Monthly Archives: December 2012

Pipers must be paid

life, , ,

I have issues with wish lists. I have said and written some stupid things about them.

Those things had more to do with my own baggage than anything else. Of course, you might ask, “How can someone have emotional baggage over the notion of wish lists?” The answer is: emotions are, by definition, non-rational. What seems trivial to you may be very painful for someone else.

My issues with wish lists are not that serious. I have this very unrealistic notion that if I care about someone enough to want to buy them a present, that I ought to know them well enough to pick something on my own. Never mind all the times I found myself at a loss for a good gift for my mom. Or something great for my husband. I know that the notion is unrealistic. I know that some of us are very hard to shop for. But whenever I go to browse someone else’s wish list, I feel guilty that I couldn’t come up with something on my own.

Other people have far more serious issues with things that many of us find innocuous. I’ve seen people driven into an uncontrollable rage—face red, unable to sit still, hands shaking with fury—over a particular novelty song, because it triggers memories of bad situations they were in where they felt endangered by another person. Or more accurately, because the song is making a joke out of a not uncommon situation where (sometimes) people suffer real harm.

Telling someone to “get over it” or “get a sense of humor” doesn’t solve anything. When we survive a bad situation, it leaves an impression. Stress causes physical changes in one’s brain which persist long after the stressor is removed. The more severe the situation, the greater the effect. When later situations trigger the memory—whether we are simply reminded of it or believe we may be in an identical situation—the brain reacts. Neurochemicals and hormones are released, and our bodies react.

You might as well tell a person going into anaphylactic shock due to a severe food allergy to “get over it.”

This isn’t to say we can’t undo any of the changes the stress has caused. Good experiences also make changes to the brain, and the right kind of reinforcement can help someone who has a severe reaction to certain triggers moderate the reaction. But it takes time and understanding.

As I said, not all issues are equal. My pointless wish list guilt isn’t debilitating, just annoying. I don’t know what causes it, precisely. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a child, I had a bad experience picking out a gift for one of the more abusive/vindictive adults in my life back then. I don’t remember, all that remains is the feeling. If I have to resort to consulting someone’s wish list, I feel very guilty, with a vague sense of failure or inadequacy.

The crazy part is, when I am drawing a complete blank on someone, and then I discover that they have a wish list, I feel a great sense of relief. Reading such a list, I always discover things the person is interested in that I didn’t know before. And often it gives me ideas of things to get them in the future. So it’s a win all around!

Abuse, whether physical, emotional, verbal, or otherwise, always has consequences. Someone must pay the piper, as the old saying goes. Unfortunately, in these cases, the person who has to pay the piper isn’t the person who called the tune.

Drumming

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I loved those Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies, when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure it was in one of those silly black and white films that I first saw the jungle drums as communication trope. Supposedly all the tribes of the jungle, no matter their culture or language, participated in this form of long distance communication where the pounding of drums could warn the neighboring villages of some disaster, perhaps, or to call the tribes to war.

So when I later first heard a pundit or read an editorial that referred to people advocating an escalation in our military actions in Vietnam as “the drum-beat of war,” I thought of those jungle drums. And it seemed to fit the context of the editorials.

In the movies the drumming was always a bad portent. The drums always signaled something that would menace our heroes. Something savage, unpredictable, and utterly merciless (there was, of course, more than a little racism in this trope).

Since drums had been used in various European armies centuries before any of those Hollywood depictions of Africa came to exist, I’m certain that particular turn of phrase also predates the jungle drum trope. Still, whenever I hear the phrase “the drum-beat of” my imagination conjures up black and white images of people dressed in khaki and pith helmets, fearfully looking this way and that, but only able to see impenetrable leaves and vines.

So, when the leader of one of the groups trying to hide their homophobia and religious supremacism behind an innocuous sounding pro-marriage name starting referring to the shift public opinion has been undergoing regarding gay rights in general as “the drumbeat of gay entitlement” I started laughing. Many of the other haters have picked up the phrase, and when they say it on one of those news show, they get such a serious, worried look on their face. Often exactly the same expression from those old jungle movies that the one person who knew what the drums meant would have while he explained to the rest of the party.

