"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."

Aw. Love. I think I typed this same quote up last year on MLK Day. That's one of those rare quotes that has not, since I saw it posted on a professor's door and taped it to my telephone twelve years ago, stopped making perfect sense.

And even while you wonder, "Where is that kind of power?" it's not unknown. I've been on the end of that kind of power, the implementing of demands of justice. I feel like I've wielded that power, too. Speaking of: Job interviews! There is light at the end of the tunnel. Back to clinical work, back to the world that makes sense to me, devoid of creepy office power plays and useless spreadsheets. A return to the grey areas and pure painful honesty of dipping your hands in the lives of the hurting. I have a great interview outfit picked out. It's a bit loud. I pull my hair back, though, so as not to overwhelm these poor people.

I've got to nap. We're singing tonight, at like midnight, some benefit for a drama collective that thought, you know, it might be funny if we "dressed up like orphans and foster kids." Right? You feel how gross that is. Anyway, I have to sleep off my self-righteousness, avoid the -8000 degree cold, and prepare to try and not drink at a show. It's a fun little thing I'm trying, a return to my sXe days. Off to fall asleep to the rageful sounds of Propaghandi! It's 1995 up in here!

The first day of the New Year doesn't count. That's in the Bible, man.

New Year's Eve is always rough, it just never goes right, somehow, and so I thought I'd stay home. Then an opportunity arose that seemed seamless, foolproof, just golden. I suspect, however, that I time-travelled when getting ready and knocked over an eyeliner or something thereby disturbing the Force and putting me on a path that was just a smidge off, at first, and then was way off track by 2 am. By 4 am, everything was fine: I was back on Kimball Ave, in the Cabrio, with my sister.

Those intervening hours, however. Yesterday they took on mythic proportions, like Odyssey-level allegory and metaphor, Jodeci-type heights of melodrama and pathos. Yesterday was bleak and self-obsessed, until I heard:

"I'm cut in half real bad, Dewey."

It doesn't take much, really, just a little more sister time, an invitation to suicide by a dear friend, and a movie parody to set me back right. Fluffy-headed Social Worker said "You can just kill yourself right now, if you want, while I'm on the phone. You probably should." Precious. It's been a nice transition, from thinking I wasn't crazy while everyone else did, to having friends that think I'm perfectly fine even while I try and convince them of the singular hideousness of my life and person.

So, in summary: I fell off a horse on Christmas Eve Day, and was forced to "Git back on, git back on!" I choose to take my New Year lessons early. That is lesson #1 of 2008--git back on horses. Lessons #2 and #3 I should have learned already--never go to Wrigleyville, and never be a VIP. Finally, Lesson #4: Selective Optimistic Amnesia and Personal Forgiveness. All that happened on New Year's Eve is that I got to hear Spoon perform "Peace Like a River." Anything else, cowardice, narcissism, my bangs getting too curly--are forgiven and forgotten, right....now.