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The Jets Bombed

If our road trip down to Philadelphia can be characterized by unfettered indulgence in radio Christmas music (see yesterday), then our return trip to Boston can be summed up in one word: Football.

We left Pennsylvania on Sunday morning and stopped in Brooklyn to visit friends. Our delight at seeing them and their perfect infant son was so great that we managed to forget we were missing the New England Patriots play the Buffalo Bills, a must-win game for the Pats to gain entry into the playoffs. Before we hit the highway, we tapped into an errant wireless connection to confirm that the Pats shut out the Bills, 13-0.

But the New England would not make the playoffs simply by beating Buffalo. In addition, either Baltimore had to lose to Jacksonville (not likely) or the NY Jets had to prevail over Miami (more likely). So in a demonic twist of fate, New England fans were forced to cheer for their arch-nemesis rivals, the despised NY Jets.

As we barreled past the Bronx, I found a broadcast of the Jets-Miami game in the abyss that is the AM frequency. At first I was confounded at how to react to the game. How exactly does one switch allegiance and sincerely support Eric Mangini and the NY Jets? “Go Jets!” I tried, nearly gagging from my throat’s stalwart refusal to allow the words to emerge from my mouth. It just felt so wrong.

When Brett Favre managed to throw a touchdown pass in the second quarter, I celebrated like a lifelong Jets fans. But my euphoric love for the Jets faded after Favre was intercepted repeatedly and the Jets defense proved impotent against Chad freakin’ Pennington. By the middle of the 3rd quarter, I had already foresaw the Jets defeat against the Dolphins, 24-17, and the end of Patriot’s season. The disappointment was tempered somewhat by relief that I would no longer have to root for the Jets. Instead, I snarled and berated them for the remainder of the game.

Like most people in New England, I am semi-convinced that the Jets threw the game after they realized that the Ravens would clinch the playoff spot that a win would ensure them. Why would they do that? To SCREW New England, of course. But I also think it’s just as likely that the Jets were just proving how deeply and totally they suck.

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By Meredith – December 30, 2008

Movin’ and Groovin’ on Christmas Eve

We left Boston on Christmas Eve in the midst of sporadic wind-driven rain. It was 1pm and the highways bustled with cars. We steeled ourselves for an arduous 7+ hour drive to Philadelphia. Mr. P drove and I fiddled with the radio to ensure a steady supply of Christmas music.

If it had been any other day of the year, the sound of a Christmas-themed tunes would have induced fierce scowling. Way back at the beginning of November, I happened upon a radio station that had already switched to an all-Christmas format. I flew into a rage, demanding “What is this shit?” I mean I love Christmas music, but how can anyone earnestly groove upon it 4 weeks before Thanksgiving? Taken out of context, the corny novelties and sanctimonious hymns of Christmas are about as agreeable as out-of-season berries.

Right before Thanksgiving, the Christmas decorations spurted up and the buzz about holiday shopping and parties began. I want to cover my ears and plead, “Too soon! Too soon!” Ideally Christmas would begin the week before Christmas. Now I know this is unrealistic. The American marketplace would be subject to chaos and pillaging if everyone bought their presents, trees, decorations, and food within a 6-day time period. People would suffer nervous breakdowns. The fact is, we have built up Christmas to such an event that a solid month of preparation is necessary to sustain its annual occurrence.

But Christmas music is not necessary, really, until Christmas Eve. As we headed to Philadelphia amid the festive red brake-lights and white headlights, I could sit back and sing along with Christmas chorals with genuine holiday joy. I crooned “Blue Christmas” with Elvis as we sped through Hartford, chirped “Sleigh Ride” with Bing across the Tappan Zee Bridge, and rasped “Santa Claus is coming to Town” with Bruce in New Jersey. It didn’t feel like I was inappropriately co-opting a holiday feeling. It felt like Christmas.

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By Meredith – December 28, 2008

It’s the Thought That Counts

When reflecting upon imminent holidays and other occasions of celebration, I suffer the desire to afflict my writing with poignance. But like many writers, I am poorly trained in expressing emotional profundity. Everything sounds like an eulogy, a pray, or the overwrought musings of a LiveJournal entry:

Christmas! I used to ache for the cozy comforts that you bestowed. I used to find great solace in the happiness and promises of your songs. I used to desire your toys. But lately all I can feel towards you is a bored resentment. You are so beguiling, what with all your parties and all your presents, that you distract us from our suspicions that humanity is being cheated out of a greater gift. Because every year, your promises of peace and goodwill turn out to be as empty and hollow as a silver bell.

Sometimes I tell my brain, “Stop over-thinking everything! Stop finding hypocrisy everywhere! Stop analyzing Christmas! Shut up and drink the freaking egg nog!”

Let me ask you something, citizens of the Internet: When you first heard that a Wal-Mart employee was killed in a Black Friday stampede on Long Island, what was your initial reaction? Were you saddened by what you immediately perceieved to be a shocking mishap? Or… did you laugh?

I confess that I laughed. The idea that frenzied Black Friday shoppers would trample a person to death struck me as so over-the-top farcical that I laughed. Later, when I read news reports about the Wal-Mart worker who was killed, I did feel pangs of sadness for the young man and his family. But I still find the scenario to be absurd to the point of humorous.

Dead white man Horace Walpole once said, “Life is a comedy for those who think… and a tragedy for those who feel.” Me, I like comedies. I’d rather laugh than cry. I’d rather think than feel. And sometimes, that’s my tragedy.

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By Meredith – December 23, 2008

5 Pounds of Honey

Last week was my department’s annual Yankee Swap, a tradition that I myself started years ago to fill the camaraderie void in our holiday lunch left by the lack of alcohol. Despite being the Swap’s progenitor and facilitator, every year I get seriously screwed gift-wise. It’s enough to smash my faith in the gift economy.

During this year’s Swap, I started out with a “Don’t Break the Bottle” Wooden Wine Puzzle, which I promptly swapped for a bottle of limoncello lemon liqueur. Perhaps my downfall was going after a covetable present, for the limoncello was promptly taken away from me and I ended up with a stuffed gopher golf club cover. Underwhelmed, I then engaged in a serious of unofficial afterhours swaps — the gopher for a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly, which I swapped for the wine puzzle (again!), and finally the wine puzzle for a tin of peppermint bark.

Oh god, peppermint bark. Just what a health-conscious woman in her early 30s wants: Milk chocolate mixed with white chocolate and topped with ground candy canes. “A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” I vowed to place the tin in the kitchen area for the department to enjoy/take off my lips and hips. Since everyone was stuffed from the holiday lunch, I decided to wait until Monday.

So today when I got to work, the peppermint bark weighed heavy on my mind. Despite an extensive breakfast of toast and neufchatel, the previous two days of XC skiing and snow shoveling had revved my appetite into overdrive, and when I placed the peppermint bark tin in the kitchen area, my hand reached out and broke off a huge chunk before I scuttled back to my desk.

“Why did I do that?” I asked myself. It was 8:30am, and there I was, nibbling on the peppermint bark with little sighs of contentment. An hour later, my ration of bark was gone and I needed more tea. I headed to the kitchen area and noticed that less than half of the bark remained. Again, my hand reached out and broke off another chunk of bark.

“Why did I do that?” I asked myself, again. The second-helping of peppermint bark steadily disappeared from my paper towel. The sugar did wonders for my morale. I may be in the office, heaping concentration upon my work until my brain sweated, but at least I had peppermint bark.

Ten minutes after I finished my second helping of peppermint bark, a co-worker dropped by with a dark chocolate snowman as a Christmas present. My mouth had the taste of sugar in it. I unwrapped the snowman, smashed its hollow vessel, and fed myself chocolate shards for the next hour. By then it was 11am, and I had probably eaten an entire RDA of calories in candy.

After a cleansing lunch of flatbread with hummus and cucumbers, a co-worker came by and invited me to a cake celebration for a departing co-worker. What, am I going to be the skinny bitch who goes to a goodbye party and refuses cake? So I ate a slice of thick, heavy cake. My blood sugar surged into my skull like a spurting oil well.

The sugar binge reminded me of when bears happen upon a beehive. It’s rare for a bear to actually encounter a beehive, but when they do, they are capable of eating up to 5 pounds of honey in one sitting. Some days, particularly cold snow-filled days leading up to a holiday, you gotta go for the sugar. You just gotta go for the 5 pounds of honey.

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By Meredith – December 22, 2008

Ski Storm!

Friday’s storm dropped 12 inches of fluffy dry powder on Boston. Today another 6 inches of granular flakes fell throughout the afternoon. Everyone groaned about the inconvenience of it all during the apex of the Holiday season, but when we see snow, we think: XC Ski!

It was a relief to be able to ski locally at the Middlesex Fells reservation, a 10-minute drive from our home, as opposed to driving to New Hampshire and spending an entire day skiing ourselves into muscular oblivion in order to justify the trip time. We could just dig out our skis, dig out our driveway, and drive to the Fells to spend 2-3 hours puttering around the miles of woodsy trails that weave through the large scenic reservoirs. For free!

Anyone who professes to hate the snow has obviously not spent any time in a snow-filled forest. You may hate the icy roads and sidewalks, the slushy sludge piles, the inconvenience of a mid-day storm, but you cannot hate a pine tree with snow clinging to its branches or the peacefulness of snowflakes falling onto a frozen lake. We went skiing on both Saturday and Sunday, and probably saw 50 other people on skis and snowshoes, and every single one of them had a crazy happy grin on their face because skiing through a forest while the snow is falling is one of the best feelings in the world.

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By Meredith – December 21, 2008

2008: Nothing Changes But the Calendar

I loathe the obligatory year-end blog post—that tired tradition of droll reflection and forced optimism. I’m at that age (31!?!) where New Year’s feels less like a fresh start and more like a bureaucratic reset. Sure, I’ll never turn down a reason to clink a champagne flute or make out with my new husband at midnight. But the sentiment’s been soured by the creeping awareness that time is just a human trick—an agreed-upon construct to keep trains running on time. January 1st is just a checkpoint on an endless loop. Nothing really changes, except I get older, people get dumber, the world gets louder, and both my regrets and the weather grow more extreme.

That said, 2008 wasn’t half bad. My work life leveled out—two solid tech writing gigs and a reliable rotation of three-day weekends. I married a truly wonderful man and celebrated not once, but thrice: with my family in Pennsylvania, with his in France, and just the two of us in Spain. The credit crisis didn’t eat my savings, and homeownership no longer feels like a pipe dream. And—for the first time in eight years—I feel something dangerously close to hope for this country.

So I’ll end this last post of the year without a “Top Ten” list, mostly because I’m currently incapable of judging whether anything I write is even comprehensible, let alone good. Wait for next year (she promises, again, with excellent intentions and questionable follow-through).

In the meantime, here’s to a warm, fuzzy New Year. And in 2009, I hope you go after what you want—loudly, boldly, maybe even a little sneakily. Dream bigger. Get messier. Be wild and audacious and deeply unserious. As Mick told Rocky, “You’re gonna eat lightning, and you’re gonna crap thunder.”

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By Meredith – December 20, 2008

First Snow Storm

They predicted this winter’s first snow storm would start at 3pm today, and they were close because it was 2:15pm when the first flakes wafted down from the gray, hushed sky. I was walking to Walgreens. The traffic on the streets neared rush-hour volume; no one wanted to risk getting snarled in a snowy commute like last year’s notorious mid-day storm when everyone left their offices after the heavy snow had started. We learn from our mistakes, if we remember them.

I needed to buy Christmas cards. I considered taking the bus to Cambridge and buying fancy boxed cards at Papyrus, but that normally quick errand could potentially take hours during a snow rush. So I headed to Walgreens, admitting total defeat for this year’s Christmas card ambitions, which started so high. I planned to print photos from the wedding and send them to the appropriate guests. I planned a card that featured our wedding portrait. I planned, and planned, and then never followed through with any plans, and now there were 4 more postal service days until Christmas and my stack of unanswered Christmas cards tormented my inner etiquette-minder.

Walgreens is packed. The free-standing pharmacy with a sizable parking lot is the closest thing our town has to a big-box store, although the whole building could fit into the health and beauty section of a typical Target. People are buying milk and bread, presumably in anticipation of getting snowed into their homes for the next week. The Christmas aisle is also crowded, mostly with women picking through the gift wrap. I myself grab some tissue paper and a few festive gift bags, because there is no better opportunity to wrap presents than during a pre-Christmas snow storm.

There is a long line at the two cash registers in the front of Walgreens. The overweight woman in front of me is buying an insane amount of junk food. I scan the contents of her carriage, fascinated and repelled by her storm provisions — various bags of chips, Hostess cupcakes, two boxes of donuts, yogurt-covered pretzels, Combos, a case of generic orange soda, and numerous cans of beef stew and ravioli. I realize she is doing her grocery shopping in Walgreens. I try like hell not to judge her, because I’m buying my Christmas cards at Walgreens, and that’s a definite chink in my elitist armor.

The snow is falling in earnest as I walk home. A little gurgle of excitement bubbles in my stomach. I don’t know why I should be excited about being snowed in on a Friday night, but I guess it’s because my house is warm, my kitchen is stocked with virtuous foods like turnips and lentils, and my Christmas cards will be finished before the end of the storm.

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By Meredith – December 19, 2008

Adventures in Discount Acupuncture, Session #3

If you saw M. on the street, you’d probably peg her as a veterinarian, not an acupuncturist. She’s a faded blond gracefully in her early 40s, trim and sensible with a soft-spoken kindness. She mentioned tonight that she’s going to Minnesota for the holidays, presumably to visit a large family who is supportive but bemused at M.’s chosen career path as a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in the liberal den of Cambridge (or so my dramatic imagination speculates.)

Every week, M. starts out by inquiring about my health in the past week. I’m encouraged to keep track off every bodily aberrance: Were my hands and feet cold? How was my appetite? Any moodiness? Did I feel dizzy when I got out of bed in the morning? I am unaccustomed to anyone caring about my state of being to this degree, and it feels rude to allow the conversation to always dwell upon my ailments. My natural instinct is to reciprocate M.’s interest by inquiring about her health, her sleeping habits, her musculoskeletal discomforts. But that would be improper, so I consciously remind myself to be self-centered and freely share the details of my ongoing cold.

“A sore throat, coughing, congestion,” I tell M., who is writing down what I say. She wants to know everything: Is it a scratchy, dry sore throat? Or a painful, hurts-to-swallow sore throat? Where is the congestion? How often is the cough? What color is the phlegm? How often do I get colds? How long do they last? I secretly bask in M.’s attention, for her sympathetic manner makes me feel as though someone really, really cares about my humdrum case of the winter sniffles.

“We’ll do something tonight to take care of your cold,” M. says, which amazes me a bit. In the past month I’ve read a lot about acupuncture, but never any claims that it could help with colds. M. proceeded to stick 10 needles in me: 4 in my wrists, 5 in my feet and ankles, and 1 in my lower arm. I still have not looked at the needles while they are in my skin, but I trust M. when she tells me “They’re not all that interesting to look at.”

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By Meredith – December 16, 2008

Movie Reviews: Happy-Go-Lucky — Quantum of Solace — W.

Poppy is happy. Really happy. Like, when her bicycle in stolen from the streets of London, she cheerfully decides to use the opportunity as an impetus for learning to drive. (Compare this to my blind fury when my bike seat was stolen). Nothing gets Poppy down. Not the rudeness of people who don’t respond to Poppy’s unflagging smiles and laughs, not the patronizing pity of friends who don’t comprehend Poppy’s source of inner strength, not even the paranoid racist ranting of her loose cannon driving instructor can loosen Poppy’s determination to be happy. Happy-Go-Lucky is engrossing, fascinating, and utterly feel-good. I cannot remember ever before leaving a movie theatre, making vows to myself like “I will smile more. I will joke with strangers. I will be a happier person.”

James Bond is vengeful. Really vengeful. Like, he’s still not over the death of Vespa, the fetching Bond girl from the previous movie. What’s up with that? Since when does James Bond dwell on dead ex-girlfriends when there’s a potential new girlfriend helping him usurp a weasely villain determined to bilk Bolivia of its water rights? And since when does M follow James Bond around the world to assist in investigations and appear in every other freaking scene? And since when does the only new technology in a James Bond film consist of a fancy touch-screen computer that’s one step above what the election analysts on CNN had? Luckily, the storyline moves so fast and the action flies so furious that these details are not as distracting as the fact that James Bond is still, alas, a blonde.

George W. Bush is dumb. Really dumb. Like, as dumb as you suspect. You don’t need to watch Oliver Stone’s interpretation of how dumb he is. You don’t need to reaffirm your suspicions that W. is nothing but a privileged frat-boy eff-up pining for the affection and approval of his daddy. You’ve survived 8 years of his cataclysmic presidency, and the last thing you need is to spend 2 LONG BORING hours picking over the who, what, why, and how of it.

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By Meredith – December 15, 2008

Happy Rainbow Christmas House

We received the “Make Your Own Gingerbread House Kit” as a pre-Christmas present, and at first I had suspicions that it may have been a re-gift, because doesn’t it just seem like something that would be a perpetual regift? Regardless, the opportunity to be creative in the particular way that constructing and decorating a gingerbread house necessitates does not arise very often, and I took it as a challenge to my aging and flabby right-brain to build an aestically-pleasing gingerbread house that any gingerbread man would be proud to call home, especially if he was gay pride gingerbread man.

First things first: I don’t like gingerbread. Nor do I like any of the gumdrop ornamentation that was included in the kit. Nor do I find the icing, which came as 20 ounces of powder that mixed with water to form a sticky paste that was exceedingly difficult to work with, in the slightest way appetizing. So the only errant temptation experienced during the construction had nothing to do with nibbling at the roof or squirting icing into my mouth. No, my desire was to smash the thing to smithereens when the roof refused to adhere to the walls, or when the gumdrops slid off of the walls, or when the icing somehow got in my hair.

The final gingerbread house looks nothing like the suggested artisanal designs included in the instructions that were called things like “Candlelight Cottage” and “Gumdrop Manor.” So I will call it “Happy Rainbow Christmas House”, because it’s sheer Christmasness allows us to feel safe forgoing a tree for another year and allowing the gingerbread house to stand as a testament to our festive spirit.

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By Meredith – December 14, 2008