Ding Dong Meme-ily on High

A meme. From Joke.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
Wrapping paper.

2. Real tree or artificial?
Artificial. One of my kids' regular babysitters was allergic to evergreen, so I bought a fake. I have to say, there's something very anti-climatic about putting up a fake tree. Without needing to wonder whether it will look good, whether it's pretty enough, or too tall, or will it dry out, and is my house going to burn down--well, where's the excitement?

3. When do you put up the tree?
Sometime around my birthday, which is today.

4. When do you take the tree down?
After the twelfth day of Christmas, and not a moment earlier. I like to amortize the labor of putting it up.

5. Do you like eggnog?
It's ... OK. Unless my mother made it, because then it tastes pretty much like bourbon and heavy cream--then she does this thing where she separates the eggs, beats the whites until they have soft peaks and lay the whites on top of the punch bowl so there's this ... raw egg fluff on it. This is very traditional and Virginian and everything, but it's completely gross. Oh, and that stuff in the cartons at the grocery store is disgusting. But I sort of like real eggnog made by people who make it brandy or rum. Except it's not worth the calories, so I don't bother with it.

6. Favorite gift received as a child?
A 16" Madame Alexander "Elise" doll from my grandmother that looked like this.

7. Do you have a creche?
Yes. I had my grandmother's bisque one from Germany, and then it was stolen from the storage space of a condo I lived in in Brighton, MA. (I'll bet the thieves were surprised, and I hope, a little ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES when they discovered the BABY JESUS in the box.) I searched on eBay and eventually found the same. exact. set. Except the donkey's leg hadn't broken off and then glued back on backwards. So you see? It all ended happily. So there, asshole creche-stealing iconoclastic thieving shitheads.

8. Hardest person to buy for?
Me. I hate everything. Especially surprises. This year I asked for socks. Black or brown. See--I'm not fussy. But will I get them? Probably not.

9. Easiest person to buy for?
My husband. Isn't it ironic? And unfair? He loves gadgets. (I hate them.) This year I'm getting him a GPS system. He'll love it. (I'd hate it.)

10. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?
A Grateful Dead clock from my older brother. I do not now--nor have I ever--liked the Dead. In fact, it wouldn't be too hyperbolic to state that I hate them.

11. Mail or email Christmas cards?
Mail. When I can be bothered.

12. Favorite Christmas Movie?
Remember the Night, Preston Sturges, 1940, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. Sterling Holloway has a small role. And of course, there's always The Thin Man.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?
Tomorrow. Maybe.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
No. Stuff I don't like goes straight to the compost heap that is our local thrift shop.

15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas?
Sevruga caviar and sour cream on softly scrambled eggs, with a toasted, buttered English muffin and glass of champagne. And that's just breakfast.

16. Clear lights or colored on the tree?
Clear. Our fake tree came with clear ones already on it. Although I prefer a mix of clear and colored. People who think clear lights are more tasteful are fooling themselves. All tree lights are pretending to be candles, and not particularly successfully. And anyway, too much good taste reveals a ludicrous level of insecurity about one's social position.

17. Favorite Christmas song?
"Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming." (Click for a cheesey midi version.) Michael Praetorius rocks my world.

18. Travel for Christmas or stay home?
Right now, stay home, because I have to sing a midnight mass on Christmas Eve. We'll take off for New England on the 27th. But somewhere down the road, I see travel in my future. When we're done with the whole Santa Claus thing and I'm not chained to the choir stalls, I'd like to go to Vienna. Or London. Or Paris. Or Rome. And let the colorful foreign people run the show for a change.

19. Can you name all of Santa's reindeers?
Yes. I'm a singer. Not only can I name them, but I'll do it (if I've had enough eggnog) by singing the introduction to "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

20. Angel on the tree top or a star?
Star. My children insisted. Before they were around to express an opinion, I used to put a plastic gold model of the Sears Tower on top of the tree.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning?
Christmas morning. We open our stockings, have breakfast, and then we do presents.

