In these last few hours of this last palindrome year for quite a while: some resolutions.

This year, I will actually get around to mailing the carefully written, enveloped, and stamped thank you notes I’ve been writing since I got home from Essex. They will not, I swear, sit on one of my spanky new bookshelves for another few days and then another few weeks until they’re so embarrassingly late I can’t bring myself to even look at them, much less actually send the god damned things.

This year, I will acquire my third vacuum since moving into this apartment, and I will redner it such tender ministrations as it requires to last more than a few months without beginning to smoke and smelly funny when used. I will have a functioning vacuum, and I will not spend another afternoon going over my entire apartment with a dustpan.

This year, I’m going to make use of all the fantastic cookbooks I’ve been given since moving out of my parents’ house, and I will improve my cooking skills. I don’t ask for much, but the transition from “boiling water” to “edible meals” doesn’t seem unreasonable, does it? No, really, I won’t spend another semester living on Thai Noodle Bowl and Luna bars, I promise.

This year, maybe I should work on my study skills. I’ve managed to get this far with my cunning caffeine/sleep deprivation techniques, but at the ripe old age of 22 it does seem I should be able to write a paper without having to resort to this crap.

This year, I will stop worrying about it and have my tonsils ripped out already. I will not ignore it until I’ve had tonsilitis another four times, and I will not put it off till next year. Again.

This year, I’m seriously going to clean the apartment from top to bottom over winter break (this is related to the vacuum thing). I will get rid of all the miscellaneous crap that’s accumulated over the past two and a half years of roommates, exboyfriends, and pack-rattitude. What happened to all my surfaces?

And finally, this year I’m going to produce a shiny new Caoine design, because I love you all that much. Happy 2003, buckeroos and buckerettes.

Having seen The Two Towers, finally, and then having seen it again, finally, I think the only criticism I have of the film that is not one shared with the book is that it isn’t long enough. I realize it’s more than a little absurd to say of a three hour movie that it’s too short, especially once you add in half an hour of ads and previews, but that’s honestly the impression I got. It was great, I just wished there were more of it - more Ents, more Frodo and Sam, more Mordor. It feels as though it had to be slimmed down rather dramatically even to reach the three hour mark, and at times it borders on confusing just because everything is happening so quickly. There’s just too much material packed into each and every one of its 179 minutes. Maybe the inevitable collector’s edition DVD will have the gobs of extra footage I’m fiending for?

That’s not to say it isn’t a fantastic movie: it’s a fantastic movie, and I’ll probably go see it at least one more time. My mother found it too gruesome for her taste, and while I wouldn’t say it’s too gruesome it’s definitely pushing the limits of PG-13. Orc intestines flying and severed heads staking out piles of burning carcasses are the tamest bits - the film contains some of the goriest fictional battles I’ve seen. Mmm, disembowling.

I hate to sing the praises of NPR yet again, but WNYC’s On The Media recently brought to my attention a literary anthology called Writers on America, published by (of all things) the State Department. It’s being distributed overseas, and only overseas, because of the Smith-Mundt Act. As a work published explicitly to influence foreign audiences, it constitutes official propaganda, and it is therefore illegal for the US to publish or disseminate the book domestically. The OTM interviewer asked George Clack what, hypothetically speaking of course, would the Smith-Mundt Act entail in terms of web publication? Clack replied, hypothetically speaking of course, that he would not be allowed to distribute the URL of such a publication, but that if one knew about it and one were not an employee of the State Department, one would be allowed legally to do whatever one wanted with it. Only State Department employees are barred from enabling the dissemination of official propaganda; the trick, of course, is that only State Department employees usually know where it is.

Google, however, knows where everything is. You can read the anthology here, and it’s actually worth it for more than the illicit thrill of perusing unavailable material; contributing writers include Robert Pinksy, former Poet Laureate of the US (whose translation of Dante’s Inferno, incidentally, is not to be missed). There’s also Richard Ford, Julia Alvarez, and Bharati Mukherjee, among others.

I was curious about the State Department’s motivation in releasing such a work at all. I’m probably oversimplifying, but it does seem like the sort of people who might be interested in reading an anthology of American writers’ thoughts on America might also be capable of (heaven forbid) thinking for themselves about the subject - in other words, isn’t the State Department just preaching to the choir? This is from the collection’s introduction: This book originated as an intriguing suggestion by Mark Jacobs, a U.S. foreign service officer with our State Department staff who also happens to be a working novelist. If we were to ask a contemporary group of American poets, novelists, critics, and historians what it means to be an American writer, Jacobs proposed, the results could illuminate in an interesting way certain America values - freedom, diversity, democracy - that may not be well understood in all parts of the world.

Well, if they say so. I’m reminded of a back issue of Granta I read perhaps last year - What We Think Of America is also a collection of works on the US, but perhaps more interestingly the pieces were written by non-American writers. You can read a handful of selections on the Granta site, or order the entire issue - unlike Writers on America, it’s freely available to the public (American or otherwise).

