12.06.00 - 04:37:09

i have come to a profound realization. it happened this evening, while i was watching rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. i love that show - the stop-motion animation one, with the elf who wants to be a dentist and the female reindeer with long lashes and burl ives as the snowman/narrator/commentator/moralize and the island of misfit toys. and yukon cornelius. and bumble, the abominable snowman.

i watched it tonight, without benefit of any mind-altering substances, unless spaghetti counts. i was, at the time, sewing a handmade christmas ornament for a thirty-year-old woman i know who has not been able to work for the last year plus because of breast cancer, and the debilitating treatments she has undergone. she and her husband will be able to have a christmas tree this year.

the ornament is a hand-sewn, stuffed snowperson, with an apron dotted with embroidered snowflakes, and a hat with a holly-leaf decoration.

i am a total sap.

that's the conclusion.

i love, i love, i love rudolph. i don't care that he was created to sell christmas crap. i don't care that the show encourages the consumption-based consumerism that, at heart, i criticize and dislike and see as an absolute threat to the concepts of 'citizenship' and 'community' but nevertheless subscribe to with the same fervor as everyone else.

i don't care.

rudolph makes me happy. admittedly, it is a wistful happiness for a time when the yeti seemed actually scary, and i was seized with longing and terror for the toys, and cold feel the vast coldness of the night into which rudolph sent himself to save his friends because his nose would draw the bumble's attention. i like that the animation is jerky.

i like the squirrel who tries to eat the gold nugget. i even get misty/mystical over the clich�s of conventional wisdom the snowman offers like a lama offering the teachings of buddha.

and i'm oddly sad. i cannot see where i have been, because it is an intangible. my memories are tainted by these impulses toward.. whatever, lessons, growth, the need for it.

i still feel vaguely cheated. like i was supposed to get some handbook when i turned 6. or 13. or 18. or 21. and i just missed it. something was supposed to be answered that never was, and never will be. i will always feel like something is just a little bit beyond me. tracking just outside of my orbit. some distant frozen comet waiting to trail into the center of my solar system and disintegrate in the heat of the sun.

and there are a trillion comets. i'm vaguely aware of them, fuzzily. they orbit at the edge of my perceptions. i can't grasp them.

can anyone hold on to anything?

i don't think so. not for long. it's always slipping through my grasp.

i know why that idea is wildly bittersweet. i don't know why it is so shockingly lovely.