ghosts are good company

i’m about to watch the star wars holiday special.  i’m hoping that it will bore me to sleep, but i’m afraid that it will be so bad that i will be riveted with awe.

solstice, christmas…  was crazy.  i had a lovely time christmas eve with cubbie’s family - they seemed to love the quiches and stuffed mushrooms that i brought to the table, and i felt included in all of the celebrations, which was wonderful - especially since it was also ok that i went to lie down in the middle, when i needed a rest.

and then we got here, and i’m afraid that we weren’t, or i wasn’t, quite as supportive of poor little sick cubbie.  he’s sick and my mother is sore, although healing well, and my grands are tired of being such good caretakers and we all just need a nap!

i don’t think i’m ready for this star wars special.  it’s been four minutes and there have been baby wookies eating cookies and that’s nice, but they are kind of annoying, when they’re being scolded in…  wookish.

BORING.

i really missed my seattle family.  it’s been the first holiday in a few years without seeing them, and that’s so odd.  i don’t even know the next time i’ll be able to get up there.  graduation, maybe.

wookies?  boring now.

bye.

cubbie and i are in florida visiting his family for christmas.  it is a little too warm for me here, so i’m currently sitting under a fan and listening to the wind blow through the trees outside of the open window.  i’m sick, i have a cold which has been around for far too long.

the funny thing about this cold is that it started at about the same day my mother went in for surgery, and so i’m hoping that when she gets to leave the hospital, i’ll not have a cold any more.  at least, i hope that’s the way it works - if the cold lasts until she is fully recovered from surgery?  i’ll be very frustrated at the end of those few months.

we head that way on christmas.  i was afraid to fly on christmas, at first, but it sounds like it’ll be fairly quiet on the plane, so that will be good.  hopefully mum will feel well enough to celebrate!  if not, we can all stand around the bed in a made-for-tv-movie type fashion and send her air hugs, so that we don’t injure her with lovin’s.

he’re the secret: knitting.

it’s not so much of a secret, but i’m not very good at it and i’m kind of shy about it. i’ll bring my knitting along, but mostly only to class, or to family occasions. i’m pretty much only a square-knitter. so i’m a little scared about the patterns i’ve fallen in love with from the most recent release of knitty.

the first pattern that i’m in love with? it’s norberta. remember that love of green dinosaurs that i confessed earlier? norberta could easily be an adorable green dinosaur.

secondly, there’s twinkletoes. i’ve always had a love for ballet slippers, and lately ballet flats have been my favorite shoe. sooo, yes. cubbie and i could wander around (or slip and slide around) our house in adorable slipper sock ballet princess land (but shh, don’t tell anyone that we’re princesses).

and finally, oh finally, there’s sheldon. sheldon is a turtle whose shell comes off. for some reason, that is utterly adorable to me. he reminds me of a stuffed turtle there was when i was little that would turn into a rabbit, but sheldon also has his own special shell-as-backpack charm. oh, sheldon.

so here’s the trouble with knitting: i want to start knitting all of these things right now, but i don’t have the right needles! i have yarn that would probably work (if sheldon wanted to be bluuue), but i never seem to have the right needles on hand.

still! here’s to knitting, and strange and juvenille fascinations.

i can’t imagine what it would be like to live my life without so many artists around me.  sometimes i forget about the art, because it seems like it’s part of breathing for so many of my friends… most of them write and write and write amazing stuff without even having to think about it - or at least that’s what it looks like from this end.  others take pictures, others make physical art.  and crafting!  there’s so much crafting, and that’s an art of its own.

i’ve always been an arts and crafts person, afraid of formal writing - i never have enough original ideas for fiction, and i can’t keep my mind on one track long enough.  somehow, though, i’ve been impressing people without even trying.  i have mentioned this other places before, but three of my teachers this quarter have complimented my writing - two in a “you should try to be published” way and one in a “i’m going to hand out this exam and on the side note that you’re very skilled at writing” way.

this hasn’t happened since my senior year of high school, which leaves me wondering if it’s just a context thing?  both places i’ve been with students who have been told that they’re not so good at school (here at a community college, then at an arts school where we learned about “punctuation, your friends and mine!”), so maybe it’s just the pompousness of my writing style that’s impressing people - that i have been doing this long enough that i can make fun of the form and the structure?  i don’t know.  what i do know is that i wrote a paper last week, the final paper for my transphobia class, and it was awesome.  it wasn’t quite in my normal, scoffing tone (the easiest papers for me to write are the ones where i hate the subject matter), and cubbie noted - and i agree - that it’s somehow more mature than the rest of my work.

the piece gave me a glimpse into a place where i can write from knowledge - because surely an opinion-piece on trans stuff is somewhere i have knowledge.  it makes me look at my procrastination and wonder what my work would look like, if i weren’t always afraid that it was going to avalanche  down on me.

not that i have, you know, any immediate plans to stop procrastinating.  and i’m going to turn that submission that i’m working on for that anthology…  sometime.  i have until the end of the month, anyway..

wow.

i’ve been a big fan of charlie brown all of my life, especially since i stage managed you’re a good man, charlie brown in high school. every year since then, i’ve been especially aware of the christmastime tradition that is a charlie brown christmas, every year trying to catch it on tv.

i’m watching it now, and… i don’t remember it! at all! i know the music, because i have the soundtrack, but i don’t think i’ve seen it! at least, not that i can remember. which is crazy!

i love the old-school peanutsness of it (look at snoopy!), and how much better it is than the newer episodes i’ve seen. heart snoopy.

of course, cubbie just yelled at me from the kitchen - “are you watching charlie brown without me?! that’s not nice!”

i got this link from my friend jaci. the simple origins of this link on seattle’s social dysfunction are telling - jaci and i met online when i was in tenth grade. she was blogging out of kent(?) and i was blogging out of dash point and it took me moving away from seattle and moving back for us to meet. jaci is one of my best friends, and yet we have immense difficulty getting together (when i’m in town) - it seems like with all of my friends, there is a challenge of figuring how to go from wanting to do something to actually doing it. jaci and i talked about getting together for literal years before we did.

