It's been a busy, blogless month. A whirlwind of good stuff. The kinds of days that bear a profound sense of change, as if the clutch's engaged and the gears are turning. Stars aligning for a shocking splash of kismet.

I've never been much for new year's resolutions of any kind. Nor have I a knack for year-end summaries. I suck at endings. But there's nothing I love like newness, weightless, boundless and possibile. I am all for January. And so far, I'm a big fan of 2007.

Maybe it's my new desk and its sunsets. Maybe it's progress. Or romance. But, God bless America, things are going my way again.

Whew.

So I did what people do when they're all kinds of goobery and thoughtful and speechless. I made a mix.

01.2007
Ships in the Night . BRAZILIAN GIRLS
In the Morning . JUNIOR BOYS
Smoke Bubbles . BASEMENT JAXX
The Last Time . GNARLS BARKLEY
Connect For . COMMON MARKET
My Way Home . CITIZEN COPE
Troubled Girl (Spanish Version) . KAREN RAMIREZ
Long Distance Call . PHOENIX
Inside And Out . FEIST
Funeral . BAND OF HORSES
In Spite of Me . MORPHINE
Here Comes the Sun . THE BEATLES
Maybe You Can Owe Me . ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI
Let It Fall Apart . HELIO SEQUENCE
Hotel Song . REGINA SPEKTOR
One Time Too Many . PHOENIX
Misread . KINGS OF CONVENIENCE
Elevator Music . BECK
In This Home on Ice . CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH

With the year coming around its final bend, breaking into a sprint, racing to the finish line, impending celebration, champagne, I could not bear to stay in Seattle for New Year's Eve. I wasn't in the mood to manage the party scene (which always seems so promising and, at least in my case, always ends up so disappointing) and I had zero desire to sequester my revelry in some wilderness cabin. I wanted something unpredictable, something over the top, something fun. I desperately needed a high-intensity injection of perspective--so I bought a ticket to Los Angeles.

Hola.

After a mildly trying day of travel that ended with me spending three-plus hours in LAX reading Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and waiting for my friend June to arrive from Chicago (it bears noting that June is 1) a most excellent human, and 2) something of a disaster when it comes to air travel--we once spent an entire day in LAX after missing a flight to Maui...), we taxied toward downtown, where June recently landed a kickass loft in an old bank building. My car-free soul fluttered upon our arrival--here was a place in LA where a person can actually walk around. Grab a little brunch, do a little dry cleaning.

Something big is happening in this part of town. You can feel it in the air and on the sidewalks. You can see it in the potted plants lining the windowsills of tall buildings. People of all kinds coming together to build a new kind of Los Angeles, layer it in arts and cultures, flood it with revival like history sprung to life, like something out of a movie. Only it's real.

And just up the street, Frank Gehry's concert hall looms above the thick of things like a prophecy for the future of the city, its vast, reflective curves wound with a series of paths, amphitheaters and urban vistas.

In the midst of all of this (as well as a wild sushi lunch and, separately, some puzzling rooftop Astroturf), I somehow ended up in the storage closet of a rapidly emerging fashion designer, Geren Ford, where I struck a bit of gold in an unexpected fashion feeding frenzy. It was like Christmas all over again.

Later tonight we're going ice-skating. And with any luck, tomorrow night's toasts will usher in the greatest year yet.

Hit me with some 2007.

I'm not sure what can appropriately follow a month of biblical precipitation. But, according to my friend Chris, who recently and successfully traded his graphic design skills for a ghostbuster visit to his basement, last Saturday's solar flare is a decent guess. Three cheers for last week being over. May we not revisit it.

Luckily for all Americans everywhere, an otherwise poopy fortnight ended Sunday with Laura Bush's hysterically indecorous fashion mishap. I love to imagine Oscar de la Renta himself fully aware of the impending awkward moment, smirking fabulously as Dubya's diabolical voice plays in his designer mind: Bring it on.

