We Don't Need No Stinkin' Titles

This morning when Penn's alarm went off the DJ on the morning show he listens to was blabbing about the Oscars this weekend. While Penn was showering I was lounging in bed half-asleep listening to the DJ talking about Heath Ledger and Kate Winslet and I thought to myself, "Wow, I am really, really unenthusiastic about this year's crop of movies." I've felt like that for awhile now, actually. This decade just hasn't been particularly great for movies. Or, at any rate, the movies being lauded by the Academy just haven't really done it for me. I'm looking at the list of Best Picture winners from 2000 on right now and, eh:

• The Gladiator: Seriously? I don't even remember that this won, but do you know how many times I've wanted to re-watch this movie since I saw it the first time? Zero. It was fine, but very lackluster in the grand scheme of things.
  
• A Beautiful Mind: Good. Just good. Another one that I'm glad I saw but have no burning desire to watch again and again.
  
• Chicago: I actually did like this movie a lot in 2002, enough that I bought it (and I rarely like movies enough to buy them; I own a grand total of 20 DVDs). I think it's one of the best done movie musicals. But it hasn't held up for me really.
• The Lord of the Rings: Ugh, no. Given, this is just not my preferred genre, but...no.
• Million Dollar Baby: I was not impressed. In this film's defense, though, I didn't see it until about a year after it had come out, and by that time so. many. damn. people. had told me "Oh, see Million Dollar Baby, you HAVE to see it, it's AMAZING." It was overhyped beyond belief. I was not amazed.
• Crash: Talk about over-hyped. I am still completely astonished that this movie won Best Picture. This movie beats you over the head with its message. I hate that in a film or a play. I don't care if it's a good message and one that I agree with, I don't need blatant didacticism in my entertainment. In my mind it just shows a lack of finesse on the part of the director.
• The Departed: Okay, this one I actually really like. I saw it for the first time last year and have watched it probably 3 times since then, somehow, and I've enjoyed it every time. But in the grand scheme of things it's just another mafia movie, lacking a bit in creativity.
• No Country for Old Men: I feel pretty much the same way about this movie as I do about The Departed. A really good example of a particular genre of movie.

Maybe I'm just getting jaded as I get older. I feel like there's not much new happening in movies these days, which means it's up the actors to make the same old things particularly interesting, and a lot of times that just doesn't happen.
So this morning I was thinking about this year's crop of critically acclaimed movies, and I just feel ambivalent about almost all of them. I originally thought I wasn't going to get the chance to see most of this year's nominees before the Oscars, but Penn and I recently rediscovered our appreciation for websites that let us illegally stream movies, and last weekend we watched an inordinate amount of them. Although not all of them were movies that actually came out this year. Friday night we watched Choke (which I thought was enjoyable but not as good as Fight Club, and the older I get the less Palahniuk's tendency to do things just for shock value appeals to me...I still like his stories, just not as much as I did ten years ago). On Valentine's Day we stayed in and I made a pasta bake that I was quite proud of--it involved making my own meat sauce from scratch, even!--and drank a bottle of wine and ate strawberries and chocolate pudding (also homemade by yours truly!) and then we watched Religulous and Blood Diamond. I know. It was Valentine's Day and we watched the two least-romantic movies you can possibly think of: a documentary about religious faith (or lack thereof) and a movie about the people that are exploited to provide us Westerners with our diamond engagement rings. Ha. Both were interesting, though, and I liked Blood Diamond way more than I was expecting too, even though we only watched half of it before going to bed and as we were lying in bed talking I predicted to Penn exactly how the movie was going to end and I was 100% correct. On Sunday night Penn forced me to watch Super Size Me because he's on a mission to convince me that McDonald's is the devil. But all he managed to do was convince me not to eat McDonald's all day every day, and I've never done that anyway. My mantra is "everything in moderation," and I feel like this movie proved that the 500 calories in a burger and small fries aren't exactly good for me but if I indulge only once a month or so it's not going to kill me. Then we watched Doubt, and on Monday night we watched The Reader.
So it turns out I've now seen quite a few of the Oscar nominated movies for this year, and I doubt that you really care, but here are some of my opinions:

• Even though I like everything else Clint Eastwood has directed, the previews for The Changeling didn't make me want to see it. Although I think Angelina Jolie has the potential to do good work, so I may put this one on my list to watch eventually.
• I wasn't really interested in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button either, and I keep hearing about how dull it is, so even though it seems to have gotten tons of nominations, I'm not going to watch it unless someone can convince me it's worth sitting through.
• Penn and I shelled out the money to watch The Dark Knight on the big screen, one of only a handful of movies I actually saw in a theater this year (I used to love going to movies, but now since it's eight freakin' dollars for a matinee here, I have to feel pretty confident that the movie is going to be worth it before I'll pay the money). I liked it a lot, although, again, it's not a genre I fully appreciate and I thought it was an hour longer than it needed to be. And Heath Ledger? He was very good as The Joker, and I'm guessing he'll win posthumously in his category, but I'm not fully convinced that that role was as difficult to play as people seem to think it was. It's not like I have a ton of acting or directing experience, but from my relatively limited experience I actually feel like a lot of times the total batshit crazy roles are the easiest to play. Exhausting, yes, especially if you decided to get all Method with it, which is what it sounds like Ledger did, but...I don't know. We don't give enough credit for subtle performances, which, in my opinion, are much harder to pull off (see my rant about Crash, above).
• Doubt was good. I love Philip Seymour Hoffman in everything, and in this movie I think he did a fantastic job of creating a character that really did leave you with, well, doubts. The women were good, too, but overall I felt like the movie was lacking something. The more I think about it, the more I think this probably functioned much more powerfully as the play that it was originally, because I think it needs the sense of intimacy that would exist in a small live theater performance but was missing with Penn and I just watching it on a laptop on the couch.
• I like period pieces and wanted to see The Duchess but never got around to it. I'll put that on my list with The Changeling, I guess.
• I can't convince Penn that Frost/Nixon would be interesting, so I guess if I'm going to watch that one it's going to have to be on my own. Actually, I probably won't be able to convince him to watch The Duchess, either.
  
• In the animated category, Cas and Jay and I watched Kung Fu Panda when I was visiting them this summer, and it was actually really cute. When I tried to watch Wall-E with my sister over Christmas break, we both fell asleep on the couch.
• Milk is on my to-see list, as is Rachel Getting Married (both of which Penn also probably isn't overly enthusiastic about watching with me...maybe that's what I'll do when he's on the ski trip with his guy friends next weekend, just lounge around with movies)
• The Reader was okay, but I thought the pace was too slow. I hope Kate Winslet wins her category, though. She's consistently good. She's one of the few actresses whose movies I will watch solely because she's in them. So even though I don't think this is her best work ever and I'm sort of tired of people getting Oscars partially because a makeup artist ages them or uglies them up well, she's an actress who deserves a Best Actress Academy Award.
• I think I'd rather read Revolutionary Road than see the movie.
• Slumdog Millionaire is another one that I actually watched in the movie theater. I enjoyed it very much and it made me feel good and I appreciate its insight into India, which is not something we get to see a lot of in movies here in the states, but, like all the movies I've seen this year, am I rushing to the store to own it when it comes out on DVD so I can watch it again and again? Probably not.
• Should I see The Wrestler or not? It sounds like another movie that is Not My Genre, but people whose opinions I respect have said it was great.

So yeah, that's what I think. Overall, some things that I'm glad I saw, but nothing that I feel like raving about and watching dozens of times. Basically, I don't care. There really is nothing new under the sun, it seems, and if I'm going to pay $10.50, I want to be blown away by novelty and technique. Better luck next year, Hollywood.

And now I'm off to pack. Penn and I are going to New York for the weekend to hang out with my friend Jen and her boyfriend. They're both travel nurses and they just moved to Boston* for the next few months so we thought New York would be a fun place that we could both get to fairly easily so we can catch up. Jen and I were good friends in college but it has been two years since we last saw each other in person and neither of us have met the other's boyfriend, so this is basically going to be a really extended double date. I hope it's fun!

*What is the deal with Boston? It seems to have a magnetic pull on everyone I know. Even though I grew up and went to college in a state 2,000 miles from there, sometimes it feels like everyone I know has moved to Boston. I have more friends in Boston now than I do in my hometown! And Penn has talked about wanting to move near there one of these days when we're both done with our obligations here. Is everyone in the country just really fascinated by Boston, or do I just happen to attract Boston People? I mean, I like what I've experienced of Boston, it's just kind of weird that so many people I know keep ending up there.

Oh, I Forgot!

Do you ever read Overhead in New York? It's one of the many, many websites I regularly waste time on. I forget how I discovered it initially, but for a few years now I've been skimming through it a few times a week for a laugh.
Six months ago when Penn and I were in New York on vacation, we had an experience that I thought would make for a good Overheard blurb. So I sent it in and then promptly forgot all about it until a few days ago when I clicked over to the website and there was the quote I sent in back in August!
Here's the link:
Overheard

If you want another fantastic time waster, go here:
http://dearoldlove.tumblr.com/
Sometimes it's sort of depressing, so if you're currently going through a heartbreaking period you might not want to venture over there. Then again, it could be encouraging to know you're not the only one mourning a lost relationship. It's nice to know that we've all done some crazy things for love. Also, sometimes they're funny. Either way it's interesting.

Alright, that's it. Two entries in one day today!

You Might Need Two Days to Read This

Wow, I didn't realize it had been almost two weeks since I last wrote here. This semester is kicking my butt a bit more than I thought it would. I have one class that requires a really intense synthesize-all-of-these-articles-and-outline-the-key-ideas 5 page paper every week, and I'm finding that I'm using an entire day of work each week just to do the reading and writing for that class (seriously, it's taking 6-8 hours, an ENTIRE working day). I also decided to heavily front load my semester so that I get my required class presentations out of the way before spring break, and while I think that was the right decision the prep on those takes a lot of time, too. Throw into the mix a major independent study project a couple of friends and I are doing which requires us to meet 10 hours per week right now and the fact that I'm teaching my advisor's undergrad class for the next two weeks while he's galavanting around in Denmark or somewhere and, yeah. That's all the not-so-fun stuff that is keeping me busy.

Fortunately, there are a ton of good things, both big and small, that have happened in the past two weeks. So I will now give you Things That Have Happened Lately:

First, the most exciting thing that has happened this month: Penn bought me a bicycle for Valentine's Day!!! On Monday night I was puttering around cleaning the apartment when he mentioned he was going out for an hour. When I asked what he was up to, he wouldn't tell me (actually, what he told me was, "I'm going to visit my other girlfriend"). When he came back I said, "So, where were you really?" and he said, "Close your eyes and come outside and I'll show you." So I closed my eyes and he led me out into the stairwell, and when I opened my eyes I was looking at a bike! At first I was really confused. He has been talking about getting himself a bike ever since he moved here so that he can use it to ride to work (currently he walks fifteen minutes to his office), so I thought it was his bike. I said, "Oh, you got your bike! That's great!" and he said, "No, it's your bike! Happy Valentine's Day!" And then I noticed that the bike was black with pink lettering and my macho man doesn't do pink, so I suppose I should have known right away that it was for me. It's a Specialized Rockhopper, which means it's technically a mountain bike, which is pretty cool.
I'm so excited about having a bike. I haven't ridden a bike regularly since I was about 12, but when Penn mentioned that he wanted to get one to ride to work, I started thinking that I would like to have one, too. I've been taking the subway to campus once or twice a week since I moved to my new place in October, but part of the reason I don't do that every time I go to work is that the station is a mile from my condo, so it's a 15-20 minute walk each way, and the subway ride itself is almost an hour long (I have to go into the city center, change to a different line, and then go back out to the suburbs) so it makes for a really long commuting process. The thing is, I actually really like riding the subway to work. First of all, it just makes me feel virtuous that I'm doing my teeny tiny part to help the environment by not using my car. Second, I don't have to deal with traffic (which occasionally turns the 25 minute drive to campus into an hour-long one). Third, I do some of my best reading on the subway because most of the ride is underground and there's nothing interesting to look at and I don't have the option of distracting myself with the internet. So yeah, it's a much longer commute than the 25 minutes it usually takes me by car, but it's so much more relaxing than driving. So since I already like taking the subway anyway, I figure I'll take it twice as much now that I can use my bike to get to the station in five minutes instead of twenty. Of course, I can't actually start riding as part of my commute until I get a couple of good bike locks and a backpack to carry my stuff, but soon I plan to join the ranks of the bike commuters.
I have a bit of a learning curve in front of me. I have to get comfortable on a bike again, both physically and mentally. I went out for my first ride yesterday. There's a great park less than a mile from our condo that has 40+ miles of trails, so I rode over there and did a 6.5 mile loop back home. I had so much fun, zooming along and checking out new scenery. I had no idea how freakin' hilly my neighborhood is until I got on the bike, though! I walk the dog around here all the time and streets that don't even feel like an incline when I'm walking had me puffing and panting and (at one particularly pathetic moment) getting off the bike and walking it uphill. So I learned that I really need to work on my stamina and on getting into the habit of using the momentum of downhill stretches to give me a boost on uphill sections. I figured I rode at about 10 mph, which I think was decent for a first ride. My butt is a bit sore today, but I was anticipating that and everything I've read says I just need to keep biking and work through it, so that's the plan.
So physically it's about breaking in my seat and building up my stamina. I can do that. Mentally, I have a bit more of a block to work through because it turns out I'm sort of anxious about riding anywhere near traffic. I actually wanted to ride further yesterday, but I stopped where I did because the path was going to cross a busy intersection and I thought, "Nah, I don't want to deal with cars." Obviously, this is something I'm going to have to get over if I want to use the bike to go anywhere other than the one park by my house. And I do. I have all these lofty ideas about biking not just to the subway but to restaurants or to run errands. I really can't think of anything I could need to do that's not within biking distance, and I love the idea of becoming more and more car-free. I HATE driving. Seriously, all capital letters, HATE it. Plus once Penn gets his own bike there are all sorts of fun places around town we could ride together. The idea of being a serious cyclist is really appealing to me. But if I'm going to do that, I need to learn to cross intersections. So, yeah. I tried to read one of those bike traffic safety guides online but it only served to freak me out by showing me approximately a dozen ways I could be hit by a car that I'd never have thought of on my own. Current bikers, please give me some confidence. I'm content to just be a recreational park and trail rider, I guess, but I'd really like to take more advantage of my new mode of transportation.
So, yes, I love the bike! Talk about a Valentine's Day gift that beats the heck out of chocolate and flowers! (Which, incidentally, I would have been perfectly happy with. I told him to just get me a chocolate bar or some sexy underwear, which was why the bike was such a huge surprise.)

