I had my mouse over the “Publish” button and was about to send off a post about how I hate being sick on vacation but it’s okay because my vacation is going fine anyway, blah blah, when my phone rang.

It was E.

I came up to Chicago yesterday to crash with a friend and do a little shop-shop-shopping since E had to work Friday night. The plan was for him to catch the good old MegaBus (woo!) from St. Louis at 8:30 to come up here today and I’d pick him up at Union Station at 3, from whence we would proceed to the rest of our vacation together – seeing more friends tonight, going to Michigan tomorrow, etc.

8:38 am

“Baby, you’re not gonna believe this.”

Have I heard that line before? “Are you on the bus?” I ask slowly.

It all tumbled out as one sentence. “I called the cab driver 45 minutes before the bus was supposed to leave and he was late and picked me up ten minutes before I had to be on the bus and he made two wrong turns and I missed the fucking bus and I am so sorry baby I am raging pissed right now and the noon bus is full so I can’t get another one till four o’clock and that means I won’t be there till almost ten.”

Delete happy post.

So I get to do what in the city by myself this evening? Am I supposed to keep the rendezvous with his friends that I’ve never met without him? Where do I park now? Meet friends where? I need a map! I am a planner and the plans have gone awry! What do I doooo????

Eff eff eff eff.

He’s calling the friends we were supposed to meet and stay with with and he’s going to get instructions for me. It looks like I might get to park the car in their swanky downtown building for free, so that’s nice. I’m probably going to have to meet up with these strangers and hang out with them before he gets there, which would make me a tiny bit nervous anyway but is making me much more nervous now because I am a germy ball of snot wrapped in blue Puffs tissues, and it is not a good look for me. Strangers don’t want to welcome the plague into their expensive lofty apartments to stay the night and clog up the furnace filter with ick. I’d feel much better if he were there with me, holding my grimy hand for the introductions.

But c’est la vie. They’re his lifelong friends so they have to deal with me (and I can still be charming with a red nose). And really? It’s just a few extra hours in a city I love, and I won’t complain. So I’ll go downtown today as planned, I just have a little more time to shop with money I don’t have, right?

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Chicago bloggers: whatcha doing this evening?

There’s a line in “The Devil Wears Prada” (movie) that I just love to steal when someone is sick. I refer to that person as “an incubus of viral plague” and it sounds so haughty-funny and people always laugh. I’m no Meryl Streep, but I used it on E when he had the flu and he even thought it was funny.

But it’s hard to laugh when you yourself are said incubus and your throat is ablaze with a raging inferno of fiery germs that no amount of cepacol or pectin can extinguish. Happy New Year’s Eve, indeed.

I’m feeling better this evening though. Tomorrow I’m off to Chicago (woo!) for a day or two and then to the Great White North of Holland, Michigan for the annual rounds to see E’s family and friends. I kind of love that even though we did break up for awhile this summer, E and I are repeating things now so I can call it our “annual” whatever. Now we’ve had 2 Thanksgivings and 2 Christmases and 2 New Year’s Eves (neither of which we got to spend together) and this will be our second family-visiting Michigan trip. Awwwww…

To Do in Chicago:

Buy a Bears shirt (or a Bears something)

Shopping with Jenn

Dinner with blog friends*

Work my mad skills as Wordpress web designer for a friend’s blog

Buy some sort of suck-up present for E’s mom

To NOT Do in Chicago:

Get smashed

Pick up boys

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* Chicago blogger friends, if I forgot to add you to my watch-out-I’m-back-in-town email list due to my NyQuil-induced haze, I’m sorrreee! Please email me if you want to hang out.

Every Who down in Who-ville liked Christmas a lot, but I can’t think of more than a handful of people that I know in my age group who really looked forward to it this year.

A lot of us don’t like the annoyance and hassle of traveling, the pain of having to shop for ANYTHING between Thanksgiving and New Year’s (not just presents – even things like tampons and cheese can get you trampled by crazies in jingle-bell sweaters), and the stress of spending much more time than usual with family. Yay Baby Jesus and all, but Christmas has, in a lot of ways, become a pain in the ass.

