New Year's Revolution

I’m bad with dates. By that I don’t mean going out with cute boys-- I’m a fantastic date. No, I mean months, days, years. I always had the most trouble with remembering time periods and dates in history classes. They just all blend together-- did something happen in 1824 or 1928? Couldn’t tell you.

In the same vein, I have no idea what happened in 2010 vs. 2009 or even earlier. I can only be sure a given event didn’t take place in 2011 because I haven’t mastered the art of time travel (yet). So it’s hard for me to compile a list of the best movies, music, books, et cetera, from the past twelve months.

Instead I give you this: a list of some stuff I discovered or enjoyed this year, regardless of release date, in no particular order.

Top Chef All Stars
I’ve watched most every season of Top Chef, and this one is by far providing me with the most entertainment. Typically it takes several episodes to even learn the cheftestants’ (I love that word) names, but this time I’m familiar with all these folks and all this drama from day one.


Cougartown
The show no one will watch because it has a stupid name is actually really, really funny. I was hesitant at first, but now that I’ve caught up on it, it's one of my favorite comedies. Parks and Recreation almost makes the list for similar reasons-- check it out when it returns in the spring.

The month of January
It was a good one.

Harry Potter
I don’t think that the Deathly Hallows Part I tops my list of favorite Harry Potter movies, but it was still an exciting lead up to this upcoming summer's finale. And I'll never turn down a midnight showing, complete with nerdy t-shirts.

TT.TKO [The Podcast]
I can’t technically unbiasedly call TT.TKO my favorite podcast of the year, but I'm going to call it that anyway.

Anchovies
I’m on an adventurous eating kick, and I’d call whole anchovies at least reasonably adventurous. I’m a little bit obsessed with grilled Caesar salad anywhere I can find it.

Braves baseball
I’m slowly but surely getting over my irrational dislike of all Atlanta sports teams that stemmed from my own watered-down brand of teenage rebellion against my Braves-loving parents. I think my record was 6 for 8 in games I attended this year. With any luck next season will be even better.

Cute dresses
No one who knew me in my t-shirt-and-jeans high school days would believe my closet now, but I make this look good.

Running
I picked it up in June, ran my first 5K in July and now my foot hurts and I can’t run ‘til it stops or I bother to go see a doctor, but whatever. I still dig it.

Netflix
Best $10 a month you can spend.

40 Dogs (Romeo & Juliet) by Bob Schneider
I Shazaamed the song when it was on the radio in maybe January and kept it on repeat most of the spring. Now it's the song with the second highest playcount in my iTunes library, only two plays behind the Avett Brothers' Distraction #74. Check it out.

TT.TKO [The Blog]
Well we have fun with it.

2011 had better bring its A-game. Just sayin'.

You Don't Know Me, But I'm Famous

I used to have a dream.

Ever since probably high school, I've aspired to someday be a contestant on Jeopardy. I would watch it weekday evenings before primetime TV, sitting on my couch doing math homework and shouting answers in the form of questions at the television in between problem sets.

Freshman year of college, my roommate and I would videotape Jeopardy when we remembered-- that’s right, these were the olden days, pre-DVR-- and watch it at night, yelling answers at the television screen. This was the exciting season of Ken Jennings, the man who set the record for most consecutive wins on the show. But no matter how many answers good ol’ Ken got right, he couldn’t compete with our favorite week of the season-- College Jeopardy.

Eventually being on College Jeopardy became my goal. The questions tended to skew younger and had a bit more focus on pop culture than standard Jeopardy questions. Each episode usually featured at least one cute, smart boy. And you got to wear your college hoodie. What could be greater? It helped that in our play-along-at-home college dorm room, the record wasn’t Ken’s, or my roommate’s; it was mine.

However, laziness intervened. College Jeopardy week would sneak up on me, and I’d lament never having bothered to find out how you go about auditioning or testing. I’ve since met people who have gone through Jeopardy auditions, and it seems like a lengthy process. Well, maybe next time, I’d think, over and over, for the next four years.

Today, college has come and gone, and so have my chances of ever rocking College Jeopardy. Oh, sure, I could always try out for the regular version. But my utter lack of knowledge of local, US or global geography would surely thwart my efforts. In short, grown-up Jeopardy is just too damn hard.

So I have a new dream. It’s perfect. How can I simultaneously impress the world with my trivial knowledge AND not have to answer any really hard questions? That’s easy: Celebrity Jeopardy.

You’ve seen SNL. It’s not a far cry from the real version. These people are morons. I may not have any idea where the longest river in the world begins, nor do I know the capital of Tanzania. But I’m no moron. I would more or less dominate.

