Doing it Wrong

Black Friday Rebel

Comes as no surprise, but I boycotted Black Friday as well. Hell, I'm not doing Grey Saturday or Off-White Sunday either.

But between the absurd (camping out? for a WEEK?? At BEST BUY!!??) and the appalling (srlsy - pepper spray?) I'm having a hard time not boycotting the whole of the flippin' holiday as well.

And I love Christmas, I really do.

But you know what? I don't love it for the shopping. I don't even love it for the gifts, although I admit I LOVE finding just the right prezzie for just the right person. But all this open-at-9-on-Thanksgiving hype is taking the shine off it.

I love the smells - cinnamon and mulled wine and chestnutes.

I love the candles and the fresh pine

I love the idea of cold weather and warm fires and families and red blankets and fuzzy slippers

I love anticipation and ritual and music (MY music mind you, not the canned tripe on ever-play in the stores)

I love out-door markets with carts filled up with ornaments and hand-made goods

So that's the stuff I'm going to try to find this year.

And sod the rest.

Thankful

Ahhh.

Having just finished a truly delicious meal, one prepared easily and enjoyably, one that has NOT left my kitchen a smoking ruin of its normally tidy self, I can honestly and sincerely declare myself thankful.

Hope the same is true for all of you.

Thanksgiving Rebel

I'm doing the unthinkable tomorrow - I'm boycotting Thanksgiving.

We will not have massive numbers of family and friends over - only those who are currently in residence.

I have not spent the last three days hectically preparing the requisite dishes.

We do not currently have a turkey in our refrigerator transitioning from granite-hard frozen to demi-thawed.

Yup - no turkey. None. WE ARE NOT DOING TURKEY.

And, before you ask, not ham neither, nor lamb. None of the Festive Meats will be on our table.

 Now, in my defense, I'm all about the giving thanks. Things I'm grateful for are front and center every day. But Thanksgiving? Not so much.

My father, post heart-attack when he was on an extreme, no-meat-at-all diet, referred to it as National Gluttony Day - and to be honest, that's what it feels like sometimes. Feasts are fine: good food with people you care for, but the days of preparation? The shopping and chopping and endless time in order to lay out a table with - and this is really what struck me this year - the Traditionally Imposed Dishes of Necessity - (many of which I don't actually like all that much) those I do not want.

So I'm on strike. I'm not doing it. No turkey, no way.

And let's be honest - the reason for turkey, and sweet potatoes, and mashed potatoes and horrid bean casseroles with questionable ingredients and toppings, and pumpkin pie and pecan pie and... and... and... is to have a particularly American dinner, which is all well and good. But being thankful, loving family, celebrating freedom, desiring peace - those aren't American inventions at all, and this year I think I'd rather spend more time being human than being specifically American.

So tomorrow, probably at about 2 or so (one of us has to work, poor soul), we're going to have a delicious meal of seared scallops with a white-wine and lemon sauce, some roasted fennel with parmesan and a light green salad. It will take about 1/2 an hour to cook altogether, and clean up will be a snap as well. We might have a glass of white wine - maybe not, it'll be early. We will talk about our family who aren't here; hopefully we'll skype with them or at least send a few texts. We'll probably look back over the year and talk about the year to come.

And we will be grateful.

Even with the boycott. But totally, and absolutely, without turkey.

But That's MY Name

My mum didn't like her name when she was growing up. There were dozens of other little girls, even in her very small town, with the same name, or nearly the same name and it irked her no end. She claims the same is true of my dad, but I haven't verified that and I've learned after many, many years that what My Mum Says My Dad Thinks is not, actually, necessarily accurate. [note: the same is VERY TRUE of my dad, only moreso as he thinks it's hilarious to make up very entertaining and often utterly false family stories: viz The One True Engagement Story,  The Camping Trip, the Bear and the String of Pearls, and The Time He Dropped The Water Bomb on the Bishop].

In response my parents gave my sister and me what were, at the time, very unusual names. It worked particularly well with my sister, whose name is so unusual that she got a draft notice from the army when she turned 18. She marched herself down to the local recruiting type office, gestured in a general way at herself and asked if that was a good enough reason why she hadn't registered. They apologized profusely and gave her a free pair of socks. Her name remains quite different. Mine? Not so much.

I mean, it was when I was a kid - but heck, so was my last name. My last name was, at least according to our small city, incredibly bizarre. I swore up and down I would marry myself a nice NORMAL name like Sanchez or Chavez or Cedebaca [note 2: I failed spectacularly at this]. However I grew up without a single other kid sharing my name, ever, ever never ever, and that gives you a weird sort of ownership over that little collection of letters. Mind you, I felt the same way about my dinky little back-water state and had a jolt every time Bugs Bunny mentioned my city. But still. It was my name, no one else's, and if nothing else that made me different.

That all changed when I was about 14 or so when, for heaven knows what reason, my name became The Big Name for baby girls. Okay, that's not true, it REALLY changed when that set of little baby girls grew up into toddlers and I was about 16 and one day in the public loo a totally strange lady suddenly said, 'Megan, did you wash your hands?' and I immediately answered, 'yes!' Because who else could she be talking to?? There is only one Megan, ever, and I am she. I just thought I must have met this woman and she was extraordinarily concerned about hygiene.

