Ana and I watch Stand Up or Die at Lauren and Jimmy's holiday party.

Some holiday party advice: The key to successfully eating one's weight in cheese products and crackers undetected is to participate silently in smalltalk around the kitchen island. It's all about misdirection - your hands never stop moving to load up your plate with goodies but up top you are nodding and grinning mischievously in agreement with a story whose beginning you missed. Occasionally, punctuate a raunchy line in the other party's story with a "hey-o!".

I got to experience Stand Up or Die for the first time. I was impressed by my friends' ability to get behind the mic and tell jokes that are funny because they are bad on purpose. Even from behind the protective shield of irony, I could tell they were nervous. Maybe next time I'll have the stones to give it a shot.

Nick's work holiday party was tonight. Oncology nurses gone wild.

He put in our names to do a song for karaoke without telling me and pulled me up to sing with him. He is pretty lucky that his girlfriend is a lush and an extrovert otherwise there would have been Words later.

Nick has been so busy the past few weeks. Coaching OSU's debate team at tournaments on weekends, regular 40-hour work weeks and a sociology class that ate most of his scant free time. Selfishly, it has been pretty unfun for a bored girlfriend in a freezing cold house with no motivation or energy to do much of anything except watch Law & Order marathons. And even I can grow tired of Jack McCoy's Moral Outrage. By the fifth hour or so.

So tonight was date night. Dining out always produces the best, funniest, most important conversations. No distractions, no television, no roommates, just you and a table and another person.

The plan was that everybody would bring holiday beer and we would watch A Christmas Story.

We didn't get to the movie.

My lovely former roommate, but forever roommate-of-my-heart, Jenn, and I ate a shit-ton of sushi and saw Milk. And sobbed our faces off.

Then I went home and stared at the wall for a few hours.

Hey, Nick, why don't we just get you Flash footie-pajamas at this point?!

Winter Science Reading Club this Sunday dealt with video games and narratology, but mostly, I was excited to hear about Matt's band, Tin Armor's, creepy stay at a bible college in Indiana.

Matt and Ana differed in regards to the future.

"My anarcho-primitivist group is gonna cut your cord!" -Ana.