1. Tonight at the Trader Joe’s my check-out dude, after I handed him my ID and he verified that I was, indeed, over 21 (surprise!), returned my ID to me and said, “Word.” I was not really sure what that meant, and normally I ignore other Californians’ speech tics because, well, hey, I just said it was the check-out “dude” who handed me back my ID. That’s how we roll here.

But then as he was packing my sad little groceries of buffalo chicken wings, Puffins, wine and flowers and some baby broccoli (which I put in there out of guilt and which will probably rot in my refrigerator) into my Envirosax and I told him I’d carry the flowers (which obviously weren’t going to fit), he replied, again, “Word.”

And I tell you I spent 10 minutes on the walk to my car (you think I am crazy enough to try to actually park in the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s parking lot at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday? then you are crazy. word), trying to figure out what the corollary in my own lexicon was to “Word.” Essentially he was acknowledging receipt of some communication from me and approving its contents, right? I vacillated between “great” and “thank you” for a while before giving up and deciding I would have to leave this great mystery of life unsolved.

2. Speaking of mysteries, my parents gave me some Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes DVDs for Christmas and they ROCK so hard! I can’t believe Joan Hickson was so ancient and yet bopping along when she made them. And I cannot even believe that E. thinks Basil Rathbone is The Definitive Sherlock Holmes. I have yet to shred that notion until a tiny million sad little pieces with a viewing of the genius that is Jeremy Brett, but that day will come.

3. I haven’t read anything since Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams over Christmas, which was awesome, but I’m ready to start in again. Only. Not quite ready. Whenever I take a long break from reading I always feel like I have to start in easy, like maybe with a little Twilight series re-read, before I can get into the real stuff. It’s like vegetables. You CANNOT, unless you want a painful and socially awkward next few days, go overboard with vegetables if you haven’t had them for a while. You cannot, for instance, eat, as I did a few days ago, an entire bag of brussels sprouts* for dinner (only 200 calories!) first thing. You have to ease into these things. Word.

Since December 5:

Finally, January 31:

The owl is a Mincing Mockingbird original. On the back it provides the caption, “Another Night, Another Bout of Sickening Yet Exhilerating [SIC] Butchery.” Bwahahaha. A present from E. for Christmas. I bought MM’s book at UniqueLA with some of his birds and sayings, and COULD NOT GET ENOUGH. Seriously, I make everyone who comes into my house read it. Two of my favorites that have made me laugh out loud just reading them to myself (you have to imagine beautiful paintings of birds who are saying these most incredibly ridiculous things): “Realizations Made While In the Midst of a Sketchy But Much Needed Manicure” and “Pledging Obedience to an Authority I Like to Call Thug Life.” Oh, and there’s my magnet: “You’re a Whore and That Makes me Sad.” I bought the book for my brother for his birthday last year and we still laugh about it to this day. I also buy MM’s wife Frantic Meerkat’s c-c-c-crazily awesome greeting cards (she has sweet Valentiine’s cards I have purchased for B. & E., as well as a temporary tattoo)*, and have turned several into prints on my wall.

Anyway. This post title is totally stolen from one of MM’s painting titles from his book (picture it coming from a beautiful cockatoo).

And it means that %^^#*$@((@(@&&@@^^%$%$%$ billable year 2009-2010 is over for me as of TODAY, and I cleaned my %^^#*$@((@(@&&@@^^%$%$%$ apartment for the first REAL time (aside from necessities) in 2 months today. And took down my Christmas tree. Brutal (8 hours!) yet HEAVENLY.

These last three months were the worst on record of my life, second only to the two months I spent studying for the bar exam. Imagine if you just skipped out on work for 9 months, and then had to do an entire year’s worth of work in 3 months? That was my life.

And when I read that caption (Pets That Dream of Living in More Orderly Homes) today, I wondered, do F&E give a crap if things are messy? I know they care when I don’t get home until 10 or 11 and they’re starving and I have about 15 minutes of lap time before I’m asleep, but do you think they care if the Christmas tree is still out and my mail is piling up on the counter and I haven’t watered the plants? Do you think your pets care? I dunno.

