Well, I’m kind of a dick.  In all my bitching and moaning about 2009, I forgot to mention a couple of pretty decent things that really made my day when they came along.  I think a lot of us can be stuck in this kind of habit, and if I was going to make any kind of resolution for 2010, it would be to knock that shit off.  (I did write about it at the time, but who reads MySpace anymore, anyway?)

By my 3rd month of chronic unemployment, I was enjoying the ability to sleep late.  I wasn’t a complete bum because I made myself roll out of bed by 10:30 11:00, but that was still nearly twice as long as I’d been sleeping when I had to be in an office at 7:00am.  Around 9am one day in May, my phone chimed with a text message.  I rarely ever turn my phone to chime for text, and using the disaster-is-imminent mode* in which I operate during the first few seconds of wakefulness, I stumbled over Graham, out of bed, and made desperate grabs at my phone.

“Did you know you have the RFT’s local blog of the week?” my friend Joe had written.

“Who shot who in the what now?” I texted back.

“Go online,” he responded, never being one to do my research for me.

Hot damn, I thought when I logged on.  Looka here.  The RFT really did name my blog the Local Blog O’ the Week, even if the entry they chose wasn’t one of my finest.  Actually, as I read the entry I felt alternating waves of nerd pride and dismay at my tendency to curse way too fucking much for no goddamn reason at all.  Hmm, I thought.  I really wouldn’t have picked this particular entry (scroll past that Blago part), and I don’t remember being this angry when I wrote it.  Why did they choose this one?  More importantly, why did they choose me?  Most importantly, why is their description of me limited to my joblessness?  WHY YOU GOTTA DO ME LIKE THAT RFT.

I still haven’t figured it out.  Graham said he nominates me all the time, which is nice.  A few other friends said they’ve sent my links, which is also nice.  But since the RFT never contacted me to let me know I was under consideration or had even been nominated, I don’t suppose this is a distinction with any sort of legitimacy.  Except, of course, in my own head, which is where the only press I ever get is pretty damn important.

Thanks again, 2009.  You were a hell of a year.

*The disaster-is-imminent mode is a mess.  If I’m forced to wake up before I’m ready, I’m pretty much incapable of doing so gracefully.  A ridiculous (and sadly, typical) example is when my friend Shannon called me in the middle of the night.  I’d been having a dream about zombies and was convinced that Shannon was not calling me to ask about the whereabouts of our boyfriends (the true story), but to warn me about the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, which she’d been fortunate enough to witness because she was awake at 3:30am (clearly, a much more believable scenario).  I.  Was.  Terrified.  I somehow convinced myself that the bathroom was the safest place to be, so I sat huddled on the toilet seat when I answered the phone.  Sometime during our conversation, I realized that she wasn’t calling about zombies, and that if she hadn’t mentioned them as a concern by now, they probably weren’t taking over.  Still, this didn’t stop me from staying stock-still in the bathroom after I hung up, mostly because I thought about zombies looking in through my windows (ahem, I live on the 2nd floor) and attacking once they saw movement.

The moral of the story is don’t wake me up in the middle of the night unless you want to be responsible for this kind of behavior.