Half Changed World

An old friend stopped by for a visit last week.  He’s recently moved to the DC area, and a couple of months ago posted a comment here along the lines of "Are you the Elizabeth who…."?  And I was.  We’ve emailed back and forth a few times, and finally managed to connect in the flesh.

When D asked who this friend was, I told him that when I met E, we were closer in age to Daniel’s age now than to our current ages.  We met in Freshman bio, literally more than half a lifetime ago. 

If we were meeting for the first time today, my guess is that we wouldn’t become friends.  Our paths probably would never cross, and if they did, we’d probably get into a political argument within five minutes.  (I certainly don’t have any other friends who are regulars on Little Green Footballs.)  Not that we didn’t have constant political arguments in high school, but somehow it seemed more possible to disagree more or less civilly then.

One of the things that I envy when I read Jo(e)’s blog is the way that she’s embedded in a community.  Her kids go to school with the kids of people she went to high school with.  I grew up in NYC, so I’m not sure that I could have had that sort of experience even if I hadn’t moved away.  Sitting at my table with E is probably as close as I’m ever going to come.

Back in November, Jody posted about a project that Forbes and Yahoo undertook to let you send an email to yourself in the future.  As I wrote in a DotMoms post, it immediately set me calculating how old the boys would be at each of the intervals offered — one, five, ten and twenty years from now.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that this simple calculation contained an awful lot of blythe assumptions.

Last week I attended a funeral.  It was for a twenty-five year old woman, the secretary for my division at work.  She was hit by a bus and killed just a few blocks from our office.  The minister acknowledged everyone’s sorrow and pain and shock.  But then he reminded us "Tomorrow isn’t promised.  Today isn’t promised."  You never know when you could step off a curb and find that it’s your day.

So I’m making my usual New Year’s Resolutions, and plans and goals for the new year.  But I’m also more than usually aware of the possibilities for things to go amiss.

I wish you a happy new year, full of joy and fulfillment.  And may you be able to handle the challenges that life throws at you with grace.

I’m afraid we’ve managed to totally confuse D with this whole Hanukah and Christmas deal.  The boys opened their presents from their paternal grandparents (who celebrate Christmas) this morning, and within 15 minutes D was shrieking "no, it’s mine!" at N.  I asked him to sit with me and asked "Do you know what the spirit of Christmas is about?"  He answered immediately "Judah Maccabee!"   We clearly need to find the light-up elephant that Baraita was talking about.

In all seriousness, we had a lovely day.  T’s parents scored some real hits with both the Bucket Blast Game, which had us running all over the place throwing beanbags at each other, and the Peanut Butter and Jelly Game, which is one of the few kids games I’ve played that doesn’t make the adults cheat in the kids’ favor in a desperate attempt to get the thing over with.  It’s nice to spread the presents out, because everything gets played with much more than if everything comes at once.  It was a rainy dreary day outside, so we hung out, played lots of games, ate left over chinese food, baked chocolate chip cookies, and watched the Muppet Christmas Carol.

In thinking about my attitudes towards Christmas, I’ve figured out that there are at least three different holidays that are cojoined under the name of Christmas these days:

• The religious holiday, with the babe in the manger and so forth.  I have deep respect for this holiday, and find parts of the story very moving, but I feel no need or desire to celebrate it myself.
• The Charles Dickens / Irving Berlin version of the holiday, which is essentially secular.  (When Scrooge wakes up Christmas morning and wants to change his life, it’s not church that he rushes off to.) This version is about winter wonderlands, crackling fires, lots of cookies, and good times spent with family and friends. 
• The buy-buy-buy Sunday circular version of the holiday, which is all about spending money.  Tom Lehrer caught it perfectly in his tribute to "the true spirit of Christmas as we celebrate it in the United States, that is to say the commercial spirit."

Thinking of it this way really helped me understand my ambivalence about Christmas.  (Last year, I wrote that I didn’t really have a good answer for why I was less than totally thrilled about having another holiday to celebrate).  As a non-Christian, in some ways it’s easy for me to enjoy the second version of Christmas — especially since I’m not trying to live up to an idealized image of what Christmas is supposed to be.  I can bake gingerbread men with my boys, without feeling like I’m a failure for not making 10 different kinds of cookies.  But, without the counterbalance of the religious components of Christmas, I’m afraid that if we celebrate it as a secular holiday, the materialistic component will become overwhelming.    Does that make sense?

It also helped me figure out why I’m so scornful of the supposed "War on Christmas."  Because saying "Happy Holidays" isn’t a threat to any of the three kinds of Christmas.   (And as many people have pointed out, it has spread largely because it’s bad business sense to offend any potential customers.)  It’s only a threat to those who are nostalgic for surface conformity, who are fine with there being Jews and Moslems and atheists in the US as long as we’re willing to be second-class citizens.

Today was not a good day.

The Senate passed the budget reconciliation bill.  It was so close they had to fly Cheney back from Pakistan to cast the tie-breaking vote, but it passed.  And the Dems have been able to delay it by a parliamentary maneuver that forces the House to vote on it again, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for the miracle that stops it from being enacted.