Christmas has turned into Valentine’s Day, that great celebration of love and togetherness that makes even those of us with our schmoopy true loves want to vomit sometimes. My theory is that the pressure to be happy just kills it. You’re supposed to show the Holiday Spirit and Goodwill Toward All. It’s the rule in the same way that there’s a rule that you’re supposed to express your love in some exaggerated fashion on Valentine’s Day. And if you don’t do these things? Then you’re a mean one, Mister Grinch. You’re a nasty-wasty skunk. Your heart is full of unwashed socks, your soul is full of gunk, Mister Gri-INCH!

Sorry. Got carried away with The Holiday Spirit.

Seriously, I think the reason that I feel like crap on Christmas is because I’m supposed to feel good.

Example:

E and I had an argument last night that I swear we wouldn’t have had if it had been March 24th instead of December 24th. He got off work at 11:30, was all stressed, and wanted to go have a beer or three and play a video game with his buddy, instead of coming over and staying with me as originally discussed. He invited me along but I was tired and wanted to stay home. Whatever, I told him, go chill with the friend and blow off some steam, no big deal, I’ll see you tomorrow morning for Christmas.

But when I hung up the phone, I began to rage. Wait a minute, I thought, I have to be alone on Christmas Eve so he can play Golden Tee? Nooo! It’s freaking Christmas Eve! I’m supposed to be with the person I love and sharing some sort of deep connection as the magic of Christmas washes over us!

I called him back, annoyed, and he didn’t understand why since I’d told him just moments before that I didn’t mind. And my dumb ass went on and on about how it’s Christmas and we should be together and crappity-crap-crap and I bet his eyebrows just went up into his hair. I had NO reason to give him shit like that because on any other day, I swear it wouldn’t have mattered.

But the Things We Are Supposed to Do get ingrained in our heads and when we don’t do them, we feel guilty. Angry. Sad. I’ve been without a boyfriend for many, many days in my life, and the days that I really wanted one were inevitably Christmas and Valentine’s Day – the days when you just know you SHOULD have someone to be with. You may not care on December 23rd or 26th, or on February 13th or 15th, but damn those days in between. Even when you DO have a significant other, you are supposed to do Something Special with that person and if you don’t, you’re a foul one, Mister Grinch. Your heart’s an empty hole. Your brain is full of spiders, you’ve got garlic in your soul, Mister Gri-INCH!

Again, sorry.

I was raised in a church and I remember being told that we should celebrate Jesus every day of the year, not just on his birthday. I asked then why we celebrated Jesus’ birthday on just one day, and was told that it was to bring people together in fellowship and love that day. Then they said we should have fellowship and love all year too.

All year? That explanation didn’t make much sense to me – if anything, it reinforced the secular meaning of Christmas because hello? SANTA only comes one day a year! THAT is what makes Christmas a special day!

E and I took a walk on the shore of Lake Michigan at Macatawa Bay last year on Christmas Day. Truly, the only thing that made that walk on the lake shore any different from any other day’s walk on the lake shore was the fact that he had a furry Santa hat on the whole time. We had a lovely day that happened to be December 25th.

Have I completely killed The Holiday Spirit by thinking we really should focus on Santa at Christmas, and not the love-and-fellowship message of Jesus?

Oh well. Call me a Grinch if you want to. I know the whole song.

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Photos from a walk that just happened to take place on Christmas Day

GUESS WHO’S GETTING MARRIED?!?!?!!!!

Emily. You don’t know her. Haha. Fooled for a nanosecond?

The idea of a “marry me or eff off” ultimatum always seemed to me to belong to that class of women who had timelines for getting married and having babies. No proposal after two years? Marry me or eff off. Want me to move in with you? Marry me or eff off. Those women, I thought, were the ones who pored over those Cosmo and Glamour articles called “How to get your man to propose in 30 days or less!” and would resort to trickery to get the man on his knees.  It always seemed like a bad idea to me, a good way to eke a proposal out of Mr. Wrong – and if he IS Mr. Right and he wants to marry you, won’t he ask on his own?

Heh. NO.

Emily and the New Fiance have lived together for five years and she finally dropped the ultimatum on him last week. It was fantastic. She’s in her late twenties, he’s in his mid-thirties. They are both gainfully employed. But he’s been saying for years that he wants to marry her and hasn’t proposed? Seriously? They both knew they were right for each other, but the man needed a nudge.

