This event, my inspiration, encourages you to “Finish a project, phone a long-lost friend or relative, investigate something you’ve been meaning to investigate, take an alternate route, sign up, commit, cancel, change.” I can do that! There is SO MUCH I haven’t done! There are SO MANY things I can change.

So many, in fact, that I got dizzy and had to go lie down for awhile because I am weak and kittenish and easily distracted and I got hungry. I made a list of all the projects and goals and to-dos and haven’t-dones that have fallen off my list lately, and then I realized that I wasn’t actually going to repaint the entire house or write a comic gothic horror novel or plant an entire corn field in the space of the day.

So for my bonus extra super day, I thought I’d start small. I thought I’d go emblematic. Something that signals my intent to continue the way I’ve started, to begin as the way I intend to go on. I’ve been whining about how I’m dying to try hot yoga for years and years. I lived two blocks from a studio when I lived in San Francisco; when I moved to Utah, I lived next door to one. NEXT DOOR. And somehow I’ve never managed to put some pants on and go sweat and fart and probably pass out from heat stroke and fatigue in the company of strangers.

How could I have waited so long to publicly humiliate myself? There is no way of knowing. But the day’s finally come where I’m going to go for it. Today I’m going to go do hot yoga. And if it is a horrible nightmare from outer space I can pretend it never happened, because today is the day that doesn’t actually exist in the normal scheme of things. And if I die, I will respawn on March 1 because February 29 wasn’t real!

That sounds reasonable to me.

And if I don’t die, or have to spend the rest of the day floating in a bathtub full of cold water and ice, I’m going to take a nap.

In theory, I love to travel. In theory, I would like to see the world. I want to meet people and do things and have adventures and taste foods and marvel at the beauty and the wonder that there is to experience on this big spinning globe we all travel on together through space etc. etc. But I only want to do it if I can stay home. If there were some way to make a day trip to Morocco I’d do it. If I could spend an afternoon in Paris, I’d spend every afternoon in Paris. If I could drop by Tokyo, it would be my favorite lunch-time destination.

It’s not the traveling—I don’t mind the traveling. It is possible I even like the traveling part. I like airports, because I always feel like they’re an excuse to not think about how much things cost because otherwise you’ll have an aneurism and here is twelve dollars for that packet of peanuts. I like planes. There is something very contained and peaceful about a plane ride. There’s something about a plane ride that makes it very easy to focus—on writing or work or reading, and then you order a couple of tiny bottles of wine and a little snack box and you feel like you’ve just splurged and you have because now you can no longer afford to send your imaginary children to college.

I like to land and then go look at things and Experience Life and eat delicious things and enjoy the strangeness of it all, but then I am done. Then I want to go home. Foreign Place is not home. Foreign Place is too far away from home. Foreign Place is not safe. Foreign Place does not have an adequate supply of Diet Pepsi or a change of shoes or my fluffy pillows.

Foreign Place feels like a mistake I can’t fix—it’s too late now. I am stuck. I think it’s that feeling of having no recourse, of having set off without an easy way back, of having to follow through whether or not you want to. There’s no inexpensive, simple way to say “Sorry! Not really feeling very ‘Marrakesh-y’ today. I’ll try again tomorrow!” You are there and you are staying there unless you can afford to pay a steep Stupid Tax to change your tickets and flee.

I definitely don’t like being told I have no other choice. I panic like a little rabbit, and my little rabbit heart thumps to bursting and then it does.

But I’ll move anywhere. I don’t want to visit London—I want to live in London. I don’t want to sightsee in Tuscany, I want to own a villa. I am not interested in vacationing on the beach in Mexico—I want a little cottage by the ocean, with satellite Internet and a hot tub. In my imagination I have settled all over the world—most of the coastal Americas, much of Canada, the majority of Europe, and select places in Asia because I am a little chicken. I would settle down in Istanbul and make a life in Prague and live in three square feet in Tokyo and own a mountain goat in Peru.

There are spots for me all over the world, and I like to think that someday I’ll claim them, but that is unlikely. It’s also unlikely that I’ll ever become a world traveler like my brother and his wife, not while I’m crazy—a state that is also unlikely to change. I don’t like it when my dreams are unlikely.

