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Dec. 12th, 2002 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonFeeling very remote lately, very inert, with (again) a big stack of e-mail I need to answer, and no oomph for doing so. I think last week at work temporarily fried my human-interaction capacitor. I feel sour, like one of those poor riding-school nags that's had a few too many kids kicking it in the ribs and jerking on the reins.
Am also feeling thoroughly helpless in the face of the Christmas Juggernaut careening toward me; must do shopping for people, but am devoid of ideas about what to get anyone. Well, I did order one present for P., at his request (which makes me feel sort of cheesy) -- the complete Hayden string quartets, as recorded by the Angeles Quartet. Of course, he already has one or two other sets of the complete Hayden string quartets, but god forbid one should be without all possible recordings. This completist bent, the collector impetus, is something I just don't get, but whatever. I will only add that Hayden wrote a boatload of string quartets (translation: $120 worth, on CD).
I also need to go out this weekend and get a tree, taking advantage of the spell of surreal warmth we're currently enjoying. (One old family tradition that I am trying not to honor in my adulthood is that of going to get the tree on the coldest day of December.) This feels like a daunting prospect, especially because it also means I'll have to shovel out the crap that is piled in the corner of the living room where the tree goes, and I barely have the energy these days to carry my dirty dishes to the sink and dump them, let alone jam a seven-foot balsam into the back of my car, lug it into the house, and get it more or less upright in the infuriating tree-stand.
Man, I used to be uber-Christmas-Woman, back in my twenties and thirties, with the baking, and the presents, and the music, and the lights strung all over everywhere. The whole thing just seems exhausting to me now, but still, attention must be paid, at least the minimal rituals must be enacted, or -- the terrorists will have won, I guess, or something.
The annoying thing is that I know perfectly well that the only cure for this unpleasant state of sour burned-outness is doing something--being active, making connection, as impossible as the prospect might seem. Sitting in front of the computer for two hours numbly playing Blasterball isn't going to help a damn thing.
Am also feeling thoroughly helpless in the face of the Christmas Juggernaut careening toward me; must do shopping for people, but am devoid of ideas about what to get anyone. Well, I did order one present for P., at his request (which makes me feel sort of cheesy) -- the complete Hayden string quartets, as recorded by the Angeles Quartet. Of course, he already has one or two other sets of the complete Hayden string quartets, but god forbid one should be without all possible recordings. This completist bent, the collector impetus, is something I just don't get, but whatever. I will only add that Hayden wrote a boatload of string quartets (translation: $120 worth, on CD).
I also need to go out this weekend and get a tree, taking advantage of the spell of surreal warmth we're currently enjoying. (One old family tradition that I am trying not to honor in my adulthood is that of going to get the tree on the coldest day of December.) This feels like a daunting prospect, especially because it also means I'll have to shovel out the crap that is piled in the corner of the living room where the tree goes, and I barely have the energy these days to carry my dirty dishes to the sink and dump them, let alone jam a seven-foot balsam into the back of my car, lug it into the house, and get it more or less upright in the infuriating tree-stand.
Man, I used to be uber-Christmas-Woman, back in my twenties and thirties, with the baking, and the presents, and the music, and the lights strung all over everywhere. The whole thing just seems exhausting to me now, but still, attention must be paid, at least the minimal rituals must be enacted, or -- the terrorists will have won, I guess, or something.
The annoying thing is that I know perfectly well that the only cure for this unpleasant state of sour burned-outness is doing something--being active, making connection, as impossible as the prospect might seem. Sitting in front of the computer for two hours numbly playing Blasterball isn't going to help a damn thing.
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Re: Stuff
Date: 2002-12-12 04:42 pm (UTC)Oh god, yes. I suck at buying presents, so I'm generally grateful when people supply me with lists of suggestions, but then you get to this point where you just feel like a stock clerk filling the order, and it's not that I really *mind* that, just that I wish I was one of those people with a gift for buying presents (which, of course, entails a certain amount of focused intuitive attention to what people are saying and doing the other 11 months of the year--one of those realizations that just makes me feel like a big insensitive lout generally, at which point I just throw my hands up). Arrgh.
Glad you liked the line, though ::g::. I meant to get "spavined" in there somewhere too; that's just a cool word.