consuming a lot of frozen pizzas. I’ve rejoined the CSA this winter and paid in full up-front, so I kind of need to be committed to eating all of the great fresh food that they bring me or I’m going to be the kind of asshole that wastes several hundred dollars. And I don’t want to be that asshole. I want to be a healthy eater who doesn’t get sick after every meal.




4. Read more. I used to devour books when I was a kid. By the time I made it to high school, I was asked repeatedly by teachers if my parents had sent me to speed-reading classes (they hadn’t) because my retention was ridiculously high for the amount of time it took me to finish books. (In middle school I finished this 181-page book in two 45-minute class periods and the teacher didn’t believe me that I’d read it until I gave her a run-down of the entire story. I then gave my copy of the book to a classmate who couldn’t buy his own and who had been having to borrow the teacher’s after school to stay caught up. The rest of the class finished the book in about two weeks. I spent that time reading a few other books of my choosing. Yes, I was a nerd.)
   
   
   Anyway, as I grew older I got busier, and even today I mostly prefer video games to books when I have a chunk of free time staring me in the face. But then I bought my iPad and installed the Kindle app, and I remembered how much I loved getting lost in a good story. I’ve been reading a lot more lately, and I’d like to keep up the momentum.




5. Move to Nashville. Ian and I carpool every day for our 80-mile round-trip commute, and while I enjoy having time to spend with him, whether it’s spent sitting silently watching the landscape roll by or chatting, the drive is getting old. Traffic sucks, and even when it doesn’t I’m still looking at a minimum of 90 minutes in the car every day. We’ve been threatening to move for years now, but I’m hoping that this will be the year. I will miss Murfreesboro, but I won’t miss the soul-crushing commute (especially when the weather is bad and I have to wonder if driving in to work ahead of a storm will mean I won’t be able to make it back home that evening).

We’ll see how it goes, I guess.

I feel more energized at the first of a year than I have in a while. I’m not entirely sure why, and I’m not sure there really is a reason, but I’m going with it.

2011 was a great year. Ian and I took several great trips (New Orleans for St. Patrick’s Day, Bonnaroo with my sister Emily, Asheville for our anniversary in October, and several camping excursions in state parks), spent a good amount of time with our friends and families (mostly his family, though mine came down to visit for an epic Thanksgiving) and were generally healthy.

After some time of feeling I was in a rut professionally, I was offered a job in April (without even interviewing!)—and after about a week of hardcore obsessing and analyzing, I took it. And while I was sad to leave my great co-workers at my previous job, I joined an amazing, innovative company with new great co-workers. Who upped the nerd ante by like a billion. And teach me stuff. And drink a lot of beer. It’s awesome.

The year wasn’t all good, though—my 94-year-old grandmother died in May after being in declining health for several years. And while I miss her at the oddest times still (hearing O Come All Ye Faithful in Kroger almost brought me to tears at least twice this holiday season), I know that she wasn’t happy laying in a nursing home bed. She was ready to go.

But! All in all, it was a pretty good year. I didn’t take pictures every day, but I did take a lot. And looking back on the year in pictures, a lot of great stuff happened in 2011:

January: Welcomed in the new year with awesome friends at a party that included me getting $100 for cleaning up a friend’s vomit. (It’s OK, I was at a level of non-sobriety where I couldn’t smell anything.)

February: There was, according to Nashville standards, a horrible snowstorm and it took me FIVE HOURS to get home. Two and a half hours were spent drive five miles to pick up Ian, and the last two and a half hours were spent driving 30 miles home. This doesn’t really count as a great thing that happened, but it was the most notable thing in February.

March: St. Patrick’s Day in New Orleans. Oh yes.

April: The new wedding band that Ian ordered me was delivered. It’s still perfectly me. Oh, and I accepted a new job.

May: Started my new job. And Ian and I went to the Renaissance Festival!

June: BONNAROO!!!

July: Bought my MacBook Pro! With CASH! And Ian, Scott and I completed the Paddle of Destiny at the Mellow Mushroom.

August: Emily and her friend Steph came to visit. We went to the Bell Witch Cave, hung out in downtown Nashville and played Rock Band.

September: Successfully replaced the hard drive in our PowerBook, a beautiful machine that someone dropped on the floor.

October: Ian and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary in Asheville. My favorite place with my favorite person.

November: My family came to visit for Thanksgiving.

December: Ian had his promotion ceremony at work. Got all my Christmas shopping done well before Christmas. Celebrated the holidays with Ian, his family, our cats and our friends.

Here’s hoping for an equally great—or better—2012. (And no Mayan apocalypse.)

I haven’t really had the urge to blog lately, though I don’t think it’s because I’ve been super-busy. I mean, I have been, but that’s never been an excuse to not blog. Ugh, I don’t mean for this to turn into one of those “Sorry I haven’t updated lately!” posts, either, because I hate those. I only blog for myself, so if anything this is an apology to my future self when I come back here to figure out what I was doing in the fall and winter of 2011 and there’s no record of my life.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out Nov. 11, which was a game I’d been looking forward to for about five years. It’s consumed my weekends lately, and some weeknights. It’s worth it, though. It’s the third Elder Scrolls game I’ve played but the first I’ve played on the Playstation platform (I played Morrowind and Oblivion on the Xbox and Xbox 360, respectively), and there have been some freezing bugs that I’ve had to work through, but for the most part I’m pleased with the game on the platform. I bought it for the Playstation because that’s the system that’s got Internet access, so I’m crossing my fingers for some sweet DLC.

And despite the fact that I’m not Christian and I do not, in fact, try to keep the Christ in Christmas, I’ve really been enjoying this holiday season. I have finished all of my holiday shopping, and I was able to complete about 99 percent of it online. Actually, being able to avoid rabid asshole shoppers is probably why I’ve been able to enjoy the season.

I decorated our bookshelf with big colorful lights, our living room window with small, warm white lights, and the kitchen cabinets with light-up stars. I’ve already burned through my WoodWick pine-scented candle, but another one is on the way. I used to get bummed out that we couldn’t have a tree in the house because of the cats, but I think I like our tradition of decorating the bookshelf and putting presents underneath it better, anyway. No trees are killed, no sap stains the floor and the cats really don’t give a shit about trying to eat the lights after about 20 minutes of them being up.

To me, Christmas is completely secular. It’s that feeling when the air has turned bitterly cold but the house is warm, and turning on sparkly lights and sitting under the Slanket on the couch with Ian and the cats makes it even warmer. It’s sharing wine and good food with friends and family as we exchange gifts and cards. It’s the smell of pine or mistletoe-scented candles that crackle as I fall asleep on the couch each night.

It’s a last bastion of contentedness before we move into the doldrums of winter, which always bring with them a boring nothingness that drags on until the terrain begins to green again in the spring.

But for now the lights are up and the candle is lit, and it’s Christmas.

For the first time in… I don’t know, 12 years or so, I was able to celebrate Thanksgiving with my mom and both of my sisters. My two sisters came down to visit last year, too, but this year my mom came along and it was awesome. After 14 years of living in Tennessee I’ve gotten used to crashing friends’ houses, and Ian’s family adopted me as their own years ago, even before we dated, but there’s just something special about having my own family with me for a holiday.

And we had a full house: My mom, two sisters, brother-in-law and two pomeranians (Isu and Oreo, who belong to my sister and brother-in-law) piled in the car and drove down Wednesday, staying until Sunday morning. I wasn’t sure how bringing two small dogs into a four-cat household would work out, but it actually went better than I could have expected. (Except for one incident where Gordo, the oldest cat, got upset and peed on the couch where the dogs had been sitting, hitting my mom’s leg in the process. Sorry about that, mom.)

We packed a lot in: Thursday was Thanksgiving at Ian’s mom’s house, which, like any Southern Thanksgiving, was an all-day affair complete with a deep-fried turkey and plenty of booze. Friday we held Steaksgiving at our house, where Ian grilled steaks and we cooked for 10 people, including his dad, dad’s wife, sister and our nephew. Considering we only have a table that seats four I think we pulled it off OK, even if I did get a little stressed as our three-year-old nephew began grinding cheese into the floor and feeding the dogs crackers, leaving crumbs everywhere. Nothing a little Windex and wine won’t fix, though. (And thankfully we had wine—Ian’s dad, my mom and I together drank four bottles in just a few hours.)

Saturday was Ian’s birthday and he wanted to go to the shooting range, so he and my brother-in-law went up to On Target while my sisters, mom and I took the dogs for a nice long walk on the Greenway and then hit up Digital Planet. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m glad now that we were part of Small Business Saturday. Although we did eat lunch at Panera, so I guess we also celebrated Chain Restaurant That Is Pretty Healthy for Fast Food Saturday as well.

That night we all went out to Mellow Mushroom for dinner and more drinks (as with any good Irish/German family, this holiday weekend was very heavy on the booze), and then came back home so Katie and I could sing the shit out of some Rock Band songs. They left Sunday morning, and Ian and I laid around the house nursing hangovers and doing laundry.

And now it’s back to the grind, though my mind is trying to focus on Christmas shopping. It’s also focused on how irritated I get when people tell me I shouldn’t say “Happy Holidays,” but that’s another post for another day.

I hadn’t formed a full-fledged opinion on the Occupy[ ] protests yet, but when I learned that Tennessee Gov. Haslam ordered the Tennessee Highway Patrol to arrest the protesters—who were peaceably assembled and exercising their First Amendment right—I realized it didn’t matter what I thought. Because agree or disagree with the reason, they have the right to protest. But apparently our governor decided to squash that right—which should concern any resident of Tennessee, no matter what your political or economic stance is.

As usual, Aunt B. explains it better than I ever could:

I want to say that, when you live in a state where they make up “laws” on the fly AND wait until the middle of the night to arrest people for violating those made-up on the fly laws so that their actions remain hidden from citizens, when they wait until the middle of the night to arrest people AND they arrest journalists so that your ability to learn about what happened is curtailed, it’s sobering.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s also telling that after two nights of arrests, and two nights of the night court judge releasing those arrested because they were brought in under a newly created law that he deemed unconstitutional, last night there were no more arrests. So did someone finally bring Haslam a copy of the constitution? Did he realize that arresting people under the guise of “it’s for their own safety!” was bullshit and victim-blaming at its finest? Did the THP buck their orders and refuse to arrest people that weren’t breaking any actual law?

I’m interested in how this will play out. Our state has had its fair share of PR nightmares lately thanks to some small-minded racists. I wonder if we’ll make The Daily Show for our leader attempting to take away our First Amendment rights? I hope so. Because I think it’s going to take more than local dissent for Haslam to get what he’s doing is wrong.