Becky: I don’t think I’d want to be known as the Colon Lady. Unless you’re talking about punctuation. In which case, I’d rather be the Semi-Colon Lady.

Rachel: No, I get semi-colons. You’re the Em-Dash Lady.

Me: Fair enough.

Perhaps our deep emotional attachments to punctuation is part of we both find this so freaking funny. And useful!

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I feel like I should say something because it’s the end of the year, and decade¹. And also because I haven’t updated in awhile. So.

I was thinking about why I never update, and it’s because I feel like every post needs to be long and have a central thesis and be well thought out.² That’s what the original point of this blog was, sort of, several years ago. But I don’t actually have a lot of deep, thinky posts in me, and it seems silly to feel like I can’t post on my own personal blog unless it’s something big and deep, when I am a small and rarely deep person. So: either I’ll post more in the upcoming year, but it will be less thoughtful, or I will continue to not post much. Either way. Shrug.

Regarding goals I had for this year: I didn’t accomplish any of them. Whoops? This was the first year in ages I’d bothered making any sort of resolutions, and now I remember why I don’t usually. But actually, it’s pretty indicative of my year in general. It wasn’t a bad year, but I didn’t have a lot of forward motion in it. So I’ve got some sort of mental goals for the upcoming year, but I don’t feel like putting them out on the internet, so I won’t. So there.

Let’s see. Other things I can talk about…

We got a Wii fit! If my year was stagnant, well, so was I; aside from the three months of physical therapy for my wrists, I don’t think I did anything involving working out or moving or not sitting on my ass. My sister thought the Wii Fit would be fun, and so it is. I’ve worked out more in the last week than in the few months leading up to it, which is good.

Good, fun things: I was skeptical of how much actual working out would happen with a video game, and I still have no idea how accurate it really is in terms of calories burnt and such. But I certainly feel like I’ve worked out after I’m done for the day. If nothing else, it’s moving and stretching, and I’ve recently rediscovered the muscles in my thighs and abs. So there’s that!

I also like working out with it because it is super fun. Little Mii characters are constantly applauding and encouraging you, even for things like jogging, which I absolutely hate doing, you know, in real life. (Also: it’s cold outside, but warm in my apartment.) And, dorky confession that should surprise absolutely no one who knows me at all, when we first got the Wii we made a whole bunch of silly Miis based on TV and movie characters. I… may have made the entire cast of High School Musical.³ But jogging is way more fun with, say, Chad Danforth!⁴

On the other hand, it’s pretty problematic in that if it measures your BMI as above “normal,” or you gain weight between days, it berates you. That’s neither healthy nor helpful; at best, it’s obnoxious, and at worst, potentially triggering for people with disordered eating.

(And on a personal level, it makes fun of me. Much of the Fit’s whole shebang is based around balance and posture; and while my posture is pretty great, thanks to the physical therapy, my balance… uh… Look, some of us failed out of ballet class when we were four because we fell over too much, even for toddlers. Why yes, Wii Fit, I do often fall down in my daily life, thanks so much for asking sarcastically.)

Other than that, not much going on. I’m on vacation for a week and I enjoy sitting around doing nothing quite a bit.⁵ For at least the third (probably fourth) year in a row, I’m going to do New Years karaoke tonight. Should be good times.

Here, have something adorable to end your year with:

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If I was the sort of blogger who wrote things on a timely basis, this post would have been up during the ALCS when I first thought about it, or at least during the World Series, when it was topical, or shortly thereafter, when people were still buzzing. But I’ve been busy with work, that novel I’m perpetually working on, and meeting some of my favorite authors. And I’m not that sort of blogger. Alas.

So. Baseball. And feminism!

The school where my sister teaches had a Yankees-themed dress-down day when the Yankees won the World series.¹ She stopped at a Modell’s store to pick up a jersey to wear, and found only men’s larges and extra larges — and a very few women’s shirts, all in pastel pink.

I don’t actually know any women who want pink Yankees gear. The blue pinstripes? Pretty iconic, is all I’m saying. Rachel asked a salesman if there was anything else for women, and he said no. They never bother to order jerseys for women. Imagine that.²

I went to see a game with my friend B this summer. B is a much harder-core fan than I am, actually, and when we were talking about how we got into watching, she said I was one of the only women she knows who watches baseball like she does — or, in other words, who watches baseball like a dude.