What I do know is I care. AND I AM SO HAPPY TO BE DONE WITH THIS YEAR (a month late, stupid delayed firm billable year).

So, hello (finally!), 2010! I’ll meet you at the bar. I’ll be the only one with newly-manicured hands, a fresh haircut, a super-cute plaid dress I bought at Anthropologie because my opposing counsel on that deal was so mean I needed a pick-me-up and which kind of makes my hips look bigger than they are (just a little bit, said B.; HUGE, said E. (gotta love honesty in a man, HRMPH), and looking like I need a drink like no woman has ever needed one before. Cheers!

*No, they are not paying me for this, I just think they’re that awesome. It’s like the first time you heard Yeasayer and you couldn’t believe it.

1. I am not sure whether I think Heidi’s new haircut is fresh and girl-next-door or boring and Mom. I cannot decide. BUT either way, I am super happy Project Runway is back in New York! I just couldn’t buy Mood in… Culver City. And I live here! (Although I never go to Culver City. Or anywhere west of Fairfax for that matter. Um, except for tomorrow night when I am heading to Culver City to see E.’s friend play. Anyway.)

2. At a party, one person I can talk to about what death means, relationship dealbreakers and his relationship with his niece. Other people I can only talk to about Project Runway and/or the weather (my weather conversations/thoughts are not as awesome and entertaining as Laurie’s). I will never know if it is because (a) the tv/rain-talk-partner is just incredibly boring, (b) we have personalities that would never get along if we weren’t forced by social convention and physical proximity to speak, or (c) I am socially awkward but a select few other weirdos don’t mind.

3. No idea still when I will get that Christmas tree down. Haven’t made it home before 9 one night this week, most nights later than that. Have not seen E. and B. since Sunday. LAME.

4. This may be too large of a question for a Thursday evening, but when will my life ever be SETTLED? I know nothing is ever settled, really, it’s not over til, well, I don’t know, something other than that phrase I REALLY don’t like that references a woman exercising her vocal chords happens, but I would like SOMETHING to be settled. My career, my relationship future, where I’ll be living next month. Right now the only thing that is settled is the cats on my lap, who are in fact making it difficult to type. Enh, maybe that’s enough for now. They’re pretty cuddly and warm, and it’s cold outside. What with all this weather we’ve been having. I know, can you believe it, this rain? And hey, have you seen the new Project Runway? Can I get you another beer?

My mother told me this Christmas that she had always thought it was bad luck to take down your Christmas tree after New Year’s Eve because that had been what her mother told her for years — which, as Grandma Crystal later admitted, was a bold-faced lie primarily designed to incite her daughter to help take the tree down.

I think my mother forgot that she has been telling us kids this same bold-faced lie for years, and I am now ON JANUARY 11th staring at a Christmas tree that is (in my mind) mocking me for my oncoming bad luck in 2010.

Anyway. I’ll get it down this weekend, late Friday night (maybe — work is sucky busy right now), and maybe I’ll even finish cleaning my apartment, which is awash in a sea of still-to-be-framed, still-to-be-SENT (ack!), and still-to-be-put-away Christmas gifts and still to-be-wrapped birthday gifts for E.

And yeah, having a clean apartment was one of the six New Year’s resolutions I have for this year, to wit:

1. [REDACTED] (kisses, Dooce);
2. Pilates the heck out of burgeoning bum bump* that emerged this year (not so many kisses, work);
3. Restart my craft club, Yurps! (kisses, crafty ladyfriends!);
4. Be a better friend and girlfriend (kisses for everyone!);
5. Save money (no kisses for anyone; they are expensive); and
6. KEEP YO APARTMENT CLEAN, MUTHAFLIPPA.

But it’s not looking good so far.

But actually, let’s not talk about that! Complaining is lame (although, as Laurie says, it does burn calories).

and….

That leaves me not much to talk about.

