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(don’t say i didn’t warn you)

The Kenny Loggins Christmas CD is the weirdest and most depressing of all Christmas CDs.

“Jesus Christ,” my father says, looking at the car stereo as if it’s done something to offend him. “What is this? It sounds like he wrote it sitting alone in a dirty bathrobe with a shotgun in his hand.”

“And a plastic bottle of vodka,” I add. “Don’t forget the plastic bottle of vodka.”

“In a ratty armchair.”

“With four days’ worth of beard.”

Unsurprising: the Kenny Loggins Christmas CD is also our undisputed, gut-busting favorite.

*

I feel like I just told you everything you will ever need to know about my family.

*

Every year since things went weird with my parents Jackie and I make a schedule for Christmas. We’re very organized. We write everything down. Sometimes there is cake and usually there are movies and always there are a lot of quotes from The Office and a mix cd entitled Happy F*cking Holidays to be listened to at great volume while consuming copious quantities of iced coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts next to the Indian restaurant on West Hartsdale Avenue. For awhile we were worried about starting new traditions but by now this is a tradition in itself, peculiar and piecemeal, sure, but one I look forward to as much as anything we ever did when I was a kid.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places.

I didn’t think it was possible.

I’m proud of us for making it work.

*

“We got the tree,” my mom says on the phone. She’s coughing; she’s got a cold.

“The two of you got it together?” I ask, listening with half an ear. I’m on my cell phone on the darkening street outside my office, heading for the train and trying not to slip on the ice.  “How was that?”

“Fine, actually,” she says, sounding pleasantly surprised. “It’s a beautiful tree.”

1. Jennie sent me this picture of hot pink cake in my email this morning. My friends are the coolest.

2. WHAT UP, YUPPIE GROCERY STORE AT BROADWAY AND I STREET. American Provisions, you appeared this week like a beacon in the dark December night of nail salons and questionable pizza joints. I look forward to perusing your artisan cheese case and no longer waiting on line for my convenience-store coffee behind men who are purchasing a six pack of Bud Light and a tin of Skoal at seven o’clock in the morning.

3. Laura’s fun, brainy theater website, The Craptacular. Go for the shirtless men! Stay for the culture.

4. This weekend: shopping, baking, elving, merrymaking. Am feeling rather festive, myself. There might even be eggnog involved.

5. “This is Peter McCallister, the father. I’d like a hotel room, please. With an extra large bed, a TV, and one of those little refrigerators you have to open with a key.”

I’m writing some stuff that takes place in 1993 so all I do is listen to Celine Dion Pandora. It’s embarrassing but delightful and, I suspect, has put me in much higher spirits than the endless loop of “All I Want for Christmas is You” and “Hey Santa” currently on the radio. Celine and I have certainly had our personal differences over the years–for example, I think it’s kind of gross how she’s spending one billion dollars to make Cylon babies with her octogenarian husband, and she thinks I can go ahead and shut my mouth because we both know if she was still doing her stage show I would be all over that shit right about now–but for the most part we are making it work, Falling Into You-style. It’s all coming back, it’s all coming back to me now, etc etc.

Apparently when SMeyer was writing Twilight she listened to a lot of Muse. Personally I think that explains a lot.

*

To be filed under Celebrity Breakup Extravaganza 2010:

Zefron and the Hudge: tragic, but probably inevitable. There is a lesson to be learned here about taking naked phone pictures of oneself for one’s boyfriend when both of you would clearly rather be dating Leonardo DiCaprio.

Sexiest Man Alive Ryan Reynolds and Annoying Pseudo-Intellectual Sourpuss ScarJo: GOOD RIDDANCE, DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU, I BOUGHT THIS FRUIT BASKET FOR ALANIS MORRISSETTE (you you you oughta know).

*

I’m halfway through Catching Fire, which is the second Hunger Games book. W, who is 11, is reading the first one but suspects there is going to be too much kissing for him to really enjoy it. Other media with too much kissing, in W’s opinion: iCarly.

