7 Minor Grievances I Face Every Christmas

Christmas is next week, and, like every year, I feel a flood of conflicting emotions. As an adult, I’ve learned to appreciate Christmas and the Holiday Season as a whole. This is due in large part to celebrating it secularly. Without the religious onus, the whole holiday is a lot more relaxed feeling. Do what you want, when you want, who gives a shit, no one. Pastafarian Holiday lasts from Halloween to the New Year, after all, and it only requires that you have a good time.

However, I was raised in a Christian home by a Christian family that seems like it wants to be super traditional but has a hard time coming to terms with the fact that it’s actually full of very modern, progressive people at its core. So Christmas was one of the big holidays where you have to do all the Christmassy things you’re supposed to do. It was a big affair. I don’t get super fuzzy feelings at Christmas, though, and I haven’t for a long time. And there are some very specific reasons.

1. There are traditions that no one else in my family it willing to do anything about but still expect to happen.

I’m super into tradition. I like there being this thing that you do every year that you can hand down. It creates symmetry and community and patterns. Every year we have Mexican food for Christmas, do family Christmas on Christmas Eve, and a whole host of other little things. In my family, everything breaks down, though, when more than a cursory effort is required to keep a tradition going.

It started with the Christmas tree when I was a kid.

Every year my mom would say these exact words “we’ve got to get the living room clean, so we can put the Christmas tree up.” Okay, she was correct in that regard. I grew up in a house that was perpetually a mess, and yes, to get the tree up, we needed to clean the living room. Except, it wasn’t “we” cleaning…it was “me” cleaning. Fine. Whatever. Par for the course for how things worked the rest of the year. So we’d put the tree up and decorate it. Again, by “we” I mean “me.” Christmas trees are supposed to be a fun family affair, but, no, it was me, sitting in the living room alone, doing it myself while watching Law and Order. Then Mom would come back in from whatever she was doing and proceed to tell me all the places that I needed to move ornaments around because it wasn’t quite right.

By my teen years, I was just done. Her yearly serenade became “We’ve gotta clean this place up so I can get a damn tree up. It’s been [x number] of years since we’ve had one up.” My response was, after putting away whatever three things I had in the living at the time, “okay, your turn.” When I left the house for good at twenty-one, we hadn’t had a tree up since I was fourteen. My sister put one up the past two years because she was living there and HAD to have a tree, but there isn’t one up this year. On the phone last night, of course, I was also met with “I really need to get this place cleaned up so I can have a tree.”

There’s also this thing my Aunt Judy started years ago where we do a photo slideshow of the year and watch it at Christmas Eve. When I was eleven or twelve, I started helping her with it because I was learning PowerPoint and I was “good with computers.” Now I do it in its entirety and have been for very nearly a decade if memory serves. I like doing the video. I got really good with Windows Movie Maker producing it every year. Last year, I finally got a copy of Adobe Premiere, and I stepped up my game. This year I’m going to include a title sequence made in After Effects (if I have the time, more on that later). Getting the pictures, however, is a pain in the ass. People in my family are taking pictures all the time, but getting them from all my cousins is like pulling teeth. And you wouldn’t think it would be hard. Just e-mail me the stupid things. But, no, I have to hound certain people via e-mail every day for a week. Facebook was the best thing that ever happened to me, in this regard. Click. Save As. Done. Then, of course, I get hounded the week leading up to Christmas with “You’re making the video right? RIGHT?”

Ingrates.

2. As a family, we’ve spent far too many Novembers, Decembers, and Januaries in hospitals.

My grandfather died December 12th, 2006 after a series of a dozen strokes starting when I was ten. Before that, he had spent at least five Christmases either in the hospital, neuro rehab, or just getting home from one of the two.The only thing that can make you feel more drained of hope than putting up a Christmas tree in a hospital room is doing it the second time. One New Years my sister got into one of her worst car accidents. Another is when the first seeds of the discontent were sown that would eventually dissolve her marriage. My niece, born about three weeks premature at the beginning of November, spent the first six weeks of her life in the neo-natal ICU, coming home just in time for her first Christmas.

So, the holiday season has a sort of sad magic for me. Good things have happened, (not everything is doom and gloom), but when your most pervasive memories of a certain time of year are bad ones, it’s really hard to break free from that.

3. I stress out about all the stuff I have to make

I tend to make a lot of Christmas presents. I’m, just…weird about presents, in general. It’s complicated.

So my weirdness leads me to making Christmas presents for people quite a lot. One year, everyone got crocheted beanies, scarfs, and/or mittens. This year, Mom, Sister, and Mom-in-Law are getting pillows and tote bags that I designed digitally and had printed via my own Redbubble store (obligatory link). Gran’s getting some updates to the great-grandkid illustrations I made for her a few years ago. In addition, I started doing yearly Christmas cards in 2011 that I hand draw. Then there’s the video I mentioned above….and oh, great spaghetti monster in the sky, just thinking about what I still need to accomplish in the next week is giving me a panic attack. Because of Ren Faire, I’ve been making making making since October, already, and I feel like all I’ve been doing is running out of time for the past three months.

It doesn’t help that I fed a solid week and a half of my life to Dragon Age: Inquisition. I didn’t regret it at the time. Still don’t. But I have to recognize the impact it made on my timeframe.

4. I always seem to get sick.

Early winter (i.e. the rainy season) is when my allergies start acting up, and sometimes I get so sick. I’m super prone to upper respiratory complications, and this year is no exception. It’s like my lungs are filled with cotton candy, right now, but I can’t up the dosage on my chest decongestant or I’ll go into weeble wobble mode. When I was a kid, I couldn’t really handle antihistamines, so there are hours of videos of me at church Christmas pageants standing in the back of the choir rubbing my nose. Oh, man. I just did it. *cough* *hack* *sputter* *sneeze* Excuse me while I go sleep for the next seventy-two hours.

5. Something about Christmas music makes me cringe all over. 

Call me all manner of grinchy insults, I’m starting to really grow weary of Christmas music. Maybe it was all the choir concerts, pageants, and caroling, I did as a kid. I just got tired of it, and the fact that it all stars on Black Friday, now, doesn’t help. Surprisingly, it’s actually the secular music (especially the modern pop stuff) that I dislike the most. I love hymns, just, in general, and the classic Christmas hymns are right up there as some of my favorite things to sing. A good arrangement of “Oh, Holy Night” fills me with the same frisson that “Love, Reign O’er Me” does.  But the pop singer renditions are what you hear on the radio and in stores, so that’s not nearly as fun for me.

For reference, this is my actual, honest to goodness, favorite Christmas song.

6. I’m occasionally wracked with ex-Christian guilt. 

There’s this big mega-church down the street from our house, and I pass by it pretty much anytime I leave the house. A few days ago, they put up a sign advertising their three Christmas Eve church services. Pretty much my entire childhood, even after we stopped going to church regularly, we went to Christmas Eve service to sing hymns, hear the word of God, take communion, blah, blah, blah. We would build Extended Family Christmas Eve around it, and my out-of-town cousins would come, too. It was all very pleasant. When I pass by this sign, then, I feel this little pang of guilt. “I should take Mom to a Christmas Eve service,” I think. “That would make her happy.” But I hate sitting in churches, anymore. Then, when I have kids, Mom’s going to want to take us all to Christmas Eve service, and I’m going to let her, but I’m going to have to handle it with my hypothetical children.

Humanist problems.

