I typed 'Christmas' a ton of times in this entry

I'm a little off-balance this year.  In my defense, it's been an uncharacteristic year.

Are any years characteristic when you're 25?  I'm not sure when life settles down.  Often, I wonder whether or not life will ever settle down, or if I will spend the rest of my life waiting for it to settle down.  This is something that I've been worried about since I was fourteen and crying in bed at night because I didn't want to grow up and go to college.

Hindsight, huh?

My neck has been out for a couple of days.  I toughed it out on Wednesday, stayed home yesterday when I found myself unable to hoist myself out of bed without the painful tightening of everything north of my ribcage.  Eventually I bundled up and walked the half-block or so to CVS, where I eventually found these Salonpas patches that Mom sent me out for.

Returned home and slapped a couple of those babies onto my neck, where they immediately smelled comfortingly of menthol (minty!) and started tingling away my pain.  Since this morning, I've had much more range of motion and fewer moments of searing pain, and I peeled off the old ones and slapped on a new one.  It makes me feel like a bionic person.

I know that's weird, because the patch isn't really any sort of robotic thing, but it makes me feel like a bionic person.

It makes me remember the preview for that movie "Meet the Robinsons", where a women has blanketed her arm in caffeine patches: "Each patch is the equivalent of 12 cups of coffee.  You can stay up for days with no side effects!  AHHH!  Sorry."

They make me feel ALIVE!  Although I did poke at myself a couple of times last night, between the patches, and tried to figure out if that was my skin.  I guess the NSAIDs and the menthol really numbed me up.  It was awesome.

I've been listening to Christmas songs a lot earlier this year, but it's not really a Christmas spirit thing.  I think Pentatonix got me in the mood when they released their second Christmas album and I stumbled across pieces of it in various places.  I also keep thinking Thanksgiving is over already because of the Thanksgiving dinner that Kate and I hosted (the joy of double Thanksgivings!  I love Thanksgiving!!), which is definitely going a long way toward pushing me into the Christmas spirit.

For once, though, I have attempted to take the bull by the horns and get Christmas presents all sorted out before December 20th, before I have to ask everyone in the family what they want for Christmas.  Happily, I think I am almost done figuring out what I want to gift.

I'm not sure what I want for Christmas.  Honestly, the thing I remember most fondly about Christmas is the togetherness: the contagious happiness pouring out of everyone's sleepy smiles in waves as we organize the gifts into little piles and start taking turns opening them.  The smell of breakfast baking and coffee brewing, the warm quiet of slippers and pajamas while we all find places to sit and delve into books rich with the new-book-smell.

It's harder to remember specific gifts I've received, because that's just not the point.

I have this song on right now, partly because I love Sara Bareilles and partly because I guess I'm kind of in a Christmas mood.

love is not a toy

and no paper will conceal it

love is simply joy that I’m home

true crime

It rained last night.

I noticed it, pattering quietly against the windows in my bedroom, as I paused on my journey toward sleep to crane my neck around and identify the noise.  It was so soft that it almost sounded like a crinkling or a fluttering, and then I thought maybe it was water in the pipes from a shower upstairs.  But it was rain.

The weather is becoming more aggressively cold, a reminder that winter follows too closely on the heels of autumn.  I am resisting the ritual suiting up in all of my wintry gear because I don't want to jump the gun on it; I want it to be delightfully warm when I finally give in.

This means I wear a lot of pullover hoodies these days, carelessly casting off all of the advice about dressing for the job that I want (or am I? maybe what I want is a job that lets me wear pullover hoodies, hmmmmm?  HMMMMM?).  Sometimes I take a scarf, and sometimes I don't.  My fingers are usually cold, wrapped around the tupperware in which I carry my lunch.

This morning, when I and my pullover hoodie, Kate's computer (gotta help a sister out sometimes), and my lunch arrived at the T station, I found myself frantically presenting my Charlie card to the turnstile, again and again and again, as it buzzed nastily and told me alternately "SEE AGENT" and "NOT ENOUGH VALUE".

Unfortunately for me, my hoodie, the computer and the lunch, no agent was in sight.  Particularly distressing when the "SEE AGENT" is refusing to resolve into the usual "ENTER [valid until 11/30/14]" that I have seen for the past two weeks on this monthly pass that cost me $75.

I looked around, at the dark kiosk where the agent presumably ought to be, at the Dunkin Donuts bustling with coffee-drinkers and (apparently) cronut-eaters ("the cronut is here!!"), at the turnstiles, each of which I had tried in turn.  I walked back to the card-feeding station, that small contingent of boxy machines that plead for my credit card.

I swiped my Charlie card.  $0.25, it said - a residue from the days it was cheaper to load money onto the card because I didn't need the MTBA in any kind of daily fashion - and down below, monthly pass valid until 11/30/14.  THIS machine knows that I have paid for the privilege of riding the T this month.  Why doesn't that one?

