Meaningless Christmas, Don’t Do the Dew, Busy Times in Bingo Square
Contrary to most of my entries, this one will be many small things, so bear with me. I have need to go on for awhile, hence the category of “Train of Thought”.
I realized last night in the shower (I do a tremendous amount of thinking in the shower) why it is that things like Christmas no longer are fun like they used to be. I think it has to do entirely with the idea that now that I’m grown, I see through all the traditions and actions we take and things we do during the holiday season that are supposed to be done out of “goodwill” and “happiness” and the “spirit of the season”. But the problem is that, in seeing through them, the meaning is lost because you know that it really doesn’t mean squat. Let me illustrate for you folk who feel your cerebellum tying into tiny knots:
We give presents at Christmas, right? Why? Well, the idea behind the gift giving is that it is time to appreciate one another, to be generous, and to remember our blessings — thus, we honor those ideas by giving gifts. They’re supposedly coming from “the heart”, an abstract concept meaning our own sense of generosity and goodwill towards others.
Supposedly, at some point, people really gave gifts because they wanted to. The reality of the situation now is that we give gifts because we feel we HAVE to. It’s tradition — everyone gives and receives at Christmas, dontcha know?
I, personally, would like to get rid of that tradition. I hate buying presents for other people, not because I’m not a generous person, but because it’s not fun. You either get them something dumb, like a DVD or a CD or something, or you get them something whacky and then they hate it. My uncle used to put “black socks” on his list every year because he’s as boring as sawdust — the man didn’t need anything, really, so why get him anything? We used to get him lottery tickets because he was a gambling freak and he loved it.
Two, buying gifts costs a lot of money, so when I look at the holidays, instead of seeing fun and excitement, I see worry, stress, and agony over trying to scrape together enough dough to not only live on the edge like we do every other month, but to chuck out an additional $500 in presents for people. That’s a lot of money, folks, and that’s not much considering what SOME people pay! I know families that give each other $100 gifts AT LEAST. Crazy motherfuckers, I tell you.
I’d rather, say, take someone out to dinner for Christmas. Have a big Christmas party with friends. Exchange cookies with another family. Go out for a movie together. Spend time with other people without the expectations of gifts and so forth. The whole gift-giving tradition is dumb and should be eliminated, at least for anyone over the age of, say, 12. Kids still get a kick out of it because they get free shit, but even there — kids are so warped by society that they BEG for things for Christmas, they want THAT toy, NOW MOMMY!! And the parents oblige by earning themselves a place on the 5 o’clock news because they clocked some old granny attempting to get the last Fuzzle Me Silly Whizzle(tm) at Wal*mart. Even the kids would do well not to receive gifts, but to just learn to appreciate the people around you, instead, and spend time with the ones that matter.
Another thing that goes along with this is that my wife and I have been talking a lot this year (as in previous) about the various traditions that my family have always done around Christmas. We are pretty set in a routine of things we always do — days to get and decorate trees and houses of each of my respective parents, days and places we go for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, etc. However, these traditions mean exactly Jack M. Squat to my wife, my sister’s boyfriend, or my step-family because they are all rooted in the traditions we once had when my sister and I were kids, my parents were married, and life was more innocent — in other words, when we didn’t know the whole story.
Nowadays I participate in these traditions more for my parent’s sake than anything, because I really believe that they hold onto these routines as a way to tie them back to a time and place when life seemed a bit better and less chaotic. Unfortunately, in so many ways, that’s not living life because they’re not growing and changing with the times. It’s much how they approach religion — we’ve always done this, so we’re going to keep on doing this. Whether or not it has any meaning behind it anymore is beside the question. But then again, dogmatics never claimed to be rational.
There’s to be a breaking this year and other years hence, however, because my wife’s tired of going along with the traditions that don’t mean anything to her (or even to me, even for the sake of the ‘family’) and doesn’t want to do them, starting with this Christmas. I will probably still participate because I feel that I still *am* a part of my family, love ‘em or hate ‘em, and it’s important to try to be with family during the holidays if you have the means. I go along with the various traditions because it’s easier than bucking them, as I know that my parental units won’t budge from the idea. I am the returning man to Plato’s cave, and nobody’s going to believe that they’re only shadows of the real thing.
