Things I broke on Christmas eve: 1. Ice cube tray. 2. Pantry shelf.
Things that bring a tear to my eye: 3. Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain saying "God, I wish I knew how to quit you!" 4. About 1 minute and 20 seconds into "Fairytale of New York" when Kirsty MacColl begins singing (especially considering she died one week before the holiday).
Things I learned from my father's first cousin's wife: 5. She is the inspiration for Khaleen, baby momma to Jedi knight Quinlan Vos in the Star Wars comics universe. 6. The Amish run awful puppy farms behind the barn facades.
Gifts that have changed my life (so far): 7. Slippers: I never knew how cold my feet were all these years!
Things that I say I will do every year but never actually do that I am actually doing this year: 8. Christmas shopping for next year (hello, sales). 9. Buying a gift wrap organizer. (I need one so bad). 10. Eating all the cookies.
Discovering Auld Angst Syne: "Contemptuously I flung Seventeen aside; it had been rendered meaningless. From now on I would abandon magazines and instead read books like 'Death Be Not Proud,' in which someone with his entire life ahead of him suddenly dies tragically. 'The Bell Jar' was only a hop, skip and a jump away, along with the poetry of Anne Sexton and my own morbid, self-obsessed poems".
After a disappointing start, the peppermint bark came out well. But it's hard not to like crushed peppermint candies on chocolate. The almond macaroons came out well too, though the recipe promised me 12 and I got 9.
But the coconut bars are a sticky mess. Martha says: "Using condensed and evaporated milk keeps these bars chewy". That's true, if by chewy she means a sticky porridge that can barely retain a shape. I can not in good faith gives these as a gifts. (Safety plan: perhaps salvageable as frosting for cupcakes!)
I'm going to try chocolate crackle cookies. I'll be back to sob later.
Now that my semester is officially over, I need to get into holiday mode.
Step 1: The Cookie Toil of 2005. So far on the short list are Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti, Peppermint Bark, Coconut Bars, Chocolate Pretzels, and Black and white cookies. More to come.
Step 2: Finish gift shopping, wrapping, and mailing.
(This is all Martha's fault really . . . )
[ETA--Cookie disaster due to extra stick of butter (no, not that butterstick. I am dismayed.]
It's over, hon, okay? Sure, we had that year together, but I never really got anything out of it. And now it's been seven months and you are still throwing yourself at me with offers of 71% off cover price. I know where to find you if I want you.
Also, you really aren't fooling anyone by putting women on the cover.
And suddenly--just like that--I decide that I like Alex Kuczynski's weekly store reviews in the Times' Thursgay Styles. Who else, when reviewing the new Abercrombie & Fitch flagship store, would write:
A haircut, in real life: "A person can't get a haircut on the Internet. That's a comfort in an increasingly impersonal world where just about everything else is for sale online and change roars by at a pace that can turn a person gray. . . No doubt someone is trying hard to invent the cyber cut."
Is the banality that pushed me too far? Not only did the International Herald Tribute deem it worthy to republish from the Boston Globe for the ex-pat crowd, but it fits squarely in the "the old ways were just fine/I'm scared of technology" mode that Andy Rooney has perfected and that lazy editors rely on for column inches. Really, once we can get haircuts on the internets, the very fabric of society will have already pulled apart.
I nearly went to the moon yesterday. My head already felt like it was in the clouds courtesy of my new cold-ette. The rest of the trip would have been fueled by coffee and Dayquil. Never got altitude and crashed on the sofa instead.
Cold-ette still raging on today, but I bought some red juice to help me feel better. Why red juice? Well, as a child whenever I was sick, my mother would get red juice for its curative effects. Hawaiian Punch, Hi-C--no matter, as long as it was red. The red is the healthy part. (The only downside is that I can not, to this day, drink red juice when well because of the association with illness.)
But that doesn't matter today. And when I am cured, I shall be IMPERVIOUS to germs during finals for the next two weeks.
