The Shock of the New

Randy finished moving out a couple of weeks ago. The apartment is strangely clean and empty. Last night Winnie and Evan came over and played Scrabble and cooked this custom pizza for Randy with goat cheese and chorizo. We ended up opening some champagne that Eve'd gotten me a few weeks ago and we had quite a time. Randy has bequeathed me a number of... gifts, including two toy cars and a kind of attack-of-the-tripods thing that has a Pope inside it. Sorry, I really can't be more articulate than that.

And then it was Christmas. I had kind of a hard time with the holidays; I don't know why. This is not, in general, my favorite time of year -- even if you reject the idea of buying everybody presents, they don't necessarily reject the idea along with you, and then there are, you know, consequences. Plus, I felt like the whole holiday had kind of snuck up on me, given the way my work schedule had turned out: Work work work work Christmas. So I hadn't bought anything for anyone, basically, and felt anxious and awful about it. And I had to spend the whole day with my parents and their friends. To mitigate things, I woke up early on Christmas morning to bake a pie before heading over, and that turned out pretty okay, although I spilled several quickly-carbonizing dollops of pumpkin crap all over the floor and oven door.

After the day itself, I recovered, to the extent that I have even been able to buy things for a few people. Tom et al. threw a nice, cozy New Year's party, and Colleen followed it up the next day with a delightful all-day brunch. Is everyone turning thirty right now or what? My friend Julia just got married; my friend Razor is going to get married -- he told me the date and everything.

Me, I'm watching a TV show on Korean basic cable called "Comedy Show Hey Hey Hey!" Maybe you've heard of it.

Emma and I have been watching some movies recently, baseball-related:

• Rhubarb: The Cat Who Loved To Play And Watch Baseball
• Safe at Home!, which is about the worst little boy in the world

What we do is I get some chicken wings from the Park Café and Emma gets some beer or wine or something and then we eat the chicken wings and drink the booze and watch the movie, but we talk over it the whole time and have to rewind a lot.

Later Eve and I went to go the Sweeney Todd movie, which was boss. She's in India now, for a month. Good luck, Eve!

Good luck to all of you!

Obamania 2008!