i'm dreaming of a hypocritical christmas.

i'm feeling a bit jaded. so take this with two advil and comment later. (;

it's minnesota. it's two days from two-thousand-seven, and the grass outside my patio has the temerity to be GREEN.

we've had a few days of icy windshields, and some frosty lawns, and even some large, fluffy, beautiful snowflakes.

but the weather is being pretty damn hypocritical for a minnesota winter, and withholding the cold and snow that makes me love the state.

of course, being a minnesotan, i can glance outside, sigh, and continue with my day, because that's what being minnesotan is all about. usually.

and if any of the rest of this post makes any coherent sense, let me know. my man dan made me some kickin' coffee this morning and i'm kind of punchy. (;

***

perhaps i get frustrated this time of year because my workplace celebrates the holiday with wild abandon--cookies and gift exchanges, toasts of non-alcoholic bubbly--all while taking phone calls from the most ungrateful, ill-mannered group of public i've ever encountered.

for almost three years at work the holidays have been a time of overtime with a thin veneer of joy. here's why:

people forget that they are speaking to other people.

other people who are working double time and triple time, staying later than late trying to patch up a human error committed by one of their teammates, who probably ran out of coffee and wasn't able to run for a refill. other people who arrive at work three hours early, other people who are trying to make ends meet. other people that you probably brushed elbows with, at wal-mart, while edging in for the same cabbage patch doll.

i'm in a different position now; i no longer have to assist people on the phone who preach the Golden Rule to their kids but don't practice it with the rest of the planet. i still work a ton (workspeak: sixty hours or so) during year end (workspeak: December 15th through January 30th, no time off and weekends optional) and i help out a lot with my client service coworkers, because i cannot stand to see someone go without assistance. props and thanks to my mom and dad, who would give their last shirt to their neighbor.

at any rate, most of the people in my exceedingly short-handed office don't see their family a lot during the time of year when family is touted as the focus of the season. if our customers knew what the stress level was like in our office, would they take pity? would they not raise their voices, when they call about a problem that can be fixed? would they edit the swear words from their vocabulary, and perhaps treat their fellow humans with a bit of respect?

yesterday, at the height of the week's strife, i turned a corner to run into one of our managers, heidi. she was carrying a sheaf of files and paper, and from her direction, had been in a meeting with some irate client.

i'd never seen this bubbly girl cry. and i suddenly also knew what the term "big, fat tears" defined. i stopped in my tracks and asked if she was okay, if there was anything i could do. she shook her head and choked out no, she'd be fine.

the problems that cause people to explode like this, they are minor. the compassion that the season preaches gets lost.

my rule of dealing with an angry client is to remember that there are worse things that could have happened than the post office losing their payroll package.

i think of dan's brother, corey, and having lost him is much, much more terrible. it's not that i do not treat my clients with respect; it's just my way of keeping a calm head, when dealing with a ready-to-detonate person.

***

on top of the stress of work and being home long enough each day to shower and make sure the cats have kibble, my mom had a cancer scare, which has since been alleviated and found to be a fatty deposit. thank heavens for fat. never thought i'd say that again, except when i slip and hit the ice and then am thankful for the deposits on my ass, which protect said tailbone.

however one of my cousins is still in hospital, after a week and a half. she was being treated for an infection, and when rushed from the northern hinterlands to the Big City, it was found that she had cancer. they removed part of her stomach, her uterus, a lot of her colon. there are still three more tumors there. she's not much older than me; it's kind of scary, and it's much worse than anything that happens at work.

it's not that i don't care about my fellow man. i do. i have been in those shoes before, so frustrated that i can't do anything other than search for my tissues and a hershey's bar for solace.

i guess it just bothers me that halloween has passed and yet people wear the same hypocritical mask: love thy brother, love thy church, love thy family, but do not spare the verbage when you're angry.

my parents always used to preach the whole "do unto others" policy. dan's mom had a little plaque on her wall about not bitching about someone else until you have walked a mile in their moccasins. there's the wiccan rede: do unto others, an it harm none. the three-fold law: what you mete to others will return to you three-fold.

it's all the same message, backed by a god or quip-creator.

