Tag Archives: life

Confessions of a part-time jerk

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Years ago a very good friend pulled me aside and asked me why I had verbally bullied a mutual friend… again. It was the first time that someone had called me a bully. I had never thought of myself as a bully. I had spent my childhood and teen years being the victim of bullies. Not that I even used the word “victim” back then. It had taken a therapist quite some time to even get me to admit that being the child of a physically abusive father meant that during the time I was living with him I’d been a victim of abuse, for goodness sake!

I protested—specifically alluding to the years of abuse and bullying and how I would never treat someone the way I hated being treated—but my friend didn’t let me deflect. He repeated the question. The truth is, once he had labeled the behavior for me, I realized he was right. I had been treating the mutual friend exactly the way I hated being treated myself.

And I hated myself for it once I forced myself to look at my behavior objectively. I apologized to the friend I’d bullied. I resolved not to do it again. I tried to make changes in my behavior—not just toward that friend, but to everyone. I didn’t always succeed.

I still don’t always succeed.

One of the lessons I took away from the self-examination and my subsequent struggles not to bully people or otherwise be a jerk is to extend other people slack when they are jerks to me. And not just to extend the courtesy others have extended me, but more slack than I have received. Or I should say even more slack than I am aware of, because I’m sure that I don’t notice all the times I’ve behaved less than kindly to someone.

Friends, family, and casual acquaintances had remained friends even when I was a jerk. The least I could do was to forgive other people’s occasional lapses. This doesn’t mean turning into a doormat and letting people walk all over me. Like many things in life, it’s about finding a balance. Recognize that some unkindnesses are inadvertent, but don’t enable abuse. 

The last several weeks has been difficult. Several little things have going wrong in my personal life. I’ve misplaced a bunch of unrelated things, for instance. Our car was rear-ended, and then almost exactly a week later, someone broke into the car and stole an iPod, a hand truck, and a bunch of smaller things. Something has gone awry on the car stereo and it won’t stay paired with my phone, which was how I was going to stream music in the car since the iPod was stolen. My husband has come down with a cold that either won’t go completely away, or he’s caught a bunch of unrelated bugs one after the other. My own health has been a little weird lately… I could go on.

Most of it is minor annoyances that we’ll sort out. It could be a lot worse. I know and love people who are going through a lot worse. Which makes me feel whiny for even mentioning any of it.

I know I’ve been having trouble not acting all cranky on everyone. I suspect I’m failing more than I realize. I also suspect that other things that irritate me are not nearly as bad as I think they are; I’m just already cranky, so I overreact.

This isn’t a bid for sympathy. Nor am I trying to excuse anything I may have said or done or will say or do. It’s more of a reminder that everyone is dealing with so much that we don’t know about. Often they don’t even realize how stressed they are. So allow people to make small, non-harmful mistakes. Allow yourself to make non-harmful mistakes.

Everyone is a jerk some of the time. Sometimes with good reason, sometimes less so. Most are just trying to survive. Other people give us a pass every now and then. 

Return the favor.

Scarves, socks, and “man” colors

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One day shortly before Christmas, my husband asked me to take him to a nearby large department store and let him shop alone. I knew this meant he wanted to pick up a Christmas present or two for me. Which normally he would do on his own, but he fractured his femur in late November, which has complicated his mobility, among other things. We drove over, and while he shopped, I sat in a Starbucks and occupied myself with my iPad until he was finished. He mentioned that he had come across some scarves that were made out of some kind of microfiber which he said was incredibly nice to touch, but they were all in “man colors.” Not only that, but they were too short to properly wrap around his neck and leave enough tail on both ends to tuck into a coat.

This is a common problem with most scarves sold in the men’s departments of clothing stores. They are never long enough to actually work as a supplemental garment to keep a person warm in cold weather. I had decided some years ago that this is because most straight men never buy scarves for themselves. Scarves that are bought at department stores and the like are purchased for straight men by the women in their lives. The men receive the scarves as a gift, lie about what a wonderful present it is, and they may try to use it once, but it quickly becomes clear that the scarf is so short that while you can just barely wrap it around your neck, it keeps coming loose, defeating the purpose of bundling up with it.

This is one of the reasons that I buy my cold-weather scarves in the women’s section. Women’s scarves are always long enough to wind completely around your neck and have adequate extra length to tuck the ends into your coat. They are often long enough to go completely around the neck more than once (thus fully protecting the throat from the cold) and have enough to wind around the lower part of your face and still have enough leftover to tuck into your coat.

The other reason is that in the men’s section the only choices you have are “man colors.” Ugly browns, dull greys, some blues, grotesque plaids, and only very occasionally a red. Whereas in the women’s section I can find a wide array of varying shades of blues and greens and purples and yellows and pastels and jewel tones and… and…

I usually buy one of the purples. But not always.

Going back to the shopping trip: Michael was a little miffed because, once he realized all the men’s scarves were too short and only available in dull colors, he went over to the women’s department. But they didn’t have the microfiber scarves there.

