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2 january 2002

this is apollo mali.

i won a spelling bee when i was 10, honest.

Info and a downloadable PDF for Girl Next Door Runs Amok

Happy new year, Denizens! I hope that your 2002 is swell, and didn't begin with a raging hangover.

So, did you have a good holiday break? I sure did, even though the drive back was ter-ri-ble. I thought I would be smart (har) and begin driving back on Friday morning. Apparently, so did the rest of East Coast America. Driving in and around the city was fine. The place was downright quiet with so many people vacationing.

Then I hit the Wilson Bridge in Delaware.

Many hours, one shopping trip, and a meal later, I bumper-to-bumpered myself to Fredericksburg, Virginia. Yuck and super-yuck.

Thankfully, two things worked in my favor. The first was this fabulous D.C. oldies station that had a bandwidth of three states. By that time, I needed to hear real-live voices instead of my CDs, you know? The second was a gift from my parents--patience. We were one road-tripping family in my growing-up years, and in the worst of traffic, you never saw my parents yell, swerve, or wield middle fingers. Kelli and I would read or do puzzles in the back seat (remember those old Fun Pads coloring books? Yeah!). Eventually, we'd get there.

And so, I got home. It was a few hours later than I'd planned, but such was the case for about 10 million other people. Eh, whaddya do.

The Christmas holiday was great! We spent part of it in this teeny-weeny town called Long Eddy, on the New York-Pennsylvania line, right on the Delaware River. Is this place pretty! We had a great time, playing vinyl records and board games all weekend long. Everyone made a few dishes, and we had one enormous Christmas feast. A couple of days earlier we took a loooong hike along the river cliffs, to end up on top of a ledge that even gave me the high-up willies. It was worth it, though, when a lone golden eagle flew directly over us for awhile, then glided on his way. A perfect afternoon, finished at the local pizza place with friends. An added bonus for me was getting to spend time with Laura Moran and her daughter, Corinna, whom I hadn't seen since she was two!

I had to keep reminding myself that she was seven. Especially when she professed her love for Dean Martin.

We spent one afternoon on the second floor of a fabulous flea market/thrift shop sort of place, buying records. Like, faded-jacket, not-made anymore RECORDS. We couldn't believe the stuff they were selling for a dollar--Paul Simon, Roberta Flack, Harry Belafonte--and carried a big pile of them back to the house. Mall? What mall? We didn't even turn on a TV that week. It was one of the most relaxing times I've had. I highly recommend a periodic shutting out of the world. You learn when your body really wants to go to sleep and get up, when it's hungry, and how much better it likes Jimi Hendrix on vinyl.

I then spent a few days in New York City with Noel. She, Rebecca, and I took in a Broadway play, Hedda Gabbler--which we don't highly recommend. Not at the Ambassador Theatre. Even on the third row of the mezzanine, we felt like perching vultures overlooking our heavily emoting prey.

The next night, we headed over to Taylor and Rebecca's for some dee-lishus home cooking (Rebecca is a culinary institute grad), and Scrabble. Playing Taylor Mali in Scrabble is sure to make you feel like a low-functioning illiterate. Want to know what he does in his spare time? Well, let's see...he creates strategy sheets with all the two-letter and q-words. He built a database that quizzes him on Scrabbly vocabulary. When he memorizes the spelling and meaning of a word, he has created a function to dump the word from the database. I'm pretty certain my IQ dropped 30 points in the course of that game. Quog, qat, qaid. Ppppthththh.

So here comes the New Year, and I am steadfast in my refusal to make a formal proclamation of resolutions. My life is nice, and I aim to keep it this way for as long as possible. I get up, find my place in the day, and eat dinner. It's not that I'm against setting personal goals. It's just that, in my experience, I've found them to be more nagging than helpful. Not too many years ago, I was a pathological goal-setter, and it nearly drove me nuts.

I look at it like this last drive home. You'll get there. When just depends on traffic.