It's been a minute I suppose.

I'm glad to be home for the holidays. Chicago is a great place to live, and has served as a superior platform for my dreams and obsessions. Merry Christmas!! I've posted some new sounds for you. "In Sickness and In Silence" is a soundtrack to someone else's video that I never saw, and that was likely never made. It's more of a Rorschach blot than a song, really. Old hospital cassettes, field recordings from Copenhagen and Beijing, answering machine messages, thoughtful samples. I made it in a snowstorm not dissimilar to the one raging outside my window tonight.

I did a little traveling in the past month. An Advanced-level Certification exam from the American Board of Opticianry was being administered in Madison, so I took a long weekend up there, spent a little time with my brother, Julia, and dearest William, and studied like mad for two days straight. Hit up four or five different coffeeshops, played "Name That Tune" with my brother, and ate Nepalese food. Ended up being the only person in the Northern Midwest who passed. Cool. I'm going to try for the Advanced Contact Lens Examiners exam next. I'm trying to fulfill this year's resolution to be more "professionally-minded."

London was next. I spent a week there, did some touristing, a little shopping, and a little biking. The prices weren't as bad as I had anticipated, and I found some great CDs and cheap Indian eats. Navigation was highly difficult, as every road that isn't curved ended up changing names three times. I went to Fabric with some Manchester girls and to 80's night with some Rollergirls...unforgettable nights. Gothic predispositions got the best of me at a variety of medical museums, operating theaters, and torture-houses. I tried to go to a Goth bar, but I guess vampires don't go out on Mondays. While biking through London's immaculate streets, I heard so much music in my head.

Missed my plane back to Chicago because I was screwing around. I tried to turn a negative into a positive by making a surprise visit to some loved ones in New York. Some of them were gone, but I had the best Thanksgiving meal of my life with Aldo and Amy. And I got to see sweet Albert. And I slept in Pam's neon heaven.

On the cycling front, a couple good things happened last month. I took First Place Overall in Team Beer'd's "Classics" series of races, winning some sweet Rapha swag and a place in the history books, all while dressed as a dirty whore (actually it was an Angelina Jolie costume, but I think I had the boobs wrong). Christina took First Place in the Women's category. We followed up those victories by teaming up for the Sadie Hawkin's Race a couple weeks later, taking Second Place overall, beaten only by a veteran messenger and a track-obsessive. And work on the new whip goes slowly but surely. Chicago has never seen anything like it, I promise you.

So now I'm back. December is full of good birthdays. Happy Birthday to Val and Melissa and Skidmore and Martha and Jason and Austin and Gretel and Grandma and me. (Stay tuned for info on that last one.)

Good news:

-Shoes that make noise when you walk. They give character to your step.

-Pandering and Fornication. Duh.

-White boys with a deep passion for Latin cuisine. Either you get it or you don't.

-Zara. Can you put one in the city now?

-Iggy Pop + David Bowie. I'm going through a "phase" that I probably should have dealt with a decade ago. The shit these guys came up with in Berlin is some of the best music to come out of the last fifty years. And the later "Zombie Birdhouse" album is clearly a touchstone for Ariel Pink.

-Workers taking over factories. This needed to happen ages ago, and I'm glad that it's opening a dialogue at the very least.

-Leather. Sorry cows. Someone has to take one for the team.

-The ecstasies of closet ornithologists. We all need a secret to keep.

-Art disguised as a love letter. Love letters disguised as art. I've recently received one of each.

-Cappuccino + Croissant. The breakfast of champions.

And the bad news:

-Taking pictures of your food. Just eat the thing already. I bet it looks delicious in person, but it's a pile of shit on Flickr.

-Anything with a skull on it. (I think I've been bitching about this for about three years, but they don't go away.)

-Extortion and idolatry.

-Kanye West and his "singer/songwriter" phase.

-London pedestrians. They don't know how to walk. At all.

-Talking to Call-Center Indians. Fucking useless people cost me like two-hundred bucks.

-And finally...Drooling in front of my boss. Though I laughed harder today than I have in a long time!

CHEERS!