How do I know I’m an early freak? Because this morning I overslept by forty minutes, stopped at the bank to deposit a couple of checks and stayed to get a new credit card, got breakfast at the deli, and I’m still the first one at the office.

No, you don’t want to know what time I normally wake up.

So as it happens, I turned 27 on Sunday. As I was drinking my first cup of coffee around 9:45am, I got an automated phone call. This is not unusual - we get a lot of robocalls from some fucking carpet installation company, and I’m also on a bunch of charity and museum call lists. (Thanks, NPR!) But as it happens, this particular robot lady claimed to be representing a dentist, who wanted to wish me a happy birthday. She actually sang the happy birthday song. The robot lady did.

The weirdest part is that it wasn’t even from my dentist, a lovely person who would never robocall me at coffee o’clock on a weekend morning. No, this was from a guy I went to exactly once, when I urgently needed to replace a lost filling about two years ago. I never went back to him because he was the kind of dick who interprets “I am raising my left hand repeatedly to indicate that I am actually not numb at all and wish you would stop drilling” as “I would like you to comment briefly on my probable pain and then just keep going.” And now I am getting automated birthday calls from him, I guess. So there’s that.

I subscribe to a couple of Wired feeds, and earlier today an article called Apple’s ‘Green’ Notebook Doesn’t Impress Environmentalists popped up. Without even reading it, I knew it had to be something about Greenpeace - which reminded me that I really wish people would stop conflating individual organizations (like Greenpeace) with environmentalism as a whole. It’s possible to be an environmentalist and also think a lot of the things certain environmental groups do do are ridiculous - just as it’s possible to care about animal rights without supporting PETA.

New York is in the middle of a couple days of freakishly warm weather. Yesterday was in the low 60s, and my weather widget claims it’s going to get up to 68 today. We’ve got the apartment windows open and I’ve been walking around in a hoodie instead of a giant winter coat, which is lovely but extremely disorienting. When I wake up in the dark and hear the sounds of the East River drifting through the window instead of the steady hum of a heater, my brain is completely fooled into thinking it’s already spring. Just like the confused crocus sprouts I saw peeking out on my way to work this morning.

This year I finally switched over from my motley collection of bookmarks and RSS apps to Google Reader, which I love and now use for everything. By far my favorite new subscription this year is Morbid Anatomy, which is one of the best blogs I’ve ever seen. Other things I added this year and like include Monoscope, Inspiration Boards, Skull-A-Day, Stephen Fry, Passive Aggressive Notes, and the feeds for a few of my favorite Etsy stores.

2007 was also the year of Twitter, of course. I don’t think I really need to talk about Twitter much, as everyone else already has, but feel free to follow me.

I also unsubscribed from the last couple of big blog network sites I still tried to read, which were Joystiq and Kotaku. My experience with both of them, and with almost everything else from Weblogs Inc and Gawker Media, has been pretty uniformly negative. The writing on both Kotaku and Joystiq is such utter shit that it’s frequently unreadable in a very literal sense. The volume of posts is artifically and unmanageably high, and the extent to which they pander to an imagined mouth-breathing teenage gamer archetype had me rolling my eyes every time I refreshed either feed. Their particular sort of desperate, local-news-style non-humor is also extremely off-putting. I now rely entirely on Zonk and 1UP for my game news.

And speaking of games, 2007 was the year I finally escaped from the clutches of Warcraft. I’d quit before, for weeks or months at a time, but my WoW-need was such that logging in even once or twice meant I’d be fully back into it within a couple a days. Now I seem to be able to log in once in a while, play for a couple of hours, and be done with it. You know, like any other game. And as for those other games, this was also a good year for consoles - our household acquired a 360 and a Wii, which we’ve really been enjoying. The graphics might not be as nice as what’s available on our Windows gaming machine, but Xbox Live and the Wiimote more than make up for any prettiness that’s lacking. My favorite games this year were Portal, BioShock, Viva Piñata (new to me if not new this year), Super Mario Galaxy, and The Simpsons Game, surprisingly enough.

My year was a lot more than RSS feeds and video games, of course - there were weddings and travel and events and movies and books and projects and family and Chris and everything else you’d expect. But I think I’ll save all that for another time.

I don’t know what disgusts me more: that “Do you think a woman can be as effective a President as a man?” is an actual, non-ironic “Political Debate” question on Facebook, or that 21% of people who responded said no. Even though I’ve found the site itself valuable for getting back in touch with old friends and classmates, I think we’re nearing the point at which I delete my fucking account. I can’t even log in without being repulsed by something sitting on the homepage anymore.