Long Time No . . . Whatever (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Holidays)

(TL;DR? Just scroll down and click on the Spotify link!  The xmas music title is not false advertising, promise.)

Christmas and I have not always had an easy relationship. As an atheist Unitarian with one Jewish parent, I have never really been on board for the specific mythology of the holiday, and as a snotty, depressed teenager I wasn’t a big fan of the artificiality and consumerism. (Or so I told myself - in reality I think I was as much trying to manage the weirdly high expectations I still somehow had for the season of cheer.)

In fact, when I was a kid, Hannukah was kind of our big winter family get-together, because my mother’s side of the family had a bunch of cousins with whom to play dreidel and get into mischief. I have very fond memories of the New Jersey Hannukah parties, though looking back at the photos and videos I can see that they were basically just pure chaos with latkes.

Christmas, by comparison, was a quiet holiday celebrated with my father’s parents. It was beautiful and bounteous, to be certain - we got our share of awesome toys, snow and caroling. But I guess the relatively subdued nature of the holiday, combined with the waning of the Hannukah party tradition as we grew older, rendered Christmas susceptible to the charming negativity that I brought to most things I did between ages 13 and 19. Anyone who's known me a while can verify that I could be quite a pill during those years, and at no time was it worse than December (with the possible exception of my birthday, yet another vaguely-defined wintertime celebration filled with unmet and un-meet-able expectations).

In any case, here’s what it took for me to come around on Christmas. 1. Don’t celebrate Christmas one year, and 2. Go to Hawaii. At the same time, if you can swing it. My family spent the last week of December in Hawaii with Jewish relatives about a decade ago now, and it was THE BEST time. We didn’t really do much to celebrate Christmas OR Hannukah that year, because the cousins were all old enough that we didn’t really need to do gifts, and after all Hannukah is a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish religion. I did insist that we eat out Chinese (well, Thai, as it turned out) on Christmas night because, deliciousness, but other than that we were decidedly non-traditional. We spent Christmas morning body-surfing at Makapu’u beach. Listen: it doesn’t get much better than that.

Since then, the whole holiday season has been a different ball game. Once I could embrace the winter holidays as an adult with all the emphasis on what you do and who you’re with - not what you get, or whose religion means what - things started turning around. And once the holidays really felt like a choice instead of an annual obligation, suddenly they were a choice I wanted to make. It didn’t hurt that my parents followed the Jersey snowbird tradition and invested in some Florida real estate a few years ago in preparation for retirement. Ever since, the holidays have been beach-infused, present-free and pretty darn nice.

Because nothing I do is really important unless it has a soundtrack, my holidays now are also pretty music-filled. And because no soundtrack of mine would be complete without some really beautiful, silly, and f-ing weird stuff on it, my christmas music is AWESOME.

Crank it up.



P.S. I recognize that this whole post just REEKS of privilege: “I used to hate the holidays, but now we go to the beach every year and I love them!” For the record, the only way we could visit Hawaii was because we stayed with our relatives there and used airline miles to fly - and it was still a really expensive trip for the family. My parents are actually underwater on the real estate they purchased in FL just before the real estate bubble burst, and on top of that they spend a good chunk of their free time wrangling a variety of totally insane, occasionally non-paying renters. Everyone’s doing okay, and we’re all incredibly lucky. I truly recognize and appreciate the opportunities I have and how they’ve shaped my thoughts, and I also recognize that nothing is as simple as it may seem.

Daylight Savings Mind

Day three of rain here in DC, and it’s getting darker every morning. Just as it did during the deluge in mid-September, this kind of weather spurs a particularly powerful impulse to contemplate every mistake I’ve ever made and catalog every failure in my life. Sometimes I literally make lists. SUPER healthy, I know.

Things aren’t even that bad. I’m keeping busy, spending time with friends and family, seeing shows, planning a big trip at the end of the month, taking small steps professionally . . . opening my mail, watering the plants, reading the news . . . all sorts of semi-adult and reasonably functional stuff going on around here. But I gotta admit, brain-wise, the ol’ belfry seems to be filling up with bat guano. And while I KNOW that (to torture the metaphor) said guano may be valuable for its properties as a fertilizer, that doesn’t make it superfun to have in my brain where normal, happy thoughts should be. PLUS as it turns out mining bat guano is really bad for bat populations, so there’s that.

In conclusion, shut up brain, shut up your face.

