Goodbye Christmas

Well another Christmas has gone by and with it some of my favorite Christmas traditions.  Like visiting the Christmas display at that double over on

Frebis Avenue

that has the left side of the double with about two thousand lights, a Santa on the roof and baby Jesus in the yard.  (I love the mingling of Santa and Jesus) and the other side of the double has a bare bulb on the front porch.  Literally the left half of the yard is so crammed with wise men and blinking sleighs and big hot-air-filled nutcrackers that falling snow can’t hit the ground and the right half is dead bare.  Maybe a bike in the yard.  Holiday Americana.

            I will miss my cat Chelsea peeing on the tree skirt.  Each year she plans a novel covert mission to urinate on the tree skirt and executes it brilliantly.  I thought this year that I had strewn enough presents around to make it an unappetizing urination station, but she managed to soak a special order book, entitled “The Girl Behind the Song”, which is now entitled, “The Piss on Top of the Girl Behind the Song”. 

            I will throw away that ten dollar JC Penney coupon again this year because I can’t find a JC Penney to shop at.  I know where they are but I am unwilling to drive to one.  (Note to JCP:  I might navigate for a $25. coupon though)

            I will miss the lights on the pathetic tree we always get since I refuse to spend more than $25 for it, you know, because it’s dead.  This year it leans right.  I will pack away the abbreviated Herbie the dentist ornament whose legs broke off the first Christmas I had it.  It goes back to the land of misfit ornaments along with the City Center ornament they gave away to the first 500 patrons on Black Friday 1992.  Downtown shopping.  That was a lasting idea.  And regarding shopping, I will miss the nightly reminders on the news that we are not spending enough money out there in retail land.

            Goodbye (until next Halloween) to the holiday songs whose lyrics I inject the word ‘cock’ into.  There’s the obvious Jingle Bell Rock, but there’s another more annoying that goes like this:

It’s the holiday season

(the holiday season)

And whoop de doo

And hickory dock

And don’t forget now

To hang up your sock,…

What the hell is that song?  Whatever it is it deserves to be fouled since it’s bogus to begin with.  The only true Christmas songs that deserve to be recognized are

1. Judy Garland singing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas (because it’s very depressing)
2. Bing Crosby singing God Rest You Merry Gentleman (very depressing)
3. and Barbara Streisand singing I Wonder as I Wander (you guessed it)

You should have the feel from a good Christmas song that there may or may not be a goose this year, and the boys are off fighting The Big One, and everyone will have to muddle through somehow.

            Ahhh, goodbye to sausage cake until this time next year.  If you don’t know what it is, you should.  Let me just say this, instead of butter, it’s sausage.  Ever creamed sausage with sugar?  Heaven.  I shall miss the wanton consumption of sweets, ales and electricity.  Now as the days get longer and colder, I’ll be fighting with the cats and the boots to get a spot on the furnace.  If I seem more caustic in the days to come, I’m really just cold.  Until April.  Happy Holidays everyone!

Most Annoying Word

I was logging on to AOL the other day and I always get swallowed up by those damn links just trying to get to my mail, I’m such a sucker, “I don’t know, what are the ten worst cities for garbage?”.  Thirty minutes later I arrive at the inbox.  The teaser this day was ‘most annoying word two years running’.  I cannot go on without knowing.  Turns out it’s whatever.  I know, right?  Seriously?  I was like, that’s all boring, you feel me?  (Just laying out some other options) 

The Marist Poll, the company who conducted the research, crowned whatever the most annoying word two years in a row.  I’d like to offer hilarious.  That’s my word this year.  It’s not really annoying itself as a word; it’s expressing a positive sentiment.  But the ubiquitous use of it is a symptom of a virus in this culture.  Very few things make us laugh anymore.  Myself included.  I say this phrase and I hear other people say it everyday. 

Oh my God, that is so hilarious. 

            You relay a funny anecdote and the person is not laughing but still wants to acknowledge the intrinsic humor and rewards the teller with the sentence,  "Oh my God, that is hilarious!"  I maintain that IF it’s so downright hilarious, the listener would be laughing and while they are laughing (an indication that something is indeed hilarious) wouldn’t have time or breath to stop and announce how hysterical the thing is.  Imagine if we were all at a comedy club and the sounds of a comedian onstage “killing” would be some cacophony of audience cheering, HILARIOUS!, VERY FUNNY INDEED!,  I’m in HYSTERICS!!

            Have we arrived at 01-01 2011 where nothing is indeed side-splitting funny?  Have we really at this exact moment in time officially done and heard and seen it all?  That like the finite combinations of notes creating melodic and pleasing sounds, have we reached the statistical finish-line of words and motions creating humor? 

            They’re showing the original It’s a Wonderful Life at the Drexel this week.  They had to extend the run.  I say it’s indicating a nostalgic direction we need.  Comedy is like your favorite toy until boredom reigns and your mom puts it away and when she sets it back out is all shiny and super-fun.  Every two years or so my dad re-sends me that church bulletin blooper email, and to be honest, I laugh all over again. 