They describe gay people and gay-friendly straight people as being on a crusade to destroy all that is right and good in this world. When they do, they have that wide-eyed look of someone who knows the menace is near, but can’t figure out from where the menace will strike.

There isn’t an evil, menacing army beating those drums and preparing to ambush them. The forces for tolerance and equality are not savage, unpredictable, nor merciless. There is a battle going on, but not that kind. And the people beating the drums aren’t at all like that.

A great example was a police raid on a gay bar in Atlanta three years ago. A SWAT-type team of cops from multiple agencies stormed into the bar without a warrant, made everyone lay face down on the floor, and proceeded to harass, threaten, search, and occasionally assault the customers for about 90 minutes. When the news first broke, city officials said the officers were following a lead in a perfectly legitimate investigation. Some veiled comments about “those kinds of people” were made, and they expected it to go away, just as tens of thousands of such raids have in cities everywhere for years.

They didn’t expect a protest march made up primarily of church ladies. For years people like those cops could count on at least two things to protect their bigotted actions from a serious investigation: virtually none of the men they harassed or assaulted would press charges (for fear of being outed), and families of the men harassed would be so ashamed of their gay children that they would never pressure any politician to look into the matter.

Neither of those things are universally true, any longer. A bunch of those men had parents who were not ashamed of their sons. Some of those parents stood up in their churches to describe the warrantless, unjustified police action. And a bunch of those church members—surprise, surprise—thought that “love your neighbor as you love yourself” didn’t include handcuffing innocent people, shouting at them, and kicking them in the head.

The church lady march was only the beginning. With the unexpected pressure from the community, the city had to conduct a real investigation. No evidence of any crime was ever found. No explanation of a legitimate case in progress was ever given. The review board ruled that two of the officers and some supervisors were provably guilty of misconduct, though the punishments at the time were minor, and to this day the city claims that other than those few “mistakes” nothing was wrong with the raid. Eventually, six of the officers involved in the raid were fired for lying about events in the raid, but the city tried to do it very quietly. A report was reluctantly released under a freedom of information request detailing how a total of 16 officers had lied or destroyed evidence to try to cover up the misconduct.

The drummers aren’t just bleeding hearts from liberal churches. Last year, while marriage equality was being debated in my state’s legislature, one legislator who was known not to be in favor of the bill hosted a townhall-style meeting in her district to let people from the community give her their thoughts. After a couple hours of person after person passionately speaking in favor of same-sex marriage, the surprised legislator said that she knew their had to be voices in the community who felt differently. She looked at a man in a police uniform who had been sitting in the front row, looking angrier and angrier the entire time. “This gentleman, for example, hasn’t said anything.”

The cop reluctantly rose to his feet. He explained that he hadn’t said anything because he hadn’t had time to change out of uniform before coming to the forum, so he didn’t want people to think he was speaking for his department. But if she insisted, well, he just wanted to say that as a father of four sons, he wanted all of his boys, including his gay son, to be able to marry the person they fell in love with.

She never found anyone at the meeting willing to speak against the bill. She eventually voted in favor of it.

Or the pair of grandparents I saw, speaking at a legislative hearing in another state, who said, “We want to dance at the weddings of all of our grandchildren, including our lesbian granddaughter.”

There is a drumbeat out there. But it isn’t calling us to march to war. It isn’t warning you of a slaughter or some other danger.

It’s inviting you to come dance at some weddings.

We can hardly stand the wait

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All: “Want a plane that loops the loop!”
Alvin: “I still want a hula hoop!”
All: “We can hardly stand the wait!
“Please, Christmas, don’t be late!”

Everyone likes something shiny and new, at least sometime. Everyone wants things that they like to remain comfortable and familiar. The struggle between these opposing and seemingly contradictory desires can be used to explain just about everything that happens in the world of consumer activity, particularly in the tech industry. Though sometimes it is a bit of a stretch.

