au revoir, oughts.

It's been a banner year for me, and as usual, as I come to the end of 2Cait9 I make the realization that I've been so caught up in the pure winningness that is my life these days that I've forgotten to keep track of whether the things I loved in this last year of the decade were actually released in the last year. I'm pretty sure most of them weren't. I'm gonna go by some 2009-specific stuff on iTunes now but here's a list of the Best of Everything, 2009, to keep you occupied.

Best move: Ottawa to Kingston.

Best non-moving-related decision: forsaking vegetarianism and eating a lot of bacon (and also, a bird).

Best private radio discovery: 98.9 The Drive. For real! hardly any commercials and they reintroduced Banditos by The Refreshments into my life. If only we could somehow convince their lobotomized idiot DJs to never, ever speak ("We call it essential alternative because we play music that is essentially alternative! EXTREME!").

Best public radio standby: Wire Tap with Jonathan Goldstein.

Best book set in the grainy, sepia toned streets of 1970s New York involving latchkey children and the 20000$ Pyramid: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.


Best love-hate relationship: Q, with Jian Ghomeshi. (Seriously though, Moxy Fruvous was fucking awesome. This song was the best.)

Best terrifying dystopia: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Best re-read: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank.

Best Batman comic: All Star Batman and Robin, Volume 1, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee.

Best emo comic memoir: Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffrey Brown.

Best superficially stupid movie that is actually awesome and involves Muppets: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (Oh Jason Segel, you have my heart.)

Best song that totally reaffirmed my faith in pop rock when it came out and then slowly, so slowly, made me want to gauge holes in my eardrums whenever I hear it: Help, I'm Alive by Metric.


Best musical rediscovery: Pavement.

Subsequent best song of all time discovery: Stereo by Pavement.

Best show: Plaskett at the Charles Bronson Centre. Or maybe, just maybe, the sheer anticipation of possessing orchestra level seats for Wilco at the NAC this winter. That might be better than all the shows in the world lined up in a row.

Best non-Plaskett album that actually came out in 2009: Hold Time by M. Ward.

Best friends: every last one of you.

You can't go home again.

Sometimes you have these days where you feel like maybe you're a professional, you know? You sit at the same table as a blogger you really like (even just for like ten minutes) and he tells you he remembers seeing your blog (even if it's just because you linked to him) and you meet a GG-nominated author while you're at your friends' place for dinner and you read most of a book (This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper is possibly the greatest book ever written about siblings, infidelity, and the shivah-sitting experience, and excellent train station reading). You're on track. You're networking, You're doing your thing. You're alright.

Then, you take the train home to your parents' house and are forced to listen to three girls in the next row argue about their perfect wedding, their perfect wedding dress (VINTAGE! no, PRINCESS NECKLINE! of COURSE my fiance isn't coming with me! it's MY wedding, not his!) (I wish I were making that up.). It's pouring rain and the cute boy in the next row is reading The Hockey News, and you totally judge him for it even though you've got a shitty old VC Andrews paperback tucked in your purse in case you finish your public-consumption book too soon. You finally get home, and feeling alternately virtuous and guilty you decide to floss your teeth, and a chunk of your tooth falls out on the bathroom floor, and your mother picks it up and then loses it. And then all you can think about is the fact that it's a very thin line between you and the lady with no teeth with whom you got in an argument yesterday because Darryl took out videos on her library card even though she told him not to, and now they're overdue and it's as much your problem as it is hers. The wind is howling and your mother finds your tooth again and tells you it looks like a little pearl and you pretty much want to vomit.

At times like this there's only one thing you can really do: skulk on down to your basement bedroom, burrow into the single bed you slept in when you were a kid, pull out the copy of Catching Fire that fell into your lap earlier, when life was still worth living, and read till you pass out.

Mixed blessings, friends.

It's good to be home.