I am assorted cranky this morning. There was a long series of events starting with Rob texting me that the bake sale was TODAY instead of tomorrow (luckily for him, this was not his error), and me being thankful I’d done the baking already but worried because I’d put everything in the freezer because I made it ahead of time, but fine, no big deal, I will just drive it all over to the school, everything will thaw. Except…where is my key? It is not on my keyring. Paul borrowed my keys yesterday, so probably my key is in his pocket. But the keyring is all bent, so perhaps my key is more lost than that. And then the genius realization that we made Rob a copy of our car keys, to give him when he gets his license! Whew! Saved! Except…the copy does not work. HOW CAN THIS BE? WHY DID WE NOT TEST IT?? ARE WE NEW HERE??? Anyway, my parents have a spare so my dad drove over and gave it to me and I took the stuff over to the school.

Really, when I type it out it doesn’t sound nearly as exasperating and thwarted-at-every-turn as it FELT. Partly is that I am trying to be brief because this is not the INTERESTING kind of dramatic event, so I left out things like “And then I realized I couldn’t go yet because it was almost time to bring the littler ones to the bus stop” and, like, the part where I emailed my dad, then emailed him to say never mind because I’d remembered the spare key, then had to email him again to say the key didn’t work; and partly it is that it all ended well with the baked goods at the bake sale, so I’ve lost the urge to communicate the FRANTIC PANIC.

Another issue is that my baby names blog is down. Just…down, since at least yesterday. I can’t even get to the dashboard. And I just recently gave access to that blog to a place that does one of the plug-ins, so they could fix their polls that stopped working when I updated to the new version as requested, so I’m wondering if that is connected to this problem and, if so, how serious the fall-out is going to be. I have copies of all the posts, but dear heaven that would be a chore. Well, maybe the blog will pop right back open today, with all the polls working again too! Wouldn’t that be nice! La la la!

Also, I bought a new chair to replace the one that had duct tape holding it together, and it’s a nice chair but I didn’t give any thought to the upholstery, which is a cool grey-blue or blue-grey, and I don’t think it’s going to go with anything else I will ever like. And I am JUST ABOUT to replace our two stuffing-bursting-out recliners, so perhaps it would have been nice to consider the upholstery. Also, I ALWAYS choose bad upholstery. ALWAYS. When we bought our couch, I thought we were choosing a daring fiery multicolored orange and red, but it turns out it’s the standard wine-color, which I dislike even though it’s convenient for spilling wine. Well. Let’s just not think about that. Let’s certainly not turn this into a series of thoughts about ALL past furniture errors and all future likely ones. La la la.

Also, my blog is doing this annoying thing where it asks me to log in while I’m in the middle of typing a post. Then it goes back to the post as if everything is fine, but EVERYTHING IS NOT FINE, and when I try to publish/save the post, it says “Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again,” and when I try again, it brings me to a BLANK POST. Luckily I am now in the habit of copying the whole post when this happens, but isn’t that annoying? Isn’t that something that SHOULDN’T HAPPEN? Well, it just DID happen. AGAIN.

Oh, and one more thing is that I heard that song about “with every broken bone, I swear I lived,” and I am very tired of the concept that “living life” has to be measured in units of DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES.

It is time to do an update on parenting a teenager, because I think the last update I gave was when Rob was in the worst part of the transition and I, as my brother remembered it recently, was wishing that either I or the children had never been born. I felt it had been a giant mistake to have children. I felt tricked by biology into doing something completely against my lifetime best interests in exchange for the very brief and pleasant and IRRELEVANT TO THE REST OF LIFE cute stage. It felt like the worst bait-and-switch of all: this PERSON didn’t seem anything like my BABY. I could feel the other four wolves in sheep’s clothing children coming right up behind this awful one, and I didn’t know how we were going to make it through without ruining our lives.

My plan was to find all those posts and link to them, but once again I regret my apparent inability to grasp the use of helpfully descriptive post titles. Here are a few samples I found by searching for the word “teenager” in the year Rob was 13: This is a Stage That Will End; Biological Set-Up; Wan. (I would have SWORN a post called I Didn’t Sign Up For This would be another, but that one turns out to be a PTA complaint.)

