December 2001 – not falling down

I’m trying to figure out how to do some sort of Xorph special, since Tuesday (ie Newcomicday) is also, um, Christmas.It’s going to be difficult without the ability to draw anything. Maybe I should do it in ASCII art.

You can’t buy real Christmas lights anymore. You go to Wal-Mart, you find the seasonal aisle in the back corner by the gardening supplies, you expect massive stacks of light boxes. Not so! You can, technically, still buy the traditional tiny-white-bulb strings–but that’s about it. No C9s or 7.5s, not even multicolored small bulbs. Instead we have–yes!–the stupid light extravanganza!

You have your net lights, which are a cheap and stupid way to get out of wading into the bushes. You have your rope lights, which are not only ugly but unwieldy. You have your bubble lights, which are fine, in limited qualities, indoors. And you have truckloads of curtain / icicle lights, which are–I firmly believe this–the will of Satan manifest on Earth.

All of this is meant, essentially, to explain the slightly odd configuration of this year’s Second House on the Left light display. We had a nice multi-colored theme going on, up until I ran out of working colored strings and still had three trees (the big ones, naturally) to go. The aforementioned trip to Wal-Mart produced the aforementioned results, and only by scavenging the clearance rack at Big Lots did we come up with five strings of C9s. Unfortunately, all of them were entirely white.

I got two of the big trees with said white lights, which at least makes for a symmetrical design. The problem was this: the enormously fat tree by the basketball goal (which I have privately nicknamed “Brendan’s Self-Image”) was mostly strung with colored lights already, and needed maybe one more string to top it off. A white string would have to be distributed evenly or look like whipped cream atop a cherry-and-lime jello mold.

This is why I sat on the driveway for twenty minutes today, unscrewing and switching bulbs between one white string and six colored ones.

Experts estimate that I have spent at least six months of my life doing menial, pointless work like that.

in through my veins
without brains

Reconciliation service tonight–aka drive-through confession.

Until I was about eight, I lived in a very Catholic community–I went to the same Catholic elementary school as most of my friends, lived down the street from the church, CCD, prayer at dinner and bedtime, the works. After we moved to Richmond, and especially when I started going to Model in seventh grade, that world got bumped around a little. I started realizing that not only were most people not Catholic, but that a few of them believed some pretty absurd things about what I’d grown up with.

So I’ve been explaining (or trying to explain) stuff like reconciliation and communion for what seems like a long time. I think I let my own self-deprecation bleed into it too much, actually, so it’s kind of a surprise how good I feel after something like this. It wasn’t a real confession, talking straight to the priest (no, you don’t have to have a screen) and getting stuff out in the air… but it was something.

Before we got started, everybody in church (sixtysomething sinners and a couple of priests) got together in the middle of the pews, held hands and said the Our Father. There was something about the sound and the timbre of all those people saying the same thing, so close together–I could feel it humming, reverberating in my lungs. It was palpable. I forget sometimes how much simple human power and trust there is in ritual.

Explanations aside, I don’t talk about my beliefs much. But the fact is that I take a very deep and quiet joy in being Catholic.