Wow… 2010 is here!

it was nice while it lasted :: agganis arena, boston, ma :: october 10, 2009

It just dawned on me that Friday is the first day of 2010.

I’m a little slow on the take sometimes.

2009 is ending on a lukewarm note - I found out my godfather died on Dec. 19th, but I found out from a family member I hadn’t seen in a long time. (About 17 years, if you want to be exact.) Then, there’s Stellen’s New Year’s Eve party. I’m really looking forward to that. I’m sure it’s going to be a good time. This group of friends NEVER disappoints.

I don’t know - 2009 was the year new friendships flourished, old ones got a new lease on life and there were a sh’load of bumps on the road. I put too many miles on my car, killed my eardrums with too much live music, took too many pictures, watched too much hockey, cried too many tears, and laughed so hard that it hurt.

2009 was the year of the GTD Summit. Of Lotus Notes/eProductivity. Of Pony! Of ski trips. Of All Crazy, instrument and Black Mountain Symphony. Of Fig’s Daily Dose of Wisdom. Of self-discovery. Of heartbreak. Of disappointment. Of second chances. Of hockey. Of amazing gains. Of paralyzing losses. Of spanking. Of douchebags. Of licking. Of hookers. Of knowing where my pen is. Of Platypus. Of Jeff Vader. Of not finding those droids we were looking for. Of tacos.

How do you distill all that into something bloggable?

I can’t.

I know that some of 2009’s ick will carry into the New Year and there’s nothing I can do to stop that. On the other hand, there’s more road trips on the horizon to see my friends Soup, Skinny, Orion, Bill, Ben, Derek, Aaron and Dave. There’s ski trips with friends and running around NYC on tap for January already. Of course, there’s hockey. (There’s always hockey!) We’re going to see Matty play the Bruins. WE’RE GOING TO FENWAY TO SEE BU/BC!!! We have the rest of a lackluster BU season to go through. I have no idea what the rest of the year will bring - but I’m planning on doing fun things so hopefully, those will offset whatever bad things may be coming my way.

I’m excited to see what 2010 will bring - I’m definitely ready for a new year and a symbolic fresh start.

When the walls come tumblin’ down - John Cougar Mellancamp

derek :: instrument at the middle east, cambridge, ma :: december 5, 2009

Some people ain’t no damn good
You can’t trust ‘em
You can’t love ‘em

This lyric pretty much sums things up with 99% of my blood relatives.

In August, I let one of those blood relatives back into my life.

She invited me down for Christmas Eve. That’s a 2.5 hr drive from Da ‘Brook and I have the two dogs to worry about since J’s in OH with his mom. It was pure laziness, more than anything, that made me say “no”. I didn’t want to spend more time in the car than I would in CT.  (Somehow, I’d conveniently forgotten that I do that for instrument and All Crazy all the time.)

I was all ready to hunker down and be all “boo-hoo, woe is me” over the holiday. I hate it to begin with, and this year’s is just really bad. One of the worst ever. I just want to hide from the world until it’s over.

I was sitting the parking lot at Shaw’s when it hit me. A) I *do* spend more time in the car than I do in CT on a lot of those band nights and B) I *do* have family to spend it with.

Suddenly, I had to be in CT tomorrow night.

HAD TO.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing, but it feels like the right thing…

I’ll know after I get there.

Bah. Humbug.

usa u-18 vs bu :: agganis arena, boston, ma :: october 10, 2009

Blergh.

This is the first year in god knows how many where I’m not sending out holiday cards. (I don’t *do* “Christmas” cards. I know so many people who don’t celebrate Christmas that it’s easier to piss off the few friends I have who are anal about it being CHRISTMAS and not HOLIDAY. Whatever.)

I’ve been having a rough go of it this year.  I just can’t find the motivation to make 100 handmade cards. I can’t find the motivation to even CARE about making them.

I’m never a huge fan of this time of year, but I normally do a halfway decent job of hiding the ick. This year, the ick is in full view.  I’m not going to hide the melancholy. I’m not going to pretend that everything is fine. I’m not going to pretend that I care about Christmas.

So there.

While there are many reasons for my ban on all things Christmas this year, I’ve noticed a change in J as well. His mother is in bad, bad shape. Like dying-of-cancer bad and the stress of that has really affected him as well. My husband, who lives for Christmas, put up the tree and hung lights on it. That’s it. I’m not in the right frame of mind to handle looking at the ornaments, much less have to touch them. Little memory landmines, each one carefully wrapped in tissue paper and put away until the next year… My angel? BOOM! My CT quarter? KA-BLOOEY! My other angel ornament?... Yeah, so *not* going there this year. I just can’t.

