Changing of the seasons

I.

The NFL regular season ended on Sunday, and with it, the Pick’em Pool for this year. All in all, everything went out on fairly high notes: the Giants beat the Cowboys to claim the NFC East title and a spot in the playoffs; the Steelers (my wife’s team) and the Lions (my Little Bro’s team) are also wildcard-round-bound. (None of us happen to be rooting for teams that managed to get a first-round bye, which arguably matters more than any hair-splitting about how the Giants finished with a weaker record than either Detroit or Pittsburgh yet are higher-seeded overall, somehow …) Ideally in a few weeks there will be at least one team still standing that the family can rally around! Or possibly a looming showdown. Either way it should be exciting (unless we end up with two weeks to coutn down to yet another Packers/Patriots Super Bowl, which would be a drag).

In the Pool, my grandmother ended up winning the grand prize for the entire season – which, funny enough, she managed to do by being consistently good week in and week out, despite never claiming the prize for most correct picks in any single week. More power to her, she is adorable. My dad finished all alone in second place, and then there was a six-way tie for third, which I managed to snag 16.7% of. (That comes out to a little less than 10 bucks, which honestly just amuses me.) It will be strange to go back to watching football with zero vested interest in certain games, but that arrangement is at least less stressful, and more conducive to enjoying crazy unexpected upsets and whatnot.


College football is almost over, too, and of course our household is looking forward to the University of Michigan’s bowl game appearance tonight. Hopefully the high notes will continue! If they do, they may actually succeed in keeping my wife and myself awake until the end of the Sugar Bowl. I miss football when it’s not around, but I have to admit that I am looking forward to a few months devoid of grappling with the temptation to stay up and watch a gridiron battle to the final whistle of the final play. It must be some combination of getting older and yet having a months-old daughter who can still interrupt a good night’s sleep pretty authoritatively, but man, I am wrung out.

II.

And here’s another example of fatigue’s overall effects on my brain: I knew that this morning it was going to be significantly colder than it has been so far this winter, so I made sure to grab my heavier winter coat as I was leaving the house. I also remembered to reach into the side pockets of my lighter-weight jacket that I’ve been wearing lately and retrieve my wallet and keys (granted, I wouldn’t have been able to leave the house without the key to my car) before heading off to work. It was only when the train was about one stop away from the station where I get off that I realized I had failed to check the inside breast pocket of my autumn coat, which of course was where my government building badge and the magnetized keycard to my office suite happened to be. I know I’ve talked before about the general inconvenience of bumpy transitions from one jacket to another, &c. so suffice it to say it’s all come up once again and winter is still my least favorite season. Too many jackets too many pockets blurgh.

Fortunately, the whole forgetting-my-badge thing is not as bad as it could have been. I’ve done it before (though this was a first since the office move to the new building) which means I at least know the process for going to the security office and obtaining a temporary visitor pass and so on. I also happened to bump into one of my co-workers in the lobby and asked her to hang out a minute while I got the visitor pass, since it requires me to be escorted throughout the building. But once that was done, it became a day at the office like any other. The old office building was excruciatingly difficult to work in for eight hours with a visitor pass, because even the restrooms were in the hallway, outside of the secured suite, so you made use of those facilities at any point you ended up locked out of the cubicle farm. Luckily the new office is much more self-contained and I’ve been able to hunker down and not bother anyone as I go about my day. All I need now is to remember to grab my badge as soon as I get home tonight and make sure it joins me on the way to work tomorrow.

Before and after

Getting closer and closer to Christmas brings out the little kid in me, the one who thrives on constant overstimulation in the form of animated tv specials and seasonal music and department store holiday displays and never-ending food &c.

Getting beyond Christmas, on the other hand, brings out the grouchy yet responsible grown-up in me. I don't think this was always the case, but it seems to be the way of things now, as evidenced by last night, when I spent a large chunk of the evening hauling garbage and recycling up the driveway to the curb, including a bargeload of cardboard boxes, the large containers in which various gifts (both given and received) were shipped to our house and the smaller bits of packaging for individual toys and electronics and whatnot. And the strangest part was that the overwhelming feeling I was left with was one of relief. As in, it was really troubling to me on some level that the garage was so chockablock full of empty cardboard boxes and properly disposing of all of it at once brought me tremendous satisfaction and took a weight off my shoulders.

