Christmas Present and Accounted For

It’s been a quiet Christmas around here, and that’s a nice thing after the frantic activity of the last few weeks. 

We stayed home rather than head out east to see my side of the family, and Kim’s side of the family decided to celebrate on the Ukrainian calendar this year so we’re good until January.  It was just the four of us, then, together.

We’d gotten things ready, because that’s what you do no matter how many other things you have to do.  There was baking to be done – mounds of pizzelles, among other things.  They make the season smell right.

And there was a tree to decorate.  It’s nice to have children old enough to decorate unsupervised and young enough to want to do so.  We cut our own tree on the 15th, brought it in and got it into the stand, dragged up the boxes of ornaments and other such things from the basement, attached the lights, and stepped back.  At that point Tabitha and Lauren took over and decorated the tree within an inch of its life – up to and including peacock feathers, which I am fairly sure is an innovation though for all I know I just hadn’t been paying attention before – and it looks lovely.

Of course, there were a few moments in there not directed entirely toward tree decorating.  You have to have those.

We spent our Christmas Eve getting things ready for our celebration.  There were gifts to be wrapped and last minute items to be purchased (it’s not really Christmas unless you’re out there on the 23rd or 24th looking for something, after all) and even though I spent most of it hobbling around like a running back on a Monday morning it all got done.  Mostly by Kim, it must be admitted - my usefulness has been rather limited of late.  But it got done.

There was then Skypage, as we opened gifts with my side of the family.

And then: food.  One of the traditions we’ve managed to keep up is the Italian call for an odd number of kinds of fish on Christmas Eve.  We don’t do the full seven kinds that my grandmother did, and we stick to shellfish these days since the only person in this house who will actually eat scale fish is Kim, but it counts.  Plus, just as they are old enough to decorate the tree, so too are the girls old enough to help in the kitchen.  With all four of us in there, it took less than an hour to get dinner onto the table.

We even made it to the late service down at our church, much to the surprise of the minister.  He was gracious, though.  Christmas is a gracious time.  He keeps inviting us to come more often, and someday surely we will do so.

Christmas Eve is the big holiday.  Christmas Day is sort of anticlimactic, really.  We had a good time opening gifts in the morning, and there is a nice dinner about to be set out onto the table now, but in between the motif was “do as little as humanly possible, for it is a Holiday.”

I like those holidays.

I like this holiday.

It is a season of hope, and don’t we all need that now.

In Which I Make an Odd Discovery

So apparently I’m a bigamist.  It was on Facebook.  It must be true.

You can imagine how much of a surprise this was, particularly since I somehow managed to marry a woman nearly twenty years my junior even while recuperating from surgery. 

I am the man.

I’ve been home most of the last few days, not really doing much of anything constructive other than encouraging myself to heal and continuing with my “Read All of the Discworld Books Again, In Order” project – a project that has been instrumental in preserving what sanity I may yet retain in the current political climate.  Also, there has been much tea drinking, because it is cold outside and because there is nothing that goes better with a good book than a nice cup of tea.  Plus I retain hopes of reclaiming that beverage from the subversive elements who have adopted it as their political symbol.  I’m a dreamer that way.

Needless to say I’ve been spending a lot of time online as well.  So I got the wedding notice fairly quickly.

Emily was one of my docents when I worked over at the museum.  We hired a lot of high school kids to give tours of the place – on some weekends the only people staffing an entire National Historic Landmark were a pair of fifteen-year-old girls – and after I returned to academia several of them befriended me on the new-fangled Facebook machine.  That was nice of them, I thought.  They were – and remain – good people, and it’s been fun keeping up with them.

She got married yesterday to someone else named David.  Not me – I checked with Kim and she says I was nowhere near the place.  I’m a little uncertain myself.  Given how much of Friday disappeared into an anesthetic black hole (apparently I also had a long phone conversation with Lauren from the recovery room, in which I asked about her rabbit several times – who knew?) I suppose it might be possible for me to have attended an entire wedding I knew nothing about, but if Kim says I am only married to her then I am happy to believe it.

