A Christmas List

My mom made me send her my Christmas list the other day. It was a good one, but I hadn’t realized yet that it was already time to start sending those out. Time’s really gotten away from me lately.

I decided to share with all of you not my Christmas list, but a Christmas list I have for you. The holidays are a time of shared joy with friends and family, and the all-to-easy slip into greed and materialistic miserism is one thing I think we all could say we fall prey to yearly and wish that we wouldn’t. So here’s a little sociological experiment for you.

Merry Christmas. From me to you to yourself.

1. Make all of your gifts.
   They say there’s more joy in giving than receiving, and there’s an incredible amount of truth to that. I made a couple presents for friends last year, and it was quite a fulfilling experience.
   Suggestions:
   Write someone a short story.
   Make someone a sock monkey.
   Write and direct a short film.
   Record an original song.
   Take a pottery class and give all of your creations as presents.
2. (Re)learn an instrument.
   Regardless of differences in personality, everyone loves their music. Creating music is also a thrill. You could even learn a few Christmas carols and play them for your family.
   Suggestions:
   Learn to play the harmonica.
   Pick up that dusty guitar that’s been sitting in your closet these past few years.
   Find your local music store and see if they give piano lessons.
   Look around your local thrift store for hidden musical gems.
   Go all out and learn some bagpipes. The kilt is optional but strongly encouraged.
3. Take yourself on a date.
   Statistically, Christmas is one of the loneliest times of the year, especially for those of us who have the house all to ourselves. To beat the holiday glum, dress yourself up, wear your fancy smell good, and show yourself a nice time.
   Suggestions:
   Cook yourself a nice meal.
   Go to your favorite restaurant – table for one.
   Check out that movie that you know you’ll love.
   On a warm day, pack yourself a picnic and go enjoy a nice lunch and maybe a long walk.
   Buy yourself tickets to a concert. You deserve it.
4. Go to the holiday service at a church different than your own.
   Every religion has some sort of major holiday around the time of Christmas, and they make the best of it as well. Whether you affiliate yourself with a religion or not – and no matter how devout you are – it’s good to experience the joy of just being human during the holidays. Branch out. Who knows? You might have some fun.
   Suggestions:
   Go to Christmas Eve Mass at your local Catholic church.
   Find a Jewish temple and celebrate Hanukkah one night. (You have 8 to choose from.)
   Be a Hindu for a night and celebrate the triumph of good over evil at Diwali. Just don’t wear a costume and wash your feet.
   Celebrate HumanLight with all the Humanists in Jersey.
   Or, if you can’t find any of these, you can always fall back on Festivus.
5. Volunteer
   This could actually fall under the “Make All Your Own Gifts” category, but you’re not really making anything, so here’s an entire category devoted to the giving of time to those in need over the holidays.
   Suggestions:
   Serve soup at a homeless shelter.
   Sing carols at your local nursing home.
   Be a stand-in room mother/father for at a classroom party for a child whose parent can’t make it that day.
   Help dispose of the used Christmas trees with the fellow members of your community.

Well, there you go. Happy Early Holidays.

Filed under: Clearing the Air

Clearing the Air

Thanks for the love on the last blog post, and for those of you who read the post and gave no love – half thanks.

Some blogs coming soon to get anywhere from bemused to hella excited about:

• A trial run at “ecoblogging”
• Little Faith
• Summer Reading List
• My Soft Spot for Hitler
• How to Overcome Procrastination (pending)

While you wait, here are some things I’ve found to be very interesting as of late:

• Blue Like Jazz – The Movie?
• Charge your cell phone in your hand.
• Funny.
• Who needs Summer Olympics?
• Project Runway: Sharpie Edition

Now go enjoy your day. Go on. Git.

Filed under: Clearing the Air

Clearing the Air

There’s a lot on my mind lately. A lot in my life is going on, and not going on, and in both of those truths I’m losing things, people, feelings, and gumption. A couple months back, a friend of my poetically described life as “a collection of seasons,” to which I so wittily replied: “yep, it’s hurricane season.”

There are some ideas I’d like to run by you guys. Or guy. Or girl. Or the vast emptiness that is my lack of readership due to my own sporatic posting habits.

These ideas are listed here:

• I’m thinking of opening up my blogging format. Normally I just wait until I’ve written a little piece then post it out of left field for others to read and (hopefully, but not usually) comment on. The opening up of the blog format will make room for new categories of posts including personal, theological, philosophical, political, media, and whatever else I feel would be interesting. I will still post bits of my writing whenever they come, but for the sake of the reader, I’d like to make a visit to my blog a little more rewarding than that. I think the avenue for feedback would be far wider and much easier to navigate, should you so choose to.
• For anyone who’s noticed, I slapped the subtitle “A Conversation in Storytelling” as a subtitle to my blog because I didn’t much care for  the cookie-cutter “…just another WordPress.com weblog” tag. But there’s truth here, even in the subtitles. I want this to be an area of conversation, where people can be open to state their opinions on things and be free to express their honest feelings on anything, even in disagreement with me. As a promising conflict theorist and fencepost postmodern, naturally I love this idea.

Those two are mostly all I have to share at the moment. If you are in favor of the more open blog format, then you’ll be bombarded with many more “Clearing the Air” posts and much more exposure to who I really am as a person, not just an aspiring writer. In order for me to determine a course of action, though, I need your feedback. Let me know how you feel. You can do that by leaving me a comment, sending me and e-mail, @reply to me on twitter, or by some other means that I can’t really think of at the moment. I look forward to hearing from you in the next few days and am excited to hear your feedback.

Filed under: Clearing the Air