Friends

in 2010 news, the bathroom is painted and the mirror is on the wall.

tomorrow perhaps we hang pictures above the mantle in the living room, and we get the oil changed in my car.

after that? one cannot dream big enough to imagine the things that lay ahead.

sid told me his resolution for the year is that if something can be done in 5 minutes or less, he'll just do it.

i didn't have a resolution at the ready for the start of the new year. i had lots of ideas but nothing that seemed consequential or well-defined enough to announce as an official resolution. but there's a lot to get done, and a lot i'd like to change, and a lot i'd like to keep in mind over the next year, so here's a list. make of it what you will.

• today was my last day working out with the personal trainer. i'm on my own now, for better or worse. i need to improve my cardiovascular endurance. i would like to lose at least 10 lbs. i'd like to lose more, but 10 seems manageable and puts me back to where i was in 2005. if i can do that, i can work on getting back to where i was at other yearly increments.
  
• i want to figure out why my skin suddenly feels like finicky old lady skin and figure out how to fix it.
  
• i really like cooking, but it stopped being fun to me this past year and started feeling like an unwelcome burden. i want to be cooking (and baking) a lot more, and i want to be documenting it all so that successes can be repeated and failures can be laughed off.
  
• it's time to be making things again. my office in this house is close to feeling cozy and usable and i have lists of things i want to do and materials to do a lot of them and so many ideas all the time and so many things i want to learn how to do.
  
• enjoy my practicum
  
• make the kitchen & laundry room usable
  
• get sid to eat more vegetables
  
• wrestle this house into feeling homey
  
• not be too sad or worry too much when sid has to be traveling for work.
  
• not be more than a month behind on magazines, if i ever manage to get caught up again
  
• ride my scooter a lot. but not miss out on how nice it is to just ride with sid. and probably at some point i would like to learn to ride a vintage bike.
  
• go out on top in my last semester of grad school.
  
• do well whatever it is i end up doing after grad school. working or not, and wherever i may be.
  
• stay in better touch with good friends and cultivate new ones.
  
• visit north & south dakota finally.
  
• remember that i am a tough cookie.
  

today is EPIPHANY! and while i haven't really had any, i'm still thinking a lot about 2009 and what's to come in 2010 and how to make the best of it.

for the last two days, i've been going through a bazillion websites and blog posts i'd bookmarked before & during the holidays and not yet checked out. several were driven by prompts from this website, on a 'best of 2009' theme. i was raring to enumerate all my 2009 bests, but now that i'm looking at them tonight, i'm a little uninspired. or, really, the issue is that they're all pretty one note, because the best of 2009 is sid.

but, to humor my earlier plans:

best new food: i returned to vegetarianism after a lapse of a few (ok, about 9) years, and i'm ashamed to admit that i've discovered a number of meat substitutes (some more legit than others) that i like. a lot. this week i'm going to make seitan from scratch for the first time and see if i can break myself of some of it.

the best place: an overarching issue in 2009 was feeling out of place, so finding good ones was key. our front porch is a good place. our burnt-orange, '70s-rec room gym is another. the creepy fairy tale cave at rock city. there was a spot i sat down while sid and i hiked up a mountain in colorado. i wanted to stay there forever. that was the best place.

restaurant moment: there was a weekend that spanned the end of january and the beginning of february, and sid and i found that we'd independently made plans to be in chicago over that weekend. he to move one last load out of his old apartment with the help of ryan, and i to visit samantha. on that saturday night i made plans to get he and ryan out to dinner with me and several friends - phil and michelle, courtney, and laura. when he arrived he slipped me a wrapped gift - a three week anniversary gift, a book on state shapes. i think i spent the entire dinner grinning at him. phil regaled everyone with stories, and we all laughed until we hurt. and that was just the start of it.

Originally published at Starry Wisdom. You can comment here or there.

2009 was a pretty poor year for me and reading. Only 23 books finished (one additional book is still being read, and as such will get counted as 2010, or perhaps not at all).

