Holidays!

(incl. Christmas list)

I'm pretty sure I love this time of year way more than I remembered. I don't know if it's that I forgot how much I love it, or that I love it more than I used to. The downside is that I have 25 pages to write for final papers before I get my break, and those are going to take up most of my time until I go home.

-Before I write here what I wrote about Thanksgiving in my journal, I should note this. In my journal for the last half a year or so, I've been using a little bit of a spelling reform, one of my own devising. I'm doing this because, while I know how certain senseless spellings got into English, I don't see why we're keeping them. A case in point is the gh combination. In Old English, it was a letter called yogh, and it made a sort of gargling sound, but now it's just two letters that have no point. Well, they make a vowel long, but e is perfectly serviceable for that. There are other little changes that you'll see as you go along. I think maybe I'll finally go public with this, and start blogging with the new spellings. (Also, a note on ampersands: I use the word "and" for regular ands, like "I woke up and got out of bed," but I use ampersands for things that are intricately connected, like married couples or mashed potatoes & gravy.)

-Anyhow:

* * *

Day One.

When we got to Oxford, only Dan & Tracy wer there; Dave & Kim and co. are coming to a second get-together tomorrow, and so is everyone who was there today. Cammy was there, so everything was instantly great. I poked her nose and she grinned, and then we did it again, and it was a theme of the nyte. Bip!

-Dan set up the Turkey Day 9-Ball Tourney and we all played that while Grandpa cooked the feast. I lost to Grandpa ryte off the bat, because the poste got in my way. Cheap! But Dan and I set up a peanut gallery in the lounge area, and made fun of Mom and Grandma when they played. The best was when Grandma dropped the granny stick and knocked at least two balls out of place, and made up a Grandma expletive—something like "Floffleschtoonkum!" Dan & Tracy are having a great time with Cammy, as far as I can tell. She's a really happy baby, and Tracy said, "I'm so glad she's not a challenge." Dan pointed out that I'm as good as an uncle to her, since there's actually a good deal more age difference between me and her than between him and me. I'm going to enjoy this baby.

-[Various stuff omitted about Grandma's iPod, which she ran thru the wash. She gave it to me so I could try to fix it, but I couldn't get it fixed while I was there, so I took it home.]

-Dinner! Dan & Tracy wer bothe, of course, thankful for Cammy. So was Grandpa, and also that Micah's finally somewhere where he can get straytened out. Mom & Dad wer bothe thankful for that; Mom was thankful for a baby, too. And Grandma was thankful for "all the faces at this table" and several other things. I'm thankful for a cousin I can be an uncle for, and for a great college education. Those are what I mentioned, but I can come up with more. Good food, great frends here and at college, a life that looks like it's just going to keep getting better, all the rest of my family, Crowduck every year, cute cats to play with, hope for Micah's future, and fingers. (Aren't fingers great?)

-The food was all the best ever… except the scalloped oysters, 'cause that's gross. There was so much; I just kept eating and eating. What a delicious day. Turkey, homemade rolls, mashed potatoes & gravy, cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts, and the Jell-O salad I forgot to try. I'm thankful I know people who are willing to cook this well for me.

-We all sat around, fat and lazy, and eventually finished the pool tourney. I'd alredy lost in the losers' bracket to Dan because the 1–9 shot lined up for him on my first shot off the break (cheap!), so I watched him play Tracy, and Mom play Grandma, and Tracy play Grandpa. In the end, Grandpa won it all. (Superior skill and knowledge of the game over ignorance and superstition.) Then we sat around with no sense of obligation. Watched the charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. Dad, Grandma, and I played Scrabble; I cleaned their clocks, of course, starting out with a jackpot, DIALOGUE, on my first turn, on a triple word score.

-I tried to work the iPod a little more, but then we had to get going, Dad and I (Mom had left erlier to see Micah). I made fun of his conservative radio on the way home.

* * *

Day Two.

Everyone here languished around for a long time. Karl and Dad weren't finally ready to leave until about 4, after Dad finished installing Windows 7 on Mom's computer. But we got Karl to come. We got to Oxford about 5 and everyone was downstairs playing the Day After Thanksgiving Pool Tourney. Dan's old frend Jake was here, as wer Kim & Dave and the Sierras and Hayden, and Dan & Tracy and Cammy. What a great crowd. When we got downstairs Kim and Dan wer arguing about a statistic Dan didn't think could possibly be ryte—that 80% of marriages where the peeple have cohabited beforehand end in divorce within a year. Dan made fun of this 80% all nyte after I agreed that it sounded a bit hye, since apparently if I agreed, that made it true. And everyone else made fun of it too, as the tourney went on. I played Grandma, and she beat me when I barely missed the 9 ball, leaving her a perfect shot. She did this to either Dave or Jake too (I can't remember). The winner, who had hardly ever played pool before and served to demonstrate how much of a crapshoot 9-Ball is, was Kim. While that was going on, I entertained the kids in various ways. I played one round of hide & seek with the Sierras.