The update is that things feel better now. MUCH better. I remember MomQueenBee saying something about each child having One Terrible Teenage Year, and me trying not to hope too hard that it was true. I’m not sure how long it DID last, and it’s not as if everything is lovely lovely all the time lovely NOW, but feelings of regret and questions about our survival have passed off, and it DOES seem like it lasted about a year. And in fact, things are so much better, I now think of the teenager years as one of my Preferred Stages. Like, some people love toddlers but dislike the Newborn Slug stage, while others are the opposite; it turns out that, at least with THIS teenager, teenager is another stage I like better than others.

What I didn’t like was the TRANSITION from Older Child to Teenager. We need a word for that, because I was thinking of that as “teenager,” and it kind of IS teenager, but it also ISN’T. Oh, I guess the word is “puberty,” but I think that’s kind of a gross word, the way some people feel about the word “moist,” and also, puberty can last for years and include several years of non-awfulness, whereas the transition to teenager doesn’t seem to line up with that. I think Transition to Teenager is an okay term, and I’ll just use that for now. Especially since I don’t think I need to talk about it anymore, except to say I hated it to the point where I really, no-exaggeration-for-comic-effect, genuinely wished I hadn’t had children. I say this so that if you get to that point and you feel the same way about it, you won’t feel like you’re the only one, and it may give you hope that it may not be a permanent regret.

But I feel like I also need to specifically clarify that all this surprised improvement doesn’t mean everything is great all the time, even though I know you know that. We have a 6-foot-tall child who sometimes doesn’t realize his voice and strength are now grown-man-sized, and that he needs to be careful how he uses them. He of COURSE thinks we are kind of stupid about a lot of things. He of COURSE thinks we are unreasonable about a lot of things. There are a lot of times when he acts like he has the worst case of PMS I’ve ever seen. He can be super sensitive about things, or super full of himself about other things, and there are still sometimes discussions where I feel like I’m defusing a bomb, and other discussions where I feel like everything was going fine and suddenly I stepped on a mine. But all this is as if I said I loved the newborn stage, which I do, and then clarified that I don’t love blow-out diapers, or when the baby spits up a whole feeding all over me and the recliner at 2:00 in the morning, or when the baby cries and cries and I can’t figure out what’s wrong: of COURSE those things happen, and of COURSE I don’t like them. Every stage has the parts we don’t like, even if we like the stage.

And I do like this stage. I’d rather try to figure out whether he’s allowed to go to the movies with a girl than to figure out if he can have a playdate at a house where the mom expects me to stay and talk to her. I’d rather make rules about curfew than bedtime. I like how little I’m involved now in his homework and his toothbrushing. Little kids say MUCH cuter things than teenagers do, but the trade-off is that teenagers tend to talk on topics I find more interesting. I like when we’re in the car on one of our trips, and he starts a conversation about why people say not-true or not-necessarily-true things (“Boys/Girls suck!” “Girls/Boys only like you until you like them!” “You were too good for him/her!” “He/She is going to be sorry!”) as comfort after a break-up. It’s fun when he says, “Oh, by the way, Josh is dating Abby now,” and then we talk about who Abby used to date, and how it is that all Josh’s exes are friendly with him even though he has so many of them.

This is also an update on student driving, because I think the last time I talked about that, the word “hate” was involved, and the tone of the post contained considerable despair. But after the first five hours or so (during which time he also had a couple of hour-long sessions with the driver’s ed teacher, which don’t count toward the 50 hours the parents have to do), things improved considerably, so that now I don’t really mind doing it.

And here’s the unexpected part: it’s been 35 hours so far of spending mostly-pleasant quality time with a teenager. We drive for an hour or so, then stop for lunch, then drive another hour or so. He’s good enough at it now that I can look out the window for the scenery as well as for Potential Death. There’s chatting. There are tacos. We decide where we feel like driving, and we go there; the other day, we went to a beach we’d never been to; another day, we drove past the exit we always take, just to see where a highway went after that. It’s a nice time, and that’s not something I expected when we were still driving agonizingly around a parking lot at 5mph.

Another thing I want to update is the social situation. Back when Rob was in 5th grade, I wrote a post about how he said he felt he was “the chosen one”: the kid who always got picked on and excluded. In middle school, sometime in 6th grade, this started to resolve: he made friends with a very social, outgoing, large-friend-network person—or more accurately, that person made friends with him. So then Rob started meeting other people in that group. Meanwhile, a child he’d had to be separated from in 4th grade because the teacher said they could not keep from arguing if they were within 6 feet of each other, turned out to be a “we fought because we were so much alike” type, and they became good friends, and THAT person was friends with OTHER people and THOSE people became Rob’s friends too. And also when he started middle school, there were extracurriculars other than sports, so he joined some of those and made more friends that way. (I wish they’d have some of these non-sport clubs in our elementary school, too: it seems like a shame that kids who play soccer can start bonding in kindergarten, but kids who like math or drama or debate have to wait for sixth grade.) So now he has a very nice central friend group, and also a number of specialized friend groups, and as far as I know he doesn’t get teased anymore than anyone else does.

I finally finished watching Boyhood. It took me a long time to watch it, because it made me very uncomfortable so I kept shutting it off. Also it’s really long.

There were four types of uncomfortable it made me. I’m listing them partly because I want to talk about it, and partly because these are the types of uncomfortable where some people LOVE them and some people HATE them, so seeing them listed out may help you decide if you want to see the movie, apart from whether I would want to.

1. First type of uncomfortable: It had some escalating scenes of the sort where someone is slipping into addiction / violence / mental illness. I hate that kind of thing so much. I especially hate it when it’s adult behavior from a child’s point of view, and you don’t trust the filmmaker/author not to take things to a very bad place indeed. I don’t find that entertaining AT ALL, and it makes me upset about The World at Large. I would have stopped the movie very soon into it, if I hadn’t been extremely motivated to watch it. But I know lots of people do enjoy this sort of uncomfortable. I know it in part because SO MANY BOOKS AND MOVIES are made along this theme.

2. Second type of uncomfortable: Reality/documentary-type scenes where the awkwardness of human existence is allowed to play out in all its excruciating glory. I sometimes love this and sometimes don’t. I find it makes me feel very self-conscious, and I have to keep reminding myself that when I’m PARTICIPATING in similar kinds of reality, it DOESN’T feel that awkward. It’s WATCHING that’s awkward. And TONS of people like to watch reality/documentary shows.

3. Third type of uncomfortable: Time passes, people get old, children grow up, it all goes so fast, there’s nothing that can stop it, we all think there will be more time than there is, but there’s actually less. Sometimes I love this kind of thing and sometimes I don’t. Mostly I like it, in a “good kind of hurt” way. Or sometimes in a “drink most of a bottle of white wine and cry silently and wide-eyed into a handkerchief while watching it” way.

4. Fourth type of uncomfortable: Children going through child experiences: dealing with a mean kid at school, being in a car with a teenaged driver who’s not paying attention, going to a party their parents would never have let them go to if their parents had known, dealing with a kid who’s making them uncomfortable but they feel trapped, being introduced to risky/mature things by other kids, their parents saying something hurtful, overhearing grown-ups fighting, experimenting with alcohol/cigarettes/sex/drugs, dealing with painfully awkward lectures from clueless adults, having very little control over major aspects of their lives and too much control over others. I don’t like it at all. But again: I know lots of people LOVE this and read young adult fiction ON PURPOSE, so what makes me want to break things and run away is going to be CATNIP to others.

Other remarks:

1. The director cast his daughter as one of the main characters. She looked so absolutely unlike a daughter of Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke that I was confused: I thought that must be on purpose for something the plot would do later (surprise, you’re not the father, that kind of thing), but it wasn’t.

2. I was distracted by the names. The mom and dad are named Olivia and Mason. The kids have peers named Barb and Sheena. It isn’t that no one born in 1968 was named Olivia and no one born in 1996 was named Barb (there were in fact 325 Olivias born in 1968 and 667 Barbaras born in 1996)—but man, what a coincidence to have SO MANY atypical-generation names in one movie (for comparison, there were 49,528 Lisas born in 1968, and 25,148 Emilys born in 1996). Hey. Hey. I have thought of the job for me: Character Name Consultant. Yessssssss. The parents are now Kevin and Michelle, and the kids are Kevin Jr. and Samantha, and the kids’ peers are Taylor and Amanda. Or we could keep ONE name oddity, since those DO happen: the kids’ peers can be Barb and Amanda.