i'm not pissed off at the people who call and whose invoices pay my salary; i'm annoyed with their behavior. in therapy we talked about that difference, how you sometimes have to separate behavior and being.

i'm going to generalize here: everyone on this planet has the capacity and the ability to be hypocritical. and if they haven't been, yet, they will be, at some point, about something.

i know i have. i know i will, in future. it's inevitable. it's the two-faced nature of humanity, the yin and yang, night and day. if you walk far enough in one direction, there is the chance that you will meet your self, coming the other way. you might not recognize your own face, but it's you, meeting in the middle.

and if that is the case, i'd hope to meet me with open arms, and not show the same hypocrisy for which there is the potential.

the mating habits of electric deer

every year our townhome managers decorate for the holidays with pine boughs and red bows on the mailboxes and such. for the past two years, out by the big townhome sign on the street, they've put up these deer-shaped lighted deer.

last year, as we waited for traffic to ease up so that we could leave the house, i giggled to dan that wouldn't it be funny to move the deer around, perhaps having some type of discovery channel mating session? dan vetoed that; he said it would be like grafitti.

this year, same thing. decorations go up and i wonder briefly if i have the stones to go out in the middle of night and re-arrange the deer into as much of a compromising position as deer could be found. and then the notion is forgotten amid the detrius of work and mundane life crap, the never-ending list that runs through my head as i sit in my car at the stop sign: did i turn on the dishwasher? did i feed the cats? do i have my purse with me?

about two weeks ago i was doing just that. we were leaving, after dark, headed towards a bookstore foray. i was sitting in the passenger seat; we were chatting about something. as we turned, i looked over my shoulder and voila! someone had read my mind! there was a lighted, moving stag mounting his very own lighted doe.

how quaint.

the next day the deer were gone, moved back to the front area near the townhome office.

go figure.

***

those deer drive me nuts, during the holidays. they aren't painted to look like the real thing; they're just wire with white lights, heads bobbing up and down. they look frighteningly like golems of the real thing. i can almost hear the pinnochio-related thoughts: but i want to be a real ungulate! i want to graze on clipped suburban lawns! i want to nibble your nasturtiums to their roots!

i don't like being out by myself at night. in fact, i'm not so keen on it during the day, either, unless i am in a public place. for whatever reason, being in barnes and noble with nine hundred other people makes me feel safer than being in the local park by myself, with just one or two other hikers.

out of nine hundred bodies at the bookstore, i'm sure that there is a better chance that one of them will be a perverted person with mayhem, mischief and assault on their mind. but my imagination paints that lone jogger on the same hiking trail as myself as much, much more scary.

last night i was supposed to meet friends at the legion in richfield, for drinks and such. i arrived and could not find them; when i got back to my car i realized that my phone was dead, so i couldn't call for clarification or anything. i decided to do some retail therapy and drove to the local wal-mart to pick up a few items needed yet for christmas prep.

as i walked up to the store i thought about how easy it would be to just be gone--be mis-placed in the sea of bodies. dan thought i was having drinks; the people i was meeting thought i was probably home. my parents and friends would think whatever they would like to think about my present existence. in the end, how long would it take before someone even realized that i was gone?

i considered briefly getting in the car and driving somewhere, and staying the night, just to see if i was missed. it was a scary thought, that momentary urge to disappear amid the throng.

i thought about how easy it would be, how simple. i thought about how much i missed my northwoods, and the safety that i felt when i was in those woods, even if it was a sham and probably imagined security.

one of the things i used to dwell on, or perhaps cling to, when i lived by myself, was the fact that a tree, standing for years in the darkness outside, could not be scared of the night. it was rooted in ground. animals, too, could not be scared of the dark--they had no choice about flipping a switch and being ensconced into the wee hours by beautiful, lovely, safe light.

this year as i plodded back to my vehicle, shopping completed, i thought again about being alone in the dark. as i drove home i thought about those ridiculous deer that bother me so, thomas edison gone horribly awry. i thought about how they could subsist in the darkness, alone or in pairs, and not feel a thing about their situation.

were they luckier, those deer, than i, for their lack of brain cell? or were they aware of their own irony: that if they were real deer, they would stumble through tight forest and browse thickets for leftover buds, all in utter blackness?