Here they are in all their glory:

Pirate Sun		Karl Schroeder		“Jan 12, 2009″		“Jan 18, 2009″
One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko		Mike Royko		“Jan 19, 2009″		“Jan 28, 2009″
Encore Provence		Peter Mayle		“Jan 30, 2009″		“Feb 05, 2009″
Neverwhere		Neil Gaiman		“Feb 04, 2009″		“Feb 15, 2009″
The Inferno		Dante (Translated by Robert Pinsky)		“Feb 05, 2009″		“Feb 21, 2009″
The Throwback		Tom Sharpe		“Feb 10, 2009″		“Mar 09, 2009″
Mortal Engines		Philip Reeve		“Feb 22, 2009″		“Feb 28, 2009″
Boss – Richard J. Daley of Chicago		Mike Royko		“Mar 01, 2009″		“Mar 26, 2009″
His Majesty’s Dragon		Naomi Novik		“Mar 25, 2009″		“May 10, 2009″
The Time Traveler’s Wife		Audrey Niffenegger		“Mar 27, 2009″		“Apr 04, 2009″
Cheeseburgers – the Best of Bob Greene		Bob Greene		“Apr 05, 2009″		“Apr 17, 2009″
Full Circle		Michael Palin		“Apr 18, 2009″		“May 15, 2009″
The Algebraist		Iain M. Banks		“Apr 28, 2009″		“May 09, 2009″
Settling Accounts: Return Engagement		Harry Turtledove		“May 11, 2009″		“Aug 17, 2009″
Focault’s Pendulum		Umberto Eco		“May 16, 2009″		“Jun 14, 2009″
Food Politics		Marion Nestle		“Jun 15, 2009″		“Oct 26, 2009″
Infinite Jest		David Foster Wallace		“Jun 28, 2009″		“Sep 20, 2009″
Anathem		Neal Stephenson		“Jul 02, 2009″		“Jul 12, 2009″
Dead Witch Walking		Kim Harrison		“Aug 07, 2009″		“Aug 09, 2009″
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights		John Steinbeck		“Aug 25, 2009″		“Oct 01, 2009″
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel		Susanna Clark		“Oct 26, 2009″		“Dec 01, 2009″
Spook Country		William Gibson		“Dec 05, 2009″		“Dec 14, 2009″
Momofuku		David Change and Peter Meehan		“Dec 11, 2009″		“Dec 25, 2009″

I’m not going to make excuses, I just didn’t read a lot. I will point out a couple of personal highlights in the list, and we’ll just leave it at that:

• Boss – Richard J. Daley of Chicago: this was a fantastic book, but I really wanted to punch the guy (Daley, not Royko!)
• Infinite Jest: This was my second read, which I did for “Infinite Summer” and probably helps account to my less than one book per two weeks total. Upon a second reading I noticed a lot of things I missed the first time, although I still ended up with a lot of questions

you will undoubtedly already have noticed my "books read" and "movies ranked" posts. this serves as a more general 2009 wrap-up and 2010 look-ahead.

when hunting for past-years' book & movie lists, i found a year-end meme that i filled out in january 2005. the most salient item from that list is #9 - "what was your biggest failure?"

my answer? "my failures are both too numerous and too insignificant to bother listing."

this remains true.

oh hell maybe i'll just fill out the whole damn thing again as a short-cut. then post a FREE STYLE thing after i finish painting the bathroom.

( blah blah blah redeux )

in 2008 i saw just 24 movies in a theater, and failed to tell you about any of them.

in 2007 i saw 59 movies and posted nothing about it here on the livejournal.

in 2006 i saw these movies but didn't seem to post my rankings.

in 2005 i saw 63 movies in a theater, but then failed to post my rankings, despite promises in that post that suggest otherwise.

in 2004 i saw 62 movies, but posted no details, but have this rather extensive oscar rundown done at someone's request.

here are my favorite films of 2003.

i saw these movies in 2002 but did not post rankings.

did you know: i honestly thought (before this afternoon) that i dutifully posted my top ten list every year? i've certainly made a top ten list every year since 2002.

