Giftwarped

It seems like this time of year is always hectic to the point of distraction.  There's always the last-minute gift-buying, the wrapping and decorating, the endless family celebrations, the prepwork for Christmas dinner, the bit where I become an overglorified chauffeur, and all those other memorable Christmas traditions that I might be forgetting in the glorious haze of the season.  Usually those things are enough to keep me in a wonderful frothy-mouthed furor over the week or so before Christmas, so when I lucked into the opportunity to take the week before Christmas off work, I was stoked.  The good news was that taking that week off allowed me to not-quite froth at the usual amount of Christmas cheer.  The bad was that I had five days  where it was in effect hopeless for me to try to get a whole lot of writing or other creativity done.  That's sort of sad in its own way, because one of the best Christmas gifts I could have ever gotten myself would have been to sit down and churn out a good thirty pages of prose. 

As sort of a related theme, I do buy Christmas presents for myself, mostly because I am the only one who apparently really knows what I want.  I am always thankful for everything I get, and my family is generally more thoughtful and touching when it comes to gift-giving than almost anyone I know.  But every year I am henpecked by my mother into putting a list together of the things that I want for Christmas, and every year, I rack my brain from September to Early November thinking of things to write, and finally fail dismally and fall back on the old standards, clothes and DVD's.  Worse than that, they're usually items that A) I don't want enough to actually go out and get it for myself before Christmas, and preferably ones that B) are not too terribly technical in detail. 

I love my family dearly and desperately, but there is no way on God's Green Earth I would give free rein for every member of my family to buy me electronic gear for Christmas.  No effin' way.  See, there is a pretty frightening anti-technical bias in some portions of my family, and sure enough, they would be the ones who decide, "Oooo, he wants this sort of thing.  Family Dollar Electronics Counter, ho!"

That's mean, I realize.  And I know members of my family who would do just fine, if they were buying for me, but damned if I want to take the chance.  We all know people that just have no affinity for electronics... hell, I've had to install software and troubleshoot hardware, TV's, VCR's, digital cameras, mp3 players, CD players, stereo systems and light bulbs for some people before.  And my mother, who is niceness and sugary sweetness personified, actively hates the onslaught of technology.  I'm half-sure that she is terrified her DVD player is going to leap off the entertainment center and devour her.

If I told her that all I wanted an ATI Radeon video card with a gig of onboard memory and a TV-out for Christmas, she would very likely look at me with that sort of desperate "Oh God, please help me" look that cats get when you hold them over a sausage grinder and tell them to justify their existences or perish.  (Or, I guess, to put it another way, the sort of look I get on my face when my Lovely Fiancee™ asks me what she just said ten seconds ago, usually during the fourth quarter of a football game.) And really, that's okay.  Not everyone cares to know technical things like, say, what SD Card, or USB Hub, or Two-Disc Special Edition in Widescreen Format means.

I don't often like leaving my electronic decisions to other people, anyway.  A lot of that stems from the fact that-- given any choice in the matter-- people invariably do no research and will just buy either the biggest name or the cheapest alternative.  If you ask for an mp3 player, you will either get one of the Apple (our motto: Quality Comes At Only 4.75 Times Market Price) iPays or some knockoff brand that no one-- quite possibly including its creators-- has ever heard of.  You know the ones... the ones that look vaguely similar to a name brand, but have a brand name like Tanguay or Sansonic.  The ones with no software of their own and an instruction booklet in eight languages, one of which is More Or Less English.  The ones that you sometimes have to hold at an obscene angle to get it to work properly. 

Guess which ones I have more experience with.

And although I will be a lot more content to trust my Lovely Fiancee™ with that sort of thing-- after all, she is partially Lovely because she comprehends technical stuff  (Quick aside... she gave me just two gifts this year: a homemade plush retarded basilisk and a light-up 20-sided die.  Say it with me, now:  Best.  Fiancée.  Evar.)-- I really have no problem with buying my own electronics and technical things my own self.  So that means I usually end up putting the same things on those Christmas Lists-- DVD's and CD's that I haven't gotten around to buying, housewares in which brand name doesn't mean a whole lot, and clothes.

Sometimes I will couch one more thing in my list just to see if people are paying attention when they read it.  One year I asked for A Movie In Which Liam Neeson says "Motherfucker."  Other requests, from years past:

• 55 More Cubic Feet of Space in my Bedroom. 
• Amiable Companionship (Preferably Non-Inflatable)
• World Peace Everywhere Except Tanzania and Nepal
• A Getaway Car, Gassed Up and Running Outside
• Injectable Happiness

The unofficial running story is that Santa Claus had a brain hemorrhage and died after reading one of my requests... and the excuse I plan to give my own children when their gifts suck.

Viral

Well, this whole write-daily-thing failed pretty fucking spectacularly, didn't it?

