So This Is Christmas

Christmas has an interesting history, of which I am mostly ignorant. Some place its roots as far back as Saturnalia, a Roman holiday which may or may not have been about a week in length at approximately this point in the Julian calendar. This event was marked by public revelry, slaves and masters 'reversing' roles (more as a jest than in reality, naturally), and gift giving. It nearly coincides with the winter solstice, which is probably not coincidental. (One wonders why human beings are so fascinated by the regular motions of the objects in the sky and mark them with such care.) Without any historical facts to back this up, it seems to me that most cultures (selection bias: those which left some indication of their existence and culture, that is, mostly ones that became agrarian, which may explain the predominant predilection with predicting the motions of heavenly bodies by cultures that I'm aware of) have holidays (holy days right?) around this time of year. Role-playing games with interesting and well-thought out settings, I'm thinking specifically of Exalted here, mimic this trend (and make it awesome, Calibration sounds cool to me, anyway). The end of a year, or digging back further, the end of the yearly harvesting cycle, happens now. The crops are all harvested and processed, and the farmers must wait for the warm times to return. (Our agrarian past explains a lot about many of the more common elements in those agrarian cultures that we know about, including our more enduring myths about resurrection, etc.) The winter solstice marks the time from which the days start becoming longer, the sun, unconquered, returns to us. In more accessible parts of our culture, it is meant to mark a time of merriment and good will toward men. The basic underpinnings of the religious elements call for the celebration of the birth of our lord and savior.

That serves as a preface to my main thrust, however. I'm an atheist, and it's Christmas. I'm much more dedicated to atheism now than I have been in the past, which makes this time of year, shall we say, troublesome for me. But why is that? As I'm sure you have all heard, we don't celebrate Christmas properly in this country as it is. "It's too commercial", "We forgot about the reason for the season", etc. With the exception of my earlier Christmases with my fundamentalist side of the family that I no longer have any contact with (thank goodness), I've never experienced Christmas as religious event. Christmas, so it would seem, is an increasingly secular holiday. Still, the name and basic assumptions (in lay American culture, I'll say) are those of a Judeo-Christian mindset. Being fervently wished many merry christmases already by every Tom, Dick, Jose, and Harry out here in Texas left me with a quandary. On the one hand, I value the conclusions I have come to after years of personal deliberation on the subject of religion, and believe that others would benefit from sharing in my current beliefs on the matter. On the other, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to change anyone's mind on the subject by pulling them up short when they 'wish me a merry christmas' by telling that "I don't celebrate Christmas because I'm an atheist, but I hope [they] enjoy [their] time off from work". In the end it just seems grinchy to pull that on people, especially because I'd probably end up delivering that with some wrong tone or other in my voice and alienating folks (though I'm sure the momentary pause and grimace before I parrot back an unenunciated 'merry christmas' doesn't do much to endear me to them either).

In the face of this, my solution is one of co-opting. A rose by any other name, right? The holiday is already waxing secular in popular culture to begin with, or so it would seem. So, rather than object to the unicorns in the christmas closet, I choose to focus my attention on those aspects of the holiday which are worthwhile. It's a bit cowardly, and not particularly original, since, apparently, lots of folks are ignoring the religious aspects of the holiday already.

The traditions of the holidays at this time of year called upon us to reflect on the year which has passed, show love to friends, family, and strangers, be joyful, and have an eye toward the coming year. These are all things that I can get behind. We celebrate the good times we have had with food and cheer. We see the year born once more and we can also take that time for a metaphorical rebirth of ourselves. Where Thanksgiving is, to my mind, a holiday focused on the abundance of good things that we can share with each other, Christmas has a  more solem feel to it. It is a holiday for the death of the year, to be followed by the birth of a new one a week later. Death, in the sense that it is used in the tarot, is more about change than _DEATH_ (scary and evil!).

So indeed, merry Christmas to everyone. May we all experience joy as we put this year to rest in good company and look forward to the positive changes we will experience in our lives in the new year.

 I return to you a month later. Much has happened in that time frame. Much more than I might have thought could. Of course, less than what I may have wanted or what you might have expected has occurred. But what isn't relative, these days? So it goes, I suppose.

I am still in Texas. I may not be, come March. Or I might still be. That will depend on my bravery as well as my ambition. Perhaps it will also depend on my own foolhardy tendency toward choosing unusual paths (actually, that is probably the strongest factor in my possible decision to uproot once again). I chose St. John's with the idea of doing something unusual, and it is likely that relocating once again will spring from my predilection toward the "path less traveled by". I have yet to determine why it is that I do this.