in 2009, i saw 42 movies (in theaters). of those, three were just terrible. from most terrible to slightly less terrible, they are:

01 Year one
02 It's Complicated
03 Wolverine

then i put ten films into a top-ten list. this list is fairly arbitrarily, and is provided with a number of caveats. i've missed a lot of movies i'd really like to see and suspect are pretty great; my critical faculties have failed me a number of times this year; and i'm definitely very appreciative of a well-made 'light' movie anymore, one that entertains me and meets all of its own goals for doing so, and doesn't strive to be anything else. that said:

01 Away We Go
02 Adventureland
03 (500) Days of Summer
04 The Hangover
05 Up
06 The Wrestler
07 The Fantastic Mr Fox
08 Last Chance Harvey
09 Julie & Julia
10 2012

honorable mentions to go:
o Cowtown Ballroom… Sweet Jesus!
o Food, Inc.
o Where the Wild Things Are
o Let the Right One In

further commentary to come, after i paint the bathroom.

In case you hadn't already put it together, 2009 was one hell of a year for me - school-wise and personal life-wise. Sadly that meant it was not one hell of a year for me, reading-wise. In the last few weeks I've finally started to put a dent in an epic backlog of magazines, and new books given as Christmas gifts make the unread shelves bulge even larger. I only read three books for pleasure this year, and one of them was really a 50 page pamphlet on local history. All other books were for school or cookbooks. Ho hum. Here, in all its glory, is the 2009 list:

For fun:
01 Armageddon in Retrospect Kurt Vonnegut
02 How the States Got Their Shapes Mark Stein
03 Old Westport William A Goff

For school:
04 The Changing Academic Library: Operations, Culture, Environments John M. Budd
05 Guide to Library and Information Agency Management Charles Curran
06 Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management Peggy Johnson
07 Librarian's Guide to Online Searching Suzanne S. Bell
08 Licensing and Managing Electronic Resources Rebecca S. Albitz
09 The Organization of Information Arlene G. Taylor

For cooking:
10 The Garden of Vegan: How It All Vegan Again! Tanya Barnard
11 How It All Vegan!: Irresistible Recipes for an Animal-Free Diet Sarah Kramer
12 La Dolce Vegan!: Vegan Livin' Made Easy Sarah Kramer
13 Vegan Brunch: Homestyle Recipes Worth Waking Up For-From Asparagus Omelets to Pumpkin Pancakes Isa Chandra Moskowitz
14 Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that Rule Isa Chandra Moskowitz

For comparison, here is a list of things I read in 2006, the last time I posted.

I made a sandwich today
without using any bacon

Well, technically there was
bacon in the two strips of topping-
bacon, and there was
bacon in the
bacon double-cheese-
flavored bacon

but just a little, and I guess the
bun had bits of flecked
bacon as a sprinkled-bacon bacon-topping, but over

all the sandwich was
one hundred percent
bacon-free

we've had a lovely vacation so far. for xmas i got up early to spend hours photographing the new luciferins colors i just released, then made celery-pear juice (one of my favorites). midday, joe & i cooked. no major menu, but he did pick up a fifteen pound, free-range, organic hippie turkey which we roasted with rosemary, sage, fresh thyme & garlic under its skin, & filled with a sort of offhanded, recipeless celery, pearl onion, & mushroom stuffing. (it was set to include pomegranate seeds, but we totally forgot.) i also made an enormous pot of russet/carnival/delicata squashtatoes, & of course had homemade cranberry sauce with it. we then ate & watched a fucking incredible movie, "eating out: all you can eat". (don't watch it if you live near me & i like you, because it's totally showing at my next movie night.) the freezer is now stocked with sandwich-sized foil packets of delicious turkey which joe painstakingly stripped from the bones.

so on to OUR ANNIVERSARY. it's anniversary round three, & full_week+_off_work_together round four. joe & i don't do xmas presents, but we definitely do anniversary presents. in the past he's taken me to a bed & breakfast & to uber-fancy dinner, but he opted to start torturing me this year as i have him. i guess his latest birthday inspired him to new ends, as he'd displayed my present, wrapped, out on top of the tv for several days. i, of course, had immediately wrapped & displayed his similarly. he gave me permission to sniff his; i allowed him to listen to mine; & we each gave each other one instance of hefting.

