They Say We're Crazy But I Just Don't Care

It's been a low-key weekend here, the first of three three-day weekends in a row.
After three days of so much me-time, I'm bored, kind of lonely, and a little tired of Law & Order.

Which is when I remembered the fun that the internet can bring. No more boredom or loneliness. I've been reading various news websites, im-ing with a friend, contemplating how far Sexiest Man Alive Matt Damon has fallen as of late, and checking out the old You Tube in the hope that there would be new sketches with Micheal Cera reenacting important moments in history.

And then I stumbled upon one of my favorite songs from when I was growing up -- you just can't help but smile and sing along. Okay, maybe I just can't help but sing along and smile. Before the internet and itunes and ipods, I went maybe twenty years without hearing this. Now I could listen every day if I chose. (I don't though, because I don't want to get tired of it.)

Enjoy!

The Truth is I Never Left You

It's two weeks into my so-called "normal" life, and I've got a mild case of the blues. It could be the rain, it could be that it's Monday. But, really, I think it's all Matt Lauer's fault.

It's that time of year again, when Matt Lauer jettisons around the globe, and thousands of Today viewers are left with the Where in the World Is . . . Matt Lauer song running through their heads all day long. Sure, the song alone is reason enough to be angry with Matt Lauer. But that's not it. I'm jealous.

I'm jealous that Matt Lauer started his whirlwind tour in my beloved Buenos Aires. (I use the term "my" as if I were a porteno myself, instead of an erstwhile visitor.) My heart was crying this morning as I watched Matt Lauer tooling around town. Eating steak and empanadas. Basking in the sun. Narrating footage of El Perito Moreno (the giant glacier I visited) and Ushuaia (the town in Tierra del Fuego where I was marooned). A year ago that was me. In fact, a year ago that was me, strangely obsessed whether Matt Lauer was going to show up for WWML 2007. (We heard a rumor.)

And so I moped about the rest of my day, so very sad that my vagabond days in Buenos Aires are over, and Matt Lauer's are just beginning. The thing is, if I were Matt Lauer, I would quit my Today show gig and buy a place in Palermo (Soho, not Hollywood) and spend my winters in the southern hemisphere. Of course, if I were Matt Lauer, there are a lot of things I'd do differently. (Although not the Tom Cruise interview where ML was glib. I wouldn't change a thing -- I'm proud of him for that one.)

But alas, I digress. Fortunately, tomorrow Matt Lauer moves on to some other place in the world, that most certainly won't fill my heart with wanderlust and wistful memories. (He's already done South Africa and Buenos Aires, so I'm safe.)

Kiss Today Goodbye...and Point Me Towards Tomorrow

So, I knew it was too good to last. It had to come to an end. By this time tomorrow, the hiatus will officially be over. After a year of fun, travel, sloth, and spiritual recuperation, tomorrow if my first day at my new job, and back in the rat race.

As years go, this one would be pretty hard to top. Eleven countries visited. (Fourteen if you count layovers in airports.) Dozens of bottles of Argentine wine. Many, many great memories with friends and family, both new and old. And, literally hundreds and hundreds of photographs -- although most are too reminiscent of Cliff Claven's Florida vacation slide shows to be shared.

When I look back at where I was this time last year, I cannot help but feel joyous at where I am now. My five plus years in New York City definitely offered some good times, but also way too many gloomy times for my liking. New York is such a tough city to live in -- you have to really love it to stay. By the end of my time in NYC, my soul felt beaten down. I was bored with work and the social side of life, but even more bored with myself. I felt incapable of carrying on a normal conversation with life long friends, let alone anyone new you might meet.

Leaving New York, my job was like dropping the sandbags from a bright rainbow-colored hot air balloon. (Bad metaphor -- I hate heights and rainbow-colored hot air balloons, and I don't want to be a hot air balloon. Plus, it then just leads me to think about that movie The Red Balloon, and that poor little French kid who ran around in a gray outfit on a gray cityscape chasing the wiley red balloon. Oooh. I like that.) Ahem. Leaving New York, my job was like when the child in The Red Balloon finally catches the balloon and is joyous, after an eternity of chasing that pesky balloon through the mean streets of Paris while wearing gray and saying nothing.

Whatever the metaphor, like the balloons, these days I feel light and carefree. Well, most of the time. Tonight I'm kind of nervous about starting my job and being the new girl. I hate being the new girl. You'd think after moving seven times before my eighth birthday I'd have learned how to be the new girl. It doesn't mean I have to like it.

But back to light and carefree. The traveling was great. Really exceptional. But I also enjoyed the down time. I liked reconnecting with friends again. I liked trying to be a better friend, actually. I've really enjoyed the feeling on a Sunday night, when instead of dreading going to work, you only worry about whether you missed this week's episode of Rock of Love 2 with Brett Micheals. Similarly, I also enjoy the decadent feeling of waking up and seeing that an all day marathon of ANTM is playing, and you have nothing to do that day but catch up on America's Most Tired Model Wannabes and their latest Tyra Mail.

Also, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE hanging out with my nephew. The first six months of his life, I was living in NYC, and saw him only a few times. But, I've been around the last year, and have earned status as his most favorite person -- except when Grammy is around to buy his love with toys. He is so happy and innocent and smart. At the risk of sounding more than incredibly hokey, I am surprised at how much joy it brings my heart just to be around him. (Not surprised at the joy it brings me to hand over responsibility to my sister, his mom, when he starts throwing a tantrum because you don't have a copy of The Backyardigans cued up for him to dance to.)

