I was going to resolve to be less passive aggressive this year, but quickly realized that such a reform would prove impossible. Instead, I resolve to cook more in 2006. This shouldn't be too hard, since my beloved 10 per week meal plan will be disappearing along with the rest of college life a few months from now.


Anyway, I've been busily sleeping in here in San Diego, where, oddly enough, it's actually been cold and rainy. I've also been taking advantage of the culinary delights of southern California (In-N-Out Burger, 24-hour Mexican food, and 24-hour Denny's, often visited in quick succession), which are perhaps the region's only saving grace. An unexpected pleasure: my uncle, who is visiting along with a number of my mother's relatives, looks increasingly like a less severe version of J.M. Coetzee.


In the world of sports (and my "world" is limited to the Premiership, the NHL, Brown intramurals, the Providence Kickball League and a little bit of professional baseball and basketball), 2005 wasn't so bad a year. I picked up my first Brown intramural champion's t-shirt in the spring, for one of my two low-intensity ice hockey teams, and in the fall the Indy brushed aside the auld enemy's feeble challenge to take our all-time kickball series total to 1-1.

Brandon and Nathan place a lot of importance on local or regional loyalty to sports teams, but for me the most important set of qualities is the length, intensity, and consistency of fanaticism. For example, my embrace of Liverpool Football Club. I've never even been to Liverpool and probably never will, but I've followed Liverpool's middling fortunes pretty religiously over the past six years, and so feel that I'm entitled to enjoy their two major successes of the past year: an astonishing come-from-behind victory in the Champion's League final, and a run of ten straight league wins, which unfortunately came to an end today with a draw at Bolton.

And, though I'd never claim to be a real Sox fan, I did thoroughly enjoy watching NESN nearly every evening this summer. As I sipped my beers and peppered Nathan with what must have been very annoying questions about the Red Sox, I formed a strong attachment to two particular infielders: the quiet St. Louisan Bill Mueller, and the "cerebal Colombian" (Boston Globe) Edgar Renteria, with his endearingly ill-fitting cap. Sadly, both are now gone, and with them any chance of me returning to the TV this summer to follow the team.


Since I'm sure you're all extremely curious about my winter reading list, I'll give you an insider's view of this massively mediocre work in progress. I've decided to proceed in pairs of books (one serious, one not so serious). So far I've finished Isaac Deutscher's The Prophet Armed, the first installment of Deutscher's classic trilogy of Trotsky biographies, and Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country, which I'm writing about for the next installment of the Brown Review. Right now, I'm working on Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, a collection of the Marxist geographer David Harvey's work over the past three decades, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Next up is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and either Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, since I'm getting post-Bleak House cravings for a mammoth Dickens social novel, or George Gissing's New Grub Street. Lurking somewhere on the horizon (appropriately, I suppose) is Fredric Jameson's recently published Archaelogies of the Future, Jameson's first sustained treatment of the topic of utopia--it's been one of his long-standing interests, dating from the 1970s--and perhaps his most important book in 15 years.