3. I think the main (in fact, ONLY) reason I would see or recommend this movie was its gimmick of using the same actors over a 12-year shooting period. That was a really cool idea. If the movie had been made using aging make-up for the parents and different actors for the different ages of the kids, I wouldn’t have had any reason to see it OR recommend it. Without the gimmick, it strikes me as an overly long and not very interesting movie with a lot of uncomfortable parts.

I have some online shopping peeves. I feel as if venting them will improve my mood.

I like to put things into my online cart and then think about them. Or I put things in the cart to see if I have enough to meet the free-shipping-with-minimum-purchase or percent-off-with-minimum-purchase deal, and if I don’t, I close the tab, leaving the things in the cart—because the next time I go back, I don’t want to have to re-find all those items. EVERY TIME I DO THIS, Old Navy sends me an email a short while later saying my cart “has abandonment issues.” EVERY TIME. The first time it was mildly annoying but I could see they were trying to be cute. Now that it’s EVERY TIME, I cringe in anticipation of it. It makes me feel like clearing out my cart, forgetting everything I would have bought the next time. THAT’ll show their automatic email system!

Old Navy ALSO sends me emails telling me the GOOD NEWS that the items in my cart are ALMOST MINE, and how extremely lucky I am that I still have the opportunity to pay for them.

I know I’ve mentioned this before. I KNOW I have. But it continues to bug me. “Everything an ADDITIONAL 40% off!”—but many things STILL aren’t as much as 40% off, which doesn’t make sense math-wise. (I do get it when the things are discounted as they’re added to the cart, or when a coupon code is needed; I mean when the store claims the prices are as marked.) Children’s Place is the one I notice most with this.

“ENTIRE SITE 40% OFF!!!*” “*some exclusions apply” Children’s Place is again the one that bugs me the most often with this, but they’re definitely not the only ones. “Entire site” MEANS no exclusions. If there are exclusions, a word other than “entire” is needed, and luckily there are plenty of those.

“ENTIRE SITE UP TO 70% OFF!” That is, many things are 0% off, which counts as up to 70% off. It’s true! And incredibly annoying/misleading. CHILDREN’S PLACE.

“40% OFF YOUR ENTIRE ORDER!!!” But now the pants that have been $8.99 for the past three months are $14.99. This is a LOT of sites.

“GIANT AMAZING 40%-OFF BLOW-OUT SALE!” One item out of thirty is 40% off—and most are familiar to me as items that were on sale before the GIANT SALE. I do expect a GIANT SALE to include enough items that I don’t feel like I’m panning for gold just to find ANYTHING that’s included. If I go to the site and can’t even tell from the prices that there IS a sale, it is not sufficiently GIANT. (Also, I recommend not using a term like “blow-out” when marketing to people who change diapers.)

“Take an additional 20% off all clearance!” But now the clearance item I added to my cart last week at $11.99 is on clearance for $14.99.

Daily sale emails, especially of the “Only 3 Days Left!,” “Only 2 Days Left!,” “Last Day!,” “Hours Left!,” “Sale Extended 2 Days!,” “One Day Left of Extended Sale!,” “Hours Left of Extended Sale!,” variety. I have even WRITTEN to Lands’ End about this, they were overdoing it so hard. They never DON’T have a sale anymore. I adjusted the email frequency with them when they added that option, and that helps somewhat. I finally had to unsubscribe to Lane Bryant: I WANTED emails from them! I had REQUESTED that they market to me! But they overdid it so severely (and, at least at that time, had no option to reduce email frequency), so I finally and reluctantly asked to be taken off the list. (I filled in the “why are you leaving?” field, even though in my experience marketers BEG for customer feedback, PLEAD for customer feedback, even PAY for customer feedback—and then collect it in a box and don’t use it for anything.)

Yesterday I went looking for boots online. I didn’t add anything to a cart; just browsed prices and options. This morning I got an email from L.L. Bean thanking me for my visit and inviting me to reconsider the items I looked at, accompanied by pictures of those items. That’s creepy. I feel spied-on and followed. I expect the same PRETENSE of privacy online that I get if I go to a store in person: if I’d gone to a physical L.L. Bean store, I wouldn’t want to get a letter a few days later telling me that they’d seen me shopping there and enclosing a list of what I’d looked at in case I wanted to reconsider my decision not to buy those things.

