Also: Since when are "joyous strains" "brave delights"?

Christmas was mostly lovely. I hope yours was as lovely as could reasonably be expected — I know this is not an easy time for many folks.

I had one moment of feminist/churchy/musical embarrassment, about which exactly one of you will care, but I'll share it anyway, because, you know, funny stories at my expense, that's what we specialize in around here.

I went to church both late Christmas Eve and early Christmas morning with my dad.

There's so much great music that we only sing for these twelve or thirteen days of the year. My dad has a beautiful singing voice, and likes to show off, and it's just really great fun to sing next to him in church. I also happen to like Christmas morning church, for lots of reasons both religious and sentimental.

So this morning, we get to the final hymn of the service, known to many as "Good Christian Men, Rejoice!" In the "new" version of the hymnal, the lyrics have actually been changed to "Good Christian Friends, Rejoice!" (An old family friend, now also a priest, used to tell me that the hymn was originally addressed to men because thy're the ones who need reminding.) Anyway, for whatever reason, some part of me, so familiar with that hymn, forgot about the change and just belted out (joyfully) "Good Christian men, rejoy-hoy-hoice" — and I was appropriately horrified to hear myself sing it as I heard everyone around me sing the gender-neutral version and looked down at my hymnal. I feel like I owe every feminist Christian, including my mother and godmother, plus the committee that put together the improved hymnal, plus my redeemer and savior, an apology.

Afterward, I asked my father if he'd noticed my error. He had not, presumably having been enjoying his own singing too much to be listening overly much to mine.

"Well, the new hymnal's only been around for 30 years; I can't be expected to remember every improvement," I said. "Seriously, in that moment, I just completely forgot that it had ever been fixed."

"As one would a dog," said my dad.

Not bad for operating on about 5 hours' sleep, I thought.

Sending hope for peace on earth

I had hoped to spend this solstice morning on a sunrise hike, as I did at the summer solstice (note: winter solstice sunrise is WAY LATER than summer solstice sunrise). However, the weather was not interested in cooperating with me.

I did get up early on this shortest day of the year, which meant I got to see the beautiful blanket of snow that had fallen overnight before it turned to rain and washed away.

Now I'll go shopping and chuck the ingredients I'll buy into the Crock-Pot to prepare for the solstice pot luck I'll attend tonight. Before I leave for work today, I'll have done about as much solstice preparation as Advent/Christmas preparation, despite being a Christian.

That preparation included helping the friends hosting tonight's pot luck string popcorn for their solstice tree, and appreciating watching their young son place a Charles Darwin puppet atop the tree. I was reminded at the time of Dar Williams's "The Christians and the Pagans," and at least one of you was, too, when I posted about it on Facebook.

And yeah, I've shared this one before, but it seemed like time to share it again.

Fitness

My 11-year-old self was a quirky kid. She firmly believed lots of things I do not hold so firmly anymore.

• She believed the world would end in a nuclear war before she'd lived out her natural life. (She was less clear on what that meant, whether that the physical planet would be destroyed or that the human population would be, but something like that.)
• She believed it was likely that there'd be flying cars by the year 2000.
• She believed she was fat. Hopelessly so.
• She believed fat was bad.
• She believed fitness was absolutely beyond her, and sports more so, and team sports worst of all, because team sports are just a way to make fat, unfit kids feel crappy.

There are some things I'd like to tell her and her 16-year-old counterpart. Neither of those two gorgeous young women would have any interest in listening to me, but still, they should have the chance to hear it:

• You are not fat. I've seen pictures. I don't know who put that idea in your head, but you're totally normal. Actually, I guess I do know, and screw that kid, and that other kid. 
• You will be fat eventually, and you will not always be comfortable with it, but it's important that you do what you can to get over that discomfort, for reasons that are physical and emotional and sociological. Another kid will call you fat when you actually are fat, and it will still sting, but it will not haunt you. The sooner you can get to the letting-go part, the better.
• Some of what has made you fat is all that dieting you're doing when you're 11 and 16. Seriously, start with the letting go.
• It's fine that you would rather do conditioning than team sports. That will be true for at least the next 30 years of your life.
• It's not just you. It is weirdly suburban that among all the fitness choices you have in P.E., you are required to take tennis (and only tennis), because that is a life skill. Some things that seem weird or outrageous when you're an adolescent seem less so when you're an adult. This is not one of them.
• Team sports are not just a way to make you feel left out. They are also a way to make some other kids who need it feel that they belong. You'll find other ways.
• You will, some day, start a team in a team sport, and stick with it for years. You will be the worst one on your team — sometimes, you will be the worst one in your league. The sense of belonging will still make you really, really happy.
• You will, some day, go to a gym you are not being required to go to, regularly. You will work out around people who are skinnier and stronger and fitter than you are, and you'll like it. You'll pay money for the privilege.
• You will love fitness assessments. You will, even while fat, be above average on everything they test you on, fitness-wise. You will score "excellent" on push-ups and you will max out the chart on sit-ups; your lung capacity and flexibility will both be just great. You'll be able to run a stupid mile without anyone yelling at you. You will be arguably more pleased than you should be to be above average. Have fun with it.
• Also, sit-ups will be out of fashion when you're an adult. They'll have been replaced with something called crunches, which are both easier and better for you. See? It does get better. 
• There will be flying-car technology, but people will mostly not be using it. Heck, there'll be electric car technology, which is cheaper and more useful, and people will mostly not be using that, either.

About Newtown

I have lots of thoughts, and most of them have been said by other people, and not all of them are cohesive — some of them outright conflict.

Here are some of the ones I haven't seen expressed as much other places, or that relate more directly to me and my perspective, right now. This will not be the cleverest post I've ever written. Like many of you, I'm just overwhelmed.

• "Mentally ill" and "violent" are not synonyms. Seriously. Also, "autistic" and "violent" are for real not synonyms.
• Nancy Lanza's mother, Adam Lanza's grandmother, was my school nurse when I was a kid. Connections are funny things, and they are everywhere. Adam was born in the town I grew up in.
• The Westboro Baptist "Church" plans to protest the memorial service today and the funerals this week. I plan to try to be part of the human barricade that shields mourners from those protests. 
• Remember when Fred Phelps was a good-guy civil rights lawyer? I don't, but I'm told that was a thing. People are sure complicated. 
• No good comes of blaming a victim for legally owning firearms, any more than would come of blaming her for wearing a short skirt or walking alone at night.
• "Access to mental health services" may be part of the discussion going forward, but it is not the only discussion. I have availed myself of an assortment of mental health services over 30 years, and I am lucky not to (yet) be someone who has been actively made worse by what that particular industry has to offer. Many people do not get off so easy. 
• If you can, check information before you share it. There is so much weird rumor and speculation out there, and some of it is the fault of major media outlets, and a lot of it is because of the ease of sharing through social media outlets. 
• In a mass murder with unconnected victims, after the initial shock, the victims' families and friends continue to mourn singly. In a mass murder at a school, there will be constant reminders going forward: In planning class sizes and hiring teachers, in graduations, in safety badges for scout troops, in the ways that whole groups of children will process through their whole school careers, and their lives in that town beyond school.
• I am not sure being generally kinder to the people around us, both those we love and those we don't, will prevent bad things from happening. But I have to believe in my heart that it will help us all cope when bad things do happen.
• I am not sure of that, either.
• There has to be some point of balance between talking about something this overwhelming and not talking about it. I have no idea what that point is, or how to find it. Let me know if you fare better.

Please, feel free to share your thoughts and feelings here and come back to engage the discussion. Disagreement with me or others is permitted and encouraged. Incivility will be deleted.

Argh,

So, sometimes, in my work as an editor, however much I may enjoy my job, I may find that it is time for me to apply for a new job, in the same office I've been working in, in hopes of gaining some new kinds of experience and growth, and maybe also some more money. It might be a seemingly perfect job, for which I am seemingly perfectly qualified. I might work very hard on crafting a perfect résumé and cover letter in hopes of having a shot. I might ask several folks to read it over for me.

And sometimes, three months after I've applied for that job, I still haven't heard anything — not so much as a whiff of the possibility of a phone interview — and might find that somewhat frustrating.

And sometimes, I may go back and look at the résumé I submitted, after more than three months have passed, and I may notice, in this résumé applying for an editorial job, a typo. I might, at that point, observe that I have ended a line with a comma that needed to be ended with a period.

And then, at that point, I might think of how I would respond to observing said typo in an editor's résumé if I had the hiring power in that case.

And then I might close the door to my office, lest my colleagues observe the sheer amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth that might result.

