Thanks, But...

To the people who have suggested I just start celebrating Christmas as a nonreligious, secular thing, and those who are thinking it... thanks for your replies/thoughts. That doesn't feel like the solution to me right now, though.

Christmas Trees

For those of you who don't know me (Hey, don't laugh, I do occasionally get comments from people I don't know, or don't know well. And they aren't all spam, either!); I don't celebrate Christmas. I didn't celebrate it growing up. A lot of my friends don't celebrate it. Most of my immediate family doesn't celebrate it. Aside from some annoyingly repetitive songs in stores and a couple of scary shopping days, Christmas has just never played a huge role in my life.
So, why, when I just drove past a Christmas tree lot, did I have an urge to buy one? Not a big one. One of those kind of table top sized guys. With maybe a star on top and some white lights around it.

 This year, and maybe some last year, I'm feeling pretty left out of the whole Christmas thing. It never really bothered me before, even as a kid. My religion (I'm a Baha'i) has a gift giving holiday at the end of February called Ayyam-i-ha, and I've always looked forward to that and not felt like I was missing out on things by not having Christmas.
I think maybe it has to do with tradition. In my nuclear family we had some Ayyam-i-ha traditions, like decorating and baking and stuff like that. I remember getting really excited about seeing the Ayyam-i-ha decoration boxes come out of the attic and choosing where to hang them and all that. I think my mom was the one who kind of kept those early traditions alive. With her gone, it's not the same. I don't have living children to pass these things on to, and doing them by myself seems a little anticlimactic. My brother has 3 kids, and we do celebrate Ayyam-i-ha. I look forward to that, and I like it, but they are kind of making their own traditions. Which I'm all for; families doing things in ways that are important to and work for them is totally the way to go. And to be fair, some of the stuff they do is a lot like what I did as a kid. Maybe I'm missing having someone to do things the way I would do them? I dunno.
But somehow, this year I feel like I'm missing out by not being a part of the zeitgeist of Christmas.

Wow, Been Awhile

Here is a quote.

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony" - Thomas Merton

I like it because I do confuse happiness with... I dunno; excitement or joy or hyperness, even. Sometimes I forget that happiness can just be generally liking how things are, rather than being constantly filled with the feeling that you just have to smile or burst.
I had that confusion with the word "fun" for a while too. I thought I didn't do anything fun because I don't generally like things people consider fun, like parties or clubs or dancing and things like that. I was equating "fun" with "wild" or "energetic" or something. Really, though, fun just means anything you enjoy, which means I have fun pretty much all day every day. And I am happy most of the time, too.

Why Colds Happen

Here is my theory on why we get colds.

Every once in a while, your brain gets tired. It needs a little break. So it wraps its self (and thus your entire head) up in a nice cuddly snot blanket. This explains why your ears and nose and throat are affected.
It also explains why you seem to think and process more slowly when you have a cold; it takes time for information to pass through the snot barrier, either to enter or exit.
Every time you blow your nose, a little bit of your brain's snot blanket is blown away, until finally there is almost no blanket left, and your brain becomes fully functional again.

Cold

Cold as in I have one. And cold is in, it is.
The high today is 57F. Yeah, yeah, that's not cold for some of you. It's cold for me!
Also, I have a cold. Rather than being unhappy about that, I'm trying to be thankful to my body that I have gotten sick a lot less frequently this year than last.
Not a lot has been going on... I've been doing some paid personal assistant work for friends of mine. School is going along well; I will be able to start seeing clients around the beginning of the year. I'm a little nervous about the marketing aspects of it all, but it'll come.
I probably have a torn meniscus in my left knee. Since the pain is tolerable and not constant I will be treating it through supplements, diet, exercise, massage, et cetera. I'm not bothering to even get the conclusive MRI to make sure I have it; it's not like any of the treatments I'm doing would be bad for me even if the meniscus isn't torn. An MRI seems unnecessary. It does increase my chances for arthritis in that knee, but not even an MRI or the corrective surgery (which they probably wouldn't do for me anyway as my knee is functional and the pain isn't terrible) would take care of the arthritis risk.
Still doing the Renaissance festival, through November 21. That's not taking as much out of me as it did last year, which is cool. I'm skipping it this weekend though, due to the cold (the flu-like cold, not the weather cold).
I think that's about it for my random update.

The Future of America

Sometimes I can get pretty down about the country I live in. We do a lot of things, as a global entity and as a culture, that I'm not very proud of.
Election days are often days when I am not excited to be American, in the end.
But today I read this essay and started feeling hopeful again. It's by the son of a guy I went to high school with. His name is Eli, and he's 12 years old. This is what he has to say:

We are in a country of political and economic decline. We have put ourselves on the treacherous road to becoming a fascist country. In the way we are living, the environment has become devastated. We are cutting down all the trees... we are dumping trash into the ocean... While we may not be responsible for this we are not doing enough to make a difference, and/ or possibly change our ways. Not enough effort has gone into fixing this nation. We have truly become a self destructive civilization. While all this could have been fixed a while ago, it seems we are only too late. What have we truly given to the world? War, debt? Is that all we are? Cannot we become maybe a more peaceful nation, or perhaps one who has not caused harm to others? While we owe money... billions of dollars, the national debt continues to soar. We now depend on that funding, and if that funding was pulled, America would crumble. We would be no longer the land of opportunity, or freedom, but where people are trying to escape, trying to rid themselves of the responsibility of fixing this nation. We are lost. We, the people... we were the people, but that ideal has changed. Our democracy as a whole has been differentiated from other countries around the world. I am not saying that they are correct. They are almost as correct as we are. But we can do much better. We can fix America... But, it cannot be just us. We have to have more support. We need to help, and we need help to save our nation.

 

 

bleh

What a totally bleh day. It's gray and rainy and chilly out. I'm vaguely ill with some kind of achey, congestion kind of deal. I'm tired. I'm unmotivated. In fact, my current facebook status (which is rather clever, if I do say so myself) is:

"I sound my lethargic yawp from the couch cushions of the world."

So yeah. Bleh. It'll pass of course. But meanwhile, bleh.