Right now I’m pinning a lot of brain-clearing hopes on the end of daylight savings time. Anything that makes my first hour of consciousness each day a little more sun-filled is a pretty good plan in my book, and who doesn’t like an extra hour of sleep now and then? It’s like a mini-snow day, a reminder of forces beyond my own little life. Natural phenomena really have a pretty profound impact on my mood. I'm pretty sure my brain chemistry changes substantially every time I take a walk at lunchtime or stop to smell a flower on my way home from work.*

Probably this means that I should be outside more or something CRAZY like that. Maybe if the f-ing rain ever stops. Tonight I’m going to see 50/50 because I really enjoy snotting all over myself in public apparently, and if all goes as planned tomorrow will find me gnawing on a turkey leg while watching some jousting in bumfuck Maryland. That’s outdoors, right?

And the sun just came out, for a moment anyway. Schizo weather. I’ll take what I can get.

See you on the other side! Hopefully at a post-5-pm-sundown happy hour, because that extra light in the morning always comes at a price. Weather jerks.



*If you’re in the Dupont area, there’s still one dumbass magnolia flowering over by the Brookings Institute. You have to climb up on a wall in heels and will probably spill pollen all over yourself, but it’s worth it.

*And in other news, I have officially become my grandmother.

Rockin' the Suburbs

This week I'm out in the NoVA 'burbs taking care of this 80-pound beast of adorableness, while my parents are in Florida and my brother's in Hawaii.





(I know. My family's got it rough.)

I've decided to treat the week as a mini-vacation, though I'll still be working. I'm taking a break from all TV, except workout videos, and trying to keep other screen-time to a minimum. I haven't opened my laptop since Friday morning. So far it's been pretty nice.

Of course, suburban life has its downsides too. I have a car at my disposal, which is not so much a bonus utility for moving/IKEA trips like in the city as it is a necessity for getting anywhere in under 45 mins (if I'm lucky). Even a fancy "planned community" like my hometown can only do so much with bike trails and carefully placed shopping centers. On the other hand, the places I CAN get to on foot are pretty uniformly gorgeous - quiet creeks and swaying poplars and serene lakes. And thanks to the dogface, I am obliged to frequent these locations, albeit usually with a little plastic-bagged excretory "present" in hand.

The quiet of the empty house has also provided me ample opportunity for contemplation, which is a blessing and a curse. I've used some of my reflection time to go through the detritus left in my old bedroom. Last night, after a rousing internal debate about exactly how many pages of ten-year-old notes about James Baldwin I really need to keep around Just In Case,* I found myself in this remarkably cliched situation: sitting on the floor holding open a sweetly painted white jewelry/music box with my name on it, listening to the tune as a little ballerina spun in the pink sateen interior. So much for tough-minded room cleaning; hello pointless sentimentality. I brought the box to the guest room, where I'm staying this week, and stored my wedding ring inside for overnight safekeeping.

Just so as not to leave this post on such a maudlin note, I'll end with this other intriguing window into my young mind:





Why, yes, that IS 12 naked Barbies, several decapitated or dismembered, and one lucky lady** wearing ALL of their clothes. Why do you ask?



*Two? Let's go with two.
**The lucky lady happens to be my Brooke Shields doll, the only Barbie I owned who mysteriously came with painted-on underwear. She really was clothed thoroughly.

Use Your Words: Lag Time

This morning I received some good advice from an old friend who once told me (quite rightly) to "get my shit together."  It seems that time has come again.  I've been a little less motivated at work lately than I could be, I haven't worked out at all since the honeymoon, and a number of Annoying Adult Tasks (dentist appointment, new checking account, ) have been languishing on my mental to-do list.  I haven't been doing nothing, to be fair - yesterday I met up with our photographer (pro pictures coming soon!), baked a cobbler, met friends for a drink, and cleaned the apartment with E - but my emphasis hasn't really been on Serious Personal Responsibility or growth recently so much as Should I Get A Hand Tattoo.  (I submit to you that the two really are quite mutually exclusive.) 

On the one (not-yet-tattooed) hand, I will say that it's quite nice to feel so comfortable in my life and in my skin that I can pursue fun without massive guilt or anxiety.  In some ways this is new for me - I've never been a super confident or terribly spontaneous person, though I might like to think of myself that way.  I think it's also the result of my recently-celebrated partnership with E, which has a distinctly stabilizing effect on my whirring negative-Nancy brain.

On the other hand, 30 is staring me in the face and it's probably time to get some ducks in a row*.  For a while now I've basically just been congratulating myself (and spending a shit-ton of money to have other people congratulate me) on my solid, happy relationship, while other grown-up goals of mine (home ownership, professional development) fell by the wayside.  And I can't help but notice that, from a distance, that aforementioned stabilizing effect can look a little bit like laziness and complaceny.