Anyway, that's my big exciting news. Other than that, here are some little things of note:

• After slacking off a bit on exercise and tracking my calories in November and December, in January I went back to tracking my eating on sparkpeople.com and really working out (as opposed to walking the Meatball at his pace for thirty minutes and counting that as my workout...which is fine sometimes, but not for ALL of my monthly workouts). They say people generally put on weight when they get into relationships, and that was true for me. I was maintaining my weight well until Penn and I moved in together, but then I started eating too much like him. We were doing things like cooking an entire box of pasta for dinner (That's 8 servings! And Penn was eating twice as much as me, but still!), or eating an entire bag of Tostitos over the course of a Football Sunday, or drinking two or three beers just with Saturday night dinner. Then I went home for Christmas and ate and drank non-stop with my family, and by the end of the holiday binge I was feeling gross. I judge my body by whether or not my clothes still fit, and, okay, things were not dire. I hadn't even gone up a full size. But some of my smaller clothes were starting to feel a bit snug. And my mom gave me a bra for Christmas (what, your mother doesn't buy you Christmas gifts at Victoria's Secret?) in my usual cup size and when I tried it on, well, my cups runneth over, so to speak. I tried to blame it on the fit of the bra, but I knew that it was actually just proof that I had put on a few pounds. So when I got home from vacation I went to work. Skiing for five days straight was a good kick-start, and then I spent all of January doing a lot of Exercise TV routines (the 30 Day Shred program is awesome) and a lot more strength training and I've been eating healthier. Now I'm back to honestly tracking my food, and I've realized that I just can't eat like my boyfriend does and expect to stay slim. Fortunately, he's really understanding and although he occasionally says, "Are you sure you don't want another delicious beer?" he doesn't make fun of the fact that I immediately portion our pasta into eight separate servings now or count out my portion of chips. After all, when I met him and he fell in love with me, I "sold him" a certain package and that package includes being thin. I feel like I owe it to him to maintain my physical shape as much as possible throughout our life together (just like I feel he owes it to me to maintain the fit body he has now, baring any health complications, of course. I realize this is sort of a controversial attitude and maybe I'll elaborate on it sometime in an entry that isn't already 200 pages long). Tracking what I put in my mouth seems a little obsessive, I know, but I promise I have a very healthy attitude about food and my body. If anything, I'm more vain and prideful about my body than I probably should be (even when I'm a bit heavier than usual). I have a very good friend whose life has been an ongoing struggle with disordered eating, so I know a lot about unhealthy eating habits and I'm very careful about making sure I never stray into that territory. (For one thing, I don't even own a scale). But this is how I think about it: I am not a dieter. I never will be. I like a wide variety of food, I think eating is one of life's great pleasures, and I don't believe in depriving myself of anything I want. So what works for me is portion control, and tracking what I eat helps me do that. If I know I'm going to drink four beers when we're out on a Saturday night, I'll enter that into my food tracker in the morning and then plan accordingly, eating one less tablespoon of peanut butter at lunch or drinking only half a Coke at lunch. I always give myself what I want, I just do it in the proper portions. It really is that easy. I try to be mindful of portion sizes and of eating a more protein-heavy dinner if I had a particularly carb-heavy lunch just to balance things out, but ultimately I eat what I want and I don't beat myself up if I eat "too much" on a given day. In fact, some days I don't track at all. But overall it puts me on the right track, and I feel so much better physically now than I did in December. Incidentally, the bra my mom bought me for Christmas? I own 30+ bras so after being worn a few times that one ended up at the back of the drawer until last week, when I went, "Oh, I haven't worn this one in a long time." I put it on and, what do you know, it fits! No more spillover fat!
  
• I heard from a contact that I need for my dissertation. Of course, we haven't actually managed to set up a meeting yet, but at least the ball is sort of rolling.
• I'm going to Russia a month from tomorrow! I got my tentative itinerary yesterday, and there is more free time for vodka drinking than I thought. Hooray!
• I can't stop playing X-box. Or, rather, I can't stop wanting to play the X-box. I do manage to drag myself away from it and do my schoolwork, but that doesn't mean I'm not staring at it longingly the whole time. Rolling things up in Katamari is so much fun, and Penn introduced me to another game that I call The Car Smashing Game, although I think it might actually be called Burnout. Whatever it's called, you get points not for winning the race but for crashing into as many cars as possible in the process, and, let me tell you, that is satisfying!
  
