Nostalgia, Christmas, and All the Feels

It's been a long weekend — week actually.

Today I told both Patrick and Beatrix that I was just not up for much more Christmas decorating than we had done. We have a tree and a wreath up, but the bins of ornaments have sat there since early December, but much more seemed impossible right now. 

A little while, our friend Rachel called to see if Beatrix and I could take advantage of last minute tickets to Anastasia (which I really wanted to see), but we could not get going fast enough. And it felt like a stupid thing to be upset about missing out on (on top of skipping yoga today), but was one nonetheless.

So, a little worn down, I ran some errands. When I came back, Beatrix had decided to do some decorating after all. It's not *everything* that we usually do, and it's not in the usual places. Which makes it all the fresher and were and more valuable. It's a whole new way to look at Christmas.

I went to a wonderful book club meeting — I love the people in my book club. My BFF hosted; she's a pediatric endocrinologist, and her stories of just how bad it is in hospitals right now was...sobering.

I then came home to watch tick, tick...BOOM! with Patrick and Beatrix (which was amazing). 

If you want a challenge in the near future, try to describe the AIDS crisis to a teen. Try to explain what it was like to see people you knew and loved dying around you, while feeling somewhat sheltered from it — the feeling of being almost voyeuristic, of caring so much about people you loved who were dying while you remained unscathed. Try to explain what it was like for people to be openly gay in the 80s and 90s to a generation who (thankfully) has grown up without fearing that stigma; recently she asked how many people in my HS class were non-binary and I spent some time discussing that that just was not really a concept then.

Which is to say in all of it that there's a lot running around my head right now, at a time of year when I should be cutting myself a lot more slack than maybe I do.


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