SHE HIRED A MOVING VAN. She didn’t threaten to. She hired one, printed the receipt with the reservation date, and left it on their kitchen table. It was awesome. Best. Ultimatum. Ever. That was Saturday. On Sunday he gave her a ring.

I don’t recall reading about hiring a moving van in any of the magazine articles, so she gets bonus points for that.

It kind of put E and me in a mushy mood, and we had a big ball-of-love night on Monday. He gave me my Christmas present early (pearls! beautiful pearls! love!) because he says he loves me so much and always wants to make me happy. How can a girl resist jewelery and a line like that? Hijinks ensued, and then we curled up and talked about having a baby someday. We even talked about BABY NAMES.*

Put your eyebrows back down now.

We are so disgusting. We’ve become the people we make fun of. Where did my baggage-girl cynicism go? When did he ever high-five a buddy for getting engaged? It makes me feel old, actually. Dating and accumulating emotional baggage are part of being young, and getting engaged means you’re growing up. Even just being in love makes me feel a little old lately, even though it’s apparently supposed to make me feel like a young, bouncy bunny running through fields of clover in springtime or something.

I don’t mean old in a bad way, really. It’s just different. I’ve been watching friends get engaged and married and pregnant and divorced for years now and it never made me feel old. It made me feel YOUNG, actually, like everyone my age was moving on and doing grown-up things while I was still the baby, relationship-wise. It was cool though. I had all the toys to myself.

Maybe it’s just time. I always reasoned that my biological clock wouldn’t really start ticking until I was with the right man for it to tick with. I’m twenty-seven and in a stable relationship; it’s not unreasonable to just think of these things now. But dude. Five years? That’s only acceptable when you start dating at, say, nineteen. I can’t imagine how frustrated Em must have been after five years of just thinking and never doing.

So, the moving truck. Brilliant.

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*Nathan or Abbie, for the time being. Now quit making fun of me.

It occurred to me just this morning that E and I forgot to put up a Christmas tree this year.

We really meant to. Last year we decorated my tree together and had a lovely, Norman Rockwellian evening with lights and garland and Perry Como and (spiked) hot chocolate. He gave me no small amount of crap for having a fake tree, though. I protested, citing shedding needles, a trunk-climbing cat and general inconvenience, but eventually said that if it meant so much to him, next year we’d go pick out a real one at the tree farm. He said he would be manly and chop it down himself and tie it to the top of the car AND lug the wretched thing inside.

Then we broke up this summer, blah blah, and I said to hell with him and his needly, spiky, shedding tree, etc. And then we got back together, blah blah again.

It’s funny to think that one of the first things we talked about when we did get back together was about that damn tree. I was, of course, terrified of trusting him again and so afraid of getting my hopes up when he went on and on with his apologies and “I want to be with you forever” stuff.

“You mean it?” I asked for the thousand millionth time. “You’re making promises again and I want to know that you’ll keep them this time. Even the little ones.”

“I will,” he said, pleading. “I want us to have a life together. I want to do it right this time.”

“You promised me last year that you’d take me sailing,” I accused. “And you didn’t.”

“But we would have done that in the summer. And I will take you sailing. We will go, I promise.”

“Are you still going to get me a tree?”

He knew exactly what I meant. “Will you let me?”

“Yes.”

And so trees and sailing have come to represent promises.

Maybe we both let each other down on this one. We don’t have a tree this year. Sure, I’d have kept up my end of the bargain and LET him get a tree, and he would have done his part and got the darned thing home. But this morning I wondered why we hadn’t done it and couldn’t come up with any better reason than that we were sleeping a lot on the weekends and kept putting it off.

Now in my head I have this picture of last Christmas and our first tree together and how I’d looked forward to more trees with him. And in front of me I have this empty space where we could have had one, and it makes me a tiny bit sad that we don’t.

It would be sadder to have a tree there without him. I HATE putting up the tree alone. Something about a Christmas tree requires that you share it with someone you love and without that, I’d rather not have a tree at all. I’d rather have him than a tree any day of the year.

Plus, now that we have promised to keep promises, I know that we’ll have more Christmases together as long as I keep him away from pine trees.

This way he owes me.