new years' resolutions?

got any?

since meeting my college roommate, i have always adopted her yearly new years' resolution: have more fun. it's nice - i never have to feel bad about resolutions like exercise more, eat healthier, be nicer, and so on. but i can think of a few that should go on the list this year:

1. stop calling blogmate every five minutes to tell her "i hate everything."

this is hard, because we've had a stressful few work weeks, but for 2007 i will try to substitute with some other more benign cliche. "it's the right thing to do" in particular works well and can be employed in events where i am asked to do something i don't like (in place of "i hate everything") as well as at the end of hard days such as yesterday when my blogmate asks me, "so can we drink tonight?" much more versatile. i can work on this.

2. get out of board game rut.

in college mb would bring a cribbage board on vacations, and set up in front of various non-midwestern scenery (eiffel tower, castles, etc.) he shared this love with ck, my blogmate and me in st. lucia last spring, and since then we enjoy bringing our somewhat-obscure little card game out to bars. when my blogmate and i play, we kind of hope to attract the attention of some young male bartender. unfortunately, every time we've tried this we've only attracted the wrong bartender, like the one with four kids or the short one with bad teeth *sigh*. so i'm thinking of expanding our bar-game base. i was secretly hoping for dominos for christmas, but no such luck. oh well, an excuse to go shopping for myself once the checking account recovers.

i did receive games over the holidays, which is awesome! but mb, butterknife, b's husband and i demonstrated recently that just the receipt of more gifts is not enough to break the cycle. we have spent the last several holidays together playing "apples to apples" for hours on end, and the game is fun but so addictive that we're all a bit burned out from last year. i had purchased for butterknife a much-desired trivial pursuit 80s edition, and we tried mightily to stop playing apples to apples in favor of the new game - which lasted for about 20 minutes until we realized that although we are children of the 80s, we have no idea which former reagan aide said which memorable thing. so we switched to my new present from ck, a more promising game called "quickword," which is a series of word puzzles kind of like boggle. anyone who knows butterknife's husband and me knows that our vocabularies are substantial, and we were quite excited about getting to stop feeling so lame about the 80s and start kicking ass with the word games. but no such luck - total word block. mb, who spends a great deal of effort pretending he only knows little words, was all over this one, with entries like "surreptitiously," while the rest of us could only produce "so." after another 20 minutes we guiltily looked around the table and went right back to apples to apples, which we promptly played until midnight when there were no cards left and we were all falling asleep at the table. doh. maybe the new games need more booze? i'm willing to work on this.

3a. Finish new awesome website.
3b. Stop working on new awesome website (it's for our wedding) and start working on actual wedding.

i won't post the actual link here, but email me if you want to see pictures of our wedding party and parents as bobbleheads. mb and i not having cable or bunny ears for the tv has resulted in some extra free time which we have used to learn more about photoshop and making animated gifs. but don't go looking at the "wedding info" section, because it's the only blank part. perhaps for 2007 we'll do something about that, hopefully before we decide to learn how to make flash movies.

accepting additions to the resolution list now - either for yourself or for me. come on - it's the right thing to do. :)

hippie holidays

i hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season, that nobody is struggling to fill last-minute holiday requests like "please, honey, would you mind picking up some butane for my kitchen torch so that i don't have to lie to my grandmother when she asks me how i'm enjoying my creme brulee set from last year?", and that everyone's home decorating is done to your satisfaction.

me?
i have picked up the butane.
but the holiday decorating is getting out of hand.

it started out simply enough, with a plan to host an appetizer party a few weeks ago, and with the realization that our apartment doesn't really have enough space to hold guests, appetizers, and a tree, we decided to scrap the tree and decorate our free-standing bike rack for a very merry bike-mas. it actually turned out great - faux pine garland and white lights strung in triangle fashion with a few ornaments here and there, presents at the bottom of the bikes. the bike-mas tree was a hit of the party, second only to mb's re-creation of his mother's famous beef smokie chubbies (for the uneducated, that's mini-hot dogs wrapped in crescent rolls).

