Sunday, December 25, 2011
Merry Christmas to All...
If you had asked me twenty years ago what the holiday season in 2011 would look like, I would have gotten it very wrong. I probably would have told you that we’d all be throwing on our Hammer pants and Simpsons t-shirts to ride our rocket bikes down to the laser tag arena for some computer-generated eggnog and virtual reality fruitcake. I never would have predicted that I’d be practicing law in Chicago (I believe my chosen career at that point was still President of Awesome), that my sister would be an educational researcher (most of her research then had to do with Days of Our Lives), or that many of my friends would have started families of their own by now (starting a new level of Tetris was about the most we could handle). I certainly couldn’t have guessed that the holidays would involve TSA gropedowns or a new spin on the Immaculate Conception from Justin Bieber. Or Pajama Jeans. If I had seen those coming, I might have just stopped the passage of time in protest, like Zack Morris or that spunky little alien girl who had so many comic ladder mishaps on Out of this World.
To my credit, however, I bet I would have predicted a few things correctly. The styles for holiday sweaters haven’t changed much -- elves that look like Rhea Perlman and puffy paint are still right on trend -- and I’m pretty sure the exact same fruitcake has been going back and forth between my parents and their neighbors who decided to "build their own ski jump" for the past three decades. Oddly enough, Mariah Carey is still around and still wearing that fur-fringed holiday tube top that gives teenaged boys weird warm feelings about the birth of their lord and savior, and my grandmother is still misremembering holidays from forty years ago, to the point that she now believes she spent her Kwanzaas during Watergate doing the Lindy Hop with Scott Baio at the International House of Pancakes. And somehow I believe that, even twenty years ago, I could easily have predicted the quick and colorful demise of Kim Kardashian’s sham marriage. As a general rule of thumb, the length of any given marriage is inversely proportional to the number of NASCAR-style endorsement deals involved. That’s just science, like gravity or Haylie Duff’s experiences on Celebrity Ghost Stories.
So the 1991 version of me would not, I guess, have been wrong about everything, no matter what my awkward side part and devotion to math team might have led you to believe. And in 2011 I found that, for all my access to high quality skin care products and entertainment options that do not involve pacing back and forth outside of the Spencer’s, the current version of me still has a lot left to learn. I went to Switzerland for work in March, which taught me a great deal about what not to dip in fondue and why simply watching Schindler’s List repeatedly was not an effective method of high school German instruction. This summer I attempted some basic home repairs, thereby learning that I should never attempt even the most basic of home repairs as well as the importance of maintaining a complete first aid kit in one’s home. (It turns out that paper towels are not a great substitute for bandages and bug spray is no substitute at all for antibacterial cream.) And this fall I helped coach a moot court team at Northwestern, which led me to understand that contemporary law students are more interested in learning about international comity than enjoying your hilarious Ruth Bader Ginsburg impression and may not ever have even heard of Matlock. I like to think that we learned from each other, although somehow I doubt that’s what the evaluations will say.
Regardless, here’s to so many great years of holiday seasons past and to the many great years that I know are still yet to come. May your 2012s be happy, healthy, and wholly unlike the John Cusack feature of the same name!
If you had asked me twenty years ago what the holiday season in 2011 would look like, I would have gotten it very wrong. I probably would have told you that we’d all be throwing on our Hammer pants and Simpsons t-shirts to ride our rocket bikes down to the laser tag arena for some computer-generated eggnog and virtual reality fruitcake. I never would have predicted that I’d be practicing law in Chicago (I believe my chosen career at that point was still President of Awesome), that my sister would be an educational researcher (most of her research then had to do with Days of Our Lives), or that many of my friends would have started families of their own by now (starting a new level of Tetris was about the most we could handle). I certainly couldn’t have guessed that the holidays would involve TSA gropedowns or a new spin on the Immaculate Conception from Justin Bieber. Or Pajama Jeans. If I had seen those coming, I might have just stopped the passage of time in protest, like Zack Morris or that spunky little alien girl who had so many comic ladder mishaps on Out of this World.
To my credit, however, I bet I would have predicted a few things correctly. The styles for holiday sweaters haven’t changed much -- elves that look like Rhea Perlman and puffy paint are still right on trend -- and I’m pretty sure the exact same fruitcake has been going back and forth between my parents and their neighbors who decided to "build their own ski jump" for the past three decades. Oddly enough, Mariah Carey is still around and still wearing that fur-fringed holiday tube top that gives teenaged boys weird warm feelings about the birth of their lord and savior, and my grandmother is still misremembering holidays from forty years ago, to the point that she now believes she spent her Kwanzaas during Watergate doing the Lindy Hop with Scott Baio at the International House of Pancakes. And somehow I believe that, even twenty years ago, I could easily have predicted the quick and colorful demise of Kim Kardashian’s sham marriage. As a general rule of thumb, the length of any given marriage is inversely proportional to the number of NASCAR-style endorsement deals involved. That’s just science, like gravity or Haylie Duff’s experiences on Celebrity Ghost Stories.
So the 1991 version of me would not, I guess, have been wrong about everything, no matter what my awkward side part and devotion to math team might have led you to believe. And in 2011 I found that, for all my access to high quality skin care products and entertainment options that do not involve pacing back and forth outside of the Spencer’s, the current version of me still has a lot left to learn. I went to Switzerland for work in March, which taught me a great deal about what not to dip in fondue and why simply watching Schindler’s List repeatedly was not an effective method of high school German instruction. This summer I attempted some basic home repairs, thereby learning that I should never attempt even the most basic of home repairs as well as the importance of maintaining a complete first aid kit in one’s home. (It turns out that paper towels are not a great substitute for bandages and bug spray is no substitute at all for antibacterial cream.) And this fall I helped coach a moot court team at Northwestern, which led me to understand that contemporary law students are more interested in learning about international comity than enjoying your hilarious Ruth Bader Ginsburg impression and may not ever have even heard of Matlock. I like to think that we learned from each other, although somehow I doubt that’s what the evaluations will say.
Regardless, here’s to so many great years of holiday seasons past and to the many great years that I know are still yet to come. May your 2012s be happy, healthy, and wholly unlike the John Cusack feature of the same name!
