Musings from Miami

( Probably spoilers under here )

I did screencaps. Sample caps and the download can be found here at skylar_town.

We weren't planning on doing anything for Christmas this year. Aaron's parents came and went early in the month, so the tree-trimming party was pretty much it. We planned to spend the weekend vegging and doing not much of much.

Last night, though, I discovered that I was missing my carol fix. Every year since I was an undergrad, I've been in one choir or another, and though I always griped about having to sing Christmas carols every bloody year, it turns out that a carol-less Christmas is kind of sad and lonely, whether we're actually celebrating or not. So we packed up the toddler and went off to the Christmas Eve candle-light service at the UU Church. Readings included the Gospel of Luke, Robert Fulghum, and what is apparently a traditional UU Christmas homily starring Charles Dickens as the "spirit of Unitarian Christmas Past." (A bit of searching shows that Dickens actually was a Unitarian, at least briefly, but that several folks hold claim to "the first Christmas tree in America," or even New England. But it is nice to know that Garrison Keillor is full of it.)

So I got my carol fix, and even got to light a candle, while Aaron and Z sat on the floor with a coloring book and crayons. Z was great, except for a few funny moments in the readings, where the combined laughter of the congregation scared him to tears and we had to take him out. Poor little over-sensitive guy.

Today we stuck with our do-nothing Christmas plan. I spent most of an hour playing with Z in the bathtub, he went down for a nap, and so did we. We all basically slept all afternoon, then had Chinese takeout for dinner. And after dinner there were presents! Z had a couple of gifts, and I took pictures of the unwrapping with my Christmas gift to myself, a new digital camera. I'd been wanting something small I could tuck in my purse and carry around with me, and spambrian pointed me to the Pansonic Lumix. 12 luscious megapixels and a glorious 5x zoom, and the whole thing is about the size of my cell phone. I <3 it!

So without further ado, I present to you "A Low-Key Lanterman Christmas."

Full Screen Here

Well, it's after midnight on December 25th in my time zone now, so Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it!

Did a minor friends cut, mostly just people who haven't updated within the last year. Which means that the friends cut is completely irrelevant to anyone actually reading this, so I don't know why I felt the need to notify everyone.

Wishing you all a fine and happy Winter Solstice. Remember, anything you do tonight, you can do longer than on any other night of the year. Live it up!

Joie!

I got an A! Woo-hoo!

Doesn't this just fill you with Christmas cheer and goodwill toward your fellow man?

Catholic Church gives D.C. ultimatum -- Same-sex marriage bill, as written, called a threat to social service contracts

"Catholic Charities, the church's social services arm, is one of dozens of nonprofit organizations that partner with the District. It serves 68,000 people in the city, including the one-third of Washington's homeless people who go to city-owned shelters managed by the church...'All of those services will be adversely impacted if the exemption language remains so narrow,' Jane G. Belford, chancellor of the Washington Archdiocese, wrote to the council this week.* "

Lovely, just lovely. How very Christian of them.

The Washington Post article fortuitously links to the website for the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, and that site has a handy directory page with Chancellor Belford's email address. I don't often do this sort of thing, but I'm just disgusted. These people should be ashamed of themselves. Using this kind of threat against innocent people to blackmail the city into discriminating against yet more innocent people? WWJD?

So here's my email to Chancellor Belford. Feel free to send your own. And don't forget to include some cheery holiday greetings. Bet she doesn't have to go to a soup kitchen for her Christmas dinner.

Dear Chancellor Belford,

In response to the Washington Post's article "Catholic Church Gives D.C. Ultimatum," I just want to say how admirable it is that the church's religious mandate to discriminate against gay people trumps it's religious mandate to help the poor. It has certainly enhanced the church's public image to be seen punishing the innocent to make a doctrinal point. I'm sure this is exactly what Jesus would do. Congratulations on so thoroughly exemplifying everything the Catholic Church stands for. Merry Christmas to you and yours!

-----------------------------

*"Exemption language" refers to the proposed same-sex marriage bill up for vote next month, which says that "Religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians."

Sign-ups for getyourwordsout 2010 are now open! For those unaware, getyourwordsout is a year-long writing challenge. You sign up with a pledge to write a certain number of words and then write to that goal all year.

