Winter Madness (Or, O Christmas Ales)

This post is in honor of "Winter Madness," Dame Tina Fey's episode of 30 Rock that perfectly crystallizes the acute misery of winter.


Hello, dear readers. It's December 29th. You know what that means.

I have big girl reservations with Hedwig/El Greco/Bernie Kosar and two friends at a fancy restaurant downtown for New Year's. We're not eating until eight p.m. I don't know if you've noticed yet, but I've been 47 years old since the day I was born. I'm a bit of a curmudgeon. It is not in my nature to be particularly adventurous. And above all else, I require a bedtime no later than three hours after sunset. Winters, therefore, are especially difficult for me to maintain any semblance of a social life.

So really what December 29th means, is I have two nights to train myself to stay awake for New Year's. I have to be cogent long enough to enjoy the meal that H/EG/BK and I will be paying what is essentially a car payment to enjoy. If I pass out in the cab on the way home, I want it to be from drinking, not because it's 6 hours past my bedtime and the cold hurts my bones. Where are my heart pills?!

On Resolutions and Routines

By the way... this blog is definitely funnier than mine.

I am, above all else, a creature of habits. Often bad ones and lazy ones. I let myself get sucked into the vortex of full seasons of sitcoms on Netflix and don't move from the couch for hours. I develop an obsession with toast (yes, toast) and eat it for as many meals as I can swing. I find shops I like, restaurants I can walk to, people I don't have to exhaust myself trying to impress - and they become my world. New things freak me out. If I don't know how to order food at a restaurant, I won't go. (Seriously. I didn't go to Subway until I was 25 because of the crushing fear of holding up the line while choosing the correct combination of every ingredient I wanted while an underpaid, plastic-gloved sandwich chef grows increasingly more impatient with me. I only go to Starbucks if someone else invites me, and I order "whatever she's having" because I wouldn't know a latte from a hole in the ground.)

And of course, now is that time of the year to reflect back on all of this year's failures and look ahead with a mix of thrilled anticipation and growing dread as I know that once again I'll commit - whether consciously or not - to being a more interesting, open-minded, optimistic and adventurous version of myself. And above all else, a New Year's Resolution is a commitment to drop old routines and adopt new ones. New ones.

About my cats

As-yet-unnamed husband and I just returned from a lazy dinner at XYZ, and while we were there scrolled through some of the photos/video stored on our phones. I thought I'd share this gem with you to introduce our cats, who need no aliases: Bills and Charlie.

Brothers, roommates, possibly lovers? We make no judgments. We respect their lifestyle. It mostly just consists of shedding on the couch and tripping us in anticipation of a refill on food. Watch and enjoy. (Caution: Content may not be suitable for all viewers. Parental discretion advised.)

Socks Appeal (Or, how to know when you're old.)

Guess what you get when it's Christmas and you're 26 and just moved back to the snow belt after a 3.5-year hiatus in a milder clime?

SOCKS.

And STOCKINGS.

And guess what? You'll love them. You'll wear them both at the same time. You'll fantasize about marching through a deep layer of snow in a dress, not even feeling the bitter North wind because you're wearing tights that could be easily misidentified as waffle-knit long johns. Even though it's about 45 degrees outside and there was no sign of snow all weekend.

Hope all four of my readers had a fantastic Christmas. Actually, I know you did, because I spent with you. Now go tell your coworkers and college friends about my awesome blog!

This week, I'll be working on a super awesome project and also brainstorming all the ways I'm going to approach perfection the nanosecond it turns 2012. Nothing motivates me/pushes me closer to the edge of crushing misery and failure like New Year's! To distract myself from the pressure of New Year's resolutions, I'll be eating and drinking NINE COURSES AT THE GREENHOUSE TAVERN!!!

In Vino Veritas (or, Blogging with Wine!)

So, before we get any further, let's get one thing straight:

When it comes to me earning money, I'm all business. Nose to the grindstone, daily 42-item to-do list, lunch at my desk, and usually clean hair/clothes. (No ironing, though, so like 90% business.)

