Holiday Briefing: Logic- The Destroyer

Does it seem odd to anyone else that the winter is when we have our Must See Them Holidays in our very, very scattered culture?

We seem so surprised when actual Winter gets in our way.

It's also odd that we put the first semester finals right smack dab inside the cluster of holidays. It pretty much presumes the traditional dependent student; as opposed to say the parent of children or head of household who is expected to create the feelings and events that are supposed to inform all of those fond associations with the season.

And thus the Holidays came.

The Taunting was impacted ( but not stopped - you cannot stop The Taunting). Unlike previous years the presents needed to be hidden only to be revealed on the day of. Part of that was practical - the theme this year was Chocolate. All Chocolate, all the time. Godiva, Hershey's Nestle's, Lindt, Mars, a little boutique outfit that made World Peace bars . . . every night a different chocolate ending with specialized chocolates for each of the Children ( who are not so Childish Anymore - as proven by the eighth candle's Bailey's infused chocolate bar for The Girl).

The secondary Taunting gifts involved clothing. Things delayed due to recession but needed anyway were made fun. Sales were shopped. Artisans were traded with. But we kept the holiday ridiculously low key, lower key even than the Cheapass Taunting of 2009. Last year it was because I was closing down my projects, and knew that things were ending. This year it is because I returned to school to create new beginnings, however the semester was ending.

Here is the catch - I thought I had taken a relatively balanced load but they were all production classes that had final projects before final exams. Although I sort of knew that, in practical terms it escaped me. There were 4 tests in rapid succession in Logic and in order to combat my LD it takes about two days to prep for a test, having done it in a very intense way this last month I discovered what I'm really doing is rewiring my brain temporarily; but so completely that after working on a logic test I was unable to use language properly for two to three days afterwards, creating amusing malapropisms for friends and family and actual Conduction Aphasia for me.

When I first took the Logic and Object Oriented programming classes I had this idea that I would develop strategies that would help other people with symbol processing disorders be able to take and pass the class, however about 2/3 of the way through I realized NO ONE with my disability is going to take these classes to this level - they'd have to be masochists and have unlimited time ( or a psychotic need to prove that they are able to pass the class anyway - at least that's what my mirror tells me) Instead I've developed a series of strategies that can help any number of other people with different LDs, or people who are not naturally adept at the structured thinking these classes require, but if you have a hard core symbol processing disorder, as my programming professor says: "There's nothing wrong with being a poet".

Everything was going well, although I was sleep deprived and then I thought - "I can modify this technique and maybe get some rest."

This was a huge mistake causing me to get a truly dismal grade on the one test I couldn't drop as the lowest score. How bad? 25. There's an average killer.

I found a scoring error and got an extra 13 points but it pretty much meant that I had to really, really invest in the final - 4 days of drills and prep. 4 hours of actual test.

But I did survive, and the Holidays happened without me speaking properly. The last final was on the 21. The trip to Grandma's House was determined to be an Xmas Day Trip. My Perfectly Normal Mother-in-Law was pronounced healthy enough to leave her house for Xmas Eve.

There was much rejoicing.

So really, everything was as good as it could be. And then finally my grades were posted - I'd gotten a 100 on the final and because of weighting managed to get an A for the class. Had I scored lower it would have been a scholarship affecting C.

Huzzah! But I was exhausted.

Anti Claus however had no patience for that sort of nonsense and broke in to make copies of our keys, and deliver a sonic screwdriver that actually is a screwdriver, kick ass motorcycle boots and small bombs of pixie dust to the Children. I think I was Found Boring this year.

I think I found myself a bit boring this year.

But I was not the only person in the family and some of the other had been waiting for Xmas day for some time. They had plans.

We travelled out to Grandma's house, where Grandma's Gingerbread Poppet had found the perfect tree, and the Perfectly Normal Husband brought all of his Holiday up with us. It is obvious that the family would like a return to things being arty.

