What's Going On

Christmas comes earlier every year

Much of yesterday was spent by my son moaning about going back to school. Spelling! Cursive writing! The horrors of school in general! Bedtime was filled with anxiety. Breakfast was misery served with despair. We made it to school in record time, in spite of leaving late with me in a flap. We got there so fast because there was no traffic. None! Which awoke my suspicions by the time we hit the normally insane left-turn intersection, and confirmed them when we zipped past the large sign in front of the school announcing today as a teacher work day. There was no complaining at all on the way home, just an unspoken agreement that he would spend the day watching cartoons on TV and I messing around on the computer. For my son it was either one last fabulous gift, or an early start on the holiday season of 2007.

Keep your rules off my psyche

I just got into a pointless and embarrassing disagreement on the phone with a person I actually like and respect. I realized mid way through the call that I was being a dickhead, which caused me to start apologizing gabbily, which made me feel like an even bigger dickhead.

This reminded me of thoughts I was having this morning driving my son to school while listening to the King's College Choir singing Christmas Carols (It just isn't Christmas, I mused to my husband, to his alarm, without English school boys and throbbing cathedral organs). The thought was that some people derive great pride and satisfaction from fitting into systems and some people, like me, have this compulsive resistance to rules.

So this morning, every time the person on the other end of the call said, "I just think we should play by their rules," I wanted to crawl down the line and strangle her. She wasn't even being unreasonable. It was just hearing those words "...follow...the ...rules..." It makes me want to run out into the streets and set cars on fire.

Nothing Seasonal

A couple of weeks ago, all of a sudden, blue jays were everywhere. Yelling from golden yellow tree tops, kicking red liquid ambar leaves around my front lawn.

The days that week reminded me of camping in BC. The ocean was in the air and frost coated the mornings.

It will do

I stopped for coffee at the Starbucks booth in Albertsons this morning. No discernible taste, but it was warm, sweet, and made me jittery. Good enough.

Yesterday morning, instead of doing the many things I needed to do, I decided to have a small seasonal nervous breakdown, largely because of the many things I needed to do. Like, for example, get the fucking parcels in the mail that are due in the UK for Christmas. Luckily, they hold to the 12 days of Christmas plan, where it isn't properly over until Epiphany on January 6. But I hate missing deadlines with the passion of the newly converted; after a lifetime of blowing off arbitrary dates, I now worship them with the conviction that my life depends on meeting that schedule.

I went through a phase in my 20's where I decided to liberate myself from arbitrary requirements in life. Like religious holidays. What was Christmas to me, a decided atheist since the age of reason at around 8, when I renounced Sunday school, church, and god as a boring scam. One Christmas I relentlessly spent completely alone with no human contact at all. What did it matter; it's only a date on a calendar. Have I been more depressed in my life? Well, probably, but I remember staring out my kitchen window forlornly at the fogged up yellow lighted window of my neighbour's house and thinking, Well I won't be doing this ever again. I made plans right away for that New Years Eve, you can be sure of that.

And ever since then, I have been careful to observe the conventions and complusions of the seasons. Because they are compulsions, I have finally learned, etched into the very whorls and grooves of the grey matter in our head. The more I read and learn about our human brain, the more I stop resisting the biological imperatives that make us seach each other out and do arbitrary ritual acts in each other's presence. Vast quantities of brain cells are devoted to this task, the tying of the bonds between us. I can resist the blanishments of an all powerful diety imploring me to worship him, piss off say I, but DNA, and neurotransmitters, and synapses, they must be obeyed. Resistance in this case really is futile, because once you are out of your adolescence, finally, who wants to mess up their brains any more?

Hence it is important to have someone to spend the day with, to get out of town, to send things away in the post on time, to make cookies and tie coloured ribbons around things in the house. And, when the timing is exactly right, to have a small festive nervous collapse in the middle of it all, and shortly before opening up that nice bottle of Bailey's waiting for you in the fridge.