When it comes to stuff I don't directly get paid for, though, like laundry, or making sure my car is legally registered in Ohio, or finding where all my past 401ks are, I'm not quite as on the ball. And that includes blogging.

Every morning or evening or Saturday at 1 p.m., I have brilliant ideas about blogging. Most of them dissolve as soon as the shampoo starts to run in my eyes, but still, a few stick. I've got a couple weeks before I can pull those great ideas together. (But, blessed be! I have 11 days in a row off of work, starting tomorrow, so I don't have to get up at 5:15 a.m. anymore do brainstorm fruitlessly, start and delete posts, and then rewatch 30 Rock on Netflix until the sun comes up! At least not for the next 11 days!)

In the meantime, I have total stage fright. I went public with this - maybe too soon. I posted on Facebook, I tweeted it to all three dozen of my followers. Hell, even my mom knows about it, which is pretty low of me, because my mom has the dogged dedication to bend man and beast to her will, and the sweet but misguided conviction that I am the most talented assemblage of molecules to have ever pulled on a leotard. (Ballet, man. I was mediocre.) As an aside, if anyone from my mom's work is reading this right now because my mom made you read it, sorry. In this instance, she was right, though - right? This is way better than quality control or whatever it is you do. Get back to work!!!


The only cure for blog stage fright is a half drunk, rapidly deteriorating Beaujolais. Cheers.


Anyway, since last Saturday, here are some updates:

1. ______ still yet to be unnamed husband (don't forget to vote on his alias!) bought me Bossypants for my birthday. I read it in 2 hours. It was a rollercoaster of hero worship followed by a deep sense of failure because I will never be that successful and a deep sense of loss because I know in my heart Tina Fey will probably never be my best friend. Because she has two dumb kids that take up all her time and love. Even though in the recent past she drove to Ohio every year around the holidays. (Tina: We both have brown hair. We both have glasses. Please call me if you're coming back to Ohio. I'll meet you wherever is good for you. Wherever.)

2. My boss bought me a bottle of wine from Amish country for Christmas. (Thanks!) I'm excited to drink it, but it begs the question -  Do the Amish drink wine? Is this a trap? Am I going to wake up in a somber, button-down dress in a few days? ____ would look like an idiot in a mustache-less beard, and all those creepy Amish men who helped build houses in the southerly suburbs who came through the Route 18 Dairy Queen drive-thru when I was 16 kind of ruined any romantic ideals of what that life might be like.

I'm Bills and I'm beautiful.
Come eat some birdseed, Chickadee.

3. We bought a window-mounted bird feeder as a Christmas present for our two beautiful male tabby cats to stare at while we're at work. We hung it up last weekend, and still - not a single bird has hit that. Can they smell my desperation? There are so many ways a birdfeeder in post-industrial Cleveland is like a blog prematurely launched by a quasi-amnbitious fake journalist. Please eat my birdseed.

And, that's the end of that bottle of wine. Sorry, Mom. I love you.

P.S. Can anyone tell me exactly how to get this site to load without having to make sure you type www before the dot? I use Blogger and I'm tired of blogging research for now. Please just help me fix it.

Alias

You've got till New Year's Eve to help me choose my husband's alias for this site. See the poll on the right. Other suggestions welcomed by most. (You know who you are.) Comment below. Keep it clean.

No Business Like Snow Business (An Ohio City Christmas-Slash-Birthday Extravaganza)

Here's a confession from my comfortable, white suburban middle-class upbringing: I have been a long-suffering birthday neighbor to Jesus my whole life. It really, really sucked to have 20 presents to open in less than a week, never knowing for sure which ones were for my birthday and which were for Christmas. In the long list of life's miseries, having a birthday five days before Christmas is right up there with losing your entire family to a natural disaster or discovering that they really have been laughing at you this whole time. Oh yeah, I wouldn't wish this Hell on my worst enemy.

