There were some very nice seasonal events, too many to list, actually.  I don’t mean to say that I didn’t have a lovely holiday.  It was just fast.  Really fast.

And it reminds me of the truest thing every parent has told me about raising a child.  It flies by!  Charlotte is closer to 21 months old than 20, and she walks and talks and has favorite toys and programs and movies.

I should use one of my favorite Christmas presents (a new camera!) to take pictures of some of my favorite of Charlotte’s presents (is that a sentence?).  She’s got a huge collection of Sesame Street figures (and the accessories) that she calls her “guys” after what I called them.  She sitting there playing with them now.

Now: winter.  And my century-old apartment is so drafty that the heat literally will not turn off.  Instead of the whole shebang turning on and off, the system stays on while the “auxiliary heat” comes on and off.  I shudder to think of our electric bill and environmental impact.  We console ourselves with the fact that we won’t be here next winter.

Maybe it’s a MAN thing?  Like how we don’t “express” ourselves or something?

Even the pile of presents (Okay, the two piles of presents) for Charlotte from “Santa” smack of the, “I love you; so I bought you this,” Christmas.  Where did that come from?  Sure, we had presents out the ass when I was little.  But we had a huge family Christmas party on Christmas Eve and Santa and cookies and church and togetherness.  It was a lot more than presents.

I blame working at the mall my last two years of college.  I worked at a bookstore, and we ran the calendar kiosk.  I was famous for being able to “man” that huge display all day without getting sick of it.  Well, there was this terrible non-religious Christmas “music” they used to play.  I think that shit messed with my brain chemistry.  Seriously.  I still can’t look at calendars, especially not ones with dogs or trucks on them.  And last weekend, the mall had NO MUSIC PLAYING, and I felt like going batshit the whole time.  It was eerie.  The weekend before Christmas, and the place was packed.  And I was creeped out because I thought it was too quiet.

Yes, it was Towson Town Center that make me a present whore.  That’s it.

Really, though, my gift to myself was a bottle of Jack with matching glasses thrown in for free.  Seriously.  Because who can’t use some help getting through the holidays?

Merry Christmas Eve.  I am off to shower, drink coffee and watch A Christmas Story with my cuddly wife.

This could be my relatively boring life.  I never go camping as much as I used to, or travel.  So I sit and obsess over backpacks and messenger bags and what sort of gear I’ll need for my imaginary solo trip around Europe and the near East (which I’ll not only never get to take, but also don’t really want to take; my wife is a great travel companion as well as life companion).  When I was in my teens and camped more, I never really thought much of gear.  I had (still have) a framepack from 1990, and that was that.  My sleeping bag still has a cigarette burn from October 1995, in the mountains of Western Maryland and probably hasn’t even been washed since.

So I sit and read about bags to do things I don’t do.  Look on Flickr at pictures of Moleskines and other tools of writers, while I never write anymore.  I read adventure and manly books to imagine myself doing it.

And I don’t do anything.

I used to convince myself (even until this morning when I noticed a few meaningless broken threads on my precious custom Timbuk2 bag — one of FOUR I own!) that I really just needed to be able to enjoy my stuff, to love it so much that I didn’t care about the universal flaws that things which are made of material always exhibit (namely, never ever being or remaining perfect!).  That’s crazy.  The only entities worthy of being loved beyond their flaws are people and maybe your country.  Not your damned messenger bag that was made in San Francisco just for you or notebooks that have freakin PVC in their covers and paper that’s really, let’s face it, not great.  More properly, I need to regain my love of things like hiking and camping and traveling so much that I don’t care what beat-up piece of crap I carry all my stuff in.  I’ve been actually planning on buying a backpack to take to the mountains this fall.  Why?  I’ll just sit there worrying about and thinking about it.  There’s no point in spending a lot of time on it.  When I was a teenager, my journal was just a big spiral notebook I never needed for classes, and then the books people would give me as gifts.