New Poppets have joined the house - Aunti Claus brought some for the Children ( apparently she didn't approve of a Poppet-free holiday. They are Candy Cane Poppets but they look a little blood spattered - one wonders where they accompanied her first before landing in the stockings)

My parents gave me a photobox. My Perfectly Normal Husband gave me a vampire, a wizard, a literary Death and a Tinker. Someone got me a Magic Trackpad.

I just like saying I have a Magic Trackpad.

Now here's the thing about Grandma's House. It's pretty much the test model for "lake effect" snow. So before leaving, pretty much the only non syllogistic thing I understood was the weather report for Grandma's House. And the report was "There might be some snow" and no one thought it would be much, but we warned all of our fellow travelers to inform loved ones and offices that there was a chance we would be snowed in at Grandma's House.

Then we got all pre-occupied with The Boy getting sick and my amusing attempts to communicate. And so we went over the river and through the woods, as we do yearly and played with dancing trees and had yummy food and shared a few bottles of wine and sort of showed the youngsters what "keeping a weather eye out" looks like it in the digital age.

Things were moving along nicely but we were starting to go - "Hmmn . . . Gee. Might need to stay an extra day or two, " when all of a sudden the word "Blizzard" started popping up on our weather eye screens.

Well they weren't kidding. We played it hour by hour but had to leave Grandma's House in a flurry all of our own because they were calling for a Blizzard at the House too.

Grandma's got about 20 inches, we got about 10. We raced the storm home and won by an inch. The other 9 fell after we were settled back in, but it wasn't much of a visit. The poppets didn't even get to come out and play with Grandma's holiday decor.

But we did spend it together and the food was wonderful.

Here is the thing I learned last week. If I were not inherently logical, I would not have been able to succeed, but to immerse myself to much in logic damages me and everything around me. There is a reckoning. The Art part came easier to me, but there was no balance in that either. The two need to be combined instead of in opposition. There was not enough time with family and just being. 6 Days - but a microcosm of the year.

And on the 7th day the Poppets came out and said - "Wake up sleepyhead! You need to play with your toys."

Well. I suppose I'm not back into right thinking for Poppets yet, I just started playing with my toys today. However I am very grateful for my friends and my family and my project teammates at school, because I am thinking about things as though they might be fun again.

That's a pretty good way to mark the solstice I think.

No one makes graphic novels about the adventures of getting the family together for a photo, but there are all sorts of stories when you do. This year I'll bet there were all sorts of adventures behind all of the holiday photos. Stories that will be told each time the album opens.

A fictional version of ourselves for the Dreamtime:

New Year's coming . . . .

Passover with Poppets

It's Pesach here at the house ,and because of All Of The Things That Conspire Against Me, I have been busy straightening out other people's houses and businesses and things that require bringing forth Order from Chaos.

Interestingly enough the word "Seder" means Order. 

To get to the point where you have Order for the Seder you have about 4 weeks to get your house ready.

I didn't manage to do that in 4 weeks. I actually started about 48 hours before Pesach ( which is the real word for Passover). This is not good. I'm usually much more on top of this but the Things That Conspire were very active this year.

There were no Poppets in my life at this time last year - odd to think about, isn't it? So the little guys were very amused at the sudden spate of ridiculous cleaning and a five hour shopping trip, reported upon by The Most Adventurous Red, who accompanied me on my desperate search for the right gefilte fish jars.  Poppets, at least the ones in my house, don't really seem to have any knowledge of Judaism and while they like to hang around the ritual objects in the house and appreciate that we set things on fire every week, this looked different to them. Some of them wandered around with questions. I couldn't really help them out,since I was trying to compress time and space through frenetic action, so I gave them some books to look at until I was done with the first round of emergency clean up.

