The Two Christmases

Posting Location: Family Home, Parma, OH.

So from my previous post expounding on Christmas and the surrounding traditions, one might assume that I'm a practicing Christian. That's not entirely accurate, but I'd like to focus on something that not many people like to openly admit: The fact that Christmas is no longer a strictly religious holiday. Actually, I'd like to take things one step further. I'd like to make the claim, here and now, that Christmas is no longer a single holiday.

I'm not talking about the trivial distinction between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I'm more talking about the subtle difference between Religious Christmas and Secular Christmas. I've personally taken to distinguishing the two as (respectively) Christmas and X-mas.

I'm sure some people can see where I'm going with this already. Christmas is the holiday of Jesus Christ, while X-mas is the holiday of Santa Claus. Christmas is the holiday with songs like Joy to the World, Silent Night, The First Noel, and O Little Town of Bethlehem. X-mas is the holiday with songs like Jingle Bells, Deck The Halls, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and We Wish You A Merry Christmas.

One point in favor of this interpretation is that both government and commerce enhance the distinction. For example, think about the songs I mentioned above; which ones are more likely to create complaints if they were included in a public school holiday pageant? If they can slip a holiday song under the Separation of Church and State filter, then it's probably a X-mas song rather than a Christmas one. It's hard to picture anyone getting away with a nativity scene in a store like, say, Krogers --- but who would seriously object to a scene with Santa and Frosty?

My biggest proof of this, however, can be found in the nation of Japan. Simply put, Japan celebrates Chrismas, despite the fact that only 1-2% of the Japanese population is actually Christian. To me, that says that Christmas is no longer strictly a religious holiday.

Due to this opinion, I tend to get annoyed at two different groups of people around the holidays. The first are the people who feel that all mention of "Christmas" specifically, or anything even remotely associated (like Santa, ect.) has to be avoided in order to preserve Separation of Church and State. The second are the people who feel that any attempt to "take the Christ out of Christmas" is a crime against their religion and an attempt to suppress their faith. Both groups associate Christmas as inextricably tied with the religion of Christianity, which I really don't see as the case. I'm the kind of person who objects just as strongly to the concept of putting a nativity scene in front of City Hall as I do at the concept of removing Santa Claus from the mall (both hypotheticals where I live).

And on that note, I'll sign off for now. With the holidays coming up, I have no idea when I'll next have a chance to really post here. I'll probably get at least one more entry before New Years. Speaking of which, I've also got a few plans for the blog for the coming year, that I may go into detail on later.

Until then, Happy Holidays and Merry X-mas!

So Many Distractions, So Little Time

Posting Location: Family Home, Parma, OH.

There's a very good excuse for the dropoff in blog entries lately. Unfortunately, it involves admitting how behind-the-times I am currently.

You see, it's mostly been because I've been reading the fifth Harry Potter book.

That's right, I have not yet read the fifth Harry Potter book all the way through; what's more, I only just started Saturday. I meant to read it the summer it came out, but then work hit, and one thing came after another...suddenly it's two and a half years later. Needless to say, I've not read the sixth book yet either. My shame knows no bounds.

Other than that it's been the usual rush that so many of us find ourselves in towards the end of December. I still haven't got all my Chrismas shopping done yet, although admittedly I haven't had to do much. I've already gone halfsies on gifts for every other immediate family member, all by request by other family members who'd already bought expensive gifts and were looking for someone to get half-reimbursement from. Whatever, saves me the trouble.

Went down to Tower City Center with the family on Saturday as part of this not-shopping I've been doing. We'd split up and planned to meet at the Warner Brother's Store, which was my suggestion, as the storefront was pretty easy to distinguish. This didn't exactly work, since I was working off of memories of being there that were at least two years old --- as it turns out that store no longer exists in Tower City (luckily we all had cell phones). What they had in it's place was a games store, which was decent enough. I also noted that they now apparently have the whole place set up with WiFi, which I felt was interesting.

Best part of the trip, though? Waiting for the bus to take us back to Parma, we noticed all these signs clustered around each other saying "Happy Diwali," "Happy Kwanzaa," "Happy Channuka," etc. My sister had pointed out that there was no "Merry Christmas" among those signs, which I had noticed, too. Then I noticed why; these well-wishing signs were all clustered around a light up nativity scene. Even though I've never heard any word of this, I can quite clearly picture the chain of events leading up to this:

*City puts up nativity scene.
*Enough people complain that nativity scene is endorsement of Christianity over other religions, in violation of Separation of Church and State.
*City hastily puts up signs for holidays in other religions so it's not just Christianity and no one can say they're playing favorites.

Which, you know, still misses the point, but at least they're trying.

