Happy Holidays

Here's to happy holidays and a healthy, wonderful New Year! Enjoy the time off, enjoy family, enjoy Cornell friends while watching the everblades, but more importantly, stay safe during the feat of strength!

Which begs the question: if all of us eLynah dorks were together celebrating Festivus, which member would have to be wrestled to the ground and pinned in order for the holiday to end? Somehow I don't think Age is the easy answer.
(and yes, I am already bored at home.)

It's great to see your kids' eyes light up this time of year. Even the child whose cheapest desired gift was an iPod Mini and the one who wants Vaughn goalie pads (by brand). Sheesh, price a pair of them sometime when the kid is outgrowing them every 18 months. That’s why I hope he finds his calling as a soccer goalie: shoes, athletic supporter, and a $25 pair of sticky-palm gloves is all the lad needs. Plus you don’t pay $300 an hour for turf time at 5 a.m. Wait, it’s Christmas and we should be thinking happy thoughts. Hey, he did stop four of five breakways Thursday night.

Perhaps if you have kids, you can look with pride and say your current family isn't as bad as the one you grew up in. (What your kids are thinking may be a different matter.)

It's a good time of year to visit close friends and their families. Students especially should do this. It underscores how many dysfunctional families are out there. In comparison, yours isn't so bad. Just boring. As an undergrad, meeting some of my Cornell friends' families made me appreciate that we had it okay. (“I’m not okay, but your family is really like not okay.”) I just got back from a pre-holiday gathering in Ohio where a couple of the relatives had enjoyed a mid-life spiritual renaissance and one told me she was worried that she would not be seeing my wife and me "afterward" (the big afterward) because we hadn't seen the light. I said I saw the light every time Moulson, Hynes, or Iggulden puts one in for the Big Red, and too bad about that Ohio State - Cornell game we’d all seen down in Florida last December, heh-heh. She said I shouldn't be so cavalier. I resisted the urge to say that even with LeBron the Cavaliers weren't seeing the light. We ended the discussion with a full and frank exchange on what happened "afterward" to people of the, ah, Hebraic and Muslim and etcetera persuasions, etcetera apparently including Catholics. She said it was okay so long as they came around before the end. I said I’d pass the word along next time I saw them. At least this discussion was better than the brother in law who spent 90 minutes expounding on the in-floor radiant heat he'd just installed during the big remodel. I love home remodeling shows, but at least on TV you can change the channel when Norm Abrams gets windy.

It's a good time of year to hear Aunt Martha expound once again how sad it is with all the suicides this time of year even though November and December are historically the lowest suicide months. That's right, Tessie, repeating it a dozen times doesn't make it true. It's possible if she says it one more time, you might wish for the homicide rate to go plus-one.

On the other hand, screwed up as this country is, it's probably better to be living, studying, or raising a family here than in, say, Egypt or South Korea or Russia or Kenya or Mexico City (pollution, kidnappers) or Tokyo (seen the size of the apartments?). This really should be a sentiment expressed on non-sectarian Thanksgiving Day rather than Christmas Eve, but it’s been busy and I’m running late. And it's better to be residing here stateside 12/25/04 than to have your home be here but you’re stationed in Iraq. One of the things I really liked about this forum was that everyone thought twice about dumping on Army before the Army game, on the grounds some of them were going to be suicide-bomber fodder a year from now and it wasn’t them personally setting our national policy ... a sense of civility those at Cornell and most other elite institutions lacked during Vietnam. (That war was, is, and always will be dumb, but maybe those of age then shouldn’t have taken it out on the guys who had the misfortune to have the wrong draft lottery numbers.) I just wish some of those yellow ribbon decals now that said "Support the troops" also were available with the other leg of the ribbon inscribed "but not necessarily the president."

End of rant. It’s holiday time.

Thank you, eLynah. I think this place works as well for some of us as more traditional and costlier forms of psychotherapy.

See you online during the Everblades parallel chat session.