Tough love says: the relationship is a lot, but it's not everything.  And the best way to undermine it is to shirk other responsibilities. So, action time.  Well, work time**, really, followed by a free screening of Fright Night (What?  I already have the passes and they'll just go to waste otherwise!  I can't do ALL the things in one day, right?)

But seriously.

What do you do when you need to buckle down?




*They're wily!

**Two ironies: 1) Completing this post made me (slightly) late for work - guess who's staying late today? and 2) When I did arrive at work, I was wearing lipstick, a very bland but work-appropriate outfit . . . and these (which did NOT cost me $183).  Hello sensible keep-at-work loafers!  See you at 5:30, shoes of amazingness.

My Cup (of Words) Runneth Over

So far, the title of this blog has been partially disingenuous, considering its content.  I do use words here, but I could just as easily have named the blog “UseYourYoutube.”  There are a number of potential reasons for this, some better than others, but either way I do recognize the fact of the situation.

However, (and who didn’t see that word coming?) this weekend I had the rare and wonderful experience of spending an uninterrupted 36 hours with some of the nearest and dearest friends from different parts of the last decade and a half of my life.  I don’t think I can actually convey in words what this meant to me, and I’m not sure I did a good job of conveying it to my friends during the weekend, but I can say that it was . . . just  tremendous.  Although my weekend ended somewhat anticlimactically with some serious gastric distress, the easy rhythm of being surrounded by amazing, familiar, loving people – and the attendant sense of deep gratitude for such – will surely be my major takeaway.   In short, I had a weekend-long Friend-Contact-High™.  It was pretty cool.

On the way home from this adventure, I was thrilled to discover a fabulous aftereffect of the FCH phenomenon, as it will henceforth be known.  I am not a very good car-rider to begin with, and the aforementioned gastric difficulties (happily self-inflicted, I should note) persuaded me that strolling the final mile home in the fresh air would be a better choice than spending any further time in a car, even to chat with the very good pal who was driving.  E was out doing chores in the vicinity of my drop-off point, so we met up, and then he took a cab home carrying my suitcase and the many awkward/heavy things he bought at Target (seriously, how many bags of soil do we really need?).  I walked the rest of the way to the apartment, enjoying the sunshine and occasionally stopping to smell a rose - as I am wont to do.

While I was walking, I started doing what I always do when I’m alone and unoccupied: telling the story of myself, to myself.  This is something I assume everyone does to some degree, though the details and scope may vary - from telling the story of a work day to the story of a relationship to the story of one's whole character.  In my own story-telling, I tend to take a relatively long view. I recognize that such stories can have limited utility, and when shared can be really obnoxious, so I’ve been keeping them more to myself these days.  But as I was walking, words and stories and ideas came flooding through me in a way that they haven’t done much, of late.  I felt eager, even anxious, to get home and write it all down.  I can’t remember the last time I felt so motivated to get home and write.   Being with people who knew me so well, and who I knew so well, for that amount of time (frequently in a hot tub, with substantial servings of wine) opened some aperture in me that had been slowly contracting without my knowledge or consent.  It felt exciting, but not entirely foreign, and I enjoyed the unusual sense of urgency.

As I approached our building, it occurred to me that this feeling is probably the genesis of all the ubiquitous ensemble dramedies/cinematic circle jerks that litter the television and movie landscape.  Gathering a group of friends in one place with no real responsibilities aside from telling stories to each other really does create a synergy that is distinct from everyday and one-on-one interactions.  I still think ensemble dramedies are almost uniformly clunkers, because they are so painfully self-aware (and they so frequently, and inexplicably, end with a pity fuck – e.g. The Big Chill and St. Elmo’s Fire).  By the third ham-fisted speech I’m always reminded of this exchange from Anchorman:

Ron Burgundy: We are laughing and we are very good friends. Good buddies sharing a special moment...
Brian Fantana: Don't say anything Ron; just let it happen.
Ron Burgundy: ...laughing and enjoying our friendship, and someday we'll look back on this with much fondness.
Brian Fantana: Yeah, yeah.

But I have to admit that the Ron Burgundy mindset here is kind of my bread and butter.  I can absolutely understand how screenwriters get FCH after a weekend like I just had and can’t resist the urge to turn it into a self-indulgent movie like Four Seasons. 

I didn’t write a movie today, but I did write a blog post.  Whether that’s better or worse is debatable, but it’s certainly cheaper.