Hey team, I sure love holidays. Take June third: if you come up to me on June third and ask what Im doing, Ill have to say something like, I was trying to make a burrito press out of a roll of toilet paper, but I discovered that when you put a bunch of food into a toilet paper roll, thats not a burrito press - thats a burrito! Do you want to try this burrito? But oh, no, no one ever wants to try the burrito. Or take the 23rd of September. What was I doing on the 23rd of September? Well, I just checked the calendar, and by a strange coincidence, I was meeting Emma Sky Marsh, so I guess thats like an anniversary that will allow me to, in the future, answer that question with something other than, I was trying to teach a new cat to sing the national anthem, but its just not working because I dont have tuna fish, so I was trying to use chicken and teach the cat that its just the tuna of the land, but then he bit me, and now Im going to the vet because doctors make me uncomfortable. From now on, every 23rd of September, I can say, Oh, todays Emmas and my anniversary, so Im making a dinner reservation and shes spending the day with her husband. And thats sort of my point - for the holidays, everyone already knows what youre doing, and you know what to do, so you dont have to sound like an idiot. Come Christmas, you can just tell people youre shopping for presents, baking cookies, and trying to stop Bryant from drinking eggnog, because he will consume it all and then fart on your pillow. For Halloween, you can always make a costume, decorate your yard, or wander through the streets, shell-shocked and drenched in blood, which you can technically do any time, but theres only one day a year its considered healthy. For Valentines Day, youre always finding some way to distract yourself from your vague sense of inadequacy and keen sense of hopelessness, although I always tell people Im spending the whole day preparing a very romantic dinner and hope no one asks who Im preparing it for. If youre some kind of writer or artsy person or whatever, holidays are a double blessing: on top of not having to think of anything to do, you dont have to come up with any ideas to express. If youre some jerk painter or something, you can just paint your mother getting much too familiar with a shirtless, waxed Santa Clause whos staring off into the distance with grey, steely eyes. Painters get all the breaks. If youre a writer, its actually not much harder - you just take a holiday appropriate poem or song, change the stupid words to be a little more stupid and corny, and call it a night. Heres the basic template for that, by the way: Twas the night before Christmas, And all through _____________ Not a ________ was ________, Not even ___________. Its basically like playing madlibs by yourself when youve already read through the story youre filling in a bazillion times. New Year is a little different, though, because theres literally never been a poem written about the New Year. The closest it gets is an afterthought in that crappy Merry Christmas song, and theres not much you can change about and a happy New Year to make yourself original while also mentioning the New Year. Its even worse for the painting crowd, though, because there are no extant images of the New Year either, and while writers can always fall back on writing about how theres nothing to write about, painting a painting about how theres nothing to paint is a lot more conceptually challenging. Anyway, we get a freebie with New Years resolutions, which are the best because you dont even have to try to come up with your own. Facebook just had me read a list of eight New Years resolutions that will improve my life, including cutting down my use of social media. Now, through the miracle of plagiarism, I could say that Im making that resolution, and then say some of the stuff the article thing said, and then go to press. Easy-peasy. Or I could resolve to drink less, which many people wouldnt know was disingenuous and callous of me to say. Or I could start meditating, and I wouldnt even have to say what I meant by meditating, or acknowledge that there are many, many different traditions and concepts of meditation. And its a good thing I can do all that New Years thieving, too, because I didnt make any resolutions. I made a lasagna. I try to make a point of not resolving for New Years these days, because I feel like its a close to worst-case scenario response time. I reckon if Im making really important life changes on the first of January, that means either A) everything bad in my life happens just after Christmas, B) I only develop the means to deal with my problems just after Christmas, possibly in the form of chocolate and pistachios, or C) I accumulate new problems and capacities throughout the year, but only choose to respond to them one day a year. This seems bad. I mean, lets say I move into my new house in a month. Its the beginning of February, and I notice that theres some pretty bad heat bleeding. Do I really want to wait until January 2016 to decide to seal the air leaks or maybe lay some insulation in the attic? Or what if I realize that Im really hungry and dont know what to do about it? Should I wait eleven months to decide to learn to manipulate a bag of cereal? In principle, of course, you could make New Years resolutions on top of other resolutions around the year, but then its not clear why you make the New Years ones at all. Are New Years resolutions the ones that are so important that you save them up for a special occasion, even though you should have gotten started a month ago? Or are they the ones that are so trivial, like reading Family Circus every day, that theres no reason to make them at all, so they can safely be put off till New Years? In the latter case, I have to wonder why I would bother; in the former case, I have to wonder if perhaps making New Years resolutions is just a way of justifying to myself my desire not to make important decisions on a daily basis, or perhaps of excusing my failure to follow through on decisions I make that dont fall on the first of the year. All that aside, making one set of life choices per year seems sort of sissy. Youd think we could make at least a few life choices a month - thats assuming, of course, that there are many ways in which we could be better - or even a few life choices a week. Or maybe just learn to make a good life choice every day. And then you get to have a whole bundle of life choices that add up to something reasonably substantive, rather than just one or two that you forget a week later and dont think about again except in moments of panicking despair when you wake in the middle of the night from time to time, then scramble futilely to make up for lost time for a few days, until the New Year rolls back around and you swear on all that is blasphemous that this year, this year, you will make sure the kitchen is totally clean every night before you go to bed. And making daily resolutions opens you up to a whole range of good life choices that just dont make sense on the annual scale, like getting a new set of tupperware or going through your freezer or doing something decent just once in your miserable life. Or making a cardboard burrito in the bathroom sink. Just doesnt make sense on an annual scale.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 06:24:36 +0000
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