Life as a Spectator Sport

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Sunday, December 25, 2005

Merry Christmas to everyone . . .

And God bless us all, though it's tempting to plead "God help us all."

Shelley and Nick are here, and Shelley just gave me the absolutely most fantastically extravagant gift I've ever received, an ounce of Chanel No. 5. I was floored. I accidentally found out what she paid for it, and believe me, if you don't already know what this stuff costs, you don't want to. She said she had used up what I had when she was a kid and thought she ought to replace it finally. Wow. And what I had then was only the cologne, not the perfume. I just don't buy things like that for myself.

I gave her a satellite radio receiver, which cost a lot less, but which seemed to please her just as much.

We finally got all the wrapping mess cleared away, and we're going to open a bottle of Red Truck wine in celebration of her third year in a big red truck--a Volvo this year instead of a Freightliner. She's come up in the truck-driving world. Red Truck wine has become an annual tradition for us. I found it the first Christmas after she started driving, and put a bottle in her Christmas stocking that year, and one of us has made sure we bought it both years since then.

Then I need to start some serious cooking.

My sweetie isn't here, but we'll be together for our anniversary next week. Nick, bless his heart, has agreed to baby-sit Clarence and the dog, so I can get away for a couple of days. Kate and I have been together five years now, hardly seems possible. When we first committed to each other, I know that neither of us thought our situation--living 350 miles from each other--would still be virtually unchanged in five years. It feels sometimes as though we're living in a time bubble--everything else changes around us, but our inability to truly be together as a couple just drags on interminably. But it's Christmas, and it's hard to be sorry for myself for long.

Hope everyone is having a great day!
posted by Liz @ 11:38 AM     |


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"If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings."


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