Okay, I wanted to run down some of the interesting bits from the Christmas vacation, but at the end of the day, they're kind of few and far between. And I think I watched the chronological equivalent of one full James Bond movie, but spread out over about five days and seven or eight different choices.

Usually, when I'm back in New Jersey, I try to bring some of my Chicago life with me. This is easiest when I drive back, because I have the safe haven of my car and the independence that goes along with it. This time, plans to get out of the house and perhaps express my individuality were thwarted at every turn, although mostly just by inertia, so I succumbed to it and just didn't really do a lot outside of family functions, some reading, and watching TV, with the exception of a Saturday lunch with recently transplanted members of URT.

And that was fine. While there were things happening back in Chicago, the whole unemployment thing and it's resultant slowing of events took away a lot of that disconnection and separation anxiety I'll typically feel when I'm not actively participating in my day-to-day grind.

The other interesting thing wasn't so much the reverting to old familial habits and latent animosities, but the effort to break from them. At two different points, my older brother noticed this; once when I mentioned giving up on trying to say something when the conversation had moved on, and again when I recommended to my mom that she not get upset over a perceived slight. The latter was somewhat enlightening in a lot of ways. My childhood was marked by a fairly aggressive temper, a good portion of which was directed at said older brother, but nowadays, most of my friends are surprised when I talk about getting mad. They haven't really seen me mad. I've gotten a lot better about letting things go, and not taking everything so seriously. This dovetails into what I talked about earlier in this space, in that I've gotten better at not letting bad things affect me emotionally. The downside is that I also don't typically let good things affect me emotionally, either, which has resulted in the end of several relationships. That's emerging as my main New Year's resolution, actually, along with mundane bits like, you know, getting a job.

Oh, and I also saved Christmas with my unparalleled (in my family, anyway) computer-savvy, but that's a story for another time.

We'll see if I feel like embarking on a full-out reflection of 2002 in the next week or so. I believe there's a Chinese curse that says "may you live in interesting times," and that's my past year in spades.