I found this via flash traffic.
I wonder if Dave Grohl has seen this. Kurt Cobain is rolling around in his grave. OH it’s so bad.
*sobs*
Month: November 2009
This is a reprint from last year
but I think it should be read every holiday season.
For some reason, everybody and their Mama is starting to hate on Christmas. Eleanor is losing the spirit. MF never had it (I think he’s lying just to look like a badass for the ladies). There’s even a Bah Humbug club in England.
Back in the day, I used to feel a little blue during the holiday and then I came to resent the holiday. Finally, I have gotten to the point where I can enjoy the thing. Here are some of my tips.
- Christmas doesn’t turn crap into gold. Yeah everybody and their mama tells you that Christmas is the time for friends and family. Everybody is supposed to get together and have a jolly old good time. This is all great and all but if your family tap dances on your last nerve: your grandpa is an alcoholic or your aunt is mean and uses you as an emotional whipping girl. None of that is going to change because Jesus was born many years ago. They’re still going to be the same shitheads that they are the other 51 weeks out of the year. Sometimes, you might have to set up some personal boundaries for yourself and limit the time with drunk grandpa and mean aunt if it’s going to harsh your buzz for the entire season.
That being said, if you have been a jackass to someone and are feeling bad about it. This holiday season does give you the opportunity to extend an olive branch or a peace pipe. It’s not calling people out of the blue for no reason, it’s wishing them well for the holiday season.
- Your problems aren’t going to go away just because it’s the seasonIf you’re unhappy,fat, or broke, you’re still going to be unhappy, fat, and/or broke. It’s not going to go away because there’s a tree and some presents
- People are not nicer during the holiday season. I don’t know what this peace on Earth, goodwill towards man crap is. Ask anyone who works in retail during the holiday season and they will tell you, “people are still the same greedy shits they are the other 11 months of the year. In fact, the greedy shitness is multiplied.” People are shooting each in Toys R Us over what? A Wii. A Bratz doll? People want to be the hero to their own friends and relatives by bringing them the choice gifts so they can get some applause and standing ovations. They will push, pull, poke, and possibly steal the toy out of your shopping cart. Then they drop fifty cents into the Salvation Army bucket and go home thinking they’re a great charitable human being.
- Avoid Christmas music. Here’s the deal. The classical music written by the white haired greats such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, Yeah that stuff rules. BUT the stuff that is produced closer to today, it sucks. The record producers know that you’re only going to play it for the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas day. They’re not trying to create a Stairway to Heaven or a Help or even a Hey Ya. They know it’s never going to be a number one single or go platinum so they’re going to put out some crap to get a little change in their pockets and go home. To put it simply, Christmas records are CRAP! Avoid that shit. You’ll hear it enough in stores, on television, and on the radio to purposefully put yourself in a position of listening to it on purpose. It’s crappy music with cheesy lyrics. It, for the most part, is not good music. It sucks. Bad arranging. The singer might be out of tune. Nobody is caring because you’ll listen to it for six weeks and then put it up and listen to it six weeks next year. It’s shitty music. So don’t be tearing out the Christmas music right after thanksgiving and expect to not want to poke your eardrums out to rid yourself of that gawdawful noise because that’s just unrealistic. Avoid the shitty Christmas music. Or write to your Congressman to demand that people release stuff that isn’t certified crap. Also, I think those records will say “I hate myself and want to die” if you play them backwards. Yes I do.
- Buy your presents online. People go crazy and they especially go crazy in malls. If you can get your gifts online, you avoid that stuff. Of course, my local Chamber of Commerce is going to send me reindeer crap for this particular item. Nice! Fertilizer for my flowers!
- You don’t have to go to every party invited. For some reason, there is this pressure to attend every Christmas party. Do you attend every party you have ever been invited? Seriously, say “No thank you, I have other plans.” It doesn’t matter if those plans are sitting on your couch with your cat watching “Veronica Mars” reruns. If you don’t want to go to that particular party, don’t go! OF course, there is this pressure to be a social maven during the holiday. If you’re not a social butterfly who likes large parties or the particular party is filled with people who will make you lose the little faith you have in the human race, don’t be a martyr for the holiday. Don’t go to the shitty party. Give yourself a present.
