2012: once more, with feeling.

Inspired all over again by Jen's list, I realized that one Best Of list is never, ever enough. So here are some other things I learned this year, in no particular order, and with links.

1. It's hard to go wrong when you make the decision to travel the unpaved roads of Costa Rica in  a 6-man golf cart.

2. I'm not very good at being the Cool Girl. More on this in 2013.

3. I'm probably actually smarter and prettier than I'll ever allow myself to believe.

4. I miss Nora Ephron and Maurice Sendak. Quite a lot. Here are wonderful obituaries for each of them, by Lena Dunham and Tony Kushner, respectively.

5. I should spend more time re-reading. In 2013, I'm going to start with Kurt Vonnegut and Virginia Woolf, two authors who meant so very much to me at such particular points in my life.

6. There is no shame in going Full Margot Tennenbaum on a weekly basis (by this I mean tying a TV to your bathroom radiator and filling the bathtub and holing up with something embarrassing as you slowly boil yourself down to a human prune. I suggest Beverly Hills 90210).

7. Some movies are worth waiting months to see, if it means seeing them with the right person and in the right city. In this case, I am talking about Moonrise Kingdom, in Vancouver, with my Best West Coast Friend Tara.

8. My heart's so firmly and massively on my sleeve that I can barely fit a cardigan over it sometimes. Luckily (and somewhat inexplicably) it still keeps me pretty warm.

9. The path to my heart consists, at least in part, of you telling me the story of how and where and when and why you bought the last book in the Harry Potter series.

10. Yoga won't save you. Not the way you want it to. But as Tara said, it might give you what you need to save yourself (although rarely in the way you envisioned, and always with sorer hamstrings and less quiet minds than you'd hoped for).

11. There's a paragraph from Blake Nelson's amazing book, Girl (possibly my favourite book ever, by the by), that has long summed up my deepest anxiety, and I keep hoping that it will stop ringing so true, and this is it, slightly condensed, from the part where Andrea's making her way back from camp after losing her virginity:

"Then it was 2:00 AM. I was like in a trance, just so tired and cried out and used up. And we stopped at an overpass and I stepped off the bus and the night was so clear and cold and my brain was like a huge echo chamber, totally empty except for the last fading sounds of the summer. ...And as we pulled into Portland I had this horrible feeling of wanting to go back because what if that's all there was? What if that's as close as you got? And I called my dad from the station and he was freaking out because I hadn't called. SO then I just sat there waiting for him, staring at my dirty tennis shoes and thinking how incredibly stupid I was if I expected life to be anything else but failed love and mindless sex and crying all night in bus stations."

I don't know what I've learned about that per se, I just like to quote it whenever I can.

12. It's okay to want to be loved the way you were loved when you were young: quietly, adoringly, to a soundtrack of sensitive indie pop songs, under the stars, on a long late walk home. Gently, uncertainly, impossibly. Yeah, it's okay.

Happy New Year, my ducklings.