Anyway, sorry to have lapsed into low-content mode here but the post-Christmas exhaustion has been pretty profound and going back to work was not exceptionally inspirational. I'm sure things will be feeling back to normal soon, but until then I'll just pop in and out occasionally when opportunity is coincident with motivation. The randomness should keep everyone on their toes.

Cookies

It’s getting close to noon on the Friday before a federal holiday weekend (and a major one at that) so I am hopeful in a fashion that borders on over-entitled expectation that very soon I will get an e-mail announcing exactly how early the office will be closing. Mostly I’m hopeful; a tiny part of me is genuinely worried that so many people, including high ranking bosses-of-bosses, have taken off already for Christmas vacation that there is no one left in the entire Big Gray complex who is properly empowered to authorize the mystical 59 Minute Rule. We shall see!

But in the interest of getting a fifth and final (probably?) post in on Christmas week, I did want to mention something from last weekend. On Saturday I went to a cookie swap party, hosted (and almost exclusively attended) by old college friends. The party is an annual tradition and I spent the better part of the last year planning on baking something special for the 2011 edition: a Krampus Cake. I like cake, I think the Krampus is one of Christmas’s most insanely awesome lesser-known bits of folklore, and I had a notion of how I could fairly easily convert a round cake into a shape approximating the ferocious horned visage of Santa’s terrifying disciplinarian minion.


It turned out to be a little trickier than I expected but I did manage to get the cake baked, carved up, reassembled, frosted and detail-decorated in time for the party. And then, en route to the gathering, I started feeling shame and remorse. What was I doing? The cake was too weird, the reference too obscure, everyone at the party would look at me askance and wonder (possibly out loud) “What is wrong with you?” A Krampus Cake? Seriously?

I got to the party and headed straight for the dining room table with my cake (and with four dozen cookies, too, because I wasn’t trying to weasel out of the whole party concept altogether) and saw some of the offerings already on display, which caused the first words out of my mouth to the hosts to be, “Dude, are those gingerbread ninjas?” Because of course they were.

Clearly between my long commute, my house upkeep, my two small children, my wife whose work schedule is staggered from mine by design, and sundry other things, I don’t get to hang out with my college friends very often, at least not often enough to always remember that they are all as weird and geeky as I am and the strange things I do to entertain myself do not constitute outlying behavior among the group. (It turned out about half the people at the party knew what a Krampus was, and the other half were moderately amused to be introduced to the concept.) In fact, the gingerbread ninjas (or ninjerbread, if you prefer) were the least of the dorkiness on display at the party, which had been stealthily given a Star Wars theme including Wookiee Cookies and Yoda Soda. I only wish the theme had been publicized earlier – with minor modifications my Krampus Cake could have been a Wampa.

Gonna build a toyland all around the Christmas tree

For all the truth there is to the notion that every child is different, the flipside is that when you have your second child there are a lot more things you are reasonably well-prepared for than things which truly catch you by surprise. And as far as our daughter goes, most of the surprises she has given to my wife and myself have been of the pleasant variety, mostly centering around her overall mellowness and affability (in comparison to her brother, of course).

Still, there are always going to be little things that pop up as the little girl’s formative years unfold along their own path, distinct from the little guy’s. Gender issues leap immediately to mind, although considering the little guy loves baby dolls and was enchanted by an episode of My Little Pony just this morning, and his sister is remarkably strong and fast and making every effort to catch up physically to her car-collecting, monkey-dancing older sibling, presumably to participate fully in tomboyish horseplay, maybe that’s not such a biggie.