No blogs the last few days, as I have spent my waking time both busy as hell and convalescing from what I can only assume is one of the most terrible cases of the 24-hour stomach virus ever recorded.  Srsly.  It started as a normal enough day--  I got up, showered, prepped myself to go to work, drove the half-hour or so to clock in, sat down at my desk-- and then, quite before I knew what was happening, I was bent over a toilet and blowing chow like a college binge drinker after the big frat party.

There is nothing that will ruin your day faster than a hardcore, bona-fide evil stomach evacuation.  And this wasn't your normal "Oh, I feel a touch ill" brands of dainty bad-taste-in-the-mouth vomit either... this was full-bore projectile horking that had the blow pressure of a freaking fire hose.  I wish I could say it was over in the 24 hours one would think should be allotted to a 24-hour virus, but oh no, it doesn't completely feel like it... I still have this constant pressure in my stomach that makes it feel like every time I sit down I will either puke with the pressure and force of a jet exhaust, or belch the Anvil Chorus and literally raise the dead with the sheer volume.  It frightens and annoys me.  See, this bunch of chundering was physically painful-- it literally caused my upper body to buck, like some sort of vomit bronco.  I still have pains in my back and sides from where I apparently strained muscles in my sides while communing with spirits in the toilet drain.

Yes.  That is impressive.  Try telling your significant other that you strained a muscle blowing chow, by the way. See what sympathy you get.  My guess is none.  My Lovely Fiancee™ was more amused by my muscle strains than anything. 

And yes, I just spent three paragraphs talking about regurgitation.  There's probably some sort of allegory to my ability to write in there somewhere, but I'm choosing to take the high road and not bring it up.

So at any rate, I spent the first couple days on a more or less liquid diet and got really used to drinking Gatorade and Powerade and chicken broth, and discovered two things:

1) Lemon-lime Powerade: I served with Lemon-Lime Gatorade; I knew Lemon-Lime Gatorade; Lemon-Lime Gatorade was a friend of mine.  You are no Lemon-Lime Gatorade.  Although your cousin Orange isn't terribly bad.

2) One sure way to kill me slowly and painfully is to ensure I cannot eat solid foods. I died a hundred times thinking about how hungry I was and how much I wanted a pizza but any thoughts of pizza made my stomach do one of those flip-flop "made you think I was gonna hurl" motions. And then I had to sate myself with a cup of chicken broth... which is a little like having a taste for steak and having to make do with a slightly underdone microwave burrito.  It's not that the chicken broth is bad.  It's just not fulfilling.

The multicolored rehashes of last night's dinners and weird pressure in my stomach aside, that's probably the worst part of it... not having the ability to eat and/or drink what I want.  And that, most especially, includes caffeine.

Caffeine withdrawal is the worst feeling in the world.  Okay, second worst feeling in the world, right behind Singing Yack Songs With the Tidy-Bowl Choir at Firehose Pressure.  But it's right up there.  Imagine doing everything with a headache that blurs your vision, and being forced to speak in one-syllable words, even when there are no one-syllable words for what you need to express.  Imagine a bull elephant sitting on a barstool on top of your head, and then holding up a hundred dollar bill to get a lapdance... from a blue whale.  Imagine your brain processes losing what makes them hyperreal and instead becoming slow, sluggish little cretinous things that decide unilaterally to take a break from doing constructive work and instead gather around watching sitcoms on the couch while they spray cheeze whiz from the can directly into their mouths.  Imagine that, and you have an idea what it's like to suffer from caffeine withdrawal.

I fear for the day that the doctor tells me, "We're going to have to cut down your caffeine intake."

I fear worse for when he just stares negatively at me after I respond, "...because we've found a legal way to put me on speed, right?"

I realize that it has now become vogue for people to say that they try to stay away from caffeine, or that their lives are healthier because they no drink Caffeine-Free Diet Mountain Dew.  And they can certainly feel free to do that. (Although my personal take is that if you're taking the caffeine and sugar out of Mountain Dew, shouldn't you just drink a sixteen ounce can of non-alcoholic beer and be done with it?  No one drinks Mountain Dew for taste, anymore than people drink beer for its thirst-quenching ability or Goldschlager for the cinnamon-fresh breath it leaves them.)  Caffeine, people say, is a terrible detriment to people.  It makes them jumpy.  It makes them irritable.  It can cause arrhythmia.  It's a horrible substance.

And I'm in total agreement in some cases.  I have seen some people-- some children, especially-- that need to be drinking caffeinated beverages about as much as I need to have a bad case of the shakes and an open-blade razor.  And much like you, I immediately want to jam a syringe full of horse tranquilizers into their carotid artery when I see them doing it. There is a single important, fundamental difference between the way those people act on caffeine and the way I do: I don't annoy me.

Except maybe when I get sick.  But that sort of goes without saying.