apparently that is why i'm sitting in my house, warm and well-lit, and the lighted deer are plugged in down the street.

the ticking of a thousand clocks

yesterday while typing up a comment on dan's blog, i realized that i'd been sitting at my desk for a good solid two minutes, just listening to the clocks in our living room.

they both read the same time. but due to the fact that humanity had a part in setting that time, they are off, by just a second or two. they don't tick in tandem; they tick separately, never leaving a space between them wherein there is actual silence.

upstairs we have two ticking clocks, in addition to the myriad electronic alarms, but they are in separate rooms; if they do not track time at the same instant, you do not know. it's only in the living room that you hear these two.

i remember when i was a child reading a story about a puppy being just brought home, and how the father puts a hot water bottle and a clock in the little puppy's box, to soothe him. the clock is supposed to remind him of his mother's heartbeat.

truthfully, it doesn't sound that far off, if you muffle it with your pillow.

i also remember laying in the basement of my grandma's house. interesting that at my father's parents home we slept in the upstairs bedrooms, while at my mother's home we slept in the basement. it's all about area, i suppose, and a family of six takes up considerable space. anyway, in my grandma's basement the walls were painted a pale turquoise, almost white, and they leaned in, shoved by frost in the winter. there was a beer sign on the wall--budwieser, i think--that one of my uncles installed in their youth. the bar light was our night light, red and white neon against those turquoise walls.

my mom's home town is steam heated. when the heat kicked on at grandma's house, the radiators were silent. but in the basement, the pipes clicked and made odd noises. at least odd in the light of three am, i guess.

at any rate, being a light sleeper even as a child, i'd wake up at night and in wobbly sleep-vision, see those walls, pressing in and wavering. i'd hear the pipes clanging, a sound i never heard at home in the land of natural gas furnaces. i only hear with my right ear; the left is nerve damaged and deaf. so i'd put my good ear on the pillow, to drown out the pipe noises, and that is when i would hear the footsteps.

soft, at first. slow and steady. and then, as i panicked, they'd speed up. for hours i'd lay there, frozen, waiting for a man to come out of those bowed turquoise walls and step into the darkness of the basement, perhaps take a seat on the brown sofa from 1952 that felt like astroturf rather than fabric, or lean up against the three television sets stacked in the corner.

it wasn't until years later, after suffering through visits during which i'd play dead to avoid the man in the blue walls, that i realized that the footsteps i'd heard were the pulse of my own heartbeat, throbbing in my temple, pressed against the pillow.

***

i'm still a light sleeper. at night, everything wakes me, even though i don't hear well at all. perhaps that is the reason i am a light sleeper--during the day, i am always straining to hear things, so it stands to reason that that alert would remain through the night.

it also explains why hearing these clocks annoys me, but the other people in my house probably do not even notice. their focus on sound is very different than mine, more relaxed.

sometimes i have to take sleep aids, to keep me drowsy enough to fall back asleep. it annoys me to do so, because i sleep deeply but i wake drowsy and it takes quite a while for that feeling to wear off. this morning, when i am awake and my cats are starting their daylight nap, the noise surrounds me: the heater, clicking and whooshing to life, the cars on the street, the sound of a neighbor going down stairs. somewhere there is a high pitched whine, as if off a television. my fingers on the keys, and the ticking of those two clocks.

***

a thousand clocks regulate life. as a rule the one which we are most attuned to and yet most ignore is that of our own inner clock, our heart. it's not until the night, when you lay in the deep of your bed, that you focus and pay attention to your very own pulse, that you can hear your heart, thudding its own rhythm in a bony cage.

the clock inside--that is the clock to which i should listen, i think. and yet i am dominated by the clocks that tick in my house: the alarm, the wristwatch, time running down sun.

usually i am not constrained by the ticking of clocks. i like to pretend that i am free as lynyrd skynyrd's bird. but the clock winds down, at some point. i see that clock in my parents, and suddenly my life is all about the time remaining. it seems often that i have frittered away my life, living outside time in my own pretend land. i have time left, if i care for my body, during which i can make the most of the little lapse between the ticking of my two clocks.