More unexpected, somehow, was how the kids’ different birthdays end up impacting Christmas. Because the fact is, even as semi-veteran parents at this point, my wife and I have never before lived with a (formerly) live Christmas tree and an eight-and-a-half-month-old simultaneously. Christmas 2008, we had a three-and-a-half-month-old, beloved for his reliability in staying right where you put him down every time. Christmas 2009, we had a fifteen-month-old who could walk and talk a bit, but we also had just moved days prior and ended up getting an uncharacteristically small tree for the new house. Now for the first time we have a full-sized tannenbaum and an army-crawling little one who likes nothing better than grabbing and pulling brightly colored objects, who also likes second-best putting stray plant matter in her mouth. (Seriously, the dogs have never tracked in a fragment of a dead leaf that the little girl didn’t immediately try to ingest, and she’s recently developed the fine motor control for a pincer grasp that allows her to pluck individual fir needles off the floor.)


For that matter this is the first Christmas my wife and I have shared with not one but two kittens, who also love knocking around bright sparkly dangly objects when they’re not wrestling each other in the dramatic environment of the low-hanging boughs and Christmas light wires. I have little to no doubt that the 2011 Yuletide will go down in family history as simply “The Year We Tied The Dang Christmas Tree To The Wall.” Because, honestly, we had no choice unless we wanted to pick up a toppled tree at least once a day for most of December.

The best thing about the past few days is that enough presents and packages have been delivered to the house that we have been able to erect a barrier wall of boxes around the base of the Christmas tree. But soon enough it will be Christmas Day and instead of an impediment to approaching the tree, we’ll have a whole new wave of unwrapped toys with which to distract the children (and the pets) from messing with it. Which, granted, may only work for an hour or so, but I’ll try to enjoy it while it lasts.

My Inappropriate Christmas List

It’s no secret that I’m something of a pop culture omnivore or that I enjoy things from up and down the spectrums of objective and subjective quality, good and bad taste, and general worth. Normally I’m not even terribly apologetic about this, but there’s something about Christmas (a very obvious something, along the lines of the Reason for the Season and all that) which makes me feel that certain entertainments and diversions that I have no problem giving a place in my life are nonetheless non-ideal candidates for inclusion on my list for Santa. Still, if for no other reason than to mock myself a bit while keeping Christmas Week going, I’d like to present Five Things from what would be an awkward-at-best Christmas list if I were suddenly devoid of my usual filters. (Hopefully the fact that I am riffing on this four days before the holiday will lend more credence to my assertion that this is not a passive-aggressive ploy to persuade certain blog-readers who are gift-giving relatives to seek out the items in question. I’m just talkin’, here.)

1. God, No! by Penn Jillette – My own personal hippy-dippy take on spirituality is not so much “complicated” as “willfully unorthodox” in that it mashes up various bits of secular humanism, Christian morality, Zen enlightenment, common-sense rationalism, Jedi mindtricks and whatever other philosophical insights strike me as particularly relevant or helpful at any given time. I don’t think any particular organized religion has got it all figured out. I don’t think atheists have got it all figured out, either. I’ve always been more of an all-of-the-above kind of guy than none-of-the-above, and I feel like I get something out of most stuff I read, especially when the author is coming from someplace interesting that he also happens to be personally invested in. Plus Penn Jillette is smart and hilarious and I’m a big fan. But asking for an impassioned defense of atheism for the celebration of the Savior’s birth? Not a bridge I’m going to cross.

2. David Comes to Life by Fucked Up – This one is much more prosaic. David Comes to Life has been showing up on tons of year-end Best Albums lists including ones whose opinions I generally groove along with; it’s also a hardcore punk concept album, which means it hits both a genre and a format I am typically enamored of. But while I have absolutely no problem with the band’s name, I still would feel weird putting them on a Christmas list for elementary reasons, specifically that the list would then be NSFMG (Not Safe For My Grandma).

3. Secret Identity by Craig Yoe – The subtitle of this book is “The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster” which should pretty much render it self-explanatory. Am I curious about the lesser-known works of one of the foremost legends of superhero comics’ golden age? Yep! Am I puritanically uptight about erotica and having same in my house? Nope! Do I think it’s appropriate to slip this onto my Christmas list? Nosirree. (Funny, maybe, but not appropriate.)