We celebrated my birthday yesterday (because I've always been far too old and curmudgeony to do any sort of celebrating on a weeknight). When you turn 26, a daylong Saturday birthday celebration includes ignoring the laundry and only running the fun errands. Fortunately for me, we were out of bread and have grown accustomed to eating some really fancy bread that we get at the West Side Market. Have I mentioned I love that place? So we decided to venture to what the cool kids call the OC: Ohio City.

I Love My Neighborhood.

I had a tough job when I moved to Cleveland. I moved a month before my husband did and had to find a place to live all on my own. Despite his devotion to the Browns, this husband of mine is not a Cleveland native, and I could tell he secretly had hoped to end up in Columbus. So even though I was pretty sure we were going to love Cleveland, I had to not just find a place we could comfortably live and afford to rent, but I also had to make sure it was somewhere awesome. I had to impress the hell out of my husband and ensure our location made it patently obvious how great Cleveland is.

Awesome view.

Fortunately I overheard a coworker talking about how much she loves the Gordon Square Arts District. I did some searching and soon found a small but comfortable apartment with one hell of a view of the downtown skyline. Honestly, I couldn’t have picked a better place. (And little did I know how much of my family history is in this neighborhood – more on that later.) We’re within walking distance to great bars, restaurants, theaters, a Saturday farmer’s market, and Lake Erie via Edgewater Park. And as if that weren’t enough, one of our neighbors has a potbelly pig who takes walks on a leash. If you haven’t visited the Detroit Shoreway area yet, come find out what you’re missing. There’s plenty of free parking, and if you’re lucky, you’ll see my neighbors walking their pig.

The Meta Post

It's probably stupid to blog about this blog. People set up blogs all the time. If I find it difficult, it just means I'm being a dummy. But it took me about a month to think about it and two weeks to re-figure out all the things I thought I knew about the Internet before I could even start coherently posting. Naming a blog alone is a Herculean feat. It forces you to commit to at least a very vague theme for this experiment (which I admit I should have probably nailed down before I got started, anyway). Figuring out where to host it and what it should look like was another challenge altogether.

All the while I'd be letting the shampoo run down my eyes in the shower while I thought up seemingly brilliant ideas for a blog I hadn't created yet. It's like trying to decorate your living room before you finish pouring the foundation on a new house.

So it's finally up and running, and I've still got some curtains to hang, and figure out how to arrange the guest bedroom, but come on in!

Oh, and why did I decide to call it Big Shot Dot the i? Well, it rolls of the tongue, for one. It's a little something my grandpa always says with his trademark blend of good humor and sarcasm that helps me remember that no matter how awesome I feel like I'm being, I might be just getting too big for my britches. That's something else he says a lot. Don't think too much about it, you'll take it to a weird place it doesn't belong.

Anyway, see the connection? My grandpa spent most of his life in Cleveland, and he says "Big Shot Dot the i" quite a bit. This blog is going to be about Cleveland, and it's going to be literally the absolute best thing that has ever graced the Internet.

As soon as I figure out how to blog directly from the shower because it's the only place I ever get any good ideas.

The Hardest, Worst Part

Hello, there! Welcome to my first post. Probably the hardest, and worst post of any blog (probably topped only by the last post of any blog.) Why am I doing this blog? Here’s why.

An explanation for this little experiment: I’m a Cleveland-area native, temporary resident of Florence, South Carolina, and recent transplant to Cleveland proper. I was born in Lakewood but spent my formative years in probably the most southerly “suburb” of Cleveland that could legitimately be called a suburb rather than just Amish country, so most of my memories of Cleveland possess the haziness and lack of geographic bearings that accompany most pre-drivers license recollections.

I went to school for journalism and PR, but as one career opportunity led to another, I’ve spent most of the past four years (Christ, seriously, four years already?) taking various roles in nonprofit health care communications, grant writing, etc. Along the way I’ve become a temporary expert at things like how to correctly install car seats for babies & children, why you can rent a breast pump from a hospital but probably shouldn’t use your sister-in-law’s that has been in her attic for half a decade, and how to take really detailed minutes at a board meeting.