            On Sunday a special collection will be taken to defray the expenses of the new carpeting.  All wishing to do something on the carpet please come forward and get a piece of paper.

           

That’s a toy I forgot I had.  So maybe we need to rummage through the toys for Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the Marx brothers and Harold Lloyd.   Find Jerry Lewis directing the choir singing “I Like to Hike”, and anything with Eve Arden and Don Knotts.  Let’s find our collective laugh. This holiday season, get to your Netflix queues and load up on some gently used toys.  And laugh till you pee. 

Incontinence.  That’s my Christmas wish for you.  Hilarious.

Applause Applause

As part of my profession in education (and I am sure a part of anyone’s profession in corporate, or medicine) I suffer a lot of morning meetings, professional development, breakfasts and award banquets.  And I’m compelled today to blow the whistle on the inane, cultural practice of applauding for every bit of minutia that occurs at these events.

People and things I am sick of applauding for (in no particular nauseatic order)

1. The planning committee
2. The governing board/council
3. The servers for bringing the chicken
4. The prize committee
5. The politicians and candidates in attendance
6. The previous speaker (again) at the request of the current speaker
7. The corporate sponsors in abstentia
8. And the foursome at your table after sharing your brainstorming ideas back to the group at large

OMG!  Thunderous applause!  You stood up and read your group’s ideas right off of that chart paper.  Very deserving!  Your ideas are magnificent if not strangely similar to table number three’s.

            Let me check my negative temperature by first saying that yes, I am grateful to the planning committee.  I mean without the planning committee we wouldn’t have these dinner banquets.  Wait a minute, wait a minute!  Are you saying that we wouldn’t have dinner banquets without a planning committee?  That’s right.

I must go away somewhere and figure this thing out.

            Why can’t we all stand up and in unison say ‘Thank You!’  Wouldn’t that be kinda cool?  Or we could send the political candidates a pizza or a dozen doughnuts.  America loves that shit too.  We outperform expectations for doughnuts and pizza.  Missy tells me that applause is free and it’s immediate.  But I say it’s meaningless.  Listen, applause should be reserved for the notoriously underpaid artistic professional who, on a nightly basis, delivers the emotional goods.  It is for performers who move me, and who regard spontaneous heartfelt applause as currency.  The physical effort toward ‘clapping’ at the conclusion of the first reading of the projected fiscal budget should not be equal to or greater than that for the guy playing Willy Lohman.  Even at the semi-professional level.

            And in the name of all that’s holy, can we please stop, “Giving ourselves a round of applause!”  What a bunch of shit.  Trust me on this, I’ve done nothing out of the ordinary today to warrant coming to a complete halt to applaud myself.  I get paid to be brilliant at work, and as a fully functioning adult in the workforce since thirteen, I’m absolutely down with the whole pay-for-work structure. 

            As we go gaily forward in this wacky culture, let’s be mindful of all the times we are asked to clap like a trained seal, and instead, let’s be creative.  When directed to give another round of applause to the previous speaker, let’s all, with grateful hearts, lob doughnuts toward the podium.  But please be sure it is underhand.  There is that fine line…..

On Hygiene in the Bleak Midwinter

     I would gladly join the whole non-bathing, natural resource saving movement we're seeing right now, if it were indeed, not bathing.  But they still take sponge baths.  Number one--that is way too active of a cleaning for me.  Secondly, it's like 62 degrees in my bathroom in the pre-dawn hours and who wants to stand there naked in the cold washing priority bits one by one?  It sounds like torture to me.  And while we're speaking of torture, I recoil at the thought of staring at my naked ass in the mirror, all goosebumps and Albert Einstein.  There's a daily espresso shot of self esteem I can do without.
     The takeaway from this is not that I'm slovenly, on the contrary, I bathe everyday.  But I hate it.  My shower-tub combination is not a full bathtub, it's a triangular-shaped shallow half-tub, just big enough to suffice as a shower floor.  I can sit in it and bathe, but once I'm in, there's really just enough room left for a few carrots and onions.
This is not a big place.
     If I lay down in the tub, my torso is submerged, but not only are my legs not in the tub with me, they are hanging out of the bathroom proper and into the hallway.  Shaving requires a multi-room logistical outline.
I'm talking small.
     I look back as I get up from my bathwater to see that what I displaced was almost enough to cook pasta.  The showering/bathing isn't really the issue, though, it's everything that comes once you pull that shower curtain aside.  It's the blow-drying, the moisturizing (too cold to moisturize, I'll do it tomorrow), the flossing, brushing, plucking, fluffing, puffing ritual that comes after.  Listen, everyone loves to have the carpets cleaned, but you still have to put all the furniture back when it's done.  And once cleaned, will the carpets still match the drapes?
     To sum up, I'm thrilled to have the geographical resources and opportunity to practice (without perfecting) the art of good hygiene, but secretly wish we could all be post-war England, valiantly going ripe for the cause, all stiff-upper-lipped and stinking of curry.  Or better yet, that we could stroll through some seven foot deep pool of drycleaning fluid just as we are, and walk out sparkling clean and furniture back in place.
   

