I am without real sleep this weekend.
Oh no, don't get me wrong, I have slept, but...well, not as much as I would have liked.
I've mentioned before that my body only lets me get about 5-6 hours of sleep at a time. If I'm especially exhausted or have gone an ungodly amount of time without sleep (which, sometimes, this time of year tends to do to me) I can maybe crank out 8-9 hours.
There are various reasons for this; the main one is that I work overnights, yet still have things to do during the daytime on my days off (and, sometimes, days on). This is a problem. It means I burn the candle at both ends, I sleep when I can, and when I can't I am forced to pump myself full of caffeine so that I can remain conscious and lucid. This has varying effects on my body, from jittery-ness to insomnia to what can, at times, feel like heart palpitations (woohoo!) -- but, most of the time, it simply keeps me on an even keel and at best, lucid and active enough to take care of my daily or nightly tasks.
I have worked overnights for over three years now. I have been trying, as of late, and in a wholly desperate fashion, to find another job that is a) not within my current company, and b) on days -- or at least a more reasonable schedule. There are many reasons for that, but the primary one is that I don't get to see my wife enough and spend actual time with her, and when I do, it always feels like a clock is ticking, counting down until the next time I have to work or have to sleep or what have you.
It also means that when the holidays roll around, I have to use almost all, if not all, of my accrued paid time off in order to get away from work to spend it with her and the family. Regardless of whether they think they are or not, my work's company policy isn't that nice when it comes to the holidays -- as a 24/7/365 operation that never stops, someone is always left holding the bag when it comes to who has to work the holidays, especially when you're management like me. I used to care a lot more and feel a lot more guilty about whoever had to do that, but in recent years I've adopted much more of a fuck you wholly and completely attitude about that place for various reasons (and I have written up the whole story to post here when I end up leaving said job, don't you worry). I generally work 1-2 holidays a year -- I always work New Year's Day, primarily so people can't complain and say I never work any holidays, and sometimes I work July 4th (I believe I've done it twice in the going-on-six-years I've been there). For all of the others, I take PTO as far in advance as the system will let me, my boss always eventually approves it, and then I count down the days.
I have four working days left until I am off for the holidays this year. I am working December 15, 16, 17, and 18, and then my weekend kicks in. I took PTO for the entirety of next week (the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th) and Christmas is a paid holiday anyway. I will return on the 29th and 30th, have the night of the 31st off to spend with Daisy and/or the family (depending on weather) and I will work the 1st. The latter part of that information isn't important -- the fact that I have ten days off in a row (the 19th through the 28th) is.
Though I'm sure my coworkers would probably disagree (because they never take time off) I actually almost never take any time off work aside from the occasional sick day, bad weather day, or mental health day. I schedule two long-ish vacations a year -- the first over Memorial Day, so that Daisy and I can have a nice bit of summer time off together around and leading up to our anniversary, and the second during the birthday/Christmas season. That's generally really it. For 2020, due to the way the days fall, I'll more than likely be taking a full week off for our anniversary and will absolutely be taking the full week of Christmas off. Both our anniversary and my birthday fall on Sundays in 2020.
This is, of course, if I'm still working where I am now. Who knows if that's not the case.
Anyway, moving onward.
Christmas used to be a time of the year that I hated. I hated it because for a very long time I was a very bitter man and hated seeing other people be happy and enjoying themselves, and Christmas tends to be one of the few times a year where that happens. Add to it that there are people out there who are huge Christmas fans (I should know, I married one of them) and add the Jesus-y component into it -- because I mean, it is a religious holiday, and I've been an atheist for over 20 years -- and I was simply miserable during the holidays most of the time.
I can also step back and look at those times with an outside perspective now, and realize that for many years of my life, I was a miserable person. Also, the fact that I had many a Christmas (both in my childhood as well as my adult life) that were bad doesn't help things much.
I've tried to go through the years in my head and remember those Christmases one by one based on where I was and what I was doing in my life at the time, and can only pull bits and pieces here and there of what I remember.
1982-85 I was too young to remember much of anything about Christmas. I only remember the tiniest of snippets, such as getting a haircut and having family photos taken. It was either 1984 or 1985 that I got the Hot Wheels City playset. I remember getting a Glo-Worm, a Cabbage Patch doll, He-Man figures and a rocking horse on wheels I could ride on that whinnied when you pushed a button (mechanical, of course, not battery-powered). I don't remember much of anything about people or places.
1986 brought me a Transformers sleeping bag (which I unzipped completely and used as a blanket well into my teenage years), the Ghostbusters Fire House and Ecto-1, and numerous other small things. 1986 is around the time I begin being able to remember family Christmas dinners at my grandmother's (or aunt/uncles' houses), where everyone in the family and all of the kids got together.
1987 was the year my parents divorced, and I remember it as the first time I had two Christmases -- I also got the Power Wheels Bigfoot. This is around the time where I begin getting envious of my cousins and their own gifts, and I remember watching Christmas specials like Rudolph with my mother in our small apartment this year.