When I switched back to Apple nearly four years ago (after my switch from Apple to PC back in the late 80s), I made my plans based on those decades of previous experience in the computer world. I knew, for instance, that I didn’t like doing a major upgrade of my personal desktop more often than every three years. Because in my experience, it usually took me about a year after switching out a machine to both get familiar with the new system, experiment with both new equipment and software, and to get everything the way I liked it. Having made that investment, I wanted to then enjoy the familiarity and predictability for a couple of years before contemplating the next switch.

My husband, on the other hand, starts getting itchy for a new system a bit over a year after getting the old one. He disagreed when I told him this. So, after we’d had this discussion a few times, I started putting labels on machines when we bought them, listing the exact date they were purchased. He would say, “It’s been over two years since we replaced that—” and I would show him the label indicating that it had only been fourteen months. He would frown and genuinely be surprised that it was only that long.

It was my reluctance to change out systems so often which I used to rationalize my decision to buy a Mac Pro tower for my desktop system. My other reasons are that while I don’t like to change the system out very often, I like having the option to upgrade monitors, hard disks, and other peripherals along the way, and the Pro tower is the Apple machine most suited to that task.

It was also fun to buy a machine with two four-core CPUs and all the other high-end options.

The truth is, I didn’t need all that power. Sure, because I have this bad habit of leaving open scores of documents in dozens of programs at the same time as I work on projects, and several of those programs will be resource hogs such as InDesign, PhotoShop and Illustrator (yes, always at the same time!), the extra computing power of the pro-level machine comes in handy.

Also, during the first couple years of the switch, I would more than occasionally have to fire up the virtual windows machine to access something from the clone of my old PC, or to use one of the programs that I hadn’t obtained a Mac-replacement for, yet. The extra power made it easier and faster to run a virtual machine within my Mac environment and move data back and forth between the two.

But, even with the massive memory upgrades, larger and faster hard disks, and improved video card I’ve installed, at not-quite four years old, it’s performance is not significantly better than my nearly new laptop. Its newer 2-physical cores multi-threading i7 processor can actually beat the tower’s 8-cores on some benchmarking tests.

The laptop’s close enough in power and so much more convenient to use anywhere I’m comfy, which means the vast majority of my work is done on it. The tower is used more as a support server than a workstation. I only do things on it when I really need both the big screen and the extra graphics oomph. Even the iPad is used for more serious writing than the tower.

So, on one hand, I have a lot of sympathy for the folks who are irritated that Apple hasn’t released a significant update to the tower in a few years. On the other hand, I seriously think that when I next update my laptop, I may find that it, a docking station, and some well-chosen peripherals will meet all my needs.

Though I do still hold out hope that Apple and others will leverage the bandwidth of the Thunderbolt connection to give us a way add additional CPU and gaphics processing power to any computer. Soon.

That would be even cooler than Alvin the Chipmunk’s hula hoop.

Get me to the church on time, part 2

life, , , ,

We got hitched.

C.D. administering the vows.
C.D. administering the vows.

I’ve been calling it “the Elopement,” in part because we were doing this quickly for legal purposes, and planning a more traditional ceremony and reception in the late spring/early summer when more of the people who wanted to attend could. And so we could do it properly.

Which is why, when we were thinking of a cake for the elopement, and Michael said that the ones we were looking at looked too much like birthday cakes, I had said that wasn’t a problem. In fact, I opined that for the proper elopement vibe the cake ought to say something like, “Happy Bar Mitzvah, Kevin.”

Then Michael said it was the wrong time of year, because if that was the aesthetic I wanted, then the bouquet needed to be flowers stolen from someone’s garden. And maybe looking a little bedraggled. Which made me say something about how I hadn’t decided if I should be holding flowers, to which he replied, “Are you saying I can’t hold flowers?”

“We can both hold flowers!”