Civil Neurosis

Why I say thank you when I want to say screw you.

Random grocery store encounter.  The cashier doesn’t look up, doesn’t greet, bags without seeing me, tears off the receipt and hands it to me without making eye contact and I say, “Thank you.”  What?!?  I storm out, fuming at myself.  What am I a trained seal?  “I sincerely appreciate you regarding me with the level of animosity reserved for child molesters.”  I say to myself next time I’m not going to do that.  Next time if the cashier doesn’t show me kindness why I’m just going to be just as shitty and rude.  So maybe the next time starts to unfold soon enough so I haven’t healed(forgotten) from the previous insult and  I recognize it as a possible negative encounter as it’s unfolding and I think of all the sincerely underemployed right now and I stare down this job-robbing jackass and declare, “Oh it’s on!” (in an inaudible whisper) and I stand firm and don’t say anything either and time starts to crawl, and he bags the items one by one and I stare at a pimple on his face, wondering if he has to stop ‘working’ more often than others to eat his overly processed food to maintain that unwavering icky energy. My eyes are warm and my vision has gone all tunnel, and for a brief moment I believe he has sensed my power, and right as I am about to blow air hard out of my flared nostrils, he tears off the receipt and hands it to me, and I take it silently and I turn and exit and we made the whole exchange without a word, and whatever secret tally he was trying to get on the day was busted because I got him.  I walk out of the store all jelly-legged and exhausted from the whole affair.  And strangely craving trans fats. I celebrate with a Little Debbie Nutty Bar.  It’s a win but it feels hollow.  And chocolate covered.  The moral for me is that civility, like spirituality, isn’t about a reward later on with seventy-two virgins in some place that doesn’t exist, but about how I feel right now.  I feel like being thankful.  The other just requires more calories than I am willing to eat.

Three times a lady

            Exhibit A:  November 16, 2010

    Things happen in life in threes, right?  Celebrities tend to die in threes, three strikes and you’re out, Christ rose in three days.  My own personal trilogy is I hit my head in threes.  True-- if I hit my head on something, I have the unfortunate doom of knowing I will hit my head two more times in the next 24 or so hours before the evil passes and I go another year and a half or so without knocking into something.

            So I am getting into my car Monday morning for the 7, 258^th time when my inner feedback loop mistakes me for a midget me, and I crown myself hard on the upper edge of the door cavity.  So hard, in fact that I feel my brain slosh and slam into the other side of my head, almost qualifying as an inside-out blow number two.  Natasha Richardson  tells me to go inside and get an ice pack.  The principal greets me as I arrive at school a half hour late Monday morning wearing an ice pack on my head. 

I’ve had some monumental cracks to the head in my lifetime.

            Like the faulty access ladder that’s supposed to smoothly release out of the attic, I met Jesus on that one. He speaks French.  Then there was the 1972 Oakland Elementary School failed swingset experiment (I still can’t blink in unison), the unfortunate ice-curling incident, and the numerous head landings from my competitive days as a brave and average gymnast.  In fact, my life story could really best be told as a rich and surprisingly lengthy video montage of nothing but me hitting my head on stuff.  (As a side note, I would use a Herb Alpert tune behind the video)

            But now I am thinking that all of this cumulative head trauma is starting to take its toll.  Sometimes when I’m tired my right hand shakes a little when I am trying to eat.  Almost unnoticeable it is except for the fact that a dozen or so corn kernels start out on the fork yet none actually reach their final destination.  It’s a frustrating diet that has me now smashing peas on my fork like a Brit and steering clear of certain foods.  Who needs the mess?  Take soup for example, what I find I’m looking for now in a soup is not complexity of flavor so much but rather a certain counterweight, like you’d find in a beef stew or a hearty chili.  I’ve tried to concentrate and fight the shake, believe me, like Mohammed Ali I’ve fought it, but now I must resign to my tremors and embrace them.  And now that I’ve come clean with this, don’t pity me and don’t avoid me, just keep your plate away from mine and it won’t be peppered with corn kernels or soaked with chicken broth.

            So after a long day at work and rehearsal, I get into bed, completely wiped out, feeling the lump now fully realized over my right ear, and I sink back into the pillow with much gusto, only to be four inches taller again, a discrepancy that unfolded loudly on the headboard behind me.  While it sounded worse than it was it completely qualified as number two.  Will the third be an aftershock or the capper of all?  Will I hit the left side, completing an equator of lumps around the middle of my head?  A friend offers to strike me on the head to bring the trifecta of misery to a premature fruition but I decline.   Don’t screw with destiny, I tell her.