Basic New Years Resolutions

Come New Years, many folks form grandiose resolutions to lose weight, eat healthy, exercise, cut all carbs/fats/sugars/etc, get in shape, find love, write a novel, win the superbowl, start a political revolution, and/or burn this mother down.  Yet not only do so many of us fail at these massive goals, but even find ourselves actively regressing.

It's not that I want to discourage grandiose goals, far from it--the more ambitious, the better.  Rather, I would just like to suggest a few super-basic New Years resolutions, certain very simple lines you can refuse to cross, so that if you don't exactly reach your goals this year, you can at least be sure that you do not regress.  For example:

• You can refuse to eat alone at a fast food restaurant. 

Note that I didn't say cut all fast food entirely from your diet and lose weight--that would be an ambitious goal, and a worthy one, too. I'm just saying that in the meantime, until you achieve that goal, a very easy line you can refuse to cross is to eat alone at a fast food restaurant.

You can even still eat alone in your car at the drive-thru, or carry it back to your place to eat alone, or even eat alone at a nice restaurant; but there's just a certain pathetic sadness, a pitiful sense of resignation and defeat, that comes from voluntarily entering a fast-food place, ordering the food, and then just sitting all alone at a booth to eat it, as though you didn't have a single better thing to do--or person to be with--in the whole wide world.  Don't be that person.  Maintain that minimal base-line dignity, it can go a long ways towards improving your sense of self-worth in other areas too, trust me.

• You can not carry a box of cookies to snack on wherever you go.

Story time: A friend once told me of a college roommate who carried Keebler elf cookies in his backpack wherever he went--he didn't eat them so much as inhaled them.  He also kept his closet carefully locked at all times, even requesting that my friend leave the room when he wanted to open it.  This of course filled my friend with insatiable curiosity, like his dorm was suddenly some Gothic novel!  And indeed, one day my friend came home to find the closet unlocked.  Burning with anticipation, he turned the knob, flung it open, and inside were...Keebler elf cookies!  Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, nothing but elf cookies.  Not unsurprisingly, this roommate was also dangerously obese.

Again, note that I don't say you should suddenly cut all cookies and/or sugar from your life--that would also be a worthwhile goal, one that I certainly haven't achieved yet.  But in the meantime, until you get to that point, you can refuse to be the sort of person who carries a box of cookies with you wherever you go.  You can even still keep cookies at home as comfort food if you must, just not on your person at all times.  Maintain that basic level of self-dignity.

• You can refuse to eat at a Mexican restaurant that serves sour cream with absolutely everything.

I used to say to only eat at Mexican restaurants with Spanish words in them ("Michoacana" stands a good chance of being good; "el Taco shack" sends up serious red flags; and something like "Larry's Mexican Grill" should be avoided at all costs; even Del Taco, with its grammatically-nonsensical name, still at least contains Spanish words, and not-coincidentally has OK tacos), but then I ate a place in Vancouver, WA called El Tapatio, and it was literally the worst.  What can one do?

The best I've come up with is to analyze the menu: if near every menu item comes with a side of sour cream, ditch it.  Mexicans in Mexico never eat sour cream, sour cream is gross and disgusting and you should feel gross and disgusting for eating it, and that same level of gross and disgusting carries over to their other food, too.  Have some slightly higher standards with your Mexican--avoid places that serve sour cream.

• You can refuse to wear sweatpants and/or PJs outside the house post-High School.

We all did it.  No shame in it.  We wore our PJs to school some bleary, winter mornings.  We were almost making a statement of sorts, against the vanity of fashion and the suffocating impositions of decorum, by showing up to homeroom in our sweatpants.

But at some point in our maturity it is not enough to simply make a statement, no, one must also act--and the great revolts of history were not accomplished in sweats.  Even dirty hippies protesting Vietnam at least put on some denim in the morning.  At some point, wearing PJs all day long becomes less a sign of protest than of resignation and self-defeat.  Again, this is not to speak out against sweats or PJs in the least--few pleasures are greater than lounging around a warm fire place on a winter's eve clad only in plaid.  I'm just saying that, for the sake of your self-respect, to change into something else to wear outside the house once you've reached legal voting age.

And perhaps closely related to this is: college girls, you can choose not to wear black leggings every. single. day.  I understand that right now they are considered "fashionable" (whatever that means); I understand that they're "comfortable" (though I confess I've never associated tight-clothing with comfort); and I understand that it's hell finding flattering, form-fitting jeans.  And again, I'm not even saying to quit wearing leggings altogether, I'm not so quixotic as that.  I'm just suggesting, maybe at least once a week, you put on a pair of pants, or even just throw a skirt over your leggings.  Practice that baseline level of self-respect.  See how you feel.

