I'm never flying again. No, really, never. Well, apart from three weeks from now when I go back to Singapore for Christmas, and then 10 days after that when I go to Vietnam with my mother and brother, but after that, I'm never flying again.

On Saturday afternoon, after we'd been ice-skating in Hyde Park---and then to the Authentic And Traditional German Christmas Market; please note that it was not just Authentic but also Traditional---my friends and I went looking for somewhere to eat. We dismissed cafe after cafe, pub after pub, restaurant after restaurant. Most were too crowded, some were too touristy, some were simply too closed.

Despite having been together for ninety kajillion years, Sean and I have never spent Christmas together. Don't get too excited, we're not spending this Christmas together either---I'll be in Singapore with my family, he'll be in Connecticut with his---but we have, this year, finally taken part in the time-honored ritual of lovey-dovey couples everywhere: choosing and decorating a tree.

Last night I had a few of my friends over for an evening we started calling Girls Night---and then immediately stopped calling Girls Night, because of the twee images it conjured of women sitting around in their pajamas, braiding each other's hair while half-watching Bridget Jones and talking about how to find a man. Our Girls Night featured none of those things, thank god, but it did feature gossip and bourbon.

I have this problem. Well, let's call it a disorder. Wherever I sit in a restaurant, I always think I could be sitting somewhere better.

Does this happen to you as well? It doesn't matter whether the hostess shows me to the table or if I have to choose it myself---actually, sometimes it's worse if I have to choose it myself---but whichever table I end up at, I always find myself thinking "wait, this is way too close to the toilets" or "great, we're right next to the door, now we're going to feel a breeze."

Whenever I go away on a trip, I feel compelled to shop myself into a frenzy right before it. This is never because I'm missing something specifically necessary to that particular vacation---hiking boots, for example, or a bikini---but rather because I suddenly go into a panic about, say, what I might wear on the plane or whether I should replace those pajamas I bought on sale at the Gap right after Valentine's Day in 2001, because, yes, right now while I'm trying to organize a hundred other things, right now would really be the perfect time to finally do that.

So listen, how about this: why can't we have advent calendars for every month, not just in December? Sure, we couldn't call them advent calendars anymore, I realize that, but perhaps we could get around the rebranding with something a little more secular. In fact, you know what, I plan to spearhead the campaign to bring advent calendars to the masses every day of the month, every month of the year! It could be a government program or something. Who do I talk to about that?

"Thank goodness we only have to do this once or twice a year now," I told him, as we were saying goodbye this evening. "Remember how it used to be?"

It's true, we've got so much better at this. Eighteen days apart? We laugh in the face of eighteen days apart, we warriors who've gone thirty, sixty, ninety days without each other. And we've got email now too, and cell phones, and text messages, and Skype, and IMs; even when we're apart, we're hardly apart.

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm big on anniversaries.