I’m off to crawl into my cozy little Brooklyn bed again shortly, but I just wanted to note that I’m back again, thanks to my ever-patient folks. After an excellent breakfast with my big brother, we stopped at Bowl & Board in Cambridge to pick me up some kick-ass bookshelves and kitchen miscellany, then piled into my Dad’s truck and headed here.

A few hours later and I’ve got a less-imposing heap of books stacked on top of my desk (down to one layer of O’Reilly books!), a really fantastic set of shelves holding the rest, and an urgent need to go straight to bed. Funny what going to bed at 9pm every night for a week will do to you (not to mention my lingering holiday cold).

I apologize for the lack of updates (and lack of mail reading) this past week, but now that I’m back things should be more or less normal, or as normal as they ever are.

Now that there aren’t any little kiddos scampering around the parental abode, Christmas has become a much more relaxed affair. I’m the baby of the family, and since I’ve moved out we’ve gone back and forth between completely ignoring holiday ado in its entirety, and making it as big a deal as it was when I was still knee-high to a grasshopper. I think this year we may have hit upon the happy medium; we did minimal present-exchanging but not the obscene mountain of stuff from days of yore. We made piles and heaps of cookies and the dinner itself left us all in a food-induced coma, but we refrained from a big Christmas Eve breakfast. By eight o’clock last night the extended family were on their merry snowstormy way home, and the rest of us read until dozing off from excessive cranberry pie.

My cold has blossomed into the mighty and fearsome Goo Stage, which (I do hope) means that it’s on its way out, with any luck. Today’s agenda calls for more lying around and reading, much consumption of leftovers, and washing of a serious quantity of dishes.

My brother and I are still up doing a little last minute wrapping and baking, in an interesting twist on days of old. We sent my parents off to bed a while ago and told them that if they fell asleep soon, Santa will have come by the time they wake up.

Today has been a moderately relaxed and exceedingly pleasant sort of Christmas Eve. I created whole forests of gingerbread trees and swathes of sour cream spritzers. We avoided making egg nog, to the relief of all concerned. The presents are mostly wrapped and stashed under our truly enormous tree (which was $14! I sometimes forget that the rest of the world is not Manhattan), and soon I’ll scamper off to bed. The Nutcracker was on PBS earlier so I’m sure the sugar plum fairies are inevitable, at this point. Ho.

This evening’s All Things Considered had an interesting segment on the German figure of Weihnachtsmann, or Christmas Man, which (apart from sounding like a track from an And One holiday single) has actually generated enough discontent to spawn the opposing Anti-Weihnachtsmann-Kampagne. Weihnachtsmann borrows heavily from the American version of Santa Claus, which is a strange enough concept in and of itself. Our Santa - before being revised and embellished through Clement Clarke Moore’s The Night Before Christmas, Thomas Nast’s illustration for Harper’s, and a series of festive Coke ads - originally sprouted from Sinter Klaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas. Germany has its own Saint Nicholas - an entity separate from and competing with Wiehnachtsmann. The Anti-Weihnachtsmann folks would like to see a return to characters more symbolically and historically rich than Christmas Man. “A fat man in a red suit means nothing,” proclaimed one man interviewed on the ATC segment. Saint Nicholas, according to standard Christian accounts, was a bishop who lived in the fourth century in what is now Turkey, who was known for distributing presents to poor children. I don’t know that I prefer a fourth century bishop from Turkey to a fat man in a red suit from the North Pole; it’s not as if the standard Christian version of things seems any more plausible than the whole reindeer and chimney thing (I am not even a little bit religious). I do remember waking up in the middle of the night hearing noise from downstairs and being completely and unquestioningly convinced that Santa was at this minute rummaging around in my kitchen cupboards.

Speaking of Christmas, The Morning News has an excellent Leslie Harpold column up on that very subject, and I’d like to mention that when I first went to grab the link for it, I typed morningnews.org and discovered a long-lost cousin of Christmas Man: none other than Domain Man.

As for my own festivities, I’m safely nestled in at the parents’ for the duration. I’ve developed my annual Christmas cold right on schedule and am being fed large quantities of tea and soup, and I have to say that if you’re going to be sick in the middle of winter, there are worse places to be sick than your Mum’s house.

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Another semester down, three more to go. I arose in the chilly predawn (earlier than ass o’clock, even) this morning and took my C final at 8am (which is just after ass o’clock), then Genetics at 10am. After visiting the philosophy department, whose poor departmental secretary is I’m sure by now getting quite sick of me throwing schedule-related temper tantrums in his office, I got my classes for next term straightened out and I’m done. Classes finished last week, exams are over, Christmas shopping is done: all that remains is to get sloshed tonight and head to Massachusetts Sunday morning.

Next semester I’ll be taking an epistemology course towards my philosophy major, an aesthetics course as a philosophy elective, another C class, and either history of modern philosphy (there’s a running theme here) or a Brit lit elective. No more core curriculum classes, no more labs or recitations, and my schedule only requires getting up at ass thirty on two instead of four days in any given week. It’s good to be a second semester junior.

Speaking of philosophy, what I really want for Christmas is a Nietzsche plushie, although I wouldn’t turn down a Soctrates or a Van Gogh (with detachable ear).