a host of holiday highlights

0 i spent three days chez YB. we had christmas dinner (well, lunch) at my parents’ house, then headed back to her place and hung out in our pyjamas until yesterday afternoon. we watched season one of my new favourite show (Sons of Anarchy, which is uh-may-zing), made food, snacked and loafed. it was great!

0 as an aside, there were many valuable life lessons for me to glean from the aforementioned new favourite show... not the least of which was recognizing when it’s time to stop putting up with crap and when it's time to take your life by the short hairs. as such, i’m thinking of embracing my inner bad-ass next year. also...

0 i basically didn’t speak to my father over christmas. i thanked him and my mom for their christmas gifts (all of which were chosen, purchased and wrapped by mom), but that was about it. i did wind up buying him a jar of jam so that there would be *some* gift from me. i didn’t do this for him, i did it to keep the peace and minimize the chance he’d throw some kind of spoiled-child tantrum to wreck everyone else’s day.

0 in germ news, i did wind up sending a very polite email to the parish where father malaria joe handed out cooties. i’m not sure anyone of note will ever see it – i kind of think the office manager or whoever handles incoming email will delete it upon receipt – but i feel better having sent it. especially since YB and i will likely attend NYE mass there on friday.

0 i’m trying to prep for a more creative 2011. i’ve begun reading julia cameron’s The Artist’s Way and will start her “course” properly in january. i need to buy a spiral-bound notebook in the meantime.

0 much to my panic and dismay, my daily-horoscope calendar of lies has, like so many of my favourite products, been officially discontinued. therefore, the page-a-day cosmic guidance on which i’ve relied for so many years (eight? nine? ten? i’ve lost count) won’t exist in 2011. i’m just not sure a sudoku-a-day or a crossword-a-day or a cute-photo-of-a-cat-a-day calendar will provide me the nudges, signs or motivation i need.

0 regarding this leather-bound journal from umpteen posts ago: it was a gift from a friend. its pages are blank and the paper is the sort of thick, rough stock that looks handmade. the cover is still stiff and the smell of leather is strong but nice. i felt a curious pressure when i received it, as though this was something one might give a poet or an author or some other scribe who writes under the shade of an oak tree or in a paris café. plus, i had no idea for what i might use it. then, as our lunchtime conversation continued, my friend suggested i use it as something of a gratitude journal – to write down one good thing about each day as it passes. and that’s exactly what i’ve done every day since. i think it’ll be interesting to read through it in a year and to look back on what struck me as the days passed.

0 further to writing, i had all these rich blog entries i thought i would write over the past week or so. i had a lot that i wanted to say – that i still want to say – but i just didn’t find a way to say much of it. then i started thinking about the other would-be posts that had fallen by the wayside this past year – most notably, the I Am From assignment of many many months ago. sometimes, i don’t write these entries because getting them out seems daunting and scary, content-wise. sometimes, i don't write them because i think, "really? who's gonna care about this?" and, sometimes, i just don’t write them because i get lazy, stay in my pyjamas and watch a bunch of bikers beat the crap out of each other for 13 episodes. in a row.