- Avoid peer pressure Yeah Mary has a thousand Christmas lights with some blow up dolls in her front yard but that doesn’t mean YOU have to do that to your house. In many ways, this could apply to some of the above advice. This goes for gifts. If you can’t afford to buy a Wii, don’t let your kid and your neighbors who are getting one make you feel bad for not buying one. Yeah it sucks but bankruptcy because you can’t pay those credit cards later sucks more. So shake it off. Be the rock star that other people want to emulate. Forget those Joneses, they’re probably all on prozac and in therapy anyway.
So there you go. There is some of my advice to survive the holidays without feeling like pooo!
I love yoga. Back in the day, I would take yoga classes at this place in DC. Of course, I move back and NO YOGA. I managed to find this VHS tape called MTV Yoga
Of course, my vhs player is kaput.
I intended to do many things this weekend. For example, I intended to attend this conference on Friday. I didn’t attend due to my wonderful clock setting skills which confused AM with PM. I woke up at 10 a.m. all warm and fuzzy and then shouted words that would embarrass my mother. Since the conference itself was in Little Rock and I live a good two hours away…. well, you do the math.
I really wanted to listen to programs on how poor people aren’t getting proper legal services. As a person who has consistently worked and interned in public defender’s offices, I know how the poor live and I heard about all the struggles to get basic necessities. It’s hard to go to a job interview if you don’t even have metro fare.
I ended up commisserating by watching Dexter episodes on DVD. I’m not sure why watching serial killers cheers me up but it always does.
My original plans were to go to the conference, stay the night in a hotel, and then run the Great Gobbler/Little Giblets 5K in Maumelle on Saturday morning. Well that went to hell, so I decided to get up early and drive to Maumelle from my house in SE Arkansas. So I did just that.
I get to the race site and go for my purse and realize that I had left my purse in SE AR. !*&)(^&)^^%!!! somehow I had left my checkbook in my car. No I don’t know either and am completely embarassing myself by confessing my flightiness to the public at large. It did end up saving my ass later because I was able to buy a Walmart gift card to pay that I could use in the gas station to get gas to come home.
So the race itself. I had not run since the great rain of 2009. I am a wuss about getting wet and this was my first real run since then. Also, the route had an incline. I knew it was going to be a slow time. It was. Average page was 15:32 AND 48:10.29 OVERALL. OUCH! that’s slow. It’s my slowest time ever.
Well progress is always one step at a time.
OH and if you’re fat and don’t want to exercise or race because people will laugh at you, get over it. People who laugh at others are retarded.
AHEM…
I met my friends John and Rebecca. Rebecca was running the race also. Here’s her picture. I went to undergrad with John way back in the day. Back in the day, he was a big cool senior who ran the radio station and I was a big dorky freshman. They were meeting some other friends and had brunch after the race. I had some spicy chorizo that burned my whole entire mouth. OOH CALIENTE indeed. Of course, I asked where he got it.
I finally (and I do mean finally) got to meet the beautiful and funny Sophie. Sophie is four. I asked her if she was running the Little Giblets 1K. She responded, “I am running zero K” Yeah that kid knows what’s going on. If I had any inkling that I could produce a kid as awesome as Sophie, I’d put a bun in my oven today. Unfortunately, I think I would produce a kid more like that kid who wanted to do “hood rat stuff with his friend”
I also saw my friend Ken from undergrad. He was Jennybee’s boyfriend back then. His son was indeed running the 1K. His name is Beckett and he is 3. Yes he is cute. His parents adopted him from Vietnam which is an awesome story in and of itself. [aside, isn’t “in and of itself” the most redundant pretentious phrase in the English language. I can’t believe I just used it in an sentence] Yeah they blogged about it over here. I hadn’t seen him in years.
THEN, I met some more friends for lunch at Panera. Here’s a picture of that. We also managed to raise money for a Shelter. Yee haww.
Even though I had many very definite plans for this weekend. I was able to adjust and still have fun. Life is about making memories and the relationships you have with other people. This weekend was definitely for the memory books.