4. Gotham City Impostors – This video game is actually only just barely a contender for this list of excisions. Sure it’s a first-person shooter where you play a member of either a vigilante gang who idolizes and dresses up like Batman OR a member of a criminal gang who worships and emulates the Joker, and then you try to kill everyone on the other side, and that’s a little bit disturbingly violent, but I do celebrate American Christmas after all and was getting GI Joe toys from the time I was eight or so. And “murder simulation” video games are pretty mainstream these days, at that. But take the slight thematic dissonance and combine it with the fact that I have a well-documented absence of time in which to play video games and either I’m planning on being a lot more neglectful of my family or I’m just asking for money to be wasted on a gift I’d never make use of. Then add on top of that the fact that it’s a download-only video game and I’m uncertain what a gift-giver would even wrap and put under the tree to indicate I was receiving it, and those kinds of gifts are a pain. Then add on top of THAT the fact that the game doesn’t even get released until January of next year and you can see what a total boondoggle the whole thing would be. (Having said all that I gotta admit whenever I hear this game is coming I really really want to check it out.)

5. Southern Comfort Fiery Pepper – There was a brief period in my family holiday celebrations (on my father’s side of the family, specifically) when my aunts and uncles and grandparents would buy one another booze as presents, not just bottles of wine but 1.75 L handles of Jack Daniels and such. And I remember getting old enough to think it would be cool when I turned 21 if I started getting included in that tradition, and then turning 21 and discovering that by then the practice had fallen by the wayside. (Utilizing the Retro-Spect-O-Scope I have to assume this coincided with one of my uncles, who has since gone through AA, becoming more and more of a problem drinker.) I had no problem obtaining alcohol for myself in my college and immediately-post years, of course, and Southern Comfort was always in heavy mixology rotation. Now they’ve recently begun marketing a spicy-hot version of the old 70-proof knock-you-on-your-ass liqueur, and given my sentimental attachment to the original and my insatiable appetite for all things Scoville-rated, I’m moderately curious to sample it. But if I didn’t already feel like a degenerate wallowing in godlessness and foul-mouthed punk and dirty comics and gory video games, the bottle of hooch in my stocking would no doubt put things over the top.

The Holly and The iPod

For the past week or two I’ve been working on compiling a playlist of Christmas music MP3’s, and my iPod has been shuttling back and forth between the dock on the PC where I’m downloading songs and the auxiliary cable of the stereo where I can crank up the tunes (whilst doing something else like folding laundry or baking cookies or whatnot). The playlist itself is still a bit of a work in progress, and no doubt will continue to be right up through the 25th and beyond, since it should end up getting some use every year. Sometimes it seems like my whole life is a ramshackle chain of works-in-progress both literal and metaphorical, but at least the Xmas-Mix 2011 has been fun. Insanely fun, really, like to the point where my wife came home from work one night last week to find me listening to it, cleaning the kitchen, and in a bounce-off-the-walls good mood.


I love Christmas music, really, I guess I always have. My parents had several vinyl Christmas albums of which I have inordinately fond memories, as none of those records were classics, exactly. No John Denver and the Muppets, no Bing Crosby or even Vince Guaraldi. We had stuff like Sing the Songs of Christmas with Guy Lombardo or The Wonderful World of Christmas compilation from Firestone Records which does include a track by Bing (but it’s the relatively obscure What Child Is This/The Holly and the Ivy medley) and a track by Nat “King” Cole (but NOT The Christmas Song(!), instead it’s A Cradle In Bethlehem) but perhaps more importantly features the greatest holiday song of all time, Little Heads In Bunkbeds as laid down by Tony Orlando. (By “importantly” and “greatest” here of course I mean, respectively, “to me and my brother who grew up with that album in heavy rotation” and “related by the scantest of bizarre tangents”.) At some point late in my middle school years, right about when my parents got themselves a CD component for the family stereo, they also obtained a Reader’s Digest two-disc 50-track Christmas compilation which encompassed a lot more of the standards. But even before that, I was always the one pestering my parents about when we could start busting out the Christmas records on the weekends several weeks ahead of the holiday itself.

