the ocean

Christmas Gifts for Children Whose Parents Hate Them

Grandma's Old Colostomy Bags
Barbie's Dream Accountant, Phil
Tickle Me Bryant Gumbel
An Eye Job
Savings Bonds
Real Nifty Spats, Like They Used To Wear in the Olden Days
Gigli: Ultimate Director's Cut Extended Edition
Tara Reid
Matches and Lighter Fluid
A Pound of German Potato Salad
Coupon for One Free Car Wash With Purchase of Regularly Priced Oil Change
An Invisible Pony
God's Love

Leftovers

Since I know you're all worried, I'll let you know that my dad and I finished the puzzle. It had a picture of penguins on it. This may well be the greatest accomplishment of all my 27 years.

I've also been eating the remainder of the hog carcass my grandmother served on Christmas for the past several days. Because nothing says "hooray for the birth of our savior" like choking down a fist-sized chunk of swine. Why don't people ever celebrate holidays with Arby's? I blame that damned oven mitt.

Santa finally figured me out and brought cash money this year. Don't get me wrong, all the reindeer sweaters were nice, and they did prevent me from getting in with a "rough crowd" all through high school, but I feel fairly certain that, even if money can buy happiness, it can't be found at T.J. Maxx. This year I'm thinking I'll try to drink my Christmas.

The drive back was uneventful. I made my inaugural attempt at listening to an "audio book." The book itself was great, but I still couldn't shake the feeling that it's boring to listen to someone talk for six hours straight. Unless that someone is me, in which case it's the greatest experience of anyone's life. I mean, just imagine hearing all these thrilling anecdotes about office supplies and gym etiquette live and in person!

Soap Dish

So I'm going to have to take a few minutes to talk about Days of Our Lives. I realize this is unforgivable, but I got a little bit hooked on it during college, when I worked at an NBC affiliate one summer and had to watch it every day. This was back when they were still burying characters alive and getting them possessed by the devil and fun things like that. Now I don't really watch it any more (and I'm not just pretending that I don't watch it because I'm embarrassed, like I do with One Tree Hill), but every year at Christmas I catch a few episodes in between family singalongs and jigsaw puzzle contests with my dad. The great thing about it is that it moves so slowly that a few episodes a year is really enough to stay completely caught up.

This year's developments are fairly unremarkable. (Unlike last year, when they had a mass murderer who "killed" about half the characters on the show, only to have them turn up on a "mysterious" island.) It is kind of interesting that they've now brought back about every single character from the late 90s, who can be divided into two categories: those who look very much the worse for wear, and those who have had a lot of work done. This is another one of the fun things about soaps -- because actors are on them pretty much every day for periods of decades, you can detect each little brow lift and facial peel as it happens. There are some characters on Days whose faces must by now have an entirely different chemical composition than that with which they started. Which is how we know we live in a great nation.

And I must say a word or two about the amazing overacting. Everything is a shout or a whisper; there is nothing in between. All kinds of sobbing is fair game, although curiously it is seldom accompanied by actual tears of any kind, tear ducts no doubt being a necessary sacrifice to "the craft." Oh, and lots of hands. It's enough to make me think they're translating for the deaf as they go.

All right, let's hope I've got that out of my system.

A Holiday Message

If I am going to be completely honest with you (and I always am, except for that time I drank an entire box of wine and began shouting that I was Frederick B. Dent, Secretary of Commerce for the Ford administration), I have to admit that this is the first holiday season I have spent as an actual adult. Perhaps not an adult in the dietary sense, unless the food pyramid now has a Little Debbie’s Snack Cakes group, or the intellectual sense, though Phil of the Future touches on existentialist thought with an alarming frequency, but certainly in the employment sense, as I have recently put in more hours than Lindsay Lohan in a bathroom stall at the Viper Room the week after Father’s Day. Yes, I have a grown up job now, complete with a secretary who indulges my highlighter fetish and a handheld organizer so much smarter than me it probably even gets Mulholland Drive, and I am learning to accept the fact that I may not always be home in time for the Real World/Road Rules Challenge. I barely even play FreeCell any more and my Friendster usage has dropped to dangerous lows. I guess we all have our crosses to bear in life; I was just kind of hoping mine would be made out of delicious cotton candy.

But the point is that the holiday season is much different when you’re viewing it through the eyes of someone who doesn’t necessarily have two weeks off to watch A Muppet Christmas Carol on continuous repeat and build a Nativity scene out of toothpicks and Styrofoam peanuts. For adults, the holidays are less a matter of pining for that perfect Transformers-related gift and more a matter of wishing your boss would just give you the cash value of those company-logo-embossed aqua socks. They’re less about hoping Santa will come down your chimney and more about praying that Leon, the sociopathic drifter who lives in the abandoned Wendy’s three blocks down, won’t. They don’t mean days of sledding and building snow forts, they mean skidding on a patch of ice the size of Greenland and nearly crashing your Yugo into the lobby of the Dollar Daze store. Certainly there’s fun to be had in both versions of the holidays; it’s just that the fun in the adult version is the kind that generally comes with nipple clamps and a subscription to Gimp Weekly.

And, in all seriousness, maybe it takes the little annoyances to make us appreciate the big joys of the holidays a little bit more. Spending Christmas day sitting on your ass playing your old copy of Super Mario Brothers 3 with your sister might not seem like such a perfectly peaceful pastime if you hadn’t spent the entire day before Christmas waiting in line to buy your Aunt Margie a gift certificate at the Dress Barn. Hanukkah dinner might not seem so delicious without the two preceding weeks of vending machine sandwiches and half-thawed Hot Pockets. And Kwanzaa might not be so significant and moving without the prior thousands of years of oppression and slavery. I’m sure Jesse Jackson will back me up on this one.

As I got ready to write this thing, I went through a whole bunch of Christmas letters from years past. (Yes, I still have them all – I also have a play about horses I wrote in fifth grade and a high school English paper containing the phrase “love is the greatest power of them all,” if anyone’s interested.) A lot of things struck me – I used to think Michael Jackson jokes were really hilarious, for one thing – but mainly I just noticed how, as much as my life has changed, my sentiments really haven’t. I’ve always thought I have the greatest family and friends in the world, and I’m still grateful for all the amazing things you add to my life today. Happy holidays!

Traditions

We have sort of a sordid history with the holidays in my house. For instance, previous Thanksgivings have featured 1) my sister slapping me in the middle of dinner at one of Quincy's finer mid-priced restaurants, 2) me accidentally spilling an entire glass of ice water in my sister's lap at the same restaurant, though a different year, and 3) my 94-year-old grandmother loudly "whispering" a variety of deprecating remarks about our waitress within her hearing. This year's Thanksgiving passed largely without incident, however; my feeling is that this means that at Christmas we are due for disaster.

We have a number of merry traditions. For instance, each year we laboriously assemble and decorate our fake Christmas tree. We stand around shouting at each other about which color-coded branches are shorter than the others and which ornaments have disappeared under mysterious circumstances or been chewed on by the squirrels that broke into our attic. Each year, at least one strand of lights stops working between testing it in the outlet and putting it on the tree, and my dad spends at least an hour muttering swear words to himself and replacing the bulbs one by one before ultimately giving up and driving to Wal-Mart for more lights. It makes the house so much more festive.

We also have a fun holiday tradition of deception. For reasons I am not sure I have ever known, my 94-year-old grandmother does not know that we own two dogs, have four cars between the four of us, or (and this is the weirdest one to me) subscribe to cable. My parents, however, remain committed to keeping her ignorant of these circumstances. So each year, before she comes over for Christmas Eve, we park our vehicles at various undisclosed locations all over town, bribe the dogs with people food and hide them in the laundry room, and turn off MTV's Slammin' XXXmas Eve. Who doesn't love the holidays?

Out of Office Message

Made the trip across the state to Quincy yesterday. This meant, first off, that I had to dig my car out of the glacier in which it was embedded, a task I had avoided for two weeks. I admittedly did such a shoddy job of this that large chunks of ice were flying off the hood and striking fellow travelers in their bug shields through a good portion of central Illinois, but it was exhausting nonetheless. I contemplated collapsing in the street To-Build-A-Fire style, but decided a week at home would have much the same effect.

I guess a lot's happened since I last posted, but much of it is not that interesting. I saw King Kong with my sister -- it featured the best acting I've seen from a gorilla since Burt Reynolds in Evening Shade -- and took her on an abortive shopping trip, since Old Navy on a December Sunday gives me flashbacks to wars I wasn't even in. I worked a couple of solid days, perhaps most notable for the dinner buffet's disasterous attempt at veal and my even more disastrous presentation of my secretary's Christmas gift (a very thoughtful check -- it took be forever to pick out). And then, well, I came here. Pretty exciting, no?