Spring. Hi. I missed you. You’re cute. Let’s not ever fight again, okay? Because I really did miss you. I missed bare legs and pink collarbones and giant blue skies that seem much closer and clouds that are so much cuddlier. I missed the sun creeping closer and closer and getting goldener and goldener. I missed warm rain and wet grass and trees that burst into lavender and white, boom. I want to shout BOOM! every time I pass a new explosion of flowers. BOOM.

I missed the dog park, and even the smell of the dog park. I missed standing in the middle of the field and watching an entire pack of dog fling themselves wildly across the grass after a ball or a stick or a Frisbee or just because they are dogs and that is what they do, but they will always come back and tell you all about the exciting adventures they just had and what they saw and what they did and they were gone for so long and experienced so many things and it was so interesting and they were so adventurous and had such good adventures but now they are back and they MISSED YOU SO MUCH. It is hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re knee-deep in dogs who love you love you love you love you love you HI.

I missed open windows and the waft of a curtain, blowing out, settling in, blowing out, settling back in. A cat in a loaf on the windowsill in a sunbeam, supervising the change in weather, that slow yellow blink the strongest signal of very strong approval you’ve ever seen. I’ve missed turning off the heat and hearing the noises of the apartment unfiltered through the white noise of a furnace. Coming home to a still-bright apartment, still warm from the sun.

It was worth waiting for, this spring stuff. Utah does spring right. Utah has the big blue sky and the enormous, craggy mountains changing colors. Utah knows from puffy clouds and warm breezes and fields of green and the smell of fresh hay. Utah can rustle up some outdoor dining at a cafe table in the sun, a prettily manicured, green and leafy park at lunch time, surprise bursts of surprise flowers, surprise! Utah knows how to balance on the edge of warm but not hot, rainy before it dries up, sunshine bright, for long enough to let you appreciate it, to whirl around barefoot with your head flung back, Exclaiming About the Wonder and the Beauty of It All, and Aren’t We So Glad to Be Alive in a Such a Beautiful World? Yes.

Photo by wildpianiste

It is exactly that kind of day, today, where, I am a mess, and completely useless, but happy to be so, because it is inauguration day, and I believe in my president for the first time in so very, very long. It is such a strange and foreign concept, the idea that a political leader can be a figure of hope and a symbol of strength and even, very basically, not an embarrassment. Someone of whom to be so very proud.

Sorry, something in my eye.

This man, who is not perfect in any way, who maybe will struggle and suffer and fail and who may disappoint us horribly, is in for a lot of shit. He’s got us all waiting expectantly for our ponies and our universal health care and for him to come read us bedtime stories and pet our hair and tell us that everything will be okay and shut out the light and let us wake up into a brand new world where everything is perfect and it is okay to be a patriot, again, to not be embarrassed to say that you are proud of your country and glad to be an American and not wince when you see a car covered in American flag stickers. This is going to be a wonderful four years, I think, but also so very very difficult and terrifying, for everyone. A lot of breath holding, a lot of hoping, a lot of frustration.

He’s president, now, and what comes next? Everything comes next. Everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The difference is in the rolled-up sleeves and this sense that is palpable and real, of hope.

It’s always the little things that get me. I am dutifully impressed and fascinated by monkeys controlling robots with their minds and the creepy-cool Large Hadron Collider, but it’s the daily evidence in our lives that while we may not be living in a future with personal jetpacks–yet–it’s still a goddamn amazing place filled with wonders and miracles no one could have imagined a century ago, a half a century ago, ten years ago.  THE FUTURE!

Usually I go about my business here in the future as blithely and unconcernedly as anyone else does, taking it all for granted because that is what you do, if you are of my generation and later. But like everyone else does, usually of my generation, this weird set of kids (and we are so often still just kids) that somehow straddles the divide between the quaintness of the 80s and the brilliant flashing diamond of the millennial years, sometimes you have to stop and marvel at the marvels, and go wow. You know, that is just cool. I appreciate that I live here in the future, with access to hot and cold running water, adequate sanitation and access to sophisticated medical care. And also the internet.

Yesterday, it was two things, practically back to back, that made me stop and shake my head, and feel a little old and also grateful for penicillin and antilock brakes. I had to get my book manuscript into the hands of a reader, I don’t have a printer, they live all the way across the country. I uploaded the document to FedExKinkos , and this very morning, even as I type, they are printing it four blocks from her house and then they are going to deliver it right to her front door, in a box, bound with rubber bands, fresh and hot off the printer. And for some reason, it absolutely blows my mind. My file went from being here, electronic in Utah, to a hard copy in New York, delivered within a day. Maybe my astonishment is all hayseed yanked off a farm in the mountains and set loose in overalls, blinking up at the bright lights of the big city–boy howdy, that’s shiny! But I tell you–that’s brilliant.