Speaking of the second most important holiday in Christianity, I can't believe that it's managed to sneak up on me like this. Not that I'm the only one; my family put up our tree and decorations just yesterday. We have a real tree this year, which is the first time we've had one in a while; so long in fact that we had to buy a new base for the tree, as the previous one was shot. It was a little too big when we brought it in, we had to cut the top off; the angel is actually nestled between branches at the top rather than sitting at the highest point.

Unfortunately, a few years of working with a fake tree have apparently made me soft as far as hanging ornaments are concerned. My fingers seem to have forgotten what it's like to work with needles that can actually hurt if you press down on them, and my creativity seems to have forgotten what it's like to work with branches that you can't bend into positions that better suit you. At any rate, the tree looks fine, and I'm almost done with shopping, so I guess it's all good.

I'm Not Dead Yet

Posting Location: Family Home, Parma, OH.



...I've just been settling in. It took some creativity, but I finally found places for everything I brought back with me while I'm here. It's ironic; my room here is larger than the one in my apartment, but since it has it's own junk cluttering it up there's no longer really any room for the stuff I brought back with me. Even though obviously it all fit in here, somehow, before I moved into the apartment. Go figure.

In addition, it seems that forces are conspiring against my updating. By the time I sit down to blog at the end of the day, the wireless Internet connection in my house decides to take a nap for a few hours. If you are reading this now, then I have finally outsmarted my wireless connection. Hooray for me.

Of course, it's not like there's been much to write about lately, aside from having a game day with friends in Mansfield on Wednesday and obsessing over Runaways on Thursday. I mean, yes I found out the younger of my two sisters now has a boyfriend, and yes there's been some drama attached to that, but I think for now I'll follow the better part of discretion and not rant on all the details for the whole Internet to see. I'm sure she'll post it to her own blog if she wants (which I'd link to, but someone won't give me the web address, and it's apparently a friends-list-only blog anyway).

It occurs to me, however, that I've never ranted about my gaming group before now.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I interviewed two members of the group for my essay, here and here. Coincidentally, both of them are GM's for our little group, along with myself; James runs the longer-running of our three campaigns on Fridays, while me and Cueto-san alternate our campaigns on Saturdays.

At any rate, the final male member of our gaming group, Randy, had been in Europe for all of Autumn Quarter, mostly in France. He just got back this week, so we had a reunion of sorts down at Jame's home in Mansfield. Cueto-san was busy, neither of the girls were available, and Randy brought a friend of his we didn't know, so it was a little weird but fun all around. We played a lot of games while we were down there:

Fluxx: This is pretty much the card-game equivelant of Calvinball; the rules change virtually every turn. Games can last anywhere from a few minutes up to an hour, depending on what the rules become. Very entertaining.

Apples to Apples: Another card game, this has players taking turns as judges and trying to convince each other that the noun they just pulled from their hand best fits the adjective on the table or one of it's three listed synonyms. To give an example: The adjective in one round was "Unscrupulous." The other two players put down predictable nouns describing organizations and persons they felt were unethical. Not having anything of that sort in my hand, I put down "Oxygen." My argument? "Oxygen is an inanimate element, and is both unethical and unscrupulous by the very fact that scruples and ethics do not apply to it." I won that round. The game's totally subjective even when you're trying not to be, and real fun all around.

The Uncanny X-Men: Alert! Adventure Game: An old board game, the less said about which the better. Alright, I'm probably being overly harsh on it because I completely and unquestionably lost. It's hard to describe how badly I didn't win without going into details on how the game is played, and that's way too much detail for a quick rant like this.

Super Smash Brothers: Yes, the good-old Nintendo 64 game. I'm better at the Gamecube sequel, and it showed. Still, I had fun.

There was also a span of time where we were all helping Randy get through a portion of Silent Hill 2 that gave me a new appreciation for that franchise.

And once again, this post seems to have gone from being about several things to one thing. I'll follow up with what held my brain captive on Thursday in my next entry.

My Extremely Busy Week*

Posting Location: Family Home, Parma, OH (Family Laptop).

*May be a lie.

Between the excitement of last weekend and the excitement of this one I was forunate enough to enjoy a week's worth of something I rarely enjoy: time away from both family and academic concerns. In past years I was subject to dorm policy at the end of every quarter, where (officially) we had to be on the way home within 24 hours of our last final. But now that I'm in an apartment, I'm no longer under those rules. I figured I'd give myself a little mini-vacation before my actual vacation, and wait a week. I initially planned on going home on Friday, but then I realized that everyone would be going home Friday. So, Saturday became the new target, as a way to "beat the traffic." So what if I ended up heading home on Sunday; the point is I'm clever. Really.

