"Um... No, I don't have any kids..."

"Oh. But your wife hasn't posted on her blog since October."

HAHAHAHAHAHA! That is WAY better than the time a client asked if I was pregnant because my top was overly blousy!

Sadly, my long hiatus from blogging hasn't been caused by anything wonderful and exciting, like a new baby or a book deal. I got really sick in November, and in December I was furiously prepping for our first Christmas as a married couple. In January my job turned soul-crushing, and since then there hasn't been much I've felt like blogging about.

That's the problem with having a personal blog that's not really about anything. If I had a gimmick,* like What Claudia Wore or At Times Dull, I would have an impetus, a raison d'etre, and a formula to follow. Instead, I have to find something inspiring/interesting enough that I want to write about it, and then write something interesting enough to post. Sometimes that's a high bar to clear. In fact, there are several abandoned drafts littering my dashboard, posts I started writing and never finished. Honestly, who really cares that I like Fresh and Easy Rice Pudding with LOTS of cinnamon? Not even me, really.

But my husband's encounter made me think. There are a few things in the past 5 1/2 months that might be worth writing about. So new posts should be coming soon. Hopefully at least one a week. And who knows? maybe I could find a gimmick of my own. Like, I could learn a new circus trick every week. I'm sure the post about juggling chainsaws would be thrilling.

*I don't mean gimmick in a derogatory sense. I very much enjoy those blogs. They are just about very specific topics.

While I was readying the pork for service--pulling it and removing fat and bones--I spilled some molten pork fat on the floor. Quite a bit of it actually. Enough that instead of just ignoring it and letting the boy clean it up later, I decided to just do it myself. I opened the cabinet under the sink and the all-surface cleaner was empty, but I found something called Vinylex. The bottle claimed to clean, seal, and protect vinyl and plastic. We have a linoleum floor. It was a match made in heaven!

I sprayed the Vinylex all over the floor, grabbed a towel, got on my knees, and started scrubbing. This is a big deal. Before we got married I told the boy I would never clean a floor. I won't sweep, vacuum, or mop, so I was pretty pleased with myself for stepping up. The floor seemed to be getting clean, but the Vinylex felt kind of weird, almost like it was leaving a film on the floor. I decided not to pay attention to that, figuring it would go away when the floor dried. Then the boy got home.

"Did you spray Vinylex on the floor?"

Very proudly. "Yeah. I spilled some pork fat and wanted to clean it up so we didn't track it all over the house."

"So you used Vinylex."

Confused that he's not showering me with praise. "Yeah, well we were out of that all-surface cleaner, but I saw this stuff and it said it was for vinyl and plastic, and we have linoleum floors, which I'm pretty sure is almost the same, so..."

"It's for vinyl and leather car seats. It has oils in it to seal the material. You just Armor-Alled the floor."

During clean-up, I would periodically hear thumping noises. "Are you all right?" I'd call.

"Yeah, I kinda slipped, but I caught myself."

Anyway, today FedEx delivered a new Scooba floor washing robot.

I did read some Madeline L'Engle books. I read a few of the Vicky Austin books (Seriously, how hot was Adam? After the hospital, when he stripped her down to heal her by swimming with the dolphins? Hot.) and I remember loving An Acceptable Time, even though I felt like I was missing something when they talked about Polly's parents and uncles. So a few months ago when I was browsing Barnes and Noble and saw a boxed set labelled "The Wrinkle In Time Quintet" I figured it was time to see what I was missing.

I have always been told that Meg Murry is an amazing female character, someone for girls to look up to and emulate. And at the start of the books, she is a finely drawn picture of a girl nearing the end of childhood, smart, easily frustrated by adults, brave, vulnerable, angry at her lack of control. She saves her brother with her capacity to love. And she names that crappy principal. And gets that farandolae to root, saving her brother yet again. But by the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, she's chosen the sideline. At home and pregnant while her husband presents his research in London, lying in bed kything while Charles Wallace saves the world, occasionally reading the encyclopedia for him like some library assistant. She's absent from Many Waters, and her only mention in An Acceptable Time is when her mother (Nobel Prize winning scientist) and her daughter (general badass) discuss her decision not to pursue a career. They decide it's because she feared being less than her mother. It felt like kind of a letdown. What happened to the girl tessering to distant planets, saving them from the darkness?

And what is the deal with such an abstract villain? While I was reading, I couldn't help but compare these to the His Dark Materials Trilogy, and that's unfortunate. The stories are actually very similar, but Philip Pullman is able to turn abstract concepts into real concrete details. Every world Lyra and Will visit is firmly rooted and believable, whereas L'Engle's worlds, villains, and creatures are vague and amorphous. She does better when she stays on earth and just moves through time. I once heard an SF writer say that it works best when she takes reality and changes one thing. And that one change creates the whole story. This is the case in An Acceptable Time, and it is the best of the series. Meg's daughter, Polly, is living with her grandparents when her neighbor accidentally opens a "tesseract" between her time and 3000 years ago. Instead of interstitial space travel and unicorns and self-sacrificing stars and giant telepathic furballs, there's just the conflict between modernism and ancient superstition. And there's a lot less vaguely Christian Unitarian philosophy.

