Great X-mas Deflations

Scott asked the other day whether I thought that Christmas is a depressing holiday because people just have too many expectations, and they can’t help but get disappointed by something. There seems to be some unfortunate truth to this theory. As a fan of Christmas, I regret to admit this to Scott, who is only annoyed by the behemoth holiday. I think that Christmas is a problem for me because the traditions and rituals that I expect rely on the coordination of too many people and rely on me having a solid week of vacation for making things. Even when I try to condense Christmas into a few manageable factors, I still have a lengthy list. The bare minimum Christmas for me is the following:

1. Buying about four gifts and receiving at least one--keeping it to just a few means you can actually enjoy the brainstorming process of finding the perfect thing for someone.
2. Exchanging stockings with at least one person--it’s fun because this includes buying weird/cheap items, which one never gets to do because it is wasteful (e. g. yucky sushi-shaped hard candy, fake eyelashes, novelty pens), and it involves buying a variety of candies and gorging on half of them. (What else am I supposed to do with them? The stockings are never large enough.)
3. Making refrigerator cookies--this is my absolute favorite part of the holiday, especially deciding which new flavor to make this year.
4. Making a Christmas ornament--when else are hastily glued-together glitter and construction paper crafts admired by anyone after you graduate from 3rd grade?
5. Having a Christmas tree--they smell great and I love watching a sappy movie while stringing up yards and yards of popcorn and cranberry garlands.
6. Cooking something that is overly complicated, like a turkey or a stew that needs multiple hours to simmer
7. Eating a large dinner and feeling physical discomfort
8. Hanging out with family members--especially ones you don’t see very often
9. Getting a little tipsy to take the edge off of being around said family members--essential! I wish I could convince my in-laws of how important this tradition is. Sadly, they are practically tea-totelers.
10. Overindulging on eggnog with brandy--why isn’t this delightful concoction available year round?
11. Seeing multiple movies at crowded movie theaters--okay, I’ll admit that I like doing this any time of year, but Christmas is when most people will agree to do it with me.
12. Singing a couple of Christmas carols--I’ll admit that I like some of them, and I also don’t think that there are enough musical traditions for non-musicians in modern America.

Which of these did I accomplish this year? 1, 2, 6, 7, and 8. Ergo, this year was not a complete failure, but I am feeling a slight aftertaste of dissatisfaction. I might have to let some of these rituals bleed over into my New Year’s festivities to fix the problem.

[Image from: www.polymerclayexpress.com/nov2001.html]

Spatially Challenged

I got totally lost today on the way to the hair salon. The only people who read this blog are people who know me well enough to know that this is NOT NEWS! I get lost all the time. This time was particularly pitiful, because I left the house a full hour ahead of time, printed out two (no fewer!) maps, and had consulted them multiple times the day before, the morning of, and about every 5 minutes during the trip. A lot hinged on this outing, because I needed a haircut badly, I have been looking particularly wooly for at least a month, I was feeling a bit down because of some negative feedback on my schoolwork, and my previous haircut with a new and incompetent stylist was a complete failure. (Those of you who do not allow your hair to rule your psychological and emotional stability may think that last sentence was irrational and unnecessarily wordy, but the rest of us know that it summed up all of my problems quite succinctly and with a tight and fluid line of logical reasoning.) I HAD to get that haircut in order for the month of December to turn out right. However, I was 30 minutes late to the appointment, had to cancel and reschedule, and was forced to waste a couple of hours until the next moment the stylist had available. The cascade of disappointment included getting a blister from walking two extra miles, failing to meet a deadline for work that day, wasting an additional 20 bucks on lunch in a shee-shee shopping district near the salon, discovering that there were items of clothing that I could never afford (such as $23 pairs of badass socks), and sobbing hysterically on a stump while passersby and people in parked cars looked away politely.

Was it worth it? Yes, I love my haircut.

Now that I no longer live in Austin, I am discovering how bizarre of a handicap this is--my incredibly bad sense of direction. I really can read a map. But, for some reason, when I look at a map with the intention of going from one point on the map to another, I lose the ability to make connections between the symbolic representation of space and real-time geometry. Also, to make matters worse, I can’t tell my right from my left, I have to use a mnemonic device to remember which direction is east or west, and I have a poor memory for business names. For example, I can remember that there is a fast food restaurant that sells burgers on a corner near my apartment, but I can’t remember whether it is McDonalds or Burger King. Also, my spatial memory is shoddy.

The only fun part of living in a new city for me, is making friends who don’t know that I am completely unreliable when it comes to getting from place to place. They start rattling off directions and saying, “Great, we’ll meet at this place at such and such time, right?” completely confident that I am a normal person who will have little trouble following their directions. Little do they know that I am a complete imbecile. I wonder how long I can keep up this charade.

[Image from: www.biblehelp.org/whatsay.htm]

Verbosity

It's official. I use too many words when I write. This semester, we had a 700 word limit on our weekly science newswriting papers, and I would always spend only 2 or 3 hours writing them and then at least 1 hour trying to shave them down from 786 to exactly 700 words. Last night, I turned in my final for my science magazine class and the word count was supposed to be 1200-1800 words. I wrote 1950. I couldn't trim it down, because I ran out of time. It's a damn fine paper on planetary science and the struggle between scientists and lay people over the importance to classifying solar system objects as planets, but hey, I'm a failure because I can't be succinct.