********

To say some HAPPY, NON-complainy things, I am having coffee with a friend today and really looking forward to it. And also, the sky is looking pretty. And also, See’s is having their “$5 flat-rate shipping or free shipping over $55” deal, which I find entirely satisfactory. (You can choose your shipping date, so I like to order myself some chocolates shipped for Valentine’s Day.)

The winner of the UK scarf giveaway is K, who wrote:

Favorite bits of 2014 include a cross-country move with our four kiddos this summer to a magical place where water just falls right out of the sky, the birth of our fifth–a girl we named Claire, and so many happy little things along the way. My niece just left for the UK as a missionary…would love to win the scarf for her!:)

K, could you email me (swistle at gmail dot com) with the mailing address?

On New Year’s Eve we watched The Sound of Music, a movie I watched a lot as a kid but probably hadn’t seen a single time since then.

Things I didn’t understand about the movie as a child:

Why someone as old as the Captain would be looking for a new wife, or why he would be attractive to Maria in any way.

Why the Captain would be cold and emotionally damaged with his children, which I understood was because he was broken by the death of his wife—but then be relaxed and warm and happy with the Baroness and Max. “The children remind him of his wife” seemed inadequate explanation.

The appeal of the Baroness.

Why my mother kept making remarks about how Liesl is more like 29 going on 30.

Why my mother was so annoyed by the near-instant transformation of the terrible naughty children into perfect delightful ones.

Why my mother (a former teacher) was annoyed by the children’s instant and full grasp of the principals and applications of music. Teaching is easy! All you have to do is explain it once and demonstrate it once and that’s all there is to it! Instant gifted musicians!

Why Rolfe is suddenly cold to Liesl after being so sweet to her before.

Alllllllll the Germany/Nazi stuff.

Why singing Eidelweiss at the festival was a big deal, and why the Captain choked up.

Who on earth Max was, and why was he THERE?

Things I didn’t understand about the movie as an adult:

Why the Captain called Maria repetitious in her request for play clothes for the children, when it was her first time asking. (Theory: cut scenes.)

Why the Captain would be cold and emotionally damaged with his children, which I understood was because he was broken by the death of his wife—but then be relaxed and warm and happy with the Baroness and Max. “The children remind him of his wife” seems inadequate explanation.

Why the family hides in the nunnery and then goes out the back door, instead of going out the back door to begin with, or else staying in hiding until the soldiers leave.

Why Liesl’s dress is SO DIRTY when she comes in from the rain. (Paul says “from climbing the side of the house,” but it’s also dirty all over the back.) (Theory: unexpected fabric complications; dyes running, multiple-take mishaps, or whatnot.)

Why Maria gives Liesl something of her own to change into, instead of going (or having Liesl go) to her room to get something of Liesl’s own.

Where Maria’s “he can’t take his eyes off you in that” dress comes from: she didn’t make it from the fabrics she was given, and it’s not something she brought with her.

Why Liesl is not a teenager, but instead a grown woman talking in a breathy baby voice.

Why a nun sings the song about having adventures and following your dreams.

How Maria can be so relentlessly, amazingly perfect in every way, never a single moment of not wanting to fully interact with all those children, never a sharp word or moment of impatience. Just boundless, delightful energy and love, always knowing the right thing to say and do, always interested in teaching and playing and having fun. And the children respond by being absolutely perfect and delightful, and never mouthing off or misbehaving or being cranky, and hanging lovingly on her every word. The teenager consults her for advice, then takes it, then offers words of love and appreciation. DID NO ONE WORKING ON THIS FILM KNOW ANY ACTUAL CHILDREN?

Who on earth Max was, and why was he THERE?

I certainly felt differently about Christopher Plummer’s appeal this time around. Also, the Baroness was a more understandable character to me. As a child, I saw her not only as old but as obviously boring and unpleasant (doesn’t want to PLAY??? not charmed by someone else’s seven children??? obviously she is completely without merit), but as an adult I saw her as charming and pretty, with an understandable desire not to toss a ball around. I appreciated the way the Captain and the Baroness had a warm and affectionate and flirty relationship: I’d expect a movie of this sort to show their relationship as a burden of duty to the Captain and clearly a terrible idea, rather than something that would have been fine.