7. My mom is kinda shit at buying me presents, I don’t know what to do about it, and it makes me feel really bad. 

There is literally no way to make the above statement without sounding like one of those spoiled brats that complains loudly on Twitter that Daddy got them a white iPhone instead of black iPhone. I assure you, though, it’s more subtle than that and has gotten worse as the years progress. Part of the problem as an adult is that my specific interests have veered so far off into the ether that she’s now completely out of her depth when picking something out for me on her own. That’s fine, and I get it. In theory, I should be able to make up for this by giving her specifics, and we’ll come to an accord and have a pleasant gift exchanging experience. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

When I was kid, there were two things I asked for on every birthday and Christmas for, like, six years. Maybe more. A super soaker and an RC car. I finally got the RC car when I was sixteen as one of those “Hahah, we got you a Chevy for your sixteenth birthday” presents, but that was after I had stopped asking. I wasn’t hard to shop for, and I did get some great presents over the years. I was into Harry Potter, Legos, and Greek mythology, so you could pretty much buy me any combination of those things and I would be happy. But when there’s something very specific you keep asking for over and over again and you never get it and you don’t know why, you start to wonder what it is you’re doing wrong. Over the years there have been so many baffling little off the mark presents that it feels like one of those old text adventure games where you know what you’re supposed to do but you can’t get the exact command right. I’d ask for a specific book that I knew for a fact was easily available, and I’d get another book that was the same price if not more that I in no way wanted or needed and would eventually end up being sold to the local book buyback store. She’d get me a shirt that was just not in any way my style, and I would return it to the store and get two or three items on clearance that were much better suited to my taste and looked better on me. The 60’s classics CD collection was all well and good, but it wasn’t the Labyrinth Anniversary DVD I was hoping to receive and was literally at Walmart at that exact moment. It’s kind of laughable…except when it’s not

Second year of college I asked for some herpetology equipment to start keeping a leopard gecko. She got me the tank, light, substrate and few other things, but told me I would have to wait until end of January to get the actual lizard. I was like, “yeah totally. No probs. Thank you.” Then I opened my next present, and it was a $200 rain coat. I had never in my life up to that point and since, ever wanted, asked, or needed a rain coat. We live in almost perpetual drought conditions. It’s not really a thing around here. She got it for me because the last time we were at that store, I had commented on how I kinda liked the pattern of the material. Now, years later, I understand that she probably bought the coat on her in-store credit card, and really was short on the cash that would have been needed for the animal adoption. But I’d like you to pretend you’re nineteen year old me. You transferred to tech school from a university because it was more affordable You’re working part time to pay for most of your own tuition. You’re only asking for a pet because you’re having a hard time making friends at this new school. Then you’re told the one thing you asked for you can’t have while holding a couple hundred dollars worth of I-didn’t-need-this-shit in your hands. It almost feels like an insult. You know what also feels like an insult? Being given a stand mixer that won’t fit anywhere in your kitchen after emailing a certain person the exact make and model of the hand blender you want.  Or, even better, imagine receiving a bunch of little dessert bowls, custard dishes, tiny spoons, and other similar bullshit when you put together a wedding registry for a reason. We didn’t need ice cream shooter glasses for my imaginary dinner parties, Mom (and sister), we needed new measuring cups and some bath towels. Which I got the next day when I returned literally everything she gave us at the wedding shower to Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

She got me the exact sewing machine I wanted last year for Christmas, so maybe it’s getting better, but damn, it’s exhausting pretending you like a present when you receive it, then having to make the tough decision as to whether you lie about returning/selling it or let her down gently….again.

6 Confessions from my Chuunibyou Years

Chuunibyou is a Japanese slang term for “second year middle school syndrome.” It describes pubescent delusions of grandeur, know it all-ness, or a sense of being ascribed almost mystical levels of different-ness. Being a “special snowflake,” if you will. As the name suggests, it’s something that often begins in the second year of Japanese middle school (which is 8th grade). There are some tags on tumblr that are very rich with examples. Working with jr. high kids every other day, I’ve seen it quite a bit. It’s hilarious to watch because in a few years you know they’re going to look back and be so embarrassed by themselves.