Seasons

I woke up yesterday morning to "flurries".

A quick note to all budding meteorologists, weatherpersons, and aspiring pseudo-scientists: "Flurries" do not impair vision.  Nor do they remain on the ground when common sense says that the ground is too warm for accumulation.  This would be what we call "snow."  It is a bona-fide sign that despite our best efforts, we're going to have to endure another winter in Indiana. Sigh.

I have this love-hate relationship with winter this year.

On the one hand, winter means that time's a-movin' on, and the more time a-moves, the closer I get to bringing my Lovely Fiancee™ up from the steamy swamps of Florida to the heartland of America and into our new home.  Our new home, I might add, that will be built as winter makes its way into spring.  That's always something to look forward to.  Then there's the bowl season and NFL playoffs in winter.  The happiness of Christmas is in winter.  The joy of a New Year is in winter.  The wonder of Groundhog Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and the Feast of the Epiphany are in winter... come on, who doesn't enjoy a good Epiphany party?

On the other hand, my kneejerk reaction is to say fuck you, winter, fuck you, cold, fuck you, High of 27 degrees days,because winter is the cold-ass, snowy, icy, bitterly frigid donkey-prick of seasons.  Everything that is relatively easy and carefree in any other season becomes an absolute pain-in-the-butt chore in winter.  Getting outside to pump gas in winter blows.  Using more gas because you have to spend fifteen minutes warming up the car blows.  Being forced to warm up your car because the ice on your windshield is too thick to see through blows.  Waiting for buses in winter blows.  Shoveling snow from your walk blows.  Salt discoloration on car paint blows.  Being forced to jack up all your utility bills to stay warm blows.  Tracked-in snow on new carpet blows.  Driving on snow blows.  Driving on snow behind Indiana drivers who forget from year to year how to drive on snow blows.  Ice blows.  Even in most drinks.

Okay, to be both fair and honest, there's a lot more hate than love to this year's relationship.

My usual views on Hoosier winters are pretty much the matter of public record.  I was born in a winter, and that was more or less the highlight-- they've progressively taken nosedives from there.  This reached a nice bloody head a couple of years back, when a chance wintertime meeting with a semi-trailer resulted in the untimely death of my Ford Escort (An aside: I loved that car, not just because it was paid off, but enough that I named it "Escort"... just because I am that creative with my names for cars.  To wit, my Suzuki Reno is named "Reno", my Pontiac Sunfire was named "Sunfire", and my Dodge Aries K car was named "K".  I also once owned a very used Chevy Caprice that I named "Deathtrap" which quite by coincidence caught fire on the highway, and a 1980 Ford Country Squire Station Wagon which could not be contained by one true name... and about which hazy legends and frightening rumors still abound.  But I digress, for now.)

So yes, I'm inclined to side with my kneejerk side here, that the only good thing to come out of winter is a fuller appreciation of how much more summer could suck.  Once fall has had its share of us and saunters off for a year, and the skies turn grey, nasty, cold, and ready to spit down frozen bullets of sleet, I generally enter total fuckall mode.  This sort of weather is going to be very fun for my Lovely Fiancee™, and my family-to-be, all of whom thus far has yet to even see real snow (i.e., anything that registers more than a light dusting on the grass).   I imagine that will have a lot of excitement for the first couple minutes: 

Minute 1:  "Oh, look, honey, it's snowing!  It's those really big flakes, too, like they show on the Christmas cards!  And it's happening in October, too!  I never thought that Al Gore was right and that we were going to experience a radical change of seasons, but it's sort of cool that we'll have to make the kids wear coats beneath their Halloween costumes!"

Minute 3:  "It is so pretty out there, everything looks so peaceful!  I'm going to put on my coat and go out there with the kids and just enjoy the moment!"

Minute 3.25:  "Holy fuck Jesus, what is it, ten fucking degrees out there?  Fuck, give me a loaded coffee or something to warm up!  It's pretty, but screw that, I'll watch it from the window."

Minute 25: "Uhm.  It's still falling pretty heavy.  Does it ever stop?  I mean, we can't even see the driveway now."

Minute 45: "Wow.  I can see why you hate that stuff.  I just saw the neighbor skid into a tree three yards over."

Minute 75: "It's still not stopping.  We're going to die, aren't we?  Like the Donner Party, only much worse because we're inside a house and look more pathetic that way."

Hour 3: "What do you mean, only four inches?  We could get more?"

I do feel a little twinge of guilt for pulling my Lovely Fiancee™ and the kids away from their tropical paradise of a home.  But I'm sure that they'll get used to snow-covered evergreens and frozen retention ponds instead of palm trees and balmy sea breezes, and I fully expect that eventually, they will come to look forward to cold weather.  Someday, I am hopeful that we all will enjoy winters in Indiana the same way that I do.

Which is to say, from far away.  Say, the Bahamas.