Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Year in Review

It has been weeks since I posted something. Which is not to say I've been doing nothing. No, it has been an exciting year. And since it is the end of the year, I will just go ahead and make this final post of 2015 my year in review. Everyone seems to be doing it, why not join in.

2015 was scary as hell. Sure, I managed to eat well and have fun, but there's some scary sh!t going down in the world. On a personal level, I impressed myself on a few occasions, made several general observations and have one major take away.

First, the NOT funny: It's been a rather ridiculous year for serious stuff.
Isis seems to be running rampant and successfully spreading a particularly heinous brand of fear throughout the world.
Mass shootings happened more frequently than badly behaving professional athletes.
Guns are a major problem in this country that seems to be invisible to the powers that be, either that or the NRA is essentially as powerful and scary as Isis and we're all f@#ked... perhaps a bit of both.
The cops are using excessive force to the extent that I had to have a "talk" with my 4-year-old about the fact that while she can run from the cops on Subway Surfers, the graffiti game on her tablet, in real life she shouldn't run, but drop what she's holding and yield. She's 4.
I also toured her kindergarten for next year and realized I was judging the shallowness of the closets and worrying there wasn't enough room to hide in there, should they ever need to.
THEY SHOULDN'T EVER NEED TO.  And I shouldn't need to think that way.
This is not an acceptable way to live. This should not be the norm, nor should we accept things as they are and just brace for when these things happen. We must go back to the drawing board and figure out concrete ways of preventing these atrocities from happening in the first place. Pretty high on my priorities for tomorrow and every day after.

Thankfully it wasn't all gloom and doom.
The Supreme Court weighed in that marriage is about love, not which sexual organs two people have.
The Pope came to visit, and that was all pretty exciting.
Donald Trump is pretty amusing... oh no wait, that was actually Anthony Atamanuik doing his Trump Dump show at UCB, which was easily one of the funniest things I saw this year. The real life Trump is frightening, unleashing the worst in people, and making it seem acceptable to be racist, sexist, orange and a bit of a D-bag. He's not gonna make America great again, but he will make my relatives in England a bit amused concerned that he has a genuine shot at this. Let's be sure to do something about that pretty early in 2016, shall we?

Other highlights from my year:
I finally made it down to Austin, TX. The food, specifically the BBQ, exceeded my very high expectations, as did Billy Idol.
In other braggy music highlights, I got to see Pearl Jam for the first time in Central Park, which really just made me want to see a full Pearl Jam concert, and soon.
Adele continues to blow my mind with her insane voice and likable personality.
Speaking of likable personalities, Amy Schumer is my best friend that I've never met. Well, that's not true. I once rode in an elevator with her and tried desperately for five floors to think of a way to impress her, make her laugh and genuinely convince her that we needed to hang out all the time. Alas, it didn't work, but I think we connected and I'm sure we'll meet again. Oh yes, we will be friends. In the meantime, she wrote the funniest version of my movie I could have imagined. So in a spoiler alert to myself, I don't really need to write a movie, she did it. The good news is, she did a much better job than I would have. So there's that.

Star Wars is back and better than ever. In a related story, I can isolate one incident from this year to deem myself a fantastic mother and everything I always wanted to be when I was 7. Our 4-year-old has been watching Episode IV, A New Hope with us. Weirdly, she doesn't mind any part of it except the hand severing scene in the Cantina. She's cool with the garbage monster (which I most definitely was NOT OK with as a child), fine with Darth Vader, uninterested in the sand people and unimpressed by the sudden destruction of Alderaan. But back to why I am so awesome... One day she asked if she could wear Princess Leia buns to school. I was only too happy to comply as I had requested, nay, begged for Princess Leia buns when I was younger, but was denied. Now as a mom, I was able to deliver and let her go to school and impress the other Star Wars fans in her class, thereby making me the mother-of-the-year. Let us not look at any other stories of me letting her eat food from the floor, or purposely popping a balloon of hers once in anger. No, we will take the one Star Wars story and run with it, thank you very much.

In other news, my husband turned 40 and I spent about a month of every minute of my free time making him a 28 minute retrospective video on his life (hence the blog absence). It was pretty good, but Prince and the people at Warner music were a bit sensitive to his karaoke performance of Let's Go Crazy, so they had You Tube mute the damn thing. I'll give you a clue, 28 minutes of video is not as good without the sound. So it is ours and ours alone to view, which we have. A lot. Go me.

So much to take in this year that it's been hard to make sense of it all.
The Theys have been at it, as usual. The "Theys" is my name for the faceless harbingers of the dangers that lurk in our everyday life. The "Theys" can most often be found spreading fear on morning television, the Today show being one of the worst offenders. They are called the "theys" as that is how my mom refers to them. Case in point:
Mom: ""They" said the next terrorist attack will be the trains, stay off the trains. "They" said trans fat is bad and we have to avoid it. "They" said bottled water might not be as safe as we think."
And so on, until my eyes glaze over wondering if everyone is as susceptible to this rapid fire of sucky information. The great news is, we are not. Collectively, we have chosen to reject the "theys" when they finally crossed the line. What is our imaginary line in the sand, you ask? Bacon. My main take away from this year is this: bacon is here to stay and ain't no scientific findings gonna change that.
In our modern world of information dissemination, we learn about major news items with the force and vengeance of a bully telling you to stop hitting yourself.  2015 was the year they actually proved that bacon, irrefutably, causes cancer and death. Do you know how our panic-filled society reacted to this news, specifically?
Us: "Meh. I'm not gonna stop eating bacon, so I guess that's that."
Theys: "No, no, seriously. Bacon is horrible and will bring death, like a plague, upon your households. Hot dogs too."
Us: "Well then, so be it."
You can keep your high fructose corn syrup. GMOs are the devil, I'll buy organic and have a better sense of where our food is sourced. I will limit my tuna for fear of mercury poisoning. But you can have my bacon when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
And here we were thinking we would never know what will eventually kill us. Now, at least for my sector of the population who is not willing to give up our bacon, we know. So much for the mystery of the future!
You can just f#$k right off if you think I'm giving up my bacon.
I wish I could quit you.
Onward to 2016. It's gonna be a good one. Guns N Roses are reuniting. I'm going to see Hamilton in February (#BRAG). Eating healthy, working out, taking better care of myself... well, probably not. But there will be good food, great friends and hopefully a ton of laughter. Wishing you all the same. Happy New Year friends!