Happy New Year, 2008!

New Year's Eve is by far my favorite holiday. Everyone is happy, there's so much to look forward to, you get to dress up silly, you get to kiss people at midnight, you get to drink, and First Night St. Louis. And you don't have to make an elaborate meal or think up gifts for people. It's a perfect holiday. No one is excluded, except maybe the Chinese and the Mayans - but props to them for sticking to their own calendars in the face of all of the rest of society.

New Year's Eve in Marathon, Florida, is pretty rockin', I must say. My whole family is staying in tonight, to toast with pink champagne (my parents had pink champagne at their wedding - I thought it was rare, apparently it isn't) at midnight. The reason we're not going out is because all of the residents of the Keys (disdainfully called the "Keysters" by my brother Clay and his wife Liz) are drunk ALL THE TIME - and make no sense ever - and will especially be inebriated tonight.

It's funny being around your family - especially around multiple generations at one time. You see every one's past and future all at once. And all idiosyncrasies and characteristics come out, like obsessive reading. Sometimes during the week I have been in kind of a storm, distracted by all the little details of every ones' personalities and interactions with each other and then suddenly a little chink of blue sky comes through and I see for a split second how normal it all is and how lovely. But that is only sometimes.

Things I've discovered this week:
- my brother Clay believes the 9/11 was a total government conspiracy. He's having us watch Loose Change later.

P.S. - Tonight I beat my whole family (being the 7th wheel I was all by myself on my own team while all the rest of the couples were together) twice at Scrabble. For this I want to thank the Facebook application Scrabulous and Claire, whom I play on a regular basis and is really good.

Also - around midnight my brother Cris and I decided it was a good idea to try to break open the $1 coconuts that my neice Natasha found - to no avail. But - my favorite quote from the night came as a result. I was trying to smash the coconut as hard as I could against the sidewalk outside the place we're staying and Cris advised "yeah, try the sidewalk, or you could throw the coconut against the palm tree which would result in huge amounts of irony."

I love New Year's.

Carrie and getting carried away with ridiculous travel plans

My friend Carrie is delightful and always eggs on the flights of fancy I have when thinking about trips or adventures I want to take. On the Myers-Briggs, we're both ENFPs and are totally more into the idea of things over the practical. Here's a list of trips that I want to take in the next year, along with the varying possibilities of me actually doing them:

- January: Mizzou has a ridiculous 5 weeks off for winter break. Awesome. There's a website my old co-worker showed me called lastminute.com Also, I want to check out cheapoair.com (I heard about it from a girl in one of my classes - I don't know how good it is). I want to go somewhere for a four days really bad. Maybe Montreal will finally work.
- May: My friend Dan is graduating from film school in Los Angeles a week after I graduate from Mizzou. I haven't seen the Grand Canyon since I was 15 months old. Carrie and I will take my car cross-country. Maybe.
June: various family trips and youth group trips (Illinois, Florida, North Carolina)
July: New York City for the first time ever. Sweet.
August: Beijing for the Olympics? If I go to Covenant Seminary, classes start the last Thursday of August, so that'll be cutting it tight. Three weeks in China. Is it enough?

...and after that is prolonging the wonderful student schedule where I get months off for travel. It's a good life.

Shanghai Expo 2010

more stuff on what will be there:

Dongtan Eco-City (article)

Cool Hunter article on Dongtan

World's Fair

Remember the World's Fair? Well, if you're from St. Louis you will, because it is constantly referenced as the glory moment in St. Louis history. It's the setting for Meet Me in St. Louis, it's how we got most of Forest Park, and is overall the best moment in St. Louis' life (besides Mark McGuire, of course, forgive me).

Yesterday I was thinking about all this and was wondering - Do they still have World's Fairs? And if they do, what does one do there? Lovely Wikipedia told me the answers to these questions:

1. Yes they still do, every 5 years, and the next one is in Shanghai, China in 2010
2. From what I can tell, most World's Fairs are about the city and what it is doing to improve technology, the economy, and life for its citizens and for the world. Pretty sweet.


Shanghai for May-October 2010, anyone?