The book they started with was the Moss Haggadah which is a beautiful book of art. There were times that observant Jews felt that you couldn't make images of things that were divine, and that included people, because people were divine, but at the same time there is a commandment to beautify the items that you use to fulfill the mitzvot. (Mitzvot means commandment - there are 613 of them so that's a lot of beautifying).

Haggadot ( the plural of Haggadah) were one of the few consistent places in the history of Jewish Visual Arts that were truly reflections of tastes and talent and locality. It was important to make them beautiful and it was heavily influenced by the regions that the calligraphers lived in. The Moss Haggadah is all hand calligraphed by a single artist in that tradition, and it is a wonderful teaching tool for the history of the Haggadot. I thought they might like it.  It belongs to the Boy of the house, because he earned it and it the source of one of my great joys in life when he finds something in it that he thinks is really cool and tells us about it in his out-loud voice.

Question Everything really has a lot of doubt about the whole religion thing and certainly had even more doubts when he noticed me checking the pockets of the coats in the closet for bread crumbs. 

He wondered about all those commandments and why we followed them and why other people didn't and why I was considering vacuuming the keyholes. Since I was in the process of skipping the whole keyhole vacuuming thing I explained to him that there was a whole section of the Haggadah about asking questions and why you should answer questions and taught our children that when they wre old enough to study on their own it was their religious duty to ask questions. So  really, in Judaism that made him the Holiest Poppet of all.  And then I left him to read the whole section while I set the oven on fire. It was on purpose - it's OK.

Question Everything was pretty impressed. Throughout the whole ritual book people were asking questions, and getting answers and disagreeing about the answers, and then asking more questions. He wondered how a religion could function that way, but I was busy reading labels for signs of autolyzed yeast extract to get them out of the cabinets and then scrubbing them down with bleach so I told him to let someone else have a turn with the book. You see very much like Jack Bauer I WAS RUNNING OUT OF TIME!

Violet found a really pretty page that matched her perfectly but it was all Hebrew, so she asked what it was. I explained that it was the 10 plagues, she was standing on the section of the Haggadah where when we read the plagues that Egypt suffered we remove a drop of wine from our glasses and drop them on to the napkin beside us. They were very pretty purple plagues , but Question Everything wanted to know why, so I did take the time to tell him. Even though the Seder celebrates that we were freed from oppression, many Egyptians suffered and died because of the actions of their ruler, and God and the plauges, so for each plague we remove a drop of wine from our glass to reduce our joy and mourn their lives and suffering. We need to remember that what we accomplished came with a cost, and they need to be respected, mourned and remembered too. 

Violet decided that the plagues were still pretty, even if the whole thing was a little creepy and the Drunken Poppet called out from the mantel that it was a terrible waste of wine, but a stern look from Winter, and he apologized. 

Meanwhile, Question Everything had moved on to another book that explained how to get ready for the Holiday by cleaning in a special way, and when he got to the section that explained why I might have wanted to vacuum out the keyholes, he asked me if I was going to Hell if I skipped it. 

I sighed, and told him Jews don't really have a Hell, and besides there's a magic spell at the end that makes everything OK just in case. I had to leave them alone for a bit while we put away all the things that aren't kosher for Pesach and brought up all the things that were. You see every year we clear out all our cabinets and pots and pans and dishes and silverware that touched things that rise, and replace them with pots and pans and dishes and silverware that never touch things that rise. It's like spring cleaning on steroids. And it leads to a lot of jokes about why in hell a desert God would command us to carry six sets of dishes. But of course it's a joke, because the six sets of dishes are not part of the mitzvot, they're what a bunch of Rabbis decided to agree on after they had asked a whole bunch of questions and argued about a whole bunch of answers, and that desert God wasn't talking to them anymore so they just sort of guessed and Voila! six sets of dishes. Someday I'll talk about me and God but today isn't that day, let's just say I'm sure that God didn't ask us to do a bunch of this but I do a whole bunch of this anyway because there are better reasons than "God says so" but they are complicated so it's easier for people to think that's why I do it. 