Now to convince Facebook.

Facebook insists on organizing people by their first names, which strikes me as a bit of enforced jollity that we can all do without.  It’s like those dorm parties where your RA is constantly insisting that you’re having fun as you get to know each other so, so much better and making friends that will see you through the college experience and last a lifetime, even though mostly what you want to do is go out with your roommate and get a pizza the size of a bus wheel and eat all of it, right down to the last greasy spot on the table, before returning to your room to lie on your bed like a beached whale and contemplate the insides of your eyelids for a while.  Your roommate can get his own pizza if he wants, and he will because he is your roommate, chosen specifically for compatibility on important issues such as this one.

Ah, bright college days.

So when Emily went to update her status to announce to the world she had married her David, she clicked on my name instead.  And then it wouldn’t let her unclick.  So we’re Facebook Married now.  I wonder what that does for my tax-filing status.

Now, it seems to me that there should be some algorithm in the Facebook machine that would check this sort of thing.  “Hmm.  This person claims to have married this other person, but that other person already has someone in that slot – something is not right.”  But apparently not.  Anyone can claim to be your spouse, and it will go through just like that.  Friends.  Ex-lovers.  Stalkers.  Random strangers.  Anyone!  Collect the whole set!

For an outfit that routinely censors breast-feeding photographs as somehow too lascivious for the refined American sensibility, they sure do have an open mind about polyamory.

It’s a strange old world.

How I Spent the Apocalypse

So what did you do for the Mayan apocalypse?  Me, I scheduled myself for some minor surgery.

Because why not?

I’m not going to get into the details of it, because eeeewwww.  Suffice it to say that it was an outpatient procedure of sufficiently limited concern that it got postponed twice in the twelve months between the decision to have it and actual procedure itself.  When your doctor thinks your vacation plans are more important than your health issues, you’re doing well.

But today was the day.  I gave the last final exam that I had to proctor in person on Wednesday, and next semester I’m going to resume my twice-weekly 90-mile-each-way commute to Not So Far Away Campus (the joy of being an ad-hoc), so I wanted as much recovery time as possible.  And if the world ended while I was under anesthesia, well, I suppose that would not be such a bad thing.

Of course yesterday was the day Wisconsin got its first major snowstorm in nearly two years – mounds of heavy wet heart-attack-quality snow overlain by a few more inches of light blowy snow for the brief moments it took for the 45mph winds to spread it around somewhere else in huge impassable drifts and zero-visibility skies.  So there were a few anxious moments regarding scheduling, is what I’m saying.  But this morning things had calmed down, at least here in Our Little Town, and Kim took me to the hospital without incident.

Unless you count being up and moving at what felt like late last evening an incident.  And thus I learned an important lesson on this, my first experience with real (i.e. not in the doctor’s office) surgery: they want you there early.  Really, really early.

I am not a morning person.  Well, let me rephrase that – I love the wee hours, preferably between midnight and about 3am, but anything between that and 7am you can just keep.  Nobody explains this to surgeons.  But they have the knives, so they make the rules.

So there I was, sitting in the pre-op area, in that darling little robe they give you that would be considered pornographic if it were made of black leather, while trained medical personnel bustled all about me.  They measured my blood pressure several times until it declined enough to be reasonable (no stress in the pre-op area, really).  They counted my heartbeats and oxygen levels.  And they gave me an IV.

My first ever IV. 

It is a strange thing to be hooked up to a bag full of liquids that are coursing their way into your bloodstream even as you watch, particularly for someone as phobic of needles as I am.  But being a grown-up means sucking up and dealing with things, so I just closed my eyes and let them get on with it.  The nurse was nice enough to cover up the entry needle with an Ace bandage so I didn’t have to keep staring at it, which helped.

The nice part about IVs, though, is that they are vectors for happy juice.

My main plan for this operation was not to be there.  Since my physical presence was required I figured the rest of me could just go somewhere else, and the nurses and doctors were quite happy to oblige.  I remember asking the anesthesia nurse if she had turned on the sedatives and her saying yes, and the next thing I knew I was in the post-op room.  If it weren’t for the obvious physical reminders, I wouldn’t know I’d been in surgery at all.

