The First Blathering!

It’s been difficult trying to decide where and how to start this, and I’ve been driving myself crazy about it for some time, but I thought to myself today, well, why not Right Now, and why not about today? I mean, this is supposed to be a kind of organic, loose agglomeration of parts of my life, so Christmas morning is at least sufficiently symbolic, and there’s not much going on this morning that isn’t indicative of my life as a whole in some way or other, so we might as well start here and build outward. Right?

So, as noted, it’s Christmas. Christmas 2019, to be exact. We’re not religious people, but my husband and I were raised with Christmas forming a central part of our winter lives and we’ve gone on to raise our kid that way too. It’s important to humans to have a midwinter ritual of light and love, and there’s no reason not to use the one in the stores. In my husband’s case, anyway, his family were religious, so he grew up with the full-on traditional spiritual Christmas with midnight mass and so on, but they also weren’t particularly… fundamental… about it all, so the secular giftstravaganza and the tree and Santa and all came into play as well. My family, on the other hand, have always been overtly secular. We’re academics (or in my case a wannabe academic). Academics steeped in folklore and anthropology, oral tradition and international studies. Ancestors, family branches, and close friends of the family (in effect family themselves) embrace(d) a variety of faiths and ways of life including Mexican Catholicism and various expressions of Judaism from the very strict to the downright interpretational. I’ll never forget the traditional neighborhood Christmas Eve party, hosted by some friends down the road, with the festive fir or pine “Hanukkah Bush” decorated with Stars of David and Mexican straw angels and lights and tinsel, and lovely mulled wine and hot buttered rum (although I was too young to drink those most of those years). I miss those days, I miss the village. We arrived in our new world very much alone, and built a family here but a scattered one, not gathering today or any day. Not a village. Someday when I’m feeling better I will start holding parties, at whatever time of year the largest number of them are available at once. And they can bring friends too and the family will get larger. Yes, I will do this. I like this idea, it brings me comfort.

Things are even more muddled now, holiday-wise, what with emigrating to the Netherlands just about half our lives ago. Here, Christmas is traditionally a religious holiday, but in recent years the consumer hype and the trees and so on have begun to take over. Kids here traditionally celebrate Sinterklaas, the day that Turkish-born Saint Nikolaas comes from his home in Spain on his white horse Amerigo, and his Servant Black Pete delivers a sackful of presents outside the door. In recent years there’s been a lot of backlash about the public presentation of Black Pete – for my part, let me just say that I am aware that he is a historical figure, and when he presents traditionally (NOT, thus, the grotesque, blackfaced, big-earringed, thick-lipped popular version) he is dressed as a scribe, the function in which he would have served in real life. He is, thus, dressed as a high-level servant who would have been accorded a great deal of respect, been paid a decent salary for his skills, and be accorded a reasonably high social status. He would probably have owned his own home, been able to select and reject employers, and been able to attend church with the average citizens. That said, the current idea to turn him into a variety of rainbow colors strikes me as a fine one. Some traditions do not, it’s true, age well (or there’d still be a holiday here wherein live eels are tortured in the streets to great merriment and fanfare).

We gave greater attention to Sinterklaas when our kid was little, often resorting to hilarious antics to deliver that sack of goods, but since our whole family is on another continent and celebrate Christmas we have, since our kid was old enough not to believe in the mythical bits anymore, tended to put more emphasis on this latter holiday. For us, it is a time to be together, and to show each other how much we appreciate the others by providing cogently chosen gifts, created or selected in love.

My husband has a superpower regarding presents; he is almost un-stumpable. Once, I wrapped a Swiss Army knife in many layers of boxes and included a distracting, shifting weight in the packaging… He guessed it was “some kind of oval thing with projections”. A walking stick, screwed apart into two pieces and wrapped separately in wildly divergent packaging? “A point-ed stick” (yes, we are Monty Python fans). This year, only a couple of hours ago now, he held a large flat package to his ear for a while, then announced, “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that”. He appeared bemused when I shrieked, “How the hell do you DO that?” and then he unwrapped his metal signboard featuring, of course, HAL 9000. A few minutes later he “gave up” on diagnosing the contents of another one and just commented, “Molecules”, with a shrug. And then unwrapped his new build-a-molecule kit. My step-father can do it too – I vividly recall one year when I was 10 or 12. My mom bought him a gorgeous hand-made pottery coffee maker, which consisted of several parts, each of which she wrapped separately and disproportionately to the box’s contents. He surveyed this array of packages calmly for no more the ten seconds and said, “It’s a coffee maker”. I was there. It was scary.

