Hand over the gingerbread, and nobody gets hurt.

I've hit that part of the holidays where I am all gived out.

I start early - I bought my first present in June or July this year - and plan obsessively, and I love to give and wrap and decorate and bake...but every year, a few days before Christmas, my give goes away and I want to ... not recieve, though there is certainly a sharp spike in my avarice levels that corresponds (oh, right, I get presents too!), but just...flop.

Of course, I'm not done with the baking yet, (and I burnt two pans of cinnamon rolls yesterday, which is tragic, as the recipe takes several hours from start to finish). I'm not done with holiday cards (aiming for New Year's), because I don't usually do them and decided to try this year at the last minute. I haven't mailed several packages, I'm not done knitting the scarf I meant to have finished ages ago, and I haven't been grocery shopping in a week and a half, so there's no milk in the house.

All gived out.

However, I am looking forward with a certain amount of glee to the post- holiday shopping...next year there will be a tree, after all, and we are woefully ornament-less. I plan to spend January intermittently haunting sales for nice sparkly bits of blown glass. Which leads me to ask, those of you who celebrate - where do you go to get the best ornaments, the ones that are not (a) twee, (b) heavy or (c) plastic? Dish.

Abbreviated Mastercard math

At an approximate cost to the taxpayers of at least $275/hour for the combined salaries in the room, I spent five hours Wednesday (plus an average of 3 hours roundtrip travel time at ~$125 an hour for three contractors) sitting at a table with four people who hadn't read the 100 page document we'd given them for feedback the Friday before and who nonetheless wished to discuss it.

Total estimated taxpayer cost, to accomplish approximately an hour of effective discussion:
At least $1750 + travel costs.

Total projected taxpayer cost of the meeting scheduled to accomplish what that meeting was scheduled to accomplish, had everyone come prepared:
At least $2900 + travel costs.

Actually hearing someone say, for the first time since I was a wee undergraduate, "Well, I haven't read it, but what I think is..."
Priceless.

There are some things money can't buy. Like the therapy I'm going to need after another year of this job.

When I grow up I want to be

My aunt sent me a "mommy joke" via email today, something about a mother telling her daughter there's a mommy test, and that is how mommies know everything and the daughter thinking that if you flunk it you have to be a daddy...

Meh, it wasn't really funny.

But it just struck me, because I very clearly remember being, I dunno, five or six or so, and having the other kids in the van on the way to school ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. They all wanted to be ballerinas or veterinarians or spacemen, you know, the usual. I said, confident, "I want to be a daddy."

Well, and wasn't I ridiculed for that. "You can't be a daddy, stupid. Girls can't be daddies, everyone knows that."

By the time we got to school I was red-faced and arguing with the other kids. "I can TOO be a daddy!" I insisted. "I can be anything I want! If men can be nurses and girls can be doctors, I can be a daddy! I can!"

Alas. There are some glass ceilings we may never break through.

As life's gone on, I've developed a more mature appreciation for my mother's more structured parenting style, and I hope I can be half the wondermom she was to me; she did it all, the mythical woman who juggled career and family and a civic life and shorted none of them (except perhaps herself, but she's a stoic, what can you do?) I think, actually, I'll probably be a parent more like she was, myself.

But my father was the magical wizard of my childhood, the one who told me bedtime stories made up just for me, the one who could fix anything, the one who brought me a doll just like the one I'd been coveting, after I'd been sick as a dog for two weeks, who let me pull his beard and ride on his shoulders and tucked me in.

This proto-kid I've got here is going to have two full sets of seriously awesome grandparents. It's a lot to live up to, parenting-wise, but what a blessing.

"A Color of the Sky," by Tony Hoagland

I'm such a sucker for a poem with a really punchy, evocative ending.

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

Grouse: a sort of bird, I believe

My mother keeps telling me I should enjoy being pregnant, that it only comes along a few times in each lifetime.

Um, like puberty, which I enjoyed so much because it was the only chance I'd ever get to feel that way? Or menopause, which I also hear is a once-in-a-lifetime stellar experience? Hmmm.

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled to be pregnant, glad that it happened easily for us and is going well so far. I know exactly how lucky we are in this, and I'm profoundly grateful.

That doesn't mean that it's enjoyable, any more than dentist's visits are fun just because I'm lucky enough to have an employer who provides me with dental insurance. Here's a secret; I'm impatient and product-oriented and if I could do this some other way, that didn't involve backaches and an enormous belly and months of feeling awful and the pain of labor/delivery? I would so be there.

I think part of the problem is that my default setting is stuck on "whine." I complain. A lot. Ask me straight up, anytime, and I'll tell you I'm one of the luckier people on earth and that my life is good. But you might not know it to listen to me. And, you know, that's okay, I think, as long as I remember to remember the core truths. I didn't post on Thanksgiving, because my house was full of wonderful people whom I love and who love me, but I have so much to be thankful for, and I know it.

In any case, as we ease out of the second trimester and into the third, all seems well, if uncomfortable - I finally gained that weight my doctor was telling me I needed, and between that and the increased fetal kicking, *oof*. And even work is turning around, though at the cost of extending some deadlines well into the month of December and even January. I may even get holiday cards out this year, or my taxes done in January, or some other such unprecedented-but-amazing thing.

---

Apropos of none of this:

hypocrisy noun. ME.
[Old French ypocrisie (mod. hypo-), irreg. from ecclesiastical Latin hypocrisis from Greek hupokrisi acting of a theatrical part, from hupokrinesthai answer, play a part, pretend, formed as HYPO- + krinein decide, determine, judge. The etymological spelling with h- became current (as in French) in 16.]
The practice of falsely presenting an appearance of virtue or falsely professing a belief to which one's own character or conduct does not conform; dissimulation, pretence; an instance of this.

So, not related to Hippocrates, then. That's good. God, I ♥ my Shorter OED.

The other morning around 4, as I drove to a meeting, I was listening to NPR talking about environmental depradation in Canada and oil sand mining and the rising cost of a barrel of oil. They'd just gotten done reporting a piece on torture in Chinese prisons (and how the US had still not agreed to similar inspections of its own detainment facilities) and I got to the apex of a bridge and saw the bay laid out around me, all refineries and factories and highways and miles of glittering, shining humanity and I thought, "This is a civilization at the height of its decadence. Look at all these people using all these resources."

And then I realized that I was commuting to a meeting three hours away, a single driver in a gas-fueled vehicle that holds five, one of two such vehicles in our two-person family. And I was drinking a Starbucks product. And I rolled my eyes at myself and started thinking about hypocrisy instead.