Restaurant work is what I thought it was, to paraphrase a coach in the NFL that none of you will know about. That is, I still romanticize the industry, but I know it is not for me, which is to say that practical experience has born out what my theoretical knowledge told me. Still, I romanticize restaurant work, and I think I have finally figured out why. To put it simply, the people who work in restaurants are people who I identify with. They are, for the most part, intelligent and ambitious, but without a strong work ethic. They are in limbo. They have a variety of experiences and fields of knowledge (very interesting ones at that, I've found that lots of political and business degree majors end up in restaurants), but they are, to a (wo)man, people who put on the brakes, so to speak. Some haven't finished their degrees, others have. By and large though, they are in the air. They studied things in college that interested them, but those things failed to capture their interest to the point that they kept up with the field as a career. They are human beings. They are in transition. They have plans, hopes, dreams. Some will fail. Some will reach too high, and like Icarus, will fall to the firmament. Some will see the lie and move on. Some will carry out the lie and move on to management. Some still will continue on and be servers for life. It is the transitional element that draws my thematic eye. These are people, have no doubt. They are real. They have feelings, hopes, dreams, faults. I love them. I hate them for being so short-minded and simple. I love that they have so little regard for their practical futures. They capture so many things about human beings that I enjoy and love, as well as hate and wish to change.

The service industry depends on the noble lie, and the general capacity of human beings to accept that lie instead of examining the information and arriving at a correct assumption. Hotels, restaurants, tourism, etc. all depend on the generosity and trust of those persons who have money but not the expertise or experience to acquire the things supplied without the additional research/resources of larger corporate entities. For the most part, people are right to depend on such institutions to provide these services. The service industry purchases the services at a bulk rate and provides those services to the individual, making a profit between the price offered to individuals and groups.

The transitional element is the crucial element to me. I think that some day I will write something focusing on that aspect of the service industry; the difference of the experience of those who work in the industry and those who purchase the services it provides. It's a sexy subject to me. What's not to like about a small group of misfits who provide a constant service to an everchanging group of human beings while still being individuals with their own flaws? None of us want to be where we are, but we know that what we do is the best way to earn the money we need to keep our lives sustainable. It is a balance between need and independence, between cold sociopathy and meak cronyism. Hotels manage to offer a similar environment, from the perspective of a front desk employee. You check in the guests and check them out, but you have no other influence other than that. You are subject to the whims of fate. Did housekeeping perform well with respect to their room? Was the meal they had out on the town any good? Were they harrassed by midshipmen? Were they picky, or easily-pleased? Did their dog die while they stayed at your hotel, or did the babysitter call them to tell them how well behaved their children were? Their happiness is totally beyond your control, yet you are the ultimate arbiter of their experience, and the management is keenly aware of this. So, in the end we have a small group of unmotivated and listless individuals who have paused on their own lifepath to meet the impossible needs of others for the small period of time that they work for the company, hoping for success and rewards, but often met with scorn and lack of consideration. They represent faceless and wealthy corporations rather than that ephemeral hope for greater things. They are the object of scorn for frustrated people rather than the common people with thwarted ambitions that they truly are.

Remember them, these people. They wanted to be more than they are. They stopped on the path of life to gather themselves. True, they do not care one whit for your problems, but neither do you care about their own. They are human and they are where they are because they reached beyond their capacity rather than settling for what they could easily take, only to find themselves settling for less than that.

 

Earth X - Dystopian Marvel Sensation

So, months ago I bought a trade paperback copy of Earth X. I bought this because it came highly recommended from Nick, whose taste I trust to yield interesting things. He had mentioned it to me some time ago, but I remember the oddest things at times, and so asked after it as well as Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe at the little comic shop in downtown Atown, balked momentarily at the price ($30), and bought it as well as PKTMU anyway.

I read PKTMU quickly (it is, regrettably, a single issue) and didn't get into Earth X. It looked long, and I was a few weeks away from moving out to Austin, which meant I had other things to be doing.

I finally pulled out Earth X on Thursday night and started reading. I didn't stop until I was more than halfway through, staying up far later than I had intended to. Which is unsurprising, really, since I am easily engrossed by reading and have been since I was rather young. I picked it up almost immediately after waking up, and finished before I had to go to work.

