One of the hardest things about being “not of The Body” when it comes to the Christmas season is feeling like you constantly have to explain why you’re not as hap-hap-happy as everybody else is this time of year. It doesn’t matter that you — by which I mean I, of course — have already explained it; you (I) still feel misunderstood and somehow obligated to keep on trying to explain until you (I) get through to your (my) Christmas-loving loved ones. Okay, sure, you (I) have explained your (my) lingering childhood traumas, and everybody gets that and has expressed sympathy and such, but maybe there’s still the matter of your (my) performance anxiety (for lack of a better expression) when it comes to gifts, or the myriad ways in which traditional holiday activities fail to generate that warm glow in the dessicated hearts of we sad, emotionally dead grinchy types.

Thankfully, there are articulate people out there who share my feelings, and from whom I can borrow for illustration purposes. Case in point: Monica Bielanko, a.k.a. The Girl Who, a fellow Salt Laker who writes sharp, funny, profane, often painfully honest blog entries about, well, everything. And I do mean everything. Her blog is not for the faint-hearted, as when she’s discussing the physical discomforts that accompany pregnancy, for example. I have trouble relating to those entries, obviously (although I still enjoy reading them), but today’s post really could have been written by myself, we’re so simpatico on this Christmas stuff:

…for me, Christmas feels like I’ve accepted a part-time job that begins right after Thanksgiving and ends on New Year’s Day. Buying, wrapping, shipping, keeping up with expectations. God forbid some well-meaning acquaintance gifts you with a little something you weren’t expecting. MUST RECIPROCATE! Not only do I feel pressure to make each Christmas The Best Christmas Ever! but the whole spending money thing just makes me sick.
And it isn’t just buying the gifts that weighs heavy. I hate being asked what I want for Christmas. I know people want to get me something I like but even that feels like a job. Like, if I don’t list items then I’m not helping you out? Who feels comfortable listing off items they want/need? I feel like I’m adding to someone else’s Christmas stress. And is that what Christmas has come to? Your loved ones call and you tell them what you want and that’s it? This exchange of Christmas commodities?

Keeping up with expectations. God, that one turn of phrase is so poignant for me. I think maybe that’s the key to my holiday pathology, more than childhood damage, more than any philosophical high-mindedness about consumerism or personal weirdness about the retail industry blurring the seasons by pushing Christmas buying earlier and earlier into the year. What it really comes down to for me is the fear of disappointing somebody I love, either because I get them the wrong thing (or I don’t get them anything at all) or because I don’t unequivocally love something they’ve gotten me (I have an incredibly difficult time taking things back, no matter that I already have twelve of them or whatever). Expectations lead to fear of disappointment, fear of disappointment leads to anxiety, anxiety leads to unhappiness… powerful with the Dark Side is the Christmas season. At least for me.

This year has been a little better than the last several, though. That’s really due to my lovely Girlfriend making an admirable effort to understand my feelings and keep the scheduling under control, and I really, sincerely thank her for that. But even when we’re not overbooking our social calendar, nothing ever seems to make a dent in the damn anxiety…
Anyhow, go read the rest of Monica’s take on all this. As I said, she really tells it like it is, while acknowledging that how it is, isn’t necessarily how we scrooges want it to be.

ED. NOTE: Incidentally, that “not of The Body” thing is a Star Trek reference, just in case it went over your head. Specifically, it’s a reference to the classic episode “Return of the Archons,” which was the first of many in which Captain Kirk destroys a computer that has ruled over a stable but stagnant society for centuries. Dang computers, anyhow.

