christmas in februaryand the swedish meatball shaped stocking

in between ginger ale departure and cranberry juice arrival, i hopped over to frigid dallas this weekend for the family's much delayed christmas gathering. say what? uh huh!

we did our best to trick the rest of the world that their calendars were indeed off, requesting christmas themed pies from local bakeries and asking for the holiday specials at ikea. alas though it failed to catch on so we took revenge on any free samples carts we came across. otherwise we rooted ourselves in for wide screen high definition winter olympic glory.

in the midst of it all we did find a determined snow flake wandering down to the pavement.

blankings of a blankety blank

don't fool yourself. nobody is what they seem. and that, of course, is a good thing. in a world of television characters, we like to make generalizations of character in order to rationalize things a bit more. are you the nutty next door neighbor or the gritty ex-ctu agent that can never forget where you came from? it's so much easier to process when we're one dimensional. even the fact that i try to sum up an entire week's worth of amazing bicycle-centric events with the old "short sentence-short sentence-short sentence-in a world of..." opener goes to show that we even try and generalize ourselves. i'm gonna be the insightful reporter of the collective twenty something super ego.

or i'm gonna be the caring boyfriend. and the self centered jackass. or all three. in a world of those six point something billion people, we're going to have a wide range of friends. because no person in that six point something is alike, we're going to have to adapt constantly to suit our surroundings. we don't do it consciously. it's just part of our id. (anyone who has any passing knowledge of freudian psychology, please disregard any use of any words i use.)

so when we find ourselves surrounded by people that bring about qualities in ourselves that we find pleasing, have we found our ideal situation or are we just avoiding some facets of our true nature? what about the forgotten sides of your ideal pals. what if they showed all of their complexities and contradictions all at once? would you still like them and would you yourself still isolate your favorite facets? what if you combined all of your friends and made them hang out and thus had to be everything to everyone.

if we all were truly everything would we all be the same? all six point something billion. brain dead robots and will smith won't be around to save us. i don't know, try it out.

the only thing anybody ever really cares about

is love. despite everything else you spend your life doing or working on, it's all details comparatively. we all just secretly want our own piece of the pie, and knowing that the six point something billion people of the world basically divvy up half and half, it all seems easy. same goes for you ten percenters. find yourself someone who kind of looks like you and does what you do and there you go. love. as obi wan kenobi once said, all you need is love.

but it's far from that simple. it's a many complicated thing. it's a lust/trust/comfort thing. it's time and distance. it's two random people crossing the stars and hoping to collide or at least have enough gravitational pull to orbit for a bit. the more stars you pass the more you learn how infinitely complex our universe is.

and suddenly going from curious astronomer to wandering astronaut shows that outhere is not exactly what i'd expected, yet again nothing i had necessarily planned for. ask any astronauts you know and they'll tell you the same. wait i think i'm about to make a point. i'll share all my otherworldly knowledge with you kids.

it's not easy and that's what makes it worth it. i wish i could say more, but it's as simple as that. i think. oh, you'll understand when you're older. what? yes, i know. okay, well goodnight.