Holiday definitions

One of the perplexing things about the holiday season is that people seem to ascribe different meanings to common words and phrases. Since so many of you find yourselves snowed under (no pun intended, unless you like it, in which case I enthusiastically embrace authorship…but I digress…) with holiday falderal, and since in my new status as officially empty of nest I’ve some time on my hands, I thought it might be a mitzvah if I was to take on the task of compilation and definition of this temporary lexicon. Hence, as the observant amongst you might have soused out by now, a start at this new list follows:

Flash mob – The temporary overcrowding at the gym that occurs after the third night of holiday leftovers, chocolates and cookies. Not to worry – the crowds will wane by about mid-February.

FAA – The agency responsible for regulating our family's holiday lighting adventures, which they claim distract pilots approaching the international airport.

So good – The standard, polite utterance when sampling some of the host’s famous holiday oyster and pistachio dip.

Not so good – How one will feel an hour later if one is simple enough to actually consume said dip.

Head banger – The type of injury most often suffered whilst bring up the bins of Christmas decorations from the cellar.

Wrapping paper – A type of doggie toy prominent around birthdays and the holidays.

Low-hanging ornaments – See wrapping paper.

Torture – Hallmark holiday movies.

Addictive substances – See torture.

B-List – Where they go to find the actors involved in Hallmark holiday movies.

Sad – Descriptor for those of us (okay, okay, yes me…) who are completely addicted to Hallmark holiday movies.

Swath – The path that Odin the Large and Lazy cuts through our Christmas decorations while wandering cluelessly about the house wearing his Great Dane-sized cone of shame.

Extreme danger – The condition faced by anyone who drives within a mile of a mall on December 26^th.

Sublime – The correct term for a four-day Christmas weekend off.

Happy Holidays

Daughters One and also Two are celebrating the holiday at One's place in Florida this year, which of course means that Mary and I find ourselves alone together on Christmas Eve.

For the first time in twenty-seven years.

Eating popcorn. Watching Elf.  And we'll be in bed early, not because I have to be up early to be ready with the camera but merely because we are tired and want to get some sleep.

It's a whole new paradigm. I don't know quite how to take it.

What I do know is that I have a better family than I deserve and some wonderful friends, many of whom will read these words. So let me just say this about that:

I love you all. Thanks for reading my drivel. And I hope in the new year not to disappoint.

Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, Happy Holiday to each and all of you!

Two sides of a coin

The President went on record yesterday as saying that a major motion picture company erred in pulling a movie due to some well-publicized threats made in reaction to its content. The movie (I have not seen it) is apparently a satire in which the central character is assigned to murder the dictator of a foreign power under the guise of conducting an interview. Ever since the trailer hit the airwaves there have been reports of threats, theoretically originating with elements aligned with the dictator against theatres that show the film. Apparently, plausible terroristic threats.

Okay, so that’s the setup.

I admit to some disappointment that the film was pulled and for the very reasons Mr. Obama has identified – we shouldn’t accept this new way of doing business in which our free speech is held captive by the despotic leader of a broken-down country or for that matter, by any whack job with an e-mail account. I get it. This is indeed a very dangerous precedent.

Having said that, we also need to recognize the nature of our duty as citizens of a society in which freedom of speech is held so dear. Free speech only works in an atmosphere of appropriate self-restraint. And with this in mind, I feel the movie should never have been made in the first place. And I don’t say that lightly.

It seems these days that anything can be presented to an audience so long as it is billed as comedy. That’s why we have TV shows and movies that focus on the scatological, the rude, the offensive-as-you-wanna-be-so-long-as-some-yahoo-will-laugh genre.   Think of the most disgusting, offensive, inappropriate, dangerous, downright wrong activity in which human beings engage. Enter it into your favorite search engine and I guarantee someone has not only done the awful thing but has thought it sufficiently clever that they’ve posted it to the net for all to see.

Feel free to be outraged but please do not blame this rising sea of crapola on freedom of speech. Blame it on lack of restraint. And lack of restraint I would argue is the monster in the closet here.

If we are to maintain a free society, we cannot forsake freedom of speech. But we place even that precious principle in jeopardy when we offer the censorship-prone amongst us examples of speech that should never have been uttered. Make no mistake about this: those self-appointed guardians who today want to deny gays the same rights as the rest of us, who don’t believe basic health care for all is the province of the government, and who really believe there’s nothing fishy in a white cop firing twelve shots at an unarmed black teenager will next be telling us what we are allowed to say.

This movie company’s cowardice in pulling this movie will come back to bite us all. But more than that, it was the production of this ill-advised film in the first place that really chaps my hide. Because censorship versus free speech is a foundational argument in this society and this is a ridiculous matter concerning which to frame the discussion. Look, I know writers have a duty to put the ideas out there and even to crowd the edge of the envelope. But at how many levels did theoretically savvy people fail to see that this one was a dumb idea? What idiot green-lighted this disaster? How many individuals ignored the emperor’s exposed backside in preference for going along with the giggling, back-slapping groupthink that produced this mess?

Yes, the ‘leader’ in question is a bullying, rampaging, horrid clown and the world would be better off if he was not in control of a country chock full of toadies with weapons. But really – a comedy about assassinating the jerk? How did you think  he would react? And what sociologically important message conveyed by this film overrode caution?

Damn…

The word is restraint, folks. And for our friends in the movie business – the word has a more important meaning than to describe the leather straps used in slasher movies.

 

Side note: Mary and I just saw The Theory of Everything and it was fantastic! Surely one of the most lovely and complex love stories I’ve seen in a long, long time. Spoiler alert: Don’t go expecting a long-winded explication of Hawking’s scientific achievements. This is a story about two people finding their way, each and together. As I said, lovely. And neither gunplay nor nudity – imagine that! There are some brilliant people still in the industry. Second spoiler alert: The scene with the blackboard - magic!