I also see myself in them, because I had it, too. I was highly intelligent, a little weird, and had read far too many science fiction and fantasy novels. These factors combined had me do….unusual things.

If I had to pick one picture to encapsulate my teenage years, this would be it.

1. I was convinced I could see the future in my dreams.

In my defense, I had (and still have) hardcore deja vu. On a daily basis, I would see something or experience something that I KNEW I had seen in a dream. Not anything big. Just a smell, or a motion, or a change in light. I started keeping a dream journal because I knew, just KNEW that someday it was going to be important. I failed in this endeavor because I wouldn’t think to write down the weird, abstract dreams, and those were the ones that would cause my “ESP.” No proof, then, that I had super powers.

I totally did, though.

Now I think it might just be the result of a time travel malfunction a la Steins;Gate.

2. I promised all my friends that I would dedicate a book to them.

I started writing my first book when I was in seventh grade. I never finished it because it was dumb, but at the time, I had grand expectations. I was going to be a best-selling novelist by eighteen, and everyone had to know about it. So I not only bragged about it, I assured them that they would be acknowledge by my biographer. Now, I did write a book (that I do want to get published someday) and I’ve a had a short story or two published, but I feel I might have gone a little overboard back in the day.

3. I pretended I got attacked by a shark once.

With bandages and everything. It was a…complicated…fulfillment of a fantasy I had had since elementary of faking a death or injury so that everyone who teased me would feel bad for not being nice to me. I was a weird kid, but the bullying was also really bad when I was little. That, however, is an entirely different story.

4. “I only listen to music from before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

I actually said this on no small number of occasions. In jr. high and early high school I listened to The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles, The Who, and all those great 60’s and 70’s rock bands. At the time, we were in the dying throes of N*Sync and Backstreet Boys, the beginning of “Toxic” era Brittney, and pre-Destiny’s Child breakup, and I thought I was far too good for any of it. Now, a few years before, I was still listening to the Spice Girls, so this feeling of musical superiority was not something I had a right to.

5. I thought I was totally incapable of having friends because no one my age would ever be able to understand me.

Eh…I still have this sometimes, but I used to break down crying for, like, no reason. And anytime no one wanted to sit with me on the bus or I got picked last for lab groups, it would just make it worse and worse. I would console myself with sad 70’s songs and writing pseudo-emo poetry that I still have kicking around in an old notebook. “Seventeen” and “Alone Again Naturally” were my particular favorites.

6. I corrected people. All the time. Just because I hated people being wrong.

There’s a specific story that goes with this one.

I was in theatre in high school. One time in class we were going through a warm up with the word “quay” in it. That word, typically, is pronounced “kee” (I learned eventually that there were two acceptable pronunciations). The warm up leader, a year older than I, turned to me expectantly upon hitting that word to ask for pronunciation because that was a thing that happened.

“Kee,” I said.

Then, from a across the circle, this guy named David said, “no, it’s ‘kwey.’”

“No, it’s ‘kee.’ It’s like a ship dock thing.”

“Well, in Latin, it would be ‘kwey.’”

“This isn’t Latin, though.”

Then this girl Hannah who was a year younger next to me was like, “Uh, no. You’re wrong. It’s ‘kwey.’”

“I’m, like, 100% certain it’s ‘kee.’ It’s used in Treasure Island, and I had to specifically look it up, so I remember.”

“I never saw that movie.”

“It’s a book?”

And the whole thing went on and on and on, and no one tried to stop it. Not even the teacher. Finally it ended when David said, “Why do you always have to be right about everything?”

Now, I remember this happenstance almost verbatim for two reasons: it led to a two year fight with David about stupid ass shit like whether Lewis Carroll was on LSD while writing Alice in Wonderland (he was of the opinion that he was, while I said he probably wasn’t). To highlight just how dumb this particular argument was, LSD wasn’t even synthesized until seventy years after the publication of the novel. The second reason was that it royally pissed me off. Like, to an extreme. I wrote an essay about it for English later that year, and I still occasionally dwell on it ten years later.

