The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
May 30
A Few Mad Men Thoughts (With Mild Spoilers, One Supposes)
During my wife’s recovery from recent surgery, we started watching Mad Men from the very beginning. If you’ve heard good things about the show but have never watched it, take it from me that you have to start at the beginning. It’s one of those great shows, like The Wire, The Shield or The Sopranos, in which every episode builds on previous ones and paves the way for an increasingly complex and rewarding mythology.
We’re into season 4 now; so far at least two episodes we’ve watched are among the best TV has ever produced, the third season finale (a white collar heist movie in 45 minutes, basically), and the second episode of the fourth season, where Don Draper wins the Clio award (think Oscars, but for TV advertising), in which we see flashbacks I never thought we’d see; an episode that brilliantly expands on everything we already know about Don Draper and his secrets, and is both dramatic and hilarious.
The more I watch, the more I appreciate the amazing influence Twin Peaks had on this show. The music, the cinematography, and the near-surreal nature of many of the scenes. The office Christmas party that ended with a lawn mower taking off someone’s foot? That was as pure a distillation of Twin Peaks’s essence as I have ever seen on TV. If The Sopranos and Twin Peaks had a baby, it would be Mad Men.
Like all the other great ensemble dramas of the past 20 years or so, my favourite character is almost always whoever’s on-screen at the moment. But Robert Morse as the offbeat senior partner Bert Cooper and Christina Hendricks as the uber-capable (and uber-vulnerable) Joan Holloway are particular standouts in a cast as rich as any on television. Both of them have stunned me again and again with the subtlety of their acting. Jon Hamm and John Slattery as Don Draper and Roger Sterling are one of the greatest acting duos I’ve ever seen. The way they dance their little dance of envy and hate, friendship and regret is stunning to witness.
The show keeps getting better and better. While I kind of regret not watching it from the start, the genuine luxury of being able to watch two or three episodes in a row is, pardon the pun, intoxicating. At this late date, I didn’t think there were any more great TV shows that I hadn’t immersed myself in. Mad Men satisfies my need for quality serial drama in a way that only very few series ever have, and is as addictive and compelling a drama as any other I can think of.
May 23
Those Boots
From the time my daughter was in her early teens, she frequently wore a pair of waterproof boots that matched virtually nothing she owned. They were polka-dotted, although I can’t remember if they were black with pink polka dots or pink with black polka dots. The latter, I think.
On any number of occasions, my wife would ask her to please, please wear anything else on her feet but those boots. But asking a teenager to change an item of clothing is like asking a bird not to fly or a fish not to swim. Whether it’s because she loved the boots, or because her mother hated them, my daughter wore those boots for years.
I got a voicemail yesterday on my cell phone. I was at work, in the new building housing the three radio stations I work for. The cellular coverage in my studio is less than stellar. I could tell the voicemail was from my daughter, but I could not make out a word. “Hi, Dad,” I think it began, but it could have been “My bad.” It could have been anything.
I texted her (for some reason text messages seem to go through fine) and asked her to text me back with whatever message she had left for me in my voicemail. Moments later, I got a text, which became a series of texts between myself and my daughter, in which I learned that she was moving out, right away, and moving away, to take a job with a company that travels from town to town. Essentially, she’s run away and joined the circus.
I have no idea how this major life change will work out for my daughter, but I did a little research and was pleasantly surprised to find out that the company appears to be legit. I couldn’t find many negative comments about them online, and the few negative comments I did find did not indicate flaws in the company that would likely affect my daughter in any way.
Penny ante stuff. Piffle. And the truth of it is, she’s an adult now. While it would have been nice to have a little more warning, she has the right to do exactly what she did: accept a new job, pack (some of) her stuff, and leave town. This all happened last night.
I won’t say I wasn’t emotionally affected by this sudden, unexpected turn of events. For nearly 19 years, she’s been a huge part of my life, every day. For nearly 17 years, we have been a family of four — six, if you count the cats. Reflecting last night on how we are now a family of three — five, if you count the cats — I got more than a little misty-eyed. Choked up. I didn’t actually cry, but that was a distinct possibility. My baby’s grown up. The little girl who I watched come into the world, who looked me straight in the eye minutes after she was born, and never cried but just studied everything around her like she’d arrived at a destination she’d long been waiting to arrive at — she’s packed (some of) her stuff and gotten the hell out of Dodge.