I Really Want To Root For Oregon This New Years...

...you know, have a team from my Pacific Northwest win the first-ever college football playoffs and finally humble the arrogant SEC.  But then, arrogant sadly describes Oregon too, doesn't it.

But even laying aside for now the character failings of the Duck's obnoxious fan base, part of why I'm finding it difficult to root for Oregon this year is because their grad student Union had to straight-up go on strike this month in order to win a compensation package that is still even worse than mine.  Considering the literal millions that Nike pours into Oregon's athletics each year, that shabby treatment of the grad students who do the actual teaching is utterly unconscionable. 

And University of Oregon is supposed to be one of the good guys!  Right?  Eugene in most folks' imaginations is grouped together with, say, Berkley, or Greenwich Village, as one of those havens for ultra-leftist thought (Eugene had not one but two separate Occupy encampments back in 2011).  If even they have student labor problems and horridly misplaced spending priorities, then what of the rest of us?

I fear that if Oregon finally defeats the SEC this year, it will only because they will have become an SEC team in all but name, which would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed.   Combined with the repressed concussion reports and fake-classes scandals and excused sexual assault and general de-emphasis on academics, each year makes it more and more difficult for me to watch college football in good conscience. 

Happy Holidays

Fall semester 2011, I had this soft-spoken Muslim student, a refugee from Iraq.  Didn't speak much.  I asked her idly one December day, during a workshop, if there was a Muslim equivalent to Christmas; she said yes, the Day of Ashura, which in 2011 fell on that very day, December 5th.  Everyone in class immediately felt bad that she was in class (though we were also kinda impressed).  I told her that had I known about it, I would have totally excused her absence.  She just shrugged in that inimitable way that I'm pretty sure only war refugees can do.

In any case, to any and all Muslims out there, for what it's worth, I hope you had a Happy Day of Ashura.

Moreover, to all of my various Jewish friends out there, including those of you who've kindly invited me over to light the Menorah, I hope you are having a Happy Hanukkah right now.

And of course, to the super-majority of my friends who either self-identify as Christian or are of Christian decent, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

And to my Orthodox, Catholic, and/or Latin-American friends, I hope that that Merry Christmas extends through the Enunciation, as well.

Tis the season when some otherwise-well-intentioned folks I know demand indignantly of those who say Happy Holidays, "What's wrong with saying 'Merry Christmas,' huh?!"

Nothing's wrong with it.  It's just that I want to include the rest of this breath-taking mass of humanity too.

Happy Holidays.

My Way

Once in awhile, you can post Frank Sinatra's "My Way" unironically.

For this was hands down my hardest semester ever you see--and it was entirely self-inflicted.  I took four graduate-level classes (five if you count Teacher Training), including two seminars, one of which was the infamous Walt Whitman seminar.  This was all in a frankly reckless bid to finish the last of my doctoral course work in only two years flat.  I was advised explicitly against such a foolhardy load by my adviser, at least one classmate straight-up laughed in my face when he learned I was doing it, while another said that whenever he got stressed-out this semester, he just took comfort in the fact that at least he wasn't me.

Moreover, part way through the semester, I learned that the undergrad Spanish class I took last Spring, more than just fulfilling my foreign language requirement, actually did count towards my credit hours, and thus I hadn't actually needed to take 4 classes after all!  But by then I was already in too deep; now my pride was on the line, and it was less that I needed to prove to others that I could do it, than that I needed to prove it to myself.

This all came to a head throughout the month of November, when I realized that if I had any hope of finishing these four papers (two 20-pagers, two 10-pagers), that I needed to start on them now.  My Fall Break was one in name only, as I stressed out each day trying to churn out a complete rough draft of each.

I did.  I turned them all in.  Early.  I'm really tired now, and have never needed a month-long Christmas break more than I do now.

Although I did sleep in every day--I arranged my schedule that way.  That's right, I slept in all the time and was still uber-productive, so suck on that Stephen Covey.  I also took all Sunday's off.  Every single one.  I did it my way, indeed.  As such, I'm pretty I have earned the right to sing sincerely, with feeling, that there were times, I'm sure you knew, when I bit off more than I could chew.  But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate up, and spit it out.  I faced it all, and I stood tall, and did it myyyy waaaayyyy!

Update:  Grades now posted.  Straight A's.  My first 4.0 at Iowa.   And more, what's more than this, I did it myyy waaayyy!

Hamlet as a Christmas Play

Embedded within Andy William's Holiday supermarket-radio standard "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year", lurks the line: "They'll be scary ghost stories/and tales of the glories/of Christmases long, long ago..."  In what is otherwise an unadulterated work of Christmas schmaltz--so sugary sweet it'll rot your teeth--that line has always jumped out at me like, well, a ghost, for as long as I can remember.  

