Christmas 2007 was...

I had gotten to used to sleeping in and just crawling into bed and sleeping whenever the past 3 days I had off, so when I finally awoke on Christmas morning I wasn't sure if I wanted heed the siren call of Tom's fantastic company and the promise of other scintillating persons and go out to Greenpoint to chill at his place with other Christmas orphans. Yea, I mentally did slap myself for even contemplating going back to sleep.

In a weird way, this Christmas was the most Christmas-y Christmas I had in a long while. I never actively stayed up and wished people a Merry Christmas, and it'd been a while since I actually spent time with people on Christmas day to just enjoy the company. As I assessed the get together afterwards "Yea, it was really fun. It was kind of like a bunch of Oscar Wilde characters got together to spend Christmas and the conversation was very un-Christmas-like yet somehow it was perfectly a happy holiday get together."

I'm glad I took my camera along. I actually felt weird whipping out a camera, but I just wanted some candid shots. I don't know, it was one of the first times I felt like I spent a honest to goodness normal person Christmas and I kind of wanted to commemorate it because I'm a loser like that. I ended up not taking too many because I felt weird/bad/creepy about it, but I asked myself, "What would the Cobrasnake do?"...That just succeeded in making me feel like even more of a creep.

Photos at Flickr...mostly of Calcifer.

Anyhow, so Christmas this year was:

1. Mulled wine. It was made with Carlo Rossi and it was delicious. Taking a hit off of Lucy's flask of clove liqueur/bitter added a little extra something to it as well. (pictured: what was left of the mulled wine)



2. Fun people to go with the good wine.

3. Watching Sweeney Todd with fun people after having partook of good mulled wine.

3. And Calcifer. O.M.G. A-fucking-dorable cat. It was the first time I'd been formally introduced to the little guy in person, but a picture of him when he was just a kitten sleeping under a book reigned as my desktop for a while. Not to like beat a meme horse, but I seriously wanted to go "om nom nom nom" on his belly. Softest. Belly. EVAH.



4. Folk art rabbit on top of Calcifer. Enough said.



At one point during the evening a song started playing and I thought to myself "Hey, this sounds fam........................wait a second."

I had to ask Tom, "Is that the marching theme from 'Paprika'?" I was extremely relieved to get an affirmative, because, I was mildly worried for a second that I was slowly going insane. He did not help by talking to me in "going crazy in 'Paprika'" gibberish about how the toaster knows all the lyrics and whatnot. Seriously though, that was a damn good animated film...some of Satoshi Kon's best work to date. With a fantastic soundtrack to boot.



But I'm going off track. I wanted to end with a warning to all. Right after finishing "Look Homeward Angel," I immediately picked up "Nausea." Look forward to navel-gazing, existential, self-indulgent wankery. If you're lucky, I might finish this one super quick and pick up something a bit more academic so that you might be spared my prosaic stylings.

Here's the opening sequence from "Paprika," just to tease you a bit more if you have not already seen it and to give you some more music. It's interesting to note how Kon seems to have reused the ethereal skipping motif he used in "Perfect Blue," but in a totally different way.