Best End of Year List 2017

The Nutcracker, Through 2017-Colored ... Ep 20 Band Manager Amber Buist

Best End of Year List 2017

At this time of year, you can’t turn a corner on the soon-to-be Internet Toll Road without crashing into a “Best Of” list. Well, tighten your helmet and put on your wrist guards like it’s 1992 and you’re going rollerblading, because I’m going to hit you with the Midlife Mixtape version.

No, it won’t be a formulaic Best Song/Album/Live Concert kind of list, primarily because that conversation is taking place over on the Midlife Mixtape Facebook page. (Have you liked that yet? It’s fun. Like hanging out in the smoking area of your high school in the ‘80s, only without smokers or Aqua Net fumes.)

For the record, mine was “Day I Die” by The National/Melodrama by Lorde/Frank Turner at the Warfield in January.

Like Lorde’s choice of fashion for this video, I like to go for eclecticism. So here’s a Best Of List you won’t find anywhere else.

Best Age-Related Insult

My good friend Dawn was out walking her dog in my neighborhood when she stopped to chat with the four-year-old who lives across the street from me. “I’m probably going to get a new neighbor soon,” said Jonah, gesturing to my house. “Why?” asked Dawn.

“Well, Nancy’s getting pretty old.”

Best Binge Watch

Godless on Netflix. Like Willie Nelson sings, my heroes have always been cowboys, but in this series the cowboys were some badass cowgirls including Lady Mary from Downton Abbey. Lady Mary on the Prairie is wayyyyy more interesting than the one stuffed up in the castle, let me tell you.

Best Sleep Tip

The older I get, or the longer CheetoSatan remains in power, the worse I sleep. I’ve already done all the things Ariana Huffington recommends, like turning off devices well before bedtime. I also do a few she doesn’t, like squinching my eyes shut when I inevitably make my middle-of-the-night bathroom run so that I won’t see the numbers on the digital clock, because if I KNOW it’s 3:23 then I guarantee you I will lay in bed calculating how many hours sleep I’ll get if I fall asleep right now. No, NOW. NOW. Oh god is it already 3:26? Tomorrow’s going to be AWFUL.

Luckily, when I was in Texas in November for my friend Wendi Aaron’s birthday, I learned she is a certified sleep coach. I learned, because I had gone to bed late one night in the house we were staying in and was laying there waiting for the sweet release of slumber, when the door opened and Wendi lurched into my field of view.

“Why did you go to bed already? That’s how you sleep?” she said, referring to the way I lay in bed with my head on the pillow and my feet pointed south, I guess? “You look like a psycho.”

She then got into bed with me and demonstrated the “right” way to sleep which involved six pillows, a leg thrown over me, and simulated drool. Confident that she had thoroughly interrupted my REM sleep to demand I rejoin the party, she then went to lay down in her own bed “for a quick sec” and we never saw her again. Her method really works, obviously.

Quickly jotting Wendi’s advice on sleeping into my phone, after she woke me up. As for the bedtime cowboy hat…when in Rome, right?

Best Cocktail

My friend Andrew is an Episcopal priest of the progressive liberal variety, so it wasn’t a total surprise when he texted me to say that he was tending bar one night in San Francisco as part of a Planned Parenthood fundraiser, and that I should come out for a drink. Feminism demanded it, so two friends and I drove all the way into the city for a drink, arriving near the end of Andrew’s guest bartender shift. He’d maybe had a couple of nips of holy wine before we got there, but took our drink orders for Moscow Mules with equanimity.

He then disappeared down the bar for the approximate length of a Sunday Eucharist. When Andrew finally returned, he set down three cocktails that were, no question, the worst drinks any of us have ever had. “Those are AWFUL!” I said to Andrew.

“Yeah, what’s in a Moscow Mule, anyway?” he asked.

I suggested maybe the time for that question would have been before he left town to go fix the world’s least complicated drink order, but he had a better idea and just upended vodka into all of glasses. So in terms of impact, that was the best cocktail of the year. Thanks, Planned Parenthood and organized religion!

Best New Skill

Twenty episodes in, I can clip out an “um” from a podcast interview recording without even listening to it, because I recognize the shape of the soundwave. I also know to cut the big block of blue soundwaves that precede every question I ask, because it is inevitably me saying, too loudly, “SOOOOOOOOOO…”

I’m putting final touches on my super-size end of the year podcast episode which airs next Tuesday, Dec 19, clipping all the way. Hope you’ll give it a listen!

What’s Yours?

SOOOOOOOOOO…Leave me your own “Best of” category in the comments. The weirder the better.