Three years and a couple of days ago, someone joined our family.
He may be welcome to stay now. I mean, the jury’s out, but I’d say that things are leaning in his favor.
One Memory of Each Grandmother
I never knew my grandfathers. Both had passed away long before I arrived on the scene. My grandmothers, though? Both lived into my teens, when–quite sadly–both passed away within about six months of each other. Grammy, my father’s mother, went first in the fall of 1986. Gramma, my mother’s mother, passed later that winter (or maybe it was early spring). Here’s a memory I have from each.
Over the last seven or eight years or so, my tastes in adult beverages have shifted from beer to wine and cocktails. My favorite cocktails tend to be rum-based, with my favorites being the Mojito and the Dark-and-Stormy, but over the last few months I’ve discovered Grammy’s favorite cocktail, the classic Manhattan.
Grammy simply adored Manhattans. I don’t know of a time when I wasn’t aware that there was a drink called a Manhattan and that it was Grammy’s favorite drink. One time, toward the end of her life, she was visiting us for a week or two. By this point she was starting to experience some problems with her mobility, but when my father invited her “down the street” (his longtime euphemism for “going to the bar”) for a Manhattan, well, suddenly she was a bit more spry. My mother later told me that when I was just a toddler and my family was moving from Pittsburgh to Portland, OR, Grammy gave her a bottle of Manhattans to see her through the trip.
So I decided a while back to try making a Manhattan, mainly out of curiosity. I have several books on mixology, so I grabbed a recipe and picked up the ingredients and had a go. The base recipe I use is as follows:
Stir together in a mixing cup with 1 ice cube:
2 parts bourbon
1 part sweet Vermouth
dash of Angostura bittersStir for at least twenty revolutions of the bar spoon (yes, I count them), and then pour over ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with at least two Maraschino cherries.
There are recipes out there that call for both sweet and dry Vermouth, but I haven’t tried that mainly because I don’t have room in the fridge for two open bottles of Vermouth. I have also used Red Stag whiskey, which has a black cherry flavor. One thing I don’t do consistently is include the Maraschino cherries, and I have received stern lectures on this from both my mother and my sister. I like the cherries, but too often our jar of them migrates to the rear of the fridge, and who wants to dig through cups of yogurt and jars of pickles and partial cans of tomato paste and who knows what else every time they want a drink? Not me…but for purism’s sake I should probably get with the program.
Besides, the cherries also pertain to Grammy specifically, because she could put the stem in her mouth and tie it in a knot with her tongue. That’s some serious stuff, folks. Everyone’s grandmother should have at least one eye-popping useless skill, right?
Gramma’s Blue Jug
I expect that everyone’s grandmother had a particular item in their home, just some ordinary thing that was just an unremarked and unremarkable part of their daily lives, that stays in our memory. We remember this item not for any specific event that we recall in which it played a part; it’s just that this particular item, whatever it might be, serves as a kind of totem for a particular time and place. If we’re very lucky, we inherit that item. If we’re kind of lucky, we at least see one just like it once in a while at an antique store.
For Gramma, it was a blue ceramic jug.
At her house it always contained ice water. She’d fill it from the tap and put it in the fridge, and I don’t remember any ice water in my life ever being so cold and refreshing as that from Gramma’s blue ceramic jug. Now, ceramic is a good material for such things because it takes its sweet time in transferring heat. Cold ceramic stays cold (or hot) for a long time. Water from that jug couldn’t have physically been colder than anything else in that fridge, but for some reason it felt like it was. This jug was blue, and it was circular in profile with the handle a part of the circle as opposed to being its own protrusion. The cork-inlay stopper matched as well.
As far as I know, Gramma had that jug in her fridge up ’til the day she died. I have no idea what happened to the jug after that. Gramma lived with my Uncle Bob, who wasn’t…well, let’s just say that Uncle Bob was not a terribly easy man to like and leave it at that. Inheriting the jug wasn’t a possibility, and that was that.