A few days later, when I opened a present from one of my aunts, I pulled out the very soft, long, thick fuzzy socks. I’ve been wearing various kinds of socks with very weak elastic for some years now to avoid some health complications other relatives have experienced due to some shared conditions. And fuzzy socks fit this need while also being fun and comfy. These sorts of socks wear out faster than more traditional socks, so I go through a lot of them and genuinely enjoy getting them as presents no matter what.

Anyway, this particular set were in “man” colors: dark brown, black, dark grey, and a blue so dark you can only tell it from the black in very bright light. I was kind of surprised, because I couldn’t think of where I’d ever seen these sorts of fuzzy socks offered in man colors.

I get tired of having such a limited palette of colors to choose from when shopping for clothes. About the only time that men’s clothes are offered in other colors is if the garment has a sports team logo on it. Since my favorite color is purple, around here that means that I’m often distracted in stores by a rack of purple sweat shirts or t-shirts or jackets or something, only to discover that they are all emblazoned with emblems of the University of Washington Huskies. And they almost always also have gold trim.

The one time I gave in a picked up a purple U-dub jacket, I found that whenever I was out in public with it, strangers would yell enthusiastic phrases at me that I often didn’t realize were references to the university sports team until minutes later. So I never responded correctly and got glared at and frowned at a lot. Or random strangers would strike up a conversation with me about a recent event related to one of the teams at the school and I would be totally clueless as to what to say.

During football season, as it it, I am still occasionally surprised when random strangers start talking to me about the Seahawks because I’m wearing one of my Seahawks caps. But at least the Seahawks are a sports team I actually follow and can converse about. I attended a completely different university and pay approximately zero attention to the sports teams at the U-dub, despite living about three miles from the campus. Of course, for the record, I happen to live about a mile and a half from the campus of the small university I actually did attend.

For years I have been buying at least scarves and gloves and some types of socks from places other than the men’s clothing section of local department stores, and I don’t have any qualms about wearing these “non-man” colors. But I do sometimes find myself having flashbacks to the teasing I would get when I was a kid and was interested in playing with “girls’ toys” and so on. It isn’t traumatic, just mildly annoying.

Which isn’t to say that I’m upset about the socks. They’re nice, fuzzy, thick, and longer than a lot of my other socks, so they’re perfect for this colder weather. I just think of it as part of my “office drag.” Besides, once they’re on my feet and under my boring colored office slacks, I forget what colors I’m wearing.

Though as soon as I get home and switch into comfy clothes (and tend to run around the house in stocking feet where I can see them), I switch to brighter colors.

Christmas Presence

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Edward Woodward as the Ghost of Christmas Present and George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1984 CBS "A Christmas Carol."
Edward Woodward as the Ghost of Christmas Present and George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1984 CBS “A Christmas Carol.”
We’re having Christmas at home for just the two of us, this year. And like last year I have the entire week off while my husband has to work for most of the week, so I drove down to Mom’s yesterday to drop off her presents and take her to lunch. I also dropped off presents for one of my sisters, my nieces, my grandniece, an aunt, and a friend that all live in the same town. So there was lots of chatting. It was nice to spend some time with everyone.

There is some new drama going on with some of the family, and I got to tangentially experience a teeny bit of it, but mostly it was just a wonderful day. The drive down was a dream, so it only took about two hours to get there. The drive home was not quite as good. The rain was so bad that for a couple of stretched visibility was severely reduced, and there was a few points that between the wind and the rain it was a bit of a challenge to keep the car in it’s lane. Still, it only took about 3 hours to drive home, so it was still a lot better than a couple of the really awful trips have been.

My aunt didn’t have a tree up. Usually she has a big tree with all blue ornaments, but she decided last year that it was silly to decorate just for herself, so she gave away the artificial tree, all of her lights, and all of her ornaments. And she says she’s been regretting it all month. So her current plan is to buy a new, much smaller artificial tree and some lights and ornaments (particularly if she can find them in after Christmas sales) for next year.

Mom did something similar a couple years ago, although her story was a bit different. My Great-grandma had a small artificial tree which she bought in 1957 or so, and she set it up and decorated it every year until she died in 1975. Then her tree went into storage at Grandma’s for several years. Until some point in the 80s, when my mom was preparing for her first Christmas after getting divorced from my step-dad, and she happened to mention to Grandma that she wasn’t certain she had to time, energy, or money to set up a tree that year. So Grandma showed up at Mom’s house with Great-grandma’s tree. Mom used that tree every year until it literally fell apart while Mom was taking it down four years ago.

Mom was in the process of getting rid of a lot of things and preparing to move to the small town where my sister and several other relatives live at the time. The first place she moved to there was much, much smaller than her previous place, and she decided she didn’t have room for a tree. Then she moved to her current place which is a bit bigger, but she told me that fall, when we were discussing holiday plans, that she hadn’t liked any of the artificial trees she’d found in stores because all the ones in the size she wanted had built-in lights, and that was a no-starter. So I could her to talk about what she wanted, and as she described it, I searched on-line until I found a tree that met all of her specifications. It wasn’t until after I had ordered it that I told her what I had done, and that her tree would arrive later that week.

