Suebob's Red Stapler

The first night of Hanukkah is tomorrow night. Hanukkah is also called the “Festival of Lights” because it celebrates the miracle of oil for a lamp lasting 8 days instead of just the one it was expected to.

Then we swing into Christmas season, where we celebrate with lights and candles…the season of light is upon us.

Here’s my request to you for the season beginning tomorrow and ending at the new year: give yourself a month off from criticizing yourself. If you’re like most people, a voice inside you tells you just how bad you are. The voice feels free to speak badly to you, no matter how minor your infraction.

You dropped a can of food? “You idiot!”

You forgot to get gas for the car- “You loser! What is wrong with you?”

And worse. Far, far worse.

So try, just try, this month, to silence the voice with a laugh at how ridiculous its accusations are, or with an inner “Shhhhh.” Or maybe, as I do, yell “SHUT UP, PARASITE!”

(Do not do this last suggestion in public places, though. The 72-hour lockup is no place to spend the holidays).

The voice lies. The voice exaggerates. The voice has nothing useful to say to you. Don’t you deserve an inner voice that is at least as nice to you as your outer voice is when you’re talking happily to your loved ones?

(The correct answer is YES, YOU DO).

Give the voice the month off. Let your heart be light.

“The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in

– A Course in Miracles

There’s some truly bad music in Zumba. This is my favorite example. The music doesn’t begin til 43 seconds in…don’t ask me what the intro is all about. 

There’s a moment at the beginning of Zumba class where I often get a catch in my throat and tears fill my eyes for a second.

I know Zumba is silly. Part of the reason that I get verklempt is that it is so silly, and yet we humans get together a few times a week to do it. We all put on our little colorful outfits, leave our homes, and come to the same spot to do…what? Shake our butts and move our feet in complicated patterns? It’s ridiculous.

I find it touching, this nuttiness.

I’m also so thankful that I can do it. There was a time in my life where I couldn’t move at all without excruciating pain. There was a time I weighed 224 pounds and couldn’t dance for five minutes, much less 55. And there were years of my sister Laura’s life where she couldn’t move her body at all.

So I go out there, colorfully clad and silly, and grin, hugely, as I shake my butt as hard as I possibly can, even though I can never keep up with Jorge, our instructor who seems to have WD40 in his hips. I do it for me. I do it for being relatively pain-free, today. I do it because my sister couldn’t.

I grin because I’m having fun. I grin because I am here now, doing this. And that’s enough.

I realized last night how little I know about music.

My friend Jim sang a song at karaoke and he asked “Was I out of tune?” and I said “How would I know?”

I wouldn’t. All I know is some music sounds ok to me and some music doesn’t.

I don’t know what an octave is and why there are more than one of them. Sure, I know an octave has 8 notes (“oct” duh), but I don’t know why those same 8 notes repeat over and over and sound different and you call them the same things. And why 8 and not 10 or 7?

I don’t know what a key is or sharp or a flat or a time signature is or anything. I missed out, ok? I was busy reading Misty of Chinconteague and I grew up in a house where the radio was never on and we only had 3 Herb Alpert records and an unplayed copy of Brigadoon. I just never caught up.

So last night CC and Jim wanted to go to karaoke and I went. I knew I wasn’t going to sing, because the world is in sad enough shape already. It surely does not need that. I’ll sing along in church in a big crowd, but how much damage can you do to “This Little Light of Mine” with 200 people singing? It’s not like belting out “Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong” in front of a room of unsuspecting strangers. Though karaoke is suspecting strangers, I suppose.

Karaoke is held every night of the week at Golden China, a large multi-level restaurant with two bar areas, shabby 90s decor and a strong odor of stale sesame oil.

The “KJ” (which I must assume stands for “karaoke jockey”) was a bald 30-something guy in khakis and a polo shirt who was pretty obviously only there to sing as much as he could. I thought he’d have a rapport with the audience, some kind of karaoke patter, but he stuck to just calling the next person, then disappearing into his little karaoke booth.

The karaoke screen was suspended above the stage, a little too high, so that it gave the singers the unfortunate effect of looking slightly demented because their eyes were rolled up in their heads to see the lyrics. It’s a karaoke fact that, even if you know all the words to a song, you are legally required to read them off the screen every single time. So everyone looked demented.

Of course, some of the singers were demented. Jim says every karaoke bar has its oddball denizens, but this was all new to me. It must be like City Council meetings, where there are always those three lunatics who attend.

Greggy was Golden China’s resident loon – a wall-eyed, close-to-tipping-over drunk who bobbed and weaved his way up to the stage, then screamed out lyrics with the intensity and tunefulness of a large hooved mammal during mating season. You have to hand it to Greggy though – he had passion. He gave it his all, every time.

Jim sang a few and was good, giving slightly somber, steady performances of “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and “Pump it Up” where he managed to get both the words and melody right, something that eluded many of the singers.

CC was overwhelmed by the 3-inch thick binder of songs and spent the hour and a half we were there pondering all the possibilities. She finally decided and was writing her selection on the entry form when I left to go to the bathroom. It was midnight and I figured it would be four or five songs until they got to her, but I was game, even though my joie de vivre had left me at least an hour before.

My epitaph is probably going to read “Not a night person.”

Sitting on the toilet, I fell into one of those weird microsleeps, where you start dreaming even though you don’t know you have started sleeping, then you jerk out of it going “Huh?” and looking around to see if anyone heard you.

When I got back to the table, CC still hadn’t finished writing the form, and something snapped. “I’m FINISHED,” I blurted. “Going home now!”

I felt like I was having a bossy out-of-body experience, but I was tired and cold and sick of stale sesame oil. I am the least fun person ever, I know.

So that was karaoke. Maybe I should put on that Brigadoon album and try to sing along.

Oh, I love onion rings. I love them so much that I used to limit myself to eating them once per quarter, so I wouldn’t eat them all the time. I figured once every three months was good, because if I cheated, I’d still only be eating onion rings twice in a 90-day period. If my goal was monthly and I cheated, I’d be eating them every two weeks, which, when you come to something that has 900 calories and 50 fat grams, is a lot.

Now I eat them about once every six months and spend the other 5 months and 29 days convincing myself that they aren’t that great, anyway.

I found something that makes me miss onion rings considerably less. They’re almost as addictive and far less caloric.

Leek Rings.

Laura would have said the instructions begin “First, you take a leek…” (read it aloud). BadaBUM.

Take three or four leeks. Cut off the roots and most of the green, depending on how much you can stand to waste. Cut the remaining part into round slices about 1/4 inch thick.

Put these all in a bowl or the basket of your salad spinner, fill with water, and separate the leek rings my pushing the middles up until all the rings come apart (don’t worry about the tiny ones in the middle, those can stay together).

Drain the rings, dry them a bit with a dishtowel. Toss with olive oil or mild-flavored veg oil. Spread them out in one layer on a baking sheet and stick them in the oven at 250 degrees. Stir them every 10 minutes or so. They’re done when they’re light brown and crispy.

YUM. Tiny baby non-deep-fried onion rings. Eat them today, with Beano so you don’t blow the roof off the house. They’re addictive and crunchy. You can also put them on top of your green bean casserole or on salad or what have you.

Enjoy.

These are a tiny bit overdone. Still good though.

These were my office scissors. They were some special kind of scissors which are impossible to cut or poke yourself with, which shows what management thought of our abilities.

When people find out I work from home, they often say “Oh, I could never do that. I would get too distracted.”

I admit that I do get distracted while I work from home. I do go throw in the occasional load of laundry, or stand in front of the fridge looking for snacks.

But what I don’t have to do is:

• Listen to my co-worker tell me her wedding plans down to the napkin color, shape and size
• Talk my co-worker down because that guy from accounting has parked in “her” parking place again even though we don’t have assigned parking places but he should know because she always parks there
• Spend 40 minutes reading lunch menus and arguing whether we should have Chinese food or go to the Thai place even though their food isn’t as good as it used to be and the fish tank hasn’t been cleaned in so long it makes everyone feel kind of bad to look at it
• Hit traffic on the way to work and be half an hour late, though technically early enough since I got there 3 minutes before the boss
• Walk back and forth to the bathroom, which is about 7 football fields away from my desk
• Walk the long way back from the bathroom (which, did I mention, is about 7 football fields away) to avoid that one creepy security guard who likes to talk about how the government is building camps in the desert for dissenters
• Spend multiple minutes trying to get an old paperclip stuck out of a crack in my desk
• Read all the signs in the kitchen area from people who have had their lunch stolen (again) or who are mad about the dishes in the sink
• Rig up an elaborate antenna system to try to get radio reception even though the building is apparently in some kind of electronic black hole
• Avoid the IT guy that I borrowed that cable from one time and never returned
• Check my teeth for spinach bits after lunch (at home, no one cares)
• Return my lunch back to the cafeteria after I find the ghostly white finger from a latex glove in the salad

See why it doesn’t bother me to get distracted at home? I still get 3 more hours out of every day. Honest, boss, I do. 

Photo by Norm Copeland. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I have some Life Lists here on my blog (though I see they need to be reformatted). Things I have done, things I have done and never want to do again (the Raven Life List, because “Nevermore”) and museums I have visited.

How about Things I Never Want to Do? An “Out of the Bucket” List.

1. See above: Spend the night in an ice hotel. It is pretty, isn’t it? But make no mistake: THAT IS ICE. Or at least compressed snow. I do not care about the difference, because frozen is frozen in my book, and I do not want to be frozen.
2. Eat a sea urchin. The look on my sister’s face after she tried Uni was enough to convince me that I did not need to.
3. Go to a rave. I love to dance and I love to do it in a crowd, but I fall asleep by 10 pm and I need earplugs at Zumba, so, no.
4. Go on a cruise. I’m a germaphobe, I don’t like buffets, and I like to spend more time in each destination. Plus? Two words: Poop cruise.
5. Have another cat. Been there, done that, woke up with them batting my nose one too many times. They’re cute. They’re furry. They belong somewhere not at my house.
6. Wear high heels. I fell off my foot wearing athletic shoes in Zumba yesterday. High heels I need like I need a loaded and cocked revolver in my purse.
7. Get anything below my chin waxed. You already know how I feel about this from the early days of blogging, remember?
8. Skydiving. Don’t jump out of a perfectly good airplane is advice I have heard and heeded.
9. Ride a motorcycle. Been there, done that, too old. I like having a hunk of metal and plastic between me and the road.
10. Shop on Black Friday. Shopping is painful under the best of circumstances. I’m a get in and get the heck out kind of girl. There’s nothing fun about that stuff to me. I’ll be eating leftovers and watching Netflix. Happy Holidays to you, too. (Now Cyber Monday – that’s a different thing altogether).

What about you? What is off the list?

I prayed for rain this morning, and this afternoon it rained.

Do you need anything?

Dark begins to creep down around 2:30. I’m trying to resist falling in. 5:15 pm and it is black outside.

This time of year has me doing math: 18 means 12 plus 21.

33 days until winter solstice. More than a month until the days start getting longer.

Holding my breath. Waiting.