Some years later, my sister managed to find one in an antique store, and she bought it for my mother, who was ecstatic to have the jug. For her, it didn’t even matter that it wasn’t the very jug from Gramma’s kitchen. The color was the same, the jug was the same, and for her it was every bit as good as having the real thing. I’m not so avid an antiquer as my sister, but I do go to antique stores a few times a year and I’ve always kept an eye out for the same jug. I’ve never yet seen one “in the wild”, but I would have bought one if I’d seen it and the price was right. If it was too much, well–I’d look at it in the case and remember drinking out of Gramma’s and move on.
Flash forward to just last week, when I went to an antique mall near Rochester, NY with my sister. She found one of the jugs, in the right shade of blue. She bought it and gave it to me. It turns out that she’s seen several of them over the years and now she owns two of her own back home, where she lives in Colorado. She was even planning to give one of those to me, but when she saw one right then and there, she figured it would save her some future postage (as well as worry about shipping an antique ceramic jug). How did I not see it, since we were at the same mall? Well, the mall is huge, so when we entered we each went a different direction. Had we reversed course, I might have seen it first and snapped it up.
Anyway, I agree with my mother: having a jug that’s exactly the same is pretty much every bit as good as having Gramma’s original jug. Right now it’s on a shelf in my study. Will I use it as a jug in the fridge, filled with ice water for a hot summer day? I don’t know yet. I sure like looking at it, though.
I could, I suppose, mix up a big batch of Manhattans and keep them in the jug in the fridge. That would be a poetic tribute to two wonderful grandmothers….
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Box of Dreams
Last week while my sister was visiting from out of town she and I went antiquing. I enjoy antiquing, but she absolutely loves it, and she did some research and found a huge antiques mall located in Canandaigua, NY, which is an easy hour-and-a-half drive from Casa Jaquandor. Among a few other things, I bought this lovely box:
At the time I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but it’s really nice! Well-put-together, with that lovely soft lining. Obviously it’s meant for jewelry (or so I think), and I don’t own much jewelry of my own, but I couldn’t pass it up.
And then, a few days later, the obvious thing to keep in the box–at least the top part–occurred to me.
Behold my entire collection of fountain pens!
That makes me happy. I’ve been rekindling my love of fountain pens of late, and this is a much better way of holding them than standing them all up in a mug, which is what I had been doing.
However, looking at this set-up, it appears that I have no more space for any more fountain pens. Hmmmmm…maybe next time we go to that antiques mall, I’ll look for another box!
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On choosing happiness
A lot of people I know–most people I know, likely—struggle with happiness. They struggle with keeping it once it’s found, and they struggle with finding it in the first place. Some struggle more mightily than that: some have to fight just to believe that happiness is a thing in the first place.
This is why I have problems when people say things like “Happiness is a choice” or otherwise imply (or state outright!) that one can simply decide to be happy. As if happiness is a simple matter of flipping a mental switch.
It’s not.
I had this exchange on Twitter the other day. An acquaintance whom I know to be very smart and energetic and hard-working in the pursuit of the concrete goals which she has set for herself asked this question:
Why is it this hard to be happy?
My answer (and I must grant that maybe she wasn’t even looking for an answer) was this:
In my experience, happiness is like anything else worth having: it requires constant work and can be fleeting.
She thanked me, and that was the end of the exchange.
But there was another exchange earlier that day, this time on Instagram, when someone posted in response to a particular selfie of mine:
I wish to enjoy life the way you do.
That amazed me, because there are many times when I feel as unhappy as anyone else. When I feel like true, enduring happiness is forever beyond my grasp, and that all I can achieve are discrete moments of happiness—a hint of it here, a taste of it there—without ever really being happy.
Other times, I feel just fine—but those moments of melancholy are frequent enough that I recognize them well. But I thought about that comment a lot, about how I look to some outside observers like a person who greatly enjoys life, and some thoughts crystalized.
Here’s the photo that earned that comment:
Just a normal photo of me, decked out in blue denim Dickies overalls and a red henley shirt, standing knee deep in a stream with a tiny waterfall behind me.
