Christmas has come and gone. Parents and friends visited, extended families seen. Tree acquired and decorated. I enjoyed both Christmas dinner with Girlfriend's family and post-Christmas brunch with my own. Christmas remains my favorite season. I know that doesn't make me particularly special, but I'll add my voice to the chorus.
I had the opportunity to observe some of the family's newer members, and I noticed more than I think I ever had before how simultaneously jading and heartwarming a child at Christmas can be. I witnessed true, unvarnished joy, elicited by the satisfaction of un-self-conscious greed. We grown ups know that there are right things and wrong things to be happy about, and that interpersonal duties require that we never become fully absorbed in our own pleasure. Contrast with a five-year-old, concerned with nothing beyond what else he gets, at the moment he gets it.
In terms of my own haul, this Christmas has given me cause to reconsider my original plan of getting a job. It looks like I'll actually be needing that time to give adequate attention to the things I got. The acquisitional highlights of the season include another year of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ip Man, Ip Man 2, Batman: Arkham City, and freaking Skyrim. Preliminary assessments estimate these items to comprise approximately two zillion hours of media. Also, my parents gave me a Kindle, which contains a theoretically infinite amount of text. I started down that road by acquiring Alexander Pope's translation of The Odyssey for free, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for 95 cents. That strange little device has revived my likelihood of reading books that I had previously written off as just too big--not in terms of length but in terms of weight. I certainly would have re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by now if my neck didn't cramp at the mere thought of carrying it to and from work every day.
But, since neither Skyrim nor indiscriminate reading comes with health insurance, I grudgingly retain employment as Plan A.
I spent some time this week watching the meteoric collapse of Ocean Marketing, but I think that affair actually merits a separate post, and it seemed appropriate to do the Christmas post first.
Two blog-related items of of minimal importance:
1) This blog is approaching its 1,000th page view, which is both neat and pathetic.
2) I've decided to experiment with labels. It sounds like fun, and what's the worst that can happen? It might even make the blog more organized to future readers.
We also got Skyrim! So far I haven't gotten to play it, but that's really my own fault for not trying hard enough.
ReplyDeleteThe Ocean Marketing debacle was...interesting. From a cursory skim of events, I took away the wisdom that when one is the public face of a corporation, one should behave professionally in emails. Also, regardless of corporate culture, one should use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling (that's just my own belief.)
All the same, Penny Arcade's vast, unchecked power makes me a little nervous. I like them, but you know what they say about power.
BRYAN IS PLAYING SKYRIM WHILE I GO TO WORK. There is something unjust about this.
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