What I Did On My Winter Vacation

How Bleak Was My Puberty

There's nothing like a trip home to remind you that no matter how far you feel you've come as a person, how much you've evolved and grown, you are still at your core a sniveling little shit.

I'm luckier than most in that I have a pretty functional immediate family. There are no deep emotional wounds to speak of, and since I'm an only child, there are fewer potential landmines to navigate in the form of acrimonious sibling drama. That said, after a few days of good behavior wherein I settled into the comfortable, familiar torpor of being installed in my ancestral home, my surly teenaged self slowly bored her way to the surface. Let's just say an incident regarding my mother (hi Bird!), a latke party and a container of sour cream frazzled my nerves to the point of fraying and my Best Self waved warily at me from across the room as my Shithead Self threw a tantrum befitting a coddled tween. 


It's all well and good when you function more or less in a vacuum, but stir some of the humans closest to you in, add vodka or the flu or both, and you get a quivering mound of EMOSHUNS it takes days to dig your way out from. 

In hindsight, I don't know that I've spent more than a week at home since those yawning month-long respites between semesters in college. As stated earlier, I was concerned that having so much down time, especially in a place I associate with such inaction, would result in a physical and mental atrophying that would make my return to the NEK that much more difficult, so I set forth a sort of loose action plan -- exercising almost every day, reading my Cheese History book, working on some writing, cooking as much as possible and eschewing the alluring honeypots of inertia, ie Netflix and its consorts (P.S. HOLY SHIT FOR EVERYONE WHO HAS YET TO WATCH TRANSPARENT ON AMAZON PRIME DO THAT SHIT IMMEDIATELY). 

As that last parenthetical implies, my plans were thwarted. Week one was fairly successful, populated with numerous gym trips to run on the treadmill like an automaton (how fucking weird are gyms, by the way?) and outings to the farmer's market with my mom and visits with friends and family members and coffee with high school exboyfriends. The marginal spate of activity made me feel justified in indulging in a few carefully selected TV binges. But week two was my week to Get Shit Done for serious, to devote concerted time and energy to Pitching New Work and Tweaking Partly Abandoned Pieces, and also Traveling Further Afield to see cousins and visit a goat farm in southern Michigan. (This one, if you're curious.) 

Sadly, nature had other plans for me. I got sick. Sicker than sicker than sick. A particularly virulent strain of evil cough/cold/flu thing that left me sounding like Marcel the Shell for days on end (amusing when I wasn't laugh-coughing myself into oblivion) basically blotted out my final days at home. Sleeping and watching a record amount of Gilmore Girls and crying and swilling heavily doctored tea were my main activities. New Years was even more subdued than I'd anticipated -- I took on a supervisory role in the making of raclette and the playing of Quiddler (an uber-nerdy card game that's a mashup of gin and Scrabble). In other words, if it was possible to embody even more lethargy than my last year's New Year documentary-watching marathon, I accomplished said goal. 

I had a dim awareness of some superstition regarding what your New Years activities will bear out in the coming year, and I worried that my brainfog and sickliness and general melancholia would be the harbinger of a craptastic 2015, but now that some of that fog has cleared, I'm choosing to think otherwise. Lest my resolutions lose their strength and force in being disseminated, I'll keep them to myself for now, but suffice it to say I'll be further attempting to tame the adolescent shrew within in 2015 and generally trying to make my Best Self the Self at Large. 

Talk to me next week.