1988 was the year of the "Christmas bush" where our tree was lopsided and squat. I had an ear infection over my birthday and Christmas this year, and I remember a lot of time spent on the couch with my mother in our trailer. It also strikes me as the first year that I/we felt truly alone over the holidays, and bad weather almost completely prevented us from spending Christmas with the family. When I had Christmas with my father, he bought me a blue bicycle with the word "renegade" on the side, as well as a sled. I spent my time at my father's house over the holidays that year teaching myself, in the cold, how to ride the bicycle (as I'd never ridden one before).
1989 I don't remember much of. A lot of the holiday season sort of mashed together, but I do remember it as the first year my former stepfather joined us for Christmas with the family, and I remember the argument he and my mother got into when it came to driving to the family home in what was, again, nasty weather -- and my mother had her brand new Cavalier at the time, which wasn't exactly built for snow and ice.
1990 was the year my mother and stepfather said that it was their turn to buy me a bike, and they did. It was also the first year my mother and stepfather were married, and the first year I spent some of the holidays at both step-families' houses for gifts and celebrations.
The holidays of 1991 and 1992 are much of a blur; I remember some of the gifts I got during those years (some Legos, a chemistry set, Micro Machines, and some VHS tapes) but the actual holiday festivities are almost nonexistent in my brain. I remember that both of these years I spent Christmas Eve sleeping in the spare room in my former stepfather's parents' house, and that I was so focused on presents and getting out of there and off that rock-hard bed that I don't know how much sleep I actually got. The holidays of 1992 are also significant as they are the last holidays I'd spend with my father and stepmother, who had already given birth to my oldest sister almost two years prior, and was heavily pregnant with my second sister.
1993 was a turning point; by this time my mother had separated from my former stepfather and it looked as if holidays were going to return to normal for my mother and me, with our family and no one else's getting in the way. My mother had gotten me some clothing (including two Power Rangers hoodies) and a new pair of shoes that year, and because she knew I'd wanted it so badly, my grandmother got me the Tiger LCD handheld game version of Mortal Kombat. The Tiger handhelds were BIG in the 90s; I must've had five or six different ones. This was also the beginning of the end of the big family Christmases with our side of the family, as the family was starting to splinter off into squabbles here and there about all sorts of dumb shit.
1994 and 1995 were the beginnings of an upward trend for a few years running -- these are the years my mother got me a Sega Genesis, my grandmother got me a Batman game and Batman Forever on VHS, and I was amassing my comic and action figure collections. I was entering my teen years and electronic things were new and exciting to me, as I had grown up without a lot of them. I began collecting videotapes. I began really listening to music and started building a CD/tape collection. Life got even better when my Dad (my mother's partner now for over 25 years, not my actual father) came into my life and we began spending time with him and his family over the holidays as well. 1996 and 1997 continued that trend as well, when I got my first desktop computer and not one, but two different trench coats (one black, one gray) as well as some games for my newly-acquired Game Boy Pocket and Star Wars stuff.
Sometime around 1998 or 1999 I noticed the first bit of a turn in how I perceived and felt about the holidays. It didn't help that I'd already had my first of several major depressive episodes by this time, nor did it help that it was beginning to feel like Dad's family never truly wanted or accepted me or my mother, but were instead just going through the motions. I was a moody, loud, depressive teenager and this didn't help matters much. I escaped into my PlayStation (1998's Christmas gift) and my first guitar, my stratocaster (1999's Christmas gift) and I, well, felt like I was growing out of the Christmas spirit. 2000 brought a second guitar, my Danelectro, and an effects pedal -- but by my college years, 2001, 2002, 2003 and onward...I was basically over Christmas and was, for lack of a better term, sick of it. Christmas came and went and whatever I got over those years, aside from the bigger ticket items (a DVD recorder, etc) is mostly a blur. I remember in my more jaded years just telling my mother to get me a carton of cigarettes and some decent coffee and to "call it good."
So, for many years, I downplayed it and barely celebrated it at all. Alley's family wasn't incredibly big on Christmas -- they celebrated it and had "fun," of course, but as you may know (if you read my Places series on here), I had several bad Christmas experiences in a row that further soured my thoughts and feelings on the season. It became a chore. I began to hate Christmas music with every fiber of my being. I became actively Anti-Christmas, going so far as to barely acknowledge the day existed for a few years running.
Christmas 2012 began the very slow upturn, I think. I can pinpoint that year in particular as the year that things started to get better. It was the year of my first Christmas with Daisy (she bought me a laptop, amongst other things) and it was the first and only Christmas since that I got to spend the holidays both with her family as well as my own -- I flew out to West Virginia for Christmas for the first and only time since I've been living away from home. By Christmas 2013 I had been engaged to Daisy for ten months and had already been accepted into her family well beforehand, and by Christmas 2014 Daisy and I had been married for almost seven months and everything continued to look up.
