Alas, no inclusion of “waiting on line,” instead of “waiting in line,” but I say a lot of this.

If you’re still into “Shit ___________ Say,” check out my contribution, Shit Shiksas Say. It’s a joint project with a TV writer friend from L.A.

Can you tell which tweets are from a Jewish guy and which are from an actual shiksa?

I know it’s all over now, but in case you’re wondering… I still don’t like Christmas. I want to foreclose on gingerbread houses and silence the godawful music. (By the way, this song is about date rape, not holiday spirit.) I want to boycott shops with gaudy decorations. And yeah, I sort of want to tell kids the truth about Santa. Gently!

Instead, I spent most of December thinking about my second annual I-don’t-care-about-Christmas advent calendar. Here’s what I did:

1. Put up tiny Christmas tree - This year, I even put some ornaments in a glass vase. I know, I outdid myself.

2. See a movie at Nitehawk Cinema
3. Replace duvet cover - The new duvet cover is a darker, more lint-attracting version of the one before. I probably have to replace the replacement. Or invest in 3M lint brush stock.
4. Clean out hall closet - Now this would’ve been a Christmas miracle.
5. Volunteer at the soup kitchen’s holiday dinner - This year, I brought a friend. We both worked the floor and spent hours talking to guests and refilling water pitchers, sugar dispensers, and such at the tables.
6. Finally read the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker
7. Sell Poang chair - It took three attempts to sell this perfectly nice chair. What gives?

8. Take summer purse to the leather spa - Yes, I have a summer purse. Yes, it goes to the leather spa. Yes, I am jealous.
9. Eat a Thanksgiving croissant from Momofuku Milk Bar - Dare I call this overrated? I dare.
10. Check out the Maurizio Cattelan retrospective at the Guggenheim
11. Frolic at New Museum’s Carsten Holler: Experience - I went after volunteering at the soup kitchen, but I didn’t get to use the slide. That was the whole point, though!
12. See STREB perform Kiss the Air - I’m really sorry to have missed this while I was in Texas. So sorry that I can’t bear to supply a link. Also: I’m lazy.
13. Go to Texas - I saw this book at the Houston airport. Discuss.

14. Swing with Annie

15. Visit the Corner Library in Williamsburg
16. Buy touchscreen gloves that will work on my iPhone - I bought a navy pair at Muji. My mom got me these as a gift, too.
17. Finish all the classes on my Pilates class card - One left!
18. Write New Year’s resolutions

I added a few more things to the list as they came up…

19. Watch the terrific PBS Woody Allen documentary - Hurry! You can only stream part one until January 2.
20. See Jeffrey Eugenides at Symphony Space - The Thalia Book Club events are so great. I highly recommend them for bookworms.
21. Read Swamplandia! as a paired book club with The Retiree, a guy I briefly dated this fall - I got completely sucked in and the dark ending broke my heart. Also, I vomited after reading one chapter, but I think it’s because I ate something bad.
22. See Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings in concert - What a show! I have such a crush on Mookie.

23. Eat at the latest Meatball Shop location in the West Village - Mmmm.
24. Purchase my annual pair of Frye boots - Don’t worry. I didn’t pay retail.

And let’s pretend I wrote one more thing down and did it with relish.

I hope you had a good holiday! Did you do anything unusually fun?

But this makes me feel better about it.

Okay, I guess it’s not that bad.

I have a few terrible stories about renting in NYC.

Like the time the single light in my Central Park West studio kept burning out, and the super didn’t believe me and left me to live in the dark for days at a time.

Or the time a different pervy super tried to walk in on me in the shower and then implied that I had an incestuous relationship with my dad.

But Kelly, my friend/mentor/blog Samaritan, has the best horror stories. I mean that in general. If horror stories were apartments, she’d have a whole building somewhere in Brooklyn. And if apartment horror stories were contests, which Curbed has gone ahead and done, she’d be story number three.

Read about Kelly’s neighbors who were running a brothel, someone else’s decomposing neighbor, and more on Curbed, and vote for your favorite story. The winner gets a free month’s rent.

I’m a little biased here, but come on, everyone loves a story about hookers. Well, except Kelly.

Happy Halloween!

The scary news is that I haven’t really left my apartment in three days, due to bad weather and lots of work. It snowed slushy, nasty snow-like precipitation on Saturday. I loved it, because it made me feel better about skipping Halloween parties. Now it’s just cold. Well, it looks cold from inside, and my heater’s on.

The nostalgic news is that this was my best Halloween costume ever. My step-grandmother sewed it out of a highly synthetic material that gives me the itchies just thinking about it. You can tell what I was, right?