Unfair

I am currently battling a band of very persistant ants. They are streaming in through a crack between a window frame and the wall behind it. They are scouting out my kitchen, looking for a home in one of my orchid pots. This has happened in the past, where one day I am idly watering a plant, and out comes pouring a trillion ants. This is then followed up with a hasty trip outdoors and the inevitable repotting of the plant, amid the frenzied melee of a trillion ants rushing to safety and me freaking out over being part of the escape route of a trillion fleeing ants.

This will not happen again. I am determined and I am pissed off about it. I hate killing things, hate it. But not as much, apparently, as having ants in my house. I am annoyed at being forced into this ethical corner by these little insects. I especially hate it when I move a plate or cup in the morning and wake the little buggers up. Really, they sleep, I swear, and they jump smartly to attention when they are unexpectedly woken up. I hate it the most when I have to kill an ant carrying an even smaller perfect baby ant in its jaws. It just sucks.

As a vegetarian who rarely kills anything on purpose, excepting mosquitos, I resent that these creatures are not keeping their part of the bargain. You are being most unfair I tell them between gritted teeth as I first stun them with a blast of sprayable Murphy's Oil Soap and then swab up their tiny corpses with paper towelling. It's just not right. I would happily leave you to live your little ant-y lives in peace outside. Why do you persist in doing this to us?

The ants are oblivious to me and my squeamishness issues. They are even oblivious to the litter of  soggy bodies all around them, which you think might clue them in to the folly of their ways. They run to escape from me when they do notice my presence, but otherwise they march in a stubborn determination, wave after little black speck wave, a miniature diaspora on a journey to death.

Dear Mr. Baker

Can we impeach him now?

The Race is On!

The results so far in the Christmas efficiency race are starting to come in. The top 3 spots are already taken, but there's still time for the rest of you to make the nonmedal rankings.

1. My husband's hippy sister, whose gift arrived from Canada the day after US Thanksgiving

2. My husband's princess sister, whose gift arrived from the UK on Wednesday

3. My friend's parents, who live in the same state as us, but still, whose Christmas card arrived today. Last year they also took the prize for first card.

As for me, I was thinking today of where to put my glass pumpkin as I guess the autumn holidays are now officialy over. I am still not quite ready to give up orange and yellow for red and green though.

I like the European/British tradition, where Christmas doesn't really start going until around December 20th and then lazes its way along until January 6 when you put everything away. It seems to give you more time to savour the event, or at least more holiday time to enjoy it. I mean, what is the hurry people?

Nancy and me

I imagine myself as Nancy Pelosi's crusty old mentor.

"I won!" she tells me, so happy. Her eyes shine and her broad smile lights up my dark, cramped, newspaper-strewn room. "I'm the first woman Speaker of the House!"

"Just don't screw up, Nancy," I tell her gruffly. "Just don't screw up."

There is to be no cutting of slack, no lightening of pressure for the golden girl.

Just don't screw up, Nancy.

Today I waited patiently

Yesterday I waited patiently while a woman of a similar age to myself had a long animated conversation with the game geek at Best Buy. Well anyway, she was animated. As I shamelessly eavesdropped, I discerned that she was anxious about buying the new PlayStation 3 for her 13-year old son for Christmas. Apparently they are soon to be released and will be hard to come by.

I also figured out that the medium-sized line up of people camping out in front of the store were there for the same reason. Not the 13-year old son part, necessarily, but the game console release. The woman was speculating that many of them were there to buy one and then flip it, making huge profits from desperate gamers and gadget heads. The Best Buy guy wasn't so sure.

I was there with a question that is stumping store employees around Redwood City, which is, can the GameBoy Advance and the DS communicate? Few people other than me appear to realize that the Game Boy Advance has a wireless communication adapter, which already makes me more of an expert than many retail game geeks.

So, how many other women of a certain age are out there, rapidly morphing into game experts at the speed of their son's electronic addictions? An army of boy-mothers who can go head-to-head, swirling acronyms around with the best of them, aiding and abetting their young in the never-ending exploration of the convergence of fun and electrons.