22. Most annoying thing about this time of year?
Worrying about what I'm supposed to be doing. Like baking Christmas cookies. The media applies a lot of pressure, trying to convince me to spend the next three weeks doing nothing but rolling out cooky dough, cutting out cookies, baking them and decorating them. Well, fuck that. I'm 100 percent white bread WASP, and my people were never the cooky bakers. My people like to eat traditional shitty desserts like plum pudding, fruit cake, and mince pies. So when my kids come whining around wanting to bake sugar cookies, I tell them they need to develop some ethnic pride.

23. What I love most about Christmas?
Aside from the religious aspect? I think the decorations. I like the greenery and swags and wreaths and lights that other, more-organized people put on their houses.

An email from Nora Ephron

Internet, I've got nothing for you today. Why? Because I spent most of the weekend cleaning out my study, that's why.

My study, which was a vast dumping ground for all of the paper a girl tends to accumulate when she's chairing not one, but two fundraisers, is almost kind of clean. The budgets, solicitation letters, mission statements, agendas, menus, invitations, proofs, reports, and general bullshit had been stacked up in piles all over the place. But now it's down to a dull roar in there. You can actually see the rug. And even my desktop! And I found a lot of bills I should have paid, and (in a fiscal attempt at equal time for opposing parties) a lot of checks I should have deposited.

But that's it. Apart from some of my usual maunderings at Mamarazzi, and surprisingly enough, at my shopping blog, I haven't had much to tell you.

So I will let Nora Ephron do the talking, in an op-ed column from the New York Times.

And don't give me any of the usual shit where you object to me squandering someone else's intellectual property. I know all about intellectual property. Intellectual property has been paying the mortgage for years. And if I take the car in for its 30,000 mile check up and find out that I need to spend $900 on repairs, I just whip out my Bank of Intellectual Property card and pay for it. So shut up. In my opinion, Nora Ephron (who??) and that useless birdcage liner The New York Times should be both pleased and proud that I'm violating their copyrights.

* * * * *

Op-Ed Contributor

The Six Stages of E-Mail

• By NORA EPHRON

Published: July 1, 2007

Stage One: Infatuation

I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me! Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong! I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

Stage Two: Clarification

O.K., I’m starting to understand — e-mail isn’t letter-writing at all, it’s something else entirely. It was just invented, it was just born and overnight it turns out to have a form and a set of rules and a language all its own. Not since the printing press. Not since television. It’s revolutionary. It’s life-altering. It’s shorthand. Cut to the chase. Get to the point.

And it saves so much time. It takes five seconds to accomplish in an e-mail message something that takes five minutes on the telephone. The phone requires you to converse, to say things like hello and goodbye, to pretend to some semblance of interest in the person on the other end of the line. Worst of all, the phone occasionally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to — to suggest lunch or dinner — even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No danger of that with e-mail.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an Instant Message from someone I almost know.

Stage Three: Confusion

I have done nothing to deserve any of this:

Viagra!!!!! Best Web source for Vioxx. Spend a week in Cancún. Have a rich beautiful lawn. Astrid would like to be added as one of your friends. XXXXXXXVideos. Add three inches to the length of your penis. The Democratic National Committee needs you. Virus Alert. FW: This will make you laugh. FW: This is funny. FW: This is hilarious. FW: Grapes and raisins toxic for dogs. FW: Gabriel García Márquez’s Final Farewell. FW: Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement Address. FW: The Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. AOL Member: We value your opinion. A message from Hillary Clinton. Find low mortgage payments, Nora. Nora, it’s your time to shine. Need to fight off bills, Nora? Yvette would like to be added as one of your friends. You have failed to establish a full connection to AOL.

Stage Four: Disenchantment

Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mail messages. I’m a writer — imagine how many unanswered messages I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail. My eyes are dim. I have a mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome. I have a galloping case of attention deficit disorder because every time I start to write something, the e-mail icon starts bobbing up and down and I’m compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn’t. Still, it might, any second now. And yes it’s true — I can do in a few seconds with e-mail what would take much longer on the phone, but most of my messages are from people who don’t have my phone number and would never call me in the first place. In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more messages arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered messages. Strike that: 116.

