Friday, January 4, 2008

True Confessions for the New Year

According to the Christian calendar, it's still Christmas. That is, until after January 6th (the "12th day of Christmas"). New Years was back in the beginning of December.

So...a happy Roman Calendar new year to you all!

If you want to read something profound about making New Year's resolutions...as in personal change ... go to my Christian leadership blog at Emerging Spirit and check it out. I happen to think it's a pretty good one this week.

It is 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, and I am currently enjoying my favorite activity: multi-slacking. It's like multi-tasking, but with various forms of time-wasters as opposed to work. You need the whole picture, so here it is.

I'm in my pajamas. They are old and sloppy, and the pants are covered with multicoloured letters, all of which spell "kiss me". No one, even my beloved of 26 years, will kiss me in this outfit.

Although I'm in a recliner chair anyway, my feet are resting on one of those exercise balls - you know - the ones you're supposed to use to get in shape. They make comfy footstools. I'm being careful not to move my ankles or toes - that might actually strengthen some muscle.

My 11-year-old Golden Retriever lays snoring at my feet - in doggy diapers. Poor thing is incontinent in her old age. At least, unlike my 91-year-old-mother with a similar fate, the dog still recognizes me when I come in the room. I stare down at her and ponder the aging process sped-up 10 times faster than in humans. Such is the fate of all of us, and the alternative is no better. The dog's presence there reminds me that time multi-slacking is time I can never recover, to help make this world a better place or to alleviate some human suffering.

A repeat of Oprah is playing on my husband's new penis-envy-inch widescreen High-Definition TV set he got for Christmas. For "the family". I wonder whether any amount of work I will do for social justice this year, or money we will give to charity, will atone for my secret-now-public love of this thing which stamps us as official yuppies SLASH destroyers of the planet SLASH exploiters of impoverished workers.

The highly-defined widescreen Oprah is talking about how to go green in your family. Most of it seems to include buying more crap - cotton shopping bags for $9 each, fancy water bottles, new cleaning products, etc. etc. She never mentioned one of the favorite websites of hypocrite-me : www.buylesscrap.com

In my hand I have a can of .........omg I can't even say it.........*closes eyes and clenches teeth, waiting for lightning to strike*......COKE. (Dont' even get me started.)

It helps that I'm stoned . After wratching my back last Saturday, the only thing that helps at the end of a long day is Tylenol #3. Between that and the Coke, I'm experiencing a strange sense of euphoria - as if I'm NOT killing the planet and destroying its peoples with my flabby middle-class existence after all.

On my lap is my trusty laptop. A cat, who lives the way we all wish we could, warms up to the radiation-heat emanating from the back of it. His purring is strangely comforting and I reflect that if I were only a little more spiritual, the purrs might be enough to alleviate my pain - and I could lay off the T3s.

Despite the opiates and all the comforts of the western world, I'm lacking in energy and feeling blue. Just goes ta show ya. Everything we surround ourselves with to self-medicate (including dogs, computers, comfy chairs, pajamas, TV sets and drugs) doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. Heck...we should be the happiest people on the planet, eh? Skipping around in a euphoric frenzy. Jumping up and down with joy at every moment. Whooppee! Pajamas! Whoopee! An HD TV! Whoopee! A dog and a cat! Whooppee! A can of coke! Yahoo! A warm house! Yippee-yi-o! Tuna casserole! Eeeeeyoow! Painkillers in a bottle! What a great life I have ! Wa-hoooooooo!

Hey

I feel better now.

Happy New Year!
/2280

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now I have a name for what I've been doing since my mother-in-law left the other day: multislacking! I revolve, this new year, to embrace your concept. I didn't have to hurt myself to spend the day in my jammies, so I wasn't able to justify T3s. But a carafe of coffee in bed with the Globe and Mail and my shiny new Christmas ipod Touch (yes, internet in bed without having to heave the laptop around!), listening to edifying audiobooks, surely qualify as multislacking at its finest.

Hope you're feeling better! Have a great new year.

Unknown said...

I always keep my Christmas decorations up until Epiphany. So now mine is the only Christmas tree on the block.

Anna S. Christie said...

ha ha - so do I, but that's probably more due to laziness than liturgical symbolism.
Sometimes our tree is still up in February!