it’s not about you

Yeah, right. We all know I’m a fighter.

I had a really weird dream two nights ago — I dreamed that I killed someone. Well that’s not entirely accurate. Technically, I woke up before she was dead, but I dreamed that there was this woman who was trying to kill both me and Judah. I knew that we would both die if I didn’t kill her first.

I don’t relish the thought of killing someone. I don’t like it. I think it’s wrong. But in this dream, it was kill or be killed. If I didn’t fight her off, I would be dead in the end, and so would my daughter. It’s kinda freaky.

I’m not really sure I know why she wanted to kill me. In fact, I don’t even know what this woman’s name was. I can’t even remember what led up to the fight scene, except that Judah and I were both on the run. We had stopped in this bathroom so Judah could use the toilet, and while we were in the washroom part of the bathroom, the woman - my nemesis - stopped in the vanity part to fix her hair.

It’s funny how things in dreams don’t always make sense. Why in the world would she stop to fix her hair while chasing us? Some Hollywood projection that it doesn’t matter what women do as long as they look good doing it? I don’t know, but I know it meant we were trapped. Judah didn’t really understand what was going on, which I’m sure is me in real life projecting her continued innocence into the dream. And she did a much better job of following directions in the dream than she does in real life.

While the woman was fixing her hair in the vanity, I crept up to the other side of the wall beside the door. When Judah finished using the toilet, she starting walking out of the bathroom, about to go straight through to the vanity. I began to motion for her to go back, go back - violently waving my arm and pointing my finger very enthusiastically and using very serious facial expressions. She must have gotten the message because she retreated.

This woman-who-wanted-me-dead heard Judah’s footsteps and started to come into the bathroom. As soon as she did, I grabbed her by the head from behind, threw her to the floor and jumped on top of her, trying to suffocate her with my hands. She had a curling iron in her hand and when she fell, she dropped it on the tile floor. When I jumped on top of her, her hand fell against the curling iron and it burned the flesh off on the back of her hand, which helped me in my element of surprise, since it caused her pain and sent her into a bit of a panic as well. It’s harder to think straight when you’re panicking.

We began to roll around a bit on the floor. I was trying to suffocate her and she was trying to get a hold on me. I got around behind her and tried to snap her neck, but she was bigger than me and I couldn’t get enough leverage to twist her head. That’s really probably because I have no idea how to snap someone’s neck.

I continued trying to suffocate her with only my hands, which seemed to be working, because she wasn’t able to get a handle on me. She kept flailing her arms and kicking her legs and I had to concentrate on what I was doing. I wanted it over quickly - because I didn’t want to have to kill someone and I didn’t want her to get the chance to overpower me, and I didn’t want Judah to have to see her mother kill anyone. What I was doing began to have its effect, because the woman’s struggling began to subside.

I woke up before it was over. I’m glad. I don’t think I could live with myself if I killed someone, even if it was in a dream.

After I woke up, I told Joshua about the dream, thinking he would be shocked that I (almost) killed someone, but he wasn’t. He said he’s killed before in his dreams, but that it usually involved a gun or some other weapon. I told him great, that must make me really horrible if I dream I kill people with my bare hands.

Maybe it’s a sort of karmic payback for the dream I had three nights ago where a man tried to rape me but I woke up before he could overpower me. Cause, that one? That one was freaky.

via the New York Times.

Saddam Hussein, the dictator who led Iraq through three decades of brutality, war and bombast before American forces chased him from his capital city and captured him in a filthy pit near his hometown, was hanged just before dawn Saturday during the morning call to prayer.

Wow. There’s really nothing else to say.

Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem. It’s as if there were now Three Ages of Woman: first Mary-Kate, then Britney, then Courtney. Boys don’t seem to have such constricted horizons. They wouldn’t stand for it — much less waggle their butts and roll around for applause on the floor of a school auditorium.

via “Middle School Girls Gone Wild,” an editorial observer column from the New York Times.

