Yesterday was so long. And in a good way. The weather was unseasonably pleasant, and my brother and I walked around downtown laughing giddily at everything, for some reason. Maybe I was tired. For some reason the fact that a bar would be named Bo James was hilarious in a way that I'd never considered before. It was good to get reacquainted with Iowa City. The Trivial Pursuit game at Jill and Dino's was a close one, but Jill and I narrowly defeated Dino and Joe and with a baseball question. It took a while for Dino to get over that.

After considering a number of bars, we settled on Sam's for a change, where we crammed ourselves into the mafia booth. I was tired from lack of sleep, but I decided to power through it like a champ, and I drank myself awake. That's healthy, right? It reminded me of arriving in London and, at Mary's insistence, doing a "lag-in," which involves a robust session of drinking rather than a nap, to get one's system back on schedule. We played a bunch of songs on the jukebox, and Chris and Ransom and Sonya and Cable showed up. Chris' quote of the night: "I figure, religion has something to offer everyone. When I was a kid, I went to church for the orange drink and donuts afterwards. I love orange drink and donuts." I sat at the bar�it's such a nice, comfortable bar�and had a good, long conversation with Leah where she reminded me of things that I probably already know deep down, but are easy to forget in more frustrating moments. "We all loved you, all along," she said, and even though I have no reason to doubt this, it was reassuring to have it reaffirmed for me, especially coming from Leah.

We closed the bar and walked back downtown, stopping to buy more beer just in the nick of time. I apologized to the woman at Kum & Go for being That Guy, who comes in at five minutes till two to buy beer. She assured me she didn't mind. Leaving the store, we ran into this guy, who was a fucking champion. He was yelling something about how his case of beer was his ghetto blaster, and we whooped at each other across the parking lot in celebration:

We continued on to Ransom's, where we kept drinking and I made an iTunes playlist and we took dozens of silly pictures. Pat arrived home, and we rejoiced. He kept slapping his knee and bellowing, "Come home to daddy, Leah!" and Leah would leap into his lap like the self-described "Pavlovian animal" she is:

Best of all, Ransom initiated Sonya into that exclusive but ever-growing family of people who he has door-tricked. She took it pretty well, all things considered. Then Leah and my brother and Ransom did gargantuan shots of rum. My brother did the shot on the condition that Ransom finish his website within the next two weeks, so they drew up a contract on a grocery receipt, just to keep everything official:

We managed to keep the party going till about five. At one point, there were about five of us all piled onto Ransom's bed, singing along with the music. Eventually everyone got back up, but I stayed there and closed my eyes and listened to "Remember" by Groove Armada, got nostalgic for the summer and my kids at the day care, and felt profound gratitude for the friends cavorting drunkenly in the next room.

Now I'm back in Grinnell, and I look forward to staying a while. I'm watching the Simpsons episode where Marge gets a gambling problem, and it's so funny, so tight. It makes me wonder how it could be so hard now for the show to be good. Plus, in a strangely prescient scene, Siegfried and Roy get mauled by their tigers.

Night has fallen completely on this, the shortest day of the year. I just helped my mother pull the Christmas decorations out of the attic. When my brother gets home from work, we'll start putting up the tree, a tradition we feel we need to keep alive even though we've grown up and won't have any toys underneath it. A bouquet of flowers just appeared on the porch from one of my mom's brothers. We see little reminders all the time that we are not alone. My usual pessimism and anxiety have momentarily lifted, and I'm reminded that difficulty and hope are not mutually exclusive. Like Andrew WK says, "just because life ain't easy, doesn't make it bad."

At the core of the weekend, and this week, is the fact that I have been among some of my closest friends the whole time. Permit me to get sentimental for a moment, but that's really all I could ask for this Christmas. The holidays this year have been surreal and different for a lot of reasons. In general, I've spent a lot of this year anxious, regretful and afraid. I feel like that's over now, and I've cleared some very important hurdles as this long, difficult year winds down. Maybe this means I'll sleep better at night, trust people more, drink less, get up earlier, figure out what's important. These may all seem like a bunch of grandiose platitudes, but I'd like to think they're genuine this time.

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