Better living through chemistry, that is one of my many mottos.

Now, there are odd consequences that follow from such a situation.  In particular there is the fact that you end up with the memory of a goldfish until the happy juice wears off.

Apparently I spent the entire time between arriving in post-op and coming to what passed for consciousness asking Kim the same three questions, repeatedly.  1) How are the girls doing?  2) What did she do all day (while I was away)? and 3) What the hell is that thing on my arm?  And every time Kim replied, 1) they’re fine, 2) waited here in the hospital, and 3) that’s the blood pressure cuff, and yes they do indeed have to take your blood pressure every minute or so, that’s the rules.  This last one caught me by surprise every time, from what she says.

Also, while I remember being wheeled down to the exit in the standard hospital wheelchair and then climbing into the car, I only remember asking Kim once when I could get a real shower again (“Sunday”) rather than the sixty or ninety times I am told I actually asked that question on the fifteen minute drive home.

Well, it seemed important.

I spent most of the rest of the day sleeping in my own bed (my own bed!), eating (they don’t let you eat for roughly forever prior to surgery), and generally laying low with the girls for company, since both Mighty Clever Guy Middle School and Not Bad President Elementary were closed for a snow day today.  It wasn’t a bad way to spend a birthday.

Did I mention today is my birthday?  Because it is.  Happy birthday to me.

We celebrated yesterday, amid the howling snowstorm – family, presents and homemade brownies – because holidays happen when you’ve got time for them.

So I’ve had my birthday celebration.  I’m in better shape health-wise than I was this morning and won’t have to have that surgery again, one presumes.  And I’m here to type about it, Mayans notwithstanding.

Life is good.

Faces of Lauren, 2012

Every year around this time I look through all of the photographs that I’ve taken since this time last year to see what we’ve been up to in the last twelve months.  And every year I end up asking myself the same question:

What on earth was Lauren doing?

Lauren has a lot of fun with photographs.  More fun than the average law-abiding citizen ought to have, really, and that is probably a good thing.  This world needs more people having fun in it.  As a photographer I suppose I ought to be Disappointed or even Annoyed that she makes such faces whenever the camera is pointed at her, but as a parent I just think it's funny and that counts for more as far as I am concerned.

When I started this project, it was just me shaking my head and posting a few pictures because they made me laugh.  These days Lauren is an active partner in this process – posing for pictures all through the year, helping me choose the best from the collection, giving me a hard time over the ones I chose, because she’s almost a teenager, sort of, and that's just what happens.

So welcome to this year’s Faces of Lauren Collection.

And just remember – the children are our future, which means that the future will be an interesting place indeed.

Needful Things

It’s snowing here in Wisconsin.

Not much.  The big storm, such as big storms are these days, is not scheduled for another couple of days.  But there are flakes in the sky, big fluffy white ones, and a thin covering of white on the ground, enough to make the world a lovelier sight.  And don’t we all need that now.

The snow contrasts nicely with the blue lights on our house.

Every year I put up one long strand of lights across the front of the house, which is about as far as my Christmas decorating skills will take me.  They are always blue.  I have always loved blue lights, ever since I was in high school.  We’d keep the blues on backstage while the audience filed in for whatever play we were putting on that night.  They’re peaceful, blue lights.  Quiet.  Thoughtful.  And don’t we all need that now.

The house still smells vaguely of anise.

My favorite Christmas cookies are pizzelles.  If you’ve never had one, you should try to find them somewhere and correct that.  They’re flat Italian cookies – you make them in a pizzelle iron, which looks very much like a waffle iron only thinner and with different patterns.  People tell me that there are other flavors, but really there is only one: anise.  I suppose you can make them anytime.  There is never a bad time for a good cookie.  But they were always Christmas cookies when I was growing up.  My grandmother would crank them out by the bushel, and we’d eat them just as fast.  They taste good, and they remind me of happy times.  And don’t we all need that now.

There is a tree in the living room, waiting to be decorated.