Now there is a little kink in my plan, and I think you may have figured it out. It’s not the aforementioned laziness-- I can fight that when necessary. No, it’s something a bit tougher to surmount-- I don’t know that I could technically be considered a celebrity.

But I’m no quitter. It’s Celebrity Jeopardy or bust. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get famous. You know that as much as I once wanted to, I probably won’t be doing it in the fields of figure skating or professional singing. It’s just not in the cards. So what else could I do? I have a few ideas.

• Reality TV star. It’s cheap; it’s easy; it’s lowest-common-denominator television. All we need is a video camera and I could be a star. I could trick an Atlanta Falcons player into marrying me and then I’ll be a Real Housewife. I’m not having a bunch of babies, so the Octo-mom idea is out. What about the Balloon Boy? I’m sure some Georgia Tech engineering student could make a contraption that I could fly away in.

• I'm practically locally famous for my unending devotion to Diet Coke. Think we could make that happen? I was born to be a Diet Coke spokesperson.
  
• Last ditch effort-- tell all your friends about the blog. Then they read it, love it, tell all their friends, and so on and so forth until the whole world falls madly in love with me and Alex Trebek books me as a professional blogger. Get on it.
  

Just give me a little time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and international superstars aren't created overnight. Look out, Trebek. I've got my eyes on the prize.

Adult Content

Maybe you know, maybe you don't, but I just started a new job. My first grown-up job, actually, working at a marketing firm. It's only my second week and already I wonder if waking up early and sitting in an office all day suits me. I can't blog for a living, though (yet!), so up I get and in I go, every day.

When I was little, I never dreamed of working in marketing for a living. No, I didn't imagine I'd be writing press releases and SEO tags all day, but I wasn't one of those kids who wanted to grow up to be the president or an astronaut or a cartoon character or something ridiculous, either. I had a few other ideas in mind:

• Pro Figure Skater

Truthfully, I wanted to be Nancy Kerrigan (minus that nasty knee injury). But since the position was already filled, I would have settled for becoming an Olympic champ in my own right. Problem is, I had never ice skated before. Other problem is, Olympic-caliber athletes have generally been training since birth. Other other problem is, they get up really early in the morning, and I like to sleep in. It just wasn’t in the cards. Which is probably for the best, because while I’m pretty stellar at Rollerblading (and look pretty awesome doing it, of course), I still fall down an awful lot on ice. My cutting edge dreams just weren’t meant to be except briefly, at a Career Fair theme party in college.

• Professional Singer

This followed along the lines of my figure skating aspirations, in that I wanted to do something for a living that I can’t even do for free. Anyone who has accompanied me to karaoke knows that while I’m not the worst singer in the bar, I’m not likely to get a standing ovation. Only the occasional notes are hit. I love karaoke, and I think I make up for my lack of killer pipes with my enthusiasm, but there’s no record deal in my future. I’m not getting discovered singing Tom Petty at the Clermont Lounge. As a kid, though, I don’t think I fully realized that I’m not a singer. I was in chorus. I tried out for solos in the school musicals and never understood why I always got the speaking parts instead (the biggest speaking parts—oh yeah, I was quite the thespian in the 5th grade). Now I know why.

• Reporter

At some point or another, I began to want to be a journalist. I don’t remember when the dream developed from generic reporter to magazine journalist, but the general idea stuck with me at least through most of college, ever since which my degree in Magazine Journalism has primarily been used as a placemat. I doubt I’d be the blogger I am today, though, if it weren’t for those long-form feature writing classes. Regardless, the journalism I participate in these days is primarily of the citizen variety.

• Lawyer

Reading too many John Grisham novels and watching way too much Ally McBeal in the 8th grade contributed to this pipe dream. I was even pre-law when I started college, and you know, it wasn't so out of the realm of possibility that I would have gone to law school. I just didn't really feel like it. When you're pre-law your freshman year, they devote an inordinate amount of time to talking you out of it. "It's nothing like it looks on TV!" they say over and over. "You're hardly ever in the courtroom! It's all research!" You mean it's not going to be like Legally Blonde all the time? Well then never mind. I'm out.

So I'm none of those things right now. Not by a long shot. And I'm not sure I know what I really want to be when I grow up-- maybe the president. Maybe an astronaut. Maybe a cartoon character. Or maybe I won't give up on my dreams after all. Maybe I'm destined to earn a gold medal or a gold record. For now, I'm just going to keep paying the bills, and maybe one day my childhood dreams will be realized.