the best part of the holiday: presents

christmas is getting more and more grating, what with right-wing nutjobs accusing me of wanting to ruin their holy, holy night. (i love that bill o’reilly claims that this is a holiday celebrating “the philosopher jesus”. the philosopher? that’s the version of jesus we’re celebrating? the one who’s an intellectual, an academic, a radical? might wanna rethink that one, bill.) but it is nice to get little reminders from my actors that they care about me.

also from the agents. three agents took three assistants and lil ol me to a japanese dive for lots of meat on a stick, sake and beer. i nibbled on garnish, mostly — mmm cabbage — and drank too much and nearly fell off my stool laughing at stories about famous people acting crazy. when i got home, everything was still hilarious, until i made the mistake of thinking about the future again and i stayed up til 2, shivering in bed.

i learned some lessons about business this week. ideally i would like to able to assimilate knowledge, even rude surprises, without becoming a harder or more cynical person. maybe in 05.

at least i made it! three months completed; i’ve earned my break. no more work until 05, until i’ve spent some time unraveling and reraveling and watching movies and cozying up with people i love and taking rambling walks. also not until the yummy-looking fleece-lined boots i bought from canada arrive. they’re my xmas present to myself.

gurgling

i’m actively angry right now, for reasons i can’t go into in such a public forum. i can, however, tell a story.

once upon a time, about ten years ago, when i was a little jewish middle-skooler at my little jewish skool, i had an issue i thought i should bring up at student council. not that i was ever naive enough to believe in the efficacy of even local governments. i mean, please. i grew up in washington. our mayor was arrested for getting caught smoking the crack rock in a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife.

marion barry aside, i had little faith in anything, let alone student government. still, i figured i’d give this a shot. i had an idea worth sharing: that students should write class/teacher evaluations at the end of the year. i had a friend willing to pitch the idea with me. i had the squeakings of confidence, good posture, and good improv skills. what, i wondered, was the worst that could happen?

oh my friends. oh, my friends. the worst was waiting right around the corner.

i made my pitch. the various student council members scattered in desks around the room, trying to appear worthy of the grave responsibility of power, nodded at me. the four older kids singled out to be Treasurer, Secretary, Vice President and President who sat in the front of the room in a row nodded too. but before any of the democratically-elected representatives could speak, a voice cut through the room, a voice with the bass and timbre of a locomotive barrelling through the 9th circle of hell; and a figure burst over me, huge with flames. i cast my forearm over my eyes and fell moaning to the ground as the voice rumbled over me, “HOW DARE YOU…”

i fell unconscious. when i awoke, i found myself outside the wretched room. worried student council reps fanned me and offered lemonade. it took me a while to recover — for one thing, my hair was tinged with char for weeks — and neither the Treasurer, Secretary, Vice President nor President of student council could look at me without fury boiling up in their eyes because of what i had unleashed.

in the end, all i had unleashed was a little drama. i got a slap-down in front of a classroom of my peers for making my suggestion. some people defended me; a couple kept their dislike on simmer, and i’m not kidding, for the rest of our tenure at that little jewish skool. a couple years later, the suggestion was implemented anyway and had nothing to do with me. but my key take-away from the experience was, never underestimate the force of a petty tyrant. i will never forget the feeling of having what seemed like a simple, logical idea, trying to present it, and, in response, coming face to face with a middle-skool history teacher cum demon.

that’s something i need to know that i didn’t learn in kindergarten.

superwoman

superwoman feels dizzy. needs wheat thins. bizarre breakfast of banana and hardboiled egg, followed by lunch of vegetable udon and diet coke, have left her head spinning. perhaps in conjunction with her crazy weekend o’ travelling: to the past and back again in only 2 days. take that, jules verne.

visiting swarthmore included many more ups than downs. i got to see the sparkling New Dorm as well as the freakishly gutted, under-construction dorm where i lived last year. i got to eat at the dining hall, hunched down in a booth hoping not to be spotted, and i got to gorge myself on brunch at Java Joe’s. most important, i got to see my swatfriends in their swathabitat. naturally that means i witnessed several naturally occurring acts of dorkiness: one (1) game of taboo, one (1) game of speed scrabble, conversations about *snort* literature.

people said “privilege.” i was HOME.

people also seemed to be shadowed by something. not just older, but sad. to the degree that it was almost good to leave again. almost. except that i had a lovely time with my various hosts of the moment, who happily provided alcohol, gossip & cheese. they go so well together. also offered: smoothie, pancake, birthday cake. oh, and by the power of two of them combined, they managed to sew a wayward button back onto my jacket. yay!

buy buy baby, buy buy

ALL i’m trying to do is get in my thursday evening’s worth of trashy television. why does everyone have to bombard me with “gift ideas”? marshalls, sears, old navy — STOP IT. i couldn’t care less how low your sweaters are priced, or who you have sarah jessica parker nuzzling. you’re a pack of wild dogs, as far as i’m concerned, and i’m this close to having you shot.

what’s that you say? grinch? scrooge? tell it to scarborough county or bill oh-“i’m the only defender of christmas”-really. christmas is not going to keel over just cuz of a withering glance or two from me.

witness this illuminating exchange:

ME: hey, honey, are we giving each other hanukkah presents?

HIM: nope.

ME: okay, good. didn’t think so.

HIM: hanukkah’s never been a big deal to me.

ME: so you just give your family hanukkah presents cuz you have to?