Since then I've gotten used, gradually, to the fact that there is a whole set of females wandering around labelled with my name, but usually I don't actually run into them. I mean, yes, I knew there was someone named Megan on our department directory - heck, I'd better since I design and update the damn directory twice a year - but in a group of over a hundred that's hardly surprising, and besides, I'd never met the child so it wasn't such an important thing. [note the third: I rarely interact physically with the majority of folks in my dept so I have a terrible habit of randomly assigning faces I see in the hallways to names I have on my screen. Poor Megan A was, thusly, tall and brunette for two years whereas really she's short and blonde and keeps an axe in her office. I actually WAY prefer her this way having met her!]

But what is throwing me now is that a while ago I decided to go all bold and brave and barefaced and use my very own name on the internet. You know, MY name, the one I and only I own. Except I don't, and having pissed about with anonymity for a while it turns out in the meantime the darn digital realm has been infested with people who apparently - and I can only take their word for it - have just as valid a claim to My Name as I have. I am, ridiculously, gobsmacked.

I'm trying to see it as an opportunity. If I do venture onto a site or a forum or whatever that already just happens to have a Megan posting I will be able to choose my own descriptor to set myself apart. The trouble is I'm not really having much luck coming up with one. MeganFIRSTdamnityouinterloper doesn't seem quite right, and frankly ORIGINALmegan isn't really what I'm going for. Megan-too seems weak, but I haven't yet come up with anything that seems... you know... me.

With 7 billion people in the world doesn't it seem, now and then, that the tiny little empire we call 'self' is getting harder and harder to define? All I know is that mine isn't, not any more, exlusively called 'Megan.' Maybe that's a good thing.

Oh THAT Pain...

I was told I was lazy a lot when I was a kid. Mind you, it was generally justified in the specific, but not necessarily true in the general. In other words, there were totally things I was lazy about - always things that I had no real interest in doing at all, and almost always things I saw as pointless. In fact the pointless thing was my downfall all through childhood and high school. Make my bed? It was going to be un-made the moment I crawled in again. Pick up the thousand-and-one books I had scattered around my room? I was only going to get them out again. Do that utterly ridiculous and juvenile hand-out for Chemistry? It is obviously just buyswork and does nothing to help me understand molecular structure. 

I should note here that I did become converted to the idea of regular tidying and now delight in order and organization and freshly wiped counters. 

But my POINT is, my POINT is that on things I did care about I would work tirelessly for hours, not lazy in the least. What my mum meant was 'you're being lazy about this' but what I heard was 'you are a lazy person.' Since laziness was a sin in our house (along with not recycling brown paper lunch bags, neglecting to compost the kitchen waste and not agreeing to partner the weird, slightly smelly old guy at summer dance camp when he asked - I was a bit hazy on the definition of sin) I felt, once again, deeply, morally flawed, and adopted SLOTHFUL as part of my self-image.

I mean, I grew out of it, eventually. I recognize that while I'm a class-A procrastinator on many things it's usually out of perfectionism or anxiety. I'm not, not really, a terribly lazy person.

But it's funny how these childhood images lurk in the back of the psyche, isn't it? 

I'm used to being a physically active and reasonably fit person. My morning routine was to come into work two hours early, run the stairs in my building for 20 minutes and then head out for another 40 or so walking or jogging around campus. [note: The other hour is for showering at the gym. a) I don't want to sit in my own fug and b) I really don't want to be mistaken for a philosophy prof] On days I wasn't working I'd hop on the bike trainer for an hour or so. But for months, months and months and months, I wasn't doing that. First I dropped the stair reps, telling myself I would just add another campus circuit and that would be practically the same thing. Then I stopped doing the campus walk, always figuring I'd pick up that day on the bike trainer, and then frequently 'forgetting' to do that too. 

I gained weight - I haven't gained weight since my youngest kid was born. My body felt soft and heavy and... and LEADEN. I wasn't walking, I was plodding. I had a thousand excuses, at least that's how I saw it, excuses why I wasn't exercising. I was tired all the time, really tired. I couldn't sleep and it hurt to run and... and...

And louder and louder my brain was shouting that I was lazy. Just lazy, that's what it was. Sloth, one of those deadly sins. 

But then I had this surgery, and two days later I was walking again and a couple of days after that I was using the bike trainer again, and ten days after surgery I ran the stairs again. And it felt FANTASTIC. Everyone who asked me how I was doing got an earful about how, a scant week after surgery, I felt 100% better than I had BEFORE I had it. And they'd look at me funny, and I was like, WHAT? Isn't that normal?

So I said it last week to my Very Lovely Surgeon who smiled at me and brought out a folder full of very interesting photos. She went through it.

'This - gesturing to picture of large alien spaceship - is the fenoombulator. It was about 5 or 6 times the size of the ones we normally have to take out. That causes a lot of bleeding and quite a bit of pain.'

'Ah!' Said I, enlightened. 'So THAT'S why I was feeling a bit off! 

'THIS - gesturing to a interior shot of said spaceship, apparently the hatchery as there was an enormous great alien egg thingy filling most of the frame - is a very large cyst. This can cause a lot of bleeding and quite a lot of pain.'

'Oh,' said I, squicked out a bit because, you know, I hadn't realized I was hosting the next generation of tentacled space tyrants in my abdomen. 'So that probably didn't help either I guess.'

'AND,' she went on, 'you had adenomyosis as well, which has symptoms of heavy bleeding and pain.'

I blinked at her and said, modestly, 'well, I am a bit of an overachiever...'

'You were really pretty anemic as well.'

For two weeks now I've been back on the routine, running the stairs and then out to loop around campus. And I can honestly say I'm taking on those stairs like and eighteen-year-old. . .

. . .

. . .

asthmatic cat with one lung.

But I'm doing it, and it feels really pretty darn good.

NOT lazy. Just a bit of an idiot.