Shamelessly Stolen

From Glamour Mama:

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
Grew cardoons.  Taught a class entirely online.  Recoiled at the sight of a homegrown tomato (freakin pregnancy hormones!).

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't really make resolutions at the new year.  It seems so artificial.  I keep a notebook with various goals and crap like that, and I'm doing reasonably well with them.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Well, not physically close, but some of my friends did, yes.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?
Texas.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
A fucking cocktail, man.  Lately, I've had to give up sugar, too, because while I do not have gestational diabetes, I had some warning signs that I might be headed there.   Do you know what it's like to give up gin and chocolate at the same time?  HUH??  Do you, punk? 

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
None, I guess, although I will remember this as the year that my son first went to preschool (3 hours a week), that we conceived our second child, that we accidentally stumbled into a Japanese festival in Jackson, Wyoming, and made fun of the sign for the tea room that said "Cha-dou" because we're snobby that way.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Probably the kale that wouldn't quit.  Oh, right, we got the farmer's market started, too.  I'm sure there are other things, but why dwell? 

9. What was your biggest failure?
Pregnancy-induced grumpiness.  Constant and entirely futile attempts to make people care about the rampant illogic in our political discourse.  Still cannot make myself actually like people.   

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing physical.  I believe the wounds caused from beating my head against rhetorical brick walls are entirely psychosomatic.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
If you asked my son this question, he would tell you it was the Kota the Triceratops that we bought him for Christmas.  Otherwise, I don't know.  The new washing machine is very nice, but it is, after all, just a washing machine.  We don't buy a lot of stuff other than groceries and clothes for the kid.  Oh, right, I did get a new computer for work (which is also home), and I like it a lot.  

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My husband because he's amazingly right for me.  My son because most of the time even I can't believe how well behaved, charming, and kind he is.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Most people's, especially during the election cycle.  It has occurred to me recently that we have definitely become a people who ask not what we can do for our country but what our country can do for us.  Yes, the government just owes us all, doesn't it?  My own behavior appalled me for a couple of months there at the beginning of the pregnancy, but I have an excuse...or something. 

14. Where did most of your money go?
House payments, car payments, groceries, gasoline.  I guess health insurance would be next on the list, but it's not much compared to the others.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Having another baby.  Texas.  Blackberry-mint jam.  I invented it this year, and I waxed rhapsodic.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?
Hard to pick just one.  "Chicken Fried" by the Zac Brown Band comes to mind.  I hated that song when it first came out, but it grew on me.  "Learning How to Bend" by Gary Allan, definitely, because it reminds me in some ways, as does "Roll With Me" by Montgomery Gentry, of the project I've been undertaking, especially this year, to be a better wife and mother.  Yeah, "Roll With Me" is a song to take to heart.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? about the same, I think--maybe a little calmer
b) thinner or fatter? fatter--or, really, "pregnanter"
c) richer or poorer? same

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Kept in touch with my friends and family.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Worry about people's idiotic political opinions which apparently aren't going to change anyway, no matter how carefully you spell out why they're idiotic.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
At my parents' house with my grandma.  It's quite a thing to have four generations together who can actually enjoy each other's company.  We cooked, we played games, we listened to Kota the Triceratops grumble and roar. 

21. Did you fall in love in 2008?
Yes. With my husband, about three separate times.  Sometimes people think our marriage is somehow easier than theirs.  The trick is that when we're getting bored and frustrated with each other, we make an effort to notice each other all over again.  It's always small things.  Sometimes it's just that instead of griping about what my husband isn't doing, I take a look at the fact that he's teaching my son how to hold a screwdriver or something, some tiny little thing, and I think he's wonderful, and I fall in love with him again.  I think how much we've been through--all the moves, the miscarriage, the financial stress (which has been immense at times), the Green Card, just all the shit--and how even after all of it, he still looks at me with the same unwavering devotion as always.  So, I keep falling in love with the same man, over and over.  Occasionally, I feel like I'm cheating on my husband with my husband.  It was a good year. 