• I successfully managed to get Penn addicted to The Sopranos. We started watching the first season when we were in Maine, and now we'll sometimes watch four hours straight at night. In a month we've made it all the way through season four. We're at a standstill now, though, because I don't own the fifth season yet and my budget this month is tight and doesn't really have much wiggle room for buying DVDs. I fluttered my eyelashes at Penn and told him he could buy it for us, and he said, "No, that's okay, I'll wait until you can buy it, that way the whole series belongs to you." I was like, "Why does that matter?" After all, we're together now. I asked him if he is envisioning a future in which we have an acrimonious break up and in the process of dividing up all our possessions we engage in a ten minute argument about who gets to keep the Sopranos DVDs. He assured me that no, he isn't at all worried about whose stuff is actually whose, he just wants me to have the satisfaction of completing a DVD set on my own. Goof. So, yeah, I may be breaking down and buying the fifth season sooner rather than later, because we're on a roll and I really want him to see the rest of the series. Of course, I don't know what we're going to watch at night when we're done with the series. How can anything top The Sopranos?
• Watching The Sopranos every night was leading to some bizarre dreams. I never really remembered them, but I was waking up every morning thinking about Paulie or wondering if there's any significance in the fact that all of Tony's mistresses are brunette when Carmela is blonde. It turns out that I'm kind of a crazy sleeper, which I never realized until I started sleeping with someone every single night. Penn says I sleep with my hands in loose fists all night long and that a lot of times when he's holding me at night I punch him in the chest! Not hard, thank goodness, but who knew I was a sleep puncher? And when I'm not punching, I'm apparently a tickler. He said a lot of times he wakes up because I'm flicking my fingers over his chest. And I very rarely remember my dreams in the morning, but Penn says he has to wake me up at least once or twice a week because I'm whimpering and thrashing around like I'm having a nightmare (I never even remember him waking me up when this happens). On the other hand, I obviously have some good dreams, too, because one night a couple of weeks ago I woke both of us up because I was laughing in my sleep! We had just fallen asleep when I let out a single resounding, "Ha!" and woke both of us up. It was so funny. I couldn't fall back to sleep for about ten minutes after that because I kept laughing thinking about laughing. Good thing Penn is such a patient guy and holds me all night anyway even though I'm a punching, laughing crazy person.
  

Taking a Break from Rolling Things Up

It's the last Football Sunday of the season. Oh no! I was a little concerned about how I was going to keep my boyfriend distracted on Sundays from now on so that I can actually read and write my papers, but fortunately his new X-box arrived in the mail a couple of days ago and he now spends an hour every day yelling into a headset as he and his friends from back home play Halo, so I guess I didn't have to be concerned about that after all. Penn isn't much of a video game guy. In fact, prior to this week I don't think I'd seen him play a single game the whole time we've been dating. But some of his friends finally convinced him to buy an X-Box, and I have to admit that the X-box is sort of appealing, if only because it lets him keep in touch with friends. I think that's nice. That, and I can now play Katamari! I've been wanting to play this game for years, literally (although it wasn't a priority, obviously), so I was thrilled when a couple of Penn's friends lent it to us. I've already spent about an hour today rolling around and picking things up. This bodes well for my academic career.

[I interrupt myself to ask WHY do we care that Barack Obama is watching the Super Bowl? Why, why, why are they doing a pre-game interview with the president?! I'm just waiting for the anti-Obama backlash that is sure to start a few months from now. There's no way he can sustain this sort of celebrity/popularity/whatever it is. I mean, he seems like a nice guy, but geez. I heard on the radio this morning that he's having a bipartisan Super Bowl party at the White House. Oh hooray. Since when do we care what sort of social events are happening at the White House? I can't help liking the guy because he's just so darn charismatic when he gives interviews or speeches, but I just worry that we're being overloaded and the backlash is going to be really intense. We'll see, I guess.]

The first week of classes went well. The biggest thing that happened this week is that I paid for my visa to go to Russia. I'm going to Russia in less than two months! I'm going for a class. We study Russian stuff for the entire semester and as part of the class we take a really fancy field trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg over spring break. The best part is that the segment of the class when we're in Russia is purely "to experience Russian culture" and see some of the places we've been discussing all semester, so we're being encouraged to just have fun and take it all in. I don't even need to take a computer with me on the trip; there's absolutely no research component while we're in Russia. How cool is that?! Plus the trip is insanely cheap because I can use all of the yearly travel money my department gives me, plus an international student travel initiative is paying for half of it, PLUS the ruble is kindly falling in comparison to the dollar, which I hope continues to happen until March. Needless to say, I'm getting very, very excited. I just wish Penn could come with me. Then again, he went to Europe without me last summer, so I guess now we're even. :-)

The rest of my classes seem like they're going to be interesting and not a miserable amount of work, but none of them involve field trips to Russia so I won't be talking about them today. Instead, I'm going to go make some sauce for my jambalaya burgers (I made super burgers for the Super Bowl!) and pour another beer. Happy commercial watching!

It's Snooooowing!

Today has been a nice day. Obligations have just melted away by the minute!

When I woke up this morning it was snowing and sticking. Hooray! This is the first real snow we've had all winter (prior to now we've just had "flurries" and "showers" that didn't stick). Even though the ground was already mostly covered by the time Penn got up for work at 7:15, I didn't get my hopes up that classes would be canceled today. My university is notorious for stubbornly staying open even when basically everything else in the region has shut down. So I got up at 8:00 and ate breakfast, read through a project that a friend is working on since I had agreed to meet with a group of people to discuss it over lunch, did my workout in front of the TV (I love Exercise TV on demand), showered, packed my lunch, and was five minutes away from walking out the door to head to campus when my phone beeped with a text message saying campus had been shut down due to the weather.
Woohoo!!!
Because campus is closed, I got out of the group meeting, a meeting with my advisor, AND my first class of the semester, which was supposed to happen this evening. Good thing it was canceled, too, because I was going to have to scramble through seventy pages of reading this afternoon to prepare for tonight. All of these things will be rescheduled, of course, but it's nice to have an unexpected day's reprieve from returning to school.
Then shortly after classes were canceled Nicole called to let me know that she wants to host a Super Bowl party this weekend. Yesterday friends were trying to convince me to do it since the friends that usually host it aren't at all enthused about the game this year and don't feel like doing it. So I went home and convinced Penn that we should host (even though the guy doesn't really like Super Bowl parties because he actually likes to watch the game and chatty people are too distracting at parties. Actually watch? The game? I've always fallen in the "watch the commercials and eat snacks" camp in the past and usually I don't even know who's playing, but after a season of Football Sundays with Penn, I have to admit that I'm beginning to understand the appeal of actually watching the games. Crazy, huh?) Anyway, it turns out my convincing was all for naught since Nicole has stepped up to take the responsibility off our hands. While I was actually beginning to get into the idea of hosting the party, I was also already getting a bit annoyed with the logistics (Do we order a keg? Am I a bad hostess if I just provide snack stuff and ask everyone to bring their own meat to grill?), so I'm kind of relieved that Nicole took over. I suppose I'll just host a non-dinner party another time.

Anyway, I'm off to eat lunch and leisurely do my reading. Maybe I'll even watch some trash TV to celebrate the fact that I now have nothing to do tonight.

27 Things to Do Before I Turn 27

Look at this, two posts in two days! I'm stocking up a bit since the spring semester starts on Monday and you all know that means I'll be lucky to post once a week here until it's break time again.