And amazingly, nothing made it seem quite as real as going out to my car this morning, on a gray, overcast day with spotty rain spitting down, and seeing those old, worn-out boots propped up against our garbage cans, discarded. Waiting to be taken away forever. Those boots, the most solid evidence that time is passing, that one era has ended, and another one has begun. For those of us left behind, an era of now being three (or five) instead of four (or six). For her, the beginning of the rest of her life.
Apr 08
Sunday Afternoon Rambling (Apologies to Roger)
* My wife Lora is having robot-assisted surgery tomorrow, hopefully bringing an en to a few years now of health problems that have varied from aggravating to incapacitating at times. I’m glad there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Today was spent helping her with a cleansing regimen about which, the less said the better. All I can say is that she is stronger than me by multiples of 50. Any good thoughts you can send her way tomorrow are very welcome.
* She can’t eat for over 24 hours before the surgery, so Easter dinner went right out the window. I did take Aaron to lunch at Five Guys, which was good, and then came home and watched a few episodes of the animated Justice League with Lora before she fell asleep on the couch. So here I am, typing words into the computing machine.
* I got the Wally Wood Stories Artist Edition hardcover yesterday. IDW has produced one of the most beautiful, if unwieldy books of comic art ever produced. I still think the big Kramers Ergot was not worth 125 bucks, but this ood book is another thing altogether. The art is reproduced at the same size as the original art, and scanned so that you might as well be holding that same art in your hands. You can feel Wood’s personality and artistry on every page. This is a treasure of comic art, reproducing some of the most classic and gorgeous comics ever created. Can’t wait for the Batman Year One volume reproducing David Mazzucchelli’s originl art, although it’s difficult to imagine it will be as jaw-droppingly impressive and vital as this Wood volume.
* Also picked up the Flex Mentallo HC yesterday. The recolouring job consisted of batch-converting every page with the “drab” filter in Photoshop, I’m convinced of it. If you’ve seen the original comics, you’ll realize what a shitty thing it was to do this to the book.
* “It’s such a long time, since my better days,” Natalie Merchant just sang out of the speakers of my laptop. I don’t really feel that way at the moment, but I always liked that line, and her music in general.
Mar 16
Blogging from a Coffee Shop 2
Hadn’t planned this coffee shop outing today, but my wife has the second of a dozen or so doctor’s appointments this morning, so I had to drop her off on my way to work, and being over an hour early, here I am in the coffee shop, once again with my English Breakfast tea. It would be wrong not to buy something while using their free wifi, right?
It’s been a busy week — warmer weather and the promise of summer always means an uptick in the number of clients wanting to get new commercials on the air, plus there’s been a plethora of St. Patrick’s Day spots for bars and restaurants. I wish somewhere around here was offering a full Irish breakfast tomorrow morning. I much prefer that to the ol’ corned beef and cabbage. I might have to do it myself.
Today’s the day the new iPad hits stores, and while there’s a part of me that wishes I had known it was coming before plunking down the money for my new(ish) laptop, part of me is glad it worked out that way, because I don’t know if I want to start transitioning to Apple products. After a couple decades of trying, it seems like with Windows 7 Microsoft has finally more or less got their shit together, and there’s really nothing I’m unhappy with about the laptop except the time it takes to pack up the charger and cooling pad, and the bulkiness of the resulting bundle. Which might have been a good deal less bulkier if I hadn’t gone for the largest laptop available, but there you go. I admit it was a bit of a kneejerk decision, spurred on in part by the ticking clock of a deal on Dell.com (I might have given them a link if they hadn’t loaded this thing with so much crapware that I had to remove bit by bit), but so far I am mostly pretty happy with how it all turned out.
Here at the coffee shop, You Can’t Always Get What You Want just came on their SiriusXM radio, and it’s hard not to feel like Hank Moody, typing away while the song gets into its still-amazing groove.
If you’re thinking to yourself that this coffee shop blogging is all stream of consciousness and very little substantial content to speak of, you’d be right. As noted above, I didn’t plan this session, and since this blog has evolved into a pretty random collection of posts over the past year or so, I doubt you’re terribly surprised (or even still reading). But I do feel the need to check in here with whatever readers are left, so, hi, and I hope you have a nice weekend. I’m going to finish my tea and head over to work.
