Miscellaneous

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On New Year's a lot of people, especially female people, make New Year's resolutions whose aim are to make them look better--lose weight, exercise more, get pedicures more often, whatever. All perfectly okay, but this aim might be better furthered by asking ourselves--and asking it frequently--"What kind of face am I creating?" I'll explain. Every once in a while, I'll see a middle-aged woman in a store or somewhere whom I can tell right off is a real bitch. Her features are set into a mean expression. Not because she's feeling out of sorts right then, but because she's had a mean, angry look on her face so often for so many years that it has settled into that expression permanently. It is not a good look. No little girl ever said, "I hope I grow up to have the kind of expression that makes store clerks walk in the other direction to avoid me, DMV employees decide it's time for their break, and complete strangers pity my children." When I see women who look like that, I wonder what kind of expression I'm building, what kind of lines I'm etching onto my face. If we take charge of ourselves now, maybe our lines will convey past laughter, smiles, and thoughtfulness instead of hatred; even past sadness looks better on the face than that. Trying to be better-tempered people will do more for our future looks than any number of resolutions to use moisturizer every day.

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In a way Epiphany is kind of sad for me. Not only do the Christmas decorations go, but the Christmas carols do too. It's no secret that the music in contemporary American Catholic churches is not very good, but for the couple of weeks of Christmas we get to sing the fine old Christmas carols and they are great. Everybody knows the words too--to the first verse, anyway, but we know the tunes so well we can fake it on the next verses.

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The people who wrote "Joy to the World" were all having a really good day.

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When I was a child I was fond of the carol "We Three Kings". Trying to figure out why last night, I think I've pinpointed it: I didn't realize the "are" in the first line was a verb, but thought that it was part of a place name--Orient-Ar, as in "We three kings of Orient-Ar..." Who wouldn't like a song that brings us visitors from such an exotic, mysterious-sounding place as Orient-Ar?

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On EWTN's Journey Home, the host said he heard the old Alaskan highway had a sign that said "Choose your rut carefully." That is excellent advice, although not expressed in as upbeat a way as you might see on a motivational poster.

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How many of us stop to think what a luxury it is that we can worry about whether our full-fat yogurt is giving us high cholesterol that will give us heart disease in thirty or forty years and whether our low-fat, artificially sweetened yogurt will give us cancer in thirty or forty years? Before the middle of the twentieth century, people worried about more immediate threats. Will there be enough to eat this winter? Will any of my family get influenza and die? Will I die in childbirth? What will happen if our son falls off that horse and breaks his legs? What if my husband is killed in the war? What will happen to my wife if the invading army makes it all the way into our town? What if the cattle get diseases? What if the well runs dry? Compared to worrying about starvation or accident and illness in an age of no antibiotics, having time to worry about whether the lining of our non-stick pans will make us ill several decades from now is pretty sweet. (This is not to say there aren't some things genuinely worth worrying about.)

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I am sorry for the people of New Orleans (as well as people imediately south and north of NO), but maybe the media should be reminded that it was Mississippi that was actually hit by Hurricane Katrina, not the city of New Orleans.

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Heard around the ---------- household recently:
From Auntie Suzanne, getting dressed: "I think all that eggnog and stuff I've been eating has made me retain fat."

From Auntie Suzanne's sister: "People can say what they like about Mississippi, but we give our dogs and cats better medical care than people get here [a hospital in Los Angeles]."

From Uncle Pookie--and be warned this isn't clean--"Is a prostitute who specializes in anal sex a crack whore?"

From Auntie Suzanne: "If it weren't for the lyrics, this would be a nice song." Yeah, and if things were completely different, they wouldn't be the same.

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I'm ambivalent about Chris Rock, but some of his comments about marriage are wise: "You're either married and bored or single and lonely" and "If you're married you want to kill your spouse; if you're single, you want to kill yourself." The latter even turns into an endorsement of marriage because, as he says, "better her than me."