Most Sunday mornings I have a ritual: Cane (or Dee-oh-gee 1.0) go out to one of the local nature parks or other such locations for a nice walk or hike, and then a stop at Tim Hortons on the way home for coffee (for me) and a donut (for him). I always take a bunch of photos as we walk. Cane smells things and looks at things and enjoys his change of scenery. One of our most common locations is Chestnut Ridge Park, which is in the hills just south of Orchard Park. It’s one of my favorite locales because of its rugged terrain, its numerous trails, and the several streams that flow through. (I’ll have a longer “Chestnut Ridge appreciation” post at some point.)
So it was a pleasantly warm morning, and Cane and I went wading in one of the streams. As you start getting to midsummer, the water levels can be iffy. Last year this area experienced a significant (for these parts) drought, which led to the streams being mostly dry for much of the summer. It’s been wetter this year, so there’s been a nice amount of water flowing thus far, and as long as I can recall, I’ve loved wading and swimming and generally frolicking in running streams in the forests. There’s a spot in Chestnut Ridge where the stream (which in most places isn’t much more than ankle deep, or maybe midway up my shins) plunges over a waterfall.
I know, not much of a waterfall—the mighty cataract is about eighteen inches, two feet max. But the sound is pleasant and the pool at the bottom is two, maybe two-and-a-half feet deep. And even better, this spot is a place where nobody almost ever goes! In all the time I’ve been going to Chestnut Ridge I’ve seen someone in that spot exactly twice. It’s easy to get to and it’s really close to the main road through the park, and yet it’s not obvious that it’s there, so almost no one treks down there. It’s a quiet little idyllic spot hidden in plain sight, which is one reason I love it.
This particular day was sunny and warm and very pleasant, and the water was pleasingly cool, so I waded into that deeper pool, up to my knees. This was pleasant enough, but there are times when the world whispers an invitation into your ear, and it was impossible to ignore. So I sat down in the water, fully clothed, overalls and all. (I emptied my pockets first.)
Like I said, I’ve always loved running water and streams and especially forest streams, going back to whitewater kayaking I did as a teenager and ever farther. It’s hard-wired into me, so much so that I doubt I’ll ever voluntarily move to a place where there are no such places. A summer hike, to me, implies the existence of a spot somewhere along the hike where I can, if I’m hot and if the water is cool, just jump in for a few minutes.
The trade-off is that I spent the rest of the hike in clothes that were soaked from neck to toe, but that wasn’t unpleasant in the least. In fact, it kept me pretty cool. And because I keep towels in the car, I didn’t even sully the driver’s seat. A good time was had by all.
So I suppose I did appear, in those photos, to be enjoying life particularly well, and I really was. It was a set of wonderful moments. Sitting in the water with my back to that waterfall, feeling it rush around me? That was a connection of a kind I rarely feel. And that was some real happiness, right there.
Thinking about these two exchanges, I have also thought of a passage I wrote in Stardancer several years ago. There’s a beautiful moment that comes for Tariana, and one of her quirks is that she always remembers quotes from poems and books she’s read as things happen to her. It’s how her brain filters her experiences. In this moment, she remembers the words:
A life is a collection of moments. We are shaped by the moments we remember.
Maybe I was having thoughts like these all those years ago when I was writing the book, and maybe I had these thoughts before that. But after thinking through these two exchanges online, I realize: I genuinely do see life as a sequence of moments, and I genuinely do believe that happiness as a large-scale, enduring goal is not the right way to view happiness. All we can do is try to maximize the number of happy moments we enjoy in life.
I do not believe that we can choose to be happy, any more than I can choose to be six foot eight. I can, however, choose to pursue experiences from moment to moment that make me happy. I can choose to take my greyhound out for hikes through beautiful places, and I can choose to eat pizza with sausage and banana peppers on it. I can choose to stop watching the local football team when all it ever does is make me angry, and I can choose to stop in the middle of my hike and dip myself fully-clothed in a pool in a stream.
Another quote?
“It will be as though they dipped themselves in magic waters.”
–Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones), Field of Dreams
I want to be careful about this. I am not endorsing the idea that one can choose happiness, because I generally believe this to be nonsense. And I certainly do not want to belittle the travails of those among us whose mental makeup, or outright mental illnesses, make it deeply difficult to make a choice of any kind at all, or those whose choices for similar reasons would be self-destructive or toxic to loved ones. These are serious problems and we need to be working on them.