This year we have 6 pledge levels—single-project pledges at 100K and 150K, and multi-project pledges at 200K, 250K, 300K, and 350K. We've had 139 members travel all the way through 2009 with varying success and are hoping to make 2010 even better with more discussions, more prompts, more short-term challenges, and more writerly community building!

The only participation requirement of the community is that you check-in to report your word count each month, so if you're looking for a writer community or motivation to finally work on your novel or motivation just to keep yourself writing consistently all year, head over to getyourwordsout and check out this post with all the information about joining for 2010.

After working through our inaugural year, I think 2010 is going to be even better.

Sign-ups are open until Dec 31, so make sure you
get over there to make a pledge before 2010 starts!

Also, a suggestion to the fandom people around here who are curious but not "sold"—if you're planning to write a Big Bang this year, you might consider signing up for the 100K single-project pledge. Most Big Bangs have a minimum of a 20K completed story so if you plan a longer novel, 60K or 70K, then you should be able to complete the 100K SPP easily after counting all the words of false stats, rewrites, and the final draft.

Just something for you all to consider! :D

I just finished "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. Aside from an occasional guilty craving for chicken McNuggets, I don't eat a lot of fast food. It's unhealthy, tasteless, and tacky. But occasionally there's that guilty craving, or the unfortunate situation of being starving and trapped on the interstate with nothing but rest stops to choose from. So I do ingest the occasional burger or two.

About 3 chapters into this book I was determined never to touch fast food ever again.

About halfway through, I started seriously considering shopping at Whole Foods and buying all organic meats and dairy products. If you decide to read "Fast Food Nation," for the love of god, don't read the chapters on the meatpacking industry and e. coli contamination while you're eating. (Unless it's while you're eating a McDonald's cheeseburger--in that case, the poetic irony might be worth it.)

One of my chief complaints about swing dances is that they start so bloody *late*. The earliest dance in town is Hot Jam, and though that officially starts at 8:30, it's pretty empty til about 9. Wednesday nights at the Graveyard don't start til 9, and Swing Soulstice on Thursdays pushes things to 9:30. So I was extremely pleased to hear that the Graveyard was doing a holiday special dance this past Sunday, starting at an unheard-of 7 pm! Since I'd spent the afternoon at ahhhnahhh's place helping to clean up from rslatkin's birthday brunch, it seemed silly to go home and come back out again, so rslatkin decided she wanted to come out to dinner with me and watch the dancing.



I've been feeling a bit burned out on dancing lately, but Sunday was a great night. The band was hot, there was a nice crowd, and I was feeling good about everything. It was neat having rslatkin watch and see what I've been spending all my free time on for the past year. :)

Last night was Hot Jam's holiday bash, and they also had a live band in to play for the evening. It was another great night of dancing, and a lot of people came out who haven't been around for a while, so the crowd was a good size--almost too good, as I got stepped on a few times, and bumper-danced rather a lot.

While the band took a break, it was announced that there would be a "White Elephant Jack and Jill" competition. I assumed this meant that the prizes were white elephant type gift items, but went around joking that it must mean you brought a partner you didn't want and tried to trade up. As it happened, I was closer than I knew. The first person chose a number at random, and was paired up with the corresponding lead. The next person had the choice to either steal the first lead, or to pick another random number, and so on.

So when Nima announced that the competition was about to begin, and called for 7 follows and 7 leads, I found myself in the front of the crowd that had started to form, waffled a minute, and then said, "What the hell?" And thus found myself in my second Jack and Jill competition this year.

Some readers may recall my last experience with a Jack and Jill, where I didn't fare so well. This was different. Not that I won, or anything, but I know I danced well, even if I didn't quite follow everything perfectly. Best of all, the music was pretty darned fast, and I kept up with no trouble at all.

Ok, it helped that I had one of the best leads on the dance floor as my partner. This was no mistake--my original partner got stolen, and I had my pick of the other leads. Hell, I thought, let's be ambitious, and walked over to the winner of the advanced division of that last Jack and Jill I was so upset over. He's a nice guy, and when I said, "Ok, I know you're like twice as good as I am," he replied, "Hey, no, don't go there. Just have fun, that's my strategy."

And we did. It was a grand experience, and I went home feeling on top of the world.


(Thanks to Melissa for the picture!)