In other girlhood news, check out this article: What’s Wrong With Cinderella?, also via the New York Times. It’s a much longer read, but as a mother of a Cinderella girl, who refers to herself as the princess and me the queen (not to hard to argue with that!), I found it very interesting. Also as someone who is concerned with the limitations and expectations that will be placed on my daughter (as well as my son, of course) simply because of her gender, I found it very interesting. I found it very, very interesting, because I have a daughter, who as I have written before, “lives for sparkly.”

That’s fine and good, just so long as sparkly isn’t all that there is to live for.

Anyone want to teach me how to do the dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller?

I’m composing my New Year’s Resolutions and next year is gonna rock.

Now this sounds like a great idea.

The Compact originated in December 2005 at a San Francisco dinner party, where guests decided to take recycling one step further and go for a year without new purchases. Consumerism, they said, is destroying the world and most of us already own far more than we need.

The exceptions are food, medicine and underwear.

I wonder if it’s feasible. And I wonder if diapers count as underwear.

Home ownership, that is. Good LORD.

Even if we somehow saved enough money (it would take longer than our lifetimes, I’m sure) or won the lottery or something, we couldn’t even afford the taxes, much less the insurance. Oh, well. There are upsides to renting. A few examples:

If something goes wrong, all you have to do is pick up the phone - you don’t have to fix it yourself.

…

Okay, that’s all I’ve got.

Thanks to Katie for the heads-up.

I got:
a 365-day Sudoku calendar
a French-press commuter mug
a jewelry box
several canvases
a tabletop easel
a Mannekin Pis magnet
an ornament
an Amazon gift certificate

Joshua got:
a 365-day Far Side calendar
an electric blanket (some gifts keep on giving)
a vacuum wine bottle stopper set
a lighter
an iTunes gift certificate

Judah got:
Alexander and Terrible Horrible No Good Very Day
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Where the Wild Things are (twice!)
Runaway Bunny
a doll
Mater
Polly Pocket car (twice! - in different colors!)
several outfits
tights and socks
ponytail holders
Play-Doh (twice!)
Alphabet cards
a necklace and bracelet
a piggy bank
lots of change
play food
a REAL (as in breakable) coffee/tea set (which we all ate breakfast off of)
Princess Tupperware
some shoesox
a wiggly snake
art supplies
a snowman mug
a mirror and “lipsticks”

Killian got:
The Very Quiet Cricket
bath squirt toys
an Uglydoll
a piggy bank
a shape-sorter
stroller/car seat toys
a Little People Noah’s Ark
a Little People giraffes and tigers for Noah’s Ark
a choo-choo train
some clothes
a Bumbo
a This Little Piggy hand puppet/book
a penguin mug
a snowman plate

Good Lord, my kids cleaned up.

What did you get?

Fifty-five years ago yesterday, priests at the Dijon Cathedral in eastern France enacted a rather unusual Christmas pageant for the benefit of several hundred schoolchildren: They hanged and burned Santa Claus.

The priests accused Santa of occupying more and more space during Christmas and compared him to the cuckoo, which usurps the nests of other birds. What would those priests do today, in an age when inflatable Santas dot the landscape? They would probably say Santa got off too lightly back in 1951.

Were the priests right? Arguments about the meaning and symbolism of Christmas are now an annual ritual and often spring from the idea that the festival has one unchanging meaning. But even a brief history of Christmas reveals a different portrait: The festival has been claimed, rejected and reinvented over the centuries. Festivals such as Christmas reflect a nation’s culture and psyche, and as the nation has changed, the meaning of Christmas has also changed.

“The dynamics of culture and society are played out in these events,” said Jack Santino, who studies folklore and popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “The deepest, most serious problems and values of a society as a group are dramatized by how people celebrate and who they celebrate with and who they identify themselves with.”

Perhaps the earliest claim on Christmas was the strategic decision by the early church to Christianize non-Christian festivals that occurred around the winter solstice.