I’ve gotten to the point where I would be ashamed if the people whom I admire were to learn about my sick ways.  When my dissertation director was here last month, I hoped I wouldn’t slip and admit how much I’d read about the little backpack I had with me at the time.  I’m not quite sure that Thoreau, Hemingway or Chatwin would own four Timbuk2 bags or even that any of them would get anywhere near a Moleskine, especially now that there are better and cheaper alternatives that do the same thing.

There was a time when the only things I was obsessed with were Space Pens, and I just wrote and traveled and camped and enjoyed activities and experiences.  This wasn’t that long ago, merely months before I started blogging, maybe a year.  I need to get back to that.  I don’t think I need to somehow learn to deal with accepting the imperfections of the stuff I am already obsessed with.  I think I need to get rid of and no longer buy the things I’m obsessed with.  Things that don’t obsess me don’t bother me regarding their imperfections.  Hell, I love shit that’s broken in!

My consumerism even extends to how I spend my time online and why the hell I even own a digital camera anymore, but that’s another post for another dark lunch-hour.

Friday: I call the bike shop, and when they offer to order me one, I say, No thanks, I’ll be in later to get something anyway. But I never make it because I get mad at the idea of crushing my frame (as if steel is not stronger than that $5 part or as if I’m even that strong!). My phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, and I throw it. Hard. It explodes on the floor, and I almost have a melt-down because of my shiny shit. I mean, I’m fucking shaking, as ashamed as I am to admit it.

Then the messenger bag that I had sent away for a warranty repair (which was itself a replacement for a very very defective bag and on which I have spent $55 in shipping to date) came back un-fixed, after they told me they fixed it. I was even madder. Tried to call them to yell at them (which I never do), but they were not there even though they were supposed to be.  So I sent them an email at the end of business Friday. An angry email.  When I left to go to dinner at Golden West, though, I felt better. Shit is shit, and fuck it all, I thought. It felt fantastic.  I didn’t give a fuck or a shit or a hill of fucking beans about anything material and ate spicy food and washed it down with Pabst and had a very relaxing weekend.

Then I let my seatpost woes ruin my week again. Have I ordered a new collar yet? No. That would make sense. Can I plainly see that I have not, in fact, wrecked my frame? Yes. Am I losing my fucking mind over this? Possibly. I mean, I should cut myself some slack. I did go three months off of a bike, and my three bigger injuries (hand, wrist, foot) bother me regularly when I cycle. But still. I am getting distracted at work reading about slipping seatposts on forums at lunchtime, instead of my favorite lunchbreak activity (taking off my shoes and reading for an hour).

Perhaps the solution is to burn all my shit? Heh heh heh. Tempting.

On the bright side, I’ll get a new seatpost collar, it will probably work, and all will be well on that front. My new phone comes today, and I was due for a new one anyway (and it was free). And the company in question responded to my pissy email with a, Pick whatever bag you want, and it’s yours, response.

And I’m going to Washington DC to see Tori Amos this weekend, an early birthday present from my sweet wife.  A long weekend in DC and then a little shindig Sunday for my Dad’s 60th birthday.  Not bad.  A normal person would be excited about this and not worried about a piece of fucking metal.

Oh, and I turn 30 four weeks from Sunday.  That, I’m not happy about.  I wanna skip this decade and just turn 40 — it seems like more fun.  I’m afraid my 30s are going to be another decade of doing stupid shit and worrying about stupid shit and so missing out on awesome shit like my 20s have totally and completely been.

But, I guess,  you never know.

And of course having a bunch of new stuff makes a lot of people (myself included) re-examine their relationship to material possessions.  I really love my new gloves and fenders and Thermos, but it’s the cycling in winter weather and not dropping five bucks a day to have good coffee at work thing that I really like.  I suppose that’s a healthy relationship to gear, right?  Using it?

I do have the tendency to pet my things though and often get very upset when a new scratch joins the dozens of others on my bike or when dust gets under the screen cover of my camera.  Then I think about my bike and not riding and my camera and not taking pictures.  Then, as Tyler Durden would say, the things I own end up owning me.

I’ve always struggled to have a healthy relationship to possessions, my body, my health.  You can’t just ignore your pains or bike maintenance, but you can’t get attached to them, either.  Tricky, I tell you.  Tricky.

Photo Friday: Meditation.