I'll try to check in occasionally this week, but you know how all-encompassing Family Fun can be.

Christmas Cheer

We had our big "holiday" bash at the apartment last night. Great strides were made towards beating back that horrible War on Christmas we've heard so much about.

Slutty Santa came by to bring door prizes for all the good little boys and girls of the world. Here, Stephen receives the gift of comparative self respect and dignity. Dave and Guest Blogger Kathy demonstrate the products of their hard labor in the craft center. I think it's some sort of reindeer. The officially sanctioned crafts of the center were paper dreidels and desecularized Christmas stockings.
The difference between Slutty Santa and regular santa is hard to pinpoint. Slutty Santa dresses a little bit more like Bea Arthur, for one thing. Either way, Daliah's forgetting all about her Old Testament God.
Roommate Liz portrayed Slutty Santa's Slutty Elf, Nip, who has apparently mugged Harry Potter.

The Ghost of Christmas Presents

Every year, my dry cleaner gives me a calendar for Christmas. Typically, it's a big, glossy affair with random pictures of European cities and lots of Chinese characters I can't begin to decipher, but figure must be some sort of crack about my weight. I like to put it on the wall next to my bed, so I can pencil in my many extravagant social events and fall asleep at night dreaming of Joy One Hour Cleaners.

But this year the calendar has pictures of young children in adults' clothing, which I quite frankly find creepy. I simply have a hard time believing that four year olds are going on romantic picnic dates in the park or rowing one another around in boats, and I certainly don't think they should be going to first base. This calendar even has a shot of a toddler in an overcoat and fedora giving his toddler wife a goodbye kiss before heading off to work, presumably at the telegraph company, since we're apparently desperately clinging to a past that never was. I just can't imagine the audience for this thing, although to be fair, I never understood those pictures where they dress babies up as flowers, either. To me, it all just falls under the heading of child abuse.

Anyway, I guess I need to find a new source for ironic-enjoyment calendars. Maybe my insurance agent or bank will come through.

A Disturbing Trend

People have started to notice when I plagiarize myself.

It used to be that I could go around freely repeating the same semi-retarded political insights (i.e. "I think immigrants are nice"), nonsensical celebrity put-downs ("Katie Couric looks like she wants to eat a baby"), and rambling personal anecdotes (the thrilling saga of the Blind Date Who Only Brought $3), and no one would know the difference. Sure, I was mainly hanging out in bus stations and assisted living facilities, but people seemed to really enjoy what I was putting out there. Or at least gurgle appreciatively.

But now that I have the blog, I can't help but feel that once I've published the story of my trip to the DMV or my list of jokes about Nicole Richie (mainly eating-related and VERY subtle), I've got to be done with it forever. Too many times now I've finished up a ten-minute monologue about the time I cut my finger in third grade, complete with multiple impressions and totally hott social commentary, only to be told, with a yawn, "Yeah, I already read that on your blog." The pressure to create new material is just immense. I may just have to start making things up. I mean, more than I already do.

Fun With Natural History

Checked out the Pompeii exhibit at the Field Museum this weekend. I was kind of surprised by how sad it made me; I mean, I certainly wasn't expecting dancing cartoon characters and cotton candy, but I guess I had mentally skipped over the whole "massive loss of human life" part straight to the awesome explosions and cool old buildings. I blame James Cameron. Ever since he turned the senseless freezing death of thousands into the Entertainment Spectacle of the Century, Featuring Leonardo DiCaprio's Dreamy, Dreamy Eyes, it's been kind of hard to keep perspective. Or that crappy Celine Dion song out of your head.

But anyway, the exhibit was really interesting. It turns out they had really cool jewelry back in Roman times, and much better frescoes than your average Wicker Park loft. And I don't care if they did plagiarize their gods straight from the Greeks, they're still way cooler than Jesus. When was the last time he took the form of a bull? They're like Transformers! Plus, I put in the extra $5 for the audio tour, so I got to hear people with undefinable accents discuss the finer points of Roman bathing. The upshot is that they did a lot of it, but still weren't all that clean. Kind of like back when Courtney Love got that makeover so she could try to be an actress.

So yeah, the Field Museum is really fun. They have dinosaurs and mummies, too. And a whole bunch of boring minerals in glass cases, but I think they're sort of required to do that so they can keep their "street cred" with the science nerds. Trust me, it gets ugly when they're mad.