So, this is my list of 27 Things to Do Before I Turn 27. Both Briar and Sara have done this on their blogs, so they're my inspiration for making the list. This is quite a bit belated since my birthday was back in November, but I figure 9 months is still plenty of time to make decent headway on a list like this. Also, I realize it might make a bit more sense to do something like 30 before 30 or 50 before 50, but I like a challenge, and I figure anything that doesn't get done this year is either not all that great of an idea after all or can be bumped to next year's list.
I included mostly fun things on this list, things that I want to do but generally don't make a priority when life gets hectic. I did include a few practical and career-related things that I need to try to do, but mostly my thought process as I made the list was, "What new things would I like to try?" So the majority of my list involves things I like: travel, restaurants, and finding ways to be a tourist in my own home. Also, I have to admit I purposely tried to list things that are relatively easy to accomplish. They'll take a bit of effort, but most of them are things that I can accomplish in a single day or even a few hours. I feel like crossing the majority of items off this list is feasible before November, and I did that on purpose because I don't want to look back at this list later and have done nothing. I think if I can accomplish even half the items I'll be satisfied, and I'll have done some fun and interesting things.

With all of that said, here's the list:

• Get another stamp on my passport
• Cross at least one more state off my list (only 18 more to go!)
• Bake a cake that doesn't come from a box
• Host a get-together of some sort at my condo (although whatever it is, I'm not allowed to call it a "dinner party" because Penn thinks dinner parties are only for old people)
• Write a book review and submit it to an academic journal
• Attend one of these events celebrating Edgar Allen Poe's 200th birthday
• Eat here, here, and here.
• Teach the Meatball to retrieve beer from the fridge
• Start some sort of savings account separate from, and more stable than, my stock accounts
• Really master driving standard so that I feel equally comfortable driving my car or Penn's
• Attend at least five live productions, not counting concerts (it is shameful how rarely I make time to take advantage of the opportunities to see live theatre/dance/opera on campus and in nearby cities)
• Find a dentist here and make an appointment to get my teeth professionally cleaned for the first time in, uh, years
• Take a beach vacation somewhere that is not New Jersey. But also:
• Visit a boardwalk on the Jersey or Delaware shore when it is actually summertime (I have been to Rehoboth and Ocean City, but both times it was fall or winter so I have yet to actually experience the boardwalk scene)
• Take my boyfriend to my home state
• Get caught up on my personal journal project and print and bind the past two years
• Try at least three types of cuisine that I have never/very rarely tried (Mongolian, Peruvian, Belgian, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Guatemalan, these are all options. In my neighborhood, this shouldn't be too hard to do)
• Read at least two of the books that made me think, "Oh, that's a classic, I should probably read it," as I was entering Penn's books into our GoodReads library
• Take a group dance or exercise class
• Buy a printer
• Buy a Wii
• Go to this museum
• Visit this landmark
• Also, this one
• Visit some churches in our neighborhood and try to find one we would like to attend on a regular basis
• Go to a hockey game
• Make a list of 28 Things to Do Before I Turn 28
  

Inauguration

***First, a note that has nothing to do with anything else I'm going to write about: it is almost February, and so far I am sticking to my resolution to cook from an actual recipe at least once a week. I know it has only been three weeks, but I'm considering this an accomplishment since we were skiing or housesitting for a large portion of the month. And this week I cooked three times! I made a whole wheat pasta/chickpea/garlic/tomato sautee dish that I've been eating for lunch this week (I made that one just for me, because Penn will eat anything I make but I don't really need to torture the guy with whole wheat pasta), on Sunday I made this roasted sausage dish, and then tonight I made Greek Wedding Soup. I included the links to those recipes because they were both really good and really easy and I know quite a few of us are on a mission to cook at home more often right now so I thought I'd pass them along. The first one is nice because it requires very little attention and you can relax while it roasts. And the second one came together in half an hour, including defrosting the meat in the microwave. For the record, I used hot Italian sausage in the first recipe, and the grocery store right behind my apartment actually had ground lamb when we were there the other day so I was able to use that and I'm glad I did (I think it would still be okay with the ground beef, but it would be lacking something). Also, if you're counting calories you might want to stay away from the sausage dish, obviously (or just make it your only major meal for the day), but the soup is only about 600 calories per serving AND gives you lots of protein, which is my favorite combination in a meal. Oh, and I realize those are both Rachael Ray recipes and I'm trying to branch out, I swear, but I am a fan of her stuff because a) it's generally approachable and doable for amateur cooks, b) the ingredients are usually easy to find at your basic grocery store (we have every sort of market in the world on my street, but I'm not usually in the mood to go from store to store looking for things) and c) I've made 20+ of her recipes over the years and only one disappointed me, so those are good odds. ***