I was also in the school band as of fourth grade and I remain convinced that when the school puts on two music concerts per year and one of them is a holiday concert in December, one of two things will happen: you will learn to love all kinds of Christmas music or you will quit the band. I never quit, but I didn’t really have that far to go to love the songs of the season, either; I just had it all reinforced on a very fundamental brain-pattern level. (And to this day I get a weird little thrill or reminiscence when I hear orchestral versions of Sleigh Ride or when the horns come in midway through It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.)

Anyway, I had started trying to make a Christmas playlist a couple of years ago and never really got very far on it, primarily because I was trying to give the entire playlist a very unified throughline. Specifically, I wanted every single track to be one which I absolutely loved in my heart of hearts; special bonus points for consideration if it were a song which is usually underrepresented in the airplay this time of year. Unfortunately, all told that only amounts to maybe six or eight different songs. And honestly, the necessity of a custom Christmas playlist seems to be obviated by the omnipresence of satellite stations over in-store sound systems and the local lite adult contempo FM station that goes to 24-hour Christmas music every Thanksgiving around here. Do not misunderstand, I am grateful for the FM option! But I can quibble with it in two ways:

1, there’s a lot of repetition of the same songs, not just year-to-year and day-to-day but sometimes even hour-to-hour. I am nothing if not a huge fan of deep cuts, so I get a little weary of Gene Autry’s Rudolph the seven hundredth time I hear it in a given month (or evening). And even certain artists get played to death in the format; this year’s big offender is Michael Buble, who just put out a Christmas album. (He also, for reasons I will never fathom, put a cover of All I Want For Christmas Is You on said album, which to me is about as inessential as anyone after Nat Cole covering The Christmas Song to begin with, but this also in the same year that Justin Bieber covered All I Want as well, as a duet with Mariah Carey, whose version of the song I genuinely do consider a fantastic piece of Christmas pop which I almost neve get sick of, but ALL THREE VERSIONS alternating every thirty-eight minutes or so? That is a bit much even for me.) One of my cardinal rules for playlists (going back to the days of mix tapes) is to avoid repetition of all kinds, so that gets tough to take.

2, in addition to the aforementioned select group of Christmas songs I love beyond all reason, there’s all the rest of Christmas music which I merely really really like, and then there’s another small grouping of Christmas music which I don’t care for at all. And of course all of those songs get a lot of radio airplay (which is probably why I dislike them so; if they weren’t so overplayed I wouldn’t feel such animosity).

So my own custom playlist neatly avoids these problem areas. No repetition of different versions of the same song, no duplication of artists, no Little Drummer Boy or Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer or Wonderful Christmastime Blue Christmas (I know dissing that last one is a little bit blasphemous, but honestly the whole sub-genre of sad Christmas breakup songs is not my cup of candy-cane tea).

And once I allowed myself to open up my custom list to all the songs I simply like a lot instead of only the ones I can’t live without, it became much easier to fill up an hour or two even while following my self-imposed anti-dupe and anti-dud rules. I’m very amused by the results, which include everything from Bing and Nat and Andy Williams and Darlene Love to Bruce Springsteen and the Waitresses and Run DMC to Weezer and MxPx and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Stephen Colbert. No Tony Orlando as of yet, if only because I can’t quite decide how much replay value my childhood nostalgia and adult sense of irony can truly support.

The only major disappointment I’ve had (these being inevitable even in this glorious golden future of iTunes and Amzon’s MP3 store and all, because those e-vendors put great effort into convincing us that they can provide anything we might ever imagine, even though that’s not 100% the case) is that I really wanted to include an interlude in the mix for Eddie Izzard’s stand-up bit about how nobody knows all the words to The Twelve Days of Christmas yet everybody goes bananas for the “five go-o-o-o-old rings!!!” part. Dress to Kill is on iTunes but it seemingly only has like six tracks, so not only is the Twelve Days bit not isolated but I don’t even really know which longer riff it is a part of (I haven’t seen Dress to Kill in like ten years). So close, and yet. Maybe I’ll get it sorted out in time for next Christmas. And then, I can only hope, someday twenty or thirty years from now my kids will approach every holiday season feeling a vague imperative to listen to not only alt rock Christmas carols but also ancient British transvestite stand-up. I can only hope!