Katie: “That’s funny, W, because I actually don’t think there is enough kissing in either of those things.”

W: “You are so gross.”

*

TV with the perfect amount of kissing: The Good Wife.

TV with too much flesh-eating: The Walking Dead

TV with too little flirty banter to be much fun anymore: Bones

*

Am thinking of starting up a blog specifically for this kind of stuff come January. That way, when I’ve been sitting on the couch for five hours, I can be like: psh, it’s for my career.

On top of our tree is a sock puppet that Marissa made last year with green googly eyes and orange pipe-cleaner hair. Before I put it up there I followed Tom around with it for awhile and he laughed for a minute and then he said, “No, really, cut it out, that thing is creepy as shit.”  In a related story, tonight I went to Marissa’s for dinner and she showed me her collection of Judy Garland Christmas ornaments and a youtube video of a chocolate bunny having its face melted off by an iron.

*

Sierra says: “Don’t you think it’s great how You’ve Got Mail is appropriate to quote in all four seasons of the year?”

(152 insights into my soul.)

*

Meg came for dinner and to sit by the tree (that’s a lie, Meg came for cheese and spinach dip and one gallon of wine) and so I made Deb’s cranberry upside down cake which, while rather unremarkable as Deb-type cakes go, was still pretty delicious. Topics covered: people who marry people who are considerably less hot than they are, why I am too old to buy jeans at Hollister, Meg’s recent discovery of procedural television in the form of a season and a half of Lie to Me. “I think I’m an expert at reading facial tics now,” she said, and I sort of believed her. I’m a pretty badass sex crimes detective, myself.

*

It’s seventeen degrees and windy and there are holes in both my gloves, right in the webbing between the fingers and the thumbs, and I’m not wearing a hat because they have not yet invented a hat that doesn’t make my bangs go all wispy and weird. The T breaks down, which I don’t mind so much because I have a New York article to read about My Boyfriend Ryan Gosling, who apparently works in a deli when he is not being a Method actor and setting girls’ loins on fire with his smoldering kisses. I suspect Ryan Gosling is who James Franco really wants to be.

The bus is late. Standing in front of the library I overhear a conversation between two men who clearly haven’t seen each other in years, catching up on jobs and girlfriends. “Same old,” one of them says, stamping his feet against the frozen sidewalk. “Same old.”

In November I am a nomad. I sleep in hotel beds and on air mattresses and in the passenger seat of Tom’s Mazda, the Massachusetts Turnpike rumbling behind my knees, clomping up and down the Northeast Corridor in my brown suede boots. “You are so loud,” Jackie says, at the sound of my heels echoing on wide-plank farmhouse hardwood. “Seriously. Wherever you go.”

I shrug. She’s right. I’m noisy.

I like people to know where I am.

*

Rachel comes at the beginning of the month and we see the Facebook movie, talk about Facebook, talk about leaving our away messages up all day in undergrad, coming back between classes to find AIM windows stacked one on top of another like junk mail. “I kind of miss that,” I confess, over red velvet cheesecake so sweet it makes my teeth ache. “Knowing where you were at any given moment.”

“I kind of do, too,” she says.

We go to the MFA and stand in front of the Brown Sisters for twenty minutes, hogging the space. I get teary, because I’m a nerd. From year to year those women didn’t change at all but still they’re somehow old by the end, lovely and sad and thick around the middle. I turn to Rach, who I met in freshman English at Maria Regina High School in 1999. She sat one row over, in the front. “You look the same to me,” I tell her. “Except for your bangs.”

I wonder, though, about the time lapse. I’m glad no one follows with a camera.

*

I’m getting paid to write fiction. Imagine that. Jackie says: it’s nice to have someone remind you that you’re doing exactly what you always said you would.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been, for the most part. In my own brain.

*

It’s concert weekend with Sierra and I meet her at the Avis in the New Haven train station, argue with the nasty girl behind the counter, think: well, you’d be mean, too, if you worked behind the counter at the Avis in the New Haven train station. We have mastered the art of iPhone navigation. We have mastered the art of the Applebee’s lunch. At the concert there is pushing and a girl throws her arm around Sierra, drunkenly demands to know if it is her birthday. (It’s not.)