Mar 13
Blogging from a Coffee Shop
Even though I’ve had my new laptop for over a month (is it still new? It feels new to me), up until this morning I had not blogged from a coffee shop using their free wifi. It’s such a cliche, but it’s something I really wanted to do — to be able to take a portable computer almost anyplace and connect to the entire internet for free seems like a miracle for the ages. I know most people probably take it for granted, but it really seems astonishingly unlikely that humankind could have ever reached this level of sophistication. If we had all reached it at once, if the vast majority of people living on the planet weren’t shut out from such luxury, it might even be something to celebrate, instead of something to feel mildly embarrassed by. Yes, in many ways some privileged people on this planet are enjoying a future of the type Gene Roddenberry and his colleagues proffered on Star Trek, but in that glorious future, there weren’t entire countries and continents suffering for the affluence of the elites. Sitting here tapping away on my laptop, sipping piping hot English Breakfast Tea, it’s not hard to feel like an elite, no matter how barren my bank account or how recently minted my slight good fortune is. (Three months ago I was staring down the end of my unemployment benefits and wondering if I’d ever get another job.)
Of course, most people don’t believe the affluence enjoyed here in Los Estados Unidos will ever end. Me, I read too much and think about too much to think the ride’s gonna continue much longer. Read last week’s column by Jim Kunstler and ask yourself seriously how much longer we can all pretend the economic system isn’t a desiccated corpse. How long before it takes more than the value of a gallon of oil to suck a gallon of oil out of the ground, and how much longer after that signal moment anyone at all will work at providing cheap oil for the enormous global energy demands of our era. And if you do any research at all, you’ll find that shale, solar, wind power — you name it — there’s no energy alternative that can sustain the way of life that we enjoy. In 50 years, or maybe 10, life might look more like the opening scene of Soylent Green, with the old man riding the stationary bike in his family’s apartment just to keep the lights flickering. Will my kids enjoy laptops and iPads and flying cars? Honestly, do you think so? I’ll be happy if they can spend their adult years safe and well-fed. But even that, I think, will depend on ingenuity and flexibility, two character traits that most Americans seem to have long ago forgotten about.
Gosh, honestly I didn’t intend to go dark here in my first session blogging from a coffee shop. I can’t blame it on the tea, because it’s delicious. But I am serious when I say that the changes that are coming seem closer now than ever — our political system is hopelessly broken and the Occupy movement, as well-intentioned and mostly right as it was, doesn’t seem to have the furious energy and hate that sustains the tea-baggers. As with most problems, the root cause is a lack of education and a lack of will by the older generation to prepare the young for what’s ahead. We’re all so busy trying to get by day to day that we spend little or no time thinking about whether we live in a culture that can maintain itself into the future, fueled by the nearly-depleted remnants of creatures that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago. There’s some degree of irony in our last hundred years being fueled by their extinction, and speeding our culture well on the way to its own.
Feb 25
Clearing Out Some Room
Sold off 106 books today, mostly graphic novels, in the hopes of making some space in my room. I’ve known for some time I need to simplify my life, and even though it was five boxes of books I offloaded, and I let them keep the boxes, it still feels like my bedroom is crowded, disordered, a mess. It feels like a reflection of my mind, which never seems to settle down, and certainly never seems like an orderly place.
The new year brought with it a new job, and now a new computer (upon which I type this very blog post), and after nearly two years of feeling like I was stuck in limbo, all these new elements are welcome. There are other things in my life I want to make new, and some I want to eliminate altogether. Clear out some room. Simplify. Organize. Maybe I’ll find the time.
Random notes: Watched the mostly-excellent special features on the new Justice League: Doom Blu-ray today. Nice tribute to the late and much-missed Dwayne McDuffie. One person remembering how Dwayne was sometimes slighted or underestimated reminded me of an unfortunate incident on a private comics mailing-list I used to run, in which a major comics retailer made some unbelievably asshole-y comments about Dwayne, not realizing The Maestro was already getting the emails. That was the end of Dwayne being a part of our little secret society, which is a shame, because he was a smart guy and I always enjoyed interacting with him. The few times I see mention of that retailer it reminds me how very wrongheaded some people can be, and yet they can still achieve a degree of success within their field, unfortunately. Radio has taught me much the same lesson numerous times.