-Dinner tonyte was Alaskan king crab. I'd never had crab before, but I decided I really should try. So after I finished all my other food, I bit the bullet and cracked open a leg. I think I liked it—sort of like chicken, but richer and chewier. I also tried pecan pie for the first time, courtesy of Tracy. It was good, but my heart still belongs with pumpkin. Eventually, we all just sat around and digested (except the kids, who obviously have unlimited energy). Karl seemed to enjoy himself, tho at some point he wandered downstairs and either napped or watched football.

-All too soon, everyone started taking off. So we did too. I said a heartfelt goodbye, tho it only needs to cover a month.

* * *

The Present Day.

I never did got that iPod to work. The click wheel wasn't working, and I suspected the connection myte need to be cleaned. So I opened it up, which turned out to be a preposterously tricky task. In so doing, I snapped the ribbon that connects the click wheel to the mainboard, dashing that hope. I called an iPod repair place, and the guy told me that, if it was any consolation, I probably wouldn't have been able to clean the connection off and make it work anyhow, since it was probably corroded by the laundry detergent and water. Then, in taking it apart further to try to put it back together better, I believe I snapped another ribbon, the one that connects the hold switch. In conclusion, Apple should make products that are easier to service. (But those would last longer, and then people wouldn't need to buy new ones as often. I still don't know how I feel about owning an iPod. It'd be nice to have a music player that's roomier than my current 2GB thing—compare my music collection, currently 8.30GB—but I don't think I lissen to music incessantly enuf to justify spending what amounts to about ten Bob's-hours, or almost two weeks' wages there, on the most cost-effective player I could fynd, the 16GB Sansa View. So I'll probably just cart around my laptop until a compelling reason to buy a pricier thing comes along, or until another free one somehow comes my way like Grandma's, one that I don't end up screwing up. Grandma's will end up either sold for parts or expensively refurbished, the former being more probable, because the iPod Nano 4th Gen. is so unfrendly to repairs that even Apple doesn't service it—they just send you a new one if you send yours in to get it serviced.)

Lastly, I have the beginnings of a Christmas list, or a short one—it depends on whether I ever think of lots more things I want.

—Headphones: the kind that go around your ear and block out other noise.

—A calligraphy pen, with a few nibs to go along with it.

I don't know how peeple who are buying Christmas presents usually make sure they aren't buying their recipient something that someone else has alredy baut them. And I think Nana & Papaw read this blog too. Hopefully I won't end up getting the same thing twice. Now I just have to figure out what to buy other peeple.

Various

It's been a while. You've probably noticed these posts getting spaced farther and farther out. One part of that is that I keep getting busy around here. Another part is that I was using blogging time earlier this month to do NaNoWriMo - a goal that I've had to abandon because of so much work, so much other stuff, and so much other stuff that refuses to stop happening. Let's start this out with Halloween.

-Harris parties are a strange tradition, one that I've never been able t

o fully get into. The concept is that someone comes up with a theme for the party, they go around collecting money to buy beer, and th

en they throw a party in the Harris Center here on campus. The problem that I've never been able to overc

ome is that, despite how much effort people put into their costumes for these themes - Halloween, '80s, Fetish, etc. - once they get into the hall, it doesn't really matter. That's because inside the hall it's dark and everyone's drunk and dancing aggressively and suggestively to Lady Gaga music that's blasting at an unreasonable volume. So there's a contrast to what I'd see as an ideal sort of conversation to be able to have at a costume party, which is something like this:

-A: Heyyy, B! That's a great costume… Civil War soldier, right?

-B: Yeah, it was a blast to put together. You've got an Ottoman Empire thing going on, right?

-A: Yeah, I borrowed the fez from my friend - he's an exchange student from Turkey.

-B: Sweet. I'm going to go check out other costumes. See ya.

-A: Cool, later!

-Instead, the lights are too low, and you can't make out what people are wearing, and you can't hear what they're saying, and many of the people there can't string together a coherent sentence anyhow. So it's more like this:

-A: NICE BEARD COSTUME!!!!! {A's fez falls off as he makes an overambitious dance move.}

-B: {Pukes on A's fez.}

-The only solution I've been able to find is to sit in the antehall, which is lit and only gets the echoes of the thumping bass from the party hall. I can stand there and watch people go past and have somewhat intelligible conversations with them before they speed off into the enveloping gloom. So, when I go to a Harris party, that's what I do, although I usually don't, because they don't all have costume themes. In any case, here are some pictures of me in my Dalí costume.

