Things I Secretly Miss About New York

Even though I politely declined, there is nothing like getting propositioned at the urinals at Therapy to boost your ego.

Ryan Does Rufus Does Judy

So, funny story - my mom felt really bad about missing my birthday and ordered a bunch of stuff from my Amazon list as a birthday present cum apology, and had a stack of CDs and books waiting when I got home in early December. And on the top of the pile was Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, which I've been wanting for approximately forever. I immediately listened to it and gushed about how it was the best album ever and how madly in love I am with Rufus Wainwright and how it was going to be my soundtrack at the lakes, where I cloistered myself in a room with a very, very old-school CD player. (Incidentally, Rufus Wainwright covering Judy Garland is - like wine and waffles for dinner - something that my grandparents and I totally enjoyed together. It's another reason I think I'm ready to retire.)

And at some point, my mom gingerly said, "you know, I don't think that was one of the CDs I ordered," and I was like, "I'm going to pretend like you remembered what you bought me for my birthday and focus on the fact that this is the best album ever."

And then it turns out that Doug ordered it from the sidebar on my blog, and it was not, in fact, my mother. Oops.

So, two things:
1) Thanks, Doug, because I have listened to this album approximately ten thousand times, and it is AWESOME.
2) Doug knows me better than my own mother.

Valkerie

Mom: "I love movies like that, where you leave and you just want to learn more because you don't know what's fact and what's fiction."
Ryan: "Was there a man named Adolf Hitler?"
Dad: "We may never know."
Mom: "I'm never going to a movie with you two again."

The Oscar Goes To...

So it was not a huge year for the economy, democracy, peace, the environment, or human rights, but at least it wasn't a total bust. It's been a helluva year for disasters.

I'm Pretty Sure Most of December Did Not Happen

Before I left, I was like "oh noes, three weeks in Fargo is so much time in Fargo and this is why you should not book airfare while reading anything by William Least Heat Moon." That is one percent true. Tomorrow is my last day in Fargo, and it kind of feels like I did absolutely none of the things I meant to do while I was back. If I'm going to look on the bright side, I saw a bunch of people when I met up with Brady and Megan and a smattering of people from Shanley at the HoDo for the past two consecutive nights. (At the bar yesterday, I ran into a girl who I sort of had a crush on in junior high, who is totally chill and finishing her PhD in math and just as great as I remembered. What can I say, my twelve year old self had excellent taste.) If I'm going to be critical, I wrote precisely zero words of my thesis. Oops.

I guess I did read about a dozen books and finished that article that's been on my desk since April (yay!), but now I've got about twenty-four hours before I have to frantically throw all of my stuff into a suitcase, which somehow caught me by surprise despite the fact that Marcel and I scheduled this trip in like mid-July. I'm hoping that this will be the opposite of Fargo, and that all sorts of crazy awesome stuff will fall into my lap if I just avoid making any plans whatsoever and just nomadically wander across the East Coast running into people for ten days. It's only sort of sad that my plans for the trip basically revolve around being in Boston early enough to get oatmeal with cherries and walnuts at Hi-Rise. And that I've given this more thought than finding a place to sleep in New York.

(I've given up on learning to cook anything except breakfast foods, so I'm secretly hoping to convince Holly to tell me how they make it so I can add it to my repertoire for those subzero mornings when the college decides to arbitrarily shut off my heat. And since I've only got like ten days before I get back to Oxford (yay!!), this is actually sort of urgent.)

Beep Beep

Ryan: "I'm a genius! I make the best waffles ever!"
Dad: "And you're humble, too."
Ryan: "I'm the total package!"

This may say something about the qualities I look for in a partner.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

I had to sleep on the couch at the lakes, and this means two things:

1) My spine will not be comfortably realigned until at least late January, and 2) I had the trippiest dream EVER. I don't remember the master narrative that tied all of these together, but I do remember being arrested for cocaine possession, getting into a fight with one of my ex-boyfriends, and running into my childhood neighbors, Cathy and Eugene, in a hotel as they were planning to leave for Mexico to star in a film set aboard a cruise ship. I know this because in the dream, I IMDB'd them in my suite after bumping into Eugene in the elevator. I'm not sure who encouraged me to be a drug mule, but I remember feeling bad about throwing away perfectly good cocaine and being arrested because of my thriftiness. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Eugene. It may have been Lee. At least, that would explain why I was so pissed off, although that might also have been because I think in the dream I found out that he was married to someone else when we were dating.

The moral of the story is that I should probably not drink coffee right before bed.