Since you asked, yes, I am spending Christmas in Texas.

My lovely husband, Matt, is from Lubbock. We’ll be swinging by the Ranching Heritage Centre, tossing carrots into Prairie Dog Town, maybe we’ll leave flowers at Buddy Holly’s grave, I’ll poison myself with another pork rind burrito with Josie’s, have lunch at Abuelo’s, a ribeye steak at Cagle’s, tamales from the tamale factory, and shit on a shingle at the Ranch House, and a trip to Gebo’s to see what’s new. If I have my way, we’ll also stop at Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas for a meal or two.

Best of all, since we’re going for Christmas, the Santa cookie jar will be on display.

Matt bought this jar for his mother a few years ago. She does a thorough job of decorating for Christmas; along with the usual holiday paraphernalia, she has a mini Christmas village (the Dickens town), innumerable Santa Claus and reindeer figures, a set of gingerbread person-shaped spoons, and of course this Santa cookie jar. It is perfect.

The reason us kids like the Santa cookie jar is that, just when you think it’s all Norman Rockwell on you, the cookie jar surprises you in an unexpected way. We can’t figure out if the kid reading his wish list on Santa’s lap is related to Angelina Jolie or if the artist who made the cookie jar wanted to send out his own message.

Here’s what’s on the kid’s list:

Now I smell it.

Those antibiotics last week got rid of my sinus infection. It means that I can now smell that the entire downstairs of our house reeks of Ivan’s now free-flowing anal glands.

I would open a window but it’s minus10 degrees Celsius outside. I think I’ll just camp out upstairs until el stinko dissipates.

Now that I am suitably drugged up, let me tell you about my day.

Vancouver decided in its wisdom to not soak its denizens, but to freeze them and, as a bonus, fill our streets with slush.

I am used to Vancouver flinging all sorts of faeces at me. Bad car with bald tires and faulty breaks or not, I pulled myself into work even a quarter-hour earlier than my workday began. Because my sleeping pill from the night before still hadn’t worn off - a side effect of swallowing them down with a glass of wine - I used my fifteen minutes to jolt myself awake with the coffee already in the coffee pot. Thank you, mystery co-worker who had my well-being in mind.

Then I embarked on my work day. I am very unpopular with my coworkers, as you may expect from someone as vile as yours truly. While they enjoy each others’ company, I supply the jet black lining to their every silver happy fluffy cloud. While they try to out-maneuver me from attending any group lunches or potluck tea parties, I miraculously appear to spread pestilence, fear and vomit-flavoured jelly beans.

Today, I decided to be Miss Happy Pants. Try out compliments and small talk when I could corner a coworker. Charm them with my smile, which I am sure cannot be all that hideous since I still have all my teeth and they are still almost blazingly white.

My biggest strategy was to continually mutter, in the face of the growing blizzard, that I love this weather! It’s so Christmas-y, I would say. Or, I heard we’ll be getting a white Christmas.

It was pretty.

The only problem was two problems. First, I began to have a twitching of a growing horror that I would have to drive in the stuff and it would not be as easy as the morning. Second, I developed a very deep fear that I would miss my parents that night - that they, who just flew in from Romania the other night, and who were cooking me all manner of favourite meals, would be inaccessible in their mountaintop home.

At once, upon hearing that the two of three bridges that could take me away from work were closed, I became singleminded in my obsession. I had to leave asap.

Gone were my proclamations of white Christmases. In were carols about frightful weather, statistics on road closures, and the bemoaning of my car’s decrepitude.

So much for my cheery demeanour to make people like me. Back to square one. Plus, I am sure that now I have a reputation as a happiness poser, as a fake wannabe optimist who’s really a glass-half-empty loser. I suppose I got my short-term wish - to get off work early - but failed to make any friends or even see my parents.

Luckily, my friend the sleeping pill will put an end to any beating myself up over further alienating my coworkers. I sleep well tonight! Tomorrow’s shit can’t hurt me today!

In 2001, I wanted to make my Japanese Christmas more traditional. In Japan, they celebrate the holiday with sex. And chickens, apparently. Which may not sound too bad, but, as atheistic as I was and am, I missed my family and Christmas was a sad time to be in a place where family was no part of Christmas.