Well, I shouldn't have left Question Everything along with the rules for leavened versus unleavened things. Leaven is chametz and you have to have a chametz free house before the Seder. So the next thing I know, I walked past the living room and there was Question Everything reading aloud to the Gingerbread. Silly preoccupied me, I didn't think anything of it until I saw that the House Reds had pulled down my How To Run a Jewish Household book.

It seems that he had wondered aloud if

Gingerbread was allowed to stay in the house because she might be chametz. Since I wasn't around they asked Spike to figure it out. Spike corrected the misconception. He's very educated. Gingerbread was a Poppet, not a cookie, so she was fine to stick around.No one was going to be able to ingest her on a bet. 

Except for maybe Cthulu or something like that, and Spike was pretty sure I wouldn't invite Cthulu to the Seder.  Actually, Spike was a little off base there. If Cthulu comes to the door and asks politely to join us I'm supposed to feed him and make him welcome because he's a stranger here and we were once strangers in the land of Egypt. Of course I'm only going to let him in after he promises to behave and tone down the whole causing insanity thing. I'm not obligated to martyr myself for hospitality or anything. So really it's all up to Cthulu, but I digress. I'm sure Question didn't mean to upset her, it was my own fault for leaving them alone with multiple books and no moderator.

They sort of were getting the gist of things now, having split the reading between them, but certainly the ones having the most fun were the Poppets who chose to read the Kosher by Design cookbook. They spent a decent amount of time wondering if you could really have dessert without cake. However since the dessert menu for the Pesach week read " merengue cookies, coconut sorbet, toasted coconut marshmallows, strawberry mousse, chocolate mousse and ice-cream sundaes",  the Pumpkin Spices, Chocos and Coffee Poppets agreed that you weren't really  suffering for desserts during Peasch and you weren't really likely to lose weight during the eight days of the dietary restrictions either. 

Now that they had the gist of things they realized that I was really rather insane trying to get everything that normally took the better part of two weeks accomplished in 24 hours with one full day of regular office work thrown in, and they decided that even if they didn't understand why I felt the need to do it, they would help. They enlisted the aid of the only actively Jewish-like Poppets in the house and began by Kashering the new kitchen that came in recently for Poppetropolis. 

When they were done they waited until I got home from work and helped me with the six hours I had left to set up for the actual seder. 

The Poppets learned alot more about the whole Seder thing then.  And our Orange Brain saved the day - more on that tomorrow.

What We've Shared

Not everyone understands or relates to Poppets, although there are a number of people at work who are intrigued by them I'm not sure that I'd gift Poppets randomly. They are cute but they sort of freaked my Rabbi out and I didn't even show her any of the "darker" ones. So it was with great joy and surprise that I found both my nuclear and extended family liked them. Some show all the signs of obsession that indicates incipient fandom and some sort of get it on the art level. So we were able to share some Poppets outside The Taunting. 

                 The little humbug flew to the east coast to be shared with my Sister. I love my Sister so much that it was more important to get one for her than for myself, so she owns the only humbug in the family. Isn't he cute?

My Nephew was also interested in things Poppety and along with some transforming magnetic Japanese ping-pong balls, we gave him a Shamrock Poppet to call his very own. It's what every Irish Jewish kid should have for Christmas!

Here is the Shamrock Poppet hanging out with Father Christmas making sure that he gets the stories straight. Father Christmas is really part of the Faerie and so are most Irishmen. 

As a member of the Magical Establishment, they are of course welcome at Grandma's house, especially when they are all attractively European about it. The Shamrock Poppet and the Nephew can now practice telling stories to each other.

Last but hardly least, is the Poppet Most Desired.