22. What was your favorite TV program?
Dirty Jobs, I guess.  Oh, I like In Plain Sight a lot, too.  I'm kind of obsessed with Mary.  I've just recently got hooked on Reno 911!, too, and there is always The Colbert Report, a perennial favorite.  Jon Stewart, on the other hand--lately, I could take it or leave it. 

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Nope.  Hate is something I've given up on.

24. What was the best book you read?
Hmmm...I was actually pretty impressed by Richard North Patterson's Protect and Defend, and that's probably the book that I most remember from this year.  I either chose stupid books this year or else my tastes are just changing, because there were actually a few books this year that I didn't even bother finishing.  I also reread a lot of books this year and discovered that my passions for Jorge Amado and Izumi Kyoka remain intact--nevermind that, as an American, I'm not supposed to read foreign literature.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
That approximately one-third of my CDs go entirely unloved and unlistened-to.

26. What did you want and get?
Pregnant.

27. What did you want and not get?
An ice cream maker.   

28. What was your favorite film of this year?
We don't watch movies, generally, until they're a couple of years old.  I think the only 2008 movie we actually saw in 2008 was "Tropic Thunder" which we liked.  Oh, "Get Smart"...?  We just saw that.  What year is that from?  Whatever.  Does Colbert's Christmas special count?  That was fucking brilliant.  Colbert and Stewart singing about Hanukkah is good times. 

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
We went to Jackson, Wyoming, where we stumbled into a Japanese fire festival, which was pretty cool.  That is also when we learned that a Toyota Yaris is just not equipped to deal with mountain passes.  There is something to be said for a powerful engine.  I turned 34.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Being able to continue eating the garden produce up til the end of it.  The pregnancy could have been timed better.  I was so fatigued and crappy and nauseous that I did not get in most of my end-of-summer chores, and so we now find our store of pickles somewhat wanting.  Green tomatoes went to waste because I had not the energy to deal with them.  For an Arkansas girl, letting green tomatoes go to waste is something akin to blasphemy.  *sigh*  Maybe next year, though with an infant and a wild preschooler, I don't know.  I already talked about it with my husband and we're already thinking up ways to make the food preservation deal as easy on me as possible for next year.  If more shit gets frozen instead of canned and for one bleeping year we waste some electricity to freeze it, so be it.  I have bigger fish to fry.  Besides, apparently Idaho gets less of its electricity from coal than the national average, so perhaps I can quit blaming myself every time I think about the devastation of Appalachia.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
Grass stains.

32. What kept you sane?
If anything did, it would be my husband.  I love my son so much it's indescribable, but my husband keeps me as sane as possible.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I realized that I have a crush on Mike Rowe.  And I fancy Kal Penn rather like I fancy a pint of Ben and Jerry's.  So yummy. 

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Just the general hypocrisy, name-calling, and illogic rampant on both sides of every issue.  Mostly, I don't want to talk to people anymore because if they're talking about anything remotely political, I feel an almost compulsive need to point out every logical flaw in what they're saying.  It's a personal failing, I know, but it's making me (probably literally) insane.  Especially, I expected more from Jon Stewart.  He's been a big disappoinment on the ideological-hypocrisy issue.

35. Who did you miss?
John and Kurt.  That's nothing new.  I miss them every year since about 2001.  Oh, and Shmuel--been missing him a lot lately, too.  We all just live too far apart now.  Bulgaria?  Oregon?  What is that all about?

36. Who was the best new person you met?
Diane.  I actually think I met her in 2007, but I've just recently started getting to know her, and she's a great person.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
People think they deserve a lot more than they actually do without being thankful for most of what they have.  Ideologies are, at root, all the same and eventually become fundamentalist and rigid and equally frightening.  Anytime you close your mind off to the possibility that you're wrong, you're fucking doomed.  At some point, I let "depressed" become my normal mental condition, and that's just stupid.  People see what they want to see.  I learned a long time ago that going to college doesn't mean that you're smarter or more thoughtful or, certainly, more worthwhile as a person, but I just realized this year that most Americans who have gone to college really do think that it does, just like people who live in cities think they're smarter because they live in cities.  That shit blows my mind. I guess the life lesson is that people will go to extraordinary lengths of self-delusion to convince themselves that they're better than other people. 

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
Pretty much all of this, except the parts about going to church, because we don't.