As for the perfection of Maria, while I was looking at information about the movie and the von Trapp family, I found this:

Far from the sweet and demure woman depicted in the film, Maria von Trapp recalls her stepmother Maria as being moody and prone to outbursts of manic rage. “[She] had a terrible temper. . . . And from one moment to the next, you didn’t know what hit her. We were not used to this. But we took it like a thunderstorm that would pass, because the next minute she could be very nice,” she stated in a 2003 interview.

I immediately felt much more as if Maria were a real person.

I’d forgotten how FUNNY the movie was. I’d remembered liking the songs, but I’d forgotten all the witty dialogue, physical humor, funny facial expressions, etc.

Well! Most of us liked it, and I suspect we’ll watch it again next New Year’s Eve.

This is a letter from Bego, who won the salt tasting kit giveaway and had me send it to a U.S. friend:

Hi Swistle,

Hope you’re doing well!

I have a proposal for you. My boyfriend’s mom gave me an extra present this Christmas with the following note:

“To: Bego, This is NOT A Christmas present. I won it from M&S but it really isn’t my colour. If you like it then keep it. Otherwise pass it on to a friend!”

Well, turns out it’s not really my colour either. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely, lovely coral colour -I’m just not a pink person. So, I wondered if we could do a UK giveaway on your blog since I don’t have one myself? We can do it whenever you feel like it and I’ll happily post it to anybody in the UK only (you know, postal charges etc.).

Pictures attached. The scarf looks pink in the pictures (on my monitor at least) but it’s really more of a coral shade. It might also be worth mentioning that it’s new with tags and hanger and everything.

If it’s not your thing I can ‘just’ give it to someone else. But this would be so much more fun!

Happy New Year!!

Bego

And I agreed, which brings the rest of you up to where we are now. The important things to note:

1. This is a UK giveaway. So if you live in the UK or know someone in the UK to have it shipped to, this one is for you!
2. It’s more coral than pink, even though it looks more pink.

To enter, leave any comment; if you like to have help thinking of something to write, Bego suggests “What were your favourite bits of 2014?” We’ll pick a winner on Monday, January 5th, 2015!

I am stressed because I took Henry for an eye exam (he told us a few weeks ago he couldn’t see the board at school), and his vision is SO MUCH WORSE than we had any idea it was, and also the optometrist gently scolded me for not bringing him in sooner, saying that my delay has cost Henry potential vision: that is, if I’d brought him in sooner, he would have had better vision, but that brain development for vision ends around age 5-6 (Henry is 7), and so even WITH glasses he’ll likely never have 20-20 vision. If I’d brought him sooner, they could have done more. This taps directly into one of my WORST PARENTING FEARS, which is the whole category of preventable catastrophe (aka, “If only…”), so even though I wouldn’t put this under the heading “catastrophe,” I am still all upset.

I don’t want further scolding here, I think that’s clear. And I would say right now I am keyed up to the point where I would interpret agreements such as “Yeah, you’re supposed to bring them in by age one/two/four/whatever” as further scolding—because right now I would hear that as “You should have known (even if you didn’t), so you screwed up.”

I didn’t even want to be scolded the first time, in fact. Our pediatrician starts nagging about the dentist at the 9-month check-up, but hasn’t done the same with vision. The schools do vision screening, so Henry was screened in preschool and in kindergarten and in first grade, but passed all three times. William failed that screening back in elementary school, and when we took him for an eye exam his eyes were 20-25. Henry PASSED AT LEAST THREE TIMES (I don’t know if they’ve done it yet for second grade) and the only part of the eye chart he could see today was the giant E all by itself in the top row. “He should have been wearing glasses for YEARS already,” said the optometrist.

So now he is getting glasses, and even WITH the glasses his eyes will be 20-25 and 20-30. The optometrist said don’t worry, that’s still considered normal range—but Henry is SEVEN. His vision is already not-entirely-correctable at SEVEN. (AND COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER IF ONLY I’D BROUGHT HIM IN SOONER.)

