Before I get to the heart of my intended post, let me start by saying that I hope everyone had a great Christmas. Mine was pretty okay, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm a tough person to shop for at Christmastime.
My parents want to ensure that everyone has a few gifts to open when we all celebrate together. I've used this as an opportunity to stock up on DVDs, because they are easy to procure and I'll get something I'll actually use.
My mom, bless her, refers to e-commerce in general as 'Amazon.' She'll say things like, "I went on Amazon to buy it, and sure enough, Target had it on sale." Odd, I know. But it probably explains a few things.
This year, I thought 'Avatar' would make a nice addition to my movie library. When Christmas arrived, I opened a gift that looked suspiciously like a DVD with great anticipation.
Lo and behold, my folks had indeed bought a DVD for me. It was, however, the (ahem) gripping 2004 Howard Hughes bio-pic, 'The Aviator.' It turns out that Mom's not a very good speller.
It felt great to decompress a bit after the bustle of the holidays. I got some serious cartoon-watching time in with my daughter. Those sure have changed since I was a kid. When I was little, the epitome of humor was watching a duck take a shotgun blast point-blank in the kisser and having its bill spun around to the other side of its head...by a guy with a speech impediment, no less.
Scout's honor, we watched one cartoon together where a family of turtles got in a car and put seatbelts on. They're turtles. Why would they need seatbelts? Their whole body is a roll cage, for Pete's sake. Put a turtle in rollerskates, and it's pretty much a Volkswagen Beetle.
On the one hand, today's kids are sheltered by delicate, touchy-feely cartoons with social messages. You know, to protect their innocent minds from that scary place called reality. Then we send them off to school, where our tax dollars are used to teach them how to put condoms on bananas.
I find the banana usage altogether confusing. Like, I get the obvious reason why they use them. But isn't the whole point of a banana to unwrap the damned thing before using it? Talk about your mixed messages.
And what a waste of food. I don't care if it had a peel on it or not, there ain't no way I'm slicing a used banana into a batch of pudding after its been handled by teenage fingers and used as a mannequin in sex ed class. I'd rather starve. I'm serious.
Speaking of food...with a litte extra time off around the holidays, I tried to exercise a bit more diligently to counteract my indulgences. As a bonus, I find that running in particular provides some interesting moments of clarity for me. I become introspective and think about my own personal quirks.
For example, I ponder the fact that I have Justin Timberlake's 'SexyBack' on my workout playlist. That's not really my typical genre. Further, I surprisingly find an extra gear when that song comes up in my shuffle. I feel like a gosh-darned gazelle. Why?
I determined that I didn't use the song as motivation. In other words, the music isn't a means for me to bring my own latent sexy back. I'm a realist. Since one must first possess sexy to begin with in order to bring it back, that clearly isn't the source of my energy burst.
After some complicated analysis, I arrived at this conclusion: It simply has a good beat to run to. In my teens, I would have been way too 'cool' to listen to a bubblegum pop song like that. In my late twenties, I would have scoffed at it for being so mindless .
But in my thirties, I've learned that there are no guilty pleasures in life. There are just pleasures. Life is too short to waste even a precious moment of fun.
In other breaking news, puppies are cute and the ocean is salty.
Like I said, while running I find moments of clarity. Obviously, they aren't all moments of great depth.