As for me, I'm trying to remember that it's not about the inhale, it's about the exhale, as I wander in and out of a network mini-series and a translated 1970s novel. I finally bought a shredder and am working my way through my 1998-2003 financial records four sheets at a time. The year is barreling to a close. The play at WET is good. The holiday parties are fun. It is raining.

Today, as the big, fat snowflakes began to fall, I had just stepped out of Sonic Boom. (Purchased: TV on the Radio and PJ Harvey's Peel Sessions; narrowly resisted: Sufjan Stevens' new Christmas collection) and was making my way toward Victrola, where I scored a seat at the counter and dove headlong into the last 60 pages of On Beauty. They were gorgeous. My heart feels fuller because of that book.

Maybe it was Zadie Smith's dizzyingly apt writing, or the sloppy kisses falling from the sky. The rapidly approaching end to a year that just started or ten solid work-free days. But before I knew it, my mind had catapulted into a familiar starburst of knotted thoughts, contemplating my insatiable and likely ridiculous desire to read and see and do everything, wishing the snow would fall for days, thinking of my friend whose father just died, the class reunion I skipped last night, a recent trifecta of illuminating encounters with exes...

Thank goodness for familiar districtions: two days of miraculously unchecked email, a few phone calls and the latest download of Grey's Anatomy. Bring on the daily grind.

Returning to the not-remotely-snowy Midwest for Thanksgiving yesterday, I really could not contain my astonishment. Modern American air travel is whack. Period.

Whilst longing for the days when removing my shoes at security still felt like an affront to my dignity, a great cynicism came over me. I not only questioned security regulations, I half-convinced myself that the latest rules surrounding liquids and gels were really just an attempt to stimulate the miniature toiletries industry.

These are the hazards of traveling alone -- no one to talk to, and WAY too much time to concoct half-baked conspiracy theories.

For the cross-country leg of my trip, I had apparently been seated in the nursery area, surrounded by no less than 10 kids under the age of 8, a good six of whom were babes in arms. While one kid kicked my chair, another threw Cheetos in my face until the whole chorus of them were wailing simultaneously like alley dogs barking into the night. Memo to the parents who insist on bringing their children into this captive atmosphere: BENEDRYL. Knock those little punks out, for the love of God.

Though the in-flight movie was some direct-to-video disaster involving a would-be country star, I took comfort -- inspiration even! -- in the paperback pages of Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which may just be the best work of new contemporary fiction I've read in years. She's hilarious and insightful, and her keen sense of cultural nuance paints a remarkably breathtaking and believable picture of everyday dramas.

Finally arrived in Detroit, I discovered (to minimal surprise) that my liquids and gels had not arrived on the same flight as myself. So I spent a charming hour or so camped out in what may be the crappiest airport terminal left in America waiting for my bag. Good times.

It was worth it, though. Today I paid a deeply nostalgic visit to the Franklin Cider Mill for the first time in 10 years. There really are some places where nothing has changed. Or maybe that's just the caramel apples talking. ;)

Okay, let's review: I've been holed up for almost three full weeks, devouring no less than 32 episodes of Entourage, 12 of which I downloaded illegally, trying to get SOMETHING out of my system in between a slew of messy drunken benders, during which I lost or destroyed three articles of clothing and failed to even flirt genuinely with a single individual. Meanwhile, my blog is wasting away in the hallows of CMS hell, hiding from the jackasses who love to hate me for trying. I'm broke as f***, still caught in the shadow of my ex semi-boyfriend and wondering if I ever should have left LA... Yeah, let's review.

Having taken the month of October off blogging almost entirely to preserve my sanity (which was very tightly squeezed between Jobs A & B for a while there), I thought I'd ease my way back in with this inspiring Tom Friedman column. Every once and a while a writer just nails it, says something so sharp and so true that all you can do is broadcast it... This comes from today's NYT.

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you're stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry -- a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service -- and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, "They must think I'm stupid." Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team's real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry's mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men -- to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld's response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you've got -- get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories -- from "Cobra II" to "Fiasco" to "State of Denial" -- all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we've been making it up -- and paying the price -- ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they're fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? Sure, George Bush told us we're addicted to oil, but he has not done one single significant thing -- demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to drive conservation -- to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century -- to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country's health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you're not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has -- through sheer incompetence -- brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq -- and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate -- it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we're as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don't think we're that stupid. Next Tuesday we'll see.

