More Christmas

One year, the day after Thanksgiving, my mother opened off the holiday season by sliding a cardboard box filled with two gigantic stuffed bears down our front staircase and calling out "Here comes the Christmas crap!"

When I was very young those two bears were my size and magical; at that point I was a teenager and they were just two oversized stuffed bears -- as my mom aptly put it, "Christmas crap."

I guess it's easy to believe that the Christmas season is beautiful and mysterious and anticipatory if you're five; if a string of lights wound around a doorway causes you to exclaim, as my sister once did, "It looks like the entrance to Disneyland!"

Later this afternoon I am going to take that damn tree back to the Target, and tomorrow I am going to go to Eastern Market and see if I can find something a little less plastic with which to adorn my dream apartment. It probably won't be a full-sized Christmas tree, but it will be something. Maybe candles, or handmade stockings. Maybe a plant. I don't know.

I could go all DIY and make my own decorations, but my creative instincts are best kept to experiments in cooking. (This morning I tried; I took some tissue paper from an ATL bag and folded it into quarters and attempted to cut it into a snowflake, like this one guy suggested to do on the NYT. It looked like a three-year-old had done it. I put it in the recycle bin.)

So I'm sitting here, staring at my apartment, which is otherwise filled with lovely natural wood and my pretty parquet and my five framed photographs of places I've been and my sixth framed cutout of the newspaper on the day Obama won the election, and now my ghastly plastic tree, and thinking "well, if I put handmade, locally-made red and green candles in the windows, if I maybe bought some hand-knit stockings and hung them across my bookcase, if someone at the Eastern Market is better at hot-gluing things to pinecones than I am and maybe I bought one of those and put it on my table... then would it feel like the anticipation of a holiday?"

What does one do to herald in a season when one is too old to believe in the magical properties of a stuffed bear, too "discerning" to consider a string of colored lights around a door transformative, too depressed by the news of the Black Friday mob death (not to mention the grossness and the ugliness of all the disposable plastic garbage available at Wal-Mart and Target) to want to do a lot of shopping, and too unsure of what the best ways are of returning any sense of celebration to a holiday that has long lost its ritual, but maybe it would be nice to have something special in one's apartment, because it's friggin' Christmas for Christ's sake!

Oh -- and too frugal to believe that one should spend a great deal of money on this kind of thing.

(Btw, GoriGirl, thx for the suggestion re: potted live plant. Will look for one when I am out tomorrow morning.)

Christmas

When I was a kid, I used to love to look at the Christmas tree. It seemed so peaceful, so pretty. There were two ornaments I particularly liked, for reasons I can't remember why -- a little gingerbread boy and a little gingerbread girl. One year I was infatuated with a set of "realistic"-looking birds that someone had given my mother and which ended up on the tree. But mostly it was the lights against the nighttime darkness.


(Our tree, Christmas 2004.)

It's a Blue family tradition to put up the tree the day after Thanksgiving, and since I do enjoy keeping traditions alive and I am going to be hosting my parents and my aunt and my sister in my dream apartment for Christmas 2008, this afternoon I went to the Target and I bought a tree and I came home and I put it up.

I want this Christmas tree out of my house.

It doesn't feel peaceful and it doesn't feel right; it feels plastic and gross and ugly. And it's not because I went and bought the cheapest one, either (though to be fair I bought the second cheapest one). It just looks awful, especially after I came back from the Target and read online that a man had been trampled to death this morning at a Wal-Mart:

By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains.

They broke through the glass doors.

And now I have a stupid plastic fake Christmas tree in my dream apartment, which is otherwise only filled with things I like.

I want to take down the ornaments and unstring the lights and put the tree back in its box and take the box back to Target. And then I want to -- I don't know -- maybe go to the Farmers' Market and buy some gourds or something, or a poinsettia, or maybe buy nothing at all, because the whole thing has thoroughly depressed me.

People decorate for Christmas because we to celebrate the season, and because we crave ritual and all of that. But this tree isn't any kind of a celebration. It's ridiculous, and ridiculously ugly. It's completely, 100% anti-Christmas.

So after I take it back, then what do I use to decorate my apartment?

