Counting Down to 2009

I am back from the seven days I spent holed up at my parents' house. It's strange to have been there for so long. First of all, there's not much for me to do there except eat and watch television, which may not sound all that bad except for the part where I get stir crazy and want to scream, and the part where everyone starts getting on each other's nerves. Compared to some people's Christmasses (like my friend V's), ours is completely tame and right out of a Frank Capra movie. But now I am back in my city, where I don't need a car to go pick up a Red Bull, and I don't have my well-meaning but obsessive compulsive mother panicking when I run out to the grocery store and don't come back in five minutes.

The song from SNL's "Dancing Lamps" skit has finally stopped repeating in my head (see last post), and tomorrow my friend L. and I are going to go to a couple of movies. During my stint in the low-security captivity of my parent's house, I made my first New Year's resolution in twenty years, a particularly apropos one now that I've reached mid-life and all of the psychological crisis that surrounds it: Avoid becoming pathetic.

That's probably always good advice.

UPDATE: My brother-in-law questioned my New Year's resolution, and I realize in this hasty post that I probably should explain this a bit further.

The thing about hitting middle age is the tendency to turn into a lizard, where the only great urges left are to lie still on a rock in the sun and eat bugs. The next step after that, which is pretty much the state my mother has fallen into, is to turn into a mushroom, where you don't even want to be in the sun, but have convinced yourself that you are content staying inside watching the Law and Order marathon on TV and worrying about the weather in other parts of the country. Not that there's anything wrong with that, not when you are in fact closing in on eighty, like she is. I just worry sometimes that I (and several of my friends -- you know who you are) might be heading there a little too fast.