But still there was rage and anger in my heart for the holidays. Daisy is a big fan of Christmas and always has been. She loves all of the family and togetherness and giving and happy, warm, fuzzy feelings. I, meanwhile, had downright loathed Christmas for years, and while I could appreciate her glee and optimism, as well as appreciate her and her family -- both here in town as well as all of the extended family, nieces and nephews and the like -- bitterness like that I possessed was really hard to shake. In public or around the family I was as cheery as I could force myself to be. In private I was the biggest Scrooge (or Grinch, if you prefer), on the planet.
I bristled or got visibly irritated when she played or sang Christmas songs. I didn't like singing along, I didn't like decorating, I didn't like the endless stress of trying to get the perfect gift for every single person (I was, and still am, very much a walk into a store, scan the shelves, pick an item that looks neat, and put it in the cart to be done with it sort of Christmas shopper).
As an aside, nowadays I'm a browse Amazon, click on something neat and buy it sort of guy. The fact that people actually still Christmas shop in stores is amazing to me. Plebians.
Still, she was patient with me. It took time. It took a few years, in fact.
A bigger part of it was that I was, and am, incredibly anti-religion. I tend to keep my thoughts on that private for the most part because, if I did not, I would be (or would have become) one of those abrasive neckbeard, incel, trilby-wearing, m'lady-saying fuckers that I cannot stand. I don't feel as if it is my duty or calling to force my thoughts on religion on other people, simply because it would make me no better than they are -- and, throughout my entire life, one of my driving reasons for living has always been to be better than everyone else. Sometimes that is more difficult to do than others.
Despite this, I acknowledge and appreciate that Daisy's parents (and all of her family, in fact) are deeply religious people from several different types of Christianity -- Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals, etc. Daisy and I were married by our brother-in-law, a Mormon minister. I do and always have had a deep respect for others' beliefs, even if I do not agree with them. And every year, I absolutely look forward to going to the Christmas Eve service at the church with Daisy and the family. I don't have to believe in anything to enjoy it -- I see it as akin to Daisy going to the Star Wars movies with me. It's a play, it is a display of beliefs that I don't have to share in order to be able to enjoy the family togetherness aspect of it.
Some people get cross tattoos, I get a Starfleet one. Everyone can believe what they want and choose what they revere or otherwise hold in importance.
So it took some time, but after I got married, a lot of those negative feelings about Christmas slowly melted away. Christmas is now an event, it is the one time of year that everyone tries to be happy and do for others. Do I feel that everyone should be doing this at all times? Yes, of course, but we all have lives and jobs and responsibilities. After a few years of marriage, I found myself turning on Christmas music willingly, putting on Christmas-based clothing and putting the yule log channel on the TV when I was just sitting around the house. I began singing along with the Christmas songs, something Daisy loves (apparently I have a very nice, bellowing Bing Crosby-like classical singing voice)
I particularly delight in the gifting aspect of Christmas. Retail therapy, as it has been called in the past by myself and some others, is absolutely a weakness of mine whether it's the holidays or not. During the Christmas season I use it to my advantage, and begin plotting as far in advance as possible for what I'm going to get or do for Daisy, her parents, and my own parents. Depending on what family is planning to be in town for the holidays, I plot for that too -- and I generally begin my Christmas shopping in September or so (this year, I started in July).
Yes, I will have a full rundown of everything I got for other people this year coming within the next few days -- I can't post it before Christmas, of course, because the wife reads this blog.
Daisy and I both have tried, and tried very hard, to do a "minimalist Christmas" every year. We almost always fail. What I mean by "minimalist Christmas" is that we always say we're only gonna get a few little things for each other in an attempt to spend less money and keep from cluttering up the house anymore than we need to...and then still spend hundreds of dollars on each other anyhow because it's an addiction and once you start shopping it quickly balloons.
In 2019 I spent approximately $293 on Daisy alone for Christmas. In 2018, that total was $235. In 2017, it was $177. In 2016, it was $285. In 2015, it was $265.
How do I know these things? Because I track them every single year. FOR EVERYONE. That's just part of the person I am -- I'm neurotic and I like being able to look back on what I did and when. It also tells me that despite our plans to have a smaller, more minimalist Christmas this year, I spent more on the wife this year than I have any other year since we've been married, and I did not intend to do that, it just happened.
Of course, I never intend to do that. I try to get one big gift and then be like "Okay, now I'm done shopping for Daisy." But then I see something else she would like, and I get it -- or she tells me something else she wants, and I get it, and it keeps ballooning slowly from there. Eventually I have to cut myself off and stop or I'll just keep going on indefinitely until there's no shipping time left before Christmas and my credit cards end up being maxed or close to maxed for a few months afterwards. This year's big gift for her is really two things, and makes up $133 of that $293 total. The big gift is always something she'll never see coming, and I plan it that way on purpose. I don't care if Daisy guesses what the little gifts are, because I tend to get her the same little gifts every year -- coconut caramels, vegan jerky, generally some sort of coffee or tea (though this year I didn't do that) -- the big one always comes out of left field and is always something completely different, something she would never see coming.
So that's where we stand now. Tomorrow the family arrives in town and the fun begins...
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