Later we sit in bed at the Hilton, watching The Holiday and eating pizza from the box. We are happy and starving.  Every single person in that movie is miscast.

*

I eat three different Thanksgiving dinners. I make four pies, the most delicious cake of my life, and a pan of brownies. The scale, which is broken, says I have lost six pounds in one day.

*

We get in an argument. It’s mostly my fault but a little bit his. I am my worst, meanest self; I am the dirtiest of fighters.

We make up. We truck on. I make dinner. He washes the floor.

Last night, he said: “Want to go cut down a Christmas tree?”

I said, “I love you kind of a lot.”

*

It’s the third of December.

It’s pizza and beer night at book club.

Yesterday I got nominated for a prize.

I think I already won one.

1. Last night H&J came over for bolognese and birthday cake and we watched The Bodyguard, a sorely underrated modern classic complete with faux-Egyptian headgear, Kevin Costner at his youngest and hunkiest (I think it’s a shame that the word hunk has fallen out of colloquial favor, though I suspect it’s because they just don’t make hunks like Kevin Costner anymore) and the implied cutting off of Whitney Houston’s lacy underthings with a Samurai sword. Happy birthday, H!  And I will always love you.

2. Now that the desk is happily ensconced in the bedroom, I’ve got my eye on a brand-new bed (and a new reason to sock all my babysitting cash away under the mattress). Tom says: “That doesn’t look a little…colonial to you?” I am confident he’ll come around.

3. There is Serious Writing Business happening around here. There are dollars involved. And romances. And a new playlist entitled “The Greatest Love of All” to serenade me sweetly while I come up with viable synonyms for “luminescent”.

4. Rachel comes tonight! We’re going to drink fancy beer and see the Facebook movie and check out the Nicholas Nixon exhibit at the MFA. True fact about Rachel: one time she was in Florence for my birthday so she sent me a glittery cardboard crown in the mail. That is the kind of friend she is and I am lucky to have her.

5. I had a gift card to LLBean so I ordered myself some wicked good slippers and they are not lying when they say they are wicked good. For the first time since the beginning of September, my feet were not colder than a dead person’s when I climbed into bed. And if that is not something to celebrate, I just do not know what is.

At Cuchi Cuchi the girls all dress like courtesans and Lisa drinks something frothy and pink called a Moulin Rouge. Our waitress wears a bowler hat, an enormous glittering necklace the side of a breastplate; another wanders by in a corset and a long, lacy skirt. Corsets give me terrible hiccups and I suspect this is only one of many reasons I will never be glam.

*

I hate Central Square, usually. I think it is an armpit populated by people who all desperately want to be living anywhere besides Central Square but are worried that admitting it will damage their dirty hipster cred. In the summer 0f 2007 I waged a six-week-long war against a homeless man who growled at me every time I tried to put my Netflix in the mailbox by the T stop on Mass Ave. Eventually I was defeated. The whole neighborhood stinks of pee and despair but inside the restaurant there is incense and a tambourine and I think, well, what have we here?

*

We order brie and pork rolls and duck l’orange; we share. Meg swears by the stroganoff and she is right (stroganoff makes me think of my mom, though I have no concrete memory of her ever cooking it; she did, however, calmly prepare an enormous tray of Swedish meatballs during one of the more catastrophic meltdowns of my adolescence). For dessert there is a banana-French toast-ice cream-caramel extravaganza. The word extravaganza is actually in the name and they are correct. “Can I take your plates?” the waitress asks, when all that’s left are a couple of melty pools of whipped cream.

“Not yet,” Meg says.

*

Across the street from the restaurant is a Tootsie Roll factory–seriously, there is a Tootsie Roll factory across the street from the restaurant–and outside the air smells like chocolate and peppermint. We stand around, chatting, easy. My heels click on the concrete.

To the Sticking Place is up on Every Day Fiction this morning! Come say hi.

Happy Election Day, bitches.