The good news it that I have something Halloween-related for you to read. It’s about candy, the great uniter. Click on the image to go straight to my latest Hunch blog post.

I read this joke in Time Out New York. It made me laugh on the subway.

Which do you like better?

The Band of Horses original?

Or Cee Lo’s cover?

I love them both as completely different songs.

How can I forget you, blog, when there’s always someone there to remind me?

From Formspring:

So creative, persistent nagging I got…

I needed some tough love. (I let these sit in my Formspring inbox for weeks before replying today.)

From Ryan:

Are you no longer blogging?  (And/Or, congrats on getting paid to write a lot of awesome stuff that keeps you away from blogging.)

From Kelly:

I know I’ve asked you this before…but DUDE! When are you gonna write in your blog again? I feel so abandoned. Don’t make me foreclose on Noisiest Passenger…

And here’s the kitten that broke the absentee blogger’s back.

From Achu:

Hi Amanda,

I am a regular reader of your blog and this is my small attempt to make you start blogging again. Since I don’t have many cat photos, I took one photo of my little kitty while waking up. It always sits on my desk. The funny thing is, one of my colleagues is afraid of this cat.

Hope this will have some effect on you.

Regards,

Achu

And there was more!

Thank you for checking in and reporting that you’ve run out of back entries and are waiting for new material.

Thank you to Jay for still recommending my blog to others.

Thank you to the person who interviewed me for a job and said, “I love your blog! When are you updating it?”

Now where to begin?

Is that first walk up to you, my face growing more familiar with each step. I look different, but not much. The circumstances and lighting are most of it.

It’s autumn now. It’s been months. How has it been months? What have I been doing?

And it’s always nothing. I was sad sometimes and crazy, chest-thumpingly happy other times. But mostly I was just normal. That sounds disappointing, but it wasn’t. I hardly noticed nothing amazing was happening to me.

The elephant in the room - which really sounds much heavier than what this unspoken thing between us is, so think of a really small elephant - is that this could’ve happened a long time ago. There were many days to meet, days we both thought of meeting.

I saw a movie alone instead. You went to bed early instead. We talked to other people about wanting to meet with each other and what that would be like all this time later instead.

So we’re here, and I”m trying my hardest to act like you don’t know me anymore. But you do. I’d tell you the same stories if I felt comfortable enough. You know the gist of them already.

One would be about how I am both delighted and horrified by people who remind me of me. I see them every day. I write about them and add weird details to distance myself. That would have made you laugh before. If you heard it now, you’d remember how you used to laugh at things like that.

It’s almost sad that something I started became such a stranger. That’s what I think being a parent must feel like.

Once we’ve settled in, I may say just this. But first I’m waiting for a sign that it’s time to be me again, not me being me without you.

We’re back.

Dorothy Parker said, “I hate writing. I love having written.”

I second that.

I recently read Steve Hely’s How I Became A Famous Novelist, a novel about a slacker who decides to get rich by writing a lowbrow novel that will appeal to the masses. I’ve joked about doing the same thing.

A few weeks ago, I went to a speaking event by the screenwriting team responsible for Night at the Museum, Taxi (with Jimmy Fallon - not to be confused with the Scorcese gem Taxi Driver), and Reno 911! The guys were really down-to-earth, honest, and funny about selling out. (Watch a mock infomercial for their book.)

Once a screenplay sells, screenwriters tend to be done with the project. The original version changes so much that the final script can be unrecognizable. And if the movie’s terrible? Well, you got paid already.

So this is why crappy movies get made - they’re easier to write, and there’s always an audience. But let’s not delve into how this makes me a little sad.

This was a rather circuitous way to introduce this excerpt from the cynical, irreverent, and hilarious How I Became A Famous Novelist:

Writing a novel - actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs - is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit…

When you think of the great writers, penning a novel seems terrible romantic. You think of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Riviera breeze billowing his curtains and the sounds of the Cap d’Antibes street cut by the tapping of his typewriter, as he lacerates the rich and dreams of the past…

Even less novelists seem glamorous. Some scribbler burning twigs in a boardinghouse in the second arrondissement as he dips his quill pen into the ink. Or a slim and shoeless thirty-something, taking a year off his job as an alternative-marketing consultant to sit in a park in Vancouver or Park Slope and type into his PowerBook a wry yet soulful take on the paradoxes of hypermodernity.

That is all delusion. Writing a novel is pathetic and boring. Anyone sensible hates it. It’s all you can do not to play Snood all afternoon.