If An Acceptable Time is the best book, Many Waters is far and away the worst. It's the only book that features the Murry twins, Sandy and Dennys, and with good reason. They don't seem to have personalities. All the prior books tell us is that they're average and have a big garden. In this book we learn that they like to eat and don't like being thrown in trash heaps. Also that they sunburn easily. And at some point while you're reading, you will realize that they have accidentally been transported back to the time of Noah just before the flood. And at that point you will roll your eyes. There are seraphim (good) and nephilim (bad) and all the people are tiny and brown and unicorns follow the uncertainty principle and can only be touched by virgins. And then there's this passage:

She was the most spectacularly beautiful girl he had ever seen. Tiny, like all the people of the oasis. She wore a white goatskin which covered one shoulder. Her hair was a sunburst of red. Her eyes were almond-shaped and as green as the spring grass at home. Her body was perfect, her skin the color of a peach.

Um, you guys? L'Engle just described Wilma Fucking Flintstone.

I've dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I'm as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.

So, that's what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over. If it's all right, I'd like to read a little something from just this year: "Somehow, Conan O'Brien has transformed himself into the brightest star in the Late Night firmament. His comedy is the gold standard and Conan himself is not only the quickest and most inventive wit of his generation, but quite possible the greatest host ever."

Ladies and Gentlemen, Class of 2000, I wrote that this morning, as proof that, when all else fails, there's always delusion.

I'll go now, to make bigger mistakes and to embarrass this fine institution even more. But let me leave you with one last thought: If you can laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you're drunk.

Thank you.

1. The Brothers Bloom

I don't necessarily think this was the best movie I saw this year--I recognize that it has some flaws and plotholes, but it was just so much fun. Director Rian Johnson rounded up a few of my favorite favorite actors and put them in a twisty turny yarn about con artists and the stories they weave. Rachel Weisz as Penelope Stamp deserves an entire post about exactly why I think she's maybe the coolest woman ever filmed. 

2. Nonfiction

It would be an understatement to say that I read a lot. I didn't sleep much as a kid, which meant that in my formative years I had an extra four to six hours a day to fill, and I filled them with reading. I've occasionally heard someone say that I've read everything, and I always get kind of embarrassed. There are major holes in my reading--Russian authors, anything from the Middle Ages, but the biggest is nonfiction. I like a good story, and I'm not disciplined enough to slog through the boring bits. Until now. In 2009, most of my favorite books have been history or science or biography.

3. Vintage Art Deco engagment rings

I got engaged this year. I really really really love my ring. That is all.

4. S'more cookies

So this year my mom invented the greatest cookie in the history of mankind, and they're super easy to make. I'm giving you her secret. Take a package of graham crackers. Break them along the perforated lines until they're long and thin rectangles. Take one piece, smear it with marshmallow cream, place another piece on top. Like a sandwich. Leave them out over night so the marshmallow hardens just a little bit. Melt chocolate. Dip graham crackers in choclate until coated. Place on wax paper and allow chocolate to harden. Stuff your face with them. They're delicious!

5. The Griffith Observatory

I love the Griffith Observatory. My boyfriend promised to take me there for Valentine's Day, but he forgot and we didn't go. Then we tried almost every night for a couple weeks, but they close the roads after dark. I called and asked, How do we get there after dark? I was told, Take Vermont all the way up. Vermont was closed. Finally we went in the daytime and I heart this place so hard. I love the planetarium with the show about the history of astronomy. I love the Tesla coil. I love the new downstairs and standing on the scales. I love the seismograph. And I love love love love love the Foucault pendulum. We went more and more and more times, and then my boyfriend proposed there and became my fiance and I heart this place even harder.

6. Brussels Sprouts

I had Brussels Sprouts for the first time in the summer of 2008. Someone brought them to a potluck. They weren't that good--clearly frozen and then boiled to death, but I tasted a seed of wonder in them. This fall/winter I have eaten them at least once a week. My favorite is to blanche them, then cut them in half and saute until caramelized, but also roasted or with lardons or shallots or steamed and buttered. Really, pretty much no matter what you do to them, they're delightful. But sometimes stinky.

7. Community

I didn't pick many new shows this fall. I sort of watch Flash Forward online sometimes when I can remember, and I did really like White Collar, but none of them make me as happy as Community. It's quick and witty and the jokes come from everywhere. Traditional jokes, site-gags, snark, quirk, weird, anything you can think of. The characters are all well-drawn and true. It's just a solid show that is always funny.

