Thursday, December 25, 2008
Merry Christmas!
Have you ever noticed how the holiday season makes people lie? Ordinarily level-headed people send out Christmas letters in which they recast their spouses’ securities fraud convictions as "getting involved in judicial process" and their daughters’ work at Baby GAP as "early childhood education." They happily fleece their young ones into believing that a corpulently fat old man dressed only in long underwear and a cap is going to break into their homes while they sleep and that they should absolutely allow him to give them candy. They open package after package of handmade toaster cozies and Angela Lansbury workout videos and The L Word action figures with the most perfectly fraudulent expressions of glee. In many ways, the holidays are, for lack of a better word, a total sham, just like Madonna’s British accent or American Capitalism from the 1950s through the present.
Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with that. The whole reason we lie around the holidays is because we want to make the people we care about happy. (Also because we’ve stopped taking our medication, but that’s a whole other story.) If we told our crazy aunts that we have rather limited needs for bedazzled t-shirts or, for that matter, any clothing prominently featuring the Smurfs, we would probably hurt their feelings. If we explained to our parents that we didn’t so much leave our jobs at the Hobby Lobby to "pursue other opportunities" as get fired for stealing yarn, we would likely break their little hearts. And if we told our nieces and nephews that the little people they see at the salad bar at the Shoney’s are not in fact elves but just ordinary folks who are very tired of being asked for Bratz dolls, well, that would actually probably be a good idea. Don and Charlene just want to get their bacon bits in peace.
So in that spirit of harmless self deception, this holiday message should probably read about as truthfully as the "casual encounters" section of Craigslist. Beginning with a litany of dubious professional accomplishments like being named Best Dressed by the 41st floor secretarial pool and winning the Long John Silvers popcorn shrimp essay contest, I should segue into a series of highly questionable personal anecdotes about my life-changing experience getting thrown out of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program and how I once made out with a certain supporting cast member from TV’s Becker. It would not be unwise to make up a child, preferably named Jennifer or Moesha, whose awkward adolescence and starring role in the sixth grade production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf would teach us all wonderful lessons about life and the American Dream. If possible, I should include some sort of reference to having a twelve-inch penis. That’s the sort of holiday message everyone can enjoy.
But it turns out I can really only lie if the subject is whether those pants make you look fat or where I was until 3 AM the night before taking the SAT. (Sorry, mom, there wasn’t really an emergency meeting of the chess team.) So I’m forced to report the same rather ordinary facts I share every year. I’m still an attorney in Chicago, where I divide my practice pretty evenly between representing Fortune 500 companies and representing guys with unpronounceable names who got the shit kicked out of them by various governments in Africa. I’m still writing and performing occasionally at venues where the "talent" is billed well below the $3 Miller drafts and free popcorn. And I’m still living in Wrigleyville, where Chicago has its highest concentration of flip cup tournaments and lowest concentration of parking spaces per person. It is, as they say, a Wonderful Life. But also a Hard Knock Life. Frankly, it’s hard to know who to believe.
Have you ever noticed how the holiday season makes people lie? Ordinarily level-headed people send out Christmas letters in which they recast their spouses’ securities fraud convictions as "getting involved in judicial process" and their daughters’ work at Baby GAP as "early childhood education." They happily fleece their young ones into believing that a corpulently fat old man dressed only in long underwear and a cap is going to break into their homes while they sleep and that they should absolutely allow him to give them candy. They open package after package of handmade toaster cozies and Angela Lansbury workout videos and The L Word action figures with the most perfectly fraudulent expressions of glee. In many ways, the holidays are, for lack of a better word, a total sham, just like Madonna’s British accent or American Capitalism from the 1950s through the present.
Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with that. The whole reason we lie around the holidays is because we want to make the people we care about happy. (Also because we’ve stopped taking our medication, but that’s a whole other story.) If we told our crazy aunts that we have rather limited needs for bedazzled t-shirts or, for that matter, any clothing prominently featuring the Smurfs, we would probably hurt their feelings. If we explained to our parents that we didn’t so much leave our jobs at the Hobby Lobby to "pursue other opportunities" as get fired for stealing yarn, we would likely break their little hearts. And if we told our nieces and nephews that the little people they see at the salad bar at the Shoney’s are not in fact elves but just ordinary folks who are very tired of being asked for Bratz dolls, well, that would actually probably be a good idea. Don and Charlene just want to get their bacon bits in peace.
So in that spirit of harmless self deception, this holiday message should probably read about as truthfully as the "casual encounters" section of Craigslist. Beginning with a litany of dubious professional accomplishments like being named Best Dressed by the 41st floor secretarial pool and winning the Long John Silvers popcorn shrimp essay contest, I should segue into a series of highly questionable personal anecdotes about my life-changing experience getting thrown out of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program and how I once made out with a certain supporting cast member from TV’s Becker. It would not be unwise to make up a child, preferably named Jennifer or Moesha, whose awkward adolescence and starring role in the sixth grade production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf would teach us all wonderful lessons about life and the American Dream. If possible, I should include some sort of reference to having a twelve-inch penis. That’s the sort of holiday message everyone can enjoy.
But it turns out I can really only lie if the subject is whether those pants make you look fat or where I was until 3 AM the night before taking the SAT. (Sorry, mom, there wasn’t really an emergency meeting of the chess team.) So I’m forced to report the same rather ordinary facts I share every year. I’m still an attorney in Chicago, where I divide my practice pretty evenly between representing Fortune 500 companies and representing guys with unpronounceable names who got the shit kicked out of them by various governments in Africa. I’m still writing and performing occasionally at venues where the "talent" is billed well below the $3 Miller drafts and free popcorn. And I’m still living in Wrigleyville, where Chicago has its highest concentration of flip cup tournaments and lowest concentration of parking spaces per person. It is, as they say, a Wonderful Life. But also a Hard Knock Life. Frankly, it’s hard to know who to believe.