Stage Five: Accommodation

Yes. No. No :). No :(. Can’t. No way. Maybe. Doubtful. Sorry. So Sorry. Thanks. No thanks. Not my thing. You must be kidding. Out of town. O.O.T. Try me in a month. Try me in the fall. Try me in a year. NoraE@aol.com can now be reached at NoraE81082@gmail.com.

Stage Six: Death

Call me.

Nora Ephron, the author, most recently, of “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman,” is a contributing columnist for The Times.

* * * * *

Are you still there? Because I'm back. OK, so this is what is making me feel incredibly witty, in that smug, post-modern way: in order to blog this, I emailed this article to myself.

In which Poppy impersonates a Nyquil commercial

Apparently, I will do anything to be different, including my unique way of celebrating the summer solstice, which is to get the World's Worst Cold.

And this is not just your garden-variety sniffle, but the complete package: my sinuses are acting up so that my nose is either running like a faucet or completely stuffed up, and even my hearing is affected; my glands are so horribly swollen that I have not a double but a triple chin; I also have a sore throat; I'm coughing when I'm not sneezing; and finally, not tonight dear; I have a headache.

On top of which, I was up half the night, because for some reason, I can't sleep when I can't breathe.

To add insult to injury, not enough of you are blogging. Stupid internet! Be more funny!

Andrew ate eight thousand

In case you're wondering, that was part of a carpet commercial I used to enjoy. And it works as a segue into yet another peek into the Sargasso Sea that is my brain. Yes, I've been tagged, so enough with the procrastinating. Time to stop all this half-assed, feckless time wasting and get down to some back-breaking, excruciating, Total Time Annihilation!

Here are the rules: • Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about him/herself. • People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. • At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. • Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So. Eight things you didn't already know about me.

Of course, I could be lazy and pretend that everyone reading this is reading my blog for the first time, whereupon I could admit that I have two children, live in Illinois, and am a cradle Episcopalian. And that would be three things already--hey, look! I'm practically half-way done!

But let's pretend I care enough to give you people some of the richer, rarer, stranger things about me.

1. I fall asleep pretty much as soon as my head hits the pillow, and sleep through the night. I never remember my dreams, and I never get up to pee. No, not even when I was pregnant.
The first thing I do upon awakening is head into the the bathroom to empty my bladder, and rabid coyotes gnawing on my calves wouldn't be able to stop me.

2. I've spent the past 10 years trying to forget most of the stuff I learned in graduate school. This is easy and enjoyable, and involves reading books and watching films I actually like, instead of books and films that other people think are important. All while drinking my beverage of choice, which very often, is alcoholic in nature. I recommend this.

3. I utterly refuse to become interested in any story that could be described as "tragic." Even "tragi-comedies" are pretty much off my radar. If I want to cry, I can just re-read the part of Little Woman where Beth dies. Works like a charm.

4. Speaking of which, by the time I finished second grade, I had read all of Louisa May Alcott's books. This means that Louisa May's ideas of what constitutes good behavior had inveigled themselves into my brain cells and imprinted themselves there when I was too young to stop them, sort of like the way a baby duck will decide that the first moving object it sees is his mother. As a consequence, I will never be as mean as I'd like to be. My friends often remark on how kind, nice, or generous I am. It's sad, but I just don't seem to be able to become consistently snarky, sarcastic, dark, or bitter.

5. I've been contributing to Mamarazzi for over a year, and still feel inadequate, mostly because I don't know who half these so-called "celebrities" are. Like "The Hoff," of whom I had never heard until his daughters released the hamburger slobbering video, or "Denise Richards," whom I confused with that woman who used to make all the aerobic tapes.

6. I am extremely put off by other people's vulgarity. But not my own.

7. My husband rakes in the dough and we have no credit card debt. Consequently I feel that I have nothing to complain about, and therefore I could get kicked out of the blogosphere any second. Since mostly people appear to blog in order to do a lot of whining, and most of the time, I don't think I have anything to whine about. This might be because of Number 5 up there, where I learned the virtue of Hard Work and Cheerfully Shouldering One's Burdens and the like, but I suspect that Louisa May Alcott herself would admit I have a pretty nice life.

