belated note on the Christmas haul

The recent expanded re-release of "The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads" = AWESUM.

Realizing how long ago these tracks were recorded makes me feel like an old, old man. In my continuing quest to slowly, slowly replace my departed cassette tape collection with digital music, I also got the CD of "Stop Making Sense" about two decades late, and together with the 2004 "Name Of This Band" it makes a pretty impressive retrospective of the golden age of live Talking Heads; it's fun to hear the same songs gradually turning from spare, punky arrangements into elaborate, funky ones in successive versions.

Listening to "Stop Making Sense" is a real brain-traveling-in-time experience; I heard these tracks so many times in anxiety-ridden parties and dorm rooms in my adolescence. Throw in Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms" and I'd probably get misguided urges to buy a Members Only jacket on eBay. GOD I AM OLD. I have no damn hair on my head, you know that?

Giving effectively

Charity Navigator and the American Institute of Philanthropy have some good advice on how to help earthquake/tsunami victims without getting scammed or hassled, with lists of links. It's sad, but in a crisis this huge, people who want to help are going to hear appeals from both con artists and (perhaps more insidious) well-intentioned people who are ill-equipped to do much good. Fortunately, it's easy to take steps to avoid the worst problems; remember that it's OK to concentrate your donations and say "no".

Holidays

In spite of everything, Colin likes Christmas and I do too. He doesn't understand why some people don't like it, but I think I do.

How you feel about holidays is going to have to do with with their traditional associations—by which I don't mean associated imagery, symbolism or even necessarily the religious significance, but with what people actually typically do on that day in your society.

If you don't get along with your family or don't have one, Thanksgiving and Christmas will probably not be much fun for you. If you're lonely and consider yourself a hopeless loser at dating, Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve are likely to be stomach-clenching horrors. Vegan? Startled by explosions? The Fourth of July isn't any fun. And so on.

The Christmas shopping season can get enervating, but I've always found Christmas itself kind of nice, the quieter and more private the better. Christmas was big in my family when I was a kid, but these days it's more low-key, even in the years when samantha2074 and I go down there. For some reason, my family's biggest yearly event now is Thanksgiving. Sam's family, on the other hand, isn't as insistent about Thanksgiving but still makes Christmas into a big production, little kids or no little kids.

Easter was always fine; for us thoroughly secular people it just consisted of dyeing eggs and getting candy. But most of the other holidays that people actually celebrated (as opposed to simple days-out-of-school) carried some sort of buried anxiety for me in either childhood or adolescence. As a little kid, I had a terrible startle reflex that made Fourth of July fireworks endlessly harrowing; I didn't entirely get over it until I was a teenager.

But by then, the twin Hammers of Nerds, Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, were times to crawl into a foxhole and pretend I was dead. Occasionally I'd hang out with my other nerd friends for New Year's, but the concept of having a date or getting kissed was about a billion miles away and in another set of dimensions, and I'd be bothered by references in the culture to the effect that this was what everyone was supposedly doing.

Actually, Valentine's Day was creepy from the get-go. What is the reason for those collective packets of Valentine's Day cards that kids are supposed to hand out in school? What do they mean? As far as I can tell, nobody has ever figured it out, and the whole business is nothing but organized embarrassment. When it actually does start to mean something, and becomes a day when everyone's buried longings emerge into the light of public humiliation, it's even worse. And even if you do get into a stable, loving relationship of the sort that I guess Valentine's Day is supposed to be celebrating, then it turns on you again and becomes a big pervy holiday in which you're supposed to enact some combination of 150-year-old gender roles and Hefner/Victoria's Secret notions of what is sexy. Yeah, Valentine's Day can go screw itself, except it's fine as another pretext to buy your spouse some chocolate. We should just rename it Chocolate Day and save everyone some trouble.

Then there's the Halloween thing. This is more personal. My sister Megan always loved Halloween, because for her, always the extrovert, there was nothing better than dressing up in a witch costume, bothering strangers and getting candy. Lots of geeks seem to love Halloween for the creative and performance element; for young adults today it's become the new Carnival.

For me, Halloween started out fun when I was little and other people planned everything for me, but it gradually accumulated not-entirely-explicable social anxieties over time, and by the time I was nearing puberty I had a weird phobia of it. I had lots of elaborate creative ideas for costumes, but what if they were no good?? Part of it was that I was generally convinced that I looked ridiculous and was terrified of looking ridiculous, and of course Halloween is all about looking ridiculous. But lots of people who have personalities similar to mine don't seem to get this block at all; instead they see Halloween as the time when there are no ordinary standards and it's okay to look ridiculous. I've never entirely been able to figure out what my problem was. Maybe I figured there was some distinction between ridiculous-with-panache and ridiculous ridiculous, and had no confidence in my ability to detect or cross the boundary.