Erratum

You may have noticed that in recent posts, the final paragraph appears in a different and slightly larger font. I don't know if this is a setting I've somehow misplaced or a function of the interface between my new confuser and the hosting site, or, or, or...

I will figure out how to fix this little problem. Meanwhile, mine ego demands that I tell you it's not me being cute or trying to overly emphasize morals to my missives. It's a mistake, pure and simple.

My first one ever...

Large and lazy and stuperous

Odin the Large and Lazy had ear canal ablation surgery (look it up if your stomach is strong) a few days ago and he is now home recuperating. With his outsized cone, half his head shaved and swollen and his eyes never quite focusing, he is the picture of confused discomfort.  

As I type this, I’ve been on duty with him for about five hours, in standby to keep him quiet and clean up after his occasional upchucks. We think the painkiller is upsetting his tummy but in case something more serious is going on, we’re not leaving him alone today, his first full day back at home.

Being half Dane and going on ten years old, we had to carefully consider whether to go ahead with the surgery in spite of his age and the difficult recovery and the cost. But not for long did we mull; bottom line, we just couldn’t see him continue with constant ear infections caused by his tumor and we were not ready to make that other decision.

His gaze when he focuses on one of us is a blend of wonder and worry and just a hint of “what the (insert doggy expletive) have you done to me?” Of course, he doesn’t know the whys and wherefores or the love that went into our decision-making process. But we do. His day will come but it’s not today.

Today is about watching and waiting and caring. This is the dog who made our daughters feel safe when parents were out, who delighted and frustrated and loved us and made our home whole.
I wish he felt better.

On campus

This afternoon finds me on the campus of a major research university, utterly on my own whilst Mary and Two engage in activities that mothers and daughters consider essential and fathers find excruciatingly boring. Accordingly, I have temporarily but firmly severed ties with wife and daughter in favor of finding my own entertainment.

Yes, I’ve gone noticing. Big surprise, right?

The venue for my current observational adventure is the first floor main lobby of the campus student center. This being roughly lunchtime and having established my ‘blind’ on a well-upholstered couch smack dab in the center of the space, I am vastly entertained by the constant ebb and flow of student life.

This is at once an alien and homey experience for me. Alien because having never had the ‘university experience’ and - no matter how I try - missing by a country mile in my attempt to get inside their minds,  I can never really ‘get’ them. Homey because in any large group of people, acting generally in concert toward similar but highly individual goals, the motivations and worries and fears and joys are mostly the same. People want to fit in, want to get their work done well, need to feel connected while independent, crave what they crave and are repulsed by whatever grosses them out (okay, so the Venn diagrams don’t entirely overlap on that one, so what?).

The young woman in the chair next to me happily agreed to watch my stuff while I went around the corner to get a hot chocolate but I have the sense that her watchfulness was not entirely necessary. No one seems much worried about walking away from their nests for ten minutes at a time to buy food, engage another group, visit the necessary, whatever. Still, I asked and she agreed to be vigilant on my behalf. It was a neighborly moment.

But I digress…

What is constantly amazing to me is not how smart these young’uns are in the academic sense. They were chosen to come here at least in large part on the basis of a demonstrated ability to learn. So no big shock that most of them will survive the rigors to spit out the other end with degree in hand.

What bogs my noggin is their seemingly effortless ability to project manage all the various activities of their lives. The kid over there selling calendars for charity gave his senior capstone presentation yesterday and will be singing in a concert tomorrow evening.  And while sitting at the table, he’s planning an outing with a group of friends. I know all this because he’s a buddy of Two’s with whom I chatted last night and because I am a reasonably accomplished eavesdropper.

All around me, students are talking about classes, finals, assignments of course, but also myriad activities, organized and un- (dis-?) and it amazes me that they keep it all straight. I’ve looked at the syllabi and assignment schedules for some of the class sections here and the weight of just the required elements of three to five courses would seem staggering. And they do occasionally stagger, to be sure. But they muddle through somehow, and they do so while piling on clubs, campus jobs (Two is a campus tour guide), excursions, charitable activities, friends needing shoulders to cry on, laundry, medical problems, and for some, True Love.

I know this level of engagement is not unique to the students at this particular institution because the same was true for the students at One’s college, on the other side of the country and in a wildly different set of majors.

I’m not qualified to judge whether these kids are being well-prepared to become engineers or physicists or cognitive scientists. But I suspect they’re being pretty well prepared for the ever-changing and frequently competing pressures of life.

Nothing Special

That’s exactly what we did over the weekend, nothing special. And it was perfect.

With both daughters home for a surprise visit, we hadn’t planned any of the activities you generally plan for a long-overdue visit.

We took in the latest Hunger Games  installment together, sharing popcorn, red vines and Junior Mints. Mary and the daughters did Black Friday whilst I worked on a writing project. We had a low key but scrumptious Turkey Day dinner with our dear friends and neighbors Susan and Bjorn.

One had dinner with a couple of college friends and Two did coffee with her besty from high school. We sat in the rec room downstairs – currently the depository for all the stuff we’ve found in nooks and crannies – and discussed what goes and what stays, what’s precious and who bought which DVD.

I made my famous turkey soup, Mary prepared for this week’s business trip, One practiced new tunes for her dinner theatre gig and Two studied. We messed with the dogs and took turns doing dishes.

We spent a simple majority of the time in various combinations just being together. Catching up. Watching a hokey Christmas movie. Arguing over the heater setting. Ate out a couple of times. Mostly ate in, whatever leftovers each of us felt inclined to eat at the moment.

As I said, nothing special.

It was glorious!