it is christmas. received a few comments about how looong it had been since the last blog. yet, today is not a great blogging day. let's see how we do.

children are here and sam the cat is already crying at my feet. kids are wining already.

blogging is doomed.

rain is coming down in a hazy delicate lace. smokey fog. this is as close to real-honest-to-god weather as we get in so cal. wind is tickling the leaves to disperse their rain.

yes, blogging is doomed, daddy announced that we are having lunch in a half an hour, but he seems to forget that the one that must do lunch (he does not cook) is me and i need more than a half an hour to get that meal done. want to write at least a little bit...

blogging is doomed.

christmas doom. lifestyle doom.

yesterday - t, at eleven years old, created for me a fabulous christmas card. it was joyful and artsy and very complex. in one little-itty-bitty section she wrote the phrase "christmas burden".

someday we should ask her what she meant.

suppose we all know what, at eleven, she meant. kind of the barenaked realities that we try to gloss over. somewhere the spiritual food of the reason gets canabalized by the larger more robust guilt and fear that we all face. fear and guilt about: will we show our love for others well this year in the tasks that we do? will anyone love us well in the tasks they do? or are we all just very lonely right beside each other? do we make any remotely feable connections? or anything that has any eternal merit?

t also was playing with my poetry magnets (which function as a rorschach test, in my mind.) she took the shakespeare set and added it to the rest and wrote "Methinks you hate me so". she is fixated on a pop-rock song right now that lyrically swells into a chorus that declares: "i hate you". hate, love, rejection, acceptance are HUGE themes with her right now.

aren't they huge issues with us all, all of our lives...

so last night, someone snuck to the table and changed the words to say "Methinks you know me so".

won't give away who that was, but they are waiting to see if she notices.

and they hope if touches someplace on the interior. redeems something. and not out of some burden. out of some hope.

meanwhile, mancub has a new software that he is using right now that shows you what things sound like in major cathedrals of the world. you can import any sound and make it reverb in the cathedrals and rectors offices and stairwells and from the choir lofts.

so he imported a fart.

now the kids are crazy. blogging is doomed. and with that, merry christmas to you all.