Happy pi day!

News for the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008:

At 2:55 there will be 142 days left until school’s out.  Yes, I have a countdown.

The top-voted Darwin Award winner for 2007 was actually two people who fell to their doom while getting it on on a roof.  If only natural selection would hurry up and weed out more idiots so that nice smart guys would be able to find me.

My skitty-kitty, Squirrel, is becoming much friendlier lately.  With purring and everything.  As a result of Operation Cuddly Squirrel, I may soon have a formerly-skitty kitty on my hands.  After having her for a year and a half, it’s about time!

I’m thankful for my family, who raised me with values about what’s important in life so that I didn’t turn out to be a wannabe Child of iPrivilege (not a typo).

I’m thankful that some of my students are really nice kids.

I’m thankful that I work with such nice people that I had two Thanksgiving invitations to juggle as well as enough leftovers sent home with me that I haven’t had to cook all day.

I’m thankful that if I had to cook today, I’ve got stuff on the shelves and money in the bank so that I can get whatever I need.

I’m thankful that I have a job that I don’t hate, that pays the bills and gives me a way to help people.

I’m thankful that I live in a country where I, as a woman, am free to have that job, to own what I earn from it, to vote, to write this blog, to live on my own, to drive a car, and to be a friend to a few of the people in line to keep it that way.  I’m especially thankful for those friends.

I’m thankful that my brain cells and wacky hobbies let me make myself useful, for example to another friend just a little while ago, even if it takes a while for stuff to work.

I’m thankful that I’m healthy, my cats are healthy, insurance is about to make my teeth healthy (over time, of course, because these things take time), and life is generally OK.

It’s not just a 30% off sale, folks. Go thank a vet.

It’s too early to make this post. It’s also too early for this post to be necessary, which is the problem; I think I have to stop reading the news and shopping. I’ll do an upgrade-and-repost two months from now, maybe.

Overcommercialized Christmas is a given. My main childhood Christmas tradition was three hours of frantic shopping on Christmas Eve, another one of wrapping (once one is allowed to do one’s own wrapping, which was a lot older than it should’ve been because it took Mom that long to give up on wanting everything perfect), and half an hour of unwrapping on Christmas morning. One of my more vivid Christmas-related memories is a Christmas list my sister started in September and kept adding to. I’m tempted to say I didn’t pick up on the emphasis on “stuff” to the same degree because of being a kid, but even so, it seems like it’s getting worse.

I stopped caring much about Christmas when I was 12 or 13. My parents were having Problems and my dad wasn’t around that day; I’m not sure where he went. Probably somewhere with friends from work. I get it, my mom was a more serious pain to be around than usual during that time, and he was raising the bar on parenting compared to previous generations, but it still torpedoed Christmas for us kids. Would that have happened if the people involved were focused on making Christmas a nice time for each other, rather than getting stuff and impressing others with how much stuff they buy? Probably not, I think.

My good Christmas memories rarely involve shopping. Snow was good, when it applied. The few that involved spending money in any direction were things like the card exchange last year, in which we all had would have had to buy stamps and either cards or the stuff to make cards but shopping wasn’t the point, and the giving tree at Chemeketa (in which some of us spoiled other students’ kids).

And yet, people can’t seem to figure it out, to the point where it’s worth it for stores to have “holiday price wars,” some people don’t think twice about whether they need “Christmas loans,” and last year’s Christmas spending predictions came in at numbers such as $795.86 and $907 per person.

When I read the holiday price wars article, I was ready to boycott Wal-Mart. Two things stopped me. The most obvious is, I already don’t shop at Volde-Mart, but I think the other is more important: they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work. They’re trying to get into people’s wallets, which wouldn’t work if people weren’t willing to get that wallet out. $800-$900 per person for Christmas shopping can’t all be at Wal-Mart anyway.

So, instead, maybe I’ll boycott people.

Staples has a display of Christmas cards and festive printer paper.  All I can say is UGH!!!  It’s…not…even…October!  This is why Christmas bugs me; not only is the meaning buried in commercialism, but the commercialism starts more than three months early.

Happy Easter, readers!

I’ll start the story with the punchline: after not going so much as once, except for a wedding or two, since before I started undergrad (so…lateish 2001…approximately five and a half years), I was in church this morning. Proximate cause was that a classmate invited me to her church’s special Easter service; the big picture, of course, is more complicated.
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