It’s some kind of balsam fir, I think, and we cut it down on Sunday.  It was a cold, raw sort of day, and we had to drive practically into the next state to get to the new tree place we were trying out this year, but it’s a lovely little tree and we made it home with it still attached to the roof of the car.  Getting a real Christmas tree is one of those great traditions, one you hope you can continue.  When I was a kid it was an annual ritual – we’d pile into the car and drive out to where my dad’s high school friend George lived, and then both families would trek out to a tree farm to get their trees.  There would be a huge meal afterward, and then we’d drive home.  Our tree this year is nowhere near the size of those behemoth trees we’d come home with then, but it is a good size for us.  It smells nice.  Perhaps tonight we’ll drag out the ornaments and decorate it, and it will shine for us.  And don’t we all need that now.

The semester is ending.

Classes are over, finals are in progress, and soon all that will be left will be grading.  And then not even that – it will all be put away.  At that point, I can start to focus on Christmas, and try to get into the Christmas spirit of things.  That’s been an elusive spirit to catch of late, even without the outside world breaking in, but it’s something worth trying for, anyway.  And don’t we all need that now.

I do, anyway.

If Not Now, When?

At some point, Americans are going to have a grown-up conversation about guns and their consequences.

Not the ideological fantasies we have now.

This will not be the He-Man-Hero narrative where lone-wolf individualists keep a big bad government at bay with their 9mm handguns and their illegally-converted automatic rifles.  That sort of B-grade nonsense is what gets you remakes of Red Dawn.  Trust me, if the big bad government really wanted to get you they’d nuke you from orbit and be done with you, and you and your precious little pea-shooters would glow for the rest of eternity together.

Nor, sadly, will it be the Calm Restrained Humanitarian narratives where an enlightened populace decides that, with the whole idea of self-defense with firearms so clearly (and statistically provably) ridiculous whatever the aforementioned He-Man-Hero narrative might mumble into its cheap beer, they should install meaningful regulations on personal firearms the way almost every other civilized nation does.  That hunting and recreational shooting are one thing, but the situation we have now is something entirely else.  But Americans have loudly and clearly denied any interest in such narratives, and that battle is well and truly lost.  There is no point in it anymore.

But somewhere, sometime, there has to be a conversation about what that decision actually means.

My friend Eric made that absolutely clear in a bitingly eloquent post yesterday, entitled The Guns of December, which you should go read now.  I’ll wait.

For me, the money quote from that post was this:

“I want to hear from the other side.  I want to hear someone--preferably a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association--tell me, preferably to my face, not that they want dead children (because that would be a bit much and we all know that isn't true), but they're okay with them.  That they understand that's the price of their convenient access to easy, deregulated weaponry and they're willing to keep paying it.  Keep in mind: I already know this to be true, I just want to fucking hear them telling me the fucking truth for a change.  I want to hear the words slip softly over their lips that they know what they're paying and they're settled with that, their souls rest easy in the hollow basins in their skulls.  That they sleep at night with this because they can.”

Everything has consequences.  Everything you do makes something else happen.  And if we as Americans want easy access to firearms, then we will have more massacres of the innocent.  It’s that simple.

And if that’s what we want, then we ought to have the balls to say it out loud.

Like Eric, I’m tired of the whole gun control argument.  My side lost.  I’m over it.  I don’t want dead children and I’m willing to sacrifice easy access to guns, but I am clearly in the minority and what I want doesn’t matter.  Welcome to democracy, now put on your big boy undies and deal with it.  At this point, like Eric, all I want is for the other side to admit the bargain they made – to publicly and forthrightly state for the record that yes indeed they are willing to pay for their guns with the blood of children.  That they may not like that, that this may not be their ideal world, but it’s the world they have decided – open-eyed – to create and they’re willing to pay that price to keep it.

And I want them to do this now. 

Now, God damn them.

For most of the last 24 hours I have been besieged by people who insist that this is not the time to “get political” in order to discuss the method by which all those children died. 

