Yesterday,
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valarltd reminded me of one of my favorite Christmas songs ever:
which I've probably listened to, oh, 635 times since then. That bit around minute 2:53-3:00 melts me every time; this probably explains far more about me than I should share in public. Also, likely not a good thing to play at work, unless your boss is an old quasi-Irish drunk, like me. Not really good for children and impressionable pets, either.
We're getting a nice little dusting of Christmas snow this morning. Nadia's class had a Christmas party yesterday; she came home so excited about her gifts, which include a CHAPTER BOOK. Far more advanced than I expected her to be able to handle, she sat right down and started reading it aloud to me. My baby is growing up. Another emotion that has no name: that sudden shock of pride, coupled with the sorrow that accompanies the fact that one stage is gone and another has slid into it's place.
I find myself so impatient with new mothers, sometimes, because they're SO worried, SO scared, SO anxious to do everything right, and that impatience is surely borne out of the fact that I was exactly the same way myself (and still am, more often than I'd care to let on) Yet it turns out you can do lots of things wrong, magnificently wrong, sometimes, and they still turn out remarkably well. A miracle of some sort, surely.
Yesterday's random pondering went in some odd directions. I spent a lot of time thinking about biographies, and how they form the majority of my for-pleasure reading. I am an incurable voyeur, I think. But sometimes more interesting to me is the story of the biographer -- the relationships you develop with your subjects; the pleasure and horror of pitting your intellect against someone dead and gone; making sense of a life unordered. How does that spill over into your real life? What happens? I mean, Huffington's work on Picasso screwed me up for the better part of a year, and while I'm loathe to speculate about her mental state at any given point, I only read the book. What in the world was it like to write it?
And I thought, Hmm. That's the type of book I'd like to read. Or perhaps, more accurately, it's the type of book I'd like to write. I've committed to writing nothing beyond work for a little while, so I can clarify where my passions lie and where my energy should go, but that's an idea worth pondering, at least. And then it struck me that perhaps I'm merely re-packaging Julie and Julia, which I haven't engaged with, on the grounds that there are a few biographies of Julia I want to read before I got there.
But there are so many -- scratch that, there are a handful -- of people who have had tremendous impact on my life, and my only point of engagement with them is their biographies. Murrow, of course, springs immediately to mind -- not only for his story as an individual man, for frankly, he's carved out of this slippery-smooth steel; you can't sink your hooks into him and get him, for he's cut of a different moral cloth than I am, although he probably has done more to frame my professional ethics than anyone. Carson McCullough. Of course Picasso, if for no other reason than he's the embodiment of the issues of entitlement and violence and the selfish nature of art.
And from there, I was thinking about the stereotypical housewife of the 1950's, and how she was really, if you stop and think about it, one of the first creations of a fledgling media. And how all these years, I've been thinking of her as a descriptive model, rather than a prescriptive one. And what was the purpose of this prescriptive model, but to encourage women back out of the workforce -- in direct opposition to the marketing that was used to bring women into the factories? How much of women's culture in this country is a sort of fandom? You either bought into the model and wanted to make it part of your life or you rejected it and went another route. Feminism, a really abstract shipping war? (I realize this is a ridiculous simplification, I'm just stretching ideas out) It surprises me how invested I am in that particularly fandom, but mind you, I'd be a second generation fan. Learned it at my Mother's knee and all that -- sort of like a toddler with a light saber.
And that's probably enough random. I finished my MIL's scarf, and it occurred to me that if I didn't want to be so behind on NEXT year's xmas gifts, I should perhaps start them now. Yes, I know I say that every year. Perhaps this will be the year it sticks.
And now, onward, upward, forward. May your day be full of relentless optimism, even in the face of all reality.
cheerful
full
okay
enthralled
pensive