It’s getting close to Christmas and I’m not feeling it much at all.
This isn’t my normal Christmas malaise, I don’t think. It could be, I suppose, because the calendar tells me it’s almost time for That Week. But usually when I get that way, I’m reminiscing about Mom and Christmas back home. It’s not that this year, at least as far as I can tell.
Part of it may be that I’m not nearly as exposed to the usual Christmas stuff this year. That’s due in part to the lack of Nutcracker rehearsals and performances. For whatever reason, the dance company my girls and I have performed with the last several years ended up not doing Nutcracker at all this year. Youngest Daughter announced early on that even if they did, she wouldn’t do it, because her 18th birthday last week would likely have fallen on a show weekend.
Middle Daughter pointed out after last year’s show that there might not be enough pointe-capable dancers this year.
I don’t know exactly why, but here we are barely a week before Christmas and no Nutcracker performances.
It occurred to me that driving back and forth to rehearsals gave me a lot of time to listen to my Pandora Christmas channel—close to ninety minutes a day, three or four times a week. Without that travel time, I haven’t been listening to a lot of Christmas music.
I suppose I could have gone to the various Christmas parades in the area. There were at least four close by. I don’t think I realized how far the melancholy had gotten though, and by the time I did, the parades were all done. It’s a little ironic because Youngest Daughter was in all four. One of the tutors from our Classical Conversations community is running for state senator and so had a presence in those parades. Youngest went along because the candidate’s youngest daughter is YD’s BFF.
We didn’t decorate much around the house this year. We all kind of liked the plain look of the tree after we got it up and decided to leave the ornaments off this year. I agreed with the idea, at least at the time. I think that affected me more than I expected it to.
We didn’t decorate outside at all this year, either. We usually do it the weekend after Thanksgiving, but that’s also the Saturday of The Game, and it was a big deal this year. Plus, even though we got the ditch dug and the wire laid out for the outdoor Christmas decorations, we didn’t finish the electrical work. I didn’t feel completely comfortable with the idea of doing the electrical work myself, so I decided to hire it out. But I ended up dragging my feet too long to get the work done before Christmas. I could have run the extension cords like I’ve done in years past, but I kept coming up with reasons to not do it that way.
I’ve had several outdoor decoration projects in my head for a while, too. I’ve got an old trampoline that would be a cool frame for a lighted wreath. It needs to be cleaned up and some welding work done before I put the lights on it though.
I also want to redo the lights for the front of the house, but that’s likely going to involve buying new lights altogether.
I’ve wanted to make some mini-trees for several years now, too. I even bought some lights a while back. I just need to get off my butt and buy the tomato cages and get to it. I’ve looked at cages several times and keep telling myself that there’s something wrong with this one, or that one’s not quite right. I want it to be just right, you know? But as my therapist pointed out many years ago, I have a habit of making the perfect the enemy of the good. I find it very difficult to let good enough be good enough.
That’s a major chunk of my problem with writing, too. I keep telling myself that it’s got to be perfect, that I can’t let something go out that isn’t just right. That’s part of the reason I still haven’t released In Plain Sight.
Actually, it’s probably the main reason.
I should work on that.
Reading
The Wren Collective did a study of 28 death penalty cases in Harris County, Texas. The organization, started by a number of former public defenders, seeks to improve the way the legal system works, for everyone involved. The report found numerous problems in Harris County, including defendants not meeting their attorneys at all before trial, and attorneys failing to prep witnesses until just the day they appear. Read the HuffPo story here: Damning Report On Texas Death Row Cases: ‘The System Is Utterly Broken’
Read the full report at Wren Collective.
Words of the Week
“Writing in a lot of ways feels more like excavation than construction. It feels like you’re uncovering this thing bit by bit, discovering what it is, instead of constructing it upwards.”
“[F]or me, the real question isn’t ‘Would you kill Hitler?’ It’s ‘Does solving a problem by finding the right person and killing them ever work? Or does it create a self-perpetuating loop of violence?’ And that to me is not a theoretical, time-travel question. That’s a real-world question.”
“Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encased in that microcosm it’s the most serious time of your life.”
“Writing sucks. I think it’s terrible. Writing is not fun, and don’t trust anyone who claims to enjoy it. Liars!”
— Rian Johnson, American director, producer, and screenwriter, born 17 December 1973.
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