The Sword of Damocles

Next week is Christmas! CHRISTMAS! And Hanukkah is over! And once again, another year has passed where I failed to get any shopping done ahead of time and spent the better part of this weekend at various shopping outlets, including the mall, which was about as you’d expect: fucking madness, with an extra dose frustration entirely centered around the food court. I don’t know why we ate at the food court, I don’t know. It was just that we headed out before having lunch and decided that Charley’s Steaks (which are more like Steak-Umms) was the best we could muster … it was a desperate, foolish move I regret to this moment. It was … it was a wall of people packed with strollers, angry senior citizens and more than a few screaming children who were so sick of being dragged around the mall by their overzealous parents. Certainly I sympathized most with the children, but mostly, I was jealous, because I, too, wanted to burst into tears while being pushed around in a recliner.

But we’re done — except for each other — and that’s what matters most. Adam’s family does all of their annual gift-giving at Thanksgiving, in a secular nod to Hanukkah, which leaves only my family to shop for at the holiday season. And as for each other … is it horribly un-romantic to admit that we haven’t gotten each other gifts for the last three holidays, except for a camera on my birthday five months after the fact? It makes me sad, when I really think about it, because it’s like we stopped trying, but on the other hand, the truth is that we’re horribly, horribly spoiled in that if we want or need something, we simply buy it. Spoiled, spoiled brats, we are. But we’ve promised each other that this year will be different.

And I’m not much of a luxury person, so that’s out: I wouldn’t know what to do with nice jewelry other than lose it, and I have no interest in anything grotesquely out of my price range. I’m not saying this condescendingly, like I am above such things (don’t you want to punch those people? It’s like the non-television watching people who claim to never have heard of Jennifer Aniston, like they NEVER SHOP AT A GROCERY STORE), for I actually find it quite pathetic and lowbrow of me. Mostly, I’d like a couple of gift cards (free shopping!) and some high-endish bath products and candles, which makes me a cheap, cheesy giftee, because I get free high-endish bath products and candles from one of my freelance jobs, so … so it’s really even sadder.

Rapidly shifting gears (what else?) I caught The Lord of the Rings trilogy on television this weekend, and is it super-geeky to admit that they are three of my favorite movies, ever? I mean, I’m not about to show up in costume at a convention or anything, though remind me to tell you of my short stint in high school in the cast of a midnight re-enactment of The Rocky Horror Picture Show(I was … well, I alternated between Columbia and Magenta, if you must know), but every time the elves show up at Helm’s Deep, I cry. And I mean, EVERY TIME, for TNT had it on repeat the last two days, and both times, I made sure to be present when they arrived in their little blue cloaks and I got choked up both damn times.

(I also need to tell you that I am enough of a Tolkien geek, having read the trilogy multiple times, and ah, I took a class on the books, that I knew that this was a departure from the novel and was at first outraged, but later touched.) (HA! As if you needed further proof of my deep-down geekiness after reading about Rocky Horror.)

(Also, I had a huge crush on Richard O’Brien, which is so utterly disgusting to me now, I can’t believe I’m admitting it. Apparently there was a time when I found Riff Raff sexy.)

Anyway! I’m sure there was more I intended to write, though heaven knows what that actually was (I honestly never know, ergo the non-sensical stream-of-consciousness you’re forced to endure), but I need to start at least trying to sleep, because on Sunday nights, I simply can’t. You know Sunday-night syndrome? I’ve got it in spades, and I like my job — I can’t imagine what it would be like if I didn’t. But on Sunday nights, I wake up every hour on the hour, my pajamas drenched in a pool of anxious sweat, so I have to go to bed super-early. And besides, Eowyn is about to beat the pants off of the Nazgul, and it’s my favorite part. (And later? THE EAGLES ARE COMING.)

Happy Monday! I sincerely hope you didn’t spend the night drenched in anxious sweat.

*Rocky! Big, dumb Rocky in the Lab, from the Rocky Horror soundtrack. GEEK.

21 comments December 16th, 2007