She had ornaments. She has some that belonged to Great-grandma, and a few that belonged to Grandma, but also a bunch that were made by her own grandkids (my nieces). She says she’s very happy with it. When we were there on Thanksgiving, she had us help her set it up and decorate it. One of her favorite decorations, a blue glittery garland with white snowflakes (which I think had been Grandma’s), was falling apart badly and she was pretty sad about it.

So while I and the youngest niece were hanging ornaments and Michael was sitting with his broken leg propped up, he secretly searched online until he found an identical garland and ordered it for Mom. It showed up a few days later and she sent me excited texts with multiple pictures of it.

Great-aunt Noriko's Santa pin.
Great-aunt Noriko’s Santa pin. (Click to embiggen)
If you haven’t figured out by now what a soppy sentimental person I am, you haven’t been paying attention. For example, back in the early 90s, a co-worker came to me one December with an unusual gift. The co-worker’s name was Noreen, and she had been born and raised in Hawaii. She had been named after her Great-aunt Noriko. And Great-aunt Noriko had owned this very silly plastic Santa brooch or pin. Great-aunt Noriko, she told me, had worn it every Sunday in Advent leading up to Christmas, and would wear it to any holiday parties or get-togethers. Noreen had inherited the pin along with other things when her Great-aunt died, but unlike her aunt, Noreen was Buddhist and didn’t observe Christmas. She said she always felt guilty for not wearing the pin at Christmas time; whereas, I wear jingle bell earrings, Santa hats, and other silly Christmas things during December all the time. So it had occurred to her that I might be willing to wear Great-aunt Noriko’s pin.

I told her I would be honored to, and I meant it. I said as soon as I’d seen the pin, I had been flabbergasted because it was identical to one my one Great-grandmother (the same one whose tree my Mom wound up using for many years) had owned, but I never knew what had happened to it. So I said that of course I would wear Great-aunt Noriko’s pin at Christmas time, and tell people about Great-aunt Noriko who loved Christmas and Santa and so on.

Which is when Noreen told me of the Hawaiian tradition of referring to everyone who is approximately your own age as cousin, and any one who is older as either auntie or uncle as a sign of respect, but also a sign of the Hawaiian belief that all people are one big family. Which of course, we are. So she gave me the pin and told me that I should consider myself Great-aunt Noriko’s honorary nephew. So, for over thirty years I have, every Christmas season, worn Great-aunt Noriko’s pin, in honor of her, and my Great-grandma, and my former co-worker.

Merry Christmas, cousin!

Past Christmas or Christmas Past?

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Joel Grey as the Ghost of Christmas Past and Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1999 TNT adaptation of "A Christmas Carol."
Joel Grey as the Ghost of Christmas Past and Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1999 TNT adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.”
Once again we hosted a Holiday Party on the third Saturday in December. And for the third year Michael and I reserved a suite at a hotel about four miles from our place for the purpose. We had a smaller crowd than last year, but it was still a lot of fun.

This year’s party was a milestone in a couple of ways. For me, it’s now been 30 years celebrating Christmas in Seattle with a group of friends that includes Keith and Mark. It has also been 20 years since the first time that I wrote an original Christmas Ghost Story to read at the party. Since the first one was written and read 20 years ago, that means this year’s story was the 21st such tale. I’ve mentioned before (Conjuring the proper ghosts) about the the variations I’ve explored under the notion of a Christmas Ghost story. Several of the tales have been set in a hard science fiction universe and tended to use more metaphorical ghosts, for instance. I’ve written comedic ghosts, dramatic ghosts, grim ghosts, and hopeful ghosts.

This year’s story had a fairy tale approach. It was the fifth or sixth Christmas Ghost Story that I’ve written set in the same universe as my fantasy novels. I’ve described this particular universe as a light fantasy world using anthropomorphic tropes with an epic fantasy wrapper. So the novels have sorcerers and dragons and knights and epic battles. The Ghost Stories have tended to be a lot more intimate. The most recent one before this year’s was a comedic murder mystery in which one of the constables in the City Watch is confronted by a headless ghost on Solstice Eve to kick of the action. This year’s was a more serious tale, and I think for the first time since I started doing this, directly related to one of the others. It’s actually a prequel to a funny Christmas Ghost Story which, it happens, was mostly written originally long-hand while I was staffing a table in the Dealer’s Den of Midwest Furfest.

Me trying the costume before the Halloween Party. For Christmas I had a black belt and wore my round gold-rimmed glasses.
Me trying the costume before the Halloween Party. For Christmas I had a black belt and wore my round gold-rimmed glasses.
I had a costume this year. Michael talked me into getting a Father Christmas costume for our friends’ Halloween party (to go along with a devil costume he got to do a silly pun). He’s been talking about getting me some sort of Santa suit or similar to wear to the Christmas party for a few years. This was wasn’t bad. It needs some more work, if I’m going to use it again.