I really wanted to write about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday night when the excitement was high, but by the time Penn and I got home to our apartment and unpacked I was too tired to think about doing anything else. And then I went back to work and I had other things to catch up on so that's why it's Friday and I'm just now getting around to writing about it.
When I moved here a year and a half ago, one of the things I remember being excited about was the fact that I'd be able to see a presidential inauguration in person. I had decided way back then that I wanted to be there to see it, no matter who won the election. As the media keeps reminding us, an inauguration is "an historic event!" and I wanted to stand in the cold and watch it happen. I would have been there if it had been Clinton, McCain, anyone. Then Obama won the election and it turned into this HUGE thing and over a million people were planning to crowd the public transportation and people were rumored to be renting out their houses for thousands of dollars to the Obamamaniacs from out of town and, well, you know all that. And I thought, "Hmmm. Maybe I don't actually want to deal with all of that." Up until last week, Penn and I were still waffling about whether or not we actually wanted to brave public transportation and go (actually, I think he had more or less decided he wanted to go, but I was beginning to lean a bit more towards the "it won't be worth the hassle" camp). We're within walking distance of a subway stop, one of the last stops on the line, and it takes about half an hour to ride downtown from here. So it would have been feasible to make our way to the ceremony from here. It would have been easy, in fact, compared to what most of the rest of the crowd had to do. But still...
Then my friend who I housesit for occasionally called and asked if Penn and I could stay at her place Friday through Monday while she and her husband took a vacation. This friend lives on Capitol Hill! So I said, "Sure, but can we stay at your place Monday night so we can go to the inauguration?" and she said yes, so that's how we ended up with a place to stay within walking distance of the Mall. Score!
It was fun being there in the days leading up to the big event. We walked down on Sunday afternoon and the Mall was still relatively uncrowded, so we were able to walk right up to the Capitol and check out the set up and watch all the media getting into position. We were also bombarded by the vendors selling an endless array of Obama crap. I think my favorite was the Obama water, or maybe the Barack pistachios. So ridiculous.
On Tuesday morning we planned to get up around 7 and leave by 8 to walk over to the Mall. We figured that would get us there in plenty of time since the musical prelude wasn't supposed to start until 10 and I still sort of thought that everyone was probably exaggerating the estimated crowd counts. But at 6:30 Penn's phone rang. It was one of his friends who gets up early for work, telling us that he'd seen coverage on the news of people already pouring out of subway stations in a steady stream and letting us know that we should probably get up and going. So we got up and were out the front door by 7:45.
The walk to the Mall from my friend's house normally takes about twenty minutes, but it took us about an hour and a half on Tuesday. There were lines of people with tickets blocking all of the routes we would normally take, so we just followed crowds being directed by cops and "inauguration volunteers". After being funneled into an increasingly tight mass by an actual human chain of police officers and being held up momentarily by a motorcade (I couldn't see who was in it, other than a military official whose chest was covered with more stripes than I have ever seen on anybody in my life), we eventually came onto the Mall at the Washington Monument. We were far, far away from the Capitol, but, hey, we could see it! We also had a clear view of one of the big screens and the sound system worked well so we could hear what was going on, and the nice thing about the Washington Monument is that it's on a slight rise so we had a great vantage point from which to view the crowds filling in. And fill in they did. There were people around us from Seattle, California, and Ohio, and while I think those people were crazy to travel all the way here to stand a mile from the Capitol, I have to admit that it was really exciting.
The whole thing was really exciting. I'll also admit that it was pretty freezing, but that's why I have a toasty-warm boyfriend. For a while before much was going on he wrapped his arms around me and I stood facing him with my hands in his coat pockets and my nose burrowed into his neck. He kept laughing at me and telling me that it wasn't that cold (it was 26 degrees, that is COLD!) and then he said, "What are you going to do when I have to let go?" and I yelped, "When is that going to happen?!" and Penn is still laughing about how panicked I was at the thought of standing on my own in the cold. Fortunately, he let me use him as my blanket until everything got interesting enough that I was no longer thinking about being cold.
The main thing that stands out in my mind about the actual ceremony was how quiet, calm, and attentive the crowd was. I was envisioning a riotous mob, people so loud that I wouldn't even be able to hear Obama take his oath. But it was the complete opposite of that. All day long people were friendly. I didn't notice any deliberate pushing or shoving, even when we were basically being herded toward the Mall like cattle. There was a really annoying, know-it-all guy standing in front of us but while we all ignored his rambling, nobody was bothered enough to tell him to shut up. During the oath and the ceremony, the crowd was basically silent, except when they were cheering. I can't even explain how strange it felt standing in the biggest group I have ever been a part of (and probably will ever be a part of) in my life and somehow still feeling a sense of calm and quiet. Maybe I just got lucky and ended up in a good section of the crowd, but I also just think that was the general vibe of the day, because everyone else I talked to that was there described the same friendliness and reverence. That alone made the experience amazing, and the fact that almost 2 million people can come together to witness something important and treat it with the proper amount of respect makes me feel like maybe Americans as a whole aren't all that bad.
After the ceremony I was a little worried about how we were going to get through the crowd to get off the Mall and walk back to the house where we were staying, but it ended up not being much of a problem. We walked along the Tidal Basin, then sort of along the waterfront, and then we were able to walk on two different highways that were closed to traffic. That was weird. It looked like those movies about the end of the world, where almost everybody has been killed by zombies or aliens or something and the only people left just stroll along the empty highways to get where they need to go. We did have to scale a fence and jump about 10 feet down a highway median (actually, Penn jumped and then I climbed down into his arms; again, this is what boyfriends are for!), but we were home about half an hour after the ceremony had finished. Not bad!
I'm so glad we went. I feel like there are very few events that happen in a lifetime that are big enough that future generations will want to know about the day in detail. I remember asking my grandparents about Pearl Harbor and about Kennedy, and once having a class assignment where I had to interview my parents about their memories of the moon landing. And now I think that maybe someday someone who isn't born yet might ask me about September 11th, and then they might ask me about this and I'll be able to say I was there. Or maybe eventually we'll get to the point where it's par for the course to have black presidents and female presidents and gay presidents and Latino presidents and future generations won't really think that much about the first time it happened because to them it will just be normal. I don't know if that will happen in my lifetime, but I'm hopeful that it will happen eventually.
I'm skeptical of celebrity worship, and I must admit that the way the world is reacting to Obama feels like that to me sometimes, like we're going wild with excitement before the man has even done anything to really warrant it. Who knows what his presidency will entail. But then sometimes I get swept up in the hype, too, and I really am thrilled that any child I raise will grow up in a world where there has always been a black president of the United States. We grew up being told that we could do anything if we set our hearts and minds on it, but we didn't have many examples of that actually being the case. Now, I think we get much closer all the time to that actually being a reality. I wish Obama well, and even though I know he will screw up (he's only human, after all) I really, really hope that he sincerely has good intentions and will do well for this country and leave a legacy that the millions of people who celebrated this week can be proud of.

Something in the Water...

All of my friends and relatives really need to stop synchronizing major life events.

Remember a couple of years ago when approximately half* the people I know all got married at more or less the same time?
And then remember last fall when everyone who wasn't already married** got engaged in a single week and I put a moratorium on the announcing of engagements until 2007 was over? (Which worked very well...too well, in fact, because in the months after that way too many of my friends went through break ups and divorces, so, uh, I guess I shouldn't complain anymore.)

Well, now the inevitable has happened. And it has happened much sooner than I thought it would. You know what I'm talking about...
The babies are on the way! People close to me are becoming parents! On a seemingly-daily basis! Ahhhhhhhhhhh! I am very, very not ready for this.
Don't get me wrong, I like babies. At least, I think I like babies. I definitely like them in theory. In practice, I have no idea since it recently dawned on me that my actual experience with infants is pretty much nil. But at any rate, I've recently discovered that despite my best attempts to ignore the damn thing, the proverbial biological clock is very real. Some moments it feels like my stupid uterus is audibly ticking (especially now that I've met someone I can actually envision myself potentially procreating with eventually. EVENTUALLY. NOT NOW. Emphasis completely necessary because apparently these days making babies around here is as easy as drinking a glass of water.) So yes, I'm excited about having a baby someday, but the regularity with which my friends have been announcing pregnancies lately is crazy. It makes me very happy for them, of course, but every announcement simultaneously forces me to anxiously eye my enormous stash of birth control pills while googling "anti-fertility rituals."
I'm thinking about this today because a friend I taught with over the summer just announced her first pregnancy via Facebook. She's hot on the heels of Penn's sister, who told the family last week that she's pregnant with her third child. Cas is due with her first in April. My cousin Rae is due with her first in June. As part of my current job I assist a secretary who is going to have a second baby any minute now. One of my fellow PhD students had a baby just before Christmas (well, he's the dad so he didn't give birth to it, but still). Two of my friends from college who had a whirlwind courtship that led to what I still think of as "The Most Unlikely Marriage Ever" (despite the fact that it has already lasted almost three years) had a baby just before Christmas, too.
I really am thrilled about all of these babies. As I mentioned above, I have very little baby experience so I'm excited that everyone else is popping out these little people for me to hopefully get some practice with. In fact, I think I have unwittingly planned things perfectly since I don't think I'll be the very last of my group of friends to have a baby but I also don't have to be the first. Muahahahahaha. Plus, it's just exciting. Babies!!! My friends are producing offspring!!!