Next semester, my goal will be to be brief. Maybe I'll read some Hemmingway in preparation. Maybe I'll write what I should have written for this blog:

I write too much.

Go see King Kong.

Molly like.

[Image from: http://nutter.net/dana/humor/joke.asp?r=605&lang=en]

Bread Baggage

It snowed today, a few inches. Scott asked me if I had any boots. The moment that I replied "no," a long-forgotten childhood memory suddenly log jammed my brain. When I was little and we visited my grandma's in Indiana for Christmas, we never had snow boots. It didn't make sense for us to have them for just one trip up north each year. So, my mom used to have us double up on the socks and then wear bread bags over the socks and then our usual tennis shoes over the bags. I think there might have been some rubber bands around the ankles, too, but I'm not so sure about that detail. It was the 80s, so of course, to cover up the bizarre practice of wearing bread bags on our feet, we wore leg warmers. This noisy solution to the problem of lacking snow boots kept our toes warm and dry while we went sledding, though I can't imagine what the neighbors and my cousins thought. (Probably thought, gee, how many sandwiches did this family of five kids have to eat to get ten bread bags?)

Then, I remembered another thing about bread bags. (How many traumatizing memories about bread bags can I dig up from one childhood? The answer, my friend, is many!) My parents also used to save the bread bags because they were so handy for lunches and leftovers. But for some reason, my dad wasn't satisfied with reusing them just once. No, he had to breathe more life into each square foot of that plastic than was ever inhaled by the original organisms that decayed to form the petroleum byproduct that makes up the bag. He would reuse the bread bag and then, if they were still remotely clean, he'd put them back in a drawer, which we called The Bag Drawer. This drawer was stuffed full of years' worth of bread bags, so that you had to do a quick little stuff-slam-yank-your-hand-away maneuver to close the thing without bags exploding out like a jack in the box. He'd reuse these bags so many times, that the plastic or maybe the printing on the bags would start to disintegrate. They were all sticky, and I think that their stickiness was infectious, so a new bag would get sticky from residing in such close proximity with the ancient bags. I also think he might have put them in the washing machine, but perhaps this is only an exaggeration that my mind has accepted as real. I remember that I hated those sticky bags so much that I would hide new bags around the house for my own personal use. That way, I could pack my lunch in a brand new reused bread bag.

By the way, my family ate only Roman Meal brand wheat bread. This is exactly what the bags looked like:

[Image from: http://www.romanmeal.com/]

Volcanoes and Planets

This past week I have been interviewing dozens of volcanologists and astronomers for my two final papers in my science journalism classes. One paper is on an Antarctic volcano that is injecting burning hot lava underneath a frozen ice sheet. The other paper is on the red-hot debate over the classification of newly discovered celestial objects—that is, how astronomers are having to redefine the word “planet” to keep tiny oddball Pluto in with the Big Nine and exclude all these massive new guys that they keep finding.

With these two seemingly opposite topics juxtaposed artificially through a hectic school schedule, I hadn’t anticipated that I would discover two important ways that volcanology and astronomy are related. I mean, in addition to the fact that they are both Earth/planetary sciences.

For one, astronomers and volcanologists both like to hang out on or near volcanoes. That’s right, most every one of these guys and gals are located in Hawaii. Volcanologists like to work within an easy distance of a volcano for obvious reasons. However, astronomers also dig volcanoes as sights for their observatories. Apparently, the telescopes get better images when located at higher altitudes, which have a thinner atmosphere and therefore have fewer pesky air molecules blocking and scattering the light from distant stars. Higher altitudes can be achieved on, you guessed it, pointy volcano summits.

The other commonality is less of a coincidence: Some astronomers study volcanoes on other planets. Why is this so cool? I can’t tell you for certain. Perhaps it has something to do with the sisterly feeling I get from knowing that another alien planet has similar blemishes on its surface. One guy I spoke with uses heat-detecting satellites to study both Earthly and Martian volcanoes. Awesome!

[Image from http://www.digitalmedia.cz/3dsoftware/show.asp?nid=128]

True Love

I saw the new Pride and Prejudice flick the other day with some ladies from my department. Actually, I'll go ahead and out myself. First we watched the 5 hour and ten minute BBC version and then made a mad dash to the movie theater (It was like a scene out of Burn Out 3!) to see the Keira Knightly version that just came out. The new movie was pretty good, though I was a bit Jane Austen'ed out by the end of the 8 hour affair.

One scene in particular moved me more than any other. In this scene, Elizabeth Bennett is in bed with her sister Jane. The warm lamplight illuminates the cozy tent they've made with the sheets. They are giggling and whispering about the dance they had just attended, in which Jane had met her new crush Mr. Bingley, a handsome man of good fortune and potential husband. (I know, I know, this description is perhaps putting a final nail in the coffin for any hipster persona I could have glued together from bits of coolness in my life. Hey, I'm a sucker for 18th and 19th century literature.) Anyway, my point is that this scene was so authentic I wanted to cry. It captured perfectly the pure delight and bathing warmth you feel when you love your sister and the two of you are completely in agreement over the importance and loveliness of some trivial event. I have two sisters and many times have we played out this very scene.

I think that you can achieve this kind of love with people who are not your siblings, but the physical comfort is hard to attain with a non-family-member. Even lovers and partners, who probably find themselves in bed together more often and more naturally than siblings, have an entire dimension of complicating emotions (good and bad) that would ruin or preclude this kind of intimate moment.