Except that I came home tonight late, and Baby Boom was on, yay! I seriously love that movie. It’s on the same par as Steel Magnolias or When Harry Met Sally for me. And I would SO love to be J.C. Wyatt, all badass in my shoulder-padded glory but giving up the corporate life to you know, have a beautiful farmhouse in Vermont (read: tiny apartment in Eagle Rock) and run a successful business from home and regularly bed an earnest veterinarian (read: earnest anything, really).

Maybe THAT should be my New Year’s resolution. Minus the shoulder pads. Probably. I hear they’re hot this year.

*Have you noticed how every single pregnant celebrity’s belly is called a “burgeoning belly bump??” It’s like gossip writers who graduated from Columbia’s journalism school are SO FREAKING EXCITED that they get to use a 10-letter word AND alliterate that they just can’t help themselves. So that is what I am calling it. I like like that better than “excess butt fat” or “saddlebags.”

I generally coexist with the animals in my apartment. Cats? Aside from the general mass of poop they produce, sweet! Spiders? I may occasionally sweep aside a web once it is the size of my head but other than that, have at it!

Ants? I have tried to let them have their limited space for weeks now but after this rainy weekend and having to spend an hour of my cooking time banishing them from the kitchen so that I could present a sanitarily prepared cauliflower and leek kugel (for the Jews, of which there turned out to be none, but, a hit!) and some herbed bacon stuffing (for the Gentiles, meh, pic above) for a party I was attending Saturday night, I had had enough.

So I Dyson’ed them all up! Plus sprayed the crap out of them with all-purpose cleaner. PLUS got some Combat traps that I am guarding with my life to make sure Fred & Ethel don’t turn them into play toys (for the sake of their lives, not the sake of the ants’ death).

Actually, this ant frustration took me back to the last time I was so frustrated with insects I cried — New York. I had just moved there after graduating college, January 5, 1998, 21 years and 2 days old, and I didn’t know one person there. Or have a job. So I stayed in a residence hotel that Katie and I had scouted on a Thanksgiving trip when we were living in DC my last semester of college. ONLY. I had no idea that residence hotel meant “place where mid-class hookers and drug dealers stay and also where there will be bugs that POUR (I am not exaggerating) from the showerhead and also lice in your pillow and when you move into your new room on 106th and Columbus with the nice Westchester-bred 6th-grade history teacher who’s writing her PhD thesis on pre-civil war Southern agricultural economies (who took a chance on you even though you didn’t yet have a job yet) you will have to surreptitiously bug bomb your room on Friday nights when she’s out and shower with anti-lice shampoo for three months until whatever these God-forsaken creatures are have finally gone!”

That was a long way to say “ants sucks.”

Aside from the ants, I had a wonderful weekend in which I:

1. Nourished people with the kugel (again, less so the Gentile dressing).
2. Won a Mrs. Santa Claus velvet with white feather trim “negligee” (I am not sure why I am putting this in quotes except that that word is so uncomfortable for me to write (I turned a color I like to call “tomato” when I opened it) the quotes make me feel better) from the white elephant exchange, and plagued someone else with an evil-eye protector kit I bought from Cauldron Kitty, a place I tried to exit as quickly as possible so that I would not smother from the sage burning.
3. Attended a Channukah brunch and had the first jelly-filled donut I have ever enjoyed.
4. Received the first of the presents I have ordered online for my loved ones, which arrived with no less than four (4!) (p.s. if you are also a lawyer, don’t you wish you could put an exclamation point after every parenthetical number in a document? And elsewhere? Seller has thirty (30!) days in which to deliver the estoppel certificate or this Agreement will automatically (!) terminate (!) and Buyer will have no further obligations hereunder, subject to the survival provisions of Section 7.2, 8.6, and 11.1, 11.2, 11.6 and 1.7 of this Agreement! Boo-yah!) “fragile” markings, which immediately transported me to my 7th favorite Christmas movie ever, Christmas Story.

And now I have 11 days to figure out the rest of my Christmas presents and bring the reign of the ants to an end. I can do it! I have the Dyson and mind power, Swede, mind power.