Party Time

My office holiday party was on Friday. As expected, there were plenty of laughs to be had.

Roommate Liz and I enjoy "The Enchanted Forest," which consisted of about six pine trees and several suits of armor. There was also a Medieval lute player, who looked like he wanted to die the whole time.
Roommate Liz enjoys a quiet moment with a nationally popular animated character. I was supposed to get a shot with the hippo, but some selfish, selfish children got in the way.
Roommate Liz and I proudly display the results of our heroic craft table efforts. Though the styles differ -- hers abstractly expresses the angst of the holiday season while mine is strictly representational -- both have in common the all-important element of glitter.

(By the way, Liz and I have not been canonized (but see below, har har); our special glow is the result of the weird lighting at my office building.)
Another part of the party had a "The World's Fair" theme, but for some reason confused The World's Fair with a circus. Regardless, we discovered that my ginormous melon looks spectacular on a tiny, corseted female body.

Personnel Matters

The temp in the cubicle just down the hall from me has been making personal phone calls all day. Well, I assume they're personal phone calls; I suppose it's just possible that it was a client who cheated on her with That Skank From Chili's, though I doubt it. Every time I walk by there, which is often, due to her key positioning between my office and the break room, the bathroom, and just about every other hott spott on this floor, I hear a different little psychodrama being played out. This morning I heard the various cajoling and pleading apparently necessary to get her child to go to school. Around lunch there was the aforementioned relationship chat. After that, things mellowed out a bit as she told a friend "Oh yeah, I'm not doing anything. I am so completely bored." She was actually filing her nails as she said this; it was as though she was auditioning for the role of sassy secretary on some gawdawful sitcom pilot starring Brooke Shields.

Also, the project assistant for one of my cases gave me a copy of his band's CD. When I put it in my computer, the genre came up as Gospel/Christian, though he assures me it is actually entirely silent on the subject of God's Love. Regardless, this kid is 23, he's got a twin, and they both play in a band in the suburbs. What more can you want from life?

Book Group

I have to finish reading "The Fountainhead" as soon as humanly possible, if only so people will stop asking me questions about it. You see, it's such an enormous book that I can't fit it into my bag, and have to carry it all over town clutched to my bosom like a 14-year-old girl with a copy of The Baby-sitters Club #42: Jessi and the Dance School Phantom. This, in and of itself, is annoying but not all that uncommon; last year I nearly got carpal tunnel hauling Gravity's Rainbow up and down the Brown Line for two months. But no book has ever instigated quite as much unwanted conversation as this one:

"Oh, Ayn Rand, eh? What do you think of her philosophy? You know, objectivism?"

I think you probably know exactly two things about Ayn Rand: A) that she has a philosophy, and B) that it's called objectivism. And I'm guessing you learned those from watching The Simpsons.

"Doing a little bit of light reading, are you? Got it all figured out yet?"

The only thing I've "figured out" is that I'm about as likely to draw my life's philosophy from The Fountainhead as from Danielle Steele's "Secrets."

"Isn't Ayn Rand the best?"

Well, it depends. The best what? Because I hear as a gynecologist she's barely sub-par.

"Man, haven't you finished that book yet?"

Yes. Yes, I have. Now I'm only carrying it around so that I can force you to eat it page by page. Don't worry, it will only taste slightly worse than Cool Ranch Doritos.

Thank you, Ms. Rand. You've gotten the public excited about reading again. Or at least about harassing the people who are excited about reading.

Next!

Last night I had to help conduct auditions for a show that's going to have some of my sketches in it. Since the last time I evaluated auditions was when I directed the German Club production of "Die Sieben Geisslein" in Seventh Grade (it had a set made out of refrigerator boxes and a Korean foreign exchange student who couldn't pronounce the "v" sound as a lead), I thought this might be a fun thing. I imagined myself barking out orders and cruelly forcing people to relive the traumas of their childhoods A Chorus Line style. I saw myself drunk with power, and perhaps a few gin and tonics, deriding the fools who couldn't bring out the brilliant wit of my skits about standing in line at the grocery store. This was, to say the least, not how things unfolded.