Anyway, one of the Ghost Story ideas that’s been sitting in my queue for a while involved my fantasy world’s version of Santa, who is “one of the oldest of the dark fae” and goes by the name Grandfather Frost. If you know your cross-cultural history, Grandfather Frost is the usual English translation of the Russian character Ded Moroz, which means literally Old Man Frost. In the original Slavic myths he was a snow demon or a winter wizard—generally a creature to be feared. As the Orthodox Church took hold in those regions, some aspects of Saint Nicholas were grafted onto the character he became more like our Santa.

So, since I had the costume, and since some other aspects of the fantasy novel I’m working on were related to Grandfather Frost, I wound up in late October starting a Ghost Story about the character. I had a good start before NaNoWriMo, so I figured this year the story would be done early for a change. No such luck. I had been hung up at about 1200 words for a few weeks into December before I finally figured out where I was going wrong and got the tale straightened out.

People seemed to enjoy the story. Yay! I need to get a couple of short story collections together and either self-publish them or something.

This week I’m in that weird headspace I often find myself in after the party. Spending time with this group of friends, exchanging gifts, and continuing the Ghost Story Challenge tradition (this year Mark and Edd each had a story ready to read to answer the challenge) feels like my “real” Christmas. So I end up feeling a little weird during the days between the party and actual Christmas day. I keep having to stop myself from asking people how their Christmas went, past tense. Or from wishing strangers a Happy New Year.

Today I need to finish packing up the car to head down to Mom’s where I’m going to deliver presents. If all goes well, I’ll be stopping off at Mom’s, one of my sisters’, my older niece, my aunt, and a friend I haven’t seen in person in many years. It’ll be a bit of a whirl, but should be fun. And I hope I wind up saying “Merry Christmas” enough that I remember that Christmas isn’t quite here, yet.

Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! And have a great day!

Getting nerdy as f— about things we love

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"I respect people who get nerdy as fuck about something they love."
“I respect people who get nerdy as fuck about something they love.”

I always thought I was one of the world’s biggest Star Wars fans. I was 16 years old when the first movie was released, and I saw it with two slightly older friends one of whom was a hard core science fiction/fantasy fan who subscribed to magazines and fanzines no one had heard of and was always talking about the intricacies of how this make-up artist did that thing, et cetera. Our small town in southwest Washington state had only two theatres back then and seldom got anything new, so these friends were always driving down to Portland, Oregon to see movies none of us had heard of.

They convinced me to go see this movie that they thought might be good on opening night. My mind was blown away. We hadn’t expected it to be so awesome. The next day we convinced several of our friends to caravan down in several cars to see Star Wars in a big group. They were equally as mind-blown.

We took another group of friends down a couple weekends later. Over the course of the summer of ’77, I drove myself and various friends down another 13 times to watch Star Wars again. The movie finally opened at one of our small town theatres in August, I think, and some friends who had refused to take the long drive to see it finally went with me to watch it on a fairly tiny screen. By that point, I not only knew every single line of dialog, but I could engage in trivia battles with my friends.

I organized excursions to go see each of the two sequels on opening day. For Return of the Jedi, two of my best friends and I got up at 4am to drive down to the big theatre in Oregon where I’d first seen Star Wars and Empire and we sat in line all day. I was 18th in line that morning for the first showing to the film.

I’m always a little amazed when I realize how many friends I have, now, who were too young to have experienced the movies the way I did. To them, Obi Wan, Luke, Leia, and Han weren’t cool characters in this awesome movie, they were beings of legend on a par with Santa Claus or Moses. And thus many of those friends have gone through all the phases of believing in the original tale, learning that it is a story that someone somewhere made up, becoming a bit cynical about the process of making movies and selling toys, and so on. Which isn’t to say they they don’t love the films. A lot of them revere them, and defend them as a treasured part of their childhood.

I didn’t go through those phases with this particular story. I was old enough that I could see which parts of the movie were homages to the old Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, which parts of the movie harkened to Westerns, and so on. That didn’t make me love the story any less, by no means. Look how many times I drove to watch it!

I didn’t own my own copy of the movie on VHS tape until I was nearly 30 years old. It was one of the first movies I bought after finally getting my own VCR. (That’s another thing, I’m old enough to remember when VCRs were a new gadget that only really well-to-do people could afford to own.)

To this day when I watch the original movie, I find it a little jarring to see those words “Episode IV – A New Hope” appear at the top of that initial screen crawl. That wasn’t there for that entire first run of the movie. It was added when the movie was released on home video, and in the re-release to theatres just before The Empire Strikes Back came out. It doesn’t matter that for 37 years that movie has been referred to as “Episode IV: A New Hope,” my visceral reaction is, “No. That isn’t the real name. The real name of the movie is simply ‘Star Wars.'”

I’m not recounting all of this to disparage anyone else’s appreciation of the film, or to try to prove that I’m more of an authority than anyone else. I chose my opening sentence to this post with a purpose. It implies something that I now want to make explicit: I always thought I was one of the world’s biggest Star Wars fans, but I’m not the biggest. I can’t be. I have seen people very literally insist that they will cease to be friends with people if those people spoil the new movie for them.