But I do think that we chase happiness as a “state of mind” in a massive misframing of the problem. Perhaps constructing a happy life is a matter of constructing happy moments. There is no “holistic”, Zen-like approach to baking a cake: you have to sift your flour and measure your ingredients and mix them in the proper order for the proper time and bake it in the proper pan for the proper time at the proper temperature. Likewise, to build a shelf one must first draw up the design, make a cut-list of wood pieces, then do all the cutting, and only then start laying the thing out. Writing a book? Well, I always return to Stephen King’s metaphor of comparing novel-writing to building the Great Wall of China. One brick at a time, one word at a time.
Maybe a happy life is made of one happy moment at a time. Maybe. I don’t pretend to know entirely, and this thought-process is admittedly half-baked and it doesn’t properly account for people whose lives are a struggle just to function, much less think about making happy moments. But again, maybe reframing the question can shed some light on an approach.
Anyway, I’ll continue making one happy moment at a time, maximizing both my moments of happiness and my ability to create new ones. That’s why I believe in having as many goofy, silly little things to do as we can, whether it’s belting out showtunes in the shower or taking care of a couple of goldfish in a bowl or walking a dog every Sunday in a park. Or writing stories and blog posts. Or watching a lot of movies. Or listening to classical music and baseball games on the radio. Or maintaining a collection of certain things. Or, maybe, jumping fully-clothed into a pool of water or letting a friend hit you in the face with a coconut cream pie.
(Oh, that pie in my face? That’s courtesy my friend Joyce, who retired from working at The Store a while back. She had seen photos of one of my other pie-related misadventures and indicated that she would love to pie me, so when I half-jokingly offered her the chance to do just that as my retirement gift to her, she jumped at the chance. The result:
She left happy, I left happy, everybody was happy. Which is the point of this post!)
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Eighteen years and counting….
Twenty Years
Dogs and cats, living together — MASS HYSTERIA!!!
Generally, Cane gets along pretty well with our two cats, Lester and Julio. Julio will actually walk up to Cane and head-butt him, where Lester’s relationship with Cane has a little “sibling rivalry” thing going on.
Well, here’s what happened tonight when Cane reached out and touched Lester.
Note that Cane is enjoying the hell out of this, and Lester is…not.
Poor Lester.
He stuck it out, though. When a cat doesn’t want to leave the warm space they’ve found, it takes a lot more than a mischievous greyhound touching their butt to get them to move. Eventually, though, Lester put his ears back, said “Eff this”, and ran upstairs.
Such is life at Casa Jaquandor!
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There’s something NEW here, I know it!!!
The dee-oh-gee walks the same neighborhood every day, usually three times. He passes the same shrubs and the same trees and the same lampposts. And he stops each and every time to smell them.
Like this rock.
![When the dee-oh-gee intently smells the rock he pees on twice a day, I'm reminded of an exchange from the first episode of CHEERS: COACH: [answers phone] Cheers...yeah, just a sec. [addresses bar] Is there an Ernie Pantusso here? SAM: That's you, Coach. C](https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2845/33178135324_f70bbfff01.jpg)
More often than not, after a lot of sniffing, he’ll pee on the thing he’s sniffing. Like this rock. And I know that the other neighborhood dee-oh-gee’s are also peeing on this rock. Nevertheless, I always wonder about the intent way he has about sniffing this rock. Is there really any new information to be gleaned? Or is he gathering the same information constantly? Is it like Sherlock Holmes, stuck on an endless loop of visiting the same crime scene?
Anyhow, for some reason, it often reminds me of this brief bit from the pilot episode of Cheers:
“I smell something!”
“That’s you, dude.”
“Huh.” [continues sniffing]
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I’m sorry, could you talk into my right ear instead?
So, I’m nursing an ear infection this week. That’s fun.
