pronoia

My First Assvice*

The other night, at my traditional group's moon ritual, I mentioned something about us trying to get pregnant. Another member, who routinely annoys me, started jumping up and down and dragged me off to the side. She and her husband had used AI! She was so excited for us! She's going to tell me the trick to getting pregnant with AI! Fortunately, we got called back to doing something, you know, related to a religious service, and I got to escape. Afterwards, she told me she'd send me an email! Telling me the secret!

The big secret? Having an orgasm while trying to inseminate! Both times she had an orgasm while inseminating, she got pregnant! But the one time she didn't, she didn't! That's the big secret!

No amount of telling her that we've tried for four months, both with and without orgasm, will change her belief that orgasm is the magic bullet, of course, just like telling people that the whole plan-to-adopt-and-you'll-get-pregnant or relax-on-vacation-and-you'll-get-knocked-up thing is not universally true, no matter what happened to you or your mother's cousin's daughter's ex-best-friend.

Sigh.

*Assvice, n., attempted advice by well-meaning but clueless people that directly or indirectly implies that you? Are a big idiot that hasn't, say, read anything about AI or considered adoption after four years of failed treatments. And also? The choices you are actually making are kind of dumb.

Yule Report

Yule was, well, amazing.

A few days ago I was worried about this holiday, because Ms. P was actively mourning Christmas and not having one. Since she has been much more of a practicing Christian in her life than I've been in mine, and since she actually likes spending time with her family, this makes sense. That it made sense did not, however, prevent me from some small panic that we would not have a nice Yule, that we would never be able to really live into our religion, and that we were doomed to a kind of false spirituality forever.

Early on I decided that, since this holiday is in part about the return of the Sun, I wanted to spend Yule without electric lights. I wanted to mindfully experience the light-dark cycle on this, the shortest day of the year. During the day this wasn't even noticeable, and we finished our holiday shopping and wrapped gifts and ate and napped. As we got closer to sundown, however, R found himself moving a little faster to get the kitchen cleaned up and functional, and we put out candles everywhere. We baked by candlelight. R made quiche for his office brunch this morning. We told stories and sang really bad queer remakes of holiday classics. E and J came over to celebrate Yule with our small group of spiritual companions, and we ordered Chinese and did a small ritual in which we named the things we wanted to let go of from the past year and ceremonially burned them to ash.

For R it was an emotional day, marking as it does the release of his marriage. For me it was a meditative day, in which I experienced again my longing for a life of slowness, of spareness, of wide open spaces of time and possibility. Of relationship and community and sustainability. The three of us committed to gardening next summer, I reaffirmed the ways I want to change my eating habits, and I let go of apathy and indecision. Even though I was cranky at the end of it (the extroverts were wound up from a day at work, and this introvert had to work herself up to get a word in edgewise), I felt blessed to have that day to remind me of our place on this earth and the ways I want to make my own life.

This morning Ms. P and I lay in bed and watched the sun rise from behind the trees. I realized how little I sit and watch these days; I only noticed now that we're near a takeoff path from a nearby international airport. I could see the different silhouettes of trees and the direction the clouds drifted. It was a blessing to welcome the return of the light, again, today.

Scrooge

I was getting lunch with my colleague today, wandering around the salad bar and wishing the hot bar had my favorite honey-pork. In not too much time, the relentless Christmas music felt oppressive. It's only been six days since Thanksgiving and already I'm sick of it.

As is my wont, I started silently fuming to myself. "This is so offensive," I thought. "The incessant, inescapable Christman-ness of this month. How many people in this city, after all, are being forced to deal with this even though they aren't Christian?"

And then, like a bolt out of the proverbial blue: "Hey, I'm not Christian!"

No wonder it irritates me so much.

I can talk until I'm blue in the face about how there's no way Jesus was born in the winter, how the early Christians appropriated a Roman holiday, how our Christmas rituals have appropriated local pagan folk-traditions from many lands, how much Christmas has turned into a commercial holiday, how it's a cultural season as much as a religious one these days, and I'm not convinced.

I dislike so much about this season: the freneticism, the materialism, the competition, the forced frivolity, the forced togetherness. That it is necessarily part and parcel of a religious holiday I don't believe in makes all of that seem, well, pointless and commercial. It's hard to come out from under it and find what is good about it for me, in the life I want to have.

Because Ms. P's family and mine are both Christian (at least nominally), I've felt obligated to celebrate Christmas. All of the family expectation comes out, and that's that. Despite not having been Christian for, well, probably ever, I have functioned in the world, at least in December, as if I am. And every year it produces a strange cognitive dissonance that amplifies the things that already make me cranky.

Ms. P and R and I are having Yule this year; we're all taking days off of work and spending time together, and on December 25th we're going to eat Chinese food and go to the movies. I'm looking forward to both of those days, but I have to get there before I can see what it's like not to celebrate Christmas and to truly experience the season as the run up to the shortest day of the year, the time when the light and the Sun return.