Well, hello blogosphere! I have been having a mighty fine time without you these past two weeks. I spent long, lingering mornings over the breakfast table with my mommy and daddy. I played many games of Parcheesi with the descendants of my mother’s sisters. I visited nearly every bar in Reading, Ohio, with a ragtag assortment of relatives, high-school friends, lesbians, thugs and cowboys. I was not, this year, kicked out of the strip club behind the public library for daring to enter with an out-of-state I.D. I stayed up too late in Columbus, learning about college friends’ sex lives and job aspirations and Christmas gifts while stomping the old grounds and such. I returned to DC for one night of Old Bay and Ravenry. I spent a regrettable amount of time on buses. I rung in the new year with my oldest friend (we met circa ‘Floppy Was a Bunny,’ courtesy of The Studio’s pre-K ballet program, somewhere between left and right hop) and a gaggle of other transplanted Cincinnatians and Floridians amidst the warehouses and Polish corner stores of Greenpoint. I donned Dan-Deacon-glasses and moonboots to co-co-co-star in what has to be the best New Year’s Day lip dub ever made by twenty sauerkraut-, pineapple-champagne- and black-eyed-pea-bellied 20-somethings this side of East River. I met a gutter punk turned Party Monster named Ross, who trash-dived a drum and carried it the whole 10 or so blocks to the show space called something that sounds like Princess Sparkle Pony, wherein Austrian men in bearded bunnycat costumes played Theremins, to my dismay. I slept in late. I paid for coffee with change. I did not know all the words to ‘Graceland’ around the campfire. I left my phone charger and my heart in Brooklyn (well, the parts of it not already left in Reading, Columbus, etc.) and, sans telecommunication, resolved last night to stop being so practical in 2009, to be full of youth and potential again, and to most definitely possibly quit smoking in February.

So. That’s where I’ve been.

For auld lang sign, my dears. And for times to come.