1. What did you do in 2015 that you’d never done before? I spent a lot of time in the doctor’s office for various and interesting ailments. Let’s not do that one again, sweet body.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? Probably not. I barely even make them anymore because I get all weird and belligerent and stop doing them 2 seconds on. 

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? YES! We had three new babies this year! Two on my side (William and Ryan) and one on Duty’s (Maya). I loves me some babies!

4. Tell us a valuable lesson you learned in 2015? I’ll be writing more about this later but this year, the overarching lessons were: learn to receive (better) and commit to yourself .

5. What was your favorite new TV program? I love Jane the Virgin and blew through Season One on Netflix in record time. Sweet, funny and snarky – all the stuff I love. 

6. What would you like to have in 2016 that you lacked in 2015? Confidence in myself in whatever direction I move Practically Intuitive. I tend to stay ‘too long at the party’ when I find someone I love learning from (and being with) and lose all sense of who I am. 

7. What dates from 2015 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Hmm, maybe the Illuminate event back in June or the #sekritboyfriend show where I “woo’d” at the wrong time?

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Not offing myself during the great thyroid meltdown of fall 2015. (I kid) 

9. What was your biggest failure? It wasn’t so much a failure as an awareness that I keep trying to leave my business in one way or another and not because I don’t love it (I DO!) but because I’m just scared that I don’t really have what it takes or am fooling myself about what I can/can’t do. IOW, I lost big time confidence in myself. 

10. What was the best thing you bought? I love my new iPhone 6 plus almost more than anything in the world. I can finally see the screen!!!

11. Whose behavior merited celebration? Duty because he’s such a wonderful man and treats me with love and caring every single day (even when he’s being less than stellar, he’s head and shoulders above almost anyone else I know). I don’t know how the Universe conspired to make this work (and it’s not without it’s ‘interesting’ experiences) but it does. I love him so.

12. Whose behavior made you appalled and disgusted? Oh hai, all of you morons in the GOP. You, Donald Trump, most of all and you, his supporters, right behind. Do you seriously have ANY idea of how fucked we will all be? You think it’s bad now? Just you wait, kids. 

13. What song will always remind you of 2015? “Hello from the other side ….” by the one and only Adele.

14. What do you wish you’d done more of? Anything that involved getting my ass off the couch. 

15. What do you wish you’d done less of? Fart around like a big dog. Man, I am an Olympic level farter.

16. What was the best book you read? I do most of my ‘reading’ now via Audible books and so far “The Year of Yes” by Shonda Rhimes has been my favorite. She’s amazingly down-to-earth and real and made this book come alive in the reading of it. Do yourself a favor (KWIZ, this means you!) and check it out.

17. What one thing would have made your year measurably more satisfying?  If I felt that I moved PI forward this year instead of so far back in the fucking closet. This is such a regret I have, I can’t even begin to tell you and yet, it’s just an ‘interesting point of view’ and more choices are always available for me.

18.  Quote a song lyric that sums up your year. I’m going back to #sekritboyfriend’s song “Straight Ahead” for this one. 

So, yeah, I stole this from The Gal (something I haven’t done in a while) and it’s actually a harder task than I thought! So, I’ll do it in hunks of fifteen.

In order of how I remember them:

1) Float On – Modest Mouse
This song was out when we found out Lauren’s cancer had come back and it sort of became her theme song. There’s not one time I hear it now that I don’t think of her. The day after she left us, Cousin O’Cool was feeling beyond sad and asked Lauren’s spirit to let her know she was around. When she got into the car, this song was on the radio. She said “Rock on, girlfriend” and to this day, when we hear it, we know it’s La telling us she’s always with us in Spirit. “Don’t worry even if things end up a bit too heavy … And we’ll all float on okay…” – so many bittersweet memories here.

2) Babylon – David Gray
This is probably my most favorite song in all the world. And I don’t even know why. Whether it was the timing of it in my life and what was going on with me, the way he sings “let go your head, let go your heart …”, I have no clue. But this song feels like peace to me. And love.

3) Straight Ahead – David Cook
From his pre-Idol album “Analog Heart”, this one was a huge fan favorite. And when he spontaneously broke into it at the first show I saw him at, I just about lost my mind! I ended up without a voice for a few days from screaming so loud. “Take a minute just to breathe and think of everything you wanted and what you got instead.” This song takes me right to 2008-2009 and my first year of intense Dave-love.

