Their mouths unhinge in unison with the lifting of their chins; above and all around, the lights dance. We stand for a moment in the cloud of cold they bring in with them – they never stay long enough to be rid of it, not completely. The roughness of their hands, the nothings exchanged, is Christmas.

It’s hard not to feel like I’m just jerking off into the internet when I write anything here – mostly because that’s exactly the essence of any social media platform, the stroking of the self, right? And that’s fine. Healthy even. My seventh-grade gym teacher told me it was, anyway.

I keep starting sentences that want to turn into pages, and I don’t have pages in me right now. What I do have in me is cereal, because I just ate breakfast. And what I’m about to have in me is the rest of the Christmas snacks in this office before they all get thrown out today. Because we won’t be here for a week, which I keep remembering and being thrilled about, because I haven’t had a vacation in two years. And over the next few days I’ll alternate between feelings of sexiness and grotesqueness, and feelings of deep emptiness and overwhelming love (mostly overwhelming love – I’m lucky), because it’s the end of another year and there are tiny lights in all the dark corners.

I don’t know how to say I think it’s okay that we love and are grateful for our cinnamon-pine-berry-scented living rooms when the buildings all around us are burning down and people live inside of them. I don’t know how to say anything at all without minimizing the tragedies we’re watching on the screens of the many devices through which we are now, somehow, more and less than ever connected to each other. It is not, excuse me, fucking okay. Things are not okay.

It’s also not okay to miss out on all the goodness we are fortunate enough to have surrounding us. It’s not okay to let ourselves become mired in all the shit. There’s hope, as long as we’re willing and able to be of service. We must learn from Artax.

So this is what I’m telling myself this year: Love and be grateful for whatever it is you have, even if it’s not a lot, even if it’s bullshit. If you have it to love, love it. And don’t be an asshole.

Merry Christmas.

sunday! the most glorious of days

I confess that "Oh, I wish I could stay!" means "Please for the love of Aslan stop drawing attention to the fact that I've been edging toward the door with my coat since I got here because you are prolonging the time before I can be at home where no one else is." Why this is a fact not universally understood by everyone, I do not know. 

I confess that the reason my stove is so dirty in the second picture (you know, the one of me spending Friday night pre-baking and freezing all the Christmas cookies I said and then immediately regretted saying I'd bake when I realized that baking, packing, and transporting Christmas/any cookies requires a modicum of planning? Also the ability to bake things that other people want to ingest?) is that I've been using it every single day this week to brown brussels sprouts in addition to frying eggs for my handsome roommate because the first thing I did after hanging the lights and garland was to test the selfie light OBVIOUSLY:

and the results of THAT little experiment sent me spiraling into the deepest grossest parts of my brain where the little voice that's mean to me lives. There's obviously nothing wrong with this picture, or the body that the picture is of. It's fine. I'm fine. I LOOK GOOD, EVERYONE COME SEE. 

But anyway, so, the dirty stove - I leave the pans on the stove usually, and when Diego wakes up for real later on he washes them before he leaves. What he does not do is wipe the stove off, and funny enough, it is the same thing I do not do when I come home at night. Because if you think I've even GLANCED at that thing after work since my mom bought us a microwave, you are mistaken. (Bless you, manufacturers of frozen black bean burgers. Bless you.) SO I ALSO CONFESS that sometimes a lot my stove has odd-colored rings around the burners for several days at a time. Doesn't THAT feel good to get off my chest. 

I confess that my arms and parts of my back where I didn't even know there were muscles are not. happy. with. me. We had our first real snow yesterday morning and I was out before everybody else for what I thought was Round 1 of shoveling. I win at neighboring. (I said that part out loud, real loud, as I typed it. For the benefit of anyone around here who didn't notice I was first.) Then it rained later and there didn't need to be any more rounds hooray! but man. Telling that to my arms is not making them feel any better. So lazy, these arms of mine. 

My boyfriend just now (from the bed where he still is) told me to decide where I want to go today to buy my new shoes. For his birthday dinner. At the obscenely expensive restaurant where we have a reservation WAY past my or anyone else at the neighboring senior center's bedtime. Also I dropped a disgusting amount of money on our train tickets home for Christmas this year, and felt good about that decision before I remembered about there not being a holiday hiatus on rent. It's actually, much like my sexy body, all fine. Everything is fine. I'm so fucking lucky, even. And I know this, and I walk around saying it soothingly to myself under my breath and being, I'm sure, very off-putting to everyone around me. But no amount of self-soothing lately is making me FEEL fine. It's hard, when I'm in this, to feel like it's ever going to be any other way. The same way I know that everything is actually fine, I know that feeling like this is temporary. But I don't believe what I know. So I'm just a big ball of anxiety right now, even though I am also happy about most things - I confess.

What I do believe with great certainty is that right now I am very hungry for banana pancakes and that I need to take a shower and perhaps apply some lipstick before entering the world. And banana pancakes, to my great disappointment, do not make themselves. 

linking up with becky, or i will when there is an up to link to, to whom i would like to sincerely apologize for not being able to figure out buttons today.