In this fictitious world all reality twists

Dear Santa,

I know, you're probably surprised to hear from me. If I remember correctly, the last time I wrote to you was when Aladdin was in theaters and Bop-It! was my newest favorite toy. And even for a couple years before the break, you probably sensed that my heart wasn't really in it. For years I'd noticed that the gifts that you dropped off at my mom's house were different from the ones you left at my dad's (One would be wrapped, the other not. One signed, the other not), but I was able to put that aside for a while. As soon as my mom started signing packages from you as To Linda, From "Santa", though, I figured there was no real need for our one-sided correspondence to continue.

But that's all behind us. As a worldly woman of the 21st century, I realize now that a little disillusionment is no reason to epistolarily neglect my largest and jolliest Arctic-dwelling friend.

As you can imagine, I'm rusty at this, but I remember enough to suppose that you're expecting some sort of wish list from me. Lucky for you (or more lucky for your elves-of-burden), my family should already be taking care of most of my material needs. Besides, if your toy factory is still anything like I imagined it to be when I was ten, you'd probably be severely ill-equipped to meet my demands anyway.

No, at this point what I'm asking for are things I need from you--you and whatever magic you appear to have, making reindeers fly and defying time and space and all that. Where does that come from, anyway? You're never pictured as having any kind of wand or Gandalf-staff. To my knowledge you don't know incantations, or fundamentalist Christians would hate you even more than they already do. Maybe you're like Samson, with the power in the beard? I digress.

You're pretty good at navigation, seeing as you direct yourself to every child-dwelling family who wants you to show up, so for the first item on my list, I want you to share some of that directionality. Put me on a path, Santa. Is being an English professor really what I should set my sights on, or is that just a cop-out for someone too scared to wander too far from grades and summer breaks? And if I do go to grad school, where do I go? Midwest? West coast? Help me out.

Secondly, I need you to do your part to fight global warming. I'm sure you've noticed that the North Pole is starting to melt out from under you, so you're probably concerned. As you may or may not know, much of the problem is caused by vehicles, be it the factories that create them or the oil needed to run them. You yourself, on the other hand, are obviously oil-independent and sitting on an energy resource untapped by the rest of the world, are you not? Essentially, by not disseminating this useful information, you are single-handedly keeping our troops in Iraq and perpetuating conflict in the Middle East. Sharing is caring, Santa. At the very least, you need to let the rest of us in the loop before your workshop turns into Sea World.

Lastly, a simple favor. For the love of God, don't hand out any more copies of Twilight, no matter how many children asked you for it. The insanity needs to end.

And that, Santa, is it. On behalf of my dad, though, I'd like to ask for a Wii. Merry Christmas.

Sincerely,
"Linda"

The scales always find a way to level out

Recently, Governor Paterson of New York approved an obesity tax--a grandiose title for a relatively limited piece of legislation, but one that explains why, suddenly, sugar-filled soft drinks and non-natural fruit juices are going to cost more than diet pop or milk. In a CNN article, he claims that the likelihood of childhood obesity can be directly correlated to the number of sugary soft drinks that a kid consumes. An impressive reduction in these cases can be had by simply forcing our lean-pocketed public to buy healthier for their offspring. After all, he says, he remembers a time when everyone (everyone!) smoked. Though this too was an epidemic (and what's more, one that was near and dear to many people's hearts), this comparable health crisis was greatly resolved by, among other things, taxation. Let the slimming begin!

The Governor's point is well made, but I kind of doubt it will be received with unanimous cordiality, with the major qualm being the driving agent of his argument: equating McDonald's with Marlboro. Sure, both obesity and smoking present large-scale health crises; both largely depend on environmental factors and are similarly largely ripe for intervention. Plus, though Europeans smoke like chimneys, they mock us mercilessly for our muffin tops, so in the fight against obesity there's even the extra incentive to protect our international reputation.

