Christmas!

November flakes are falling from the sky, sparse and lazy. The east coast gets slammed, and Buffalo remains, for the most part, green and grey. Odd.

I spent my weekend in an oil pastel haze. I don’t want to say why (psst – Christmas gifts), but I loved my Saturday night, which consisted of quick and dirty oil pastel sketches. I go through long periods where I don’t draw at all, but when I make myself, I really do enjoy it. I was almost feverishly intense on Saturday night, drawing and blending, drawing and blending until my fingers were such a muddy mess, I had to wash them several times to see skin again.

I did not so much enjoy my Sunday morning, when I realized that I had run out of a key ingredient for my Christmas gifts, and that the store selling it was closed until today. But then, in the afternoon, I had pasta and wine with my friend Donna. We watched “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day,” which I love, and which is one of only two gifts I bought for myself this Christmas (the other is “Lost in Austen”).

Tonight I’ll buy the missing ingredient, and then keep on doing what I’m doing. Tomorrow is my department’s holiday lunch, which I am looking forward to. Tomorrow evening, I’ll finish my Christmas shopping – hopefully – and then finish my wrapping. I will try to be as serene as possible during this entire shopping and wrapping process.

On Wednesday, I load up the car with presents and Floyd, and drive on down to Familyland, hopefully with decent weather on my side. Wednesday is also my nephew Izaak’s 10^th birthday (it seems like only yesterday, me asking professors if I could take my finals early so that I could be with my sister, who was due in mid-December… and then, of course, Izaak coming almost two weeks later). At some point during this little Christmas vacation, Izaak and I are going to have a birthday lunch at Friendly’s.

Though I want to be serene, I am realistic enough to expect some stress tomorrow evening, but then it will be five days of Christmas bliss. New movies, toys and games for all of us, good food, a cat to play with, my brother’s dog ROY! (I have to say it like that) to play with, and babies, babies, babies! Sleepovers, hot chocolate, popcorn. Hopefully some pretty, fluffy, Christmas-miracle-type snow. I am excited.

well-rested

I have been home sick since yesterday, late morning. When I woke up yesterday, I really thought that it was sleeplessness catching up with me; that was why I was so achy. But as the morning went on, I got that familiar fuzzy-headed feeling. I was starting to get a head cold.

Is it odd that I put so much emphasis on intelligence, and yet, whenever I get sick, it is my head, my brain that seem to be getting attacked? I should ask a doctor.

Anyway, I work in a quasi-medical setting - I'm not so much on the medical side of things, but my employer takes sickness very seriously, so I came home as soon as I realized I was actually getting sick. Even further, my boss called me this morning to ask about my symptoms, because she has to report anything that might be the H1N1 virus.

I know I've said this before, but I'll say it again. Sometimes it's nice to be sick (as long as you're not suffering too much), because it makes you slow down. There was no question of cleaning my room or working on Christmas presents. The only thing my brain and body wanted was sleep. And so I chugged some Airborne and crawled into bed, flannel sheets and lots of pillows to snuggle into, with the space heater on full blast next to me. Floyd came and curled himself up in the crook of my arm, and together we slept for hours.

The night was spent watching movies, before I finally fell into bed again. With Floyd next to me, under the covers , of course.

And now he lays in my lap while I type this, bundled up on the couch. I'm still a bit achy, partly from sickness and partly from being so sedentary. I may have staved off the stuffiness for now, with my constant imbibing of Airborne, and the gallons of tea with honey I've had. And all of the sleep.

I'm unhappy to have missed work (I enjoy going there, being there, doing what I do), but it was kind of pleasant to be forced to take a break. And tomorrow I'll return to work quite well-rested.

when I think about the future

My mom extended her unemployment recently. It’s been a little more than a year since she was let go (forced onto temporary disability and then laid off) because she couldn’t stand for 8-hour shifts. When I think about things that I want, things that I would spend on if I somehow made or came into money, the first thing on my list is to get my mom new hips. The second thing on my list (after paying off student loans, of course), would be to support my mom so that she doesn’t have to deal with the kind of lawless jackholes who would lay off a good worker rather than give her a fucking chair to sit in.