More Pictures From My Life

Here are more pictures I've taken recently (and some not-so-recently, but I just finished pulling all of the pictures off of my cameraphone):


The Obama HQ in Stafford, VA. It's a little hard to read, but the sign it is covering reads "Heart & Soul: Ari's House of Dance and Performing Arts." (It's about time the arts supported something besides themselves!)

The White House on Election Night. Surprisingly, the picture doesn't at all do justice to how many people were actually there.


The spread of food at my housewarming party. I love my apartment. Everything is so minimalist and clean, and I have that fantastic view. Sometimes I think I will never be so lucky as to live in another place with such a beautiful view.

The food, close-up. Realized when it was all on the table that nearly everything was brown. Meh. Also, I need a large pitcher so I can decant things like that jug of apple cider and maybe make it look more inviting.

My friends and I call this the "Epic Fail" construction company. Mostly because we live our lives dictated by internet memes.

A few places have gone out of business recently (none sadder than Olsson's Books and Records). This one amused me because, next to the giant Blue Screen of Death, there is a piece of printer paper taped to the window that says "Ask About Our Reverse Mortgage Plans." Guess that one didn't work out so well.

One of many new bank mergers. I want to know how much they paid to get Regis and Kelly involved. Also -- and it's hard to tell from the picture itself -- the fake smile on Kelly's face looks a lot more like she's in extreme pain. Either she's horrified by the direction her career has taken, or those skinny jeans are cutting off her circulation.

Two Kheers + Time = PIE

It's a little hard to tell that there's a kheer under there because I kinda went nuts with the garnish. But here's what happened:

The party invite I got said that dinner would be served around 6:30 and that people could come earlier if they wanted, to socialize. I arrived at 7:00, was the first person there, and was able to help my hosts do some of the cooking. The other guests all came around 9:00 p.m., and it was quarter-to-ten before the hosts insisted we stop chatting long enough to move to the table for food.

There were two kheer-like desserts in attendance: mine, which was a lot closer to a rice pudding than a kheer, and another one which used vermicelli. Both sat in the kitchen waiting their turn to be brought out, and both ended up sitting in the kitchen, forgotten, for hours. When the various desserts were served (there were many, because nearly everyone had brought something), the guests were appropriately excited about having both kheer and "rice pudding" until we realized that both desserts, having sat unattended for nearly six hours at this point, had dried out completely. (The first guest to take a bite of my kheer said, kindly, "should we add some more milk to this?") We ended up with one dish of hard, crunchy rice and one dish of vermicelli that had swollen to the size of spaghetti noodles.

Luckily there was also pie, and plenty of it.

Despite the fact that we forgot about the kheers, it was a great party. Or, perhaps, because of the fact that we forgot about the kheers, it was obviously a great party. Happy Thanksgiving!

Kheer

I was going to write one of those perky Thanksgiving-style posts, in which I listed out a rememberance of items, people, and places for which I was thankful.

I thought of it yesterday at lunch, when I -- having put the final touches on a project that has been keeping me busy non-stop for the past few weeks -- let myself take a complete lunch "break" and found myself walking uptown, as it were, past the place where I temped when I first arrived in the city.

No one was sitting in the park today, but I walked around its perimeter anyway and remembered how I had ached to have pretty clothes and to get to go to work with smart, fun-looking people like the ones I saw in the park.

This time, I was wearing one of my ATL dresses and my high-performance MBTs and had an invitation to go out to the movies in the evening and was meeting another group of friends the next day for Thanksgiving dinner.

I was, in every sense of the word, thankful.

My phone, meanwhile, was vibrating repeatedly but I didn't bother to pick it up; it was too much work to fish it out of my keyring purse and punch all the little buttons with gloves on.

When I got back to the office I opened up my phone and found out that there were bombs going off, all over Mumbai.

It's hard to respond to something at which I stand at so great a distance and simultaneously am linked to so many people who stand much closer; sending long-distance hugs to all of the people I know who are connected to the city is the strongest thing I can think of to do.

But it has put a pallor on the day, particularly considering that the hosts of the Thanksgiving party I am going to attend in a few hours grew up in Mumbai.