8. Almost everyone I've met through the internet has been weirder in real life than you'd think they'd be, judging from their on-line personae. And incredibly talkative. And I'm sure they'd say the same about me.

I hereby tag: Babelbabe, Major Bedhead, RW, Sarah Louise, SarahO, Susie Sunshine, Suzanne, and Tut-Tut. But feel free to ignore me. I'm nice about things like this.

About Poppy

My name is Poppy Buxom. (OK, it's not, really.) I live in Newtopia, IL (which is a suburb on the north shore of Chicago, and yes, that was a pseudonym, too), in a tear-down house that could use some TLC.

I live with That Stud Muffin I Married, our 11-year-old son, our nine-year-old daughter, and my son's Malayan box turtle.

Many people consider me a Stay at Home Mooch, because while I don't work for a living, my husband does.

However, I prefer to think of myself as a housewife. (There. I said the "h" word. How boldly outspoken of me! I'm the Lenny Bruce of mommybloggers!)

But see, I really spend quite a bit of time keeping house. Or more accurately, thinking about keeping house. Once my children are safely at school, I can spend hours obsessing about interior decorating. I have a library of books that allow me to learn about outdated housekeeping practices (if you ever need to learn how to iron a bra, let me know.) I also have a lot of antique cookbooks (if I let it, it could be a real cream-of-mushroom soup-arama around here). Basically, I'm a font of knowledge about things nobody has cared about since your grandmother was in Home Ec class.

Yet I'm no Martha Stewart, or even a wannabe. I don't actually do much Good Housekeeping, I just read about it a lot. (I do manage to do some tidying up. And laundry. Lots of laundry.)

Before I started spending all my time dusting and then vacuuming (never the other way around) I was a graduate student in English Literature. For over a decade. Well over a decade. Being A.B.D. for almost 10 years capped a brilliant career that consisted of every loserish, slacker job ever invented (except maybe Starbucks barrista, because that hadn't been invented yet). I was a waitress, a secretary, I taught English to high school and college students, I temped, I processed dental insurance claims, and, in my best job ever, helped stupid computer users in the Biology department at MIT. Basically, where'er I walked, I flirted with failure.

Despite my efforts to persevere in my splendid career, I got promoted. In order to maintain my slacker status, I was forced to quit that job. I moved to Chicago, and while I was at it, robbed the cradle married the cutest MIT alumnus in the world. Then (much later) we had kids. Who are either high-functioning autistic or have Asperger's syndrome. Or something. No one is precisely sure what's going on, but all are agreed that something is off, neurobehaviorally speaking. All I know is that for me, child-rearing involves lots of testing, IEP meetings, therapy, and worry.

So--even if from a certain distance, I look like a soccer mom--I'm not. I don't foresee myself spending much time watching my kids playing soccer.

In this blog, I'm doing my best to portray the humorous side of my world, which is so often overwhelmingly about kids with special needs. (I know what you're thinking; what fun!)

And guess what? My husband and I have both been diagnosed with depression. But I figure you guessed that, already, didn't you? After all, this is a blog. I am a mother. Which means I'm a mommyblogger. It goes without saying that I'm mental--except that since it's my blog, I thought I'd say it anyway.

Also, I just outed my husband. How's that for telling it like it is? Take that, dooce! I can be confessional, too.

I like blogging, MST3K, Hollywood films of the 1930s, British humor, singing, Emily Post, early music, New England, the Patrick O'Brien Aubrey/Maturin novels, disco, Elsie de Wolfe, gardening, E. F. Benson, roses, Groucho Marx, Dorothy Draper, P. G. Wodehouse, engraved stationery, the Episcopal church, Lord Peter Wimsey, the Boston Red Sox, Georgette Heyer, opera, and cocktails. Not necessarily in that order.