Best Christmas EVER

Posted 9:59 AM by sean
Man, this Christmas will be so totally awesome.

Every Christmas it's the same goddam thing, over and over, family, presents, food. The last few years we've even been up at Ian's hellhole of a farm-house, where you have to go *outside* to reach half the entertaining shit you can do, where the only reprise from the endless discomfort is the incredible comfort of the entire house, where there is that asphyxiating oppression of knowing the whole family is under one roof. I mean, is there even enough air in one goregous majestic farmhouse for all these mouth breathers to sleep at the same time?

I don't know, but I know we've managed to avoid all of that this year. There has been this lingering debate for the last few months. Will Kent and the family manage to get to New York? ("Oh God," said me, crossing my fingers, "please let them think it's too much trouble. If I have to spend one more minute with my nephews...") Will Michelle fly out? ("She just got a new job," me thought, "there is no way she'll be able to take time off!") Will Tessa and Ian stay in town? ("Oh please," me pleeded with the heavens, "I've had all the wit and wordplay I can take. I'm so exhausted by talking about stuff that Ian and Tessa understand, please make them go away...") etc.

I knew it was too much to ask for. I was gonna end up, again, stuck, covered in presents, eating those god-awful orange rolls, listening to Ian and Sean Patrick talk about music or basketball (two things I couldn't possibly give another shit about) while Tessa and Jordana and my mom talked about writing (as if they know anything) and Steve bringing me *another* cup of frickin' coffee while Michelle bores me stiff with more stories of her "fascinating" life.

But, no. I wake up this morning and it's like a Christmas miracle.

1. Ian and Tessa. GONE! I can't believe it. Driving to Texas as we speak. *TEXAS*!!! I will *FINALLY* be able to talk about my weight without someone in the room *laughing about it*. And Tessa with her endless fascination with *conversation*, as if talking about stuff weren't a total waste of time. With them out of the way, I no longer have to worry about having a couple in their thirties who live in New York to relate to. But even better...

2. No FARMHOUSE! Oh, man. I will get to have Christmas where I always wanted it, in my two bedroom row apartment in Queens. I have a five foot tree that fits perfectly in the dining room (with the table moved over and the branches of the tree which face the wall sort of scrunched up, so that it looks less like it's standing and more like it's leaning, y'know, chilling), I have a string of lights around the front window (any more decoration than that and the paint will probably fall off the wall in sheets) and, best of all, I have one 4X6 bathroom which should be *plenty* for anyone staying here. Which leads me to

3. KENT and Family. My Christmas wish didn't come true here, they are actually coming. But, their two options for sleeping are either a) 45 minutes away in Brooklyn (which is almost as good as them not being in New York at all) or b) at my friend Mac's house (which hopefully won't induce them to stay very long, as it hasn't been cleaned since the Pleistocene). I couldn't stop them from coming, but the Christmas miracle still happened. The weather is so bad in Ohio that THEY ARE POSTPONING THEIR TRIP BY A DAY! They will get here so late on Christmas Eve that I'll be able to just say hello Christmas morning, explain that I have a lot of private thinking to do, and before you know it, they will be headed back to Iowa.

4. STEVE. Ah, bliss. Sure, I made the obvious overtures. Sure, I kept insisting that I wanted him to come. I'm so good at acting and I so completely believed my own line that I actually, for a moment, felt terrible when he said he was going to Utah. It took me a minute before I remembered, I WANT TO BE TOTALLY ALONE ON CHRISTMAS. Yeah, I got a good line when it comes to Steve, the old "hard nut to crack" thing, but I won't have to see him *for the entier holiday season*. Which leads me to...

5. MOM. Always the hard case. She's just always *there*. And *CHRIST*, I am so sick of being around this goddam know-it-all. Every thing I do, she's hovering, either in the next room or at the end of the phone line, laying out advice for everything from orchestration to bread dough. God. I *get* it. You know *everything*, don't you? And there is this myth that Christmas isn't Christmas if Mom isn't there. Well, you know what? I've hated Christmas forever, if Mom isn't there, maybe it won't have to be the same fucking presents/family/food bullshit it is every year.

Imagine my surprise when she decided to go to Texas. It's like I won the lottery! I stopped for a minute, thinking she was pulling my leg. After all, it didn't make any sense. But she had some explanation about hating Christmas (man, can that woman *talk*) and that maybe if she did it different... God, I can't remember, but WHO CARES. She's OUTTA HERE!

6. DAD. Oh, crap. What would I do about this. I really liked Christmas when my dad provided some structure, but if I have christmas with my dad, there is sure to be plenty of room and good food and a nice place for me to sleep, and Jesus, am I sick of that kind of Christmas. Fortunately, he agreed to come to New York for Thanksgiving, and I have him convinced that I am... Man, what is it? How do I avoid... OH YEAH, this is awesome, I have him convinced I am scared to fly. HAHAHAHA. What kind of shithead idiot is scared to fly? Anyway, he wasn't coming out here, and I wasn't going out there BECAUSE OF THE PLANE FLIGHT, so it all worked out.