"Scary ghost stories"?  Since when is that a Christmas tradition--and not only a tradition, but one supposedly as seasonal as mistletoe and caroling?

Apparently not all that long ago it was a legit thing we did--and Andy William's 1963 hit probably debuted right at the tale-end of our collective memory of that storied tradition.  In 1891, British humorist Jerome K. Jerome purportedly said: "Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories...Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres."  Evidently in Victorian England--the source of all our other modern-day yuletide practices--the "scary ghost stories" were as much a hallmark of the Christmas season as the stockings, the trees, the holly, the carols, and jolly ol' St. Nich.

It is of course no coincidence that Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a ghost story--and far less well known is that Dickens also published many other ghost stories for Christmas ("The Signal-Man" is a good one I had to read for a class last year).  Also, James Joyce's 1914 story "The Dead", wherein a middle-aged Irish professor learns that his wife still pines for her lover who died at 17--that is, he learns the dead are still with us--likewise takes place during a Christmas party.  It apparently used to be the rule, not the exception, to contemplate the dead on Christmas.

So why did the ghost stories disappear so thoroughly from the Holidays? Partly it may be that modern-day Halloween siphoned off all the ghost stories (at least here in America, anyways); partly it might have to do with the fact that we don't tell any stories on Christmas Eve anymore--a solid half-century of Holiday movies and TV specials has taken care of that; partly it may be that few believe in (or admit to believing in) actual ghosts anymore; partly it's yet another sign of how our cowardly modern age refuses to face death; and partly it may just finally have seemed a little gauche to discuss death during a holiday that celebrates a Birth.

But on the other hand, "scary ghost stories" fit right in with Christmas, in their own sort of way.  The holiday does occur right after Winter Solstice, when the nights are longer than any other time of year--and thus when the dark things have the longest time to haunt them, no matter how bright our festive lights might try to shoo 'em away.  That Birth also portends a rather spectacular Death, as you might recall--and not just any death either, but literally the Death to end all Deaths.  Christmas is a day, then, to remember how close death is to us--and of what awaits us after death, too. 

Which brings me to Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is also a ghost story--and early in the biting (December?) cold of Act I, Marcellus the palace guard, in trying to understand the ghost's sudden appearance and just as sudden disappearance, exclaims:

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.
-Hamlet Act I.i.181-187

Now, perhaps Marcellus here is simply running his mouth in a frothing panic, just trying to call to mind all the disparate ghost-lore he knows in trying to understand this fearsome apparition...or, perhaps Marcellus is calmly hypothesizing that the ghost disappeared because it is the Christmas season, "Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated," when ghosts have the least power to walk the earth.  For apparently on Christmas, "no spirit dares stir abroad, no fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm."  Perhaps that is why the English were so cavalier to tell ghost stories on Christmas Eve--they maybe believed that this was the one night a year when the ghosts had no power to haunt them.  

That also means it would truly take a powerful ghost with a terrible purpose--say, Prince Hamlet's murdered father, "murdered most foul"--to be able to walk the Earth during Christmas season.  Truly, something must be rotten in the state of Denmark for a ghost to appear during Christmas.

Now, I'm not here to make a call for a return to Holiday ghost stories or what have you--we in the U.S. get quite enough of that on Halloween, like I said.  Besides, I actually kinda like our modern conception of Christmas as the time of year when we stake out our brightest lights against our darkest night, when we unequivocally proclaim our faith in new birth in the face of winter's total death, when we deign not to even acknowledge the ghosts, so confident are we in the coming return to life.  No, my ambitions this Christmas are a more modest:

I would just like to see a Christmas production of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

I think it would be spectacular to see a Christmas tree in the background when Claudius proclaims victory over Fortinbras, or when Prince Hamlet cries "Oh that this too, too sullied flesh would melt..." maybe while handling an unopened gift.  I'd like to see holly strung about when the players perform their play within a play.  I'd love to see Prince Hamlet contemplatively handle a Baby Jesus figurine from a small, nearby Nativity scene while he recites the famous "To be or not to be, that is the question..."  And when Ophelia appears, I'd love to see an ironic sprig of mistletoe overhead when she tries to give back loving "remembrances of yours/That I have longèd long to redeliver" while he shouts back angrily "get thee to a nunnery!"  And I cannot think of a more hauntingly beautiful setting for Ophelia's suicide than under a flickering Christmas light display.  Oh yes, I think it would be absolutely lovely to see a Christmas production of Hamlet with full seasonal decorations, one that explicitly foregrounds the "scary ghost stories" of Christmases long, long ago.

If someone knows of some such production, won't you please drop me a line?