(no subject)

[mmm_pi3]

Hi I hate the holidays. If you know me, you know I'm a weirdo socially liberal progressive Catholic. Thus, I hate the commercialization bit of the holidays to no end, it's even to the point where the churchy part doesn't hit me right anymore. I'm all for Easter/Triduum. (Ok, so shhhhh, I accept the fact that students aren't supposed to care about religion and I'm a bit of a freak for doing so.) I loathe all those secular, non-carol Christmas songs, with the exception of Carol of the Bells. You can't go wrong with that song. Everything about this season is just presents, presents, presents. You're supposed to give presents and cards to people you either don't care about or for whom you have no idea what to get. You're expected to convince children that some fat old man in a garish outfit is going to come down the chimney with a large sack of over-expensive, easily-broken crap because they haven't done anything as bad as kill someone over the past year. In this stupid bloody state, stores are not allowed to be open on Christmas. No matter if you don't celebrate Christmas, too bad, you can't work for a living because some asshole celebrates the consumerized birthday of some guy who died two thousand years ago on another continent. I hate the holidays.

About the presents thing. Once again, if you have talked to me about it within the last three years or so, you know that I avoid not only Christmas, but all other presents. I like presents, sure. Everyone likes presents, but I won't be offended or bothered if I don't get any, since I don't give any. Well that's not true. I like giving presents too, just not if they're forced. In my mind, presents are something that you should get for someone cos you're somewhere and you see something and you say to yourself, "You know, that would be perfect for So-and-So." And so you get the present and give it to So-and-So just because. Aren't surprise presents so much more fun anyway? People have now come to expect presents for every goddamn occasion in existence. I think I've finally started to wean my mother off of getting and giving presents between us. Part of the problem with the obligatory occasion gift-giving is that more often than not, people end up with gifts that they really don't appreciate and that really don't mean anything. Probably better to give your obligatory gift recipients money or gift cards so's they can choose how to spend it. Man, I'm such a Scrooge.

So yeah, being that the above is my philosophy on gift-giving, if and when I have children, I'd like to raise them without Santa Claus, and probably without expectation of gifts on specific occasions. Is this cruel? No, seriously, I'd like to know if this is a reasonable goal. I'll stop talking about the holidays now.
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By the way, I have added some goals to my list:

• write a book
• clean the apartment (for the first time!)
• do dirty dishes right away
• get five As

Reasonable, I think. Especially the grade thing. This is the first time in my life that I've had only As and Bs after a grading period, but I've still never ever broken 4 As. I'm really ticked about that Language, Gender, and Society grade. If I'd only not been a lazy ass and actually bothered to spend time composing some bullshit in class to turn in as homework, I'd have gotten an A. Raaar. That class was such nonsense, all you had to do was know how to write coherently and cohesively; no need to know what the hell you were talking about or to know what the word modality means. It was great, all my papers were such crap; I had no clue what I was talking about and I pulled all sorts of conclusions out of thin air, but my TA thought my writing style was "fabulous" and I used all these fancy words and elaborate sentence structures that I got 100% on all of them. hahahaha. The only engineer in a class full of sociology, linguistics, and gender studies majors and my writing is "fabulous." hahahahaha. I'm so arrogant. hahahahahahahahahaha. Ok, I'm done. Hee.

I apologize for the crappy style of the holidays rant. I've really been trying to pay attention to the quality of my writing, but a) I'm in a shoddy mood due to i) the holidays and ii) being at the mother's house and b) I'm at my boring data-entry job and I don't want to waste too much time on my writing when my monitor faces the opening of my cubicle. (yes, I have a cubicle! whee!) Oh, yeah, I almost got hit by a bus on my way to work this morning when I stopped to say hi to my boss while in the middle of crossing the street when it said DON'T WALK. Hooray for downtown Boston.

EDIT: Two more things.
-I pretty much am in love with Gmail.
-A month ago today I stopped wearing makeup. It's been liberating.

So uh yeah, have a happy new year and stuff. I only have a week left here, thank God. A week from right now, I will be in Pittsburgh International Airport, on my way home. I miss Pittsburgh. Already.