And that’s simply insane.

Seriously, you are the sort of person who will discard another human being because they slip up and mention something about a movie?

I love Star Wars. It changed my life. It changed my view of storytelling. It set a standard that I still measure other stories against. And I’m a storyteller myself, now, who believes that storytelling is not merely fundamental to the definition of human, but that it is a transformational force which can move the world. I believe all of that, but I’m also able to understand that a plot twist is not more important than a human being. A literary surprise should not be more valuable to you than the love or affection you feel for another person.

I’ve made ludicrous statements myself, such as that I can’t be friends with someone who thinks The Phantom Menace was a good script. I’ve said things about movies or books or shows that I love and people who don’t share my enthusiasm which were insensitive at best, and outright cruel/pure assholery at worst. And then felt like a complete heel when I realized how I sounded. So I recognize that people might be being just a little hyperbolic. I realize that maybe these same people would regret it if they really did ostracize someone for “spoiling” the movie.

I hope, at least. Because here’s the thing: if you really love Star Wars that much, you should love the fact that other people love it. And maybe they don’t love it exactly the way you do. And maybe they love it so much that when they talk about it they reveal some details that you think of as spoilers, where as they think they’re just telling you it was awesome. It’s fine to let people know that you would like to be spoiler-free. And clearly, if someone tells you the ending for the malicious and intentional purpose of upsetting you, they are being an asshole and maybe you would be better off without them.

I try, myself, not to mention plot twists or reveals and the like of anything I’m watching or reading. I constantly bite my tongue about which clone is my favorite in the series Orphan Black, for instance, because merely mentioning my love of the character could spoil an important plot-twist that happens near the beginning of the second season. Even though it has been out for years, now, there are still friends I’m trying to get to watch the show, and I don’t want to ruin the joy I felt when that reveal happened.

But it’s just a story. It isn’t actually a matter of life and death. And just as we hurt people when we make disparaging remarks about things they like that we don’t, we also cause pain when we piss all over someone else’s enthusiasm. We shouldn’t do that. Especially about things they love.

I’m trying to learn not to do it. Won’t you join me?

Presents under the tree

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My sister and I with our presents Christmas morning at my paternal grandparents; house.
My sister and I with our presents Christmas morning at my paternal grandparents’ house. My guess is I’m about 9 years old in this pic. (Click to embiggen)
I remember lots of Christmases being asked to pose with my presents so one of my grandparents could take a picture. I remember it happening a lot. Some years they would have several of the kids pose together. Some years, particularly when one or more sets of cousins were present, they’d arrange a photo first with one, then the next kid, and the next until we were all done.

I don’t have very many of those pictures. I’m not sure which extended family member ended up with them. The picture above is one of the very few I have in which my sister appears with me. I don’t have any with my cousins. And since I never spent a Christmas with my younger half-siblings, I don’t have any with them, either. In the modern era of digital image sharing, I suspect that if people take that particular kind of picture that it gets shared with all the relatives who sent the kid a toy. I know that part of the reason this particular scan is such low resolution is that for a while one of the standard processing options you could ask for when sending film in to get photos made, was you would receive one image that was about 3 inches tall by 5 inches wide, and then printed on the same chunk of photo paper two smaller images, about one-and-a-quarter inches by one-and-a-quarter. Besides the two duplicate images being a lot smaller, they were also cropped square, so some of the image on the left and right was lost.

The idea was you could take some scissor and cut off the two duplicates from all the pictures and share them around. That’s how this picture, take at my paternal grandparents’ house, maybe by my grandparents, wound up in my other grandma’s photo album. One of the miniature duplicates was mailed to her.

The other reason the picture is a bit hard to make out is that the photo was printed on a faux-linen texture photo paper. The texture introduces some noise into the image. And over time, the parts of the texture that is raised tends to rub of and lose part of the image.

I cropped this down a bit to cut out the boring parts of the room in hopes the picture would look a bit more interesting, but the resolution at which it was scanned, plus the tiny size of the original are conspiring against me.

I remember the robot and kept it for years. It walked back and forth, the chest panel opened up and these sort of laser canon things folded out and made a lot of noise while the robot’s upper body spun around. In my early teens the robot started falling apart, so I disassembled it and tried to figure out if I could rebuild any of it into anything useful or cool. I never quite liked any of the things I transformed it into.

I don’t remember who gave that one to me, though based on the size my guess would be my paternal grandparents. I have a lot more memories of poking and prodding presents under the tree during the days and weeks leading up to Christmas than I do of opening presents Christmas morning. I loved lifting the presents, turning them this way and that, figuring out the relative mass of different parts of the package to get an idea of the shape of whatever was in the box. Guessing what materials the gift is made for by the weight, density, and most importantly the noise it made as it moved in the box.