7. MICHELLE. The only spot of bad news. Michelle is not only flying out, she's coming out earlier than expected. I don't know what the hell I'm thinking sometimes. Michelle calls and she's like "the flight a day earlier is an extra $150, and I can't afford it" and as I'm *thinking*, "maybe you should cancel the whole thing!" my mouth blurts out,

"I'll help you pay for it, I can't believe that it's three days before Christmas and I'm here by myself, I'm looking at this pathetic tree and imagining none of my brothers or parents being here.

"I can't believe that the family cracked and splintered on Christmas of '85, and that the shattering was so profound that none of us has fully recovered but, despite that, we have one day a year when we remember that, at one point, we all lived under the same roof and, maybe it wasn't perfect, but it was what it was, and we have one day a year to get together and both mourn and celebrate the death of that family and relish in the birth of this new one, a family that is patched together with the thrown off remains of the old family and created through *choice*.

"Because we learned that we love each other, not as brothers and sisters and parents, but as people. When we talk on the phone now, we know that we *could* live without each other, but we don't want to. And we don't say it, we don't have a sermon about it, the fact that we are all together, fighting, shitting, eating, laughing, cooking, admitting our mistakes, bragging about our accomplishments, brooding about our failures, all under one roof for one day a year is like our makeshift religious ceremony. We are a people without a home, it's never "next year in the holy land", but it is always, "where will we all be next year." It's why we buy individual presents for each person instead of large master gifts, it's why there is a pilgrimage instead of a phone call. We negotiate the time and place because it is hard to do so, we find actual gifts for each person because we are showing that we think of each person. We open our gifts the morning of and set out stockings because we are honoring our past. It is the only thing we have that approaches being a "holy day" and it became this organically. It is because it always has been.

And I find myself stunned at the precedent, that our yearly pilgrimage to be together will simply not happen this year. We have missed one person at a Christmas, sometimes, and we've even flown the day of to be where we need to be, but we've never been spread to four different corners of America on this day. If it was me that had to miss Christmas, but everyone was still together, it would suck but it would still be Christmas.

"So, yeah, I'll help you with the ticket, and I'll come pick you up. Kent and Melissa will get in late on Christmas Eve, but, shit, I'll stay up all night if they want. I'll do Christmas in a motel 8 in New Jersey. I just wish we could all be together."

I can't believe I said all that shit. It's December 23rd and I am in my apartment by myself. I slept in this morning, 'till 9:30. I woke up because I was done sleeping. *THIS* is the kind of Christmas I want from now on.

Gravity

Posted 8:55 AM by sean
I am not a metaphysical person really, which is strange coming from someone who only understands the surface, pedestrian ideas of science. But I like what I know. If you are boiling a pot of water, it doesn't help to start with a little bit and then add water as you go, it will simply take a certain amount of energy to boil all the water that you need. If you want to jump high, going to the moon will help, but you still will have only a certain amount of strength to mass moved ratio. You will jump higher on the moon than you do on earth, but so would everyone else.

Your weight is actually a measure of gravity, it isn't a thing like mass or density. It is a completely capricious measurement in astronomical terms. It's even useless in talking about your health, mental or otherwise, because density, fat percentage, mass, that kind of stuff is what we should actually be measuring. My weight has always been higher than you would expect. I'm five ten, and at the same height in high school I still clocked in at close to 180 despite being thin as a rail. I once dropped to 170 and my family thought I had contracted a disease. Meanwhile, several of my friends are my height and 150-160 and they look totally normal.

I have gained a bit of weight in the last year, and about three weeks ago I finally talked to my wife about the fact that I just don't believe I'm ever going to lose it. I hired a personal trainer and got my fat percentage down, and couldn't sustain it.

Is it a will power thing? ... I am going to go ahead here... (yes, I'm stalling) and I'm gonna say... No.

I really need to reject the idea that my weight is a failure, and I have a list of reasons. Yeah, I'm gonna list them, eventually, this is a fucking blog, this is what we do with blogs, we write stupid shit that is only really meaningful to ourselves and the few friends we have peeking in our lives, so yeah, I'm gonna write the list, but first I want to clarify the rejection of failure.

A lot of people state rejections of widely held beliefs not because they actually reject them, but because they desperately want to. "I will no longer care what people say about my shoes, I love these shoes, y'all can go suck it," says a girl, who secretly wishes people loved her shoes. Am I doing this? Am I rejecting my weight as a sign of my own failure and self hatred because I *want* it to be true?

Yeah, probably.

Anyway, these are the reasons-
1) There are a bunch of physical things that I love to do. I love to dance. I love to play tennis. I love to conduct recording sessions (which is a pretty healthy upper body work-out). I love to golf. I like weight training with a friend, or even by myself.

But I hate almost all of the physical things available to me. I loathe the gym. I hate riding or running on a machine wherein you don't get anywhere and there's no point. I hate "going for walks" or "running". I don't just find it irritating and hard, it triggers all of the worst things about being me, the endless cycles of shit I have been asked to do during my life that mean nothing to me, where the end justifies the means, but the end is a million miles away and the means are soul suckingly boring.