early on the 26th we went & saw avatar in imax 3d. best movie of the year & we're going again this week. after that we went back to union. we split an appetizer of potato gnocchi with stewed rabbit (the gnocchi were fantastic but looked uh... interesting. i therefore told the waiter, "the larvae were delicious," which he laughed at), then joe ordered the medium-rare duck breast with roasted chesnuts & golden raisins; i had pork cheeks with brussels sprouts, miniature carrots, & parsnip puree. looooove their brussels sprouts, they're tiny & totally sweet like they should be.

the bus took forever to get us home, but then it was time. as mine for him was more of a to-do, he went first. the long, side-heavy box ended up being a bottle of cologne - totally outside either of our comfort zones, as i've NEVER worn perfume. however, it's a scent that i like & have complimented on a girl we both know, & joe said it "turns his head" every time he catches it on the air, so we'll see if it does the same thing to him on me.

as for my present to him...

about four years ago, joe's first suspension was filmed for a british documentary on body modification. he never had a chance to see the result, but figured they didn't use much of his footage because he didn't do anything "spectacular" - just went up, hung, didn't want to be swung around, & came back down.

in early october of this year, i received an email from my friend icemem: Does Joe happen to be in a film called The Human Canvas? One of my best friends here in town (an artist who deals with extremes of body image) has been showing it to her friends all over the place for the last year and I've only just found out about it, if he is, that would be a -really- weird coincidence.

of course i knew immediately what that was, & jumped on him to send me a copy. he didn't have to - it's on YOUTUBE. & it was put there by the guy who actually made the documentary. so i emailed him via youtube, & he was happy to send a real copy, albeit in PAL.

unfortunately, i couldn't convert the PAL dvd in my computer or any of sic737's, & it also wouldn't play in my "i will play all of your burns & avis & mpgs & even some movs, & also i have proven my ability to play PAL before" philips dvd player either, so i ended up ripping the youtube version & burning that to a disc that even our sony dvd player likes. it looks decent enough, & i figured i'd give him the PAL disc too, & he can try his compudork friends' computers.

so i made him fetch his present from the tv & unwrap several layers of bullshit to get to it. i had wrapped the dvd itself, then stuck it in a magazine & wrapped that, then shoved the magazine into airpack bubbles & wrapped that, then stuffed the whole mess into a box & wrapped THAT. (it was very cute when he thought the magazine was some sort of fancy book from italy because there was a dior ad on the back.) the disc i burned just said "happy third anniversary" or some shit, so even when his present was in his hands he didn't know what it was.

he didn't identify it immediately either, thinking i just got him some bodymod documentary... until he started to recognize the voiceover. he asked, "you found it?" a bit incredulously. i nodded & forwarded to his part, which is a full 7-8 minutes or so & even spans a commercial break. it was pretty great to watch him watch himself - especially since he's lamented often that he barely has any recordings of his hook work - just one pic of his faceframe (five facial hooks tied to a huge picture frame) & some poor non-flash stuff i & others have taken.

so it's sort of funny - i'd initially allowed him to listen to my present, which he eventually did; he had let me sniff his, which made sense at the end. anyhow, here's the youtube link for the documentary. joe's part starts around 40 minutes for anyone interested in seeing spacey, freshly-hung thok.

& just like last year, i also compiled another montage of webcam shots of us. again, edited for public consumption; again, they're all pretty well worksafe. :)

( click for 2009 cuteness )

& a bit of jewelry: ( dichro pron x3 + one other simple match )

& a soupcon of linkage for those obsessed with my hair:
http://community.livejournal.com/get_up_dread_up/6109801.html
http://community.livejournal.com/get_up_dread_up/6116652.html
http://community.livejournal.com/get_up_dread_up/6128669.html

also please everyone play this: http://vimeo.com/8338091

next up: spending all day working on two hair clients.