It’s why my maternal grandma always set up at least one box with extra things inside (buttons, bolts, little bells inside mint tins, et cetera) to make weird rattling noises. And it’s one reason I don’t feel like a Christmas tree is complete until there are wrapped presents under it. It isn’t that I want a lot of gifts. I just want some wrapped boxes to try to guess the contents of. And to have days to check it out and think about it. It’s the puzzle and the potential of things in might be that seems to get the little kid in me most giddy.

There’s also the pretty paper and ribbons and such. Especially back when a lot of the presents would come from relatives who lived far away and would mail them to us. All of the wrapping would be different. One aunt might have wrapped on the presents in cream-colored paper with images of holly leaves and berries, for instance, and another had silver paper with snowflakes. I remember some wrapping paper would have images that weren’t just a few abstract or cartoon characters, but would be a fully illustrated Christmas scene, such as a family decorating a tree, or people going sledding. I like trying to compose stories for those pictures.

I now enjoy giving presents a lot more than getting them. Some years I try to wrap everything in similar paper. I seldom stick to it, though, because there is also certain wrapping paper I find that I think a particular friend or relative will really like it. Or it reminds me of them in some way. I seldom survey anyone afterward, but sometimes someone will comment on the cool wrapping paper, and that makes me feel as if I accomplished the mission.

I probably think about this sort of thing a lot more than other people do. But it’s a pretty harmless obsession. And it adds a bit of bright color to the world, so that can’t be bad.

Making a list and checking it…

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A steampunk Santa... (wonderhowto.com)
A steampunk Santa… (wonderhowto.com)
For the longest time I wanted to be the kind of person who got a bunch of my Christmas shopping done in advance. It shouldn’t have been difficult. There are certain people I know I’m going to want to give a present to every year. And I come across things all the time that make me think, “Oh, that would be good for so-and-so!” But for various reasons I wouldn’t.

They weren’t bad reasons. Sometimes I’d look at the potential gift, think about how many months it was until Christmas, and worry that the person would buy it for themselves before Christmas arrived. Or that someone else would give it to them at some other gift-giving opportunity. Or I myself, while looking at the gift, would realize the person’s birthday was only a mont or two away, and I’d buy the gift, but as a birthday present, instead.

Then one year, at a science fiction convention in March, I kept happening on things that would be perfect presents for certain friends, and they were unusual enough that I was relatively confident none of our mutual friends would purchase it. And I picked up presents for about seven of the people on our usual list of a couple dozen people. And once I had a box in the bedroom that already had presents for several people, it was really easy of the course of the next few months to take the plunge and pick up presents as I found them.

And then I got laid off on the last day of June.

I wasn’t unemployed for very long, but my jobs for the rest of the year were contract gigs through agencies. Some of them only lasted a couple of weeks. My take-home pay for each was considerably less (particularly since I was paying our medical insurance all out of pocket) than it had been.

Already having half the usual presents acquired helped in a couple of ways. First, there was simply a smaller number of gifts that I wanted to acquire than usual during that last half of the year. But also, because there were already gifts for a bunch of people, I had an incentive to no just throw up my hands and say, “no one’s getting anything from me this year” or whatever. I didn’t want to hand one friend this really nice thing I’d picked up in March, and then hand their spouse or significant other whom I usually picked up nice things for an obvious token gift, right?

What that did was keep me on the look-out for thoughtful gifts constantly. And that helped my attitude. Maybe it’s just me, but thinking out things I’d like to give to people I care about makes me feel good. I can’t be depressed while imagining how much a friend is going to enjoy this cool thing I found for them.

Yes, there are lots of things we spent less money on that year. But we still had a really fun Christmas.

Then the last week of the year I started work as a regular employee at a new job, at a salary and with benefits that put us back in the kind of shape we’d been in before I got laid off. And because I’d gotten into the habit of keeping my eye out all year for presents, the next year by the time December rolled around, I already had presents for a bit more than half the usual list. We still had to do a bunch of shopping in December, but it was a lot less than in most previous years—less stressful and more fun.

I don’t know what happened this year.

It didn’t even occur to me until midway through November that I had picked up nothing: not one single gift for any of our friends or family. Why? I have no clue. Even when, last summer, announcements were made at work which indicated upper management at work was looking to sell the company (which might mean a big change in my employment situation), it didn’t make me think, “I should start working on Christmas, now, while I’ve got time.”

So, here we are, it’s December already. We’re way behind on our usual decorating. I hadn’t done any shopping or even any real thinking about what to get for people until just this weekend. So we’re in a scramble at the end of the year. And there have been more announcements at work, another company has tendered an offer. In a few months I’m either going to be an employee of the new owner or looking for a new job altogether.

I’m trying not to let any of this get me stressed out. I’m 99% certain that I was feeling down last week and very cranky much of the weekend because I’ve been fighting off a cold, and the remodeling at work filled the office with fumes that irritated my sinuses and eyes, and noise and disruption that just make things a teensy bit of a hassle throughout the day.

The truth is, decorating and wrapping and all of that makes me happy. As my husband noted on Sunday evening, when I was up to my eyeballs in boxes of decorations I’d hauled up from the basement, after putting lights on the bushes in front of the house and so forth, that it was the first time he’d seen me smiling in a few days.