“In the early centuries of the church, they debated whether they should fix a date to celebrate the nativity,” explained Santino. “They chose December 25: ‘People are celebrating the birth of the sun, and we should convince them to celebrate the birth of the Son.’ ”

The growth of Santa as the predominant icon of Christmas in much of the world grew out of the efforts of retail wizards such as John Wanamaker and Rowland Hussey Macy, founders of the modern department store. Much like the early church fathers, Wanamaker and Macy systematically laid claim to a Christmas of their own making in the 19th century.

By this point, said Russell W. Belk, a sociologist and anthropologist at York University in Toronto, Christmas had already been through several incarnations — Christians in the United States had initially resisted Christmas because it was seen as tied to the Catholic calendar, but waves of European immigrants brought traditions of Christmas celebrations with them. Still, the idea of giving gifts to relatives was not the norm, especially among English immigrants, where Christmas gifts were primarily seen as acts of benevolence toward servants and slaves.

“A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens’s 1843 morality tale about a greedy merchant transformed by Christmas into a generous soul, was part of the process by which Christmas became a festival that primarily celebrated the family. But even as millions of people were moved by the redemptive tale of Scrooge, real-life merchants were far more likely to change Christmas than to be changed by it, as Leigh Schmidt, the head of Princeton University’s religion department, pointed out in his book “Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays.”

Business magnates who had once protested that holidays such as Christmas were a drain on the economy spotted the business potential of Christmas and encouraged the idea of gift-giving among family. Where Christmas gifts had once been primarily about charity, advertisers and marketers encouraged the notion that Christmas was primarily a family celebration and stressed the importance of reciprocal gift exchanges for friends and relatives. By the 20th century, American marketing geniuses led by Coca-Cola had seized on the advertising potential of Santa Claus. Although Santa’s ancestors in Europe and Asia had various religious connotations, the modern Santa is an American invention, with growing appeal in Europe and around the world.

“Coca-Cola to some extent owns Christmas,” said Belk. In the 1930s, he added, “they had a painter commissioned to do one painting of Santa Claus every year . . . it seems likely that the red color of Santa’s outfits came from Coca-Cola’s paintings.”

Children in non-Christian and non-religious homes in the United States now expect gifts at Christmas — and the practice is increasingly popular around the world as well. Santa is huge in Japan, for example, where Christians make up only a tiny slice of the population. In the United States, Christmas celebrations have also exerted a gravitational force on non-Christian festivals: Hanukkah and Kwanzaa share the modern Christmas notion of giving and receiving gifts.

The annual disagreements about the meaning of Christmas reflect the competition to define Christmas in a diverse nation. For a religious and still predominantly Christian nation such as the United States, Christmas remains Christianity’s most important claim on the public calendar. This Christmas is very much about Jesus. But for a nation that also worships at the altar of capitalism, Christmas offers a good part of the retail economy a chance to move the accounting ledger from the red to the black. The patron saint of this Christmas is Santa Claus.

via The Washington Post.

via the New York Times.

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, women of all economic levels — poor, middle class and rich — were steadily gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force. By the mid-’90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier.

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-’90s.

For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span.

These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements — the first female secretary of state, the first female lead anchor of a nightly newscast, the first female president of Princeton, and, next month, the first female speaker of the House — do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say.

A decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision.

Grrr…

I felt my first California earthquake this morning. Only took ten months.

I was sitting in the tub with Judah, letting the shower fall on us, when it felt like the whole tub moved as if the walls stretched - just for a minute. Then it was over. I thought about asking Joshua if he felt that, but thought someone next door just slammed the door really hard, or that Judah had fallen hard against the bath pillow we were leaning against, so I didn’t say anything.

Last night, I fell asleep in bed around 9:30 trying to comfort Killian, and when Joshua came to bed past 11, he said he felt an earthquake earlier in the evening. He said it felt like the building was swaying, like he was on a boat, and that it gave him a little sense of vertigo. He said came in to check on us, only to find all three of us passed right out.

Joshua and I are now wondering if we’ve felt earthquakes before without realizing it. For the amount of times Judah jumps off the furniture around here, I’m sure the guy below us thinks so.

Anyway, it’s kind of exciting. I feel like watching disaster movies today.

Link.