Sometimes when he's in a "mood," Z won't sit in his high chair to eat, but wants to sit in my lap and be fed. I know I should encourage independence and regular meal habits and all that, but I also know he won't fit on my lap forever, and someday I'll miss this. I don't want to look back and think, "I wish I'd held him more."

Some mornings we bring Z into bed with us for his morning bottle. I know I'm not supposed to be giving him bottles anymore, but it's pretty much impossible to get him to eat solid food first thing in the morning, and we like to snuggle him in bed while he drinks his milk, which we couldn't do if it were in a drippy straw cup.

I believe it was Stephen who likened snuggling his two-year-old son to being in bed with a sackful of ocelots. This is pretty accurate, except in this case the ocelots have been crossbred with octopi and chihuahuas, thus creating a hybrid race of hysterical eight-legged mammals. But...he won't want to snuggle us in bed forever, and at some point it will of course be wildly inappropriate. I don't want to look back and think, "I wish we'd snuggled more." (I try to keep this in mind when I wake up with a small foot or a pint-sized butt in my face.)

I knew that parenting a toddler could be a lot of tedious, frustrating, exhausting work. What I didn't know was that it would be so much sweet, snuggly, hilarious, ROFLMAO *fun*!

I love you, little guy.

Z discovers a new food and art medium. Hilarity ensues. (Click for full photo set.)

You who have been with me lo these many moons may recall that, shortly after Z was born, my doctor put me on Zoloft for post-partum depression. I took it for several months, and it was very helpful. So at some point I decided I had adjusted to motherhood, and carefully weaned myself off the Zoloft, happy to think I could go back to unmedicated normal.

This state of affairs held for a few months, and then just after the New Year, I began to notice a certain creeping, foggy exhaustion coming back into my life. I also found myself having a lot of difficulty and frustration dealing with the myriad developmental changes Z was going through as he got older and more complex. It came to a head shortly after Z's first birthday. One day in the car with Aaron, when I picked a fight with him for nothing I can recall now, and burst into tears. We decided that perhaps unmedicated normal was not all it was cracked up to be, and I went back to the doctor, who agreed to put me back on the same low dose of Zoloft.

Wow, what a difference. I am all about better living through modern chemistry. Most noticeably, when Z throws a tantrum or gets sick (which often go hand in hand), I am so much better able to deal with it than pre-Zoloft. Aaron says he has never seen me smile so much, and I agree with him that I feel happier than I ever remember being.

Which makes me wonder how long I'd been suffering from untreated depression.

When Aaron first met me, I was a bitterly angry person. If you'd asked me, I wouldn't have described myself as unhappy, it was just that I spent a lot of time being angry at the world for being stupid--which meant I spent a lot of time angry. Much of this stemmed from the abuse and social marginalization I suffered in middle and high school, which primed me to assume that the world really was out to get me, specifically. I wonder if I'd been able to have some kind of drug therapy or emotional counseling, if that would have helped me way back then. I'm not sure I would have accepted it, though--I would probably have been suspicious of it as an adult attempt to entice me to conform.

I also look back on my teaching experiences, which were incredibly frustrating and fed my anger at the world's stupidity. I wonder if I'd been better able to deal with the various academic stupidities, and the petty annoyances attendant on working with adolescents, if I'd had the Zoloft to regulate my moods. I was easily frustrated in those days, and tended not to stay in any one job, or location, for very long. I now wonder if the reason I spent so much time job hopping in the late 90s was that it was only the limerence of a new job that was keeping the depression at bay--and once that wore off...

I knew a lot of people on one kind of medication or another for depression, but it never would have occurred to me that I should be one of them. For one thing, I wasn't sad, I was *angry*, and that anger always seemed justified. But mainly it was that they always seemed to have much worse problems than I did--my life was good, my life was great, and I certainly didn't have self-esteem issues (quite the opposite, frankly). How could I possibly be depressed? This, of course, has an obvious answer--if life is that good and you're sad or mad or anxious anyway, then maybe these emotions aren't merely situational; maybe they have a difference source.

I try not to think of it in these terms, but...how much of my life did I waste this way? How many potential successes did I turn into failure through blindness to the fact that I needed a little help?

All of which is by way of saying, if you're feeling depressed, get help. It makes a world of difference.