So, let’s get this holiday show on the road!

It is about being thankful, after all

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Things to be grateful for (Click to embiggen).
Things to be grateful for (Click to embiggen).
It’s easy to spend all of our time worrying about bad things happening in the world, ranting about stupid things people do, complaining about problems that plague us, and so forth. I feel especially bad doing that because a lot of things in my life are not just good, they’re wonderful. And it’s worthwhile to remember that. And not just remember it, but share it.

So, among the things I’m thankful for this year:

  • My husband — sweet, kind, loving, smart, sexy, and way too awesome for the likes of me
  • My friends — talented, entertaining, amazing, supportive, and inexplicably willing to put up with me
  • purple, anything purple
  • people who help other people
  • books
  • coffee
  • people who sweat the details
  • flowers
  • people who make good art
  • electricity
  • people who love
  • soy nog
  • people who clean up after natural disasters
  • rockets and satellites and space probes and all the cool things humans build to learn more about everything
  • tigers
  • people who make other people laugh
  • otters
  • my family, yes even the most crazy, because they’re part of what made me who I am, and I’m sure that I drive them just as crazy as they drive me
  • people who make music
  • my job
  • people who don’t sweat the small stuff
  • my wonderful, talented, hard-working, long-suffering, handsome husband (who absolutely deserves to be on this list more than once!)
  • people who dance
  • raspberries
  • people who do science
  • kittens, puppies, adorable pictures, and all the sweet goofy things in the world
  • people who build things
  • music
  • technology that lets me carry my entire music library in my pocket, access the world’s libraries from the palm of my hand, read silly things people say halfway around the world, and complain about the most petty first world problems while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store
  • people who care
  • my extended chosen family, which yes overlaps with several other times on this list (not just the second)
  • the crazy world of entertainment that gives us everything from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to Ashe vs Evil Dead and everything in between
  • readers
  • sexy people (yes, including the cast of Magic Mike)
  • my clever, patient husband who happens to be both an amazing computer resurrectionist and a damn good cook

Thank you, everyone who reads this. Where ever you are, whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving today or not, I hope your life has more blessings than tribulations. May you be surrounded by love and filled with joy—because you deserve it!

Lots to be thankful for (click to embiggen)
Lots to be thankful for (click to embiggen)

Oppressed Oppressors, part 4

society, , , ,

The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown since 2007 in both political parties. Source: Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2015.
The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown since 2007 in both political parties. © Wall Street Journal (Click to embiggen)
I always regret giving in to the emails, pokes, not to mention questions directly from some of my relatives about looking at Facebook1. The most recent example of why I shouldn’t look at Facebook wasn’t the crazy anti-immigrant meme that one of my cousins was sharing, it was the commentary he made along it: that it’s wrong to let these foreigners into the country, especially while treating good Christian white guys like him as a minority in his own country. There are so many ways to unpack that that I don’t even know where to begin2.

I didn’t begin, by the way. I’ve stopped attempting to communicate with him at all ever since the conversation a year or two ago while he was ranting about the War on Christmas where I tried to point out that not everyone who objects to manager scenes and the ten commandments in courthouses are foreigners who refuse to “learn our ways.”

So when I saw a news story today about a Pew poll showing that White Christians now make up less than half of the U.S. population, I realized this sort of irrationality is going to get a lot worse. Studies have already shown that people who are members of a privileged class start feeling as if something is being monopolized by another group when that group achieves 30% of the screen time or talk time, et cetera7. So now that White Christians actually do make up a minority, well, it’s not going to be pretty.

Of course many of them have felt that they were in the minority for a long time. I remember a few years back when the percentage of people who identified as non-Catholic Christian went below 50% that folks in the religious rightwing went bananas, claiming that Christians were now in the minority. This reveals a tiny piece of one of the major issues, here. Which is that a lot of the sorts of people who will non-ironicly talk about “taking back our country” don’t think that everyone (a lot of everyone) who claims to be a Christian actually is.

Another revelatory bit is an amusing string of posts that have been going around Tumblr. The original post talks about how sometimes the sheer cruelty of some homophobes makes them wish you could set them up with a blindfold, a stick, and a hornet’s nest, but tell them it’s actually a piñata. Someone else responded by commenting how casually anti-Christian most liberals are, and how they (the Christian commenter) are once again being demonized for their beliefs. The original poster then points out the the post said absolutely nothing about Christians, “but you chose to put yourself in there.” It isn’t liberals who define Christianity as anti-gay, it’s all the anti-gay people who call themselves Christians and claim that Christianity is anti-gay who have defined Christianity as anti-gay. The part that doesn’t often get acknowledged even on the liberal side, is that those folks refuse to accept anyone who doesn’t share their anti-gay views as part of their faith.