It's phenomenal. Comparison's have been drawn between (and Earth X was done in part because of the success of) DC's Kingdom Come and Earth X, mostly because both take a large scale view of the universe they take place in, star the big stars of their particular license, deconstruct the idea of super heroes, and are apocalyptic. I liked Kingdom Come quite a bit, but in the end, I'm much more familiar with the Marvel side of comics than the DC side, which tips the scales in the favor of EX. I ended up getting the jokes more often (poor Bucky).

The way it was done also leans more to my tastes than Kingdom Come. KC was much more visually oriented. The art style was gorgeous photo-realism and there were lots of splash pages (it is a very pretty book). EX is really heavy on dialogue (with lots of text-only interludes between 'issues') and the images almost feel cramped at times with how small they are, like everything is being squeezed in, but in a way that ups the intensity of the read (for me, anyway). As a reader, I squirmed my way through the panels along with the desperate characters as the story unfolded. EX also benefited from a cast of characters who were more human beings and less gods incarnate, the way that the DC flagship characters tend to be. Or maybe the things that keep the Marvel characters awake at night are things that make more sense to me as things to stay awake at night over.

Anyway, EX does an excellent job of stringing multiple story threads together into a coherent tapestry with enough creativity and thoughtful (Fact or Crap) changes to make it all hang together without violating one's sense of the essential characteristics of the involved characters (unless one is one of those crazy canon continuity types who can't stand being so frivolous with the carefully constructed backstories of so many characters). The development of the plot through dialogue between the main viewpoint character and his interlocutor is well-handled, and the plot devices don't end up feeling forced. It's a great read and well worth your time. If you don't know much about the Marvel mythos as a whole, some stuff will be a bit unclear to you, but the essentials are all in EX, so readers able to juggle a few things at once without the background will do fine anyway. Some have complained about the complexity of EX, and it is a complex plot at times with a few sharp turns here and there, but that's part of what makes it a satisfying read. And Joss Whedon liked it, too.

Dusting Off Old Ambitions

My mother sent me a package containing sundry items from my past recently, which I opened about an hour ago.

Some things made me sad, others made me laugh, and some gave me pause.

In particular, something that caught my eye and stopped me was a paper object, with a small photograph of my second grade self (I think, the shirt was from that era) and some small blurbs about myself. I wish I had a scanner at the moment.

The blurbs were as follows:

"All About Me

By Ben Crane

I like to: watch t.v.

I like to eat: chocolate pudding

One of my favorite books is: Dear Daddy

If I could go anywhere in the world, I would go to: Florida

When I grow up, I would like to be: a FBI guy"

I don't remember the book. Looking around online confirms the timeline I imagined for the time of the creation of this artifact, since it seems to concern itself with lost family members, and my parents had gotten divorced at some point just prior to my beginning the second grade.

Telling, in my opinion, are the last two things. I'm not so sure about Florida anymore (Nick doesn't speak well of it), but I think I'd like to give it a try sometime. Interesting to me is whether I wrote this before or after I had visited Florida (a trip which I remember mostly as a time in my life when I was an awful child to my mother and everyone around me, but also enjoyed in some aspects). I don't remember exactly when that trip happened. Thankfully, I remember the 'new episode' of Star Trek: TNG that aired while I was in Florida. Wikipedia informs me that this episode aired on April 26, 1993 (oh so close to a Sublime song). I believe this would place me at the end of the second grade when I visited Florida. It seems likely that I wrote Florida as a response after having been there, but I can't say for sure.

Anyway, of most note, however, is the last answer I gave (duh, right?). I had forgotten about that, and honestly, I'm kind of surprised that at that age I was interested in doing that (blame The X-Files, my mom was a loyal viewer at the time, and it was a great show). Turns out I'm not particularly qualified at the moment. But maybe it's something I can work toward. I'll need at least a master's degree in one the fields they like, and focusing on foreign affairs a bit more in my studies would probably help.

Regardless, looking over other old stuff from school has reminded me that once I was earmarked as a high achiever. I have most definitely fallen off the 'fast track' since then. I think I'd like to get back on it.

After one aborted attempt, I have now decided to make a more serious effort at this 'other blog site'. This time, it's personal!

A recent post from my other blog:

 I am flying out to Washington DC on November 26th. After a brief stint in Delaware, I will bus my way to DC on Saturday and spend a few days out there before flying back to Austin that Wednesday.

Spur of the moment, I suppose. I miss seeing some folks out there, and my roommate has been gone for about a week already and is likely to stay out in Maryland with his family for the holiday, so rather than spending it all by my lonesome, I decided to have a little adventure.

I'm thinking that I'll be dual-posting for awhile, until I get lazy enough to start using this full-time.