The winner of the ham battle is you!

I know it's been a difficult year for a lot of people. But gosh, 2011 was an amazingly brilliant year for me. I became Jewish; I asked for and was given a lot more responsibility in my job, and was really great at it; I threw a great, fun wedding with Ewan; and more generally I clarified for myself a massive amount of things I want to do (and things I thought I wanted to do but don't really), and made a pretty good LIFE PLAN TM for the next ~2-3 years on how to do those, and kind of how to be a better person generally. (I did most of this at Jew Year's Resolutions on Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur, FWIW, but not all.)

I also helped fix some things I thought were irreparably ruined and got a lot better at keeping things I value and paring off habits that are basically useless (if deceptively fun). I made a lot of progress on figuring my Neurology Thing That's Been A Question Since I Was 13, and even though it's not sorted yet it's still a lot farther along than it has been for the past 12 years.

That all sounds a bit BORING but the gist is 2011 was an excellent year of figuring out how to become the person I want to be and do things I want to do. I had several exciting starting-off-on-journeys new-identity ritual markers, and I'm happy with all of them so far. BRING ON 2012 I AM READY FOR YOU AND THE REST OF MY LIFE. And for all of you who've had a more unpleasant year, I hope 2012 is much better. ♥

I went to see The Compleat Works of &c &c at the New Red Lion in Islington last night with allochthonous, and had a REALLY GREAT TIME. The play was well done - they had changed the conceit from "we're a bunch of earnest schmucks spontaneously working through Shakespeare's plays" to "we're a bunch of earnest drama students who have found this adaptation of all Shakespeare's plays", which I think works well because most people are familiar with or have heard of the original already. There was an excellent running gag with one of the actors waiting for his mentor Kevin Spacey to turn up, and indeed a table with two gifts, a chocolate bar, a magnum of champagne and a giant "RESERVED FOR KEVIN SPACEY" note was arranged in the middle of the normal dinner-theatre seats.

They pulled me up to do Ophelia (but to be fair I was one of only two young women in the front row), but the best bit came when Louisa (the other one) was doing the wave with the rest of the front row (yes, it was part of the show) and was called out for holding a fork in her hand.

ACTOR: What is that? What is that? You're just waving cutlery around!
LOUISA: ...It's symbolic of the conflict!

Which is basically the BEST EXCUSE FOR ANYTHING ever and one I am going to use forever now.

After the show the actors were selling a delightfully bizarre spectrum of tat with dirty words and jokes on them, so I got tigerpig a cushion and a gift for the_alchemist for being my best woman.
Louisa and I left in search of a drink and ended up at the Eagle (the one on City Road, not the famous one), where they had Thornbridge Ashford on and the barman seemed shocked that I was asking for omg a specific kind of beer. I then spent the next half hour THRILLING Louisa with a monologue on IPAs until she managed to neck her drink and make a run for it, and I staggered home via London Bridge Marks & Spencer, where this morning I discovered I thought it was a good idea to buy:

+ bag of giant pretzels
+ bag of caramel-filled chocolate eggs (on sale)
+ plastic bottle of red wine.

Oh DRUNK SELF, you are so charmingly id-driven.

TODAY I am bashing away at a surprisingly tedious report on Ghana, and feeling a bit of senioritis as my boss is going away next week to SINGAPORE and I have of course a two-week holiday off work after that. I am currently stuck at halfway on my 101 Things in 1001 Days list and trying to think of things to add to it.

1. Hurrah, I've figured out how to add Hebrew dates to my Google calendar, and found a Jewish holiday calendar that isn't rubbish! I found both throuth this Google help thread: Can I add jewish holidays to the calendar? which also has some comically unflattering things to say about Google's own Jewish holiday calendar, which is actually pretty dire.

2. ATTN PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW THE NHS WORKS:
I got a letter yesterday from the Maudsley saying, "Hello! We have received your GP's referral for ADHD things. We are checking with your PCT whether there is enough funding for us to give this to you. If funding isn't resolved in eight weeks, the referral will be cancelled. Thanks!"

Is this usual? What does this actually mean? DID DAVID CAMERON TAKE AWAY MY ADHD TREATMENT? Is there anything I can do to make it more likely I will get treatment?

Ugh, I've been super upsettable and on edge this weekend. A lot of little things happened that were objectively fairly minor and get-overable but made me feel unliked and unloveable. (Nothing major and nothing in my marriage or anything, just small social things that hit harder than they should have or were probably intended to.)

From reading my flist and Twitter, I am pretty sure that everybody is feeling a bit more run-down and vulnerable and sad lately. Man, holidays during the cold dark part of year and the government keeps taking away ways to help people live. It is pretty awful! No wonder we're all in a mood.

Anyway. This weekend I did fun things! After recovering from the week where I did ALL THE WORK with a nice 10 hours of sleep on Friday night, I kicked around at home on Saturday evening watching Dexter with tigerpig. We were watching the most recent season, with Julia Stiles. It was annoying that the entire plot was about sexualised violence against a series of attractive thin blonde women, but aside from that, I really liked it. It had many good women characters, including Dexter's cop sister who I think is now one of my top 10 TV characters. She swears at everyone and it's great!

Yesterday Ewan & I watched Home for Purim For Your Consideration. It was fun, although definitely not the best Christopher Guest film. I would definitely watch a straight-up film about Parker Posey the Queer 1940s Southern US Jewish Woman and her Queer Girlfriend.

dubdobdee's Grebt Yule Feast last night was really lovely, even though it was in Hackney. It's really nice to hang out with pleasant interesting people who are good cooks. I have had trouble letting myself relax lately, and, I don't know, it was just a really lovely laid-back evening with good people. Hooray.

I hope snow and travel delays clear up before our 6-hour train to Edinburgh on Christmas Eve!