Today was our most anticipated event of the Christmas season: our holiday potluck. I prepared the Wham Bam Thank You Ham, and we had just as much dessert as we did mashed potatoes, green bean casseroles and vodka-soaked fruit. I’m close to slipping into a food coma, but I couldn’t let a feast go by without thinking of the MacAlister’s pizza dinner, Fuller’s Pepsi and Kevin’s bad luck that leads to Uncle Frank’s famous quip:
*Note: I wrote this yesterday and then realized the video I wanted to post I could only find as a Flash, which we all know good ol’ WordPress won’t support, so I gave up and went to work, and today will provide two clips.
It’s Friday and Matt Howard’s coming to visit and explore New York City at Christmas, and I got to be late and ride the V train to work this morning, and I got to eat a fourth piece of chocolate from my Advent calendar, so one would think things should be joyous and bumbling, but no.
I’m anxious and I’m sad, and it’s all the fault of last night’s episode of The Office. Parks and Recreation was bad enough, with poor Tom Haverford being all Sir Mopes A Lot since he split with his green card Canuck wife.
The Office’s cold open with Michael’s Elvis voice and Andy’s baby voice was just so promising. And then disaster struck.
Where did the writers think they could find humor in disappointing a class full of kids wanting to go to college? I felt terrible for and hated Michael at the same time, and my insides were practically braiding themselves they were so twisted. Nothing. Was. Funny.
My heart longed for The Office of Yesteryear (necessary invocation of melodrama, thanks), when Christmas was a trip to Morocco with Meredith’s head aflame, or a rousing game of Yankee swap, or the most prudish rendition of Little Drummer Boy ever performed in office karaoke.
So I share today one of my favorite Christmas moments from The Office. From the episode “A Benihana Christmas,” meet the funny-awkward Michael Scott, not the dream-destroying & unfunny crying man we met last night. Needless to say, I will be harshly judging this year’s Christmas episode. Let’s see what you’ve got, you twisted bastards.
(Here is where I WANTED a clip of Michael marking his Asian gf’s arm so he could differentiate her from another Asian waitress, but that plan failed miserably. Instead, I offer a brief look at the most evil Christmas game of all time, Yankee Swap, and then a lengthy clip of The Office UK, when Tim & Dawn finally seal the deal. Though it only makes me a little weepy, while Jim & Pam’s first kiss can make me hysterical. That’s enough.)
Well, we put up our Christmas tree last night. A hearty one it is, strung with lights and cranberries and Baby’s First Christmas ornaments from 1984, 1985 and 1986. I wore long sleeves this year in an effort to prevent a serious pine needle breakout reaction, because my skin can’t handle anything that isn’t the air inside my bubble. We drank spiked eggnog and spiked cocoa, and then we gave up and just drank the rum, thus eliminating any middleman calories and significantly improving our health & fitness.
And we settled in to watch Rudolph, and the Rockefeller Center tree lighting (during which we cried…troops! their families! ::sob::) and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which got me thinking about Christmas bonuses, and how much I’d love to have a swimming pool. Full of the jelly-of-the-month club.
I still meet people who have never seen A Christmas Story. As if there is something better to do on Christmas than watch TNT for 24 hours. What is this “family and togetherness” bullshit? There’s a Red Rider BB Gun to be had, people!
I stopped liking Ralphie long ago. Whine, whine, pout, shoot yourself in the face, look awkward, whine. Things like this are funny IF YOU ARE CUTE. Fail, Ralphie. Sorry Hollywood had to capture you at the most excruciating of your awkward years and try to redeem it with a lisp. And I’ll give them that — the Lisp is Ralphie’s one good quality, especially since he has a friend named Schwartz. And a chubby kid saying “son of a bitch” makes me smile in any context. But that’s it, Ralphie. If you just said “Schwartz” and “son of a bitch” the whole movie, I might like you. But as it stands, I imagine you blind with “thoap poithoning” and I grin maniacally.
But your brother, Randy? With gems like the Meatloaf Rap, My Zeppelin, and I Can’t Put My Arms Down, you rock this movie boat. And in the movie’s alternate ending, Randy shoots Ralphie in the face, thus saving him from future thoap poithoning and Little Orphan Annie decoder ring disasters.
And here we are, in Randy’s shining moment.
In another (quite possibly futile) attempt to reinvigorate my blog and force people to read what I’m writing, I’m posting a clip each day from a Christmas special, mostly ones that actually matter to me. So don’t expect anyIt’s A Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street, because I didn’t see either of those movies until I was a teenager, and by then I was stauch and against anything new. (Becoming nostalgic at the age of 15 is really a great way to hold onto your “good ol’ days,” considering there aren’t many.)
No, all of my favorite Christmas specials are cartoons, stop-motion animation, or Muppet adventures. My mother taped a half-dozen specials from TV onto a VHS in 1992, and my sister and I still watch it several times a year, commercials and all. We’re probably the only people outside of the Playskool and Nabisco companies who can sing jingles to ancient Ritz Crackers and Playskool Dinosaurs ads. And that sure makes us special.
We begin with one of my favorite events in television history, and it happens so rarely that it’s always a big to-do, but when you throw CHRISTMAS into the mix, my nostalgia & my six-year-old brain get together and drink Huggies and eat wax bottles and have the happiest day of their lives. I’m talking, of course, about the Sesame Street gang and the Muppet Show gang teaming up for one gargantuan Jim Henson extravaganza. And Christmas carols. I will keep you from the elation no longer.
Totally late on the uptake, but isn’t the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack mindblowing? These computer speakers do it no justice; I anticipate it will work best in brain-engulfing headphones, and if I could find a local wooded grove to romp through, that would be perfect.
