Saturday, December 24, 2005

not even a mouse

Regardless of the reasons why one has come to be in the situation, the bottom line is that being thirty-four years old and facing an Xmas Eve and Xmas Day that will be spent completely alone does prompt some reflection about whether one's life is proceeding as it ought to be.* Not that I'm that find the solitude per se that unpleasant; it's just a particularly symbolic solitude, especially because you know all the merriment that is going on in other abodes elsewhere while you are sitting in your pajamas typing up a blog post.

In any case, 'tis what it is, and I'm not going to be overdoleful about it. Instead, I have decided that I am going to spend the time trying to take care of 100 different small life infrastructural things. I'm not sure I'll be able to come up with a list of 100, especially since some obvious candidates require business to be open as opposed to their employees spending happy time with their loved ones, but I am working on dispatching items on the list while I am working on generating new to-dos for it.

Each load of laundry, just to be clear, counts as a separate item toward the 100. Jogging today and jogging tomorrow also count as two separate items.

* Or, at least, this is the bottom line if one was raised in a relatively straightforward Xian tradition, even if one has strayed rather far from that in the intervening years.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

C'mon, Jeremy. You're in a new town. Give yourself a break.

Anonymous said...

I'd wish you a merry Christmas but you'd probably turn it into something negative.

Tom Volscho said...

I rode on an Amtrak train for 10.5 hours today, if that makes you feel better.

Anonymous said...

Did you know:

The battle cry used to be to put Christ back into Christmas, which means "Christ's Mass" and still does when it is spelled "Xmas," since X is an ancient (1,900 years old) symbol for Christ.

Not sure about Xian; that sounds more Chinese.

jeremy said...

Anon 11:38pm: Jerk.

RWS: If the Christmas tree was on fire at the time, there would be some Biblical justification for your action. Especially if it was also talking.

Tom: I thought you lived in Connecticut.

Anon 11:38pm: Jerk, again, and more emphatically.

jeremy said...

Anon 8:51am: If I ever went through a transgendered phrase (which, granted, is rather statistically unlikely at this point), I think the name I would choose for myself would be Christi, just so I could spell it Xi, and then sign my name just with the Greek letter.

Anonymous said...

For what it's worth, holidays like this usually lead to the same type of reflection for me, regardless of who I am spending them with (at least within the realm of possibility of who I'd be spending them with).

Tom Volscho said...

I was coming in from my fiance's house in western Penn. Is my last Xmas as parentals retiring by end of next month and moving to midwest. Hope you enjoyed the holiday, despite. I babysat my parents dog last 12/25 so I have joined the ranks of Xmas-alone-spenders (despite the presence of a k-9). Good thing is that New Year's is next weekend and first night is really cool in Boston if you are staying in town.