And as I was uploading and marvelling over the futuristic convenience of on-demand printing and shipping, I looked at my twitter page, saw that a friend was stranded because his train was delayed by an oil refinery explosion along the tracks. I didn’t have my cell phone on me, so I emailed his phone instead and asked him if he needed a ride. We messaged back and forth while he was on the shuttle bus. “I think the driver is lost,” he wrote. But no, he doesn’t need a ride. “Holler if the bus driver starts heading towards Vegas ,” I write back. When we don’t hear from him for awhile, we check Google News, and see that the trains are running, if slowly, and he ought to be home soon with Arby’s bag in hand.

And okay, I want to jump up and down and yell oh my GOD do you REALIZE how many AMAZING things just HAPPENED in that SINGLE PARAGRAPH! Today a wonder we behold. These things are so commonplace and ordinary and I feel a little dopey when I get that urge to bounce around and take people by their sweet little chipmunk cheeks and look deep into their eyes and urge them with uncomfortable-for-everyone sincerity to say hallelujah, amen! I should just take everything for granted until we get ourjet packs that are guided by the minds of the monkeys who run the Large Hadron Collider . But probably tomorrow I will become speechless with wonder over the miracle of heated automobile seats and those sneakers with the little wheels inside.

There is premium denim out there, people. Premium! For a premium, admittedly. But in the world exists brands of luxury denim that are not only luxuriously made of hammered gold and pressed diamonds and sheets of fabric that have been woven by fairies in a land of dreams where wishes always come true and McDonald’s breakfast is served 24 hours a day, but they also have magical properties. The greatest of all qualities that premium denim has, and I have heard tell that it has many qualities, is that it makes your butt absolutely magnificent. Premium denim lifts, shapes, separates, fluffs, caresses and presents, so to speak, your glorious technicolor ass in even more glorious surround-sound.

I will say it right here, flat out to the world and in front of all my peers and loved ones: I am not ashamed to say that I would like to have a glorious ass. That’s right. I am fond of my buttocks as they are. I think they are nice buttocks. But I would like for premium denim to come into my life and take my very nice bottom by the hand and lead it all the way up to the Promised Land. I want people to sing hallelujah to my bum, to weep and cry out loud to the heavens praise the lord and pass the hand lotion, it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Premium denim, they say, can do this for me. It can also make me look gigantically tall and obnoxiously long-limbed and spectacularly thighed. In premium denim people will mistake me for Heidi Klum, be briefly embarrassed, and then want to be my friend because I am even hotter than Heidi Klum! Okay, maybe not that last part. But premium denim! It exists, and we can all agree that somehow, by dint of its premiumness and magical denim properties, it is something that you want to be investing in. And oh, it’s an investment. Not just of money, but of time, because do you know how many kinds of premium denim there are in the world? As many as the twinkling stars in the sky they came from.

And then each brand is subdivided into types and shapes and washes and waistbands and styles and colors and platonic ideals and lengths and then after you figure out the combination that best suits you, your complexion and your astrological house in which your moon rose, you have to figure out your size and in order to do that you have to know a mysterious number which is possibly your waist size but there sure is a lot of goddamn interpretation of exactly what it means to be a certain number of inches. How do you interpret a number of inches? It is a mystery of premium denim. It is what makes me say you know what? Maybe I don’t want to invest in magic denim. Maybe I am okay with my perfectly adequate butt. I was happier when I didn’t know about premium denim.

photo by digicla

There are some beliefs I hold that I have never considered myself gullible for believing, though. Stuff like “A poinsettia will kill your cat dead, so do not have one,” and “All the heat goes out the top of your head, so wear a hat!” and “Drinking a lot of water and eating McDonald’s breakfast will fix the night after a whole barrel full of eggnog.” As it turns out, these things are not true, and neither are the truths that so many people had previously held to be so self-evident, that sugar will make you crazy-nutball banging off the walls, and if you eat after, say, 7:00 p.m., you will get very fat and then die, possibly of suicide around the holidays, which is when everyone rushes to knock themselves off, you know.