Yesterday Apple Weather told us we might have an inch or two of snow, and this morning the city plowed the parking garage twice before 10am and my dog ran through 8” of new fallen whiteness.
Oops?
This seems par for the course these days, when every app and every attempt at future predicting and controlling is as accurate as a wayward Magic 8 ball. Meteorology as a science seems to be either exploding or imploding as the illusion of certainty I grew up with melts completely away.
Just stick your head out and see for yourself, eh?
I’m grateful for the snow, which started around 7am and is just trailing off now that it’s just past noon. It feels a day early, but a White Christmas Eve is also pretty nice. I’m sitting in the office, wondering which of the dozen projects I’ve left unfinished ought to get my attention as I nudge forwards into the ambiguity of 2024. Audio book? Pregnancy book? Mastermind group that is absolutely NOT going to be called a Mastermind anything?
This decade has me in a dervishy-pivot mode, and I’m so jealous of people with boring, consistent, or regular work. I wonder how they do it the same way I marveled at one of the girls in my Sunday School class who really seemed to be buying the virgin birth and did not once ask the priest about what Santa brought the baby Jesus, as I did in 1984. When I was three.
JEALOUS.
Ever the third culture kid, I find myself surprised and horrified by the cultural subtext that has our youth obsessed with eyebrow shaping and our grown ups watching modern gladiating of actual humans sports-balling themselves into grave head injuries, and abhorrent and unnecessary destruction of densely populated beachfronts.
No wonder Apple Weather is struggling.
Today I read Nora McInerny’s Sunday Dreads, which is a Substack that feels quite a bit like mine, although she’s already published many successful books and has quite a following. Her books are excellent - unwrapping grief with wit and gravity in a way I do or hope to, but also her subject matter is often tough for me because the husband who widowed her has the same name as my terminally ill person and that feels a bit like a face slap from the universe. Too close to home in some ways.
Also. Spoiler?
Regardless, it’s good, and I hope you take a peek or a follow.
I hope that your Christmas is full of the things that feel important to you, whether that’s silence and desert air or an egg-heavy beverage or the best of capitalism’s finest foot prisons. Whether it’s picture-perfect and hollow or dismissive and cozy, it’s yours to tick off as we nudge closer to next year.
I’ll be observing this Christmas in limbo - eating a medically restricted diet (consisting principally of kitchari and pumpkin pie) on the off chance my scheduled surgery unfolds… as scheduled, despite the ominous call from my surgeon on Friday suggesting it might not. I’ve cued up a few lattes for the weeks that follow just in case, and we’ll see how it all shakes out.
It feels apropos - to wonder at what comes next. A bearded jolly fellow? A virgin birth? A bevy of wise men? Mutant reindeer?
Laughter, I hope. And tears, if they’re up for a visit. Christmas, whether you keep it at all, seems to bring with it both the expected and the un.
Merry merry. I’m grateful for you.
<3
K
PS: If you’re into the things that I do, you can find them here and here, and if you’re into some kind of Mastermind group that meets virtually, talks about being a great human, teaching the thing you’re here to teach, writing well, and holding epic space (and is not called a mastermind group!) reply because I’m mAkiNg a LiSt. I’m thinking about calling it “The Holding Spaceship.”