But, she said, it was nice to see a game with another woman because she didn’t have to avoid talking about how Derek Jeter is wicked hot.

Yup. That’s my experience, too. Because that’s the thing about talking baseball with dudes. There’s an awesome feeling of being in-group, and what’s more fun than talking about something you love with people who are similarly passionate? But for me and B both — and, I suspect, a lot of other female sports fans — there’s an unspoken knowledge that commenting on a player’s attractiveness means you will be out-grouped instantly. Your opinions will be taken less seriously, and instead of a real fan, you’ll be seen as one of those women, who only watches the game for eye candy or because your boyfriend makes you.³

The thing is, this is not something that happens in reverse. For some reason, a sports-centric magazine with a primarily male audience puts out a yearly edition that’s devoted to women in swimsuits, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a magazine about sports. ⁴ Movie reviews nearly always comment on the female lead’s attractiveness, but even when written by men, the reviews aren’t discounted out of hand, on the grounds that people assume men only watch movies to stare at the women. And often, female athletes are uber-sexualized, and their looks are considered at least as important as their skills.⁵

So maybe I do watch baseball like a dude, because apparently even sitting on my couch watching the YES Network is a gendered activity. (Sigh.) But I also watch baseball like a chick. Because, whether you believe in Derek Jeter’s intangibles or Derek Jeter’s actual defensive statistics?

Dude is wicked hot.

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So Rachel and I tentatively refer to Lily, our cat, as the failiest of fail cats. She’s a cat who climbs up on top of our highest cabinets and then can’t get back down. She’ll get so excited someone is petting her that she’ll roll right off the couch. She is exceedingly ginormous, but not terribly ferocious.

Tonight, Lily caught a mouse. This is the good news.

The bad news — other than the fact that our building in general and, evidently, our apartment in specific, has mice — is that she is still a fail cat. So she ran from the kitchen where she caught it, past us in the living room, and into my bedroom, and then, whoops! Dropped it.

IN MY BEDROOM.

Now, Rachel and I used to be country folk; we grew up in a house with birds in the eves, a few bats in the attic, occasional mice, and on one very memorable occasion, a raccoon in the bathtub. So it’s not like we’re afraid of such things. On the other hand. MOUSE. HIDING. IN MY BEDROOM.

After our moment of shock that our failcat is secretly a mouser — albeit a bad one — and some very brief shrieking because such things are startling (AND DID I MENTION SHE LOST IT IN MY BEDROOM?) we tracked it down, hiding behind my bookshelf. This necessitated removing all books from the shelf and moving the shelf itself, at which point the mouse naturally ran out from behind it, and in underneath it, in the approximate half-inch of space there. (It was a very small mouse. And brown. And actually quite cute, but I DO NOT WANT IT IN MY APARTMENT.)

Luckily, Rachel was on the phone with our friend Erin at the time, and Erin is super smart and suggested perhaps, if we could flush it out from under the bookshelf, we could catch it in Tupperware and put it outside. This was the best solution we could think of — Rachel and I are both vegetarians and have been for a long time, so even if we’d had a convenient way to kill it, we probably wouldn’t have.

How does one flush a mouse out from a dark space under a bookshelf? Well, if one is me, one uses an adorable (and, it turns out, highly functional) keychain with a rubber ducky charm. A charm that happens to light up and quack. Presumably terrified, the mouse dashed from its hiding spot and right into the waiting Tupperware, and we carried it out the apartment and halfway down the block without pausing to put on coats (or, in my case, shoes — going sock-footed in January on a New York City sidewalk: I don’t recommend it). We let it go and it scampered off, which was probably for the best, since that meant it likely hadn’t been hurt (just terrified) and wasn’t in pain. The down side is that even if it can’t get back into our building, it likely will get into someone’s somewhere, because where else could it go?

But at least not back to ours, we hope.

On the other hand, mice rarely travel in packs of one.

So we’ll see. This requires some serious thought and consideration about how to prevent future mice in an apartment when we have no control over the building as a whole, and what to do with any mice we might catch. Or maybe consideration of moving. Either way.

I’m off to go put all the books back on my shelf and clean up the havoc wrecked by the cat, the mouse, and me and my sister. Then clean the kitchen top to bottom. So I leave you with a picture of the mighty huntress:

Isn’t she ferocious?

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