So what did I end up doing over that week? As planned, a whole lot of nothing. Most of the week was spent planted in front of the computer net-surfing. Wednesday night I went to Applebee's with my flatmates; my parents had sent us a $40 gift card to celebrate the end of the quarter. We were seated just in time to take advantage of the half-priced appetizers --- which ended up taking the place of our entrees.

All in all, a good week. Hopefully the rest of the break will go well.

Who Is RUNNING This City?

Posting Location: University Village.



If things had gone smoothly today, I would have been making tonight's post from home. As you can see, things did not go smoothly today.

See, the plan was to see my boyfriend one last time before the break, as the odds of us getting together over the holidays are slim. I would then come back to the apartment, finish cleaning up some, throw my stuff into the car, and be on the highway by around 2:00, 3:00 at the latest. I parked on the street outside his house, and went in to spend some time with him. Now, I'll admit, when I arrived there was plenty of space in one spot between two cars, and I did park a little close to the car in front of me; I figured this would be fine enough, as the guy had plenty of space in front of him to pull out should he need to. Well, that move came back to bite me in the ass, because lo and behold I come out to find that another car has come and boxed me in. And I mean, there was no way I was going to be getting out of that spot anytime soon.

Did you know that in cases like these, where you're boxed in by another car parking on the street, that you have no options legally available to you other than just waiting the other guys out? That's right, checked with the local police and everything; because they "couldn't know who got there first," there's nothing they can do. Who got there first? Can that really matter?

It just struck me as odd that, with all the different laws on the books regarding traffic and parking, they apparently have nothing covering this kind of situation. One can almost imagine a situation where someone might lose their job because two people happened to park around them and had nowhere else they had to be for the rest of the week. Hell, what if I had been a medical specialist, and someone's life was now at risk because the only option I now had was call a cab? Okay, so maybe I'm intentionally coming up with scenarios that are against the odds because I'm ticked at the inconvenience this caused me. But then again, I'll bet the odds are around the same that the local fire department will have to use any given fire hydrant at any given time, and yet we have laws against parking in front of those.

At any rate, I ended up waiting over six hours before one of the yocko's finally had somewhere else to be, by which point it was 6:00 PM and I was in no mood for a two hour drive upstate (to say nothing of packing). So, I put off going home until the next day and just went back to the apartment.

This is the part where I check my mail and find a letter addressed to someone at 567 Stinchcomb Drive. Which is not my address. Aside from also being in University Village, it's not even remotely near being my address (though, incidentally, they got the right room number). How it mistakenly got delivered to my mailbox is beyond me. What's even more baffling is that there's a 557 Stinchcomb Drive, which, if someone were to make a mistake in delivering a letter to 567 Stinchcomb, you'd think it'd be to that address.

The icing on the cake is that I did some walking, and from what I can tell 567 Stinchcomb Drive does not, in fact, actually exist.

So now, on top of all the packing and driving and unpacking I now have to do tommorrow, I have to find a way to get this to a post office and do a "return to sender" thing. I just love Columbus. It's a good thing I'll be spending the next few weeks back in Parma, because this city has really started to grate on me as of late.

A(nother) Parable Against Procrastination

Posting Location: University Village.



So, looking over my last few entries, I realize that I haven't actually mentioned a lot of what's happened lately. Let's remedy that, shall we?

Starting with academics, my first --- and last --- two finals of the quarter were both on Monday, which I believe I did reasonably well on. The preceeding Friday the last two response papers for my Utopia and AntiUtopia course were due, which frankly I'm amazed I haven't ranted on already. See, the papers were due at 12:00 noon on Friday, as the proffessor was only going to be in his office until then, and I, naturally, let myself put off both papers until Thursday night. Did I mention these two papers were worth around 50% of my grade in that class? Seriously. You'd think I'd learn by now. At least I wasn't kidding myself this time around, and indeed took advantage of prior experience; knowing I was probably going to be up all night finishing these two, I started the evening with two sticks of Black Black. And, as expected, they did the trick; I managed to finish them both off by 6:00 AM Friday morning. With some unexpected extra time on my hands, I screwed around on my computer for a couple hours, then figured I'd get in a quick power-nap for an hour, which actually turned out to be closer to four.

Anyone catch that the first time around?

That's right. I woke up six hours after I'd finished the papers --- and three minutes after the deadline. The busses from University Village only go on the hour or half-hour marks, so I had just missed the previous bus --- but then those only arrive on campus ten to fifteen minutes later anyways. Driving --- now my only option --- takes about as long, and without a University parking pass my only parking options were at my boyfriend's house off South Campus --- leaving me with at least as long a run to where the papers had to be turned in.

Did I also happen to mention that my proffessor in that course told us that after he finished up his work for the quarter he was going to Australia for the break?