Enjoyed pizza with my wife after I sold off those books today, and then we went and I waited semi-patiently as she picked out gifts for a baby shower coming up next weekend. Somehow 19 months of unemployment made me a little more patient in waiting for other people to get done the stuff they need to do. I guess that’s one good thing to come out of it.
Feb 21
Almost 10
I think this June will make it ten years I’ve been blogging. I mentioned recently to someone I met in 2005 that I was blogging back then, and he said “There were no blogs back then.” Okay, well, I know I started in 2002. I’m just too lazy to look up the exact date right this second. *
I do remember that I signed up for a paid Blogger Plus account, because it offered a more stable and reliable platform and interface than regular old free Blogger; two weeks later they upgraded everyone to Blogger Plus for free. They sent me a Blogger hoodie by way of apology. I think my daughter still has it in her closet somewhere. My oldest blogging artifact.
As I write these words, I am waking myself up with an ice-cold Coke Zero and half-listening to Imus, back after he took Preznit’s Day off yesterday. My son has the whole week off, but since my wife and I (and our daughter, too, amazingly) have to work all week, I don’t think his vacation will be anything to get too excited about it. These days he seems happy to play his X-Box 360 anyway, and seems to be single-handedly propping Blockbuster up by making daily trips to see what 99 cent games they have in stock.
The news guy on Imus says Rick Santorum is still the front runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Jim Kunstler often has said that The Long Emergency will lead to political madness, and I think the nation tolerating Santorum’s hate-based campaign proves Kunstler’s theory. I wish progressives had a credible candidate. Hell, I wish the Republlicans had one.
Hmm, sports is on now. Carmello Anthony, Jeremy Lin, Knicks, Nets, blah blah blah. The only thing that bores me more than sports is country music. **
My online comics buddy Yan Basque does these daily updates on his personal blog — I’d like to get into the habit of doing something like that. I recently got a new laptop computer that’s given me a lot more portability, and I want to get into the habit of blogging more regularly again. I’m still getting used to the flat (“recessed”) keys and the touchpad. They’re so alien to me. I did get a wireless keyboard and mouse bundle but now that I’ve had this thing a couple of weeks, I feel like using those would be both an added, unnecessary step and also cheating.
“Bill Maher catches Linsanity,” says Imus’s producer, previewing an upcoming segment. Linsanity. That’s one disease I am 100 percent immune to.
—-
* June 7th, 2002
** This is a lie. They bore me in equal measure.
Jan 24
Goodbye, Whims
My sister (born Deborah, self-christened Whims) died this week, an event prompting condolences from well-meaning friends and acquaintances, but no condolences are needed. All her death really evokes in me is a sense that something bad and wrong has come to an end.
It quickly became clear that I should have kept the news to myself. Because while I am genuinely grateful for the support and comfort of those around me, the only sadness I feel is for my sister’s son, a decent, bright and good-hearted guy who has suffered terrible confusion and probably a good deal of pain due to my sister’s activities and behaviour of the past few years. The plain truth of the matter is, and death shouldn’t make us afraid to be honest, my sister was a troubled person, a virulent racist, and she brought pain and discomfort to my family for most of the time she was alive.
Such a terrible thing to say. Such a terrible thing to feel you have to say. And yet there it is. My earliest memories are of late-night threats made over the phone, against my mother, by my sister. As a young child she filled me with fear. As an adult she usually filled me with disgust. For every kind, decent thing she did — such as assisting my wife and I with groceries once when we were very poor and newly living together — I could name you twenty that would tear your guts out.
The worst:
There were four of us kids that my mother raised. My oldest brother, my sister, me, and my younger brother. There’s more to the story than that, much more, but for the purposes of this reminiscence, that’s all you need to know. My oldest brother was adopted, but never knew it. My mother began demonstrating Alzheimer’s symptoms in the 1990s, and as the disease progressed, eventually my sister (a nurse) brought my mother (also a nurse, in better, stronger days) to live with her. Around 1994 my mother died, and my sister wrote the obituary that appeared in the newspaper.
