Somehow, somewhat, somewhere, I missed the ever-gathering Christmas season. I've been far too busy acting in a show for the past two weeks, I think. Now that the show is over, though, it seems as if the holidays have swooped down around my pale and tallish shoulders with a mighty whoosh. It feels sort of like being set upon by a giant, inky, carol-spewing vulture, only without the carrion parts -- insofar, that is. There are gifts to be bought and places to drive and family homes to decorate and dithers to be gotten into, and it's already the twenty-third, and good lord is there no such thing as free postage anymore? And what's with all this virtual snow? Don't I know that every webber and their webbing mother is absolutely loathe to watch snow in a javascripted can?

And yet this morning, just around noon, a poem popped into my head. And it has been many moons since any amount of happy versewords arranged themselves up there, and so I was promptly filled with all kinds of Christmasy gladness. (Don't fret, ardent fans: I'll transfer it later.) And when I filled my car with petrol around midnight this morning, the attendant lady and I spoke about hellos and shopping and wished each other a very happy Christmas. And so there we have poemgladness and crazystrangergladness, and well, that's almost like Christmas gladness. And no matter the vultures, no matter the busy occupations, no matter the general dither of these vexing times, simple Christmas gladness never gets old.

Whenever things don't go my way, I sit back and I say to myself, "You know, if I were queen, I wouldn't have to deal with this." Were truer words ever spoken? Queens don't have to deal with much. They wave a crystal scepter, or they release the hounds, or they pass an edict, or they go for a walk along their royal beach. They don't have to deal with things not going their way. Of course, imagined queendoms have very different things to deal with than real queendoms. Real queendoms don't have to deal with much at all. (Today, mind you. Back in the day, they had a lot of guillotines, actual governing, or the feudal system and such to worry about.) Now queens mostly deal with, say, having tea, or deciding what dowdy bag goes with what dowdy shoes, or whether or not they should pretend to actually have a purpose beyond that of bloodlines, celebrity, or tabloid food-n-fodder.

Sometimes real queens also have to deal with those pesky peasant uprisings. I find myself thinking about those more and more these days, and I'm thinking more and more that, were I queen of an imaginary queendom -- IMAGINE THAT -- I'd probably want to wave a little pitchfork of my own. Because uprisings can sometimes be quite healthy ... particularly when things ain't going your way.

It's amazing what a good song can do. You can be having the worst day of your life, drive away in a snit, turn up a CD, and suddenly Frank Sinatra is driving along with you. Frank's not having a bad day. Frank is calling his luck a lady. You can be exhausted, turn on the computer, turn up the computer music, and suddenly Roberta Flack is easing on out from your internal speakers. Roberta's not exhausted. Roberta is strumming her pain and killing it softly.

That's why we listen to music, isn't it? To soothe. To laugh. To inspire relatively bad pith. And we also reeeeeally want to define love, or else there wouldn't be fifty zillion songs about it.

Dear Finals Week,

You ought to die a very bludgeony type of death.

Sincerely,
Christa

P.S. Your mother wears army boots.

Yes, I can see him now.

He sits on high in an office duplex somewhere. He sold off his firstborn child in order to pay for his designer tie. Every so often, he gives in to a stereotypically evil physicalization -- he rubs his hands together, or he rolls around some medicine balls, or he lifts his pinky finger to the side of his chin. (His pinky finger is, of course, laden with a large ring to signify the selling of his second-born.) Yes, he sits up there, this mighty executive, and then he stands up. He clears his executive throat. The time has come for action! He issues a memo! For he, Nonesuch "The Man" Whoever, suddenly decides he ought to TEAR UP THE STREETS SURROUNDING CHRISTA'S APARTMENT FOR NO REASON AT ALL! That's right; he wants to REPAVE THE ALREADY-PERFECT PAVEMENT AND MAKE CHRISTA GO LEAPS AND BOUNDS OUT OF HER ALREADY-LATE WAY! And just to put the proverbial icing on the proverbial cake, he'll gladly HAVE THE POOR WORKING FOLKS DO ALL THE REPAVING DURING THE MOST TRAFFIC-LADEN HOURS OF THE DAY! Hooray for this man! Give a cheer for him! All bow to his AWESOME GRAVITY AND GREATNESS!

"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"
"Man, I don't even know anymore."