Also, I don’t know what his actual 20-whatever is without glasses. Is there a way to tell from the prescription? The giant E says 20-200, but surely his vision is not 20-200. Surely. I asked the doctor how bad Henry’s vision was, but he misunderstood and told me the -2.75 information instead of the 20-something format I’m used to—or maybe they don’t use the 20-something format anymore. Anyway, do you know if there’s a way to tell from the prescription? I will put it here, in case you know:

R SPH -2.75 CYL -0.25 AXIS 95
L SPH -2.25 CYL -0.75 AXIS 112

I just finished Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

It’s post-apocalypic fiction, and I really liked everything about it. I liked how she shifted around, in time and between characters, and the way the shifts felt more like a relief than like a distraction or gimmick. I liked the way she built the story, and I liked the connections that were gradually revealed. I liked the particular assortment of story lines. I liked the omniscient stuff, when she’d suddenly tell us that character x would die two days later on the road out of town or whatever. I thought about it whenever I wasn’t reading it. I wanted MORE; I was very sad when it ended.

I can’t even tell you how touched I was by your answers to today’s Christmas polls. Oh, wait, I can totally tell you and it isn’t even difficult: I WAS VERY TOUCHED. I can’t explain why, and actually I can’t. It was just very touching, especially when other people’s answers matched mine, and also I think more of us need Christmas pajamas, don’t you? I mean, what is the deal? I seriously no-kidding thought to myself, “Well, it makes sense that the kids would have them and not us, because WE might change size from year to year.” The children are GUARANTEED TO CHANGE SIZE AND YET THEY HAVE THE CUTE CHRISTMAS PAJAMAS. SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY WRONG HERE. FOR NEXT YEAR WE WILL FIX IT.

I have a half-developed thought, but it isn’t getting more developed by just sitting around waiting, so I’m putting it here. It started when I was finding myself disappointed by my reaction to Christmas songs on the radio. I think of Christmas songs on the radio as SO SIGNIFICANT and SO PLEASING. So why was it that this year I kind of wanted to see if another station was playing Taylor Swift’s Blank Space instead?

I was mulling this and I thought about how special Christmas Radio was to me, that Christmas when Paul was out of work and I was working, and I would drive home from work in the pitch dark, and the Christmas songs would be playing on the car radio, and the Christmas lights were so beautiful. That is a great memory. The songs and lights were so beautiful.

But they feel different this year, and that’s just how it is. They felt different last year, too, and the year before that, and can we be mathematical and realize that the year I’m thinking of as Christmas Songs Are Transcendentally Wonderful is 2003, before I was even pregnant with the twins, and the twins are now 9? Things change. The year 2003 is the year I Really Felt the Christmas songs on the radio, but that doesn’t mean I’ll feel the same about them in 2014. And indeed I don’t.

This is my basic gist: that the things that feel Important and Memorable about Christmas vary from year to year. I remember another year when the Christmas cards hit peak importance: Paul and baby Rob and I were living with my parents for a few months after moving, and my parents had other plans for Thanksgiving and left us there by ourselves in their house, and we tried to pull things together with deli turkey and bakery buns and a can of cranberry sauce, and it fell really flat. After dinner we put baby Rob to bed in the crib upstairs, and we sat in the living room and watched Cirque du Soleil on TV, and I started on the Christmas cards and felt happy in a way I have NEVER FELT SINCE about working on Christmas cards. But every year I wait for that same feeling.

There was another year that a Christmas Light Drive felt So Awesome. The first year we did a Christmas Light Drive, it was the same year Christmas Cards felt so good. We were living with my parents, and they wanted to go to a Christmas Eve church service, and Paul and I weren’t going to go to that and yet I wanted SOMETHING between “dinner” and “presents.” (My family opens presents on Christmas Eve night. When I was a child, it was “Christmas Eve service” and then “PRESENTS.”) So we decided, on what seems in retrospect like something more important and special than Whim, to go on a drive to see the Christmas lights, just to pass the time and make baby Rob drowsy and have something to do until my parents returned. We’ve done it ever since, but there was a year somewhere in there, after the first year but before now, when it felt a word I don’t feel comfortable using (“magical”). It was so wonderful. I thought, “This, THIS is my favorite part of Christmas.” Every year, I wait for it to feel the same, and it doesn’t. It feels NICE! I’m so glad we do it! But it doesn’t match that one year, whenever it was. Just like nothing matches that year when my whole shift at the pharmacy was improved by knowing soon I would be driving home in the dark listening to Christmas songs.

