Christmas

Christmas is such a monster topic that I am not really sure I want to tackle it in a blog entry. Which in part explains why I am several days late in doing so.

Christmas is colours and lights and anticipation and disappointment and memories and nostalgia and childhood and cliché and more colours and pressure and family and travelling and spending and eating and chocolate.

Christmas is a carefully-manufactured bread-and-circuses event to get us through the hard winter months (obviously speaking as someone who has never experienced a festive season in the southern hemisphere). Christmas is the ultimate celebration of the excesses of consumerism, encouraged by the minute rich elite that run this show and stand to profit. It is all the more successful because guilt is removed, as all this consumption takes place in the guise of giving, of sharing, and of tradition. I wonder if anyone has done the maths and calculated the effect on the economy, GDP, ecology etc. if Christmas, or at least all aspects of it pertaining to consumption, was simply eliminated? To take the art of bah-humbugism to an extreme, I wonder if this consumer-fest has reached such a level of excess, that its removal would alone be enough to bring human consumption of the planet’s resources down to some form of sustainable equilibrium?

Don’t get me wrong. I actually like Christmas. It appeals to the big kid in me. I like the colours and lights and the ease of access to chocolate. I like the challenge of dreaming up gifts for people – the puzzling, the reflection, the light-bulb moment when I hit up an idea that seems to suit the needs and desires of the recipient. If I had the time and abilities, I would happily home-make gifts rather than buy them. The only time I resent the gifting obligations is for certain awkward members of in-law-type families, with whom we have little in common and limited knowledge of their tastes and preferences. Then the pressure of finding something for the sake of it, appropriate or otherwise, just because we have to because they will give us something, overshadows the pleasures of present-hunting. Yet I participate in this charade, and not really for the sake of keeping up appearances, but because it seems like the right thing to do.

Then, as the cliché goes, Christmas is a time for family. The pleasures and the pressures of making time, for once, for people that mean so much to us, or else mean so much to someone who means so much to us (the whole in-law issue rearing its ugly head in a big way). I really do not want to dive into the murky waters of this topic, but further to my last entry (Waiting for the end), I want to acknowledge that I have just had the privilege of sharing a second “last Christmas” with a loved one. I have once again lovingly participated in the challenge of making a “last” Christmas together special. As with everything, we only really appreciate such privileged shared moments when it is almost too late – and I can only remain eternally grateful for the unexpected length of “almost” that we, this time, have been granted. 

The person in question keeps apologising for “ruining” another Christmas. We both had to acknowledge that if it wasn’t for the circumstances, chances are we would not have all been together for at least one of the two Christmases concerned. Uncountable numbers of people will have just spent their last Christmas together, or missed the opportunity to do so, without knowing it until it is too late. There is really something to be said for living every moment as if it was the last.

Waiting for the end

As the theme of this blog concerns my fears about the fate of humanity, I suppose it would make sense to address the fact that the world was supposed to have ended several hours ago. I am writing this at 0:33 on Saturday 22^nd December, 2012, and as far as I can see we are still here. Unless the main consequence of the apocalypse is one grand hallucination which looks distinctly pre-apocalyptic. But then, why not accept that the whole shebang is some form of brains-in-vats, Matrix-like virtual reality and be done with it?

I can’t help wondering what it must have been like for those that really did believe that the world was going to end. To be thinking that death was inevitable and imminent, that all that one cared about was about to be horrifically destroyed . . . I simply can’t imagine what genuine anticipation of such a catastrophic scenario could have felt like. Terror? Acceptance? Liberty? Or, like my own fears that are the premise for this blog (see First entry), was it just Too Much to Compute?

What is worse: a sudden, unexpected cataclysmic life-event, or drawn-out anticipation of something terrible yet inevitable? I guess the answer is obvious, and that the chance to come to terms and say goodbye beforehand is an evident blessing. The chance to really value time spent together, to really appreciate what other human beings bring to us, just before it is too late. For so many different butterfly-wing-triggered reasons, every meeting could be the last, every goodbye final, without us knowing until after the event. But when those of the medical profession pass verdict, and a loved one’s end becomes that much more inevitable and imminent, only then do we stop taking things for granted. Yet we also, somehow, resist grinding to a halt; we keep muddling on, and waiting.

My grandmother, having barely suffered a day of ill health in all her life, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 81 and given only weeks to live. And so all the family, herself included, got on with life, whilst waiting for her death that bit more consciously than before. I would find myself imagining where I would be when I finally received the news, how I would react; even how, at her funeral, I would finally meet all the people she had talked about but never introduced to me. In the end, she lived for two more years, and when the news finally came I was in a foreign country, pregnant, and unable to travel to her funeral.

In 2002 my grandfather (other side of the family) suffered a major stroke that left him severely disabled, unable to move, speak or eat. Coming shortly after a heart operation, he was not really expected to survive long. In fact he lived, bedridden, immobile and pretty much incomprehensible, for more than ten years. When he finally passed away I was in a foreign country, breastfeeding a newborn baby, and unable to travel to the funeral.

With age the waiting games inevitably move closer to home. My current "game" began over a year ago: as early as the diagnosis for some; only when chemotherapy was withdrawn for the more optimistic/naive (me). I suspect, for the person concerned, it began as soon as she acknowledged the symptoms, and chose to seek medical help later rather than sooner. Sometimes I imagine where I will be when I finally receive the news. Will I somehow know, when it happens, via cosmic resonances or some such paranormal phenomenon, before I get THE phone call? Or will I be in the room at the moment of passing, and really be "there" for her?

I know that I must appreciate the time left, value every moment, and be grateful for the fact that every goodbye so far has not turned out to be the last. But I also find myself somehow becoming numb to the anticipation. As always, I keep doing what the everyday dictates, and just keep muddling on. More to follow.

Too much music...in my head

As a little addendum to my Too much music entry, here’s what happened on the tram yesterday morning. I was wired for sound as usual when, a few stops into the journey, a distant acquaintance got on and made eye contact. I immediately unplugged my ears, and we exchanged greetings and brief small-talk about how late we were both running. The conversation rapidly petered out, and he started playing with his phone; I didn’t want to force it, especially in what was a foreign language for him, but I felt it rude to definitively turn my back and re-plug. So I left him with the option of talking further if he so desired – in my experience, some people like to practice their English when the opportunity arises – and contented myself with mental musings in the meantime.

As it happened, nothing more was said until our leave-taking as we descended from the tram. It was only then that I realized that the music I had been listening to previously was still playing – in my head. A part of the chorus, at least, was spinning round around in my mental audio machine, rather like the way snippets of songs do on restless nights when my brain is too active to sleep.

So I tried an experiment; I deliberately made the mental switch to one of my habitual tram-stop-to-office tunes (as detailed in Too much music). With very little conscious effort on my part, the song proceeded to play to the virtual ears of my brain, relatively complete in structure and texture. It was quite remarkable.

This set me thinking; perhaps this current cultural glut of wiring and memory space, as discussed in Technology in my pocket, is just a temporary stage in human evolution, a stepping stone to help train us to access and utilize the 90% or whatever of our brain capacity that is currently redundant (or is that an urban myth?). Then we will be using our own multi-GB memory space, and be able to render visual and aural mental images so vivid and accurate that external play-back equipment will be redundant.

Or, rather more likely, exercise of my over-exposed musical memory is pushing other, more functional stuff out of my head, like pin numbers and to-do lists. Oh well – at least I know I shan't be too bothered when the iPod battery is flat.