That obituary was how I found out my mother had died, because my sister didn’t bother to tell me. That obituary was also how my older brother found out he was adopted. Can you imagine being a middle-aged man, never mind a troubled Vietnam veteran, being told for the first time that you were adopted, by reading it in the newspaper? “Nancy Doane is survived by her adopted son Robert…” began the paragraph that must have devastated him, as my sister intended. She was a vicious, spiteful person. After my mother’s death, my sister spent many months trying to seize control of some stocks that my mother had intended me to inherit. There’s no doubt of her intentions, because she told me herself, and added my name to the ownership of the stocks. When my sister finally gave up trying to get them turned over to her against the stated wishes of our mother, and turned them over to me, I cashed them in as quickly as I could. My wife and I were raising two very small children, and were making very little money. As a result of the stock sale there was enough money to buy ourselves wedding rings (we hadn’t had the money for them, or much else, at the time we got married), a new pair of sneakers, and exactly one nice meal out at a decent, but not extravagant restaurant. I hope her failed attempt to steal this minor amount of money from me as I was starting out my own family was worth the two decades of contempt I carried for her ever since.
There’s so much more. The time she knocked my then-preteen brother on his ass for impulsively saying something both innocent and true. The time she stole everything from a husband she married solely for what she could get out of him, waiting for him to go to work, then backing up the moving van and taking it all. More, more, more. But it finally took her racist rants on immigration to prompt me to unfriend and in fact block her on Facebook. I just didn’t want any more of her hatred and negativity in my life.
A few weeks back I received word that she seemed to be falling even further into dangerous behaviours and habits. There was talk of drug addiction and loaded handguns, mutterings of revenge for being fired, likely with good reason. I began to wonder how much longer she could live the way she was living. Now I have my answer. Not long. My wife told me today that my sister’s death was news she never expected to hear. I told her I’d been expecting it for weeks.
I don’t know yet how exactly she died, and honestly there’s a lot more about her that will remain forever unknown to me, forever a mystery. Late-in-life hints that there may have been so much more lies and deception on her part than I really had ever could have guessed, although actually I had wondered about some of it from time to time. But the truth is, the death of my sister is not painful for me, though I feel for those to whom it might cause pain. For me it’s mainly about closure, about the open wound that was her life, not so much healing as just finally coming to an inglorious and not-entirely-surprising end. The only lesson I could offer up from her long, destructive life and quick slide from madness into death, is that we all will be remembered not for what we wanted to be and wanted to do, but for who we actually are and what we actually do. I wish I could remember my sister fondly and with love, but unfortunately I remember her too well for that. All I can say is, goodbye, Whims, and thanks for the groceries.
Jan 23
What You’re Missing on My Twitter Feed
Here’s a roundup of my recent tweets on Twitter (slightly edited and remixed for clarity here on my blog). I’d love it if you’d follow me on there; you can do so via my Twitter profile page.
* Anyone who thinks Jesus cares who wins a football game doesn’t know much about Jesus.
* Plattsburgh, NY feels more like Canada than Los Estados Unidos. Signs in French. Currency exchange!
* In a just universe, gin would be the best cure for dehydration.
* We were supposed to have 50 MPH winds tonight. And I think I hear them now. The cat wants to go outside, but he would blow away.
* Getting up in the night just to pee, $2.95. Remembering there’s laundry to be taken out of the dryer? PRICELESS.
* When I pass a car with blackout tinting I like to stare right where the driver probably is, just to make them wonder if I can see them.
* It is a basic human right that the needs of the weakest be addressed before the wants of the strongest.
* Ron Garney, Tom Raney and Mike McKone might be my three favourite regularly working superhero artists at the moment.
* Two guys come into Subway together, wearing the same company uniform, then sit at separate tables and don’t talk. Wonder what the story is.
* If there’s a better reason to have kids than waking up to find out they made red velvet cupcakes and saved you one, I can’t think of it.
* When you’ve had a red velvet cupcake at 2AM, the rest of the day will probably pale in comparison.
* That thing when you bite into an apple and you bite so much you get some of the core? Hate that.
* ”Faux-arty” is too long for Twitter. Just abbreviate to “farty.”
* One time I pasted a “30” on the February page of the calendar in a radio studio. Morning guy said it was February 30th all morning. #hahaha
* Hey, it’s a leap year. Didn’t know that. Nice that we get an extra day before the end of the world.
* 2012: The year people start saying Twenty-Twelve and stop being stupid. Welcome to it.
* 2011 closes with me getting the best possible news — I got a new job, and start on the first workday of the new year, Tuesday.
