Temerity Jane

Ok, so I was wrong.

“Oh, not time yet for this week’s post. Bother :/” – vronak

Ok. Ok. I get your point. Your snarky, sarcastic point. I’ve gotten it.

I guess 27 did not turn out to be the magic blogging age. I thought to myself, you know, self, you’re 27 now, and everyone knows that 27 is a magical year in blogging. I’m pretty sure I read that on the back of a cereal box somewhere. Well, I was mislead.

Actually, I’ve just had a really busy week. I’ve had a lot going on at work, teaching classes and doing trainings and conference calls and such and by the time I get home, I am really, really tired of words coming out of me.

Oh, as an aside, let me tell you about one of the worst decisions I ever made in my life. It was yesterday, see, and I taught a class in the morning on Understanding Content Management Systems. Good stuff. I had a couple of hours after that to eat a turkey sandwich and get more work done, and then I had another private training to teach on OnView, one of our products. So in those couple hours, I’m plugging along and getting things done and it’s getting closer and closer to 4pm, the time at which I had to fire up the desktop sharing software and dial in to a conference call with the client. I had about 7 minutes left, which was just enough time for one mroe task – mailing the stack of Christmas cards that had been left for me to handle. So, right before I had to talk for 90 minutes straight, I licked 40 envelopes.

Not my brightest moment, people.

Anyway, the reason it’s been so quiet around here since Thanksgiving is because I’ve only had one idea for a post since then. Not like, I wrote one post and never had an idea since, but because every time I have sat down to write a post, it’s always about the same thing, and it makes me sound crazy.

But anyway, here’s the thing. Lately, all I’ve been thinking about is Christmas music. I don’t particularly like or dislike Christmas music – there’s a time and a place for it, and that’s, you know, Christmas. But every year, it seems like Christmas music starts playing earlier and earlier.

I was driving to the airport in the middle of the night the day before Thanksgiving so that I could fly out to Phoenix to spend the holiday with Phil and his family, and all I could find on the radio was Christmas music. It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet, and all I could hear was Christmas music. It annoyed me, but I wasn’t too bothered yet.

I spent from Wednesday til Monday with Phil out in Arizona (and kind of Nevada, boy do I have a problem with slot machines, by the way), and was driving home from the airport in the very very early morning hours of Tuesday morning, and there it was again, Christmas music all over the radio. I guess after Thanksgiving was the appropriate time for Christmas music to begin, but I just wasn’t ready for it. I had just finished Thanksgiving with Phil’s family and while everyone was very nice and welcoming and it was a very good time, of course it was tense and nervewracking. I’d just finished with all of that and here is the radio, yelling at me “HEY GUESS WHAT TIME TO GET READY FOR CHRISTMAS.”

See, Phil is coming to meet MY family for Christmas, and while everyone is very nice and will be welcoming, it will of course be tense and nervewracking and there’s nothing you can do about that, that’s just the way it is when you meet the family, you know? But we’d JUST finished with that. We’d JUST done it, and here was the radio saying, hey, are you aware, it’s about time to do this again? It’s like this giant snowball has been set in motion at the top of a mountain and it’s started moving and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

And every day since then, there’s been more and more Christmas music. It’s spreading all over the place like a fungus and soon that’s all that will be available, just Christmas music, because the radio doesn’t seem to care that a girl needs a goddamn break once in a while.

And it’s not just Christmas music, but it’s the Christmas music that is causing me to feel like my throat is closing up and my tongue is too big for my mouth every time I have to drive anywhere. It’s not just the music that is doing this, though. Over the next 6 months to a year, there’s going to be some pretty major changes in my life and some pretty major decisions to be made, on top of all the ones that have already happened and are in the middle of happening, and there’s no slowing everything down. Not that I necessarily want to slow everything down, but the fact is that if I wanted to, I can’t call halt to time. It’s just going to keep going and keep going, and Christmas music is going to pop up in more and more places, and the next “thing” is coming whether I want it to or not. And not only is it coming, the whole world is making me known that everything is coming and there’s nothing that can be done at all.

I babysit, you know? Once or twice every week or so, pretty much. I’ve watched Noah and his new little brother once a week for the last 3 weeks straight, I think, and I will tell you this – 3 weeks ago Noah was drinking with a straw, and then 2 weeks ago he was drinking from a cup if I held the cup for him, and now he’s holding a cup and drinking from it and he’s all “May I have some nuts please!” and “What’s is that in there?” and making JOKES at me which are actually kind of funny, and I was looking at him the other night and thinking “HEY what happened to 3-weeks-ago-Noah? I liked that guy. Not that I don’t like Current-Noah, of course I do, BUT CAN YOU HOLD UP A SECOND THERE, BUDDY!” Not to mention his two month old little brother, who three weeks ago was just an awake/asleep/awake/bottle/asleep lump of baby-smelling, blanket-wrapped, future person lump. This week, when I got there, this former-lump casually informed me, “Just so you know, I smile now and on top of that, guess what? GOT YOUR HAIR, SUCKER!”

All these changes that are coming are easy to deal with because they’re “eventually” or in the future, and everyone knows that eventually is so not the same thing as right now. But eventually is going to be right now at some point, and the world is conspiring to show me that it is bringing eventually to me, with haste.

And this would be enough to handle, for anyone, I think – you know, coming to realize that time actually moves forward, which I guess most of you probably already knew, but maybe I’m not so quick on the uptake as some people, or any people, but on top of that, not only is everything happening and everything coming and going on, there’s all these outside forces. There are people in my life, or associated with my life, or vaguely on the outskirts of my life, that are people that I interact with or not, as I choose and as I feel like it, but they exist, and while not all people are totally aware of everything that is going on in my life and the inevitable rolling forward of time and my inability to do anything about that, they’re aware of it in THEIR lives, and they’re making choices and doing things in their own lives that are bumping up against mine. So here I am just coming to terms with the fact that things can’t stay exactly the same forever, or actually, they could have stayed exactly the same forever but I made some decisions and choices that have irrevocably altered my ability to sit still on my bed every night and play video games by myself forever, but on top of coming to terms with that, I’m getting all distressed at the fact that these seemingly unrelated choices by seemingly unrelated people are changing and fucking with my “eventually.”

So not only is “eventually” coming, I can’t even accurately assess what “eventually” is going to be, because not only can I not stop the progression of time, I can’t stop other people from handling the progression of their own time.

So, apparently, 27 is not the magical blogging year, 27 is the year when you figure out shit that the rest of the world has known since the dawn of time, and also the year where every time you hear Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” all you can think is “Is TJ gonna have to choke a bitch?”