All in all, I think it's pretty cool. It's just that there's nothing like vicariously venturing into carseat and diaper bag territory to make me realize that I really am closer to 30 than 20. Yikes.

*This is possibly a slight exaggeration.
**Okay, okay, this is also a minor embellishment of the actual facts.

Skiing!

I got my grocery store's weekly savings flyer in the mail yesterday, and as I was flipping through it I noted that the store is having an "Inauguration Grab 'N' Go Special." And do you know what the special is? Fried chicken! Seriously. So what do you think, is the store racist or just completely oblivious?

Changing the subject completely, Penn and I are back from our ski trip. We had such a good time!
Last Friday we went to a used sporting goods store and I was able to buy a pair of used skis, boots, poles, and nice gloves all for less than half the amount it would have cost to buy a new pair of skis and for only double the amount it would have cost me to rent for the duration of our trip. If I even use the skis just once more in my life they will have been worth the investment, and I like the pair I got. They're not super-fast, but that works well for me and I should hopefully be able to use them for several seasons before I need to upgrade.
We drove to Boston on Saturday and spent the night with one of my college friends who now lives there and then on Sunday we got up (before sunrise!) and drove the rest of the way to Maine. I would like to point out, by the way, that I drove Penn's stick shift truck on the highway in Maine for about an hour and a half so he could take a nap. I even had to go through a toll plaza, which I managed to do without freaking out and stalling! True, it was seven in the morning on a Sunday and we were in middle-of-nowhere Maine so there was pretty much no one on the highway except for us, but I still feel like that's at least a little accomplishment.
We went skiing at Sugar Loaf. I highly recommend it. Supposedly it's one of the very best places to go on the east coast, and while I can't vouch for that (since it's the first place I have ever skied on the east coast) I can say that it's very comparable to the place where my family used to ski in the Rockies, and apparently comparing anything on this coast to the Rockies means it's good. My only complaint about the mountain itself is that it was really, really windy. I've never been on such windy slopes. Given, I think we happened to pick a really windy week, too, but I was looking through the packet of brochures and several of the restaurants and in-town activities offered "wind hold" specials, so I think that means the wind is probably a pretty regular thing at Sugar Loaf. Here's how windy it was: several times I was skiing along and the wind would be so strong it would stop me in my tracks! Given, this never happened on a particularly steep slope and I'm not an incredibly fast skiier, but still. Pretty bizarre. At first I thought I was just being a wuss about the wind, but then on the windiest morning the ski report said something about "sustained winds of 30 mph with gusts up to 65 mph" and I no longer felt like such a weakling.
The little-too-windy factor was tempered by a lot of other really awesome things, though. There is a good variety of terrain, and all of the lifts led to many slopes so that even though Penn and I are at different levels (he can do anything; I will gladly do all blues and can often be talked into a black but I won't attempt double blacks...yet...) we could always get to the top and find something that would either work well for both of us or would allow us to split up and easily meet up again partway down the mountain. Our hotel was great because it was literally ski-in, ski-out. We would get up in the morning, bundle up, walk down two flights of stairs to the locker room to put on our boots and get our skis, and then we'd walk out the door of the locker room, pop our skis on, and get on the lift that was steps away from the back door. It was wonderful, especially at the end of the day when we were exhausted and wanted nothing more than to be back in our warm, cozy room, beer in hand. Most of the condos and hotels seemed to have a similar ski-in, ski-out arrangement, which is definitely a major plus for the mountain. The other great thing was that there was hardly anyone on the slopes. I suppose we just picked a good week to go and I'm sure some weeks (the spring break weeks, for instance) will be much more crowded, but we didn't have to contend with any crowds. Our hotel was nice and quiet and seemed to be at only half-capacity, at the most. We skied for five days and waited in line for a chairlift exactly twice (and both times the "wait" was about two minutes). Most of the time we could ski right up to any lift and hop on. There were many times when Penn and I would be the only people on a trail. I knew I was getting spoiled when I was approaching the base of a long-ish trail one afternoon and there were suddenly about half a dozen snowboarders in front of me and I thought, "Damn it, where did all these people come from!?"
Having entire trails to yourself is definitely a huge perk, but there were a couple of times when I thought, "This would be a bad, BAD situation if one of us fell and got hurt right now." On the fourth day we skied it snowed all day, which led to some really nice powder conditions and hardly anyone other than us braving the weather and taking advantage of it. There was a lift on the far side of the mountain that we liked because it went to the very top (well, as high as you could go) and led to a series of blacks and double blacks that Penn could do and a blue that I liked and would do a few times in a row while he tackled the harder trails. On the morning it was snowing we skied over there and got to the lift right as the operator decided they needed to close it because of the wind (and probably because it was snowing so hard at the top you could hardly see). So there we were, getting ready to sit down on the chair when the lift operator yelled, "We're shutting down, it's too windy." Since we were the only ones in line at that point (or even in sight, for that matter) and since our only other options were either taking off our skis and hiking back up to a higher point to ski down to a different lift or poling along a series of annoying, flat cross-cuts to get back to another lift, we talked the guy into letting us be the last people to head up. He shook his head and said, "You're brave," but he let us do it. It was definitely weird getting off the lift and hearing it grind to a stop. I realized at that point that we were pretty much on our own, and I was really grateful we were together, just in case something had happened.
Luckily, nothing bad or painful happened all week. We both had the usual post-skiing soreness, but I'm pretty sure Penn didn't fall once and I only had two minor falls and only one where my ski actually popped off. And even then I didn't go head-over-heels, it just popped off because I came off a powdery patch onto a really icy patch and the change in texture surprised me and I overcorrected and ended up facing sort of uphill, crossing my skis and flopping over. I pretty much fell uphill. Of course, the one time I managed to lose a ski Penn was ahead of me and couldn't help. We were on a black slope at the time, and usually when we did a black (or any trail we thought might be more challenging for me) Penn would let me start well ahead of him so that he could stay behind me to help just in case I needed it. It worked out pretty well, usually. I would start, he'd wait until I was partway down and then he would ski until he was slightly ahead of me and wait for me to catch up, we'd both rest for a second, then he'd let me take off again...as predicted, I was much slower and more cautious than he was (which is pretty much our personalities in every life situation, to be honest) but he slowed down and I tried to ski a bit faster and we were able to ski together in a way that was fun for both of us (at least, I think it was fun for him; he can save the crazy speed competitions for his next boys' weekend on the slopes...and as I pointed out, I'm much more fun for the apres ski experience than any of the boys are! They don't cuddle.) Anyway, fortunately just after I fell a woman came down the slope and stood below me so that I could lean on her to put my ski back on, so it wasn't a big deal. Penn asked what I would have done if she hadn't come along, and I said, "Uh...grabbed my ski and scooted down on my butt until I got to you?" which is honestly what I probably would have done because it was a pretty steep slope and I really couldn't stand up on my own.
Anyway, all in all the skiing was a big success. Penn is really good for me because he challenges me to try things I wouldn't try otherwise, but the couple of times that I said, "No. Really, NO. I am not going to do that trail, I don't feel good about it," he understood and didn't force me. I'll never be as fast as he is (I value the feeling of being in control of myself way too much to truly get flying) but I think if we keep skiing together I'm definitely going to get better. I was already much better at the end of our five days of skiing than I was at the beginning. I also realized that part of what makes me cautious is purely psychological. There were a few times where Penn said, "We're going to do this one," and I said, "What is this one?! I don't see it's name, how hard is it?" and he said, "Just do it, it doesn't look that hard, right?" and then we'd get to the bottom and he'd go, "You did a black!" I do psych myself up a lot more when I know that a trail is "Most Difficult," and now that I know that, I'm a little more willing to judge the trail based on how hard it actually looks and not on what color it supposedly is.
It really was funny how much our skiing could easily be a metaphor for our entire relationship. He challenges me to take risks and bend the rules a little bit and spend more time living in the moment. I think I challenge him to show more self-restraint and look more at what is best for the big, long-term picture instead of just looking for the in-the-moment benefits. It's a pairing that worked well on the slopes, and so far seems to be working well in life, also. We have a good balance, I think.