As ear infections go, it’s not one of the worse ones I’ve had in my life. There wasn’t much of a preceding ear ache at all, but the inflammation and swelling came on quickly, and there is occasional ringing and pain associated with it. Don’t worry, I’ve seen the doctor and I’ve got prescription ear drops and I’m taking ibuprofen to keep the pain to a minimum. This particular ear infection has been more toward the “Wow, what a pain in the ass THIS is” side of the spectrum than the “OMG JUST SHOVE A SHARP STEAK KNIFE IN THERE AND END IT ALREADY” side. And believe me, I know.
I got ear infections all the time as a kid. They came every spring, it seems to me — like Capistrano and its damned swallows. Every spring I’d get sick and it would settle in one of my ears and off I’d go to the doctor to be poked and pried about in there. I have vague recollections of one doc sticking a pair of tweezers in there and extracting a chunk of ear wax the size of a quarter, and I have other recollections of my mother’s, ahem, aggressive application of ear drops to a particularly swollen and inflamed ear canal. (Hey, she had to do what she had to do. I’m still here and I’m not Beethoven, writing music I can’t hear.)
Of course, nothing was quite so bad as Stephen King’s experiences with child ear infections. Thankfully I never once had to endure the lancing of my ear drum, as King describes in this somewhat harrowing passage from On Writing:
The doctor looked in my ears, spending most of his time (I think) on the left one. Then he laid me down on his examining table. “Lift up a minute, Stevie,” his nurse said, and put a large absorbent cloth — it might have been a diaper — under my head, so that my cheek rested on it when I lay back down. I should have guessed that something was rotten in Denmark. Who knows, maybe I did.
There was a sharp smell of alcohol. A clank as the ear doctor opened his sterilizer. I saw the needle in his hand — it looked as long as the ruler in my school pencil-box — and tensed. The ear doctor smiled reassuringly and spoke the lie for which doctors should be immediately jailed (time of incarceration to be doubled when the lie is told to a child): “Relax, Stevie, this won’t hurt.” I believed him.
He slid the needle into my ear and–
Actually, I’m not gonna quote the rest of that passage. Suffice it to say that King tells the tale quite ably. He ain’t the Master of Horror for nothing. That guy has a knack for making you feel like you’re there when the awful shit starts happening.
So as I write this, the ear is still overly swollen so it’s hard to hear on that side. The other morning one of my bosses tried talking to me from my left before I had realized he was there (and thus had a chance to tell him of the annoying malady-of-the-week), and I just turned and looked at him as if he hadn’t said a word. Luckily he’s a nice guy. I’ve had bosses with whom that might not have gone over so well. (Not at my current job, though, I’m glad to say.) I’m doing a lot of “What the hell is that sound!!!” reactions to standard stuff: the running of the refrigerator really sounds strange when it’s not in its proper stereophonic sound. I can tell it’s getting better by the fact that it’s not as sore, but wow, I’d really like at times to just jam the world’s biggest Q-tip in there and root that shit out.
There’s something about those maladies when you can feel that various openings and cavities within the head aren’t nice and open the way they should be, isn’t there? As I science-fiction geek, I think of it thusly. There are times in life — rare, but real — when given the choice between a working lightsaber and the gizmo Arnold uses in this scene from Total Recall to extract the tracking device from his sinuses, I’d take the nasal rooter.
In other boring news, I ran out of small coffee filters last week and thus I had to switch to drinking green tea in the mornings instead of coffee. I’ve actually been enjoying this change, partly because I’ve been using one of my nifty teapots!
And in one last bit of weird life stuff, last Friday we ordered out at work for Chinese food for lunch. It seems that the dark feelings of the Trump Era may also be affecting those who write the fortunes for fortune cookies:
Wow.
OK, that’s enough of that. Back to working and writing and waiting for my left ear to inevitably pop open, all at once, when I’m standing someplace noisy. I’ll be the guy covering my ears and screaming in the middle of the Housewares section at Target.
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2016 in review (or, “Whew, at least THAT’s over.”)
2016.
This was a terrible, terrible year.
Maybe not for me personally, but there really was a sense this year – for me, at least – that a long era of potential optimism, which managed to keep flickering even through awfulness like 9-11-01 and the Great Recession, was now well and truly gone, and that a shadow has fallen through which we have little choice but to fight and scrape and try to hold to as much of the progress of the last 40 years as we’ve made.
