vovat | Holiday Road

Well, it's nearing the end of the holiday season. I'm not sure exactly when it ends, as I remember someone telling me as a kid that Christmas decorations are usually taken down on New Year's, but a lot of people celebrate Epiphany on the sixth. Some of the fancy light displays in my neighborhood are still up now, or at least they were last night. Maybe they'll follow the old tradition and keep them up until Candlemas. It's also a time of even more obnoxious weight loss commercials than usual. When will our society overcome its strange obsession with weight? It kind of makes me want to eat badly and never exercise just to spite the industry. Oh, who am I kidding? I do those things because I'm lazy and don't like most vegetables. But really, what I mainly object to is the preying on insecurity, and the prevailing notion that weighing less is always good. There's a commercial for one exercise product where a woman says, "My husband tells me I'm a hottie." So what did he think of you before? Even the perpetually skinny John Waters has addressed how messed up it is for people to say that someone who's lost weight looks good NOW, as if they didn't before. That's not to say losing weight isn't hard work that deserves praise, but can't you praise someone without fat-shaming by implication?

Anyway, Beth and I spent Christmas and New Year's at her mom's house, but returned to Brooklyn in between the two. I generally keep my car down there, both because it's difficult to find parking in Brooklyn, and because the insurance rates are much lower there. A few days ago, I had the car up here, and it took me around two hours to find a space. Mind you, I'm terrible at parallel parking, so I pretty much need a space I can pull into. When we were driving back down on Thursday, I noticed my tire warning light was on, but I figured it just had to do with the dropping temperature. Then someone in another car told me the pressure was low on my back right tire. After we'd gotten on the New Jersey Turnpike, it went totally flat and I had to pull over and call Roadside Assistance. They didn't cover that part of the turnpike, though, so I called the Turnpike Authority instead. It cost me thirty dollars for them to replace the flat tire with the spare, but I was told I can get reimbursed by Roadside Assistance. I probably should learn how to change a tire, but I was so nervous at that point that I'm not even sure I would have trusted myself with a jack. It seems like this car gets flat tires way too often, and I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing, or if it just uses bad tires. Beth's mom suggested someone might have slashed it, which I guess is possible, but doesn't explain other problems I've had in the past. My uncle-in-law is supposed to do some maintenance on the car, but I'm just glad I won't have to drive for a while.

Going back a bit, Beth and I met my mom, sister, brother, and brother-in-law at a diner in Pennsylvania, where I had a pizza steak for the first time in a while. They seem to be pretty much limited to the Philadelphia area, although I don't know if that's entirely true. I just know I haven't seen them at any of the diners in New York, and I've been to quite a few. We exchanged gifts, and Beth and I opened our other presents on Christmas Day. Among other things, I received two new Mario shirts, a stuffed Dry Bones, a Kindle Fire, and the Sunday Press printing of Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz. We gave the cats a Friskies Pull 'n Play, which you put treats inside and they're supposed to play with it to get them out, but they're not at all interested. New Year's Eve was pretty uneventful; we watched the ball drop, but went to bed soon afterwards. It's so weird how the network NYE specials keep reprehensible people employed. As someone on the autistic spectrum who showed signs of it BEFORE I was vaccinated, I must say Jenny McCarthy is a plague on humanity. And NBC had Carson Daly, who as far as I know hasn't directly caused children to die, but is someone I figured was pretty much universally reviled. Anyway, before coming back to Brooklyn last night, we ate at Friendly's, a restaurant that doesn't exist in New York City. They apparently have some on Long Island, and I've been to one in Yonkers, but those places aren't easily accessible by public transportation. I thought I hated clams, but I found out the ones at Friendly's are actually pretty good. I guess I just had some bad ones before. I remember going to a seafood buffet in Virginia and finding their clams gritty.

Also, after holding out for a few years, I finally have an Instagram account. I don't expect to use it much, but who knows? Actually, it isn't that I was holding out so much as that I wasn't able to sign up the first few times I tried. The few pictures I do have on there now were already on Facebook, but since it's easy to miss things there due to all the content, more exposure can't hurt. I do sometimes wonder how certain Internet applications become popular when they really don't do anything you couldn't do on other ones, but not enough to actually do any research on the subject. I will say that I'm really bad at taking pictures of myself.