Although it's hard to choose, my favorite episode is "Introduction to Film." Hulu it. You will not be sorry. The central plot is really brilliant, and so is the secondary storyline, but it's the tertiary storyline that yields the funniest thing ever on the show. The study group has known each other for awhile at this point. Jeff (thirty-something rascal) predicts that Pierce (clueless, slightly creepy old guy) will say something racist in less than a minute. Group yada yadas for awhile. Shirley (middle aged black woman) coos over Troy's dainty sneeze. Troy (young black man) says, "You're not my mother." Pierce double-takes. "She's not?" Honestly. Go watch it right now.

8. Heidi Ryder

When we got engaged, we had a list of what we wanted for our wedding. A great photographer was at the top of our list. So we, and by we I mean Free, began the search. Google was consulted. Friends recommended photographers. I signed up with an event site and was inundated with pleas and offers. People begged. It was unseemly. Finally, we set up a meeting with Heidi. And she was nice and professional and liked our ideas about what we wanted. And her portfolio was good. And she had packages in our price range. So we booked her and set up our engagement photo shoot. The pictures look like this. I love Heidi Ryder.

9. Lady Gaga

I was vaguely aware of Lady Gaga in the closing months of 2008. I knew she wore big sunglasses and no pants and thought she looked a bit like Christina Aguilera. I hadn't really heard any of her music. Then I heard "Just Dance" and loved it. I used it for my alarm. I bought her album and listened to it over and over and over and over. As I saw her performances and read interviews with her, my like metastasized from her music to her. I like her over the top kind of insane fashion choices. I like her performance-art-twist-paradigms-make-the-viewer-uncomfortable thing. I like that she got her start as a songwriter and continues to write her own music. I like that she handled the intersex rumor by not taking it seriously. I like that she says what she thinks instead of what will make people comfortable. I just like her.

10. Animation

Like all other kids, I liked cartoons. I liked Disney cartoons and He-Man and She-Ra and Tiny Tunes and even Conan the Barbarian, a really terrible one on every morning before school. But the older I got the less I watched. And while I've liked a few animated features in the last few years, I've gravitated toward foreign stuff (Spirited Away) or things with arthouse cred (The Triplets of Belleville). I also favored hand drawn animation. It seemed freer, less constrained by the laws of physics.--anything could happen. So I'm a bit surprised that two of my very favorite movies this year are Up (CGI animation) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (stop-motion animation).

11. Glee

Glee. What can I say about Glee? Right now I can only think of bad puns. Also, it's kind of getting late, and I'm a little bit tired of writing this post, so I'm just going to say that I like it a lot. I like Jane Lynch and Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele and hairography and wheelchair choreography and telling your girlfriend's parents she's pregnant by singing "You're Having My Baby" and doing the Single Ladies dance in a football game and singing mash-ups while high on ephedrine and "Don't Rain on My Parade" and boozy Kristin Chenowith and "You Just Keep My Hanging On" in a cheer uniform. I like it all.

Happy New Year. I can't wait to see what I'll like in 2010.

So while I was at Porto's this afternoon munching on some potato balls, I was also listening the people next to me. A young woman was talktalktalking away to her mother, who could not have been less interested in what she was saying. She was talking about her school--I couldn't figure out which one it was--and some guy and his friend who was a much better writer than him. And her mother, who was wearing a surgical mask, did not ever react in any way. It was so bizarre, and in spite of her quasipseudointellectual affect I was starting to feel sorry her. Then she said this:

I was in the mall and I saw a celebrity's child and I went up to him and said his name and his babysitter kind of freaked out...It was Gwen Stefani's son, and I said Hi, Kingston. Then his babysitter took him away.

That is insane. Approaching strange children and calling them by name is only done by pedophiliac stalkers who have moved onto the kidnapping phase of their plan. Also, who recognizes celebrity's children?

Interestingly, this is the only thing her mother responded to. She said she thought the babysitter had done the right thing. Then they got up and left their trash on the table, even though there was a garbage can right behind them.

I hope everyone else got something they can be excited about this year.

1. Lunch with Emma Thompson. I unabashedly adore her. Hopefully she would give me tips on how to be exactly like her. She is the woman I dream of becoming.
2. A 13" MacBook and a great leather bag to put it in.
3. The sudden ability to sew beautifully without taking any lessons or ever making a mistake.
4. A Mini Cooper. I don't even care what color.
5. No more debt. I don't have that much, really, but it's more than I can pay off right now, and I'd really like to pay it off RIGHT NOW.
6. A gift card to Vroman's with infinity dollars on it.
7. Three months in Brazil. Also, the magical ability to speak fluent Portugese.
8. A job teaching kids about art. Or as an elementary school librarian.
9. New dresses that fit my new, stricter modesty requirements. R.I.P. cap-sleeves.
10. Perfect jeans, both skinny and boyfriend cuts.
11. Hot shoes for my wedding. 2 1/2" peeptoe heels in smoky lilac.
12. Healthcare reform. I don't have health insurance. It is appalling how terrified I am of illness and injury.
13. L'Artisan Parfumeur Fleur d'Oranger 2005. An astonishingly beautiful fragrance, and so expensive I will never have the nerve to buy it for myself, not even if I win the lottery.

See? That's not too much to ask, is it?