I knew, because of some of the friends involved, that there would be more than a slight festive look to the house when we arrived. and there had been hints that the super simple ceremony we had told C.D. we would be happy with might not cut it with one of our witnesses. There had also been whispered conversations I almost overheard, where some friends immediately denied they had been talking about anything, so I knew people were planning some additions. I just didn’t correctly anticipate how many.

A kiss after the toast/
A kiss after the toast/

When we arrived at the home of the friends hosting, and walked in the door with the hat boxes and such, a cello and violin began playing “Here Comes the Bride.” My godson was playing the violin, and our friend Jeri Lynn was on the cello. I should have realized there would be a surprise string section. It is entirely in character for our friends. But it did surprise me, and I started crying.

Then, of course, I saw the flowers. Lots and lots of flowers. Red roses. Big lilies. White mums. White poinsettias. And more. A big altar of flowers.

Two rows of chairs were set up facing the flowers. Four very pretty wedding-cake-shaped candies were under a beautiful glass dome. Gorgeous cut crystal champaign flutes were lined up. I could go on. But even typing this is making me get misty-eyed.

I cried a lot.

So after hugging, expressing astonishment, setting up the cakes, and getting our bouquets in water, we went off to get dressed. More friends arrived. More decorations appeared. The musicians kept playing incidental music until we were all ready to begin.

I cried more. I couldn’t actually look at Michael while I was repeating my vows, because when I did, I would cry harder and wasn’t able to talk.

I must say, a small wedding like this is especially fun because instead of a receiving line, we just turned into a hugging mob. Which was perfect.

We fed each other the wedding cake candies. We cut the cakes. There was a toast (with amendments). There was a lot more hugging.

And then we changed, rearranged the room, and sat down to play a game.

Thank you to Ieva, Kristin, Jeri Lynne, David, C.D., Valentine, Sky, Judy, Matt, Jeff, and Darrell, for being there for the happiest day of the year–and quite possibly my whole life.

Most of all, thank you, Michael, for becoming my husband.

I love you all!

The service made me cry a lot.
The service made me cry a lot.
Indulged in the felicity,
Of unbounded domesticity.
Quickly parsonified,
Conjugally matrimonified,
A first-rate opportunity,
To get married with impunity!

(Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan for re-arranging their lyrics!)

I’ve got my love to keep me warm

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Our good friend, C.D. Woodbury, who happens to be the man officiating our elopement today, had a gig with his band last night, which we’d already been planning to attend with friends. When I realized earlier in the week that it would be the night before the elopement, I started referring to the planned excursion as our bachelor party.

C.D. Woodbury Band performing at Grinders Hot Sands.
C.D. Woodbury Band performing at Grinders Hot Sands.

The band has recently been recording an album of all original songs, and this was their first gig after laying all the principal tracks. So they premiered several of their original songs. It was a fun evening with friends, great music, great food, and great beer at Grinders Hot Sands in north Seattle.

I’d heard from several people that the bread pudding at Grinders was a religious experience. Bread pudding is not on my diet, so I didn’t order it the last time we’d been there (to hear the same band play some months back). Of course, the meatball sandwich isn’t really on my diet, either, but…

Michael ordered the bread pudding, and told me to have at least a bite. I ended up eating most of it because the whisky sauce was stronger than he had expected. He’s never been fond of the taste of alcohol. For the record: the bread pudding is like a religious experience. It is awesome.

Listening to a blues band (a great blues band, and I’m not just saying that because they’re friends) with a bunch of friends is more my kind of bachelor party than any of the stereotypical activities.

As long as you hold me tight

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I’ve been grinning like a loon much of the day.

I have also been crying a lot—tears of joy (and astonishment).

Today the law allowing same sex couples to marry went into effect in our state (having been passed by the legislature, signed by the governor, and finally approved by a 54% majority of voters {in a year where the state at 81% voter turnout, I might add}).

Picture taken by Chelsea Kellogg, reporter for the Stranger.
Michael and I.

