christmas is the tn.

Today and yesterday I worked until 8PM. Retail. Two of the three remaining days before Christmas. Tomorrow, the last day of the "shopping days left" countdown, aka Christmas Eve, I will work until 6PM.

Today I think I may very well have wrapped more presents for other people to give than I am actually giving. To my entire family. And close friends. I actually thought we might run out of tape.

There's something about it I don't really mind though. Even though there are a bunch of scary and, sometimes, disturbing changes going on at the store right now, I actually kind of enjoyed being there. I was busy. I was needed. I was wrapping books like a little lost North Pole elf.

We're leaving for our big trip home on Monday. There's no place like home for the holidays. So what if it's the day after Christmas? I'm really hoping that it snows, which is kind of a dangerous thing to wish for, I realize. This morning, half awake, I had a half-dream about making snow angels.

I have this memory (which may not really be true at all, but it's there, in my head) of making a snow man by myself. Only, by the time I got the bottom snowball (of the standard three-snowball snowman anatomy) completed, it was so heavy I couldn't pick it up. And I seriously did not want to build my snowman on the side of the hill, on the verge of collapse, at the precise location the tulips would bloom four months later.

The memory-narrative goes like this:
Huge snowball. Too heavy. So I go, in my little snowclothes, out to my dad's shop, a place of business mind you, and try to find my father. Just the thought--the idea of remembering without actually having remembered yet--of being in that place, the loud sounds, the fiery cloud of a welder I had to look away from, me dripping little piles of snow in a trail along the cement floor...my mind is flooded and it brings tears to my eyes. My dad had to bend over really far to be able to hear me. He is 6'1". I was probably about 5 years old. It was really loud. From there, I remember his plaid jacket and work gloves. And that he picked up the snowball like he was picking up a beachball.

And that's all I remember. I have no idea if I even finished it. And where was my sister? When did I ever build a snowman alone? Will the world ever have the answers to these pressing questions?

my father's true calling. (that i heard. instead of him.)

Yesterday I was trying to tell Anna about this phrase my dad has used to describe John's artwork...and I couldn't remember it. It goes something like this, "half a *forgotten word* off." I think it might be "buggar." Only, my dad isn't British. It means, like, unique, interesting, weird in a good way; it's a compliment. Anyway, it made me feel bad. Because that little detail is the sort of thing that is going to drive me crazy when I'm 80 and trying to remember precious details of the father that I've lost. (Dad, if you're reading this, please do try and live to be 116--this is in no way an invitation to check out early and not strive to be the Oldest Man Alive in 2061.)

So then, this morning, still trying to remember the forgotten word, I realized how often Dad uses words that aren't real anyway. He's an engineer and could easily tell you the drive ratio (I have no clue if that's real) of a particular machine rounded to the nearest logarithm (or whatever), but sprinkled in with the description will be made-up names for parts that he's designed--in other words, parts that don't have a name. Names such as: whatzit, whozie, thingamajig, and (my favorite) doohickey.

I've decided that instead of retiring, my dad should become the guy who names Olympic mascots. Seriously, in 1996, when the games were in Atlanta, the mascot was an exclamation point with a face named Izzy. For 2006: Neve the Snowball and Gliz the Ice Cube. Come on. Dad, you could totally do this!

the art of pressed flowers.

I've just finished reading an article from the November issue of The Believer, a magazine I overzealously believed would enter me into the fascinating world of literary fads, social criticism, and intelligent humor that I have decided is the McSweeney's Universe. In fact, the magazine's articles all sound incredible, but I have previously done little more than read Nick Hornby's recurring column "Stuff I've Been Reading" (although not the one in the issue being discussed at the moment).

Strangely enough, I actually think I will one day read all the back issues that are now standing together wedged by our make-shift bookend (two books with the same title, "A History of Art," stacked one on the other, because they are huge and we couldn't find anything else of any weight in our entire apartment) and John's reference books (including, but not limited to, at least six books with titles starting with the words "the art of..."), a new member being added to their ranks each month. I've been floating around in the craptastic world of Retail During the Holidays, while perfectly wonderful books (such as Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw and Denison, Iowa, both of which I am at least halfway through and thoroughly enjoy, but have been collecting dust on my bedside table) have been sitting around my apartment slowly rotting away from the shame of never being read. This is the battle I fight with myself.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been very depressed lately. And I received some bad news at work back in October...and I really haven't read much since then. (I did read Shopgirl, but it's a novella barely bigger than a pamphlet, really, and I wanted to read it before seeing the movie. Which, by the way, I still haven't seen.) I talked to Anna about this a couple of weeks ago and she said she hadn't read much since getting "the news" either. We work with books. Reading at home now reminds me of something sad. It's wearing off though. I'm getting used to the idea, I guess.

But when the November The Believer came, I saw the title of this article and kept thinking, I have to read that one. It's called "Other People's Bookmarks: Fellow Wanderers of a Forgotten Republic," and you can read it, in full, here.

I won't lie: I mainly wanted to read it because I was jealous that an already-established writer beat me to it. Wasn't this really my idea? Obviously, not really. It was just an idea that I happened to share.