And I’m not just saying this because of a few Tumblr posts. During the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential Election, as Mitt Romney seemed poised to sew up the nomination, he met with the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, (and the current head of Billy Graham Ministries). After Romney promised to fight marriage equality tooth and nail, a large section the the Graham Ministries website which had been there up until that meeting that went into great detail “proving” that the Mormon Church is a cult, rather than a legitimate part of Christianity, simply vanished. Literally deleted without comment. And suddenly Franklin Graham and all of the rest of the rightwing evangelicals were endorsing Romney.

A similar thing happened with Graham Ministries and Liberty University and the Moral Majority and such a couple of decades before when they all stopped referring to the Catholic Church as a cult (which they often described as ‘the whore of Babylon”) and the pope as the antichrist. It was 1994, after two years of the Clinton presidency, and it was becoming clear that popular sentiment was become less explicitly anti-gay. There was even a big conference that resulted in a bunch of evangelical leaders and Catholic leaders signing a document that supposedly outlined common doctrine. Except the document was mostly focused on a list of political goals, not least of which was overturning gay rights laws where they existed, and opposing any expansion of anti-discrimination laws by adding sexual orientation or gender identity.

So, while they like to claim that the word of god is inerrant and unchanging, they certainly are more than willing to forget all sorts of doctrinal differences in the name of preventing queers from having equal rights, or women from having control over their own bodies, or mega rich people having to pay taxes.

Because clearly when Jesus said to welcome foreigners, feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the naked, and so on, what he really meant was that god only helps those who help themselves… and happen to be white, and claim to be Christian, and never do anything foolish such as being born in poverty or in another country.

tumblr_lq0mwkRaHA1qzq52eo1_500

Footnotes:

1. What’s the joke? “If I wanted to listen to my rightwing relatives most racist opinions I’d call them more often”?

2. First, there is the explicit notion that it’s perfectly okay to treat minorities poorly…3

3. It would be petty of me to also ask why a guy who hasn’t set foot inside a church in 30-some years except to attend someone’s funeral or wedding describes himself as Christian4.

4. And while church attendance doesn’t necessarily equate to belief, let’s just say no one in their right mind would describe his lifestyle as being even vaguely Biblical.

5. Note that it is not that Christians no longer make up a majority (They’re still about 70% of the population), nor even that Whites are no longer a majority. It’s that particular combination of being both White and a Christian. I think the more interesting statistic is that White Christians still make up about 70% of all Republican-leaning voters. While Democratic-leaning almost exactly one-third White Christian, a bit less than one-third non-White Christian, and then a bit more than one-third people of all races who either identify with another religion or none at all6.

6. Note that this still means that 64% of Democrats are Christian. So the Democratic Party is hardly the bastion of godlessness that some would have you believe.

7. Those same studies show that folks in the dominant group think that other groups are getting “equal time” when their representation or recognition amounts to 15%.

Here comes the gloom again

life, ,

It’s that time of year. For the last 17 years I’ve been dealing with an annual bout of depression. It usually manifests as random moodiness, occasional bouts of the irrational grumpies alternating with periods of mild melancholy. Very rarely there are even periods of free-floating rage.

It typically starts in September or so, and the kick off is usually when I notice that my birthday is approaching. Because a long time ago, the approach of my birthday also meant the approach of Ray’s birthday, which meant I could start planning what I was going to give him and how we were going to celebrate our birthdays.

And each year the depression usually stops sometime around the anniversary of Ray’s death, November 14. It’s never a completely clean ending. Some years I have a good cry. Some years when I don’t feel I’m getting through it or it’s just being worse than usual, I schedule a marathon of movies that will make me cry, so I induce a good cry.

This isn’t the only time of year I get sad remembering him. There’s always a moment during the decorating of the Christmas tree where I’ll start crying again, for instance. It might be when I unwrap one of his favorite ornaments, for instance. Then there’s times when one certain Christmas song as recorded by one particular artist pops up.

Last year was particularly bad. Much worse than it had been in some while. I don’t know any particular reason it was worse last year.

I had noticed that it didn’t seem to be happening this year. I wondered if maybe because last year was so bad that maybe this year I’d get a pass. But no. This morning I woke up really cranky for no reason, and then while I was picking out clothes to wear today I glanced up, saw Ray’s favorite stuffed tiger in his usual spot on a shelf above one dresser and I just about burst into tears. Every little thing that has gone wrong today (and they’ve all been quite minor annoyances, really) has either made me disproportionately angry or completely demoralized.

I have friends and loved ones who deal with chronic depression. I always feel a little guilty for even mentioning my annual issue when it seems so minor by comparison. But one of the times I said that, another friend reminded me that there’s nothing unreal about grieving. It’s not a competition. And it isn’t a zero-sum game.

Just as grieving my late partner doesn’t detract from my love for my living husband, admitting I’m not well doesn’t take anything away from other people.

It’s been said that shared grief is divided, while shared joy multiplies. I think another way to look at it is: sharing pain doesn’t really diminish the load, but the shared compassion and empathy replenishes our reserves, so the grief becomes bearable.

So, anyone who needs a hug, consider this an open offer. Because we all need a little more love.