What I did on my winter vacation (present and past)

So this newsletter took a little vacation because I was on vacation and we are one. I should have posted something about how that was going to happen but I didn’t know myself—I had plans to post throughout the break instead of becoming a person who could only do two activities per day and one of those activities was often “eat in restaurant” or “play cards.” I have been off work—and kind of off reality—since the evening of December 18, if you can imagine, and will be getting back to work on January 5—hopefully reality will come sooner.

Other things from vacation

• we went to three provinces to see friends and family. I would never recommend flying at the busiest and most expensive time of year to anyone who has another option, the opening scene in Love Actually not withstanding (it can truly be like that sometimes), but I have done it many times and it generally goes fine. In fact, we have had such good flight luck (relatively speaking—this year we had about 3.5 hours total of delays—nothing in airlines terms) that I am expecting my luck to eventually turn to such an extent that I wil have to move into O’Hare Airport in one giant lifelong flight delay, maybe sometime in 2032. Watch this space.

• We attended many holiday parties, dinners, brunches, and occasions. It was so delightful to see so many farflung favourites but it was pretty much nonestop fun, which was a lot! I have talked before how I am an ambivert and working in publishing in a sea introverts, especially in post-2020, work-from-home life, it is very hard for me to get to the end of my social battery, but this trip got me pretty close. Looking forward to a quiet, couch-y January.

• Read books! Fewer than I expected, due to the aforementioned partying, but still some. I enjoyed the new iteration of Hingston and Olson’s Short Story Advent Calendar, now the 12 Days of Stories and I finally finished Priestdaddy, which I thought was outstanding though it tapered a bit at the end. Also, because I long to be in the zeitgeist but struggle to watch much TV, I started reading Heated Rivalry since everyone was talking about the show. Due to me never knowing what’s going on, I was confused to find that Heated Rivalry is actually the second book in the series, so I read the first one first, which is generally completely unnecessary in romance novels (in case you have a different zeitgeist from me, all these books/shows are about closeted gay hockey players in love, similar to the Him/Us books I read last summer). The first book in the series, Game Changers by Rachel Reid, is pretty dull. A guy working in a smoothie shop, wishing he could move out of his parents’ house, pay off his student loans, or actually use his history degree, suddenly meets a random very successful hockey player and they hit it off. A normal, pleasant fantasy, I assume. The problem is, that is the whole story. The relationship goes fine, they have a bunch of sex and emotions, and then the smoothie guy strong-arms the hockey guy into coming out of the closet, which is awkward but ultimately fine. The end. This takes forever and it is extremely earnest and dull, and I couldn’t imagine how it could be a TV show. Then I watched one episode of the TV show and realized it was a different book, and much more interesting and funny, so I started reading the sequel, which is in fact better, in that it has dramatic tension and the occasional joke. It is also fine to start with the second book of the series and I didn’t need to put myself through that.

• I did watch some TV, but not much. My attention span for TV is very low these days and I’m constantly asking people for recommendations and either hating them after one episode or knowing I would and not bothering. The only thing I actually want to watch is Midcentury Modern, which has apparently been cancelled. Mark is keeping his distance from my planned write-in campaign to Hulu. Anyway, so I watched one ep so far the TV version of Heated Rivalry and thought it was pretty good. It is, very strangely, directed by the guy who did Letterkenny, Jacob Tierney. Letterkenny is an foul-mouthed Hee-haw type sitcom about rural Ontario that reminded me of my hometown and that I watched for several seasons until it got too silly even for me. It had a lot of wordplay and hockey in it, so those things are well-done in Heated Rivalry. There is also a lot of sex in HR, which was not in LK. I regret to inform you that I am uncomfortable with the sex in Heated Rivalry TV version. It’s neither graphic—you don’t exactly see body parts—nor fade to black. The cuts and angles are just very suggestive. I suppose my reaction is a sign of age. I can’t help but feel that I should leave these nice young people to enjoy themselves and not be peeping in at them. I do not feel this way in the book. I will still probably watch more of the show but how much more tbd. I also watched Pluribus, which is a show about alien mind-control, which is very well done but VERY slow moving. I am sure I would have given up if Mark were not so enthused. As it was, I’m glad I saw some of the cooler visual scenes, but was annoyed when we got to the end of the season and that’s all that happens?? We also watched all the Christmas episodes of Bob’s Burgers, which was nice.

• Mark insisted on Pluribus to make up for my bad movie choices. I am always trying to watch treacly holiday movies, and this year I picked my eternal favourite Elf (still laugh-out-loud funny/Mark dislikes), The Muppets Christmas Carol (solid, reliable/Mark may have been asleep), and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York—we both agreed it was bad. Much darker and more cynical and violent than the first one, which is already fairly violent but is a classic of my youth that I still like. Also has Trump in it from the years when he was a more benign figure. The reason we were thinking of it is Macauley Culkin appears in John Candy: I Like Me, which we also watched. I Like Me is a genuinely excellent documentary about Candy’s life and the only film I’d actually recommend of these. Also a documentary about the New Yorker, which was fine if you like the New Yorker but left out a lot of what I deem important. I learned some stuff, though, and enjoyed finding out what one of my favourite journalists, Jon Lee Anderson, looks like.

• Slept. So much. It was great.

• There was probably more but it doesn’t matter, as most of this post already sort of doesn’t, and it’s also long. So I will leave you with this dialogue.

RR (goes to Wal-mart for the first time in decades, returns)
MS (naps)
RR (climbing into bed) I saw an Elf t-shirt, but it was hideous. It had a hologram on it.
MS: Mmm…uh-huh. Elf.
RR: Remember Jem and the Holograms?
MS: Yeah. I had a crush on Jem.
RR: Really? But not Jerica?
MS (naps)
RR: Wait, stop napping, I have more questions.
MS: Ok.
RR: How old were you when you had this crush? And what were your plans for this relationship with a cartoon?
MS: After Jessica Rabbit, the guardrails were off!
RR: So you are saying that Jem was a step up in that she was a human woman, albeit in cartoon form, and not a cartoon of a rabbit?
MS: Hey, Jessica Rabbit was a human woman. She was just married to a rabbit.
RR: Jessica Rabbit wasn’t a rabbit?
MS: No, she was married to Roger Rabbit so she took his last name. Keep up! She was the sultry redhead in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
RR: Which was a cartoon. And you watched that when you were a child even though it’s a movie for adults?
MS: I guess. Was it?
RR: I think it’s like PG-13 [editor’s note: it was actually PG].
MS: Ok.
RR: And then you later became enamoured of Jem from a Saturday morning cartoon?
MS: Yes.
RR: And how old were you at this time? Please don’t say 14.
MS: I don’t know. But not 14.