Anyway, in sum, and with no great measure of mature reflection, it was a bitchin' year. I can't believe it's over. I can't believe I didn't write a best-selling novel about my year, like the Coyote-Ugly author turned spiritual Eat, Pray, Love-self-actualization-book-whore. (The story about the porcupines in Botswana was pure money, or it would have been if I had included the part about me swilling moonshine and vomiting before said porcupine incident.)

Thanks for reading, friends. And with that, I'm off to watch the season finale of Rock of Love 2, a fitting denouement for the last night of my sabbatical.

Semi-Charmed Kind of Life

In addition to avoiding diabetes and moisturizing more, entertaining is one of the things that has been occupying my time while waiting for my new job to start. Now that I have left NYC and live in an apartment that can fit more than three people at a time, plans for dinner parties, Oscar parties, and a return of the much loved Small Party (Le Petit Soiree) have been bouncing through my head for months.

So, I've been meaning for a while to write a post about hosting dinner parties, and in fact made a half-hearted effort last month in my entry about the pressure to be a crack pastry chef. The folks over at StuffWhitePeopleLike have saved me the effort, and summed up perfectly the thirtysomething's formula of hosting a dinner party and the anxieties that accompany it.

Thus, you are saved from my own personal diatribes about hosting dinner parties -- and one very gross story about how I fell victim to the bubonic stomach flu right smack in the middle of the dinner party I hosted last month. Not pretty.

I Don't Want to Wait, For Our Lives to be Over...

I'm back from North Cack-a-lack-ee, and it was fantastic. We traveled to Bald Head Island, right near the NC-SC border, and just south of Wilmington, NC, the locale where the beloved teen-opic Dawson's Creek was filmed. True to the idyllic waterside (nee Capeside) scenery of The Creek, it was a fantastic trip.

Eleven of us converged upon a large beach house on Bald Head to celebrate my friend Kate's birthday. (Bald Head is fun to say, no; although not nearly as fun as Gay Head, on Martha's Vineyard.) It was like a grown-up version of spring break, or a slightly more juvenile version of The Big Chill. We drank wine, played games, ate delicious seafood and corn on the cob, and chased each other through the house with water guns. I lost countless games of cards, and read a book in a rocking chair perched just above the dunes, alongside the ocean. Dreamy.

On the downside, I have a dreadful stripe of sunburn on my lower back from laying on a bench reading a book. No, it wasn't warm enough to wear a bathing suit. I was just a fool in low-rider jeans with an inadvertent couple of inches of skin showing between my jeans and my slightly shifted t-shirt. It never fails -- take me near a beach and I'll manage not only to get a sunburn, but a striped sunburn clearly illustrating the 2-inch by 8-inch patch where I forget to apply sun block. (Usually it's a stripe on my armpits or near the edge of my bathing suit.)

One of the most fun parts about Bald Head is that cars aren't allowed. So everyone putt putts around in little golf carts. I was content to let everyone else chauffeur me around until Saturday night, when we were returning from dinner at the Raw Bar on the island. We went to the ferry to pick up a friend, and headed back to the house. But, while we had been gone at dinner, a huge storm passed, and there were fallen branches, frogs, puddles, etc. making the roads nearly impassible for regular cars, let alone the little golf cart I was driving. PLUS, it was pitch black. There aren't any street lamps on the roads, and the headlights on the cart were weak. We would have been better off with two little pen lights taped to the front of the cart. PLUS, some of the people in the cart -- not me, the driver -- were stinking drunk and noisy, and I don't know how to park when it's noisy, let alone drive.

We made it back, though. While I may be a sucky card player, I'm an awesome navigator and driver, with a sense of adventure and direction that needs neither map nor clear road. (Okay, my friend Debbi, even when drunk, is an awesome navigator and numerous times kept me from my going in the wrong direction, even though I was absolutely positive that I was right and she was wrong.) But the important thing is, we made it back.

On the Road Again

In a few hours, I'm heading on the road again for mini-break down South. My friend Kate has invited a group of people to spend a few days hanging out in her boyfriend's family house on an island off the coast of North Carolina. I have absolutely no idea what the island is called, just that cars aren't allowed on the island. It should be dandy -- I'm looking forward to a few days filled with sweet tea and sunshine.

Nerves and Stomach Pains

So if last week I was worried about making delicious chocolate mousse pies, that's the furthest thing from my mind this week. It could be that the pie actually turned out tasty. Or, it could be that I made an awesome dinner on Saturday for some friends, thus proving I am an awesome cook. But probably it's because I was sick with the stomach flu for two days, and when I think about food even now, I still want to vomit. Blecch.

Apart from an aversion to eating again and some lingering dehydration, I'm pretty much fully recovered. Which is good, because tonight's my first night on-call for the volunteer program I previously mentioned. I got my pager and staff phone out this morning and was fiddling a little bit. Shortly, I'm going to grab my training materials and go through what I need to do tonight.

Suffice it to say, I'm a little nervous. I'm not entirely sure why I'm so nervous, since I have worked with DV clients before, and even represented them in court. In theory, you would think that is more nervewracking. But, it seems different. When I've volunteered before, I've helped with mainly the legal system, which I know fairly well. Also, by the time you met someone as a legal advocate, the urgency of the situation has tapered off somewhat , and my role at least seemed a little more one-dimensional and detached. With the new on-call program, though, I feel much more aware of the immediacy of what's going on, and much more responsible for being a more comprehensive advocate and empathetic listener (or is it sympathetic listener?). So, I'm nervous.

In any case, my first shift starts this evening. We'll see how it goes.