10 things that have made my life better in recent history

I just finished drafting our 2012 St. Olaf Class Newsletter, and I don't want to spend much more of today sequestered in front of a screen. Besides, my car is in desperate need of washing... But I'd say it's about time I write again! So the following items have made my life better lately.

Better than what, you might ask? Better than it would have been without them. Better than it was before they happened. I think life is continually, simultaneously getting better and worse with every passing moment. Bittersweet, perhaps, but that fact brings a promise of eternal richness to an otherwise potentially very dull world.

So here goes: a flashback to Sunday nights on KSTO senior year, All Good Things. The 10 things this week that have made life awesome.

1. Skyfall. I LOVE JAMES BOND. My second cousin Stephen just posted on Facebook some baloney about his girlfriend being extraordinary for going to see James Bond with him on their anniversary. Sorry, Stephen. I'm sure she is just as extraordinary as you say, but James Bond is a woman's man. A girl who will go see Avengers, though, or Wreck-It Ralph, is the girl to covet. JUST saying.

BUT let's be serious for a moment. Skyfall, in my opinion, was a particularly brilliant specimen of Bondery. NPR did a pretty rad interview with the director, Sam Mendes. The part that struck me most was a brief discussion of the darkness of Bond's character, highlighted in the latest installment. This darkness struck me equally in the film. I'm seriously considering reading the books now, if I can get my hands on them. I've found them singularly elusive in the past...

2. This Is How You Lose Her. Speaking of reading, just this morning I finished the latest from Junot Diaz. He was one of my most admired writers before this book, but has only been lifted higher since. Unlike The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (a brilliant piece of literature, although it begs a disclaimer as an emotionally tough book to read), This Is How You Lose Her is a collection of short stories excerpted from the life of a recycled Diaz character named Yunior. With a suspicious aroma of autobiography, the stories collectively dissect the life of a pathological cheater: "A cheater's guide to love." I liked the last story best. It closes the book with a sentiment that has rocked my world all day today: "The half-life of love is forever."

3. Harpoon UFO Unfiltered Pumpkin Ale. Another spoiler to the mythical pumpkin beer post. This is delicious. Pumpkin-y and spicy and beer-y all at once. Pleasant but not pansy. Delicious.

cha cha now y'all

4. Pat Benatar: The Hits. Found it at Target. Only cost $5. Makes life epic. The only weird thing about it is track 7, "Hell is for Children." Just don't get it...

5. JIM AND GREEN GOT MARRIED!!! I love Jim; I love Green. But I have not been so happy that they are together as I was at their wedding. It was perfect. So them. The whole thing was obviously very carefully planned. The reception was great: hand-decorated by the family, catered by their favorite restaurant, with beer and wine made by Green's family, DJ'd by the great DJ Felony (i.e. Jim's excellent pre-picked playlist). Also provided an opportunity to see quite a few people I haven't seen in a long time. For some it had been two years or more. Mostly it was good to dance with those people again. This is something I miss most nowadays.

6. My company just won some awards for social media! I am proud just to be associated with this rockstar team, but I'm especially proud to have put in a lot of personal time on these projects, both in making them great in the first place and in compiling the contest entries. So validating.

7. I have started cooking meat. As you may remember from some of my first-ever posts on this blog, I often eat a lot of tuna fish and canned beans. Since moving out this year, I still eat a good amount of canned tuna; but I've gotten into dried beans instead of canned, and even some frozen tilapia filets! This week, though, I've had non-fish meat TWICE! The other day I got some beef cubes from the Italian market on the corner, and sauteed them up with some onion and green pepper (which I found out you can chop and freeze to make them last longer!) and put it on rice. DELICIOUS! Also, on Friday night I had a friend over who is originally from Jamaica, and she showed me how to make chicken in a brown sauce. Still not totally sure what to do with all the blood and skins and all that, but I guess I can get over it...

8. Actually wrote a poem yesterday. Maybe this will kick me back into motion on the "pulling my stuff together and maybe even writing more poems" front.

9. We turned on the heat this week! In the grand scheme of things, running heat doesn't make my life better (it raises the energy bill, it makes the house stuffy, can be a fire hazard, gives me colds and allergies, basically symbolizes a surrender to winter...) But in this particular case I will tell you that it was getting unbearably frigid in our house, so now that the heat is on it's a little easier to get out of bed in the morning... and we can't see our breath in the kitchen anymore.

10. There is a lot to look forward to, and a lot of people I love. This is partially a cop-out (because the other things I can think of to fill this spot would make anticlimactic "number 10s," i.e. pruning the tree branches hanging over the power lines in the backyard) and partially a way of collecting all the good things, past, present, and future, into one: having tea with my mom on Thursdays; the rare moments when I and both of my roommates are in the house at the same time; being in touch with classmates and old friends; getting to visit my sister at St. Olaf and running into a bunch of other people while I was there. Also, my birthday is 2 weeks from today, and Thanksgiving is coming up soon, which is arguably my favorite holiday. No. Second-favorite. After New Years. And tomorrow I'm going to start up my workout routine again, which has been challenged lately by hurricanes, Noreasters, travel-related exhaustion and potential illness, so I should be more on my game and less irritable than I was last week. Oh YEAH!

Thanks for playing, friends. Always remember-- there can be more than 10. To be continued...