On Thursday we leave for Oregon. Because we are intelligent people, we opted to fly out of Oakland. Here is where I remind you that I live in Santa Barbara. Here is also where I inform you that Santa Barbara is about five hours from Oakland, provided the traffic is good. See? Intelligent people.

In our defense, we thought we'd combine Christmas and New Year's into one extended trip. Being that many of our friends have moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, we thought there'd be a good chance of being able to crash somebody's NYE party up there. We reasoned that we'd just fly back into Oakland after Christmas with the beau's family, pick up our car, and be ready to celebrate without having to drive very far. Right? Sounds reasonable. Except we forgot all of our friends are now 30 years of age, too, and that we have collectively undergone a transformation in which the only thing we are motivated to do after sunset is park our asses on the couch and watch House Hunters. Oh well. Whomever we hang out with, we will all probably be crowded onto one couch and dozing by 10:30 p.m., and it will probably be the best New Year's Eve in the history of forever.

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Right here, this is everything I like about hockey.

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First of all, this post is late. Sorry about that. Yesterday I was just too darn busy baking cookies to get this thing up in a timely manner. I know. It's a crying shame.

Second of all, this post features holiday music. I'm also sorry about that, because this is the Special Time of Year of Holiday Music Overkill. I have mostly avoided it by avoiding shopping at actual stores, but the other night I had the misfortune of spending 25 minutes inside of a Sur La Table and by the time I left I was on the verge of murderous rage over the term "Jingle Bells."

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Today there was an office holiday luncheon downstairs in the break room. For thirty minutes, I stayed upstairs at my desk, ignoring it. I knew exactly what was going to be spread out on those folding tables without even looking, because every work luncheon features exactly the same preservative-riddled delights purchased in bulk from Costco. The only thing that ever changes is what color of seasonally-appropriate frosting they slather on the goods. Who knows what even goes into that heavy, icky stuff? Ugh. I was better than that damn luncheon, dammit.

But after thirty minutes of enjoying how clever I was, I went in the bathroom and braced my hands on the counter. I leaned into the mirror and took a good, long look at myself. The sickly yellow potlights in the ceiling above cast my features in stark relief. I gazed at every harshly-lit pore, every wrinkle, every wayward nostril hair. And then I knew.

My god. I've become a food snob.

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Like many other 30-year-olds, my concept of a great night out increasingly involves making a pot of white cheddar shells and cheese and staying in to watch House Hunters. I've always been slow to take to new trends -- it took me five years to agree to having a cell phone and I finally opened a MySpace account only after all of my friends had already moved to Facebook -- but now I am positively backsliding into utter cultural oblivion, especially as it pertains to current popular music.

This naturally has a lot to do with the fact that on those few occasions when I venture outside of the house at night, it's to dark wood-panelled pubs with names like "The Pig and Gribble" or "The Hanged Goat" instead of fog-machine-clouded hookup bars with names like "Sharkeeze Lounge and Vomitorium" or "Ronnie's House of Leering and $1 Well Shots." The kind of places I go to these days seem to be populated by sad intellectuals with Elvis Costello glasses who are perpetually sighing into their artisan beers, places whose jukeboxes seem to be stocked solely with Joy Division albums -- places in which there is nary a bare midriff nor a hot new club track to be found. So I guess I can understand why it took me a full year to realize that the Black Eyed Peas had released an album in 2009 with such widely-known and widely-played songs on it as "Imma Be" and "Boom Boom Pow."

Full disclosure: I downloaded these particular tracks and commenced trying to reconnect with the Youth of Today. Full disclosure, round two: my brain has taken a liking to these songs, particularly "Boom Boom Pow." Furthermore, my brain has decided without consulting me first that "Boom Boom Pow" is quite obviously the Best Song of All Time. So much so that it must play it repeatedly, with no advance warning, and often in undesirable settings such as at my department's team meeting and during my appointment with the gynecologist.

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I'll admit it, I occasionally shop at Anthropologie. For a long time, the clerks would wrap your purchases in white tissue paper with little red dots on it. I saved this paper and used it during the holidays, because it just fit.

I save a lot of things, actually. Wrapping paper. Boxes. Ribbons. Bows. Anything that's not egregiously torn or wrinkled gets folded up and shoved into a plastic bin for future reuse. I would say that this behavior demonstrates my frugal, savvy, and eco-friendly nature, but I suspect it mostly stems from sheer laziness. I don't want to leave the house in search of supplies every time I give someone a present, you know?

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I was never really that much into "electronic" music.

Until one day, I was.

To be fair, this isn't electronic music in the sense of trance, or house. It isn't inaccessible. It's pop. Good, clean, delicious pop that makes me want to get up and tear around the house like I did when I was a kid, and like I sometimes still do. Ask the beau, he'll tell you.

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We were honeymooning on Vancouver Island.

On the drive from Ucluelet to the ferry terminal in Nanaimo, the car fell silent. “What are you thinking about right this second?” I inquired of the beau. “That sign,” he said, gesturing to a black and yellow checkered road sign that warned of an approaching curve.¹ “And driving.” A few moments passed. “What are you thinking about?” he asked me. “Narcolepsy,” I replied. “Like, can it happen at any time? Can you be running and all of a sudden, bam, you’re laid out on the pavement in a dead sleep?”²

Other things. Now that we don’t have a wedding to plan anymore, we think and talk about other things. Turns out that other things are like riding a bike: you may feel a bit rusty when you get back on, and those muscles may ache from disuse. But you never forget.

The beau and I spent a lot of time on our honeymoon talking about other things, and about The Future. The Future is something we’d talked about before, obviously, but during the whirlwind months of wedding planning we’d apparently lost sight of it. We were on a deadline, see. We were working towards something very specific. Then that thing was over, and we were suddenly like: okay, what now?

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Friday night we went to the beau's office holiday party. This is the fifth year I've attended his holiday party, but the first of those years that we've been married. Some things happened this year that definitely did not happen in years before:

• I got a lot of how's married life? thrown my way. "It's fine, it's great," I said. I didn't really know how to respond to that. Maybe because I'm not really sure what married life is. It mainly feels a lot like life before September 18th, except there's a lot less wedding planning. I don't know if the sameness is a bad thing or a good thing. They say no news is good news, so maybe I'll go with that.
• "Has he changed now that you're married? Does he just lay on the couch and expect you to bring him a sandwich?" someone asked me. "Yes," I said. Yes. It seemed easier than saying no.
  
  

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