It turns out that auditioning people is totally hard and not so fun! For one thing, it forces you to deal with the sad reality that a lot of really cute people are not that great at acting, and that no matter how much you might want to sleep with them, you can't let them near your prose. Then, you have to listen to the same material being read repeatedly until any humor you might once have found in it is a more distant memory than that episode of Punky Brewster where her friend got stuck in an old refrigerator and we all learned an important lesson about safety. Plus, you really can't be rude to people while they're in the room, so no matter how much you might want to laugh (even if it's just because your friend just drew an amusing caricature of Scarlett Johannsen on your notepad and not because the auditionee has given Tom Cruise what appears to be a Jamaican accent) you can't do it. Being professional is incredibly important, even if you do have Cheetoh crumbs down the front of your shirt for the first hour of the evening.

Anyway, the cast is chosen. Maybe I'll make up for my auditioning fun deficit by forcing them to run laps or something. Because life should be just like high school basketball practice.

Free Fiona

So Friend Amy got us tickets to the Fiona Apple concert last night. I have to admit that, though I'm a fan of her music (Fiona's, not Amy's, although word on the street is she's putting out a devotional CD next Spring) and nearly drove my '95 Neon into a parking gate while grooving to "Criminal" my sophomore year of college, I was primarily hoping to see some sort of emotional outburst. I wanted a vegan-themed rant or at the very least a quick "this world is shit." On this ground I was sadly disappointed. Although she did admit that she sometimes gets angry and kicks things (and, come on, my mom does that, people), it turns out that Fiona Apple is really nice! And tiny. She's like two foot one, tops.

Fiona thanked everyone for standing out in the cold to get into the concert, although she didn't mention the rather comprehensive searches we had to endure. (And who brings a weapon to a Fiona Apple concert? Unless it's maybe an ex.) She also apologized for giving the evil eye to certain audience members, clarifying that she was just getting into the song and not placing any hexes for ill-timed singing along. (I would, for the record, approve.) And she actually giggled at several points! Maybe the sullenness was just a product of dating Paul Thomas Anderson; imagine living years of your life with drafts of Magnolia constantly coming at you in the middle of Friends.

But despite the lack of drama, I have to say it was a pretty great concert. Girl can really sing, and she did a bunch of my favorites, including, as the second encore, the MTVrific "Criminal." If I'd had a '95 Neon, I'm pretty sure the first few rows would have been toast.

Celebrity Living

Busy night last night. Stopped by my office happy hour -- your home for awkward small talk and impossibly strong drinks -- for a little while and consumed enough Red Bull to forestall the effect of the week's work for a few more hours. Then I went to a Hanukkah party, where I found out I am amazing at dreidel games but don't so much like Boone's Farm Blue Hawaii any more. There were a number of amusing incidents involved, including 1) some random guy believing for some reason that two of my friends worked for a local radio station and trying to score Creed's latest off of them and 2) my other friend deciding to randomly text strangers the phrase "I miss you." This was followed by a little bit of theatre, as my writing teacher, who has great hair and makes amusing sound effects when you are least expecting it, was doing a sketch show. There were disembodied Ashcroft heads involved, so it really had me at hello.

Today I've just kind of been puttering. We had five or six bags of trash piled up in our back hallway, so I thought it would be good to take those down to the dumpster before protective services decided to take away children we don't have. Also, a mysterious honey spill in our kitchen cabinets required some attending to. I'm not sure how it happened, but rest assured that I've got investigators sweeping the Hundred Acre Wood. Oh, and I even tossed out our old shower curtain. When it says hello to you when you walk into the bathroom, you know it's time for it to go.

Winter %#&*%*@ Wonderland

Got a little bit of snow last night. I know this because I slipped down the front steps of my building this morning and nearly impaled myself on the front gate. Then I stepped in an ankle-deep puddle of slush near the train station, resulting in some frostbite-type symptoms that you can be assured I am carefully monitoring. I also had to make about five minutes of awkward snow-based small talk with one of the floater secretaries on my floor as I walked in today. Apparently, Mother Nature is out to kill me, even if she has to bore me to death.

I love how TV treats Winter like its so warm and cozy and delightful this time of year. It's all insanely attractive people wearing Old Navy Performance Fleece and throwing snowballs at each other without mussing their hair. Why don't they show my dad in his long underwear and snowsuit cursing God as he tries for the fifth time to dig the minivan out of an embankment? Or our Quincy neighbors trying to fight back snowdrifts with a flame thrower? Those are Winter memories you can't buy in a child size large, people.

Speaking of which, my office "holiday" party is coming up! There are going to be themed floors, including one called "the enchanted forest" that features a lute player. There will also be face painting. It seems certain to be a disaster. I totally can't wait!