Or in amazing car speakers, but that makes me think about how much I miss car speakers, and it’s too sunny out to complain.
I found it everyone, I found it, I figured it the fuck out.
Monday nights.
Where Mondays exist only to draw & quarter the 9-to-5ers, it puts me back in a sense of sanity. It’s the bookstore that does it. When I think about leaving work and heading behind the register at Housing Works, my insides melt a little? Like when you think about Christmas? Like that.
Everyone I’ve met – or meet – is new. No connection to any of the million things that wring my insides on a daily basis, just there for books and charity and true, genuine interaction with a few true, genuine people. It feels severely & sincerely New York, the New York I always wanted to live in. Indie bookstores that play Elvis Costello, and I can ring someone up and turn small talk into a discussion of Death Cab for Cutie’s discography, all while eating fresh-baked cookies and digging through freshly donated books.
When I started at Bonaventure, I didn’t know one person on campus, but I knew those grounds were where I needed to be. And the hundreds of people who felt the same way, we all gravitated to each other, we all formed these bonds out of nothing – and everything. And this, this feels the same. So organically grown. That smile? That’s seriously, really Tanya. That is a conversation I don’t have to force, an interest I don’t need to fake.
Every time I leave the store, I can do anything. Write a book, knit a sweater, run a marathon, because no one has notions to preconceive. I haven’t a mold I try to fit. Perhaps that’s why I look forward to even the train ride home, alone, and the rest of the evening in my bedroom, alone, because in these few small hours I’m grasping who I can be when no one knows me. And I either sound like an aspiring drama queen or a closeted murderer, I realize, and I’m probably totally blowing my cover, but man, Monday nights.
::Abrupt ending::
A little jog, a little Jimi, a little isolated balcony on my little bedroom in Queens. Back to Autumn In New York.
Currently living as the antithesis of Winnie the Pooh, I’ve found nothing but blue skies and crisp, clean sunshine the past week. Of course, I jetted far from the East Coast when I heard about the snow hitting upstate New York, but my good weather luck still counts.
From the moment I descended the stairs of the miniature charter plane at Yampa Valley Airport, I found myself breathing uncharacteristically deeply. No worries, everyone, just smelling Colorado. I felt my lungs high-five each other and hug me from the inside, grateful for a break from the air-dwelling particles of the city.
Strange how anticlimactic the moment is when you see a best friend again after a long, long time. It all feels normal, like you could have just as easily been meeting for lunch after a morning of classes. Hi, Jenny, we don’t even need to hug, really, didn’t I just see you at the Richter Center/Hickey/Plassmann steps/Bain’s living room?
Waking up Thursday morning, still on Eastern time, I sat up on my fold-out bed and saw sky. So much sky. Trees had turned actually colors, not this green-to-dead pattern they like to follow in Central Park (“nature,” everyone), and I saw the clouds as if they were at eye level, because…um, they were.
My camera didn’t get much human play, mostly landscapes (and a snake!) from our travels. A day hike through Mad Creek, a drive through Vail, Breck, the Continental Divide. One stop to search through dust and rocks for fossils, and not two hours later a stop to stand in the snow at the summit of a mountain that tore a hole in the tropopause. Then down to Boulder for ice cream and to hate on Kansas, mainly for the traffic and not so much for the college football.
Denver’s a weird city. And I say that not as a New Yorker, because that’s not fair, but as a kid from the general coastal area, where I can drive a few hours in any direction and hit a major city. Not here, man. I can drive for hours and hit treacherous peaks, bleak and windy deserts or plains, plains, plains, but densely packed homo sapiens are not to be found. Makes me start to wonder about that weird fantasy of mine to go to a Nowheresville for a while, work in some local diner, write about the people. Sometimes real people in these places are better than any I could ever create. Just a thought I sometimes have.
Since I’ve never been a skier, my winters in Colorado would be for creating elaborate meals while my friends shred, and then feeding all the frozen athletes before we all imbibe heavily in front of a large fire. All night. Every night. I’m such a romantic. #thingsiconsiderwhenivisitanewcity
Back to the sky. The lack of ambient light didn’t just mean more stars, it meant the sky was the farthest from blue I can ever remember seeing. Black, endless, cloudless night sky, and no matter what the temperature was during the day, it was guaranteed to be frigid when I stayed outside to look for too long. Beyond worth it.
Leaving out details of course, because what good are words or photographs to remember the real scenery? The plummeting valleys between giant crags, rolling hills rife with neon green aspen, rivers so unlike the ones I’m used to; wide, rushing things that I’d be nervous to even cast a lure into, lest a rapid choose to take me with it. And the mind-numbing, blinding, endless sky. All this with one of the most special & unique humans I’ve been so blessed to know. It was only four days, but I wasn’t sick once, not gasping for air or clutching my stomach, no routine anxiety.
I do a yoga breathing exercise every now and then (mostly after a long night of drinking) to cleanse my mind & body of whatever toxins are still hanging out. Next time, I might just try a flight* to the Rockies.
*Just not a 1:59 a.m. – 6:31 a.m. flight, because that was probably the worst idea I ever had.
Jetting off to Colorado today to spend a long weekend hiking the Front Range, sampling some brewerys, playing with some dogs, and maybe making a quick trip to Moab, UT to see the arches.
If sleeping on the Colorado River and the company of my college roommate don’t shake me free, nothing will.
I promise to return and write. Like I do. Not like I don’t.
I’m feeling incredibly misguided. And trapped, and lost, and unseen, and no wonder I constantly think I’m going to vomit or have a heart attack. Where am i?
Who the hell am i?
Just one of those weeks. I need to find a flow. She says, as she decides instead to tap a box of wine and watch 5 hours of Boy Meets World. Hey, Day Waster, the world’s going to end, and what have you done?