Huh – I just wrote “jackholes” instead of “assholes”, and then I went and dropped an f-bomb in the same sentence. I am nothing if not wildly inconsistent in my swearing patterns.

Other than how I’d like to help my mom out, I rarely think about the future. I am not one to set goals for myself, a list of things to be done by the time I’m 35 or 40. I tend to go with the flow, unless I’m unhappy somehow. Then I might start imagining that I’ve escaped the money troubles, the evil boss, the bad friend. I imagine myself older, in a small house (country or city, depending on the day), wearing flowing, non-constricting but fashionable clothes, writing in a light-filled room.

The other day it occurred to me that when I do imagine this future, perfect life, I never really see a man around. I see myself hanging out with friends and family, and I see the perfect bags, the perfect boots, the perfect accessories, the perfect laptop, car, cat, clothing and furniture to go with my perfect life. I never see children around, because I don’t plan on having any, but the man thing did give me pause.

I often say that I’m alright being alone romantically, but there have been times when I wonder if I’m lying to myself, if I do have some subconscious yearning to be giddily in love. Well, it’s obvious now that I shouldn’t worry too much about that. If my fantasies of the perfect life don’t involve the perfect man making me happy every day, then perhaps I really AM alright with being alone into my dotage.

I’m not saying that I really, really want to be alone forever (although that might be my actual subconscious yearning, which I will examine at a later date), but I will certainly not be depressed about not having a man now. Some people might worry that they’re not normal if they think like this – I’ve certainly wondered about myself – but I’m kind of elated. Especially since I have no desire to go out and meet somebody.

ripples and twinkles

For the last few weeks, I have had one strange fingernail. It is the ring fingernail on my left hand – the nail has tiny little ripples and waves in it. When I first noticed the abnormality, I thought that I had somehow burned my fingernail, or injured the nail bed. I have a tendency to move too quickly, to bump into things in my haste to do something or to get somewhere, and my hands take the brunt of the damage. I will never be called graceful, with my little scrapes and cuts all over.

But then I got curious, as I often do. I went online and searched for rippled nails, and found a most informative slideshow of different nail problems and what they might mean in terms of your overall health – for instance, bluish nails might mean anemia or a blood circulation problem, yellowish nails might mean a liver problem. If you have nails with black stripes underneath, you might have a skin melanoma. The possible diseases just got worse and worse, so when I got to the rippled nails photograph, I was almost scared to look.

But I read the text quite bravely and found out… that it’s an early indication of psoriasis.

I already know that I have psoriasis. I inherited it from my grandfather. I had a few maudlin “I’m going to have scaly skin all my life, WHY ME?” moments during my teenage years, but it actually hasn’t been too bad. I have patches of scaly skin behind my ears and on my scalp (it looks like light dandruff), and in the colder months I can get little patches around my waistline and on my legs. I have a salicylic acid gel and a stinky tar ointment, and otherwise I just moisturize as much as I can. Totally livable.

I can even live with rippled fingernails, I guess.

*~*~*~*~*

So Thanksgiving was fun, if hectic. The kids screamed and interrupted my sleep whenever they stayed over at mama’s, so I’m still catching up on quality rest. The feast on Thursday was enjoyable. My brother loaned his “Left 4 Dead” game to us for the weekend, and we all had fun shooting zombies. Mom and I completely avoided Black Friday, but we did shop for some things on Saturday – I am doing some hush-hush artsy stuff for some friends.

I also bought some Christmas decorations for the house. I’m not putting up the Christmas tree, which is broken and needs to be propped up with heavy books to even stand up, let alone stand straight. We never put anything under the tree anyway, because that seems to be an invitation for cats to wrestle under there. But I figure that if I place smaller things around the house, it will be quite festive. And lights! Twinkle lights wherever I want them, not just on a tree in the corner.