I tried again and again, wondering if, for some reason, the turnstile was registering the quarter's-worth of value on the card before the monthly pass, if there were some way to strike those twenty-five cents from the record.  Finally, the frustration hit its peak.

Holding my wallet firmly in hand (I am a good citizen who has paid for my T pass, not a sneaky one trying to backpack on your ride), I entered closely behind someone else, touched my wallet to the contact as I passed through the gate, and it belatedly tried to close on me, buzzing insistently, now, and angrily.

I, with righteous adrenaline coursing through my veins, courtesy of my rapidly beating heart, passed through to the other side and boarded the train as the buzzing quickly faded out behind me, lost in the noise of the morning commute.

After all, if someone had been there to stop me, I wouldn't have had to sneak through in the first place.

I hope it works tonight or I'm destined to live a life of faux-crime until December.

so she doesn't feel left out!

The gift idea for Dad has fallen through a bit.  I am going to have to dedicate some time to brainstorming.  Thanks to Mom for her excellent recon work, though; she helped me avoid accidentally getting a less awesome gift for him.

HOWEVER.

I have come up with an awesome gift for Mom (specifically for her birthday, but I also know what to get her for Christmas).  I am exceptionally pleased with myself.

future planning

I am very pleased with myself because I have planned out my father's Christmas present, and he is always the hardest to shop for.

It is a good one, I think.

weekend, incomplete and inchronological

With the advent of November has come a sharp decrease in the temperature.  The walk to work this morning was blustery and cold, wind slipping through the open zipper of my black leather jacket, fingers tingling when I had to remove my hand from my pocket to replace the slipped strap of my purse on my shoulder.

(again and again and again, it slipped, and the stiffness of the coat makes the replacement more of a chore than anticipated)

October went out with a bang, small possies of small costumed children looking down at the bowl of candy with the requisite "trick or treat", Kate in a Luigi hat and Ben in his inflatable man-riding-dinosaur costume, slippers and microwaved apple cider with cinnamon, macaroni and cheese in the oven with browned and bubbling provolone.

My phone stopped responding to my finger, and the slow horror of realization chilled the warm food in my stomach: an iPhone that doesn't recognize touch is nothing more than a pretty watch, a glorified news-ticker.

I didn't trade it in for the $9 when I went to the AT&T store just outside of the Central T stop, figured maybe I could pull some pictures off of it, maybe I could pull the treasure trove of videos of Laura (and sometimes Jon) dancing, Jon goofing around last Christmas break when we all sat by the piano (DJ at the keys) or singing 16 Tons.

I'm still becoming acquainted with my new phone, bells and whistles and fingerprint recognition.  I input my thumbprints but rarely remember to use them to unlock the phone, the rote memorization of my passcode burned into my hand.  The old phone sits listlessly by my bed, coming to life at 8:00am on weekdays to sing my alarm tone.

It is an alarm tone that I cannot dismiss, not even by force restarting the phone (the only trick left to me with the neutered screen), so I suppose that I am lucky to have picked a relatively inoffensive tone, not a song or dogs barking or alarms blaring.  I also suppose that I will have to wait until the battery finally gives out, which could be weeks from now, to dismiss the alarm forever.

I had to go to work on Saturday in addition to the AT&T store for my emergency phone replacement, so our original lunch plans of grilled cheese on homemade bread and homemade tomato soup were slightly thrown off-kilter.  I made a loaf of inoffensive white bread, halved the recipe but forgot about that when I added the yeast and the sugar, decided to run with it (how bad could it be).

The dough rose, I punched it down, stretched it out into a rectangle and rolled it into a tiny loaf, dwarfed by the loaf pan that I laid it in.  Then I covered it with plastic wrap, slid it into the fridge, and wrote out directions for Kate to bake it the following morning.

She baked it while I was out, and she and Ben assembled the tomato soup - the Pioneer Woman recipe, with sherry and heavy cream, and petite diced tomatoes and a diced onion.  I came home with an umbrella in one hand and the bag containing various phone accessories from AT&T in the other (the poor girl at the desk did the best she could for us, and she did pretty well, considering, and then she suggested a case for the phone that was cheap and included a screen protector and she meticulously applied the protector for me).

We talked about the phone for a few minutes, and then Kate said "oh, I underbaked the bread, and then I didn't know if we could put it back in, so..."

I'm still not certain that the bread was underbaked.  It may have been the extra yeast and yeast food.  All I know is that we had a moist loaf of bread that, when sliced semi-thickly and toasted up in butter, agonizingly slowly, in a nonstick frying pan with a couple of slices of velveeta (only the best for our grilled cheese days), it was the most delicious grilled cheese I have ever eaten.

But scarf weather, man.  She is upon us.

PS I know inchronological is not a word but I'm being snappy, not rigorously correct.