The frenzy is now over for this year, and I’m typing this watching some of my buddies, a gaggle of jackdaws and magpies, collecting the cat food I left out for them this morning. It’s been a good morning, after a terrible, terrible year. We can rest in each other’s love and the love of friends and family and gird our loins for whatever 2020 feels like beating us down with. Pessimistic? Not really. It’s been a nightmare of a couple of years and that was supposed to be the time I finally got to rest and take care of my family, after all the years of hard work. It is what it is – the universe doesn’t owe anyone a single damn thing, there is – on a cosmic scale – no such thing as “fair” or “deserving”. Only chance, entropy. Only a path to be felt out, forged, clung to, abandoned, as is fit.

That’s another thing – you’ll figure out pretty quickly that I’m irreverent, brutally honest, and an unshakably rational realist. I’m also a dreamer, kind to everyone but myself, unflaggingly forgiving, and live with my head in the clouds.

This is going to be a terribly unconventional “autobiography”. Just writing it fills me with feelings of confusion and Impostor Syndrome, but people keep telling me that the things I’ve done, the stuff I babble about, the encounters I’ve had are interesting. That I should share these things. So I’m gonna. Here goes. And if it’s done in a way that you’re not used too – GOOD! Exploring new boundaries is never bad.

Here’s how it’s going down:

This is a public blog. Anyone can read it and look at the pictures and, once I’ve got it fully set up, leave comments. It will be organic in form, with no beginning besides this one post and no firm direction: things will link back to each other in, ideally, an ever-expanding web. Changes, when they appear, could be as subtle as an added word or sentence, such as this one, in a post which already exists, such as this one. They will usually have significance beyond improving the grammatical flow or accuracy of the post.

I’m also economically challenged. I know that will resonate with a lot of readers. I hope to supplement my income by any creative means possible, and this is worth a stab. See, you – yes, you! – can read this blog and look at the pictures, leave a comment, the usual pizzazz. If, however, you pop over to my Patreon page (which is going to be fully updated Very Soon to further reflect this here blog and so forth!*)** and subscribe, at any tier, you can also: ask me questions which I will do my best to answer in the blog, select from the set of topics I could be persuaded to write about (nothing boring – it’ll all be stuff like “that time I almost got myself abducted”, or “weirdest animals I’ve been bitten by”, or “WAS that an alien spacecraft?” or “ways I’ve nearly died”), select locations for day trips about which I will write and do photo-logs or even videos, enter to win custom art pieces, suggest further ideas for this blog, argue with me about something I said, ask me who that crow in my picture is (it's Alastor!), just all kinds of stuff. Sound intriguing? I hope so!

I expect that by the time this gets very far, some people, possibly from among my friends and family, might get offended or feel confronted. I am going to write this with my own personal flair for compassion and understanding, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be holding much back. Nobody’s secrets are going to get spilled, nobody’s going to get mentioned by name, and wherever possible I will be obscuring details (for example, all work-related stories will be framed in such ways as to make in unclear whether this is a job I had when I was 20, one I have now, or somewhen in between) – but it’s not like I can be very secretive: anyone doing some low-level sleuthing would be able to figure out who I’m talking about regarding that time I was forced to burn all my books, for example, or whatever I’m talking about at the time. But let’s be decent about this, OK? If you think it’s really clever of you to have figured out who a particular anecdote is about, please consider that I didn’t say so for a REASON, and I will not react particularly well to you grandstanding about it and undoing all my careful let’s-protect-this-person vaguery. Just stay out of it.

At any rate, this seems like a decent capping moment for this the first entry; otherwise I’ll NEVER shut up! I wish you and yours all the very best today, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, and for the coming year. Another entry will appear when I feel like it – do not fear, I intend to exert great discipline and not let this lag more than necessary. But do bear with me; I’m currently dealing with some Mega Level Health Shit and it affects my focus.

*I know many would say I should have fully prepped my other sites, got my Twitter page sorted and updated, etc. before starting this blog, and in a Very Big Way those many are right. However, I have been struggling with discipline, my motivation having fled for Reasons (which I will at some point go into), and I was in danger of embarking on a Cat Vacuuming Cycle instead of actively getting started. I made a command decision to just launch and play catch-up with the rest instead of waffling around forever being unsatisfied with my preparations. So don’t freak out if at some point the whole look of this blog changes, too. It is what it is.***

**And now has been.

***I love footnotes. Fight me.