I worked on perfecting my "Dalí Look" - which consists of eyebrows raised as if you've just heard a gunshot, but a mouth that's sort of a cute rabbit impression. I got it better in this picture than in the next one.

Taken by Elissa. She was going as Little Red Riding Hood, but she didn't have a riding hood, so she was going to wear red shorts and something else skimpy. That was about par.

One more, in case you just didn't get the point with the other two, I guess.

-There were some other good costumes. A group of friends, one of whom lives in EcoHouse, went as the Seven Deadly Sins. A girl I kinda know went as Jared Fogle before he started eating at Subway. There was a guy dressed as a box of Franzia wine, a guy as Rorschach, and someone in a full-on Gumby suit.

-After Halloween, I started writing my NaNo novel, and before life intervened, I had written some 26 pages (longhand in a notebook), which made it, quite possibly, the longest continuous thing I've ever written. Its only competitor is an earlier (and terrible) draft of the same story that I wrote in tenth grade, which may have topped thirty pages, but I don't remember. I still intend to finish it, but we'll have to see when I've got some time. Most people don't write that nowel that they've always wanted to write because they never feel like they have the time to write it, and until this month I had fallen into the same trap. But now I know that the time is there, as long as you don't have this college's workload to contend with, and family difficulties on top of that. So, this winter I should be able to write the rest of the book, and hopefully at the end I won't feel like it needs to be thrown into a dark corner and forgotten for several years.

-Also: my roommate has moved out of EcoHouse. This wasn't a huge surprise, because she had gotten to the point that she usually only stopped by for five minutes each day to feed her rabbit. She didn't come to the weekly house meetings, and she never talked with anyone from the house. As she was taking some of her stuff out of the room, I asked her what drove her to move out. She said she'd expected it to be different, more like an environmental-type thing she'd done over the summer called Big Grееn Summеr. She'd done this with Nathan, who lives down the hall from us, and he said that she contributed about as much to that project as she did to the house. (I feel slightly nervous writing this, because I once gave her the address to this blog, but I really doubt that she reads it anymore, so I'm not very nervous.) Anyhow, now I have a single room that's the size of a double. I'll be getting a new roommate next semester, or perhaps moving into a single-sized single next door, but until the semester ends I have tons of space all to myself.

-Other than that, and being terribly busy, and trying to start a romance but apparently failing (at least so far), and seeing a pretty cool concert by a band called Why?, not a whole lot happened in the last few weeks. Well, for me, at least. Back at home things have been happening as if someone told them they won't be allowed to happen ever again.

-I don't know what I can say about our family issues from this far away. I guess the most helpful thing for me to say is that I do sincerely believe things are going to work out for the better once this is over. Micah is in a place where they can straighten him out and give him a chance at having a life course where he won't end up in dead-end jobs that continue forever. It's painful that it took such a drastic measure before he could get to this place, but I honestly think it'll improve his life a lot. Something big needed to happen, and it did. And I hope things clear up legally so that you three aren't all split into different places eventually.

-I've met with my advisor, and we figured out my schedule for graduating early, which will involve a big workload, but not so insanely much bigger than the big workloads I've been dealing with since I got here. I also discovered, when we discussed seminars, one that I hadn't seen before, called Sustainable Development in Costa Rica. This is great not just because Costa Rica is one of the places I've been thinking of WWOOFing after I graduate (see previous post). It's also great because the class takes a field trip over spring break (which is two weeks long), to Costa Rica, expenses paid for by the college. I think that qualifies as getting my money's worth for this education. It goes without saying that I really hope I get in. As near as I can tell, there are 19 people applying for the 15 available slots, and my good Spanish puts me a shoo-in. I'm also going to apply for the Chicago book company internship within, oh, let's say the next two weeks. I just have to pull together a résumé, which will be considerably more impressive now than it was the last time I updated it. I can add that I'm a published font designer and I've had (a quarter of) a magazine article written about me; I can also say that I've successfully been the driving force in the design of something like eight publications since I started being at the top of Press. And of course I have mad proofreading skills, in at least two languages (three if you count Esperanto, which you probably shouldn't). I think I have a chance at getting the internship. I really hope I do.

-This has been a disorganized entry, but I think all the information I meant to convey is around here somewhere. I'm going to call it done, and if you'd like it to be in a more logical order, you can go ahead and print it out and paste the pieces around and enjoy. Hopefully I'll be able to write again soon, with something happier than a lot of this one has been. Until then, I'm out.