sunday best-of blogging

best holiday album: the jingle cats' meowy christmas. since i stopped living with imo, no one but toadie will let me listen to it all the way through. we love it to death, though; in fact, it's the only holiday music any of the three of us can stand. it appears to be one of the tests of true friendship for me, along with a willingness to laugh until you cry at bloodsucking freaks and vast sentimentality over the sad plight of cujo. go ahead and sample the cat rock yourself, and you let me know whose side you're on.

best/worst dog: my parents have a chihuahua named peanut, whom i don't know well, as they got him after i moved to boston and i don't usually get home more than once every three or four months. he is unnaturally attached to me, though, considering how little he's seen of me, and whenever i spend the night at my parents' house he sleeps on top of me and stands guard. any time anyone comes to the doorway of my room he stands up on my hip and growls, and if the intruder comes within less than two feet of me he goes berserk and bounces around barking and snapping until a more secure perimeter is established, at which point he lies back down as though nothing happened. i think it's pretty cute, especially since he's such an itty-bitty (and relatively toothless) critter, but my parents, who take freakishly good care of him, are less amused. my mother has been nearly bitten by him trying to remove him from me in order to bring him outside to pee, and that's bad, 'cause he should know that no one needs to worry about being killed in her sleep by my mom—if she's going to do away with you, she's going to do it to your face. still, though, it's pretty funny. but wrong. but funny.

best photo of the friendliest stray cat in italy:

that's toadie's leg he's wooing. you can see his much shyer female companion entering the frame from the far right, and on the left you can see our hostess' glorious yellow plastic boots. in the back there you can see the slushy lake that symbolizes the soles of all of our shoes for the last three days of the trip, but this was the first of those days and we didn't know how moist things were about to become, so we were all pretty happy to hang out in the muck and caress the locals. apparently they were happy with that as well. think of us fondly, kitty, and know that we carry your heart in our hearts.

best exchange from a crime drama: the following was transcribed verbatim, but i can't remember now what show it was on, because i was transcribing it from my bed after weaving in and out of sleep for fifteen or twenty minutes:

"fresh off an airplane from a conference, and BAM! i got seminal fluid."
"some things never change."
"what?"
"cocaine."

most socially oblivious comment made by a radio personality: "i hope you don't have too long of a walk from the parking lot to work today, because it is frigid outside." and if, by either choice or necessity, you make use of public transportation, or you couldn't afford the heating bill this month because all three of your kids are on antibiotics for strep and you haven't had health insurance since you got laid off in october, or you just got kicked out of the last available atm vestibule in the city, well, it sucks to be you. maybe you should try and get a gig as a dj, 'cause it's snug as all get-out in this here booth.

best cousins: the children of my father's baby brother are both such phenomenal human beings that every time i see them i want to pack up and move to georgia just so i can see them a little bit more. the boy will be graduating with his master's in may, two years ahead of schedule, and already has a job lined up as a math teacher in a public high school near athens. he's a supergenius and is always happy to spend hours talkingwith me about incredibly dorky things, but he also shares my exact tastes in movies and books, and all of my political and social views. when he was born i was about five years old, and i was obsessed with him and tried to claim him as my very own baby. today i would be every bit as thrilled to be able to show him off as my son, but i'm pretty content with the current situation. his sister, who is about a year and a half younger than him, is also a genius and an outstanding writer, but has decided she would rather spend her summers on the road with the warped tour than taking extra classes, and i think that's equally fabulous. she's wanted to be everything from a veterinarian to a music journalist (hmmm, who does that remind me of?), and right now she's thinking about maybe interning with a small music label and then looking into PR, but i tell her every time we talk to try everything before she makes any decisions, because you can't be sure about it until you're there. her mother doesn't necessarily appreciate this, but i couldn't care less, because i'm pretty certain it's the best possible advice. college will be there whenever she needs it, but the time won't be. we both get very excited about stripped-down indie rock and sanrio paraphernalia, and we both want to maul andie macdowell. she happened to drive to new york city a week after i did, and out of all the stores in manhattan we both have the clearest, happiest memories of yellow rat bastard in soho, which each of us stumbled upon accidentally. if everyone were lucky enough to have two friends of their caliber built right into the family there might not be any more frivolous law suits.

best new year's resolution; stop putting things off. and i don't mean washing the dishes or starting that book you bought three months ago or cutting back on white flour, i mean the real things. everyone has, or at least i imagine everyone has, a vision of the way his or her life would be if everything were just right, and still we trudge through days that are nothing like that vision, largely because we are waiting for the opportunity to get everything right all at once. well, i'm not going to do that anymore. i'm going to make a baby step towards the big, shiny picture every chance i get, starting this week, when i'll meet with someone about a new job. it's not exactly the job i fantasized about in exactly the city i've been dreaming about living in, but it's a lot closer to it than the job i've been hating going to lately, and that's all that ought to matter. it's true that you can never reach a point if every time you make a move toward that point you only halve the distance, but it's also true that all that halving will get you a hell of a lot farther away from the place you wanted to leave. so i choose motion, and happy travels to all of you, too.