HIM: no! i give my family CHRISTMAS presents. christmas is entirely different.

merry … whatever. at least we get off work.

set! no, wait! … set!

one of my least-favorite games became, over the summer, when i played it compulsively with the other cty RAs, one of my favorites. (witness, in guendlesburger’s cty picture gallery. also witness: me, as a zombie, trying to eat my friend tamar’s head.) lacking a deck, i hadn’t played since, until the always obliging yami supplied a link to a daily game. i’ve been playing a game a day since, in the hopes that it will help counteract the effects of the television vacuum.

one of my favoritist actors is coming in today to read. ohmigod. she’s, like, fo shizzle, of my favoritist. apparently she’s extremely high-maintainance too. squeal! i probably won’t be able to say a word to her. i will bow my head and whisper how i am not worthy as she sweeps by me into the booth. i am, can you tell?, super psyched.

holy night, batman!

it’s hanukkah! what? how did that sneak up on me? i don’t have a candle to show for myself, let alone anything to put it in or light it with. christ, i’m a bad jew. how did i get to be such a bad jew? christ.

i think i’m heading to swarthmore this weekend. this time for real. maybe someone there will feed me latkes & try to soothe my wounded spirit. after all, i lost my month-long subway card; i left my fly open for two hours yesterday before noticing; i can barely get my contacts in in the morning. i’m a wreck. it took one of my actors having a meltdown in front of me to make me feel better. (i have his wild screaming on tape and i intend to play it back for myself over and over again as needed.)

the company christmas party was last night. i was all excited for my first! ever! — i was envisioning scenes from the apartment, where company employees do the can-can on tables, everyone’s groping everyone and drinking tons of punch. well, there was no punch to be had. the entire thing, in fact, seemed much more like a bar mitzvah. i was bitterly disappointed. luckily, the open bar helped me get over it.

happy hanukkah, to those of you who remember it.

plans for the weekend? why in fact i have!

a friend is coming to town and sleeping on our couch, making her one of the distinguished handful who have had that honor. i know the number is still under 10 because once we hit 10, we’re totally going to wash that sheet we keeping making the couch with. we promise!

meanwhile, roomie dina has finally finished her papers (yay!) and boyfriend ben has finished his first semester classes (wow!). things look good for the inhabitants of 92 2nd avenue. plus we haven’t seen a cockroach in the kitchen for DAYS. i’m proud of all of us (especially the cockroaches. great self-restraint guys.) — once finals are over, the two of them will have made it through the rocky entrance to grad skool. how rocky is it, you wonder, you who have never attempted? so rocky that i didn’t make it past the first classs. a round of applause for my housemates.

me, i’ve made it through my first 3 months on the job. not entirely insignificant, although, to be fair, a position where even on busy days i can still read through both newspapers that matter, salon, slate, the gawker empire, and manage to get in a crossword puzzle, isn’t exactly deployment to iraq.

one of the newspapers that matters has a fascinating article today on modern women’s happiness. it has some frank, surprising insights into the more and less generally stressful parts of women’s days, including the tidbit that most women rated “taking care of children” as less unpleasurable than “housework,” but not much less. ouch. so much for the mommy myth; hello desperate housewives.

aromatherapy

one of my actors gave me a scented candle today because i’m such a great … whatever i am. aww. i’m definitely looking forward to the landslide of gifts that christmastime portends. the christmas decorations themselves still startle me. i know it sounds crazy but i’ve never gotten used to them.

you know what i could get used to? HEALTH INSURANCE. kicks in today, baby. how do you like them apples (of which i no longer have to eat one a day, badumCHING!)? i survived the 3 months of stepping gingerly and throwing nyquil at every malady. this was my first manufactured endpoint, december 1, When My Health Insurance Kicks In. since i don’t have semesters anymore, this sort of thing will have to serve.

i chose my general practitioner by the objective awesomeness of her name. ready? DEMOCLEIA. everyone should have to choose a super-cool doctor name when they graduate med skool. like when you get confirmed. if med skool grads lack creativity, the professors could always bring in celebs to do the dirty work. (phinneaus, brooklyn, apple …)

my brother’s in town, interviewing for a job, which means i got a free drink followed by a free dinner last night, and he got a free place to sleep on the couch with minimal interruptions by our minimally-maladjusted cat. not. bad.

something like fame!

a little bit of swarthmore makes it onto aldaily: textbook disclaimer stickers! how exciting.

for the record, i went to a religious skool that taught no theories of origin but evolution. we had three judaic subjects a day out of a total of nine. bible stayed in bible class; it never so much as tapped on the glass of a bio room door. if it had, it would have been laughed back into the hallway. and if it sought to commiserate with rabbinics or hebrew, i imagine they would have sniffed and walked away. rabbinics and hebrew knew their place and they would have very little sympathy for bible trying to cause trouble.

it just wasn’t done at my skool to mix religion with anything that wasn’t religion. theoretically, we were supposed to learn morals and ways of learning from the torah and apply them to our daily lives. but it’s not like we were ever tested on that.

& sure, the skool fumbled from time to time. once the directors of the spring musical thought it would be a great idea to put on a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. then they cancelled out any points they would have gotten for progressiveness by censoring from the text all double-entendres and striking the word “virgin”. i considered it disgusting at the time. now i’m gaining some perspective.

nearly branded a communist cuz i’m left-handed

thanksgiving didn’t feel too thanksgiving-y this year. for one thing, the electricity went out right in the midst of the cooking. the turkey had only been in the oven for half an hour. as i understand it, though i don’t eat the bird, the bird must be cooked afore it can be et. my family regrouped, in relatively good spirits, and with the barest of notice we whirlwinded everything in portable containers, including the surprised still-pale bird itself, and moved the 15-person feast to another house.

the other house was blessed not just with electricity and a newly remodeled kitchen but also with a rear-screen projection television. those things are frikkin awesome. my six boy-cousins and i watched pirates of the carribean, feeling like we were in a mini movie theater.

for this and other reasons, the feast felt more fancy than festive. still, and always, it was good to be with my family. plus eventually the electricity returned to my house to keep the transported and well-traveled leftovers safe.