Unless Santa decides to bring my father back from the dead with a side of cure-for-cancer, you can take your “merry” Christmas and shove it.

I don’t want anything to do with it this year.

both eyes open, still movin’ blindly

dave :: instrument at the main pub, manchester, ct :: november 7, 2009

There’s a song on the rough mix CD that Skinny gave me…  they tried it out at one of their shows and Soup put it to a vote. We all voted against it, choosing “Booty Beach” as the winner that night. At any rate, Soup raps at the end of this song and the words just got into my head. (Hundred miles an hour, goin’ nowhere fast…) I’m still not a fan of the rest of the song because anything that references dying fathers is definitely a permanent fixture on my do NOT play list, but that rap at the end, it just speaks to me. I’ve found myself reciting it more than once recently.

The BU hockey team is struggling. I wish that this year’s captains were able to bottle up what ever last year’s captains did and use it. It looks like they’re trying to, but time will tell if they’re successful. In the meantime, it’s hard to watch. Hockey East is completely screwed up this year. Even the national polls are a little messed up. It’s a very odd time to be a BU fan - rebuilding years suck. But, we’ve been building relationships with our sectionmates, so it’s been a good year for that. It’s nice when you get to commiserate with someone who understands what you’re feeling. So many of my friends aren’t hockey fans, and if they are, they’re NHL hockey fans. It’s a completely different (dare I say worse?) product than college hockey now. College hockey is so much better on a thousand levels. Mostly because these kids still play like there’s something “real” on the line, because they love the game, because - with the exception of the ban on fighting - the game is still what I consider “pure”. It hasn’t been commercialized and the rule books haven’t been rewritten to make a consumer-friendly product.

I finally finished a birthday present that was supposed to be completed in September. Now that the recipient has it, I guess I can spill why it took so long. There was a comment a while back about how she liked this band, so I made the decision to make her a mega mix. I have what feels like a gazillion songs - bootlegs, commercial recordings, rarities, etc. - and to go through all of them and find the “perfect” version of each one, to try to balance them all out, to try and stay away from the commercially available versions,  without repeating songs just because I liked the “then and now” aspect, that was so freaking hard. I didn’t know just how mentally taxing… I must have put together a thousand different versions. I’d pretty much been working on it since August, but it was *so* hard.  I did repeat one, though. As much as I like the original version of that song, there’s a reference to Jefferson Holt that has since been removed, so I also added the revised version. At least I didn’t screw up and put them on the same disc. The mix ended up spanning four discs, and I could have done two more. There were also three other mixes - two mashups and one with some of my favorite singer/songwriters. Those, in a way, were a little harder. My taste in music has become a little more melancholy as of late, so there were some lyrics and song titles that I felt a little uncomfortable sharing. Too soul baring, in a way. Five months for seven mixes… I think that’s a new record of being all OCD about making the perfect mix. Oh well. At least I finished them before Christmas!

Last night was my friend’s holiday party. I’d been on the fence about going because I feel like complete crap. I still do, but I was heavily medicated last night. I’m so glad we put the dogs in the kennel so the hubby could come play with me. It was great fun and for a while, the weight of the world was off my shoulders.  So much I could say about last night - so many misheard things, so many random shout-outs, a wicked embarrassing story involving Bubble Tea was told - complete with verbatim quotes from the event!, Pony - but the thing I’ll always remember is that out of the five of us who obsessively tweet, not a single one of us tweeted last night. Not. A. Single. Tweet. Every since texting and Twitter came into our lives, I don’t think I’ve ever been as present in the moment as I was last night. Yeah, there were “OMG! I HAVE to tweet this moments!”, but those were filed away to be written about later. 

We were ORDERED to go to a New Year’s Eve party with the same group of friends, and I don’t think I’ve looked forward to NYE as much as I am this year. Slowly but surely, I’m gaining control over my life again. Still not getting the closure I need in some areas, others are getting better more quickly than I thought they would, and The Big Thing that’s really been weighing me down is still weighing me down, but I’ve grown used to the weight. Not happy with the ripples its causing in my life, but there’s nothing that can be done about it, so I’m just waiting it out.

Life goes on, whether we want it to or not, right?  This pain is just a price we pay for the privilege of waking up every morning…