So I made up my mind to celebrate the holiday with a turkey. I would show my Japanese family how fun a traditional Canadian Christmas would be.

(I have lived most of my life in Canada yet always celebrated Romanian Christmases. Perhaps because this is such a family-oriented holiday, I never had a chance to visit your typical white family on this holiday to try different traditions. I decided, however, against a Romanian Christmas. I could probably buy a hog in Japan, but slaughtering the poor creature and making myself a year’s worth of sausages and piftie was more traditional than I was willing to go.)

Turkeys are not a Japanese bird. The gimmick required that I order a turkey from one of those companies that import foreign goods to satisfy western tastes. My turkey, the company reassured me, would arrive on December 23. This would give me two days to learn how to cook.

Meanwhile, I had some idea that Canadian Christmas required cranberry sauce. I found some of the stuff canned in a Tokyo specialty shop. I also experimented with gravy from a package. I also bought a small potted tree and tried to cajole my Japanese family into decorating it. I ended up hanging a few candy canes on it.

On the 23rd, in anticipation of my turkey’s imminent arrival by courier, I phoned my mom to ask how one cooks a 10-pound turkey without an oven. She reassured me that it could be done stovetop with a large basin and a bottle.

I then waited for the doorbell to ring. And waited. And waited.

At about 9 pm, the phone rang. It was the turkey company. My turkey was sitting aboard a ship in Yokohama, awaiting customs clearance. The company wanted me to know that the turkey would arrive early on the 24th.

The next day, I sat at work and worried that the courier would arrive early, not find me home, and take the turkey back to Yokohama. I rushed home and sat to wait for the turkey again. And waited. And waited.

The next morning, I begged off of work. My boss gave me unpaid leave so I could have Christmas day to myself. Then I got the call.

My turkey did not clear customs. The turkey would be staying on that boat in Yokohama and would probably be returning to its port of origin. The company would refund my money.

I was de-Christmased. Stuck with a lousy tree, a can of cranberry sauce and a bowl of gravy.

Then I remembered. Earlier that week, I saw what I thought was turkey at a local supermarket. I jumped on my bike and raced across town to see if I could track down this last chance at a Christmas meal.

Christmas 2001 was a meal of exactly one barbecued turkey thigh, with plenty of cranberry sauce and gravy, and no leftovers.

Human roommates can be annoying. I’ve gone through mean drunk roommates; pathologically clean roommates; pathologically dirty roommates who didn’t mind roaches, rats, pigeons or termites; roommates whose out-of-the-country friends stayed with us for months (some of them coming in multiple batches - imagine the bathroom lines); roommates whose crazy abusive boyfriends had to be chased away by other sword-wielding martial arts roommates; and roommates whose stance against recycling compelled them to sneak out during the night and merge my recyclables bin with the plain old garbage.

Living with a cat roommate is not always easy either. Sometimes we misunderstand each other. Sometimes the cat refuses to play by the rules, just like the human roommate who always smoked in her room despite the strict no-smoking rule. Yes, we do get into arguments too.

Thus, here are my top ten cat roommate pet peeves:

1. He uses our white carpet toilet paper to wipe his butt after #2.

2. He always has tuna breath.

3. He licks a lot. Sometimes he licks my hands while I am trying to get to sleep, then I get nervous that I’ll touch my face with said hand and get a whiff of his tuna breath.

4. He is very noisy when he licks his privates. He vibrates a little. The bed shakes a little. I am grossed out.

5. He sleeps at the foot of the bed, thus stealing leg room from me.

6. When he climbs on my sleeping body, he always stops to survey the landscape from atop my boobs. He is a 16-pound cat.

7. He always follows me into the bathroom and demands I turn on the faucet so he can drink. He never turns off the faucet even though the fixtures are cat-friendly.

(Note on the above photo: this faucet is not cat-friendly. We now live the house with the cat-friendly faucet.)

8. His hair gets in everything. I can be at work, 30 km away, and will be drinking water from a glass, when I see one of Ivan’s hairs float away and land in my glass of water. These hairs stick to everything as well.

