Fuck X-mas

Go tell it from on high!

I hate Christmas. You know it's true, girl. What I hate most about it is that I can't even come up with any vaguely original reasons for hating it. I hate it for the same reasons that everyone who hates it hates it: blatant commercialism, fake sentimentality, forced family togetherness, fake generosity, obligatory consumerism, sloth, greed, shitty cookies, same fucking songs every year, traveling's a pain in the ass, neighbors gotta put up their 40-foot inflatable snowman, piles of boilerplate X-mas cards, people still pretending it's a religious thing amid all the shit-buying. The whole thing's just unspeakably obnoxious and makes me ashamed of our species.

But none of this is even remotely original. I prefer to hate things for reasons that I come up with on my own, or at least for reasons that are intriguing and new or at least interesting to talk about. That's kind of a snob thing, I guess, but shit, how many more times does bitching about X-mas bear repeating? I'm boring myself just writing about hating X-mas. In fact, I find that complaining about X-mas or hearing people complain about it is almost as bad as X-mas itself by this point.

It's very much like a phenomenon I've recently observed which I call The Recurring Cell Phone Conversation. You've probably noticed nowadays that whenever relatives or groups get together, talk inevitably turns to the encroachment of cell phones in our daily lives, and invariably culminates in a roundtable discussion where people start one-upping each other with stories of the most shocking place where they witnessed somebody talking on their cell phone: In a movie theater! On the toilet! During surgery! While skydiving! At a funeral! While administering a blowjob! While giving birth! While being beheaded!

Hyperbole aside, you can see that this Recurring Cell Phone Conversation has become (at least to me) far more bothersome than listening to people talk on their cell phones in public. I hardly even care anymore when people yak on their goddamn walkie-talkies in public; I can either tune 'em out or listen in to their conversation for laffs. But I'll tell you I sure don't need another round of that "You wouldn't believe where I saw this guy answer his cell phone!" conversation.

Same with X-mas. I hate it, and yet it's hardly even worth griping about. So what to do? I want to either go somewhere far away during X-mas, or, alternatively, stay here and just be allowed to ignore it and not be expected to participate in it whatsoever. Maybe there should be a new movement. I figure there's enough people who are fed up with X-mas bullshit by now that there's a good footing for a Ignore Christmas movement to take hold in this country. Who's in?

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While we're being all bitchy, a couple of snide HUZZAH!!!!s are in order:

1. Blockbuster, as you probably know, has taken the drastic measure of eliminating late fees on video rentals, which can surely be interpreted as a death knell of a very desperate company that's taking it up the ass big-time from the likes of Netflix. I know I'm not alone when I say that I hate Blockbuster with the heat of a thousand suns, so it'll be no tears from me if/when they eventually eat shit. Did you know they were banking a cool $250-300 million off of those late fees from your dumb lazy ass? If ever there was a business model that deserved to die a tortured and sadistic death, it's Blockbuster's.

2. Dave Barry is retiring, and thus will finally quit sullying the nation's newspapers and forwarded e-mail inboxes with his insipid, tedious, grating attempts at cleverness aimed at similarly inclined baby boomers who listen to the Big Chill soundtrack endlessly in their cars and wear ties with blinking Christmas lights on them. Until I heard this news I actually never believed Dave Barry existed; I assumed it was like Jay Leno collaborating with Bil Keane, and "Dave Barry" was just their nom de plume. Guess not. Sadly, Barry's self-exile will only create a vacuum for this massive demographic constituency who can't get enough of Big Mouth Billy Bass and Adam Sandler movies, a vacuum which will soon be filled by some other blissful schlep who fails to see the shame in that stale yuppie humor about obsessive golfing/fishing followed up by a joke about how much of an impediment your spouse is to your obsessive golfing/fishing.

Yes, thank you. I do feel much better now.

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Plenary Year-End Bullshit

In lieu of the customary, shopworn practice of compiling year-end best-of lists, I leave 2004 with the following questions languishing in my mind unanswered. Some snide, some genuine. And I'm leaving the more obvious "how the fuck did that blow-tard Bush manage to win that election?" type of questions as an exercise for another day:

* Does anyone else get really weirded out when they hear the word "meantime" used without being preceded by "in the"? Example: "Meantime, stocks were up 3 points from yesterday..." Isn't that what "meanwhile" is supposed to be used for?

* Why is the BBC World News' coverage almost entirely about the United States?

* Is there a term for a male metermaid? Are the female ones even called metermaids anymore?

* Why are newspaper headlines in present tense, but the stories in past tense?

* How do periodicals like Newsweek and Time and Atlantic Monthly and The Economist get all of their letters to the editor to sound like they were written by the same person?

* What is it about old peoples' handwriting that makes it so easily distinguishable from that of younger people?

* When you come across books where it says "This page intentionally left blank"... why do they do that?

* Has there ever, in the history of the world, been a group of five or more people at a Chinese restaurant where someone didn't make the joke about appending "in bed" to the end of a fortune cookie message?

* Do you notice how alarmingly frequently in books there will be a block of quoted text where they forgot to add the closing quotation marks?

* Do people who say "warsh" for wash also pronounce squash as "squarsh?"

* I guess I know the answer, but are there really men that are attracted to women with frosted hair?

Uh, I guess that'll be all for today.

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