I find that disgraceful.  I find that immoral.  I find that a cop-out.  I find that a dishonor to the memory of the dead.  And by God I will not agree.

If not now, when? 

When the next massacre happens?  Because as sure as the sun will rise on December 22 regardless of what the Mayans said there will indeed be a next massacre, and I’ll put money on the fact that it will happen before this time next year. 

When the bodies are safely buried and out of sight, so we don’t have to confront what that decision really means?  When we can treat them as statistics and not children, and pretend that it’s all a matter of dispassionate debate, logical assumptions and clever repartee instead of the blood-soaked bargain that it is?

When?

To all of you who think “this is not the time,” when is the time?

At some point, Americans are going to have the grown-up conversation about guns and their consequences that we have because of the decisions that we as a society have made, and it might as well be now.  It would be the moral thing to do.

I won’t hold my breath, though.

Unprocessed Thoughts on Today's Events

There is a special place in hell for people who prey on children.

And there is a place right next to them for the people who make it easy to prey on children.  The aiders and abettors, the folks who can look directly at one catastrophic display of evil and say with a straight face, “the solution to the problem is to make such displays of evil even easier to achieve.”

Yes, I’m talking about the gun lobby.

The gun lobby has long ago stopped being about gun “rights.”  It stopped being about hunting and recreational shooting long before that.  And, pious protestations notwithstanding, it has never been about self-defense – nobody who has any actual knowledge about how guns are used takes such nonsense seriously.  Ask any trained professional – ask any cop or soldier (a real soldier, not some play-acting militiaboy) about that.  Only the wannabes and the couch potato heroes, deluded by video games and cheap beer, think that way.

And we all pay the price for that.

I study the Founding Fathers for a living.  I know what the Second Amendment was written to do.  And dammit, it wasn’t this. 

Not that the Supreme Court, in its infinite prostitution, understands that anymore – they overturned over two centuries of jurisprudence to give the gun pushers their Christmas list, a couple of years back.

Nor do many Americans understand it either.  The other day I got a post on my Facebook wall from a friend complaining that people who wanted to regulate guns were like people who wanted to regulate good drivers to punish all for the crimes of drunks.  Where do you start with something that stupid?  Where do you even begin to point out all the factual, logical, ethical, moral and historical failures of that statement?  The fact that we already regulate drivers?  The fact that deliberate premeditated murder is different from accidents?  Where?  It would take a stronger man than I and more whiskey than there is in the barrel even to scratch the surface of just how malevolently dimwitted that statement is, and how little respect that person had to have for me even to make such a statement where I would read it.

When Americans decide that they care more about their children than they do about their guns, things will change.  But not until then.  It’s as simple as that.

So today is just the latest massacre of the innocent, the latest occasion where some heavily armed waste of DNA decided to take out his shortcomings on other people’s children.  And there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, but already – already, before the blood has even cooled – the gun lobby and its sycophants are saying, “Hold on, don’t have this discussion now, let’s give it time,” because they know that in the end they will bury this one just like they buried the last one and just like those parents will bury their children, children who left for school this morning and won’t ever come back.

They will tell us, as they told us last time, and the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that, that the solution is to have more guns, so that more people can shoot into crowds of children, because somehow that will kill fewer people.  They will tell us that the problem wasn’t the guns but the shooter, as if the shooter could have murdered so many children so quickly any other way.  They will complain that any regulation on guns will inconvenience legal gun owners, because their inconvenience matters more than those children.  They will emit whatever fetid ooze they have to emit to divert attention from the fact that the objects of their fetishistic desires are the means by which the evil most often do their work.  They will distract the rest of us from working to keep that from happening again, because it is not in their interest to keep it from happening again.  They profit from fear, they profit from death, and they have no real desire to stop.

So they will laugh, all the way to the bank.  All the way to their comfortable little political think tanks.  All the way to their internet chat rooms and comment boards.  All the way to hell.

Fuck them.

Let them take their guns and shove them far up into the recesses of their lower intestines and pull the triggers, and let them find that special place in hell that they so richly deserve, right next to the guy who did the shooting today.

And let them rot there.