Jan 01
Looking Back at 2011
As seen at Ramblin’ with Roger, like most of the memes I respond to.
Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don’t think I have ever made a New Year’s resolution in my life.
Did anyone close to you give birth?
One of my daughter’s best friends.
Did anyone close to you die?
No, but there was at least one close call.
What countries did you visit?
Stayed right here in Los Estados Unidos all 365 days of 2011.
What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Patience.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Finding a job.
What was your biggest failure?
Didn’t write about everything that I wanted to.
What was the best thing you bought?
A Frankenputer built by my buddy Brian in the wake of the death of our 7-year-old PC. The replacement isn’t perfect — the bolts in its neck are rusty — but it works, and lets me do many things I would be lost without, like blogging and keeping in touch with friends on distant shores.
Whose behavior merited celebration?
The Occupy Wall Street folks finally made a move I’d been waiting for since December of 2000, when an entire, exhausted nation relinquished democracy.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
The moneyed monsters mocking and undercutting the Occupy movement and disregarding their very real concerns, and the armoured, anonymous thugs wielding batons and tasers in the name of preserving the corrupt and destructive status quo.
Where did most of your money go?
Groceries and rent.
What did you get really excited about?
The possibility of real change, unlike the phony bill of goods sold to over half the country by the current resident of the White House.
What song will always remind you of 2011?
I didn’t listen to much music in 2011, and none of it was new. This might be the first year since my early teens that not one new song penetrated my consciousness.
Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
Happier.
Thinner or fatter?
The same.
Richer or poorer?
The same.
What do you wish you’d done more of?
Spending time with my kids.
What do you wish you’d done less of?
Worrying.
How did you spend Christmas?
Chinese food and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Our favourite local Chinese place was unexpectedly closed (we went there Christmas 2010 and had a wonderful time), so we had to go to the other local Chinese place, a very utilitarian-feeling buffet in a worn-out strip mall. The food was mediocre-to-terrible. The movie was incredibly fun and more than made up for the lousy lunch.
Did you fall in love in 2011?
Not that I recall, and I think I would recall something like that.
How many one-night stands?
None.
What was your favorite TV program?
Homeland blew everything else away. Dexter criminally mis-used Edward James Olmos and really slipped a bit in my estimation, although its final-seconds cliffhanger has me dying to see what they do next. More of my 2011 TV thoughts here.
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No.
What was the best book you read?
New? Roger Ebert’s Life Itself: A Memoir, which I reviewed. Classic? Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which is perhaps the most dazzling piece of writing I’ve ever experienced. I read it for the third time in 2011 and still found new surprises in the narrative and profound appreciation for the actual writing itself.
What was your greatest musical discovery?
Late in the year I found a new appreciation for latter-day U2. Songs like Beautiful Day, No Line on the Horizon and Magnificent got under my skin and reminded me of how much I loved the band during and just after college. U2 is the only band I’ve seen live twice (once in Syracuse on the Joshua Tree tour, once in Saratoga Springs during, I think, the Pop Mart tour, if that’s what it was called. The one where Bono talked to people on a giant screen via satellite hookup, anyway.
What did you want and get?
A Blu-ray player for the holidays. The first movie I bought on Blu-ray was J.J. Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek, which came out so long ago that my review of it is on the version of this blog previously hosted on Comic Book Galaxy.
What did you want and not get?
An eBook reader.
What were your favorite films of this year?
Margin Call had me mesmerized for virtually every moment of its run time. Nothing thrilled me more in the theater than Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, I am almost embarrassed to admit. An action movie starring Tom Cruise? It’s crazy, but man, I loved it.
What did you do on your birthday?
I don’t remember. I checked my blog for memory-jogs, but didn’t find any. I’m sure a good time was had by all.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
“Oh, hey, I forgot I had this. And it still fits!”
What kept you sane?
Reading.
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I don’t have a crush on any celebrities, if I’m reading the question correctly.
What political issue stirred you the most?
Equal marriage rights.
Who did you miss?
My wife, who did a lot of overtime and weekend hours this year to keeps ends meeting.
Who was the best new person you met?
I don’t think I met any new people in 2011, but one friendship expanded into a weekly breakfast get-together that became the highlight of most weeks. Tea, breakfast, and good conversation. What more could you want?
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:
Persistence almost always pays off in the end.
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow…
— Paul Simon, Graceland