On the original Star Trek, Captain Kirk seduced the alien babes with the help of his trusty Universal Translator. The Colonial warriors of the Battlestar Galactica (1978 vintage, of course) carried a gadget called the Languatron while on patrol, just in case they ran into non-English-speaking creatures. And in an inspired bit of silliness, Douglas Adams came up with the miraculous — and unexpectedly deicidal — Babel fish for the heroes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Well, the new iPhone app Word Lens won’t exactly turn your phone into a Languatron or a Babel fish — it works with text only, not spoken language — but it’s pretty damn incredible nonetheless. Check it out:

This is not a hoax. It’s available at the iTunes app store and I’ve found reviews for it in a number of places. And even though the reviews appear to be mixed — the app’s literal approach leads to a good percentage of Engrish-style misunderstandings, apparently — the thing does work, if not quite optimally. One reviewer says, “Word Lens will work well enough if you need to read a street sign or specials in a restaurant.” And I can attest from my own experiences as a monoglot wandering alone through Germany that understanding street signs and menus is often all you need to get by.

As my Loyal Readers have probably figured out by now, I’m not a real cutting-edge guy, and I resist hopping on most bandwagons just on principle… but this app is almost enough to make me want an iPhone. Almost. Maybe when my five-year-old Nokia flip-job finally gives up the ghost and I have a practical incentive for buying a new phone…

(Via Andrew Sullivan, a political blogger who is often at his most interesting when he’s not writing about politics…)

I think the headline above is all the set-up this requires:

Taken from the deeply cynical, often vulgar, frequently profane, occasionally offensive (even to me), but almost always funny someecards.com.

DSC_0498_e, originally uploaded by jason.bennion.

Here’s what it looked like today at the old Bennion Domicile, gateway to the fabulous Bennion Compound, following three days and nights of more-or-less continuous snowfall. Thankfully, I haven’t had to be out in it much at all until now. I don’t do Black Friday, and I didn’t have to go back to work this morning, either. I’ve got a lot of unused vacation time that I’m trying to burn up before the end of the year. It’s use-it-or-lose-it, a deeply silly policy that’s supposed to encourage workaholic ad-men and -women to actually take vacations, but considering that the warm, vacation-y months are usually our busiest times, what happens is that everybody puts it off until they can’t any longer, and then tries to figure a way to take it all at the end of the year. And thus the office ends up looking like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie during November and December. That is, the place becomes very quiet, very cold from the lack of heat-generating lifeforms, and more than a little spooky. But no less hectic for the poor slobs who are present.

And I get to go back to that tomorrow… Sigh.

Okay, that last entry was a major drag. I apologize for getting carried away like that. As I said, I have a difficult time with the holidays, and I do tend to get overwhelmed with anxiety and ennui as they approach. I really would like to just run away from them. I guess I’ve turned into my father after all.

That said, however, I do try to enjoy them. inasmuch as my particular form of social retardation allows. So in that spirit, I’m now going to do what I’ve seen so many other bloggers and Facebookers doing today and list off a few of the things for which I’m thankful on Thanksgiving. Well, maybe not actually on Thanksgiving, which is of course just another stressful damn holiday, but in general. You know what I mean…

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Ah, Thanksgiving again, the portal to the madness and melancholy of the holiday season, the signpost warning that another year’s end is coming up fast and you’re going too fast to make the turn.

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DSC_0495_crop, originally uploaded by jason.bennion.

Ah, Utah… a land of eccentricity no matter which way you look… in the people, certainly; in the landscape, unquestionably; but perhaps no place more than in the weather.

Last week, people were walking around in light jackets, and even shirtsleeves during the warmest part of the day. Then came a couple days of unnervingly strong and temperate winds, followed by torrential rains on Saturday night and then, with a temperature drop so abrupt it almost makes The Day After Tomorrow seem plausible — well, okay, not really; nothing could actually do that — the first big snowstorm of the year. I woke up yesterday morning to nine inches of the white stuff on my deck. There were good-sized tree branches down all over the valley, shattered by the weight of sodden snow caught in unshed autumnal leaves. The Girlfriend had an entire tree come down just outside her apartment, narrowly missing her bedroom window.

The state’s official slogan is “Life Elevated” — no, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean either — but I think it really ought to be “Like Drama?”

