boston, i’ve heard, is the same climate as copenhagen so i guess this is good preparation. some nice walking today, all of us in different bright-bold colored hats: becca red, ben purple (an adapted neckwarmer), me green. it took us a while to get going. before we left this morning we had to discuss veganism in depth with becca’s mother and think much about what we were going to do and when. ultimately we decided we would wander around harvard square — once cool, now yuppie, like so many places — see gosford park, dine, and meet rabi in a coffee shop in davis square. that all went as planned. first we sat on the floor with books in Wordsworth, which is one of my favorite things to do. i read through the first forty pages of dave egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. i’ve been meaning to do that for ages. i didn’t buy it — i couldn’t — i brought five or six books with me and have been eyeing all of becca’s in addition — but i enjoyed it.

i think i’m finally ready to make my top ten list. bearing in mind i’ve yet to see mulholland drive, in the bedroom or waking life, i hereby submit, in no particular order:

gosford park; amelie; bread and tulips; hedwig and the angry inch; lord of the rings; the royal tenenbaums; the man who wasn’t there; memento; in the mood for love; and, my favorite, princess and the warrior.

i’m sure all of you are thrilled. anyway if i’ve forgotten something let me know.

in the computer lab at commonwealth, becca’s high skool. she’s elsewhere enjoying her reunion. i’ll probably catch up w/ her but after several hours of being in the company of strangers, albeit nice ones, on three hours of sleep (9 a.m. to noon) when i saw a computer i dove for it.

since, she’s taken ben and me on a brief introductory tour of cambridge and boston; we’ve met up with her friends, drunk tea, sat in a hotel, and our now supposed to be partying. i’m too frayed and muddled still to be witty or attractive or engaging so i don’t feel like exposing myself to people. at the risk of being seen as becca’s antisocial friend from swarthmore (when will i stop caring what other people think, i wonder) i’m going to find a nice corner to curl up in and read.

i miss my friends a little, which is silly considering i was just with them [you] for a week. seeing other people reuniting in a high skool setting inevitably brings back memories. i drifted at some point slightly from some of the people who helped bear me through that ordeal. how? why? is it better this way? is there anything i can do? is it worth even thinking about?

my fingers are still cold from spending the day outside. well, the day post– a second showing of rings which ben hadn’t seen. he suggested we hop to over breakfast at 11:40; we found that it was playing at the Uptown, a classic old movie theater, at 12; so off we went, making it with only minutes to spare. i called it impulsive but that got euphemismed “spontaneous”. why ‘impulsive’ is more insulting i don’t know.

at any rate, he enjoyed it and even a second time through, i didn’t find it overlong and the photography was, if anything, more beautiful. i very much admire a director who can go virtually the entire movie without lingering on a horizontal axis. i guess keeping the camera moving is one trick to keep the film moving too.

we picked up cheap, excellent pizza at Vace’s, an italian deli were my mom buys dough, and tracing the path lana jay and i trod countless times over the summer we walked down to dupont circle. i narrated as we went:

… the zoo where i spent the summer when i was sixteen, volunteering in the greenhouse with a little person engaged to another little person (he would pick her up in a red car specially made to accomodate him); a harmless, mentally ill man from a rich family who’d been working there for years; an elderly lady for who liked working with the flowers; and toni, my skinny, chain-smoking boss who got a wandering eye from a car accident that landed her in a coma for six weeks after her husband of twelve years informed her he’d been sleeping with their mutual best friend for a year. she was only slightly bitter; they continued to live together after the divorce. she told great stories. i rode in the back of a pickup truck for the first time that summer and if you go to the small mammal house or the elephant house, you will see trees in the planters that i installed myself.

… the chinese embassy where i arrived after a march in paper chains from the white house with jay, winter, tenth grade. i’d been wondering how to get his attention and settled on this route, which ended with me standing, up to my shins in snow shouting “Free Tibet!” at the brick walls

… calvert street, where i worked last summer at wifp and got heckled frequently for having the audacity to walk to the corner

and so on. we stopped at Second Story which was having a 20% off sale. he picked up blues records; i found a copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and a book by ntozake shange, the author of for colored girls…. then we metroed to friendship heights for more book shopping so he could make good use of a $50 gift certificate to an evil corporate conglomerate. now home. it was a red-cheeked loose-hair day. i liked it.

happy new year. 2002 huh. hey, a palindrome! that’s nice. i can’t really imagine a year topping last year for me. for the country, yeah, quite possible; for the world, certainly. but i had a great year last year. i’m kinda sorry (and i know i’m probably the only one) to see it go.

watched the ball drop with very little ceremony at lana‘s house. liz jay ben and i arrived together at 7 and found the house laid out nicely in preparation for smore-making, sushimaking, snacking, trivia-sign-making (a laone of our barn parties: we had everyone write a little known fact about themselves and post it up on the wall) and general revelry. the first three/four hours were excellent: a few more people came, good moods all around, laughing, talking. ben nursed a fire. we lit a thousand or so candles around the place. much fun. then people i didn’t really know came and some people left and there were a few low spots. we watched eddie izzard’s glorious which is funny but not as good as his HBO special. then it was 5 a.m.

we’d planned a game: a throwback to post-highskool bonding in which everyone takes turns typing up their answers to some questions (like, What do you want to be when you grow up? and Who would play you in the movie of your life?), then prints out their answers and puts them in a bowl. then the bowl is passed around a circle and each person fishes out an answer, reads it aloud, and the group tries to match the answer with the person who supplied it. it went allright except that people kept coming and going during it so some of the people to whom answers were attributed weren’t there to confirm or deny.

the past couple days have been fun in general though. mostly we’ve just chilled. ben’s been immersing himself in Harry Potter III. … it was a good year. i can’t believe i’m spending the first half of the next one in copenhagen.

about to go to brunch at my grandparents’, only, this being my family, naturally we’re running late. last nite what i thought was just a matriarch-patriarch-brood dinner turned out to be a matriarch-patriarch-brood + friends-relatives-and-wellwishers surprise event for my parents’ 25th anniversary. held at la ferme, a fancy french place to which i hadn’t been since lisa’s batmitzvah ohsomany years ago. the kids all had disposable cameras on their tables and i took a picture of geoff looking soulfully into someone else’s eyes — i don’t even remember who now — but he tracked me down, grabbed the camera, pulled the roll of film out and tore it apart. emotions ran high in middle skool.

this being my family, everyone was running around taking pictures last nite. as the centerpiece of the evening was a science-fair type display board covered w/ photos from the last 25 years, it seemed both appropriate and redundant. to me, both my parents look better older which is rather odd. my mother takes excellent care of herself and she really is lovely, although she’s never believed that.