Another year, the special/important/sentimental element was Christmas TV. I taped (TAPED) on the VCR (VCR) a bunch of children’s TV channel Christmas specials, and I could just weep thinking of them now: Blue’s Clues, with Steve! Little Bill! PB&J Otter! Maisy! That show with a kid named Stanley who liked animals and had some sort of animals book he could travel to other countries with! But do I watch that tape now—or rather WOULD I, if we had a VCR? Well…no. It’s not the same.

One year it was baking. I remember sipping a Cool Proofy Drink in the kitchen while making little plates of assorted treats to hand out. It was so free and improvised! I did what I wanted! I acted on whims! I baked some brownies, and then I made some fudge, and then I dipped some Oreos in melted mint-chocolate chips, and then I made some pretzel-M&M things. It was fun! I was doing my thing! I would do it every year!! …I’ve never done it since.

The most recent example of this is the movie Love Actually. The first year I watched it, I was a little less than fully impressed: I’d heard so much about it, and it was fine, but I had trouble keeping track of the characters. The next Christmas, I watched it again and liked it better now that I knew better who was who. I don’t know which Christmas it was that I felt almost TRANSPORTED by it: third? fourth? But I know it’s never quite been like that again. That was the year I thought, “I will watch this EVERY CHRISTMAS.” And I have. But not to the same effect.

Just as there are highs, there are lows. Last year I watched Love Actually and I was bothered way more than other years by the weird political scene where Hugh Grant stands up to a seedy, molesty American president played by Billy Bob Thornton, and we’re supposed to think less of Natalie because she’s…caught standing close to him. Why is that in a romantic Christmas comedy? And the many, many fatness slams! Beautiful Emma Thompson is the fat wife, even though she’s thinner than most of us. Aurelia has a fat sister (thinner than many of us), who is of course also unpleasant and rude and unmarriageable and acceptable to mock, unlike thin Aurelia: if we saw Aurelia’s fat sister, we’d understand why Aurelia turns down sweets. Eating and not being skinny, GROSS. Aurelia also tells her employer COLIN FIRTH that he’s getting fat. Beautiful wonderful Natalie is three times referred to as fat and/or as having fat thighs. “The chubby one?,” the thin assistant asks, when Natalie’s name is mentioned. Oh, but Keira Knightley, BEAUTIFUL Keira Knightley whose jaw is like a jutting sharpened blade, who looks as if she could and would tear the flesh from your bones! SHE is the obvious feminine ideal!

I wasn’t even going to watch it this year, then. I’d come to terms with Christmas cards being less fun than that one year. I was actively coming to terms with Christmas music on the radio being less magical than it was that one year. But I thought it might be over for Love Actually, until I watched it tonight with a glass of spiked diet Coke and everyone else in the house asleep. I fast-forwarded the political parts (again, what are those doing in a light romantic holiday movie? can we not just watch him dance to Jump for My Love and call it a day, without watching someone’s lying-awake fantasy of what they should have said and how it would have left their opponent speechless?). I re-wound and re-watched the part where Emma Thompson confronts Alan Rickman, and I have more to say about their relationship later, but tonight’s relevant information is that I finally, finally figured out the words Alan Rickman says before calling himself a fool (“I am so in the wrong”). I re-wound the part at the end where everything wraps up to repeated triumphant music themes and the screen starts dividing. And I enjoyed it again, and I plan to watch it again next year.

My point is that different things are wonderful in different years. Some years are Christmas song years. Some years are Christmas movie years. Some years are Christmas card years. Some years are Christmas cooking years. Some years are Christmas shopping years. Some years are Christmas light years, or Christmas book years, or gingerbread house years, or Christmas TV show years, or Christmas family years, or Christmas sitting-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-with-a-fractious-baby-and-feeling-dreamy-about-the-lights years. Things that were wonderful one year night not be wonderful the next year, and they don’t have to be.