Back after Chrismahanukwanzaakah
Yeah, it's from the Virgin Mobile commercial. So what?
So I had this little blurb on smartasses for world peace (I'll summarize: smartasses exist in every culture and should band together to mock people who suck, who are also in every culture), but due to an unfortunate interaction between Blogger and Mozilla on HP-UX, it got eaten before it ever saw the light of day. Alas!
But I did want to take this opportunity to say that 2004 has been a truly amazing year here in Natalie Towne. It's been a great time of happiness and personal growth and all that other tedious stuff that everyone writes about at this time of year that no one except the author's close friends cares about. Seriously, though. Thanks to all of you who have been with me and made this year possible.
I'll be in Colorado for Christmas proper, and returning sometime between late on December 31 and late on January 2. If you're my friend and are going to be in Colorado (hell, even if you're not my friend, just as long as you're not my enemy!), I'd love to see you. Contact information is on your right. :-)
Best,
Natalie
Natalie and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad 24 Hours
Curses.
Yesterday afternoon, I attempted to register online for a statistics class from
Mission College. I discovered that I couldn't register online because I hadn't met the prerequisite. What was the prerequisite? College algebra. I have a degree in electrical engineering; I'm pretty sure I can handle algebra. But I nonetheless can't register online.
Curses.
I call the counseling office at Mission College, and discover they don't have actual humans manning the phones. I, eventually, discover how to leave voice mail. My husband offers to bring over my personal undergraduate transcript before his appointment. I decline, because I don't think it will help. When the counselor finally calls back, they decide they want to see it, but of course I, like a fool, declined my husband's invitation to have him drop it by my office, so now I have to go all the way home and get it myself because my husband has already left.
Curses.
So I drive home. Not 10 blocks from my apartment, a construction pickup decides to change lanes into me and leaves a lovely dent in my brand new car that I hadn't even made a payment on yet. The driver denies wrongdoing.
Curses! Dammit! Curses!
I call my insurance company and then drive my car over to the body shop they recommend (it is, fortunately, perfectly drivable). The people at the shop are nice, at least, and they assure me that it'll be like new. Well, dammit, it OUGHT to be like new considering that it freaking IS new.
Curses.
I come home, tell my husband, drink beer, and assure myself that tomorrow will be a new day.
Zzzz.
So this morning, I have to do two things before work. (1) Ship all Christmas gifts that I bought myself that need shipping. (2) Go to Mission College, which the entire reason I arranged to leave work early yesterday, but that plan of course was foiled by the necessity of dealing with the consequences of the individual driving the F-250 failing to watch where she was going. And, on further reflection, (3) call my boss and leave him a message that the thing that I said I was going to do yesterday wasn't done because of the aforementioned fender bender.
(3) was no problem. (1)
seemed like it would be no problem. I went to Kinko's in San Jose at Oakland and Brokaw. A word of advice: don't do that. I was "helped" by the most singularly useless individual I have ever encountered in a customer-facing role, who couldn't seem to grok that I considered it his job to, you know, help me, answer my questions about whether a given shipping method would ensure that my packages would arrive at their destination before Christmas, and generally pay more attention to me than to whatever the hell else he was doing that involved getting up and checking the label printer every 45 seconds. I was there for well over half an hour, and there was no one else in line.
Curses.
(2) involved, as it turned out, standing in a lot of lines, several of which were lines that terminated in people who could guide you as to which line you ought to stand in next. Incredibly enough, the documentation I provided was actually sufficient to allow me to register for the class.
Hooray.
But all the time that got eaten up by all this crap meant that I couldn't join the refugees of my former company (which, alas, finally went under last week) for lunch at one of my very favorite restaurants,
Shalimar in Fremont.
Curses.
My life, generally, is good, even considering the past 24 hours. But I'd like the annoying bits more spread out next time.
Yuletide Detente
Bah, humbug.
I'm not partial to Christmas. I liked it when I was a kid, of course. My family wasn't particularly neurotic about it, though there were certainly annual rituals such as the annual heated discussion on how, exactly, we were going to implement the necessary process of driving around looking at Christmas lights. But on the whole, it was fine.
As I've gotten older, though, I've passed through feelings ranging from anger to frustration to hostility to condescension and back to anger. I'm sure anyone who's ever read an anti-Christmas essay has heard the long litany of reasons, so I won't stress them here: overwhelming commercialism, insensitivity to those who couldn't care less, the blaring of horribly arranged and recorded overdone carols from every available speaker in every conceivable place of customer interaction, and all the attendant marketing everywhere to remind one, in case one was utterly stupid and unobservant, that yes, in fact, it is Christmastime, and if you don't like it, then go hide in your apartment for a month (or, now, closer to two months) until it's over and done with.
Bah.
This year, I'm trying to do things a little differently. More to the point, I'm trying to take it a little less personally. It is abundantly clear that my continued unwillingness to take part in this ritual of American society doesn't matter one bit to anyone except my close friends. The battle for Thanksgiving has been lost, probably forever, and all the sitting around in November complaining about Christmas ads I could do won't affect that. I am being, in short, more of a fatalist (and I appreciate the irony in becoming a fatalist to deal with the so-called season of hope and good cheer).
So I've finished my shopping, bought my plane ticket, and started preparing for a week with my in-laws. My mother-in-law loves Christmas, in every respect, but this year, I won't mind. It takes all kinds to make a world. All I need to do is persuade her to give me a black Santa hat to match my attitude, and we'll be set.
