monday, december 24

It is approaching midnight… Santa will be climbing onto his sleigh yet again to bring cheer and material goods to all the good little girls and boys. I wish he’d bring me a Vaio. And a Jeep.

I feel tapped out from the past few days… being home is great and it always grounds me and reminds me where I came from and why I’m went where I am and why I’m going where I want to. Right now I just want to be home in Chicago, wrapped up in my big down comforter and someone has come while I was gone and cleaned my house and gotten rid of all of the stuff that I’ll never need for the next year and even done my dishes and restocked my refrigerator to boot. We had dysfunctional family Christmas at Dad’s half-brother’s house. Mom insists their home is modular and not a trailer and then says that Dad’s half-brother’s sister’s house is arriving soon and will be right next to Dad’s half-brother’s sister’s. I said that anytime a house arrives, it’s a trailer. It may be a nice pad with a feng shui – but anytime a house arrives instead of being built – it’s trailer.

Uncle Jack and Cousin Daniel were they’re usual converstaionless selves – I think Annie Sullivan would have liked the challenge. Not that I was the chipper talky either – after 26 years of Christmases with this crew, it is harder than ever to pretend to be polite and interested in people that you see less than three hours during an entire year.

Dinner was at Kunz’s – which is pronounced like the vowel in the word ‘hook’. Stop giggling. We ate lots and my body is beginning to react to the extreme calorie intake that began last Thursday. I will definitely have to buy a weekly pass on the romaine train this coming week.

And this is the first Christmas that I am not going to mass. It seems that as the years go by, we as a family get less and less interested in all the official things that we are supposed to do and wing it a little bit more each time. I think I might write a letter to God tonight.

We did do our customary Santa hat wearing during the evening and visited Aunt Joyce who was alone on Christmas Eve – she was prepping a cache of presents for the visit of her horde tomorrow during the day. We helped her wrap all of her presents up and that was probably one of the nicest Christmas-sy things we could have done all day – short of working at a soup kitchen.

I missed Brigitte’s show on Friday. I’d gone out with Alan – and we hadn’t had Alan/Andy time since before his wedding (and more importantly – before his stint in the nuthouse) – so we had late lunch and then went to see Lord of the Rings. Which was fucking amazing. Stunning moviemaking. Excellent excellent excellent. I am reading the whole shebang now. Such ballsy film-making – we finally get a truly worthy dungeons and dragons movie. So just as the credits run, Brigitte’s show is starting. The thing is this: the role she understudied she was on for this weekend. So we’d all been waiting for this weekend to go see the show. I missed the 8:15 show but there was another one at 10:30. Then Ron called and we had just gotten in from staying with his mom for her thyroid cancer surgery that morning in Milwaukee. He had called late morning and was having having a hard time seeing his mom come out of the surgery – her body was reacting violently to the anesthetic and she also suffers from lupus as well. He was so upset when he called that I couldn’t understand what he was saying first – I feared something much much worse had happened. By the end of the day his mom was feeling better. But I knew that Ron needed some comforting that night so I spent the night with him and missed Brigitte’s show – fully knowing the wrath I would incur. I left a message the next day apologizing for missing the show and that I’d flown home to Indiana safely. She calls the next day and says that she was in hysterics and nearly called and left a nasty message on my cellphone. I’m sure in a week in won’t make a difference but the extremity of her reaction really got to me. I dunno. How many times have I put her friendship first above others and this one day I have all of these people pulling on me for support – along with having to fly home the next day… it was all just a lot to handle. Like I said, I’m sure a few weeks from now it will not be a huge issue but I just got mad that she got as mad as she did. Oh well – I’m sure we’ll both get over ourselves real soon.

I did a great deal of work on my coaching website on Friday. It looks really slick and I want to have it staged for roll-out with the new year. It is entirely managed with MovablyType – a weblog content manager program that I’m probably going to convert this blog over to as well. I used little icons and spots of graphics and it’s gonna be pretty fucking sweet. I’m very proud of myself.

Just finished reading Bomb the Suburbs, a book from a Chicago writer about the collision of hip-hop and white suburbia – among other things. Very though-provoking. It reminds me again about how mainstream my surroundings are lately and how I need to force myself to dip into the crazy diversity that is Chicago. Without getting my white-ass kicked of course.

That’s about all I can write right now – everyone out there have a wonderful and safe Christmas…

Oh, Heather and Brooks and I also went to go see Monsters, Inc. – fucking hysterical movie. So so funny and so so creative. Go see it!


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