The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine : Our Social Disease

“There’s no sexual energy here at all,” he says. Seattle is “a city of the mind . . . a city of geeks. People here . . . they totally blow you off. And these are good friends, right? They just don’t call you. It’s unbelievable.”

i see this with all of my friends from seattle, and i wonder how it affects me as somebody who has moved to other cities but remains rooted in the emerald city (emeralds are beautiful but cold).

Seattle is like that popular girl in high school. The one who gets your vote for homecoming queen because she always smiles and says hello. But she doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to. She doesn’t want to be your friend. She’s just being nice.

there’s been this trouble with me and people. in large communities (high school, and college), there’s this thing where everybody seems to know me. this would be great, but i don’t know them. i don’t know why i know them. but i say hi and i will chat with them… and i won’t know who they are and i probably won’t remember them the next time we have the same awkward but pleasant conversation. did i mention that i was prom king? i was just being nice.

i chat with people on the buses here. in elevators, cubbie and i have had good conversations with people. i made my best contacts in a series of one-day classes, while not really connecting to people in my long-term classes. i have email addresses for those people, but i haven’t yet contacted those folks - even though i’ve blogged about how great the last class was - and i’ll probably lose the addresses before i use them.

what is that? blaming it on seattle seems useful. cubbie talked about how much trouble he had socializing when we moved here, but i didn’t hear anything about that when he moved to seattle. more than once i’ve remarked on how amazing it is that cubbie wasn’t a native seattleite. i am fascinated.

one of my favorite stories to tell is about how i cope with my agoraphobia by befriending people in public. this summer, cubbie and i went to see kimya dawson and the mountain goats at neumos (why must they have a scary clown on their webpage?! oh look, mountain goats are playing there on march first. that means they’re playin *here* march seventh through ninth! delightful.). we got there early and, feeling very awkward, i wandered over to find some comfort in the presence of kimya - who is a friend, in the she - is - very - popular - and - has - a - lot - of - people - who - want - to - be - her - friends - so - that - she - is - nice - to - me - but - probably - doesn’t - remember - my - name sense. see above, i suppose (this is also such a weird time, mediawise, for being friends with your heroes). so we chatted and i chatted with people around her and i felt better, and then cubbie came back (from where?) and so we found a place in front of the stage and set up camp, maybe sitting on the floor (which is a conversation-starter in itself. on our first date we sat on the floor in front of the stage before the show and met all of our neighbors), and eventually got to know the people standing next to us, who were super cool and really helped the show be more fun. they were more into the mountain goats and we were more into kimya, so averaging that out meant that we were all super excited about everything. they offered us alcohol which we didn’t take and we all got along and had a lot of fun. which was more fun than just getting mad at them for shoving us. and the moral of the story? is that we never knew their names. and we never saw them again.

i have better relationships with strangers than i do with my friends, i suppose is the point here. i’m fascinated by what my seattle family might have to say about this. anyone? (beuller?)

when i was buying my coat, there was christmas music all around. it’s crazy how much the stores with their muzac can whet your consumerist urges - i don’t spend much time in stores, is the thing. so i’ve been thinking a lot about gifts to give people (and would love your input on what you’d enjoy), and since i’ve been asked, here are some things that i’m interested in.

mmm, things. these are the computery expensive ones. less expensive things are at the bottom of the next list.

• the thing that i would be exceptionally happy about would be a memory upgrade for my macbook - i currently have one gig of ram, and two would make my computer so much happier. that’s $350 in the mac store, but might be found cheaper eleswhere - i haven’t done much research.
• on a similar note, an external hard drive would be delicious.
• speakers and/or a wall-charger for my ipod, i just remembered, would be helpful

as for other things, i’m all about pirates and dolls and dinosaurs. because i’m secretly four years old?

• doll-wise, i’ve been all about blythe dolls for the past few years. based on a big-eyed doll that was sold in 1972 and brought to fame by a photographer using one as her model, they’re now being released by takara, in japan. my favorite is the star dancer, largely because she reminds me of one my favorite friends. i also love the night flower and rosie red encore. one of the things i love most about blythe dolls is the ability to customize them - i’m thinking about giving one new hair - and the most afforable for that is the new prima doll.
• dinosaur-wise, i’m loving a lot of dinosaur-themed things that are for sale on etsy, a list of which can be found here.
• as for pirates, it’s all about archie mcphee, as always. there are things from there linked in the above list as well.

soooo, those are my wishes. they’re random and silly. cubbie works at a bookstore, though, so all the books that i want i can get for cheaper than… most of the world can. music… is expensive. oh! theatre! local stuff is exciting and intriguing, but i have no idea where to start looking.

anyhow, those are the random things that i like. what do you like? leave me a comment! tell me about your favorite things! tell me about how christmas is a christian holiday, rather than a consumerist holiday! tell me anything!