I guess there really are times when society progresses in three-steps-forward, two-steps-back fashion, but this year it really does feel like there’s a giant signpost ahead indicating that it’s time to take a few steps backward.
Yeah, 2016 was crap.
My year’s-end questionnaire awaits:
Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I just keep my resolutions the same: read a lot, write a lot, and do cool stuff. I guess I did…OK. I fell behind on writing goals, in terms of publishing. Forgotten Stars III won’t arrive until March 2017, and that’s my own damned fault. But I did get a lot of other drafting done, to the point that I now have a backlog of completed first drafts.
Did anyone close to you give birth?
No, but a person I know online – a young woman who moved out of her abusive home and is now working to put herself through college – did. I’m rooting for her and her husband, hard.
Did anyone close to you die?
No. But holy shit, was this a year for the Reaper.
What countries did you visit?
Just the US, except for in my dreams.
What would you like to have in 2017 that you lacked in 2016?
More readers. Getting more books out will help.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I typed the words THE END three times. So that’s something.
What was your biggest failure?
Not getting Forgotten Stars III out, I suppose. And our home continues to be only about 70 percent moved in-to, if that makes sense.
What was the best thing you bought?
It wasn’t really a year for buying lots of stuff, but there was some of that. While antiquing I managed to get a few nifty Toby jugs, the collection of which I have increased a little since then (I have an odd weakness for these goofy things). Books, here and there. Jewelry for The Wife and some cool stuff for The Daughter. And I got a really swell deal on a pair of new-with-tags vintage Lee overalls, which I am slowly breaking in from their raw state. Awesome!
Whose behavior merited celebration?
As always, The Wife and The Daughter. Also the cats and the dee-oh-gee.
And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who ran for President with grace and class and did her damnedest to be a fine candidate who would have been a decent President.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Take a wild guess.
Our incoming President is a loathsome turd, and his administration is shaping up to be quite the turd-filled punch-bowl. His party continues to be a revolting crew, mostly motivated only by power and by no desire to actually do good work for anyone save the rich and the white and the male. And the degree to which Donald Trump’s campaign and victory-on-a-technicality have enabled the very worst among us, from the KKK to literal Nazis, to crawl proudly from beneath their rocks is truly dismaying.
Where did most of your money go?
Food, booze, paying down bills. That NYC trip we took in 2015 had quite the lingering price tag. (That said, I’d go again tomorrow if I could.)
What did you get really excited about?
This wasn’t a year for excitement, to be honest. It was a year for hoping for the best and, when not getting it, hoping against the worst (and then getting precisely that).
Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
My life is OK. But that of my country is not.
Thinner or fatter?
About the same.
Richer or poorer?
About the same.
What do you wish you’d done more of?
Reading, writing, and cooking.
What do you wish you’d done less of?
Wasting time on the Internet.
How did you spend Christmas?
At home, with the family. My sister was in town for the second Christmas in a row, so that was nice. This year it wasn’t snowy. And since Christmas fell on a Sunday, we still had to whisk the dee-oh-gee off to a local park for his Sunday nature walk. He was confused as to why he didn’t get a donut from Tim Horton’s afterwards, though. (They were closed.)
Did you fall in love in 2016?
Stock answer: I fall in love on a daily basis.
How many one-night stands?
Stock answer: As a gentleman, I decline to answer. (Real answer: Zero.)
What was your favorite TV program?
Person of Interest ended with a solid finale. Castle ended with a less-solid finale (in fact, that show’s last season was pretty painful, in the end). We enjoyed Cutthroat Kitchen and we fell in love with Crazy Ex Girlfriend. We continue to enjoy Big Bang Theory, Superstore, and Brooklyn Nine Nine. Stranger Things is amazing! And we like Cutthroat Kitchen. MasterChef has started to get pretty irritating, I must admit.
Oh, and The Musketeers. That show deserves its own post.