When I sat at my laptop and thought "what am I going to write about that encompasses all of the emotions of this strange day?" I decided to procrastinate by going back and looking at the posts I wrote on Thanksgiving Day last year.

Last year, I had just come back from India and celebrated by making kheer for Thanksgiving dinner.

This year, a year's better at cookery, I'm going to make kheer again. Not exactly for celebration this time, but as a way to remember both Thanksgiving with my own family (this is the first Thanksgiving I've ever celebrated without them) and to do something that is the cooking version of sending out long-distance hugs.

If it turns out well, I'll take it to the dinner along with the bottles of wine my hosts requested me to bring. (This year, at least, it will fit in with the other foods.) If not, I'm pretty good at eating my own cooking.

And to everyone in or connected to Mumbai: my thoughts are with you.

More Yoga News

So I've overextended (that's a fancy way of saying pulled, right?) the muscle underneath my ribcage. Not sure what muscle that is, but I do know that it hurts.

I talked to my yoga teacher about it and she said that it happens to a lot of students if they push themselves too hard trying to do Marychasanas A through D. This makes sense because I am nothing if not a push-too-hard kind of person. She prescribed deep breathing exercises (to bring healing oxygen to the sore muscles) and suggested a few modifications for me to use in my daily practice until it stops hurting and I can go back to pushing-myself-but-not-too-hard.

I can kind of predict how well my day is going to be based on how my yoga practice is in the morning; days where my body is responsive and my breath is focused tend to be really good days, and days where I have physical (or occasionally mental) issues tend to be not-so-good. Which meant that today, where I spent a good portion of Mysore class feeling like a giant waste of space because I was only able to mark through half of the postures, was pretty terrible.

Bleh. On the plus side (sort of), the yoga studio will be closed over the Thanksgiving holiday, which means it will be a good time for me to rest my overextended muscle and maybe start working my way back into things. (I was able to do friggin' jump throughs last week and I am so irritated that I can't do them this week!)

Why do I take Ashtanga so seriously? Because it is that awesome. That's why. ^__^

Yoga Rest Day

At the beginning of my Ashtanga practice, whenever Saturday rolled around I was all "dang, it's yoga rest day! but I want to do my yogas!"

Now I'm all "BRING IT."

I guess I've reached another stage in my Ashtanga practice: the stage where I should probably start going to class 3x per week instead of 2. I'm getting into more difficult postures now, the ones where I have to be "placed into" the posture by my yoga teacher because I'm not yet flexible enough to find the posture on my own. I've been working on Marichyasana D for three weeks and haven't been given another posture (the posture I referred to on my Twitter yesterday was a closing posture), which is completely fine, because I am having enough work getting myself in and out of Marichyasana D and still haven't found a way to unlock it.

I'm also a bit perturbed because after a lot of work I was able to do successful jump throughs (not jump backs -- still haven't figured out how to get my knees pulled in enough for those), and then after a few days of being able to do jump throughs I suddenly couldn't any more, no matter how tightly I tried to tuck my legs in.

So I need to start going to class more, and I probably need to start getting up a little earlier to do so (gaah! 5:30 a.m.!). But I wouldn't do it if I didn't find Ashtanga completely intriguing, and if I wasn't enjoying myself. (I still think that Ashtanga uses the parts of my brain that used to get excited about playing video games: the parts that are all "ooh, how do I defeat this monster, maybe if I try this way or that way, ooh, now I did it! and I get to move on to the next level, which is 95% exactly like the previous level except for this one harder thing...")

Sometimes I look at the other students in Mysore class and think "wow, if I keep this up someday I will be doing what they're doing -- and that looks really hard!" Sometimes I think "why aren't my hamstrings as flexible as everyone else's? darn my short-legged genetics!" And sometimes I think "I wonder if I'll still be doing Ashtanga in ten years? I wonder if I'll still be doing it when I'm 80 years old? I wonder if it fights osteoporosis?"

But mostly I think "I need to come to Mysore more often."

Which means 5:30 a.m.

These days I (and my muscles) really appreciate yoga rest days. ^__^