I spent years in school wishing someone would give me an injury so I could get out of class. How is the gym gonna help me?

2) I've gotten quite a lot done in the last six months, but a huge chunk of it has been sitting at this desk. A lot of us sit at desks too much. It's a problem we all have.

3) I've been saving money, or trying to, for the last two years. Yeah, I got a personal trainer, but instead of meeting with her enough times in a week to be effective, I kept trying to stretch it out to once a week, or less, in order to get my money's worth. At sixty dollars a pop, she's not expensive, but anything over, y'know, five dollars is more than we can afford. We also can't afford dance lessons, memberships to tennis clubs, golfing, etc. It would cost me more money than I have to do the things I enjoy.

4) The ultimate reward for a good cook is a flavorful meal. I'm sure there is probably a way to cook and enjoy it that is less damaging to me than the way I currently cook. And this is one place where I am willing to change, I really would love to be able to cook healthier food than I currently do. I'm sure this can be done with spices. Currently, most of the flavor in my food comes from animal fat, whether in actual meat or butter. I honestly don't cook with much oil, and I haven't been exploring spices nearly enough.

5) I have to give a nod to the self-hatred thing as well. although I don't think it is as deep or as rich as, say, my sister, who always finds a way to take herself to task for every possible thing she's done wrong (and has since she was very young), but I definitely have an abiding joy in wallowing in my own suffering. Jesus Christ, you read this blog, you can tell I almost eroticize my own suffering, great long galloping paragraphs all about how much I suck.

I've gained weight *not* because I have no control and I don't feel like going to the gym. I've gone to the gym and lost weight, but it is worse to go there than it was for me to go to grade school. And I probably went to the gym more times, all told.

There have been stretches when I could get my weight under control, but only if I had a show I had to lose weight for. I couldn't even do it for my wedding. I need to find an activity that will keep me healthy, and it has to be something I want to do and something really affordable. I'm not lazy, if I'm gonna golf with my Dad-In-Law, I'll get up and drive for an hour at 7 in the morning through heavy traffic. It is *not* a matter of me being unwilling to put in the hours. But I just can't afford to go on my own.

And the fucking gym is out of the question.

A Very, Very, Very Fine House

Posted 1:24 PM by sean
Jordana and I put in an offer on a house a few blocks from us that I am fairly sure we won't end up getting. It was a fun experience, taking the plunge and offering up hundreds of thousands of dollars that we don't have in an effort to have something we probably don't deserve and borrowing the money from someone we don't know in order to do it all.

In the discussions we've had with people, it's amazing how much people reveal about themselves, and how much I reveal about myself. When I told my friend Ehren, I found myself explaining that we would be up to our eyeballs in debt, lest he should think that I think I can afford to be a homeowner. When I talked to either Seth or Mac, I tried to get them to move in to the rental. When Ian heard we had to re-do the kitchen, he said, "that's at least fifty thousand dollars right there", which will give you some idea of how far he's come from the six hundred dollar kitchen we had at the beachwood house. Tessa just smiled when we said Astoria and said "I *knew* that was where you guys were happy, I'm so glad." She'll regret that we live so far away when she needs an emergency pair of babysitters, but she knows we're chosing for our own happiness.

All the parents are thrilled. It's interesting, if I had to borrow two hundred dollars to pay a parking ticket, everyone would be pissed, but they would totally loan me a thousand dollars toward a down payment.

The first floor of the house will be the social floor, and the basement will be our bedroom. There is a full bath down there and, strangely, a full kitchen (which we will have to re-build upstairs)(to the tune of somewhat less than fifty thousand dollars...) but it is a huge flow through space with no real windows, and Jordana and I realized that we have been trying to create this bedroom for ourselves for the last five years.

My favorite bedroom growing up was the one in the basement at our house in Iowa, and two houses before that, I loved Kent's room in the basement. It may seem awful to some (In fact Jordana's grandmother recoiled when we told her) but to me it's the absolute best part of the house. The idea of having a den, an actual den like lions or bears, is just fantastic.

Jordana is totally light-phobic, and otherwise she is *completely* low maintenance. She does her make up in bed with the lights off, and it takes her about twelve seconds. The only pea for this princess is light too early in the morning. If we haven't sealed out all the light at a motel or something, Jordana jumps straight up. Plus, this is the floor that is naturally cool in the summer, and with the hot water heater and washer/dryer it'll be plenty warm in the winter. And, if not, we'll buy extra blankets.

In any case, we gave an absurdly low offer because... well, because we offerred all the money we could possibly offer if the circumstances are perfect and, y'know, we have a tail wind. It's a nice negotiating place to be in, knowing that if they want one dollar more we have to say no. But it also means we won't get the house. Mostly it's just a thrill to say, "Hey, Sean, remember when you thought your life was over at 28? Well, look what you're doing now. Buck up, fucker, and quit yer bitchin'"