I watched most of Jessica Jones but have not finished it, because it was pretty depressing. Luke Cage is great, although as of this writing I am still three episodes from finishing it. We enjoyed The Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt and await its third season. We need more comedies!
Stuff I’m interested in watching: Daredevil, The Man in the High Castle, Poldark.
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I usually go with “I don’t hate”, but I can’t say that anymore. I hate what the Republican Party in this country has become.
What was the best book you read?
I didn’t read as much as I intended to this year, which could well have been a big factor in how “Off” the year felt in general. Books I liked a lot included:
Lost Stars, Claudia Gray (a really effective Star Wars novel that does not focus on any of the major “classic” characters)
Grigory’s Gadget, E.A. Hennessy
Without Benefits, Nicole Tone
How STAR WARS Conquered the Universe, Chris Taylor
What was your greatest musical discovery?
A symphonic metal band called Without Temptation. Imagine a heavy metal band inspired by The Lord of the Rings.
What did you want and get?
An “Instant Pot!” Now, I just have to learn to use it.
What did you want and not get?
President-elect Hillary Clinton.
What were your favorite films of this year?
Wow. As I write this, I realize that the last film I saw in a theater, in initial release, was The Force Awakens. I may have gone an entire year without seeing a single movie in the theater. That is pretty mindboggling. I used to love the theater-going experience so much that I’d see just about any piece of shit. Now, the time-and-money commitment just isn’t there. Amazing. I won’t even be seeing Rogue One: A STAR WARS Story until January 2, 2017.
I think I can guarantee that I won’t go the entirety of 2017 without going to the movies. If nothing else, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is coming out, and I’m actually a lot more excited about that than I am about any impending Star Wars film.
What did you do on your birthday?
As usual, I worked! We celebrate my birthday each year with a trip to the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival (we missed it in 2015, actually, due to our scheduled NYC trip that year), which is always a few days after my birthday proper. We had a great time, though.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2016?
Overalls and scarves. And I’m started experimenting with button-down shirts. I know. Weird.
What kept you sane?
The family and the cats and the dee-oh-gee. Hiking. Writing.
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
America Ferrara, Amy Acker, Jim Caviezel, Daisy Ridley. Just to name a few.
What political issue stirred you the most?
All of them. And we’re about to swear in a President who is literally on the wrong side of all the things.
Who did you miss?
Good lord, was 2016 a year for losing great talent or what? My God. All of them. Each and every one. Just terrible. (Especially Carrie Fisher. With her passing, we’re getting into the passing of the people who shaped the things that most made me who I am.)
(And I actually wrote the above paragraph before Debbie Reynolds died. This goddamned year can not end soon enough.)
Who was the best new person you met?
So many astonishing people, I can’t believe it! Many online, but a few offline as well (mostly through work).
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2016:
An awful lot of Americans either believe terrible things, or are willing to believe terrible things if they think it will somehow profit them to vote for someone who believes and says terrible things.
I know, that’s not very charitable. I don’t care. It is, as far as I’m concerned, a perfectly accurate reading of the current state of play in this country.
But on a more personal note, the old lessons apply: Read a lot, write a lot. Go for walks and look at sunsets. Take all the pictures you want. Learn new things and try new stuff. If you have a dog, take him for walks. Buy books for your daughter, even when she complains that she likes to pick her own books (let her do that, too). Nothing fits your hand so well as your lover’s hand. Eating out is fine, but learn to cook things, too. Have a place to go where they know you and what you order. Don’t be afraid to revisit your childhood passions now and again; you weren’t always wrong back then. Overalls are awesome, it’s OK to wear double denim, and a pie in the face is a wonderful thing!
If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
I’m posting two songs this year, because they both fit. The first is from the brilliant Hamilton, and the second is from the also-brilliant Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. The first might become something of an anthem to keep at heart as we move into what seems to be a pretty dark bit of history, and the second – well, the song’s title sums up 2016 for an awful lot of people. (By way of context: the man singing the song, named Greg (played by Santino Fontana), has been pursuing a pretty toxic relationship with Rebecca, but he has recently realized that he is an alcoholic and is leaving town to belatedly go to college and get his life on track.)
Is it 2017 yet?