But 0% of smokers are biologically predisposed to smoking. There is, however, a certain percentage of the population that is genetically destined to forever hear people euphemistically refer to them as 'big-boned', 'stocky', 'stout', 'thick', or 'fluffy', no matter the drastic measures they undergo to make themselves look more like hourglasses (or more recently, flagpoles) and less like potatoes.

Does this mean that we shouldn't try to assault this trend and send it treadmilling back to a manageable range? Which is worse: insulting 1 million naturally husky Americans or politely coughing and turning a blind eye to the whole ordeal, thereby condemning 7 million children to an otherwise preventable future of type two diabetes?

As a former fat kid until the age of 14 (and I think we all can agree that the worst time to be overweight is in middle school), I feel a little justified in thinking that I can see from both sides of the fence here. We all know, thanks to sorely-needed PSA backlash, what's at stake if we decide to condemn weight gain and to unwaveringly condone the media in its uninhibited zest to promote THIN = GOOD. The closest the average TV show or movie gets to an accepting and well-rounded view of body image is WELL, OKAY, IF YOU INSIST ON BEING FAT, AT LEAST BE FUNNY. As a relatively humorless former fat kid, I can personally attest that neither of these mantras leads to particularly high self esteem.

The perfect mantra, as far as I can tell, would go something like this:
"Knowing what your natural body type is and then, driven by self-respect, striving to maintain your natural level of health, meaning that if you're naturally on the larger side you shouldn't feel the least bit ashamed about it, but if you're naturally capable of being cholesterol- and diabetes-free then you should love you body enough to maintain that level of health, and either way you should practice a healthy regimen of diet and exercise for the sake of longevity = GOOD"

Daunting, to say the least, and not at all easy to fit on the back of a Dove Beauty Bar of soap.

I suppose there's no way to solve the 'crisis' without someone's feelings getting hurt, nor is there a means to solve such a complex issue simply (not once in this already extensive deliberation did I even mention the fact that childhood obesity is also correlated with poverty and disadvantaged minority demographics). With some reservation I'll support measures like those Gov. Paterson is putting into practice, but I'd feel better about it if he also gave obese people complementary license to punch in the face as necessary anyone who uses this legislation as a joke book.

The boundaries of language I quietly cursed

DID YOU KNOW:
The guy who invented the standard Qwerty keyboard, Christopher Sholes, deliberately scattered the letters of the alphabet around on the keys inconveniently, spreading common letters far apart. The reason was practical: when typists began to type too fast, the old timey machines that they used would jam, and so Sholes mixed up the letters to slow the typists down and keep the machines running smoothly. Naturally, people adapted over time, made up for the shortcomings, and now we just have a nonsensical keyboard arrangement with a cute pet name.

This fun fact was brought to you by my Perception and Cognition textbook, the same book that brought to my attention just how automatic and unconscious typing has become for me, and probably for anyone else who spent middle- through high- school fanatically IMing their classmates. It's certainly a less conscious process than actual writing, in which you have to pay diligent attention to spelling, keep the sentences on the lines, make sure the writing is legible, and deal with the inevitable hand cramp if you're like me and hold your pencil with a grip that would strangle most small animals.

For one of my classes, throughout the semester we've been required to keep a journal, composed of reflections and self-interrogations on the class concepts. My personal process for this assignment, since the concepts were usually pretty dense and we were actually graded on our quality of thought, was to just spew ideas unceremoniously into Microsoft Word for a while, and then do more intelligently-driven editing. For the class final, we're required to write our two last journal entries in class, and the jury is still out on whether or not computers are going to be available for us to use to do it.

This, more than anything, has made me aware of the unnervingly large impact computer word processing has had on my life. I'm not at all convinced that an in-class handwritten journal entry will even resemble the positively-graded ones that I've written up until now. In the face of having to laboriously, physically scratch out my thoughts with a Bic rather than a Mac (and therefore being forced to think slower, write slower, edit less, plan more, and pay attention to my hand) the graded level of my intelligence my actually suffer. The thought makes me 1) have exponentially increased respect any novelist/writer who lived pre-1970, and 2) wonder what those authors could have done with a word processor.