My six year old niece got the idea of Poppet right away, and some of the pictures posted in the blog have been taken with her creating the shots. But she's too little to use my very expensive camera and so she had to take pictures by proxy. The poppet my niece wanted more than any others (at least based on the oh-so-subtle hints) was a Question Dogma Poppet. We don't know why, but we do know it was a Perfectly Appropriate Aunt Gift. So if necessary, my Sister can just blame me for being a Bad Influence. It's OK, I have a really kick-ass outfit for when I'm being a Bad Influence.  But it was somehow wrong to give her a Poppet of her own, without the ability to take her own pictures - so what you see here is the picture she took with her very own Fisher Price - Damn-Near-Indestructible, Pink So-Her-Brother-Won't-Go-Near-It camera.

No, it's not very high quality. But it runs on batteries, it's digital, it's hers and she doesn't have to ask permission. Her mom has gotten her other Poppets to play with as well, I look forward to the pictures.

Of course there was also the Limited Edition Winter we gave my Perfectly Lovely but Perfectly  Normal Mother in Law. And the Gingerbread Poppet I gave Grandma. By the way - it ends up my Mother already had a house for Ginger.

So the contagion has been spread. My Sister actually called me to see if  I saw the new Steampunk Poppets, I had but not the newest listings - thanks to her I saw the newer pics. My Sister saw Steampunk Poppets and thought of me. . . . . that's so sweet. It's kind of cool to have something in common so organically. When I showed her Poppets she showed me the Blue Dog by George Rodrigue. She shared an artist that was meaningful to her the same way Lisa Snellings Clark's work affects me. 

It might possibly be the closest I ever felt to her, and we've been through some stuff together. But this was just sharing, possibly the freest most incidental sharing ever, but that's why it connected with me so much. Nothing was at stake, and I didn't have to explain because she just understood. 

I treasure that moment, because I don't try so hard to explain or justify myself to her anymore. And she can call me up now and tell me the history of voodoo dolls really being about healing and not curses. And we can both celebrate sprawling brass chandeliers.  It wasn't always the case and it's awesome (in the religious, "full of awe" sense of the term) to me that we have that sense of sharing now. That should be celebrated and treasured and ornamented with Poppets and Blue Dogs. So this year was Poppets and I'll see what I can do about the Blue Dogs in the future. 

The Taunting- Travel Edition

Tonight is the Eighth Candle. The Overlap created the Chaos that was expected, but that didn't stop The Taunting. Traditions must be upheld, even Aunti Claus knows that The Taunting can be messed with, but it cannot be stopped.

On the morning of Christmas, before the trip to Grandma's, Aunti left a mini version of a taunting of her own, following all of the rules we use but leaving it to us to figure out. Gifts from Aunti are never simple. The gifts were unlabled and exactly the same size. The children ( who are not really so childish) figured out that she was using wrapping paper code, binary for the boy and non-denominational capitalist greetings for the girl, and they opened their Black Death and Mad Cow Disease petri dishes, and found Not Poppets in their stockings. The Not Poppets will get a post of their own at some future point.

The boy was very happy with his collection of Black Death and now carries some in his pocket because it's cute, and fluffy, and Black Death.

Then the team packed up and sent itself to Not Really Upstate New York to Grandma's house, where Grandma lets the butter sacrifice itself freely into baked goods and Santa is NEVER confused.

 

And a wondrous time was had by all with food and love, and some stories. And dessert-lots of dessert

The love of butter and dessert is the reason we gifted Grandma with a Gingerbread Poppet.  Upon introduction Grandma looked at her and wondered "Do you think she wants a house?"

So you see, although Grandma thinks the boy and I are a bit nuts with the embassy project, the apples have certainly not fallen far from the tree, Christmas or otherwise.

You can also see that Grandma's Gingerbread Poppet found places suited for her at Grandma's house with very little effort. 

The Taunting however could not be denied. Three days we were going to be in Not Really Upstate New York and that was three days that needed to participate in the taunting. On the table where Anti Claus once had a really mod silver tree was a bowl of fruit, and no sign of Aunti at all.  It seemed to be the place to be. The Taunting, Travel Edition was set up.