9. He always has to be the centre of attention. Whether it’s sitting on top of our boardgame as we play, sitting on our mouse hand as we do computer stuff or sitting beside us as we eat dinner, he’s there.

10. He is menacing around our other, smaller roommates and sometimes to the neighbourhood kids.

(This Halloween one kid ran away in fear, crying to his mother that he saw a big black dog.)

I swear, we did not fart on his pillow.

Yesterday afternoon, Matt laughed at Ivan who, resting on his muppet cushion, seemed to be unable to open his left eye. “Sleepy head,” we thought.

On closer inspection, we realized that Ivan’s eye had puffed up and was tearing up. We felt the swelling and Ivan did not protest. He purred, thinking we were lavishing more cuddling.

Four hours later, one sketchy after-hours veterinary emergency clinic visit later and his human slaves a few hundred dollars poorer, Ivan was home again. As Ivan did not take kindly to the anal thermometer, the vet sedated our guy and he staggered about for the rest of the night.

Now we have to rub ointment on his eye twice a day. Matt and I also have to both pin him down and shove antibiotic pills down his throat. I had to explain a few new claw scars to people I met today.

His eye is still puffy. Hopefully we will have our handsome cat back soon. He looks like a boxer. Ugly.

The most obsessive part of my current WWI obsession is reading a book called Intimate Voices from the First World War. Compiled by documentarians Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, the book takes on WWI chronologically with diaries, letters and oral histories. Starting off with Gavrilo Princip’s co-assassin, Vaso ÄŒubrilović, who recounts the day when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie met their deaths and set off the war, in a letter to his sisters, Palmer and Wallis amazingly found sources from both sides of battles, sometimes fighting opposite each other that very day. At one point, on November 5, 1914, diarists Dr. Ludwig Deppe, a Dresden doctor working in Tanga in what is today Tanzania, and Richard Meinertzhagen, a British officer, meet and each write about the meeting that evening.

After each diary cuts off, I flip hurriedly to the back to see if the writer lived. Most live, perhaps the reason why their diaries also survived. Yet, a couple have died so far.

First, my lovely Dr. Josef Tomann on May 16, 1915. Trapped in PrzemyÅ›l during the siege, Tomann had a sense of humour about the citizens’ predicament (”What is the difference between the heroes of Troy and those of PrzemyÅ›l? The Trojans were in the belly of a horse, while we have horse in our bellies!”) Two months before his death, he had commemorated an anniversary in his diary: “Mitzl, it is seven years to the day since we first kissed!” (Mitzl was his pregnant wife, back home in Eger, Hungary.)

Then my self-righteous Austrian - despite his confidence in the sanctity of his side’s mission, he remains a human and the chance to know him through his writing makes him precious - dies. His July 19, 1915 final entry is:

It is enough to drive you insane. Dead, wounded, massive losses. This is the end. Unprecedented slaughter, a horrific bloodbath. There is blood everywhere and the dead and the bits of bodies lie scattered about so that …

The compilers explain:

The diary breaks off here in mid-sentence as the Austrian officer unknowingly records the moment of his own death. A Hungarian officer finds the body when the firing dies down at the end of that day, adding to the diary underneath the Austrian’s last words: ‘I found this diary in the hand of a dead officer on the Doberdo plateau: God bless him.’

My poor nameless Austrian never met his Maria, his Italian love that the war turned into an enemy, again. I wish that Hungarian took care to note his colleague’s name so that we could find Maria and tell her descendants that he always thought of her.

Lately, apart from work - I am going through a temporary promotion - and a professional course that is taking over my life, I am cultivating some obsessions during my personal time. Who needs sleep? I already look my age and it seems that from here on there’s no going back to youthful splendour. Besides, I could always pretend I have kids, like every other human female my age, to explain my less than virginal looks.

The obsessions are going well, thank you for asking. They are extremely fulfilling and give meaning to my life.

What are they, you ask? I’m glad you want to know.

The first one is Belgium. My third vacation from now will be in Belgium, the mystery state of Europe. We don’t know enough about it here in North America: Belgium is famous for its beer, chocolate, pedophiles and for being trampled through by Europe’s armies. And then it gets better! There are at least three comics museums (the Tintin Museum is opening in 2009), a couple of peeing statues, museums of French fries, hearts, bird nests, Belgian endives, playing cards, laundry, sewers, barbering, shoes, jukeboxes, and finch-catching - after all vinkensport is a popular competitive sport for finches in those parts and the human spectators are rather keen on it. With so much weirdness, Belgium has earned a place among my list of potential vacation countries.

But while I started off with Belgium, another obsession developed. Its roots were not only the initial Belgium one but also a surprise WWII one. The former obsession is about WWI, while the WWII obsession started from a recent acquaintance made with the sister of a member of the Dutch resistance. I know no one who is old enough to remember the first world war, but all sorts of people have told me about their lives during the second world war, about the war in Burma, Poland, Britain, and Moldova.

My fourth obsession is an Anne Boleyn one - which will, with any luck and plenty of tangents, spin off into a Moorish Spain obsession with an Iberian vacation in the works. Someone highly recommended The Other Boleyn Girl, which I listened to during my commutes, thought it decent for popular fiction, and picked up Eric Ives’ more weighty nonfiction The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. I also cracked open one of my two unread Elizabeth I biographies in a Tudor fit. Both this latter book and the Cherry-Garard bio (he’s the guy who went looking for penguin eggs at the height of the Antarctica winter) now lie beside my side of the bed while I try to finish off the library books.

Aside from work and the obsessions, boardgames, card games, and, I am embarrassed to say, TV shows (True Blood, Supernatural and The Big Bang Theory) now squeeze the blogging out of my life. Plus, somewhere in there, I have to slip in a re-write of my novel. It is National Novel-Writing Month, you know.

I had been saving up this idea for over a year: a Halloween get-together with friends where we read ghost stories to each other. Very perfectly nineteenth century. Like when people didn’t rely on strangers to entertain them with TV shows or pre-recorded music, instead amusing themselves with their own talents.*

My dream was a Martha Stewart Halloween. The woman does Halloween properly, eh. Someone to emulate.

One day, Matt surprised me with a stack of Halloween-themed magazines, including that one of our creepy holiday doyenne. By the end of the evening, Matt and I jotted down our favourite ideas, whittled our menu to something more realistic, and made an agenda for the party preparations. On the morning of our ghost story night, we set out a few hours before our friends came to buy up supplies, only dillydallying long enough to buy more book darts.**

Of course, I always count on Matt’s chef skills to make my dreams a reality. Besides a stew in a pumpkin (we forgot to photograph it), Matt used Martha’s suggestions to create a nuclear waste green artichoke spinach dip and white chocolate-covered pear ghosts:

Matt anthropomorphized the cheese dip, while I cheated and decorated the table with cookies and rodents:

Lest you think I did nothing, I did decorate the place with inflatable toys:

Note: You can see our fireplace in the above photo.  I eventually flipped a switch and turned on the fireplace. It set the atmosphere.

Ivan also got into the act with the headpiece part of a Yoda costume:

When the guests arrived, we did succumb to pre-chewed entertainment with the latest episode of Supernatural, a clip from [REC] and Jan Svankmajer’s version of the Fall of the House of Usher (which only I watched).***

Then we remembered the reason we gathered: to read ghost stories by flashlight in the dark.

Ryan read “The Snail-Watcher” by Patricia Highsmith; Matt read “Incarnations of Burned Children” by David Foster Wallace; Rob read the story of a New Westminster ghost; and I read “The Furry Collar” from JB Stamper’s 1977 book  Tales for the Midnight Hour.

*Karaoke still sucks. Since today’s people rarely sing, when they make the mistake of getting on stage with a karaoke machine to back them up, they sound like farting giant clams.

**The subject of a future blog post.

***The subject of another future blog post. The link, alas, takes you to Youtube, my archnemesis. Svankmajer should be enjoyed on the big screen or on, at the very least, a very large television.

This is a poster by a finalist in the Chicago International Poster Biennial, by by Tomasz Boguslawski from Poland:

Squelchy steak subject matter for a juvenile play.

(Via Iancul.)