Caustically Optimistic

Wii Fit

This Christmas I asked for socks. Presents are an unfortunate part of Christmas but participating in the gift giving makes my life easier. I don’t demure and say, “I don’t want anything,” because that’s a lie. We’ve done a ‘no gifts’ Christmas and that was fantastic. The stress surrounding Christmas evaporated that year as we avoided places like the mall, Target, and art galleries not to mention the stress on Christmas morning of faking liking presents that just don’t fit. We’ve all gotten that gift: it was the thought that counted but so little thought was there. This is why I ask for socks, argyle dress socks that are thick enough to make walking in a winter wonderland comfortable. I need socks, socks are as inexpensive or as chi-chi as you want them to be, and if I don’t like them you and I will never know because they’re on my feet and in my shoes.

This Christmas we added to our gifts with utility by getting a Wii Fit. Last Christmas I bought my parents a Wii because it can double as a low-impact exercise along the lines of what my parents should be doing at their age and level of health. My sister is now a pro at Guitar Hero and we are both pro bowlers. My parents bought the Wii Fit for the family hoping it would relieve the stress on our bowling arms, cut down on the number of times we heard, “My Name is Jonas,” and perhaps even take a few pounds off our flabby physiques.

So far, we’ve had a lot of fun with it and my sister and I are on track to lose a great deal of weight. Many people have a goal of “Slender by November,” we have a goal of beating the other one and since Wii Fit tracks progress in a ranking system we have, so far, made this not about losing weight but pummeling the other one. We will probably look like those Ethiopian Children from the Eighties if this keeps up before Valentine’s Day. I want to crush her like Reagan crushed Mondale and I know she’s hoping for a late rally. It’s not happening Sis, hang it up.

Actually, because of my work schedule the only game I’m better at than her would be the game where you, as a soccer goalie, deflect balls with your head. So far my best score is in the four-hundreds and her best score is long since forgotten (it only displays ten scores). This game is not only fun but it draws upon a skill set I already had. So while the Wii Fit tells me constantly that I am obese (true) and that I am unbalanced (how it determined the madness in my mind is up to you to decipher but I don’t question the cleverness of the Japanese) it also doesn’t take into account the litany of excuses I have for being physically able to be Jabba the Hutt’s stunt double with little or no make up. My left foot is broken, impairing my balance and Dick Cheney ate my heart when I was a Republican.

The games are all pretty strange but so far this is the strangest. This one has everyone’s avatar line up and kick soccer balls at you and you get more points with each successive ball that bounces off your head. This seems normal enough and it isn’t even odd when shoes start flying off and hitting you in the face if you don’t get out of the way. It is when the severed heads of pandas are hurled at you that you begin to get a little nervous about the intricacies of this game. Sure, there are reasons that they’re using the severed heads of Pandas but its still creepy. I’m an absurd little bird but this is beyond even my imagination. I’m surprised that I haven’t heard from the animal rights activists about the severed panda heads.

I can just see the protest now, because cruelty to digital animals is still tacky. It sends the wrong message to kids and we know that Wii Fit was designed to get our wee people fit after so many hours on the couch. There had to be something better to kick at people, digital artichokes perhaps? This teaches our kids the wrong lesson. Everyone knows that if you see the severed head of a panda you shouldn’t touch it for fear of contracting something or irritating the Chinese Government. If kids think its okay to toss about the head of digital panda they will think that chucking the severed head of a real panda is alright as well. I’m really unhappy about this and if it wasn’t the only game I’m better at than anyone else I’d say more about the matter.

What I will close with is this: your children are fat and sloven; you aren’t much better yourself. I am not judging. I have an extra Olsen twin strapped around my body and have been using Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders as my personal trainers for too long. Get them the Wii Fit. Have your children perform even these fake exercises; it is good for them. Please do this and please talk to them about tossing about the heads of dead animals – especially pandas.

If you don’t do this you are putting your children in mortal danger. Also, don’t come to me if your kid catches something from the severed head of panda. I don’t want to have to say, “I told you so.”

check engine light

Question: What did you get your sister for Christmas?
Answer: Hopefully, you’ll learn the meaning of Christmas BEFORE the check engine light comes on.