Loyal Readers may remember a lengthy two-part entry I did a couple years ago about a neighbor I had when I was a kid, a cantankerous woman who was justly infamous in our neighborhood for her unpredictable temper, and who carried on a territorial pissing match with my parents — well, mostly with my dad, if you want to get technical about it — more or less continuously for a couple of decades. More recently, my folks and I watched as she fell increasingly under the vile grip of Alzheimer’s Disease before finally being institutionalized by her children. I wrote at the time:

She’s not The Crazy Lady anymore. She doesn’t seem to have any memory of the feud, or all the screaming, or all the threats. She doesn’t remember throwing garbage over our fence into the pasture, or having my dad throw it right back. She doesn’t remember playing petty games with the irrigation water, or recall my dad turning her in to the city council as a nuisance because of the way her goats smelled. She’s a different kind of Crazy Lady now, a sweetly confused old woman with skin tough and leathery from years of working under a hot sun, who believes my father’s ’56 Chevy Nomad is her first husband’s station wagon and that I am a high-school senior with my whole life ahead of me. My parents and I have all had trouble wrapping our minds around this change of paradigm, but Dad has done the best with it, I think.
…
I never would’ve have wished this fate on anyone, not even my father’s mortal enemy, but it’s hard to know how to feel about this development. I spent so many years fearing and disliking The Crazy Lady that it’s hard to now see her as an object of pity. It’s like the sudden deflation that came with learning that Darth Vader, the scariest creature in the galaxy, was just a crippled old man.

My feelings haven’t changed much since I wrote that. To be perfectly blunt, the woman was a royal bitch throughout my childhood and teen years. Everyone on the street feared her and did what they could to avoid her. I didn’t like her one bit. But nobody deserves what happened to her. Nobody.

I learned yesterday that my neighborhood Crazy Lady — Janice was her name — passed away the day before, Tuesday, October 19. My parents have heard that, in the end, she didn’t recognize anyone, not even her own children. Her mental dissolution was complete. It’s an image that fills me with existential horror, and a great deal of compassion for a fellow human being that lost one tiny piece of herself at a time until there was simply nothing left. There are very few fates lying in wait for we fragile creatures that are more unjust, more terrible, more frightening, or more pathetic than that.

But then I read in her obituary that “She did everything she could to help in the correct development of her children,” and my bleeding heart scabs over as I imagine the scene my parents have often described for me: Janice chasing those same children around the front lawn, in full view of the whole damn neighborhood, wailing on them with a broom handle. I was only an infant when that happened, too little to recall it personally, but I have my own memories of her kids down on their hands and knees, plucking weeds from the lawn on the hottest day of the year while their mother stands above them, hands on her hips, like a stereotypical southern prison guard lording it over a chain gang in a bad exploitation flick. And it’s such a creepy phrase, isn’t it? “The correct development of her children.” Sounds like something a vicious schoolmaster might say in one of those plucky-underdog coming-of-age stories. Only Janice’s kids didn’t turn out to be David Copperfield or Harry Potter. In fact, I happen to know that at least two of her daughters worked as strippers for a time. Which makes me wonder which of the children wrote that frankly bizarre bit of spin and how they could do it with any kind of straight face. Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps?

I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead or of her survivors, but my feelings toward this woman remain so very muddled. Perhaps the best thing to focus on is something else I wrote in that entry two years ago, the larger position the woman I used to call the Crazy Lady occupied in my little universe, and the most important thing — to me — that her death really signifies:

The Crazy Lady is the last of the neighbors from my childhood. To the north, Mac, the nice old town doctor’s widow who lived next door to us, who knitted me Christmas stockings when I was little and who was the other victim of Alzheimer’s I mentioned, has been gone for years; Mr. Stephensen, the grandfather of my old buddy Kurt and who claimed to have known Butch Cassidy as a boy, has been gone for years longer; and both of their houses were bulldozed a decade ago. To the south, Jack and Rae are both long dead, too.

 

I don’t expect to ever see The Crazy Lady again, certainly not alive. And when she’s gone, a big part of the town I knew growing up will go with her. There isn’t much of that town left, these days…

And just like that, an era comes to a final, definitive end. For whatever it’s worth, I do sincerely hope my former neighbor — and her long-suffering children, as well — have at last found some sort of peace. They certainly didn’t have it when I was a kid.