4) Heart of Gold – Neil Young
My dad always called me his “heart of gold” and used to sing this song to me. This will always and forever be a reminder that my dad saw me at soul level. (Neil Young has one of those very distinctive voices and it fits this song perfectly.)

5) And you and I – Yes
Takes me back to 1980ish, just driving my old mustang convertible around Loch Raven with someone whose heart I kept trying to capture (and failed) but we had good times. He liked this kind of music and I liked him so … I liked this song. Even now, it’s really not my style but holds amazing memories for me.

6) Barely Breathing – Duncan Sheik
“Don’t know who I’m kidding, imagining you care” I could listen to this song forever and ever and never get sick of it. It’s part of a tableau of songs from a period in my life that took me to my depths. (Clearly, I resurfaced.)

7) By My Side – Godspell
I saw this play when it came out originally and loved it from the start. It’s such a profound song and one that moves me to this day. I sang these lines to Lauren in my head many times before she passed away, I so didn’t want her to go. (I tried bargaining my life for hers but the Angels told me it didn’t work that way.)

“Where are you going? / Far beyond where the horizon lies / Where the horizon lies
And the land sinks into mellow blueness / Oh please, take me with you”

The night I said goodbye to Lauren before she left us, I said to her: “Go meet your new road” – even though she was in a drug induced haze, I know, with every fiber of my being, that she heard me. And she did go meet that new road her soul had chosen. (Dag, I miss her.)

8) The Closer I get to you – Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway
Oh, I really wanted this to be about me and my sweet high school boyfriend but yeah, no. He had totally moved on from me by then and had come back from college just to go to the prom with me because he promised even though he didn’t want to. Such a pretty song, though.

9) Knocks me off my feet – Stevie Wonder
Same boyfriend, one year earlier – we were sooooo in lurve! He learned the piano parts to this most beautiful song and played them for me and when the band played it at *his* prom, he sang the lines to me “Oh but I love you, I love you, I love you more and more”. (This was before he went to Germany where he met the woman he eventually married. I reveled in being loved like that.)

10) Let it ride – Bachman Turner Overdrive
This song reminds me of being 13 and hanging out at home during the summer. That was also the year The Exorcist came out and the theme song “Tubular Bells” freaked me out like no one’s business. If it even came on the radio, I’d stop what I was doing and run to change the station. For some odd reason, these two songs are linked (not sure why now) and whenever I hear this, I always think of the other song. Weird. I love the guitar in it and always wait for just one particular moment in the song.

11) I can’t make you love me – Bonnie Raitt
Oh, the memories associated with this song. I was 32, so so so madly (and so dysfunctionally) in love with someone I couldn’t have. He bought me the BR cd and this song brings back my feelings for him. The way she sings it is full of longing, heartache and resignation – sums up my feelings for him tenfold. Still one of my favorites to this day.

12) Ghost – The Indigo Girls
“And I feel it like a sickness how this love is killing me / but I’d walk into the fingers of your fire willingly / and dance the edge of sanity / I’ve never been this close / in love with your ghost”

My friend Cindy made me listen to this song one day in a parking lot and said it reminded her of my desperate longing for the guy mentioned above. And it so so did. In fact, this is the song that both he and I remember so clearly as part of our relationship. (Yes, I actually do speak to him from time to time – waves to Hollinger – and don’t think he’d dispute that this song was so much about us at that time in our life.) One of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. Poetic and heartbreaking.

13) I’m a slave for you – Britney Spears
Don’t you *dare* laugh at me for this! (okay, maybe just a little) I am not a fan of Brit-Brit but I just dig this song. It’s more the music than the lyrics – anything that has that kind of rhythmic african tribal beat I sort of love.

14) Sweet thing and Ain’t Nobody – Rufus and Chaka Khan
Songs I sing for no one because I’ve not had a real, real love that fits these although I wished I had. (Love that lives in my head – yeah.) I can wail these two songs with the best of them (in my car, of course. Never, ever in public) and can feel these down to my bones. Great songs, both. “Ain’t nobody / loves me better / makes me happy / makes me feel this way ….”

15) Make Me – MWK
“Make me fall for you, as if I had nothing else to do / Let me hold you true to what I thought I knew” – MWK is the band that Dave played with before American Idol along with his buddies Andy Skib and Neil Tiemann. Andy has a really interesting voice and this song quickly became one of my very favorites. Dave and band have performed this now and again on tour and I know it’s heresy for me to say this but this song truly belongs to Andy. I will always choose Dave’s voice over Andy’s in a contest but no one owns this song like Skibbie. It’s a great big bombastic song to blast on your car radio on a summer day.