And the article is good. Well-written. Interesting. Etc. But there's something missing, for me. Michael Atkinson doesn't include the circumstances which led up to these books coming into his possession. Sure, he mentions that he loves used-book stores and eventually comes to shop in them based on what slips of strangers' lives are peeking out from in between the pages, but it isn't until the article was almost over that I even realized he was in New York. That changed things, for me. The repeated presence of Pennsylvania and the inclusion of New Jersey seemed almost obvious then. Of course people in those neighboring states could have somehow let their books slip away into the used-book stores of New York--it's not that far away.

I've been collecting bookmarks at work for months now. And the prize of my collection is from Anchorage, Alaska. Did someone visit Alaska buy a book on shore and read it on the ferry on the Alaska Marine Highway, and then come back to their home in the Hollywood hills and forget about it for ten years until their bookshelves were so full they weeded out the stuff they'd never read again and took them down to a little store in the valley to see if they could trade them in? Unfortunately, I found this treasure, as I've found most of the bookmarks in my collection, on the floor. I have no idea what book it came out of. I found it in the room where we keep travel books, so it could easily have fallen from the pages of a book about it's origin, but I'll never know that.

I once found a thirty-year-old baptism certificate, written in Spanish, on the shelves of our science section. What was it doing there?

Also, Mr. Atkinson, being an established writer and a person who probably finishes reading books, has the luxury of clearly being employed outside of the bookselling industry. Not me! I can say with some level of modesty that in this one instance I have an insight a real writer-reader person was unable to reach:

There are some items that you cannot remove.

I have no problem collecting lost bookmarks off the floor or that lay hiding behind books, but I have difficulty removing certain items from books still on the shelves. For example, a newspaper obit that has yellowed the pages that hold it--a biography of the same person. Or, more commonly, pressed flowers and four-leaf clovers. I can't take dead plantlife out of a book that isn't mine. I just can't. For one thing, these items seem to have become disconnected from any former life they may have had and have become, all of them, one thing: book ephemera. They're not really even flowers anymore. They've become part of the book in a way even the authors themselves could not.

The sadness of pressed plantlife is that I know, really know, that that book was never read. It's not enough that, in actuality, used books can be seen (although cynically and pessimistically) as cast offs, but to know they were never read and remain unsold is just sad. Imagine your excitement when some bright young girl with braids throws open your pages, letting in sunlight for the first time in five years, and feeling your spine crack and stretch, like stiff bones or aching muscles, only to be greeted by a piece of greenery shoved inside of you and then to be slammed shut, forcing you to take in this foreign object without so much as one of your words (and you know how interesting they all are--you're a reference book--she could learn so much) ever being read. It's heartbreaking. Book and flower, forever wed in their loneliness, forgotten by both the book's owner and the flower's finder. Now they live together in musty disharmony, without the other books in the set, which may be keeping a table level somewhere in Van Nuys for all I know. The point is, to press a plant, you have to put it in a huge book that will easily go undisturbed. And when you do this, do you think you'll ever retrieve it again? Why do we press flowers anyway? What are we going to do with them? They're flat now. They'd make horrible bouquets...

I've gotten sidetracked. I have an immense guilt complex. I love books. I tend to buy them new. At first, that sounds like I don't want to be a part of the greater readership. At first, that sounds like my desire to "save" books from being unread exists only for those I've purchased--in short, that my love is conditional. But I cannot bear the weight any other way.

And let's face it... I probably wouldn't get around to reading them either.

i'm not gonna lie to you.

I've been really depressed lately. But on the plus side, I've finished Christmas shopping (except for John's grandmother) and am going to mail our Christmas cards tomorrow.

After an exceptionally crappy day at work, John brought home the singing Chicken Little for me:


Chicken Little and I, we have a lot in common, what with us both being rather apocalyptic in attitude.

My Minnie Mouse antenna ball was recently stolen. My car was parked right in front of the office of our apartment complex at the time. We live in The Valley. Who here needs to steal a Disneyland antenna ball? Seriously. Just go to Disneyland. There's no need to sacrifice your morals over a piece of foam. Again, it's The Valley. Seriously. We live with the yuppies.

I sort of imagined a gang of Valley boys in baggy Old Navy jeans and Abercrombie and Fitch sweaters vandalizing the streets of Burbank and Toluca Lake by stealing things with little to no value and dropping their Starbucks cups just beside the sidewalk trashcan.

I'm so hard on the people in The Valley. They're really not that bad, most of them. It's just that there's so many of them. And we live in the Pretty Rich People capital of the world.

And yet, today, I saw a guy arguing with a girl at Popeye's over 20¢. Seriously. I've been stupid crazy depressed lately, but I'm not yelling at anybody. The holidays are here. Lighten up, people!

*Edit* Wanna hear Chicken Little sing?

i miss the eighties.

This wonderful thing is what I wish I was getting my sister for Christmas. Or maybe this. Either way, it'd rock.

"When we're not on stage, we can't wait to play..."

a study of differences.