Right now, at the corner of Elliott and Broad, a 19-foot-tall typewriter eraser is hanging off the side of the road. Nearby, a sweeping staircase climbs from the waterfront toward a tinted glass bridge that crosses the Burlington Northern train tracks. And ahead, at the top of the hill, Calder's majestic Eagle sits perched on the bias, silhouetted in the falling light. This is the Olympic Sculpture Park, coming into bloom.

Last Thursday, I toured the yet unfinished park, and even with the awkward edges of construction, it felt like nothing short of wonderland. All around me -- in the trees, the views and the art -- excitement was multiplying.

I feel like that a lot these days, like something huge is happening. In the air. In the clubs. In the conspiratorial back rooms where plans are being hatched. All around this town, the sh*t that's going down has a through-line, a whole that's bigger than its parts combined.

The sculpture park and its sister expansion downtown are a part of all that. With nine acres of free outdoor space and two full floors of free indoor space on the way in 2007, SAM is entering our daily lives like never before. Seattle is getting the museum it deserves. And that is something to celebrate.

So celebrate we shall Thursday night at the Showbox with an unparalleled combination of performances. Drum roll, please:

---The inimitable Marya Sea Kaminski, Lathrop Walker and Micky Place of WET
--- Pioneering DJs SunTzu Sound
---Choklate, Seattle's hottest soul singer fresh from a very successful west coast tour for her critically lauded album
---Awesome, the most aptly named accordion-wielding rock sensation in town
---Common Market, reigning harbingers of hiphop

This party is not just a chance to rally for the future of art in this town and make the museum our own. It is a chance to prove that we are coming together, big and small, far and wide, of all kinds -- because all ships rise, and THAT is the spirit of the times.

Let there be zeitgeist.

When I was in college, I had a professor who claimed his life's ambition was to invent a word so that his legacy would carry on in the English lexicon. (Incidentally, this man wore a bow tie every single day and I once spotted him at the gas station standing beside the pump, reading a book as he filled his tank.)

While I don't have my sights set on an entry in Webster's, I do love to make up words that stick. Here's my latest favorite.

snottorati. [sna-tow-rah-tee], noun, pl.

1. Persons who assert their collective cultural or artistic superiority through pompous, often unwarranted, criticism.

2. Mean elitists.

During an entirely unpleasant bout with some kind of nasty virus last week, I spent an inordinate amount of time lying on the couch watching TV. I checked out Katie Couric for myself. I absorbed commercial after commercial for the swath of upcoming season premiers. And I watched more detective shows in about four days than I've seen in the last six months combined.

I learned many, many things.

1. Katie Couric is nothing but the TV version of USA Today. But Brian Williams is an exceptionally smart, brave journalist who makes television worth watching. Though I still can't believe the evening news continues to broadcast before 6:30 p.m. on all three networks. It's a good thing people over 50 are the only ones who need to know what's going on in the world.

2. In the absence of Friends and Sex and the City, and in the twilight of ER, there is a hole in the soul of America. And there are many hungry television producers who are eager to fill it. (If I see one more trailer for The Class, I am going to stick a pen in my eye. Especially if it involves slow-motion or a swing.)

3. The local TV news has slowly adopted the plotlines of CSI. CSI, however, has substantially greater value to humans.

4. Rockstar Supernova, which I watched with shameful dedication all summer long, was a terrible disappointment in the end. I don't know why I ever thought a bunch of heavy metal rockers would choose a fierce woman as their singer when they could have a little rocker dude like Lukas Rossi. If I didn't know that guy was from Toronto, I would have bet someone found him at the Cha Cha. Bah.

Finally off the couch and unplugged from the TV, I see the summer frenzy is slowing, suspended in September light, dusted with gold. The windows are closed in my apartment and, quite all of a sudden, sweater season is here.