add to the bike-mas festivities mb's beloved "zwarte piet" dolls, which means "black pete" in dutch; they are the friendly but politically-incorrect-in-america traditional christmas elves in holland. i'll summarize their presence: mb loves them. i love hiding them. so ensues the now-annual holiday tradition of each of us taking turns hiding the zwarte piet dolls in each others' stuff.

all fine so far. but now add ck's much-loved holiday gift to mb: wind-up hopping lederhosen. mb loves them, and i also love them. we gave them a prominent home on the dresser right next to the small lego "little jo-na" that mb gave me a few years ago (it really looks like a teeny lego replica of me; weird.) but last night i headed for bed to find the lederhosen sitting on my pillow next to mb. this gives me the feeling that the holiday festivities are taking over just a little.

i can't help but feel like my life is becoming a little bit too animated. mb and i are generally good-natured and happy people, but we realize that there are limits. for example, this weekend we watched a video on the life of ram dass (some guy who was a harvard professor with timothy leary who got booted from harvard after they started running experiments where they tried to create a placebo-controlled trial of hallucinogens to stimulate religious experience). when they did the segment where ram dass brings all the hippies back to his father's farm near boston while they all skip around in a big circle and bathe naked in the stream, we decided that we are not *that* good-natured. and last night, when we were reading the travel-blog of mb's hippie college friends who left their jobs to take a two-month stint camping around the country with no particular plans or destinations, hearing about their enthusiastic descriptions of the "energy" of the desert and the good vibes of parking lots despite entering said parking lots forgetting that their bikes were on top of the car (oops - ouch), we coined a new term:

some people are so good-natured that you just want to mock them.

so my hippie-mocking cynicism balances the take-over of the lederhosen a little, i think.

right?

glass half full

i won't lie. since thanksgiving i've definitely done my share of sulking. for one thing, self-loathing is a fairly distasteful experience, and since i attempted the turkey trot knowing full well that i was on the brink of serious injury, i can only blame myself for the searing pain and the limping and the crutches. so i hate the hobbling, and i hate myself for doing it.

that said...

there's something to be said for having a stress fracture.

that i appear to have done this to myself while running, or even better, while attempting a 10 mile bike/sprint suggests some sort of dedicated and accomplished athleticism. i'd even go so far as to say "hard core." no one has to know that said bike/sprint was completely out of my league.

and i'm told by kl and dh that i look cute when i'm so vulnerable and pathetic.

so i get to be badass and adorable?! i can't lose!

still woozy under the effects of all the attention, sympathy, and looks of admiration, i decided to take it one step further and go on my first ever helicopter transport of tiny sick baby. nevermind that i almost shrieked in terror while in the MRI machine, being fearless is fun, and flight doc just sounds cool.

i probably don't have to tell you that the helicopter experience was somewhat hair-raising, what with my overwhelming sense that we were about to fall right out of the sky. i also probably don't need to inform any of you that no amount of badass injury or life-saving can will save you when what you need is interpersonal know-how.

it figured that the other doc on the flight was someone i've known peripherally for a couple of years, and that i've had to be a little icy with him several times in the past, as he constantly feels the need to make veiled references to a brief romantic stint that once transpired between me and a friend of his (more adventures in self-loathing, but that's a story for another day).

it came out in small talk while in flight (over the headsets, mind-you) that he'd recently broken up with his rather serious and live-in ex-girlfriend, and of course i got roped into admitting that no, i wasn't seeing anyone either. flight doc made some "oh, so should we catch a movie later?" crack that was just weird enough to make me a little uneasy (since i was already practically sitting on his lap in the tiny helicopter cabin). not knowing what else to do, i gave a a really weak, "oh, you don't want me, i'm damaged goods," and started talking about my stress fracture.

i almost got away with it, but as we were landing the PILOT called me out on this not so slick maneuver, again over the radio for everyone to hear. "jo-na, am i imagining things or did he just ask you out and you said something about your leg?" again i failed to be quick-witted at the moment it really counted, and muttered something about the two of us going way back, and was left limping along behind to the stretcher, feeling like a complete tool.

i would be mortified by this experience, except that it offers the chance to work my stress fracture, my helicopter baby rescue, and the fact that i once dated a 5'4" nicaraguan man all into one, convenient, self-promoting story.

it's like my boss always says: never be sad about your data