Let me tell you, I'm pretty sure I've never driven that fast down a side-street before, and I'm damn sure I've never run that fast in my life. Thankfully, due to the grace and intervention of some force I have not yet identified because I pretty much made an all-points-bulletin prayer in transit, the proffessor had not yet checked his mailbox by 12:24 when I finally arrived at the office. I was able to turn them in and salvage my grade, then shakily walked back to my boyfriend's house to crash for about half an hour or so while my lungs regenerated. The experience really showed me how out-of-shape I am; while it's a good thing that I wasn't actually coughing up blood, I'm pretty sure it wasn't so good that I felt like I might at any minute.

After that, really, my other three classes were a breeze to wrap up. Even two consecutive finals can't really compete with the get-ready/drive-like-hell/run-like-fuck triathalon I endured Friday, especially when they were subjects I felt I was doing reasonably well in. It helped that my English Ballads proffessor more or less stated the week before that it was nigh impossible to really "study" for the final; it involved using methods that we wouldn't really know unless we'd been coming to class and paying attention all quarter. I had, so it was actually pretty easy. And my last class I had already finished up in --- as the entry dates for my blog essay can attest to.

Well. This pretty much turned into a rant about my misfortune, hasn't it? I guess I'll have to follow up with a rant about what's happened this week later.

Campus After Midnight, Addendum: MoMo's KTV & Tea Station, Part Deux

Posting Location: University Village.



So on Saturday I had the opportunity to visit MoMo's a second time. The pen-&-paper RPG game I'd been running that night wrapped up early, so we decided to cap the night off with some karaoke. I should mention this was at about an hour after midnight, by the way --- appropriate, no? They only had one small room operational at the time, however, and that was occupied, so the three of us had to spring for a medium-sized room --- $30 for an hour of karaoke.

I think it was worth it, though. The room was very nice, as they had couches in them. My one friend thought the lighting could've been better, but I found it to be adequate. The song selection screens were a little odd, but pretty easy to navigate once you played around a bit. The actual selections were...eccentric, to say the least. They had some really good songs, to be sure, but some of their inclusions and omissions were a bit puzzling. No Margaritaville, but four versions of Don't Cry For Me Argentina? Wierd, but not so wierd that it's a bad thing. A lot of the versions they had were actually covers of the original songs, but that wasn't so bad, either. The oddest thing, though, and consequently the funniest, were the background scenes they showed on the TV with the lyrics. These, frequently, had absolutely nothing to do with the song in question --- scenes of Japan during Don't Cry For Me Argentina, scenes of 80's vampires during Total Eclipse of the Heart, etc. As I said, this was just funny, and if anything added to the experience for me.

And what did I sing, you ask? Well, along with the aforementioned Don't Cry For Me Argentina, I also did Strawberry Fields Forever, White Wedding, and Sound of Silence (which I "aced" according to my friends). All in all, an enjoyable experience. I'd maybe go a little earlier than I did if you have a small group to make sure you get the right-sized room for you, but larger groups should have no problems.

IDIOT!

Posting Location: University Village.

I almost ran over a guy just now because he felt like running a red light with his bicycle. Not even motorcycle --- bicycle. What the fuck. I'dve felt like killing the guy if, you know, I wasn't trying so hard not to kill him at that moment. Now added to one of the many reasons I hate driving in this city, which I might rant on later.

Campus After Midnight, Addendum: MoMo's KTV & Tea Station

Posting Location: University Village.



Breaking the somewhat-formal style I adopted for the essay, I'm going to rant a bit about another late-night entertainment option I found off-campus: MoMo's KTV. University Plaza isn't exactly within easy walking distance of campus, but those of you with a car will find it less than 15 minutes away, and of course anyone in University Village is within easy walking distance of it. As a result of this it slipped by my near-campus survey, but it really deserves mention, as it's one of the few non-club, non-bar entertainments in the campus area open past midnight.

I mentioned Pochi Bubble Tea in my rant on High Street's food options after midnight. MoMo's has much the same fare, minus the solid food snacks. However, MoMo's makes up for the loss of food with two unique features: Karaoke and a Japanese gift shop. The karaoke I suspect might be of a greater interest to those looking for entertainment past midnight. The place has a common area in front with a fish tank, some coffee tables and couches, but that's not where the karaoke takes place. There are ten rooms that can be rented for hourly rates that vary with the size of the room, the time of day, and the day of the week, and it's in these that people can croon tonelessly to what appears to be a huge variety of songs.

I didn't try the karaoke myself, but I can vouch for the bubble tea they serve; it's at least as good as Pochi's, and unlike that place MoMo's is open past 2:00 AM (open past 5:00 AM, if I read the hours right). I wouldn't recommend walking there past midnight unless you're with a reasonably-sized group and have a lot of time to kill, but if you have a car, or don't mind the walk, I'd say it's a great place to spend time past the chime hour.