So, that’s my realization about why the holidays suck. It’s not that they don’t have the potential to mean anything, but that we’ve wrung the meaning out by doing things that no longer matter to us anymore yet we are stuck in “tradition”.
I’m an addict, I know it, and it’s starting to bother me, so I started to try to do something about it today. I drink WAY too much Diet Mt. Dew. I have drank Dew in large quantities ever since I was in middle school, really. I used to chug down 3 or 4 cans before each day of classes in HS and I learned how to “shotgun” cans of Dew while on break at Fareway — I got down to about 2.5 seconds/can.
I drank the regular stuff all until probably a year or two ago, when I realized that ingesting 300 calories/can and several cans/day was a bad, bad idea, especially when Diet had 0 calories. So I switched, ploughed through the week of going, “This tastes like crap!” and eventually got onto it without problems.
However, now I drink about 3 litres/day, sometimes 4. While I’m getting no calories, I’m still quaffing an awful lot of random chemicals that may or may not be contributing to an altered body chemistry, nothing to say of the potential for cancer, etc. Also, I’m taking in a terrific amount of caffeine which oftentimes leaves me shorter and more jumpy and less concentration — some is good to speed me up and smooth me out, but too much leaves me shaking.
But it’s hard — I love the taste of it and the caffeine is necessary given my late hours and normal workday requirements. “Just go to bed earlier!” the pundit cries. Well, thanks for commenting on what you don’t know, asshole. I now work the equivalent of 3 jobs as well has having multiple hobbies, a wife to be with, a house to take care of, and my own personal time. If I went to bed at 10pm every night, I’d never get anything done. So I bank the hours, write an “IOU” to my body, and keep awake with the buzz juice.
But, I’ve decided I have to cut down, if not remove it entirely. My stomach is starting to be eaten away from the constant acid (I just assume it will ache all the time nowadays) and I’m starting to feel really out of sorts, like it’s a poison or something. And I don’t want to keep going like this and find out that I have some sort of tumor growing on my spleen because I couldn’t lay off the drink. :P~ So here’s my shot at cutting down — I’ve drank water all afternoon. Not nearly enough, but only water. It’s a start, I figure.
Gotta take bottles back sooner or later, preferably sooner, because they’re starting to overtake the basement. I figure I’ll be rich as shit because there’s a ton of them, but they’re such a pain to deal with. If the Iowa would get it’s head out of its ass, provide good, local recycling options that don’t suck, we could get rid of the 5cent deposit entirely. But when communities provide recycling on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of the month, as long as that Thursday precedes a full moon rising into the equinox of Capricorn, and the weather is 65F and balmy — well, people don’t give a shit anymore, and they’ll just chuck it. Remember, folks, time is money, whether you’re employed or not. Everything has a cost, and right now, the trash can is underbidding the recycling box.
Many house projects that I should be doing but either lack the funding or the time: Gotta get a shelf or a box or something up for hats & mittens before people kill me because they’re either wet or lost. Gotta buy foam pipe cover to insulate the rest of the piping in the basement — that adhesive roll on shit isn’t very good, really. Gotta get my ass and some insulation into the crawlspace underneath the 1/2 bath to insulate against the outside wall, now that I think that’s where the breeze was coming from.
Need to buy the replacement pad and other parts online for the in-furnace humidifier, then hack together the solenoid from the washing machine that I found and those parts to put it back into a working humidifier. Need to buy 2×12 planking and probably 2×6 supports to make heavy shelves for the 3rd basement room so I can get “The Collection” properly stacked and stored instead of sitting in little Towers of Pizas on the floor. Need to mud the hole next to the phone jack in the kitchen and repaint. Need to paint the upstairs hallway and bathroom, as they’re starting to look really nasty. Need to do something about the shower in the basement which is looking nastier by the day.
Many other things, too many to list, really. That’s just a smattering. Yike!
Well, that’s enough babbling for this entry, I guess. More later, no doubt. Everyone have a good one.