This was probably the biggest reason people disliked me, even though, I thought, I was coming from a good place. I liked being right, I thought other people would like being right, too. Well, obviously, things don’t work that way. Correcting factoids is still a thing I do, but I try to be less irritating about it. I didn’t even correct our friend Alex when he got his East Asian history wrong while playing Risk….though I did complain about it to Husband the next day (mostly because I was too tipsy to remember the exact year of the Meiji Restoration, and, therefore, unable to provide an adequate rebuttal. That year was 1868, by the way.)

There are a slew of other stories of me being a complete and total dork, but we can’t live in the past, you know? Just go forward, knowing that you’re, hopefully, a better person that you were back then.

A Life in Lists

Why a list format? Isn’t life too much of a big beautiful thing to break it down into such trite, bite size portions? Maybe? Bees? I’m going to do it anyway–at least my life–and here’s where I tell you why.

 

1. My Life (and Probably Yours) is Already Comprised of Complex Set of Lists

I’m constantly making lists of things I need to do, things I need to remember, and things I need to buy. The grocery list is in the kitchen on a white board that’s constantly updated. There are more white boards in the office, a piece of paper taped to the inside of my craft “cabinet” with what I need to restock on, and a notebook filled with, just, junk that I needed to keep track of at the time.

Seriously,

unless I

write it down

I forget

almost

everything.

It’s more than notes scribbled on paper, though. From the minute you wake up, the day gets broken down into a series of lists. These are the things you must do before you leave the house, these are the things you must do when you get to work, there are the things you must do before lunch, these are the things you must do before you can clock out, etc. All day, every day, we’re checking off little imaginary lists just to get through it all. Missing one of those things on the list, no matter how small (like not putting on mascara) can make your day feel weird all over.

 

2. Lists Let you Store and Observe Stuff Outside of Your Brain for a Bit

There’s a reason we make lists and outlines and bubble charts and crap when we’re trying to figure stuff out. The human brain can hold, what, seven things in its working memory? So what if you need to know eight things? Write all that junk down, and bam, you don’t HAVE to try to remember it all. What more could you ask for?

In addition, have you ever made a pros and cons list? It’s when you’re faced with a decision, and you write down all the pros and cons of making that decision. Then you get to look at the list and see how many cons versus pros there are. Maybe you even add some numerical weight to each list item, then merely do the math. It helps sometimes, doesn’t it? Writing things down, in general, gives you a chance, to view things objectively. When it’s there in black and white, it’s harder to deny the truth of the matter.

3. Because I Can

And what exactly are you going to do about it?

4. The Brain Likes Lists

Why are Buzzfeed and Cracked so popular? Because there is something super appealing about bite sized information in easily digestible doses. We’re constantly breaking things down into chunks that we can better cope with. Books have chapters, magazines have articles, comics have issues. Try an experiment. Pick up a book without chapters in it. It’s harder to read, sometimes. Even something as light as a Terry Pratchett  novel (a number of the Discworld books are chapter-less) can feel daunting with only white spaces and little paragraph stars to break up the text. Compare a two hour movie to four episodes (maybe closer to five) of a television show. After which do you feel slightly more mentally taxed?

I’m mostly spewing anecdotal evidence, but things like memory chunking show that our brain automatically takes big things and breaks them down into smaller things that we can handle better. So, lists.

 

Is it good for the brain? Maybe not. Maybe so. Maybe we’ll breed bananas to taste like strawberries. They say that the internet is killing our concentration, and maybe they’re right. Maybe it took me two weeks to write a 600 page diatribe on lists just because I kept drifting between Jezebel and Reddit every time I sat down in front of a computer.

And, below, are all the articles I referenced when trying to write this

wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

http://brainconnection.positscience.com/how-we-remember-and-why-we-forget/

“The Shallows” on NPR.