Hi-ho readers,
I’m coming at you live from my last day off of this incredibly long holiday break. I’m doing some work that I was not very good about keeping up with last week, but in my defense, I was very busy sleeping 18 hours a day at my parents’ house.
Places to Go, People to See
Frankly, not much. I spent most of last week indoors, but did have a very nice Christmas with my extended family. I watched a lot of classic movies (Scrooged, How the Grinch Stole Christmas [cartoon and Jim Carrey], A Muppet Christmas Carol, A Muppet Family Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Elf, A Christmas Story…)¹ My cousin Carrie had her first child last week, which is very exciting as I don’t remember the last time we all had a baby to spoil. I also attended the Pinstripe Bowl football game at Yankee Stadium, which was confusing but fun. I spent New Year’s with friends up on Candlewood Lake, and got back to it as part of a choralschola for TENET‘s performances of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 (which was written up in the Times!) I celebrated one year of sobriety on January 1st, which I wrote about a little on Instagram. I feel happy and strange about it, as expected.
What I Read and Liked
- Love the Holidays? The Philippines Celebrates 4 Months of Christmas Mania (NPR)²
- How Tumblr Helped Queer Mainstream Pop (Pitchfork)
- Citrus taxonomy (Wikipedia)³
Songs in My Heart (with playlist)
- Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder) – Anne Sofie von Otter and Elvis Costello
- If You Think It’s Love – King Princess
- Make Out in My Car (Sufjan Stevens Version) – Mosey Sumney
- Maybe I’m Amazed – Paul McCartney
- This Is My Life (La Vita) – Shirley Bassey
- Sweet Tooth – Dave Rawlings Machine
- Ready to Run – Dixie Chicks
- Number One – Joni Mitchell
- Eleven – yMusic
- Champagne Year – St. Vincent
- It’s Raining Men – The Weather Girls
- Go West – Liz Phair
Other Business
I vaguely miss having cable because of the communal watching experience on Twitter. I feel like that used to accidentally happen more, but it happened to me while I was watching my fourth episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives at my parents’ house and other New York Twitter people in the suburbs clearly also had the low-numbered channels on.
Also, I just went grocery shopping for the first time in what feels like a month and even though I hate cooking it was really nice to buy food.
See you in two,
Emily
¹ What are your favorite Christmas movies?
² This article/radio piece also reminded me of the excellent Manila episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, and I read this piece from CNN about how his representation of Filipino culture was appreciated.
³ I ate a really good orange around Christmas and also re-watched the Acid episode of Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, so I did some heavy late-night reading on the topic.