fruitcake

As of today my father has officially spent half his life with my mother.

In other words, today was my parents' 25th wedding anniversary so I am sitting at the dining room table blogging in front of a beautiful bouquet of purple and white flowers.  (And when I say today, I mean I haven't slept yet since I woke up on December 20.  You understand.)

Remind me to plan that my important wedding anniversaries (if I ever do settle down) will never fall on a Tuesday.  Our house was like a sprawling, overpopulated game of musical chairs with a few inanimate players tonight.  Which resulted in, long story short, all of us sitting down for dinner at 10pm.

And now I am sitting up waiting for the raisins on top of my second batch of fruitcakes to burn, just slightly, so I know they're done.

My life has not been quite this complicated, on a regular basis, in quite some time.  This is what I get for moving back home, I guess...

This morning Grampi came down to the kitchen earlier than usual--"So I have time to eat lunch before physical therapy," he explained.  Oh, the men in this house!  The other night after dinner I passed along Time magazine's Person of the Year article, about the Protester.  His main worry, before reading the article, was about protest information getting into the wrong hands (i.e. certain religious-political groups) with a nefarious agenda, so I quickly excused myself to avoid a blowout.

Anyway, this morning, on top of his usual "time for work" opener, he says, "I've been reading that article you gave me, and you know, it's realllly interesting."  Of course he's going to get his own thing out of it, but I'll tell you he's been exploring the spectrum of conservatism a little more adventurously these days, so I don't mind discussing things with him quite as much as I used to.  He continues, "I'm really fascinated, they're saying it's like a virus, that it just spreads like an infection, these protests."

It takes me a split second to process this comment, and once I put two and two together I am struck dumb by the gaping chasm of understanding that both changes and reflects the differentness of our perspectives.  I open my mouth to explain to my doctor grandfather that "viral" to my generation has less to do with epidemiology than it does with the internet, but then I remember the hours I've already spent explaining, to various degrees of failure, social media and how it works and how I use it on a daily basis, and the moment passes.

This is a thrilling sociolinguistic dilemma: My grandfather's thoughts on protesting feed into the way he understands the use of the term "viral," and his understanding of "viral" spreading color his reading of global sharing and mobilization.  What excites me most about the protest phenomenon is almost completely lost on him.  His worldview comes pre-installed with a firewall against being able to fully grasp the way I use the internet, as well as my deep appreciation for social movements.  This is a much more enmeshed situation than you want me to get into here, but I will tell you that my brain is exploding quietly about it.

Speaking of the men in this house, I let my brother use my car today to do some Christmas shopping.  The joke in our house right now is that 50% of accidents happen to drivers under the age of 20, and 50% of those happen within the first 6 months of those drivers getting licenses.  No wait, that wasn't the joke--the joke is that my brother will be 20 in about a week, and if we can make it through the first 6 months of his licensure without him having to actually drive anywhere, then the danger zone is over!  Ha.  Yes, we are hilarious.

Anyway, him borrowing my car meant I needed him to drop me off at work and pick me up afterwards.  So last night I said, "That means we'll have to leave at 8:30."  To the guy whose usual bedtime is about 6am.  But he replied cheerfully, "OK, just wake me up 10 or 15 minutes before you want to leave so I can splash some water on my face."

He's not a bad driver, but the poor guy gets such a rap from the family.  And for some reason, riding shotgun while my brother drives my car (or any car, if I recall correctly) stresses me out beyond belief.  I may have control issues, which I expressed by letting him know ahead of time when the speed limit was about to change.  By the time I got outside at the end of the day he was already buckled into the passenger's seat so I could live out my neuroses in peace.  This might be something I should work on.

So we are a family of seven, with two cars, three jobs to work around, and a LOT of Christmas shopping to do.  This means that various family members and vehicles have been M.I.A. at random times and for undefined lengths of time, and that this happens more and more the closer it gets to Christmas.  I'm losing my mind.

Check out my muscles! Ohh yeahh...

Not to mention this week has been a series of wild goose chases for me.  I spent Monday afternoon trying to track down mace (the spice, not the spray) and never actually found it.  The fruitcakes seemed to have turned out OK in spite of that.  I love this living recipe, and I'm so excited to adapt it based on my lifestyle and the ingredients I can get my hands on.  When I was little, my aunt Judy used to always send fruitcake from Oregon for Christmas, wrapped with her other gifts in Sunday comics pages.  For the longest time I didn't like it (big surprise) and then one year I think I realized that if I started liking fruitcake I would be the only one of my siblings to like it, and this was an obvious source of superiority for me.  Then I discovered I really do love fruitcake, and as Coffeeshopcrush hilariously put it yesterday, it's packed full of energy in case you just so happen to spend a lot of time in the woods...  Anyway, Aunt Judy gifted me her simplified version of the recipe she got from her grandma Allene.  And now it is up to me to fashion and ship 8 fruitcakes.  It's a more interesting and delicious version of those dumb chain letters that were going around in the 90s (another thing I love).  (Not chain mail--the 90s.)

So, life is complicated.  And living at home is like secondary education with a major in compromise, and a double minor in patience and sharing.  I have felt blessed all throughout college to have learned these important people skills through growing up in a big family, but after four years of blatant selfishness I'm realizing how rusty I've gotten at moving in a pack, at making decisions that impact 4-6 other people, at somehow taking up both more and less space than I do as a party of one.  (Cue track below.)

I think it's doing me a world of good.