Anyway, now we're back in the real world. In Maine we'd gotten into a total old people routine: getting up by 9 at the very latest so we could hit the slopes, coming in for a quick lunch-and-defrost after 2-3 hours, going out for more skiing until 4, then eating dinner, having a few drinks, and watching football or movies until we fell asleep by 9:00. I was working out all day and sleeping at least 10 hours a night. I kind of wish life was always like that.
But now it's back to work for both of us tomorrow (I still have two weeks until I'm back in classes, but I start my assistantship work and an independent study project tomorrow). I'm not particularly excited about going back to real life, especially since I ended up wasting most of this weekend by getting sick. I started feeling sick when we were driving home on Thursday, and by the time we actually got home on Friday (after another night spent with college friends in Boston) I was feeling pretty lousy. In fact, I barely remember Friday night because I was so fuzzy-headed and loopy from cold medicine. One minute I was lying with my head on Penn's lap watching an episode of The Sopranos, the next thing I knew he was putting me in our bed. He literally had to carry me to bed because I was so sleepy and out of it! Yesterday wasn't much better, although I rallied enough to finally go to Slumdog Millionaire, which I really liked. Luckily, I'm feeling much better today. There are still a lot of personal things I want to accomplish before classes start again, though. We'll see if I can get any of it done.

And now to end on the same sort of completely unrelated note I started on, I would like to point out that Penn and I are currently drinking "HeBrew: The Chosen Beer." I'm not kidding! It was on the Make Your Own Six Pack shelves at our favorite liquor store, so we had to try it out. Who comes up with these things?!

On the Right Foot

2009 is off to a good start. For one thing, I just realized 2009 is very easy to type because the 9 is right next to the zeros. I like that. As always when a new year starts, though, I can't believe how quickly time has gone by. It seems like just the other day that my grandma was giving us Y2K gifts for Christmas and I was drinking sparkling grape juice at my friend Sara's party with all of my high school friends. And now almost an entire decade has gone by.

Anyway, last night was a lot of fun. I ended up wearing my purple dress after all and with tights and my winter coat I was actually perfectly comfortable. It helps that we were either inside the club or on the subway for most of the night, and we drove to the subway station rather than walking so I was really only outside for a grand total of ten minutes. The concert was so much fun. Robert Randolph is funk and soul, so it's great music to dance to. Since the only time I can ever get my boyfriend to dance with me is at concerts, I took full advantage and we danced all night long. We were also just tipsy enough that we thought it would be a good idea to make out like horny teenagers all night long, too. Actually, that WAS a good idea. Once you're an adult there's something really fun about just kissing for a while. Plus it's not like every other couple in the club wasn't dancing close and kissing all night, too. New Year's is definitely a holiday made for couples, which I had never really thought much about until this year. At one point I thought, "Hmmmm, maybe I should be appropriate and stop kissing for a second," but then I looked around and every couple around us was kissing, too, so, yay, guilt-free public displays of affection! Happy 2009! The concert was a good way to ring in the new year. At midnight the band led a countdown and a ton of balloons rained down from the ceiling as we grabbed our free shot of champagne and the music started up again and we went back to dancing. It was the perfect mix of low-key and celebratory, and I had a great time. The night even ended well because we hadn't put much thought into how we were going to get home, other than hoping that the trains would run later than they usually do on Wednesday nights. Fortunately, the trains were running later than usual and we somehow lucked into making our way into the station two minutes before the last train of the night pulled up to the platform. All in all, it was a fun way to say goodbye to a very memorable and special year.

I celebrated the first day of 2009 by not leaving the house at all other than to take the dog outside to go to the bathroom. Penn and I woke up, napped for a while, woke up again, decided to nap a little more. I finally took a shower at about 4:00 in the afternoon. Penn and I spent most of the day sitting on the couch watching football with his friends who are visiting and Anna, who came over for a while. We also had bratwursts for dinner, since apparently it is good luck to eat pork and sauerkraut on new year's day (crazy Yankees...I only knew about good luck black eyed peas prior to this year).

Tomorrow I'm on a mission to buy a pair of used skis because on Saturday Penn and I are driving to Sugar Loaf in Maine to go skiing for five days. Skiing! In Maine! I've never been to Maine, and even though it's going to take forever to get there (we're basically going to Canada) I'm really excited to see it since it's supposed to be beautiful. I'm also really, really excited to go skiing since it is my favorite physical activity and the last time I got to do it was almost four years ago (and, actually, the last two times I was on a mountain I was snowboarding, not skiing...I think there's going to be a pretty steep re-learning curve next week). Penn loves skiing. I'm fairly certain he's going to be bored out of his mind skiing with me, actually, since I know I'm going to be much more slow and cautious than he is. But I hope it's going to be really fun. The only downside is the high in Sugar Loaf was 9 yesterday. THE HIGH. So I might die of frostbite, and I might end up with broken bones, but I hope that I get a couple of good runs in first. I'll let you know how it goes.