Damn.

What are the odds I can convince my boss that it's a UCC thing?

The end

I'm not going to lie to you people: This month of gratitude has been long and difficult, and maybe it showed.

It's not that I am not experiencing gratitude, it's just that this is my 90th of these posts in three years, and so much of what I am grateful for is perpetual or semi-perpetual. How many ways can I say I like my friends and family?

Some actual rejected topics for recent month of gratitude posts:

• Cuban sandwiches
• Meetings that start on time
• Not actually knowing Manila from "RuPaul's Drag Race" Season 3 in real life
• Corrective lenses
• Not owning a dog
• Broccoli
• The wisdom of cowardice
• A short driveway
• Frank Oz
• Really great phrases (I actually like this one, but then I couldn't think of any. Aside from, "Her eyes flashed," which I love and which reminds me of Scarlett O'Hara.)
• The optimism of Powerball

They're not all bad topics; I just don't necessarily have a lot to say about them all. OK, and some of them are bad topics.

Day 30 of my month of gratitude: I'm glad for the end of the month of gratitude, thankful to be able to just be grateful rather than telling you how grateful I am. I don't think this'll be the last incarnation of this project, but it may be the last time I do it quite this way. Thoughts?

Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon...

[Ed. note: If you are my biological first cousin and you live in New York, you should stop reading this entry right now. You should also come back to read other entries other times, and comment so I know you're out there.]

This Thanksgiving, my young (9, I think) first cousin once removed had a new iPod Touch and was showing me his music. He had a lot of music on it, and was sure it'd all be brand-new to me.

He did not count on a 40-something-year-old cousin who primarily listens to music on her car radio and in a college gym. His very Top-40 taste was all entirely familiar to me. I am not sure whether he was more gleeful or more frustrated that I knew every song (except the theme song to the new James Bond), but he was definitely both.

Later on, I was talking to his somewhat older than I am father, my first cousin, whose name I coincidentally drew in the family present-swap. I asked what he'd like for Christmas, and he's interested in updating his music collection. I didn't get more instruction than that, just that he'd like music that has come out since, say, the '80s. We talked about how much of his son's music I liked, and he said he was trying to keep up.

Now, I love music.

But also...

I don't buy it new much, and the new stuff I like tends to fall into pretty specific categories:

• some über arty-indie something one of my much cooler friends said I had to listen to (The Weakerthans), or
• something from the radio that people my age, much less his age, should pretty much be embarrassed to like (Ke$ha). 

(The obvious bridge between these categories is anything by Owl City.)

So, friends... What should I put on the bizarro playlist that I am clearly now constructing for this cousin? I know, it'd be helpful to know what music he likes of any era, to know anything at all about his musical taste — but we're all in the same boat here. Our goal is, collectively, to expose him to some new music. It's not our job to ensure he loves all of all of it. Please, please, please, comment, check back, add to this conversation.

Day 29 of my month of gratitude: I am thankful for music — old and new — and the lyrical people who put it in my life.

Ferry me across the water

When I was growing up, my home church was St. Christopher's in Plaistow, NH. That's after St. Christopher's moved from Kingston, before it moved to Hampstead.

This year is that church's 50th anniversary. And this week, my parents and I are headed out to beautiful Hampstead to see the place and go to church and enjoy some lunch with them.

We moved away in 1985. But before we moved, that place had a pretty big part in my spiritual and social development. Yeah, yeah, Sunday School and whatnot. But by the time we moved away, I was well into my angsty middle school days, was unhappy and confused in school. And St. Christopher's was a place with kids I liked. There were supportive and consistent adults. And there was a youth group filled with people who might well have been bad influences as we got older*, but through my eighth grade year, they were cool, and kind, and liked me, and respected me when I stood up to peer pressure. Not bad, right?

I assume it'll be weird to go back again, especially because it won't actually be "back" and there won't be a lot of folks there we knew — 27 years is a long time. But, gotta say, I'm pretty excited.

Day 28 of my month of gratitude: I am thankful to have had such a right community for me in my youth, and thankful to celebrate 50 years of their ministry to others like me. I'm also thankful to have had reason, as a child, to hear the story of St. Christopher. If you don't know it, you should read it; it's like the opposite of that "Footprints" thing.

*I clearly remember at least one of my youth group buddies dressing as a pack of Marlboros for a church Halloween party. In middle school.