What I want

I was thinking about this this morning: When I was a kid, and you asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I would either run and get the "Wishbook" (I think that was Sears?) with the pages I had dogeared. Or I could talk about whatever toy one of my friends had, or that I saw advertised (toy advertising was less then than it is now, but it was still done).

Now, I realize the things I want most, the things that would make me happiest, no one (well, no mortal) can give me: they are things that cannot be bought in a store. They range from large to small, from selfless to selfish:

1. A cure - and an affordable and not-too-invasive cure - for cancer. (Yet another family friend is going through chemo for leukemia....)

2. More free time for myself, to work on the things I genuinely want to work on, whether that's research or reading to "level up" my knowledge for teaching or to knit or to hand quilt or whatever. I could probably wrestle a little of that by being online less, but then I'd miss the interactions, such as they are, that I have online.

3. For there to be some kind of good and genuine (and ideally grassroots) solution to things like hunger. Or unemployment. Or whatever.

4. For my town to go back to thriving more than it is now. I'm still sad about the quilt shop closing, and I realized the other day that also the paperback exchange, the day spa, and a photography studio that were downtown have closed. I don't know what's wrong, if it's that the recession finally did hit us, or if people were ekeing along the best they could and just ran out of money, or if the conclusion of the business owners was "most people seem happy with the shoddier but cheaper goods the wal-mart sells" or what.

5. A more loving world. And I don't just mean that in the sense of "people not deciding to kill a bunch of people to make some political/social point, or to fulfill some twisted agenda." I mean less snark, less stuff like people making comments that say "hurr hurr hurr she's FAT" when some singer posts a clip of herself on YouTube. Not restrictions on speech other than people deciding, "You know? It's not helpful for me to say that so I'm not gonna say it." That requires a change in people's hearts....

6. Being more comfortable in my own skin and less wracked by self-doubt and second-guessing over the things I do. To, when I get a little power in some situation, make the decision I need to make and then be comfortable with it and not worry about how people will react to it and if it's the right decision. In general, to worry less about what other people think. Also to be able to say "No. My personal well-being comes first" sometimes when $thanklesstask comes up and I'm pressured to do it, even though I already have too much on my plate.

7. A better ability to feel like what I do is "good enough" or to recognize that I am doing things some people can't do. I get frustrated with myself, for example, that I'm not a better pianist. But I suppose only a small percentage of people play the piano at all....and that playing it imperfectly and making occasional mistakes in a piece is better than not playing at all. I tend to fall into the trap of "If I'm not good at it, I don't want to do it*" (A lot of the stuff, like piecing and knitting, that have steep-ish learning curves, I learned to do as a kid, before my Inner Critic set up shop. It's harder now for me to cope with not being good at stuff at first)

I'm not good at doing things badly but cheerfully. I haven't been, since I was a kid. Doing something badly embarrasses me.

(*There's a Pony storyline for them! I think that would be a good episode. Not sure who would learn the lesson, who would feel that she (or he, I suppose it could be a Big Mac centered story or something) wasn't good enough at something, but I would like it as a storyline)


8. If I can't have a "more loving world," at least have a few weeks where nothing too terrible happens anywhere in the world. (That's probably about as likely as getting a "more loving world," though)

9. For me to be able to get off some of the dang medications I'm on. Especially for me never to have to deal with hives again, and be able to cut out the antihistamines. And for my food sensitivities to go away, so I don't have to be that person at the holiday party who is asking people "Does this dip contain celery?" or "are there cashews in the cookies?" And, if I'm asking for things that are technically impossible, I'd also like my blood pressure to resolve to the point where I can drop the medication and also stop worrying about salt in my diet so much.


I commented on Twitter that one of the sadder things of being an adult is that the things you want most for Christmas are things no person can buy for you. And it occurs to me that it's ironic that when I was a kid, and arguably more of my emotional needs were being met* and I felt more secure in my life, I was able to come up with material things I wanted, but now as an adult, I kind of flail and go "I don't know a new saucepan?" when my parents ask me what I want.

(*Then again, there might be a little bit of the old "No matter how miserable it was, the farther you get from childhood, the better it looks" operating there. My peer interactions were often unhappy as a child...but then again, within my family, among my parents and their friends and people from church, I always felt pretty secure in the idea that I was loved)

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Last night was a Christmas party for one of the groups I belong to (this was why I made the meat balls). This party is mostly about the food, but it also features a small-toy donation and a gift exchange among members. It's a "blind" gift exchange (we draw numbers and pick gifts) so you never know who's going to get your gift or what you're going to get.

Fortunately, the person who got the cowl I made seems like someone who will appreciate it. I was a bit nervous at one point, counting the gifts - had someone brought an extra one? (some times people do, which defeats the whole thing - then there's one gift left over at the end, and usually it's the smallest or least-impressively-wrapped one - which could be my gift in a lot of years. And while I'm mature enough not to openly act as if it's a rejection of me that no one picked the gift I brought (especially as it's usually something I made), still, I'd feel it as a little bit of a rejection).

Also, this year, I got a gift I genuinely liked and was tickled by, so I didn't have to put on my polite face. (I sometimes have to at those blind gift exchanges - like, I get a bottle of cologne that I KNOW will set off my allergies, or some kind of food item I don't like, or some gew-gaw I can't use). The gift I picked turned out to be a copy of Max Lucado's "The Christmas Candle" (which I had not read) and a bracelet.

The bracelet is called "God's Heart" (I know, in some groups, bringing that as a "blind exchange gift" would be risky and/or frowned upon, but in our group we are all practicing Christians at the moment, so....). You can see a version of it here. I like the subtlety of it; I prefer, if I'm going to wear religious jewelry, that it be something that is more a reminder to me than an advertisement to the world. And it is a nice, simple, delicate bracelet, and it's easy to put on (it is, I guess, spring steel, so you can easily clasp and unclasp it). So I liked it and exclaimed with genuine happiness over it. And I will wear it.

I probably ate too much, and some of the "wrong" things (someone did pigs-in-blankets with cocktail sausages, and I'm not supposed to have cured meat because salt, but I admit I ate several - because I never get them, and I was hungry, and especially hungry for protein foods. I did also have some cheese (which is generally okay on my diet) and some of my meatballs and a couple of mini quiches). Among the sweets there were a number of hard crunchy cookies (off limits because temporary crown) but someone brought a pumpkin roll so I had that, and also a peanut butter cup.

I also discovered that with crackers (someone brought artichoke dip, which I like, but the crunchy crackers were kind of a no-go), if you put some in your mouth and then take a sip of your drink, some crackers (like Ritz crackers) will dissolve enough you don't have to worry about them if you have bad teeth. (Actually, that's another thing for my "impossible wish list" - sound, undamaged teeth where I don't worry about breaking one).

Usually if I have some kind of dip-thing at home, I use bread to put it on...

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And about the larger world: I feel as if we're heading towards a tipping point of some kind, and either things are going to change for the better or rapidly get vastly worse. There are glimmers of hope but there are also things that happen that make me want to run away and be a hermit.

Here's hoping that whatever happens is more like the genuine Nativity than like the Second Coming that Yeats wrote about.

I think what frustrates me is that as an ordinary person, there is nothing tangible I can do to make things better. I don't like feeling impotent.