The bill has some pretty lousy welfare provisions — a few of them better than what Congress has been talking about, but some of them worse.  And, from my selfish point of view, it’s incredibly frustrating to have Congress throw out everything that we’ve painstakingly tried to improve over the past four years, and stick in some language that no one has ever seen before.  It really feels like the main thing I’ve spent my time at work on over the past several years has just been a total waste.

We got a panicked call this afternoon from a Senate staffer because the lobbying office from her state was calling furious about the TANF section and she wanted talking points.  All of our reaction (which we didn’t say out loud) was "And you didn’t realize that this was going to piss the states off?"

And then I got home and opened up a rejection letter from a job that I had pinned high hopes on.

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  For our ancestors, who didn’t have electric lights, it was a terrible time, "the dark midwinter." But it’s also a season of hope, because the days are finally going to start getting longer.  You can understand why almost every northern hemisphere culture has a festival that involves lots of lights

But today, I’m thinking of Frontier House, and the huge pile of wood that the families chopped preparing for the winter.  And the expert took one look at it, and said "it might last until January."  I know there are seasons and cycles to everything, and that the darkness won’t last forever.  But I’m feeling like I don’t have enough wood stocked to make it through until spring.

Ok, that’s way too dramatic.  I have a terrific family.  I don’t have any health issues more serious than a runny nose.  I have a job that doesn’t eat my life, that pays well enough for T. to stay home, with great colleagues who appreciate me.  I have a wonderful group of readers of this blog.  (According to Typepad’s stats, I got my 100,000th hit today.  Statcounter’s numbers are higher — I’m not sure which to believe.)  But I’m feeling pretty darn down.

When I was in sixth grade, I got into an argument with a substitute teacher who didn’t believe me when I told him that we didn’t celebrate Christmas.  I was outraged, but more by his stupidity* than because I felt religiously persecuted.   This was New York City, after all, where the public schools close down for the High Holidays.

NaomiChana at Baraita has a really thought-provoking post up about the "December Dilemna" for Jews.  She writes:

"Apparently we American Jews are supposed to spend the month of Kislev engaged in a nonstop angstfest about — well, mostly how we will decorate our homes. Single candles in windows are out; nine-branched candelabras are in; seven-branched candelabras depend heavily on context. Greenery is dubious,* especially triangular shapes, and circles are questionable, but any medium which can reasonably be shaped into a four-sided top is cool. Blue lights are fine; clear lights are fine unless they look too much like the ones the neighbors have strung around their creche scene; multicolored lights are Right Out. Also, lighted reindeer forms are frowned upon; my search for a lighted elephant form (preferably stepping on a lighted Eleazar Maccabee) has so far been in vain, but I like to think that would be OK."

I don’t think the solution to the December dilemna is to stick a huge menorah up next to the Christmas tree in the middle of the park.  When you do that, Hanukah is always going to seem like an afterthought, a sop toward political correctness.  And Hanukah is a third-tier Jewish holiday in any case.  I’d be a lot happier if school districts were less careful to include "I have a little dreidl" in their Christmas Winter concerts, and more careful to give teachers a list of the dates of major Jewish holidays with a letter saying "please don’t schedule major exams or projects for these days."  And, like Tiny Coconut, I’d like to see more floating holidays so non-Christians don’t have to choose between observing their holidays and having a vacation.

NaomiChana goes on to argue:

"You want a real dilemma involving Judaism and American culture? Try "whether or not to run errands on Shabbat."….These dilemmas run up against Jewish fundamentals. What you tell your kids about the white-bearded, red-suited guy in the mall is probably not that kind of dilemma."

Ok, ok, point well taken.  But what do I tell my kids about the white-bearded, red-suited guy in the mall?  D attends a Jewish preschool, so December isn’t all Santa all the time, but he watches enough television that he’s definitely got the concept.  He knows that we don’t celebrate Christmas, but that his paternal grandparents do.  And when we’re with them on December 25, they hang stockings for all of us.  We’re not seeing them this Christmas, having schelpped out to Portland for Thanksgiving.  I’m not quite sure whether D is expecting us to hang stockings without them.  And I don’t know if we should, whether or not he’s expecting it.  (Even without the excuse of non-Jewish grandparents, my family did do Christmas stockings when I was little; I’d guess my parents gave it up when I was 9 or 10.)

* It’s ignorant not to know that not everyone celebrates Christmas, but it’s stupid to persist in that belief when confronted by a real live person telling you that she doesn’t.

I’m totally blown away by the holiday cards that Andrea is making.  I love the idea of doing crafty stuff like that, but the reality is that I usually wind up spending a bunch of money on supplies and then finding that it’s not nearly as easy as it looks to make something that looks halfway decent.  And if I tried it with the boys around, I’m sure I’d wind up finding embossing powder in unexpected crevices until June.

I started making a photobook of the boys last week, but then I discovered that I was only up to July in my selecting/editing of my digital photos.  I like the photos I get by taking dozens of shots and throwing out most of them, but I always underestimate the time involved in staying on top of them.  It’s just so easy (and cheap) to take 30 pictures in a matter of minutes.

D got the idea that he wanted to decorate picture frames for some of his relatives (with pictures of himself in them, of course).  We got some wooden frames from Michael’s, but his idea of decorating them is to make three swipes with the paintbrush and then say "I’m done."  It’s taking enormous willpower for me not to impose my standards on him.

The one project that I did complete is the scarf I knitted for D.  I started it at the end of last winter, then abandoned it when the weather got warm.  It’s about as basic as you can get — moss stitch, cheap acrylic yarn.  I like it because I don’t have to count stitches or remember what row I’m supposed to be in.  It’s not exactly a work of art, but D said "it’s beautiful."

To give you an idea of the kind of day I’ve had, I’ll let you know some of the things I’m grateful for tonight:

• That after N woke me up early this morning because he was covered in diarrhea, when I cleaned him up, he said "back sleep now" and so we both did.
• That our friend invited D over for a playdate this afternoon, so I was able to go grocery shopping while T took N to the urgent care clinic for the horrendous swelling of his genitals that followed (and not the fun kind — he’s 2).
• That another friend went to the grocery store with me so I had company waiting on the huge lines that occur in the DC area whenever a flurry is forecast.
• That when D started puking this evening, he recognized it in time to make it to the bathroom.
• That we had already decided to pass on the party we were invited to this evening, so we didn’t waste the cost of a babysitter.
• That we have a gas stove, so I was able to cook dinner even though half our kitchen lost power.
• That whatever caused us to lose electricity to half of our kitchen this evening corrected itself when we finally decided to unplug the refrigerator and plugged it in on a different circuit.  (And yes, we tried flipping the circuit breaker about a dozen times before this.  Suggestions for long-term solutions are welcome.)

Good night.

Sleepy:  My strategy of putting an 11 pm bedtime on my to-do list isn’t working very well.  I keep trying to sneak in one more thing.

Grumpy:  I hate how early it gets dark these days.  And I’m stressed about the logistics of flying cross-country with the boys.  We flew a lot with D when he was an only child, but this is the first time flying with two kids.  At least we don’t need to schlepp a car seat for D.

Sneezy:  So of course, it looks like I might be coming down with a cold.

Dopey:  This morning when I went to put my contacts in, I discovered that I had carefully put them in their case when I took them out last night, but never added any soaking solution.  I think they’ll be ok in the long run, but I definitely needed to wear my glasses today.

For once, I remembered at a reasonable hour on Thursday night that I need to make the challah dough if we want fresh challah for Friday evening.

I asked D if he wanted to help me make the challah, and got an enthusiastic yes.  So we measured out yeast, water, oil, salt and sugar, cracked in an egg, and started adding flour and stirring.  I showed him how we added flour until the dough wasn’t sticky anymore, then turned it out onto a cutting board to knead.

After a minute, D asked if he could have a turn so I let him pound the dough a bit.  "Roar!"  he said, "Stomp!  Stomp"

"Are you a monster?" I asked.

"A dinosaur.  Roar!"

I asked if I could have a turn, and folded the challah over a few times.  "Ok, you can go again. Stomp that dough." 

He banged away at it.  "Now I’m going to turn over the entire city!"  He folded it, carefuly copying my actions.  "Roar!"

1)  T got an email a few weeks ago from Netflix, notifiying us that we were eligible to participate in a settlement of a class action lawsuit.  The suit alleges that Netflix made misleading claims of "unlimited DVDs" and "one-day turnaround" and the settlement provides for a one month upgrade to the next level of service plan.  T commented that his inclination was to decline the upgrade, as he thinks Netflix has provided us with exactly what they promised. 

2)  As some of you may have noticed if you tried to comment last Tuesday, Typepad has been having some service issues.  Monday, they sent out an email apologizing for the outages, and offering compensation.  The interesting twist was that they are letting users pick what level of compensation they think is appropriate:

"We are all aware that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.

We also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. If you often use the service on weekdays between 7:00 am and 1:00 pm Pacific Time you may have experienced one or even many periods when you had problems with TypePad’s speed and responsiveness. If you use the service at other times, you may not have experienced any problems at all. After wrestling with these facts and wanting to be fair to all our users we have decided that the only option is to allow you to choose how Six Apart should compensate you.

By default, you will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don’t have to do anything; we will just credit your account.

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation."

Users can choose between 15, 30 and 45 days of free service, or reply "I really wasn’t affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.  Thank you for the offer, but please don’t credit my account." 

I’m fascinated by the choices, and would be very interested in seeing the distribution of responses.  My guess is that most people will pick 15 days, and that more people will pick "no credit" than 45 days.

3)  Yesterday, I came home to a nice surprise — a check for almost $200 from Olympus cameras, refunding what I had paid earlier in the year for them to fix my camera.  They’ve issued a service advisory that covers faulty CCDs, and proactively identified my repair as one that should have been covered.  Hence the unexpected check in my mailbox.