January 12, 2004

2003 ended in about the lowest, saddest way I could've imagined. I don't really have the right words, so instead of falling short & trivializing it, I'm just going to box it up and put it away. Good riddance, 2003. What a shit year.

I did get to see two of my cousins for the first time as adults, which was nice, if for miserable reasons. Raised out of driving distance of all the relatives, I don't have any sincere sense of extended family. I'm particularly close with my parents, but I don't much know what to make of cousins and aunts and uncles and even grandparents. But I like the idea of them. They seem snug and automatic, people you get to like without qualification, giddily abandoning the selectivity you enforce (or neglect) in real life relationships.

But now that I've closed up the last chapter of 2003, albeit a bit late, the new year is having its predicable rejuvenating effect. I'm peeling back the onionskin moodiness I've been nestled in for what seems like forever. I'm feeling all business and energy and ready to quit making excuses. Well, as much as I can ever stop making excuses. 2003 was my first year ever as a Kelly (I'm usually a Brenda), and I'm bound and determined to keep 2004 from rushing away from me. Maybe I'll even leave the homestead and cultivate a social life again. Ha ha.

Last night, I went with Suzanne & Jay to see Underworld at the dollar movies. It was just the kind of sci-fi junk food I was craving. With Buffy gone and The O.C. competing w/ Angel (I watch The O.C. & Rebecca tivos Angel for periodic marathons), I've been in sci-fi horror withdrawl. I needed to get my sci-fi on without getting my space on, and Underworld was just the ticket.

I'm still feeling a little sheepish about my love of space sci-fi since Suzanne nonchalantly called me a space nerd a couple days ago (although I'm beginning to turn in favor of the slur). It happened when I got busted up when Starbuck said "With support troops like these, who needs Cylons?" I kept repeating it and cracking up all night; hence the space nerd comment. Mainly it stung because she said it so casually, not as an insult but a fact. I've been pigging out on all the Battlestar Galactica & Firefly complete series DVDs, so I suppose I was bound to be relegated to nerddom eventually--especially by Suzanne, who, lacking the obsessive-compulsive gene, doesn't seem to get sucked into either alternate-world realities or complete series sprees.

Technically speaking, I am most certainly not a space nerd. Never able to cultivate any interest in the twin stars (Trek or Wars), I lack a foundation for genuine space nerddom. But I can't help loving the sound of it. Maybe I'll make myself a SPACE NERD t shirt. Or a homemade, hand-lettered SPACE NERD bumper sticker. A while back, I saw a hand-lettered GALACTIC PATRIOT bumper sticker someone had made and taped to their bumper with clear packing tape. Since then, I've been sniffing around for something pleasing enough to inspire fabrication of my own handmade, taped-on bumper sticker.

After the movie, we went and got Mexican food, then beer at Poodle Dog, where Suzanne and Jay made goo-goo eyes at each other (but, thankfully, did not actually make out like the couple at the bar) and Jay annoyed me by bringing up and then refusing to reveal one of his friend's ex-boyfriend's sordid secrets. It wasn't like I actually know either of them by sight. And he was on such a high horse about it, even though you don't get to be all morally superior about not revealing a secret if you're dissolute enough to hint at it in the first place. I was achingly curious until I remembered that the girl in question (I'd met her once a couple years ago) seemed like she'd have a low threshold for depravity, so her boyfriend's alleged perversion lost its intrigue.

I also learned that I've been calling the wrong thing ben-wa balls all these years. I thought ben-wa balls was another name for anal beads. Once Jay googled them, I remembered a long-ago reference from Kelly Sue, and that I had known at one point what they were. Somewhere along the line, I must've heard a joke about someone cramming ben-wa balls up their ass and got it in my head that one was the other. Plus, the notion of stuffing golf balls up one's girly nethers and going about one's daily business is a bit confounding, so it makes sense that I would omit that device from my mental dictionary. Still, it vexed me that I had it all wrong, because I like to know the proper names of things. If I hadn't already revised my 2004 list about a hundred times, I might rearrange it to accommodate learning the names and variations of sexual implements. I don't want to embarrass myself at my next Swinger's Club meeting.

11.30.03