Two days before Christmas I had an excuse to slip my earthly bonds and escape Kentucky and travel to Ohio for work. We needed to drop off a driver at another dealership to take delivery of one of their cars. There is a store in Cincinnati that Chaos Bean likes to buy clothes at so I used this as an opportunity for someone else to put gas in my car for a trip to ‘the big city,’ and get something for Chaos Bean that she would like and use. Unfortunately, on the way to Cincinnati a truck overturned delaying six hours and by the time the accident was cleared the malls were closed. No one died in the accident but I’m pretty confident that I’d have liked to choke-out whoever caused the accident because that, combined with my unruly work schedule left me without a gift for the Bean. The trip took us thirteen hours and left use wasted for Christmas Eve.

After work on Christmas Eve we suffered through a trip to the grocery for our parents and then went to a mission church being pastured by our former, and very boring, vicar. It was possibly the worst church service I have ever been to. The sermon was off-point, wrong on the facts, and poorly delivered; the liturgy wasn’t delivered correctly or in order, and the music could best be summed up best as, “a joyful noise unto the Lord,” and nothing much else. Christmas, for me, isn’t about family or Hallmark: it’s a religious holiday.

The only religious thing I get to do around the holiday is going to church. I’m bombarded by the sacrilegious dross from Santa and Frost the Snowman, trees adorned with pagan symbols, to hearing how we should de-Christ Christmas. This irritates me like nothing else because if this happened to a holiday that belonged to a group other than the Christians it would be called cultural imperialism and other nasty things. Imagine, if you can, Hanukkah being a holiday about a magical unicorn that pees gasoline and defecates gold coins or Ramadan being the time of year when Ronald McDonald and the Whooper put aside their differences to burn Colonel Sanders in effigy. Sure, a lot of what you do at Christmas makes you feel good and ‘stuff’ but does it direct you back to the message or purpose of Christmas, which was to displace a pagan holiday and remember the birth of Christ? I’d guess it does not.

So, after not getting Chaos Bean a remarkable gift, and just some small things found here and there, and church being a bust I was convinced that the observation of Christmas would be ruined this year for me. I would place emphasis on gifts so much but I can count the biological family we have a relationship with on my hands so expressing appreciation for that at Christmas and other times of the year is important. As we were leaving the worst Christmas Eve service, ever, Chaos Bean announced that we could make it to Mass at the monastery where she went to school. I decided that since gas was inexpensive and the weather was dry that I would go along with her and make that a present for her. She mentions it every year and gas is either too expensive, the weather to wet, or the hour too late.

After dropping my parents off at home we turned the car around and pointed it towards the monastery. During the hour-plus trip we talked about a lot of things including how we’re estranged from our mother’s relatives, something that pains my sister but to me comes as a great relief. I never understood people who fought to be among people who didn’t accept them; my mother’s family doesn’t like me (or my sister) so I’ve created another ‘family’ around myself of people I care about that care about me and fit the creed of any healthy family, “We love you for who you are and where you’re at, but too much to let you stay there.” Chaos Bean lamented the fact that very few relatives like her but until recently adored me. They’ve never really given her a chance and to be fair, they only liked the idea of me; not the person they took the time to get to know. Perhaps, I thought, our family is normal and I’m expecting something unreasonable from them – and this kids is what we call foreshadowing in the profession – perhaps everyone’s family is psychotic, nasty, and conniving and I’m expecting something from (ironically) a Hallmark movie.

The reason I am saying this is that when we arrived at the monastery Chaos Bean gradually morphed into a different person. There was an appreciable air of anticipation in her gait and her normally crisp attitude softened. I wasn’t sure what it was but as we hurried past the Lourdes Shrine, Madonna Hall where she lived, the Academy where she went to school, and mounted the steps to the Cathedral of Mary Immaculate and the Nunnery it became more intense. I understood as we encountered the Sisters greeting people at the doors. When you visit our Great Grandmother her face lights up in a way that lets everyone in the room know she’s happy to see you and that you are a person she loves very much. With the exception of nuns who’ve joined the order or the convent since my sister’s time there, every one of the Sisters made this face when they saw, greeted, and hugged Chaos Bean. You could attribute this to a standard feeling towards visiting people from the outside world but you’d be wrong, they didn’t great me or anyone beyond the girls who went to school there with such happiness.

Chaos Bean, who helps me in my running critique of everything under heaven was the model of good behavior during the Mass speaking twice, once to tell me not to talk and other time to indicate that priest had knocked the sermon out the park. I could write a book about the sermon but I will say this: it was Christ-centered, direct, and spared no punches on account the holiday. It was fantastic. After the service Chaos Bean stayed behind to clean up the overflow seating and encourage others to do so as well and then pointed out some of the features of the Cathedral unique to that sanctuary – as we both grew up in Germany and have seen more than a couple Cathedrals in our day. We then followed the other worshipers through the gates of the nunnery into their living area – while Chaos Bean discussed what we’d be eating, not unlike how people in normal families describe what Christmas or a holiday would be like at their home with their family and I realized something important.

Chaos Bean knows what a family is and how it should operate because she has been in an extended family that operated well. The Monastery is not unlike what a Grandparent’s home should be for anyone: filled with happy and somber memories, a place that holds the promise that more of those memories will be made and later cherished. It was filled with classmates, other alumni, and of course the Sisters – and everyone was either happy to see each other or emotionally intelligent enough to fake it for the sake of the holiday. It was also filled with other things: cherished artifacts from the past, and foods set aside for special occasions. Mainly, the place was palpably filled with love and joy.

Perhaps, I hold onto the religious aspects of Christmas because those are the only ones left untainted by the trauma of an abusive extended family and abusive grandparents; perhaps its not just morbid religiosity but something more. I’m confident that even if I grew up with a healthy extended family that I would still feel the fervor for my faith but I’m also confident that I wouldn’t be so regimented and doctrinaire about religious observances if there had been other genuine and wholesome attributes to them as there are with other people’s.

Finally, this reminded the gifts given to commemorate the holidays should reinforce the special connections with family – biological and acquired. Sure, Chaos Bean would have liked a new pair of pants or a “Satan Dancing with Delight” hooded sweatshirt but I think the chance to visit the people who love her in a place full of happy memories is important. Going to Mary Immaculate certainly improved my Christmas and I hope it improved her Christmas and started her year on the right footing. She’s good enough, she’s smart enough, and gosh darn it: people love her.

metaphor

About a year ago I was walking across campus scolding, or perhaps counseling, one of my team’s favorite students about a certain behavior he was engaging in before the holidays. He was being awful to Valerie, which is okay if you are Ashley or me, but not if you are some mere mortal child. I was especially disappointed because this was the kid you could depend on to be a decent human being, do well in school, and at the same time be a normal kid his age. As we were walking we passed two men digging a ditch and he interrupted me to ask what it was. I said, “That, young padawan, is a metaphor.”

The other day at my new job, the one I pretend to like, we had a piñata. And by, “the other day,” I may have meant, “I’ve been too lazy or busy, no lazy, to write this out and it was the day after Thanksgiving.” After a speech about how we don’t sell cars for the money, we do it for other reasons – reasons not elaborated upon – and it made me reexamine my whole life, it was my ‘come to Jesus’ moment that Nedenia always talks about. To own the truth I also fixated on how the little Elvin manager was holding a stick wrapped like a candy cane to bash into a chili-shaped piñata, which made me think of lunches at Chili’s with teacher friends. I’m not good at the paying attention part so when Frodo handed me the candy cane I seemed daft because I held it and stared at him because at that point I wasn’t sure what was going on. I wasn’t daydreaming as much as waiting for a point to all the talking. Nothing disgusts me more than motivational speeches.

When I figured it out I whaled on the piñata, one swing and it was done. A piñata filled with five hundred dollars struck by a very angry troll is going to burst right away. Once everyone saw the money on the ground and realized that it was money everyone dove on the floor, fighting for the money. I did not. The managers encouraged me to join in the, well, I don’t know what to call it – fun? Then, when I didn’t take to encouragement they told me to join in the activity at which point I picked up the dollar that fell on my shoe.

However, I watched these grown men scrounging around on the ground for money and felt sick. This is what my life is: scrounging around for money in an indiscriminate, ruthless, and undignified way. I don’t make the world a better place. I don’t do anything productive. It was the annual Christmas metaphor. My life had been reduced from workaday teaching, saving the world one kid at a time, to doing something purely for the dirty money it brings in.

I need to return to teaching or doing something that does something to make the world a better place. After doing something that benefited other people I can’t do something that just benefits me and after doing this job that only benefits me I have a better appreciation for how my previous work benefited other people. I know it sounds pompous but it’s the best job in the world because you’re being the change in the world you want to see instead of hoping it will happen somewhere else. The President-elect once said, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Before the President-elect was the junior Senator for the Land of Wiretaps and before I had even heard of him, that was the mantra I worked by and I will be a dissatisfied person until it is again.