For various reasons, we didn’t go to wait in line for the office opening at one minute after midnight. We each took the day off from work and headed downtown after the sun was up and we’d had some breakfast. Since one of the reasons we didn’t want to be standing around outside on a nearly-winter night with rain in the forecast was that Michael still has the cough from our recent bouts with the flu, I let him sleep in. So we got to the county admin building at nearly noon.

I spent the morning reading news blogs and looking at the pictures of couples who had been the first in line at our county and a few others that opened early. They selected some couples to go first in line, such as a sweet pair of ladies who are in their late 70s-early 80s and had been together for over 35 years. Or the two men that age who have been together more than 40. Seeing the picture of one guy pushing his husband-to-be in his wheelchair up to the counter made me cry. There were a lot of pictures like that being posted by the various news outlets.

When we arrived, there wasn’t a big line. We were pointed in the right direction by people at several points, and getting congratulated by all these people. While there wasn’t a line, every workstation was busy with couples getting their licenses. And just as we and another couple were leaving… two more couples came in. So it was at the steady stream point by then.

A reporter from The Stranger asked if she could take our picture and ask a few questions. Since I read their blog every day, of course I was willing to answer questions. The first picture in this post is the one she took.

Us again. Why do I always stand on his right?
Us again. Why do I always stand on his right?

In addition to the regular paperwork, we were given a copy of the proclamation signed by the county executive, and various other commemorative items. We were directed out a different door than the way we’d come in, and some more volunteers were there, handing out roses and taking pictures in front of a sign commemorating the first day that marriage equality was the law. They took a few of these with my camera, then one of the others asked if we wanted one of us kissing.

For whatever reason, that was when I started crying for us. All of my tearing up, getting misty-eyed, and full-fledged crying earlier in the day had been for other people. This was the one where it finally hit me in the gut: the most wonderful man in the world has not only been living with me and putting up with me for nearly 15 years, but finally we’re going to be married. Not civilly united, or domestically partnered, or any of those other names, but married. Part of my astonishment is the simple fact that this wonderful guy actually wants to be saddled with me. I mean, yes, we’ve been together nearly 15 years (it will be 15 in February), and he’s had ample opportunity to run for the hills and hasn’t. But you have to understand, I don’t completely get why he puts up with me. Seriously, there are times I can’t stand to be around me, so I know for a fact I am not easy to live with!

Fortunately, Micheal's hat is hiding my tears.
Fortunately, Micheal’s hat is hiding my tears.

And there were more people waiting outside. We were offered donuts. There were also people handing out business cards and promotional fliers for wedding-related services. That’s to be expected, obviously. And I’m not complaining. Thanks to the fliers I’ve found several possible places to rent for our reception that I didn’t even know existed.

There were no protestors, though. I had kind of expected some. There are always a few of those people with the old testament signs and such at events like the Pride parade, so I just figured they’d turn out for this. Then when we saw that the line was shrunk to the trickle, I thought that protestors had left. I didn’t find out until we were back home that the reporter was there taking more pictures, after the big lines were through, because there had been a rumor that a group was coming to protest. Apparently they never showed up.

While we were walking back to the bus stop, a random woman on the sidewalk saw the roses, looked at us, grinned, and said, “Congratulations!”

I’ve violated one of my rules and dived into the comments sections of some of those news sites posting the pictures. And the amazing thing is how very few haters are commenting there. In the ones I looked at, if there were negative comments at all, for every 1 negative comment there were easily 20 comments from people saying how happy the pictures make them feel, with lots of mentions of people needing to grab a tissue. And a number of people going out of their way to say things like, “I want to say for the record, that I don’t believe any of these couples has in any way diminished my heterosexual marriage.”

I thought I was emotionally overwhelmed when the Referendum passed, and when I thought about all those straight people who voted for it. But it feels more overwhelming now. I guess going in and getting the license finally is making it feel real.

We have a three-day waiting period. We’re going to have a simple ceremony with friends this Sunday. We’re calling this the Elopement. I want to get the legal stuff handled as quickly as possible, if for no other reason than that I can finally add Michael to the much better medical and dental at my work. So this is the legal thing. And I know some of our friends will be there, and it will be fun and happy.

But the real purpose of a wedding is to allow your extended community of friends and family in on it. I don’t just mean the celebration. I believe that what makes marriage sacred is not that two people have made a pledge before some deity, it is because a group of people have committed to support two people in their love. When I attend someone’s wedding, I’m entering into a covenant with them and the other attendees, affirming a particular loving relationship, but also affirming the power of love itself. It’s a commitment to the extended ties that bind all of us together in circles of mutual affection and respect.

Which is why, yes, we’re planning something bigger and a bit more formal later next year.

And there will most definitely be a party.

Frightful weather

nature, , ,

I thought I was going to drown.

While Seattle is known for rain, most of the time what he actually experience is overcast days, with occasional scattered misting. We very, very seldom have downpours. Even the heavier showers tend to be intermittent and scattered.

But about once every winter I get caught in a true downpour that soaks through my waterproofed leather coat, and all the layers underneath.

Last night it happened early in my walk home. When I stepped outside the office building, it was barely drizzling. Three blocks later I pulled the hood of my coat over my head, as the hat was no longer enough. Then, four blocks further, it was as if angels in the sky above had aimed a bunch of firehoses right at me.

The first mile or so of my walk home is along our waterfront. Not right on it, a block away, so that about half the time there is a building between me and the open air. The deluge hit when I was on a two or three block section where there is nothing but lawn and train tracks sheilding me.

The wind was coming off the water.

Even in the height of summer, the Puget Sound only gets a bit less frigid than ice water. This time of year, the water is maybe a degree above freezing. So any breeze coming off of it is like an arctic blast.

Rain starts out high up in the sky as ice crystals. They warm up as the fall, turning into droplets of ice water. In really warm weather they may get all the way up to cool and refreshing, but this time of year, I suspect that they are only about a billionth of a degree above freezing when they reach a hapless pedestrian on the ground.

So I was being hammered by nearly frozen water. Each droplet sucking heat from me, while the cross-breeze was doing its best to finish the job and turn me into a popsicle.

And there wasn’t really any place for me to go to get out of the rain. What buildings were nearby were mostly office complexes. So I moved as fast as I could.

I decided, once I had reached the halfway mark, when my walking route meets up with a bus line, to take shelter in the bus shelter(!) and wait for a bus.

The thinng that worries me about this, is that this is the second deluge I’ve experienced this year. And December is tradionally a month where we dry out a bit after the heavy rains of November, before the heavy rains of January.

I’m getting a bad feeling about this winter’s weather.

At least Scrooge found redemption

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Many, many years ago, before what most people think of as the internet, I was active in several forums on Fidonet. One December someone started a thread about Christmas movies, and someone else posted into that thread a brief explanation of why The Bing Crosby, Danny Kay, and Rosemary Clooney White Christmas was their favorite movie.

And one of the first replies to that post was a cranky rant about how that movie was not the film which had introduced the song of the same name, that the song had been originally written for the Fred Astaire film, Holiday Inn, and no one should like White Christmas because it wasn’t the movie that introduced the song.

Nothing in the original message had even mentioned the song, “White Christmas.” The person had even said that the movie was full of corny and silly bits, with a highly improbable plot.

I shrugged my shoulders at the cranky, crazy person, and went on to read other people’s recommendations of their favorite Christmas movies.

A year or so later, I think it was on a Usenet forum, a similar thread was in progress, and again, not long after someone mentioned White Christmas, there was another angry rant about how that movie wasn’t the one that introduced the song, and how much the person wished people would stop saying it had. Except, of course, that once again, no one had.

I’ve seen it again, and again. Mention the movie, White Christmas, and some troll will post a rant about it not being the movie that introduced the song. Now, sometimes, before the troll got there, someone would mention in a more friendly way the fact that the song was originally written for another movie, but had become so popular that a studio decided to base an entire film on the song. But eventually, there would be the angry post conveying the same fact.

When I posted on an old blog a list of my favorite Christmas movies, I got an anonymous message from someone, ignoring all the other movies in the list, to angrily tell me he’s tired of people mistakenly believing that White Christmas, the movie, introduced “White Christmas,” the song. Which, of course, I hadn’t said.

It’s perfectly legitimate to dislike a movie that someone else likes. It is also socially acceptable to join a virtual conversation about a movie by sharing some trivia about the film, one of the people in it, and so on. The part that I don’t get is why this movie, of all the innocuous, corny, trivial films that have ever been made, seems to always attract this one particular rant.

I have wondered if it’s just the same troll. Does he have alerts set up searching for mentions of this film, so he can log into whereever someone mentions it and post his rant?

If it isn’t the same troll, what makes several people feel a need to react with righteous outrage about a movie named after a song which it didn’t introduce? How can such a trivial detail provoke such outrage?

People get angry about things that other people enjoy all the time. No matter how wrong headed (and factually wrong) it is, I underatand why people get worked up about the so-called war on Christmas, for instance. Something that represents their faith and their personal history appears to be under attack. I think they are deluded to think it’s under attack, but I understand why traditions and beliefs and treasured memories are important to them.

But which movie introduced a sentimental holiday song? Really?

And of all the things about that song to get exercised about, again, it’s which movie introduced it? Not the fact that it’s a secular song about a sacred holiday? Not that a song for a Christian holiday was written by a Jewish man? (Actually, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that—because now the war on Christmas folks will decide that Irving Berlin started their whole war, or something.)

Maybe these folks just need to be visited by some ghosts, perhaps the spirits of Musicals Past, Present, and Yet To Come.

Haven’t you always wanted to see those ghosts doing jazz hands?

That Jingle Java Jive

life, ,

My late husband and I had been dating not quite three months, when one night he said he was going to make some coffee, then he turned and gave me the goofiest grin, “I got Jingle Java!”

It was early in my coffee evolution. I’d been raised in households that depended on cans of Folgers ground coffee, with jars of Taster’s Choice instant as a backup for those times when you didn’t want to percolate an entire pot. I had been introduced to Starbucks just a couple years earlier, since my place of employment was only a couple of blocks from the location of the original Starbucks store, and had quickly become addicted.

The Jingle Java blend he had picked up was a store brand of whole bean coffee, and it wasn’t bad. So the next time I saw Ray, I brought a bag of Starbuck’s holiday blend as a present. Unfortunately, it turned out Ray thought all but the very lightest Starbuck’s coffees were too darkly roasted, and didn’t much care for the holiday blend.

By the next Christmas season we were living together, and I wound up buying a small amount of Starbuck’s holiday blend for me, and a large bag of Jingle Java for Ray. Since I’d done that, Ray found another coffee company’s holiday blend for us to try (I don’t remember if it was SBC, Tulley’s, Peet’s, or someone else). I’ve never liked the notion of flavored coffee beans, so we stuck to the blends.

So a tradition started in which every December we’d get several different holiday blends of coffee and rotate through them throughout the month (and usually well into January). Which I kept doing after Ray died. Michael hates coffee, so it’s just me drinking it, now. Which means I’m often not finishing them up until mid-February.

Except this year, I’ve been having a hard time finding many varieties. Over the last couple of years, the variety of whole been coffees available in grocery stores has significantly decreased. I don’t know if it’s because after two decades the grind-your-own coffee craze is finally dying out, so only us hard cases are doing it, or if the economy just has people buying as cheaply as they can, or what. At most of the grocery stores I’ve been to, the only thing I’ve found is Peet’s Holiday Blend, already ground. Coffee starts oxidizing as soon as you grind it, which changes the taste, so I don’t like pre-ground coffee.

And the store brand Jingle Java we used to buy—nowhere in sight.

There are flavored coffees, but those usually just taste like someone poured nail polish remover into my cup. At least to me.

At one upscale market (that’s within walking distance of my house), I happened to find a display of one of the brands of coffee that I never see anywhere else, and they had a Holiday Blend, so I have two this year. I like both, there’s no reason that I need more than two to choose from–I don’t need any, obviously. But it’s something I liked doing. A silly tradition. An excuse to think about Ray and the many fun and silly things we’d do together every Christmas season.

I love new things. I just wish the universe would give me veto power over some changes, you know?

Joyous voices sweet and clear

music, , , , ,

Several years ago, my hubby bought me an iPod Nano for my birthday. I had been resistant to the notion of an iPod. I was used to the ritual of changing out discs in a carrying case I kept with me to use with my portable disc player, and I just didn’t quite see the point.

The funny thing was that I had iTunes installed on my computer and had imported a bunch of my music CDs into its library. One of my Palm Pilots had used iTunes to synch music, so I had given it a try. I hadn’t been terribly impressed with the experience, but I had found iTunes on the computer a bit easier to use than other music playing software, so I had kept it.

The iPod quickly changed my mind. The convenience of something that fit in my pocket and replaced both the portable player and the carrying case with all those discs should have been obvious, I suppose. I found myself importing music like crazy, because the small number of discs I’d imported before that would hardly fill the Nano’s humongous 4 gigs of space.

I spent most of the Thanksgiving weekend importing Christmas music, and wound up with about 3 gigs worth of holiday songs. That left enough room on the Nano for a Scissor Sisters album, a few Queen albums, and my podcasts. So I could set the entire iPod music collection on shuffle for the month of December. I would get mostly Christmas music, with an occasional non-Christmas song to break things up.

And, of course, the iPod carried a much larger portion of my Christmas music collection than I’d been able to carry around in that case for discs.

The following year, Apple released the very first iPod Touch about a week before my birthday. Guess what my hubby gave me for my birthday? I think he got me the 16gig model, which seemed enormous. It was enough of an incentive to get me working a bit more seriously at importing all of my music collection on disc into the computer. I don’t remember how much of my Christmas music I got imported for that second Christmas (and because of a hard disk crash a few years ago, I can’t use the “date added” information in iTunes to make a guess–iTunes thinks the date added for about half my library is the day I bought the new hard disk and started restoring from backup), but it was far less than 16 gigs, and so I had start making big playlists if I wanted to have something I could randomize to give me hours of Christmas music while working.

Christmas music is one of my obsessions. I usually start listening to it a day or two after Thanksgiving and keep listening to it through Three Kings Day. Unfortunately, my hubby is one of those people who really dislikes Christmas music, or at least a lot of it. I’ve managed to figure out a bunch he can stand, and load that up in the player for the car. Otherwise, I listen to it when he’s in the other room or try to remember to use my headphones.

My hubby’s not the only person I know who has issues with at least some kinds of Christmas songs. I know a lot of folks who have problems with the specifically religious music. As a gay kid growing up in a very conservative and uptight denomination, I understand. Some sacred music triggers memories of very bad experiences. I get that what some people hear in those songs is, “You must conform to this belief system that has oppressed you, or else!”

My particular idiosyncrasy is that traditional religious Christmas songs just don’t register that way for me. I know all the words to “O, Holy Night” in more than one language (my Latin’s a bit rusty, but…), and intellectually I get that it’s sacred, but emotionally, it’s Holiday Music, to me. It evokes the same sense of wonder I get when accompanying friends out to the countryside and looking up into the night sky, hundreds of miles from a city, where the enormity of the universe is visible just by looking up. I love singing along to “Angels We Have Heard on High” because I remember the many Christmas concerts where I either sang it or played in the orchestra. In my head, I’m singing the tenor, and bass, and alto part (and wishing I could hit all the notes for the soprano), as well as playing the trumpet and baritone horn parts.

So I get a little bit too enthusiastic about lyrics that sometimes annoy some of my friends.

For me, Christmas is a season of light. We do these things to remember that the sun will come back, to remind ourselves how much metaphorical light our friends and other loved ones bring to our hearts throughout the year, and to give a bit of light and joy to both loved ones and complete strangers.