Fungible Convictions

• 95% of the time, her tongue sticks out.
• She can learn really basic rules after only three tries; for example, the first two times she got on the part of the couch without the blanket, I picked her up and put her on the blanket. Now she goes straight there.
• She likes a little warm water mixed in with her kibble.
• She demands belly-rubbage! Now!
• She only barks when she’s playing with a ball. And her barks are kinda cute.
• She’s a little picky about treats but seems to like turkey jerky strips. (Thanks to the guy at Greenward for the suggestion.)
• Her farts are frequent, loud, and thermonuclear.

To paraphrase Lindsay: “Our Gatsby. I think we’ll keep her.”

The first dozen of thousands of photos:

Lindsay would like you to know that Gatsby fell asleep and then farted. She’s perfect!

She was very nervous on the way back from New Hampshire, understandably. But she started settling in surprisingly quickly once we gave her a tour of the condo. She’s gone for two walks and pooped both times. She really loves having her belly rubbed, maybe even more than Lindsay does.

Right now she’s curled up and sleeping on the couch next to Lindsay. She seems to recognize the sound of our voices and responded once or twice to her new name. And she’s smart. We left a bone next to her food and water, and she grabbed it and took it right to her crate in the next room.

We love her, like, a whole lot.

Big huge enormous thanks to Paws and Claws, to Kim S. and Kim B., and especially ginormous thanks to Vicki for letting Gatsby (née Patty Cake) into our lives.

Favorite images

The wedding gets top billing of course. Lindsay and I still have to go through all our photos to choose prints, but this is still my A+ #1 favorite, the Nuptial Terrorist Fist Jab:

A close second was a photo from my final chemo session back in January:

The most emotional image of the year came from election night. Not Palin in front of slaughtered turkeys, not Jeremiah Wright at the lectern, not even Obama’s speeches—the image of a weeping Jesse Jackson will be my visual definition of the 2008 election:

Immediately after the election, there was a flood of photographs uploaded to the “Message for Obama” pool. This was tops:

Favorite songs (maybe only one or two actually written and released in 2008):

• “Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields. Lindsay’s and my first dance.
• “The Well Below the Valley” and “Sí Bheag Sí Mhór” by Planxty. Both still haunting.
• “Wonder Worm” by Captain Sky. “Unidentified craaaaawling object!”
• “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn and John. Tops from my drives to and from Tufts while listening to WERS.
• “Where Is My Love” by Lucinda Williams. One of the top five songwriters working today.
• “Cayman Islands” by Kings of Convenience. Must have felt amazing for them hearing the recorded version the first time. Just a lovely song.
• Anything by the Rev. J. M. Gates from the Anthology of American Folk Music
• “Terraplane Blues” by Robert Johnson. Oldest favorite.
• “Freddie’s Dead” by Curtis Mayfield. A superb song from Superfly, largely lost to history except that it was covered by, of all groups, the Derek Trucks Band.
• “II B.S.” by Charles Mingus. A favorite song every year until I die.

Favorite books:

1. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
2. The Best American Comics 2008
3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
4. Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
6. How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative by Allen Raymond
7. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson

Favorite poems:

• “Exxon” by Robert Wrigley
• “Here the Birds’ Journal Ends” by Mahmoud Darwish
• The O’s by Baron Wormser

Favorite moments, aside from my own wedding and the election:

• Commiserating with my wife on the side of the G.W. Parkway as we both got sick after my cousin’s wedding and needed my dad to pull over seven separate times. (Moral: stay away from homemade Romanian liquor.)
• Last year was all about my illness, and though this year featured the end of chemo, it was far more awesome to a) meet my chemo-twin Erica and to spend a long afternoon with her and her husband at the Gulu-Gulu Cafe in Lynn, to b) meet up with paraneoplastic-twin Scott on the Cape, and to c) have dinner with Marc Wein, who’s a sweetheart and presented on my case at a conference.
• Babies! Our friend Katie is ready to burst—the baby “dropped” last week—another friend had their first last month, Nancy (see post below) just announced her pregnancy, and our friends Nada and Alex welcomed the world’s prettiest catcher’s mitt back in January (I kid! She’s beautiful, especially now that she does parlor tricks):

  

Favorite new computer programs (absolutely new or just new to me):

• Twitter/Ping.fm/Brightkite: Twitter and its companions spread faster than lolcats, theinternetisseriousbusiness, and the aforementioned Palin turkey video combined.
• Vidalia and Tor: high-gear, well-maintained, indispensable tools for online privacy.
• FontExplorerX: saves a ton of time when I’m trying to find good typefaces to use, though I overwhelmed it when I installed about 15,000 of them.
• Evernote: replaced Delicious this year, because Evernote also saves entire webpages for offline viewing—not to mention saving images with my built-in iSight camera.

Favorite websites:

• General interest: BoingBoing, as always
• Prurient interest: The Daily Puppy and Cute Overload
• Politics: Talking Points Memo
• Tech: Schneier on Security
• Friends’: The Newtster Prepares Supper and Things
• Work: Center for Future Civic Media
• Design: I Love Typography
• Tutorials: PSDTUTS

Favorite quotes (all of them come from my cousin-in-law Colin, who’s currently recovering from serious surgery on his gut):

• Absolutely belted in a silent cathedral before his epistle reading at my wedding: “GOOD MORNING.”
• Yesterday in his hospital bed, to his mother. “The pain button isn’t working. You’re still here.”
• And to give his mother the last word. “His new girlfriend is nice. They’re always nice. And then they leave.”

Special thanks for helping make 2008 great go out to:

• My wife.
• My family and in-laws, but especially my dad for continuing to come to Boston to take me to doctor’s appointments, particularly the two sleep-deprived EEGs.
• Paddy, Jon, and Alan for a kick-ass bachelor-party weekend in Chicago.
• Sarah Wolozin, Henry Jenkins, William Urrichio, and Ellen Hume of MIT for hiring me for the best job I’ve ever had. And Geoffrey Long for aiding the transition into what had been his old job, and Generoso Fierro for being an incredible resource for understanding the inner-workings of MIT.
• [Snark]Tufts for not really understanding what I did so that I felt compelled to look for another job.[/Snark]
• And a very special thanks to Paul and Hope of the Half Shell restaurant, for feeding me so much food over the last five and a half years and for cracking me up a few months ago by showing me a picture of your new grandson and saying proudly “His name Demetrios! Is Greek name!”

And to all you readers, thanks for a great 2008. Keep in touch for 2009, and my best wishes to you and yours.

Resist puppies, babies, and health, I dare you.

Friends John and Nancy got a bully puppy:

Friends Nada and Alex had their first baby:

And I got a clean bill of health from my thoracic surgeon: