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i am: 40...a capricorn / moon in pisces / libra rising...an old soul with a young spirit...older than i look...contemplating my 3rd tattoo...NOT a web designer...a lesbian...working things out with the g.f....a native iowan...a graduate of cornell college and ohio state...a critical reader and thinker...really rather shy...agnostic...an ardent feminist...a bleeding-heart liberal...a pacifist...and so not your average white grrl...
e-mail me
feeling generous? *grin*
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December 23, 2002
holidazebeing agnostic makes this time of year a little weird for me...i feel like a great big ball of contradiction.
i grew up celebrating christmas like i'd imagine most people who celebrate it do (at least in the midwestern u.s.): with gift giving and receiving, copious amounts of home-cooked food, traveling long distances (often in inclement, if not downright dangerous, weather) to be with loved ones...that kind of thing. the adults always stressed "the real meaning of christmas"...lest we forget that it was not supposed to be all about the presents. special church functions (e.g., services, youth and children's programs) were always a part of the deal.
but what's "the real meaning of christmas" for a non-christian? for someone like me...raised christian (lutheran, to be exact), but who has not only made a conscious decision to stop practicing, but who no longer believes? am i a hypocrite for celebrating a holiday i don't even believe in? sure sounds like it.
part of continuing to celebrate christmas has been about my family. they celebrate it...they give me gifts...they have expectations that i'll come "home" to join them for their celebration (tho, like this year, i don't always meet that expectation). it would feel very strange to just suddenly stop reciprocating. plus...my mother prays for my soul enough as it is. if i stopped acknowledging december 25th as a holiday, it'd probably put her right over the edge she's teetering on.
a bigger part of it is that i find immense pleasure in giving gifts, and christmas gives me a socially-validated excuse to go "all out" with that. i love to shop, and this time of year, i get to do a lot of it. i pay close attention to my people year-round, so that when it comes time to shop for them, i know exactly what to get, exactly what will please them the most. i wrap each gift carefully and creatively, so that receiving a gift from me (as sherri says) is "a party." i love watching people unwrap their gifts, seeing their faces light up when they see what's inside (or imagining it, if i'm not there). if i suddenly stopped celebrating christmas, i would lose a prime opportunity for all these activities that i love...for these little ways to show people how much i care about them. yeah, i suppose i could celebrate the solstice instead, but...that wouldn't feel quite right, either.
this year, because sherri and niq and the kids (robert, 14; ja'nique, 8; lamont, 6)—plus an extra kid "on loan" for the evening (d'errin, 4)—are coming over for christmas eve...i felt compelled to get a tree. how can you have kids over for christmas, and not have a tree?? it's only 4 feet tall, and it's not even real (tho it's cute for a fake tree), but it's the first christmas tree i've ever bought for my own home. even that felt strange at first. but at 1 o'clock on sunday morning, when s and i stumbled in, all martini-laden from a holiday party/stonewall benefit and were too wound-up to sleep, what did we do? we put up and decorated our first christmas tree. and in an odd sort of way, it felt like we were starting our own new tradition...something we can share with our kids (when we have them...and minus the martinis).
s and i have already started a new tradition by agreeing that we're not going to spend christmas apart anymore, despite pressure from our respective families to be with them. the last several times i've gone to see my parents for the holiday, i've ended up in tears at least one point during the visit, anyway...so why have i separated myself from my lover/partner/best-friend-in-the-whole-wide-world for THAT? on the one hand, i feel good about taking that stand. on the other hand, why is it so important to me to be with s on a holiday that i don't even believe in?
there is the fact that she believes in it, and it's important to her for us to be together on christmas...so maybe that's what it is. but it feels like it's equally as important to me. why is that? am i just hanging on to what should, for me, be a day like any other day, because it's convenient, because it feels good? is picking the parts that i enjoy, and discarding the rest, offensive to people who believe in and celebate the whole shebang?
s said recently that, once we have kids, she wants to start celebrating kwanzaa...and i can't wait. i may not be of african descent, but at least i'd be celebrating a holiday in whose principles i could actually believe, even if they weren't/aren't intended for me.
while it's true that i DO tend to analyze everything to death and take worrying to a level unknown to humankind prior to my birth, i don't mean to imply that i sit around worrying about all this and forget to enjoy the good parts. i don't. but this stuff winds itself through my brain on a fairly regular basis. i never seem to be able to answer my own questions, and my fear of being a hypocrite (as someone who despises hypocrisy probably more than anything else) is...well, it just is.
hopefully, you're at least a little less conflicted about "this holiday season" than i am. hopefully, you've got it all worked out and know what you celebrate and what you don't...what you do wish to observe, and what you don't. whatever that is, for each of you...you have my wishes for the very best of it.
1:10 PM
December 18, 2002
apropos of nothingas i'm sure you've realized, i haven't had the time to blog much lately. between work; gift designing and making (you should see some of my beaded creations...i'm actually kinda proud of myself), wrapping (this is a big deal...i am known nationwide for my stunning gifts), and shipping (2 to iowa, 1 to california, 1 to texas, 1 to canada, and 1 to minnesota for me; 1 to texas and 1 to new york for s) ; decorating (children are involved this year, otherwise i probably wouldn't bother with anything beyond the string of white lights on the mantel) and the 17 loads of laundry i've done in the last few days (if that's an exaggeration, it's not much of one) , i'm about to drop. for reallies.
while today is no exception, i thought i'd share a few of the things running through my (half-crazed) brain when i'm not busy writing multi-million-dollar funding proposals, deciding which beads and sterling silver charm(s) to use for my next creation, jockeying for the last roll of matte silver curling ribbon at world market, standing in line at the post office, or deciding what ornaments should adorn our little tree: 1) does nivea have a brother named lubriderm? a sister named eucerin? (why on earth would the child's parents do this to her??)
2) if i were a jewish rapper, i'd interject "CHALLAH!" in the middle of my of rap.
3) (why do my blogs of late have so much going on parenthetically?)
10:33 AM
December 06, 2002
colorado dreamin'first of all, i cannot even express how very happy i am that it is friday. it's only been a 3-day week for me, but it sure has seemed a lot longer.
last week was a whirlwind. the first part of the week (in addition to work, of course) was all about running errands, doing laundry, and making sure we were ready for our trip. then, thanksgiving at jeff and john's...23 people for dinner (21 men, s, and me), enough food for 100 (i ate my annual piece of turkey—aside from seafood, that one piece of turkey each year is the only meat i eat), and lots of laughs. my friend sue and her new grrlfriend michelle came by for dessert. sue (who, years ago, i considered my closest friend) is like a completely different person now that she's finally broken up with her old grrlfriend (the one who, as s so accurately describes her, looks like what would happen if yoda and meredith baxter birney had a baby. now, if she were a nice person? i wouldn't repeat that. but...to say that she's not a nice person is an understatement...and i'll leave it at that). michelle, by contrast, seems nice, funny, and a whole lot more interesting...e.g., she's a couple flights away from getting her pilot's license...and she and sue just seem to "get" each other. even tho i think it'd probably be better if sue spent some time alone between grrlfriends—she's been single for about a week and a half in the 15 years i've known her—it's good to see her happy again. maybe we will even start doing things together again. (you see, yoda/meredith didn't like sue to have her own friends...)
anyway, we had a nice time. we usually halfway dread these gatherings...we're often the only women there, and we aren't all that crazy about some of the other usual guests. but this year was fun...if bittersweet. jeff and john broke up about a year ago, and just sold the beautiful victorian house they've spent the last 5 years renovating...so this thanksgiving dinner was dubbed "the last supper". it's great that they're still friends, but just weird that i'll no longer refer to them as "jeff and john," now that selling the house and moving on with their lives individually is a done deal. they'd been together for 13 years, and i've known them the entire time (john and sue were two of the first people i met when i moved to columbus 15 years ago)...so it's like the start of a whole new era or something. not a bad thing...just weird.
so friday morning, we were off to colorado. we landed in denver at about 3:30 (the airport is way cool), got the rental car (they were out of the class we'd reserved, so we were upgraded to a mercury grand marquis...known thereafter as "the big-ass car". i HATE driving big cars, and this one was so NOT us...they should have just upgraded us to a volvo, or even an suv), and we were off to boulder. it's absolutely breathtaking—not just in terms of breathing difficulties due to the altitude (which were considerable), but also geographically (the mountains are, like, right there), meteorologically (blue skies, sunny, and in the mid-to-upper 50s the whole time we were there), and in so many other ways. visiting places like this makes me wonder...why on earth do i live in columbus, ohio?? i mean, i have plenty of reasons for living here...but couldn't we have just one little mountain? just a fraction of the days of sunshine boasted by the denver/boulder area??
but anyway...friday and saturday nites, we headed to the coors center for the tournament. our grrls lost to villanova in the first round (by only 6 points, and it had been a 2-point game until a really bad call late in the second half set the tone for the remaining few minutes), but beat hartford easily on saturday and took 3rd. not great out of only 4 teams, but with villanova going on on to win (something colorado was certainly not banking on), it's always better when the team that beat you goes on to win the whole thing.
with the exception of driving up into the mountains (okay...so this is one part of the trip during which the big-ass car was probably a help and not a hindrance...the horsepower was much appreciated, even if i couldn't park the damn thing once we got to the top) where we could look out over all of boulder (kind of like this, only more panoramic), we spent most of our time in and around the pearl street mall, one of the coolest downtowns i've ever seen. blocks and blocks of shops, restaurants, street vendors, entertainers (namely fire jugglers and balloon-animal makers) and opportunities for people-watching—these are the things we love best where ever it is that we're traveling—with, of course, the mountains as a backdrop...and plentiful free parking, even. we had a fabulous time.
we noticed a couple of things about boulder, tho: 1) there appear to be almost no black folks there. native americans, yes (which makes sense). hispanic people, yes. but during our hours and hours on pearl street, we saw just 3 black people (one of whom did a double take when he saw s...like he was thinking, "hey, another black person besides me!"). there were a few more at the basketball games (not counting the players), but not many. and there were no "black magazines" (ebony, essence, etc.) in the bookstores we visited. there's a common perception that not many black people live out west, with the exception of california...but (based on this trip, and our trip to portland in august) it seems to be the reality. i'm telling you, i would be ready to move to boulder toMORROW (are you detecting a pattern here?), if this weren't the case. i guess this is one of those reasons we're still in columbus...at least we're not usually in a sea of pink faces wherever we go (unless, of course, we make a wrong turn and end up at tuttle mall).
2) there appear to be almost no overweight people there. we saw 3, and they appeared to be a family. i guess it's a lifestyle thing...with the mountains and everything, people are just more active...or something. so anyway, we headed to denver early sunday afternoon. a nice drive, and we found our hotel fairly easily (thanks to mapquest directions that were actually accurate this time). despite lovely amenities (such as the cylindrically pleasing bottle of voss at bedside, linens with an insanely high threadcount, a down comforter, the dvd and cd players, and the spa tub) we did have some issues with said hotel...namely, that it was costing us nearly 200 bucks a night to stay someplace that's under renovation (the worst part of which was the false fire alarm blaring repeatedly on monday morning) a fact conveniently omitted on the web site and when s made our reservations. but downtown denver is cool as a whole. i explored the 16th street mall while s relaxed in the room, and (after the sopranos...it's on 2 hours earlier there) we had dinner at a lovely little fondue place. have you any idea how absolutely exquisite bananas are when they're dipped in warm white chocolate?? and...there are apparently a whole lot more black folks in denver than in boulder, too. :)
we spent way too much time in the denver airport on monday (it's cool...but not that cool), afraid of being bumped off our flight, so we didn't really have time for any more fun. and given all the chicago flight cancellations, we very well may have been bumped, had we not checked in 3 hours prior to our flight to st. louis. but it was a great trip. s and i love traveling together, and are almost assured a great time no matter where we go...but this trip felt kinda special. we may not have had any business spending so much money on ourselves right before x-mas, but...i am oh so glad that we did.
1:33 PM
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