![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabular_rasa. . . okay, so that was sort of pathetic and pushing it-- but my solution to this holiday idiocy is to just acknowledge every holiday. Honest to God-- who wants to celebrate no holidays, or even just one, when you can celebrate them all? I never understood non-Christian kids who'd want to leave class for the Christmas parties (which, really, were always, always, always, for me, Winter Break parties. Honestly-- if I went to a predominantly Jewish or Muslim elementary school, I'd have had no problem celebrating Hanukkah or Ead. Shoot, we learned en masse all about Kwanzaa at Roosevelt, and that never bothered me. Why not share all our traditions and be happy? Let's put up a Christmas tree and play the driedl game and have some of those chocolate gelt coins and latkes with candy canes and figgy puddy. Or we can skip the figgy pudding, because that stuff is freaking nasty.
*Gets preachy (blame the ridiculous Truth and those silly people; fight fire with fire)* The point is-- and it's been made before-- it's not going to kill you to acknowledge other people's holidays, and, sure, being sterile ("Happy Holidays" "Seasons Greetings") about it isn't going to offend, but neither is being curious and asking someone who's holiday you're unfamiliar with what it's all about and maybe even partaking a little. It's not like you have to convert to Christianity to enjoy a candy cane or renounce Jesus to play with a dreidl. It doesn't even have to be about Judaism and Christianity, either. There are Hindu and Buddhist and Jainist and Shinto and Bahai and Islamic holidays abound. Half the holidays people celebrate, it seems, are more folk culture than religion, anyway-- folk rituals, holidays tied to a nation, cosmic events (the solstices/equinoxes-- I get excited about them; they're not "holidays" to me)-- shoot, Christmas isn't even really Christian anymore, at least not the Santa/tree/gifts/food/family part. So maybe there's a couple of groups, either inside or outside the mainstream religions that are going to be exclusivist-- but, well, I'll just put aside how I feel about them . . .
Anyway . . .
So yesterday Dad lugged us all up to the lake. It was . . . not really fun.
It was wet and mushy and slushy, and raining, of all things, and we didn't have any phone service. That meant no phone, and no internet. None of our cell phones work up at the lake, either. This is just unabidable-- particularly considering that I had been talking to Kristina as we drove up to the lake, and I was just in the middle of making plans with her when the cell phone service cut out. So now she's on her way to Ohio and I have no idea what is going on . . .
. . . but, I guess, it was okay in the end, because I hadn't been up to the lake since I left for school in August.
(Still, though, I forgot to print off that ONE THING I needed to print off while I was up there . . . still, though, I'll be back, I'm sure . . . I've got nearly a month, lol . . . )
With this time, however, I was able to get a little more than halfway through Wicked, the novel-- and it's a lot different than the musical, but I like them both. The musical was more parallel to something I'd create, and therefore like, with its almost cheesy/campy pullings from the original novel (The Wizard of Oz) and the movie, and was simpler in its sense of good vs. evil as personified as Elphaba. It had to be simpler, being a musical confined by the two-and-a-half-hours of musicals. Yet the novel is more thought-provoking, of course, and Elphaba is more ambiguous and less relatable-to, and Nessarose is just . . . different. Fiyero's completely different; he's probably the most radical change. For some reason he looks an awful lot like Viktor Krum (um . . . studded with blue diamonds, lol . . . ) in my head, but, then again, that's my head . . .
I'm glad that I don't just take people from the movie versions of things and plant them in novels. I'm glad my imagination is separate like that. Abysmally terrible casting of the Harry Potter movies, thou shalt not conquer me!!! Lol . . .
Seeing as how I hadn't slept Christmas Eve-Christmas, wrapped up in my new flannel pajamas in my bed downstairs against the freezing air of the never-quite-heated-in-winter lake house, I slept very well last night, and had a very weird dream. It involved being back at Wash U, but some people from home were there, too, like Kristina, and, oddly enough, Serena, to whom I haven't spoken since the end of the school year, lol . . .
There was something about a revolt to save Center Court (the only buffet-option food place on campus, for ye not-with-it non-Wash U people, lol)-- wonder where that came from? *muttermutter*-- involving virtually everyone from D2, and . . . matching uniforms??? The girls' versions looked something like cheerleading skirts with knee socks, and everybody wore the same black-and-some-color sweatshirts. Patricia and I got in a fight over who got to wear the yellow one-- which was dumb, considering I don't even like yellow, and it made us look like Hufflepuff Quidditch Team cheerleaders, or something, lol . . . In the end, Patricia won, apparently, and I was in some turquoise-ish colored one.
Lisa was running late to the whole revolution thing, because she was busy doing Sudoku (a direct reference, I'm sure, to the Sudoku book Neil received for Christmas-- and was getting very frustrated over, lol . . . ) in her room. We got her going along, though, and then arrived late, in time to realize they (*they* . . . there's always an enemy, lol . . . ) had taken Anu hostage. Then there was something about Christmas cookies, exams (that's when Serena showed up), and the campus changing to look an awful lot like the Roosevelt Elementary school playground (the one I remember, not the new, stupid, tiny one, lol . . . ).
Anyway, weird dream, yeah . . .
I feel like I'm a lot more out of touch with reality back home than I am in school-- or at least a lot more out-of-the-moment, or more introspective and withdrawn. I think it's because I'm away from people so much more often. I also feel kind of bitchy, but that's just recently, and I think that has something to do with upcoming monthly cycles-- but it could be the direct result of my being more reserved and just not wanting to be bothered to talk to people face-to-face, communicating with them through more indirect means, like livejournal.
At least I'm more in the mood to write my story, now-- but that's almost useless to start anything, since I've only got about five days until Florida, and then I'll be busy after that-- and I can't send anything from this computer to my home computer, either, as I learned painfully during NaNo.