They were here first

Thanksgiving is a weird holiday. Throughout my childhood, I tended to mentally consider it a lamer, more politically correct version of Christmas. The two holidays share a mutual association with the spirit of appreciation, a huge meal, a break from school, and ripe opportunities for intrafamily drama. Even though Thanksgiving lacks gift-giving (which is the central determinant for childhood ratings of holiday awesomeness), after a certain point, I began to appreciate Thanksgiving for its simplicity. While each new holiday season brings with it both Christian sermons about Christmas being a hostage to commercialism and secular sermons about Christmas holding religious diversity hostage in a fit of single-minded religious fervor, Thanksgiving is a holiday every American can safely enjoy. You can wish your neighbor a happy Thanksgiving without desperately attempting to remember whether or not you spotted a menorah on her windowsill the year before.

The older I get, though, the more aware I am that there's something oddly and unnervingly conspiratorial about Thanksgiving. Anyone older than the age of nine or ten quickly learns that while, technically, the event celebrated at the end of November was one of harmony and agreement, almost immediately after it came the genocide. Isn't it odd that one of our most significant national holidays heavily depends on a dramatic and collective case of selective memory? I can't say I know of many other countries whose top three holiday celebrations include one that commemorates a fabricated friendly relationship with the indigenous peoples they wound up massacring and/or enslaving.

Since Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson appears on our twenty dollar bill, I don't think it's unfair of me to suggest that the U.S. as a whole is seriously committed to encouraging ourselves to pretend that whole Native American thing never happened. And luckily for that effort, the population of people most likely to rise up in righteous indignation over this issue now makes up less than 1% of the population at large.

It is, admittedly, nice to have a non-religious oriented holiday that, apart from historical accuracy, encourages a national sense of thankfulness and community and an excuse to put our lives in proper perspective. But it would probably be handy to acknowledge more often that the price of this annual moral status-check is the decision to inflict our sense of history with multiple personality disorder.

The calendar hung itself

This is going to sound terribly lame of me, the wild 'n crazy college kid that I am, but I think I've forgotten how to relax. I've spent the entire semester (out of necessity) marshaling the heap of minutes that make up every day into a viciously-trained legion of productivity. Every spare moment has had a regiment and duties, classified into lectures, homework, jobs, meals, sleeping, and the occasional friend-sighting. Occasionally I'll find myself with a spare thirty minutes or so, but such impromptu stragglers get quickly merged into one of the useful corps.

Now, when everyone elses' schedules are gearing up in preparation for finals, I find myself with one less job and fewer academic demands, since most of my classes have paused their usual work loads in deference to studying and paper-writing. Suddenly I have time again, and all my severely trained, finely honed minutes are wandering back bewilderingly into a civilian lifestyle, wondering what to do with themselves.

Fortunately, any time I find myself with an unexpected excess of time, after only a couple thumb-twiddles the lure of this site draws me to my keyboard, deluded with the fantasy that now (at last!) that I have time, I'll write something worthwhile.

I, of course, should have learned by now that my personality renders me completely incapable of being a truly engaging blogger. While I've always been offended on the random (and, I might add, relatively infrequent) occasions where I've been compared to a turtle, I do feel most comfortable when there's something separating me, shell-like, from the rest of the world. I might have the vocabulary and grasp of syntax to compose something readable, but I firmly believe that truly good writing of this sort only emerges with a coupled willingness to prance emotionally naked around the screen. The furthest I'm willing to go is a half-ironic bathrobe'd shuffle.

And so, for the next several weeks I may find myself with the time to pay more attention to this site than has been possible during the once-monthly flings we've had for the last year or so. But that doesn't mean I'm going to write anything.

"Turned wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as 'History,' harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic."