i guess that december is just always hard for me

Last year at this time, I thought I might melt down. The year before, I was living in the Mission with an evil woman and the two car alarms she called children, she was evicting me to move in her stoner boyfriend, and I was waiting for the word that my father's cancer had metastasized, which in fact came on New Year's Day. The year before, before I was blogging, I spent December in the throes of a beautiful and doomed affair with a man who looks exactly like Jake Gyllenhaal, an affair I sensed was doomed when he invited me to spend New Year's with him and his friends in a house in Santa Cruz, and then told me as we were getting ready to head down that he thought he'd made a mistake. Oh, and then of course he came down with something and was terribly sick New Year's Eve and I held his hair back, as they say, and then he unceremoniously dumped me as soon as we got home. Yep. Good times.

I'm going to ramble a bit. But I was just walking home from rehearsal, trying to figure out why I was feeling so foul, and I realized that I usually do, around this time. It was worse when I lived in the Midwest and had real winter to contend with, but it's still not my best season. That whole dead season thing, you know? Trying to be festive when really, you just want to pull everything in and hibernate. And having a birthday at this time of year can be a real bitch; it makes the whole year-end process of taking stock of what one has accomplished that much hairier.

My birthday weekend... eh... thank you everyone who made it to the various rendezvous points on Saturday. I really do appreciate your coming out. Disappointingly, there were people sick, or people with sick parents, or people who said they'd come by and then couldn't make it. Ours was a small but dogged band, wending its way through dinner and a show, and I had a massive headache for much of the night, and the three opening acts for the band I wanted to see at 12 Galaxies were all incredibly loud and (to my ear) boring, and I just never felt like the evening fell into any sort of groove.

It was more... effortful... than it was festive. I felt like I was worrying too much about whether other people were enjoying themselves--getting a conversation over dinner started when I realized that none of my friends knew each other, running to Walgreen's for earplugs when the "music" was too loud at 12G, worrying about whether BunnySlope's companion was enjoying himself, losing Friend of RatFister at the club (we found him again, eventually, or he us), and so on. I was glad to see everyone, but I just wasn't up, and there were a few points where I started thinking longingly about being home in bed with a book. And I couldn't figure out how to fit everyone else in there with me.

Last night was better, perhaps because I attempted less; after spending the day working (yes, my birthday, damnit) I went to see Narnia with Java. As we were sitting through the interminable "pre-show countdown", a tall blond man in black came and sat down next to me. And I'm thinking, is it possible? And yes, it was in fact PRobot! And his girlfriend! I haven't seen him since we had our ugly confrontation when he picked me up from the airport, coming home from Detroit and my dying father, and he called me passive-aggressive (which is entirely possible, although I have to admit I've never really been clear on what that means). So, y'know, I was thinking it might be awkward. But it's been so long since all that happened, I've been through much more painful things since then (amazing how pain gives you perspective, isn't it?), and we had a very nice if brief chat, and we all shared a candy bar during the big battle sequence. So that was okay, and I recommend Narnia highly, unless you're my mother, who cannot watch movies where bad things happen to

1. animals
2. robots (the scene in the first RoboCop, where he kills the bad robot and its foot twitches? Yes, even that)
3. children
4. or space aliens

without making a scene. Mom, don't go. Even if I promise that everything turns out okay, this movie will upset you. It is my duty as a loving daughter to tell you not to see this one. Everyone else, go; the kids who play the kids do a tremendous job, the animation is very good (especially on the beavers and cheetahs), Rhythm and Hues have really figured out how to do fur, Tilda Swinton is a warrior goddess, and in general they got it all right.

I think what I need to do is just start making enough money that I can spend my Decembers on the beach somewhere, eating fish tacos and drinking cerveza. I'm not even sure I'd like fish tacos, but I'm willing to try.