Christmas Week!

It would be completely understandable if everyone expected me to slack off this week on the blogging due to the imminent holiday, but on the contrary, I find my spirits rising as the big day approaches and my energy level seems to be following suit, and combining that with the fact that I’ve already been totally slack for this whole month which produces a foundation of guilt and piles atop it a backlog of odds and ends to talk about (I could seriously do an entire grab-bag style post about various office building seasonal decorations alone – see below) – the bottom line is that I am confident in declaring this Christmas Week here at PA and committed to churning out a full Monday to Friday slate of semi-sensical ramblings. My gift to all of you!

It occurred to me this morning that Christmas being observed on a Monday, as it will be this year, is pretty rare; an equal amount of the time it falls on a Friday, with the remainder breaking up the middle of the week in various ways. I know that’s pretty simple calendar math, but it’s significant in the workaday world of the Big Gray because, for example, when Christmas falls on a Wednesday then by and large the two days on either side of it are a wash, as some people take the days leading up to Christmas as personal leave and other people take the days immediately after and the paid-time-off hoarders take the entire week, so the buildup is actually fairly anticlimactic. And the prior week, in that same case, feels too far away and disconnected from Christmas to be part of the official lead time. Contrast that with this year’s configuration (as you are wont to do when you overthink things the way that I compulsively do) and you realize this is not just the optimal but the only way to get a full five days of workplace Christmas run-up. Which I happen to enjoy, so that works out well for me.

As if to emphasize that point, this morning my government supervisor handed out her Christmas gifts to the staff (personalized travel coffee mugs – classy!) so, yeah, I’m pretty sure this is Christmas Week sanctioned by the appropriate authorities and everything.

Since we’ve already had our office holiday parties (both small and large) around here really the biggest work-related impact of Christmas Week is which Christmas ties I’m going to wear between now and Friday, the answer being “all of them”. Granted I don’t own a tremendous amount of holiday-themed neckwear, but oh by golly I’m going to be holly-jolly and give each one a turn. I have one fairly understated red tie with tiny green Christmas trees on it which has already gotten a wearing last week at the office potluck, which leaves me with another red tie with white snowflakes, a black tie with large stylized Christmas trees, and a tie patterned with green, red and yellow smiley-face ornaments. I have listed the remaining ties in order from least to most gaudy, which is not coincidentally the order in which I will be sporting them from Tuesday through Thursday. (Today I’m wearing a boring striped tie because it was either that or wear red-ties-with-slightly-different-snowflakes two days in a row.)

On BizCasFri I will of course go tieless, and probably just wear a green sweater and khakis. I kind of wish I had a truly obnoxious Christmas sweater; I also kind of wish I had the ability to say to some of my coworkers, who made the transition to holiday-themed fashion statements earlier in the month, “Wow, where did you get that sweater?” without betraying that I covet the item in question for 70% ironic reasons.


+++

OK, really just two items of craziness regarding office decorations:

- Someone on this floor but outside my department put up a full sized artificial Christmas tree which must be about nine feet tall. It is, in fact, taller than the ceiling clearance of the office. So the drop ceiling panel above it has been removed to allow the very tip of the tree to stretch into the space between floors. I find this almost unbearably hilarious.

- Down in the building annex that contains various delis and convenience stores and whatnot there are some very nice Christmas trees as well. One of them is decorated with fake birds which, no problem, my Christmas tree at home has some of those too, little plastic animals with real feathers strategically attached. But the trees in the building annex have peacocks on them which are (a) life-sized and (b) dyed red, I guess because Christmas? Possibly these are Santa’s peacocks? I’ve been seeing them every day for weeks now and they still don’t make much sense to me.