Jumpin' right in.

So what's going on, crew? How was Black Friday? I was safely locked away inside a scrapyard listening to Pandora. I think I've finally reached the year where I am not excited to hear Christmas music on the radio. I still like Christmas music - I like the Christmas music I grew up with, but there is just SO. MUCH. terrible Christmas music on the radio that it's a painful experience no matter what time of day I turn it on. I mean, it has to be, because there are only about 90 Christmas songs, total. I mean it. If each song is 3 minutes (and some are less), that comes out to

*math*

and that is no where close to 24 hours. So radio stations have to accept every awful singer's rendition of every awful song, and they have to play every modern song all these famous people's people are throwing down onto legal pads drenched with flopsweat in the waiting rooms of recording studios, desperately trying to come up with something, anything, that will make more money, ill-got or otherwise.

And as a result of all this hustle, we have songs like Christmastime in Washington, Feed the World, and that F*CKING EAR-RAPING NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST CTHULU SUMMONING KRAKEN FILLED CESSPOOL Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime, a song which upends all my noble ideas about gun control every time I hear it. And this is December's radio. No, this is December and the last two weeks of November's radio. 97.1 started earlier than ever this year, on the weekend BEFORE Thanksgiving. 101.9 had the decency mercy? quiet but detectable malice to start 12:01 a.m. on Thanksgiving day.

What else do we Baltimoreans get to listen to, now that two acceptable stations have been slain? 101.1, which is so riddled with Nickelback and Linkin Park landmines that it's just not worth it. 104.3, which plays a total of 10 songs "sung" by a total of 4 "artists". Our only refuge is commercial free, listener supported 89.7, which is usually great, but I've been getting far too much hilbilly bluegrass gospel lately, and the pledge drive alarm is starting to go off in the back of my head. PLEASE, 89.7, don't pledge drive during Christmas. Think of the children. The children who drive to work every day.

How did I get on this? I don't even remember. Ah, Pandora. Blissful, wonderful internet radio. You never let me down. Although, you know what? I realize all my complaints are very 2002. Really, I do. What with satellite radio and iPods and stuff, why am I even complaining? Call me old-fashioned, if you must. I still listen to the radio. I think it's a good idea that I don't want to go away. I want the old radio days to come back. But radio today is becoming more and more a symptom of this current generation that supposedly has a negative attention span, where 10 "songs" by 4 "artists" is all they can handle. I was reading Alice in Wonderland last night because I don't remember if I've actually read it (probably have, and I thoroughly encourage re-reading anything), and I thought to myself, "jesus, no kid I know would EVER be able to sit through even the first chapter of this." And that's depressing, because Alice in Wonderland is a fantastic, fabulous, earth-shatteringly wonderful piece of children's literature, and at one point, little children even read it BY THEMSELVES.

But Christmas and all its music is upon is once again and fun shall be had by all, even us atheists. I've been asked in the past how atheists justify celebrating religious holidays if we don't believe in what they represent. First of all, forgive me for divorcing the act of putting a tree in my living room and hanging lights on it from the holy birth of your Lord. Second, just about all the Christian holidays are superimposed onto pagan holidays (harp, harp, yes, everybody knows) and you've divorced yourself from what they represent, so we're not so different, you and I.

I remember Christmas as a kid. How amazing. My poor parents would drag all the boxes out of the attic and put them in the middle of the floor and my brother and I would attack them, putting every stupid thing with a piece of glitter out and somewhere in the house, from little porcelain santa clauses to a huge stuffed reindeer that got shuffled from room to room because it was so big and inconvenient, but we HAD to have it out. If we didn't, I'd imagine all the poor Christmas decorations that didn't make the cut, sweating it out all year long in a box in an attic, making tic marks on the inside of the box as to when they'd get to come out again, only to be pulled out for half a second, declared to be ugly, and thrown back in for another year of waiting. Pulls my soul apart just thinking about it now. Now that I'm grown up, though, I know exactly what my parents were thinking with each tacky thing that came out of that box: "One more thing to put away later. Stellar." I mean, I think that now, when I'm trying to convince myself to put on a clean shirt. If I ain't using it, I sell it. Go make tic marks inside somebody else's box.

But once the tree was up and all that tacky stuff was out and the lights were on and it was juuuuuuust dark enough outside and it was Friday night so there was no school tomorrow, I would sit on the couch and the tree would be lit up, and I'd be surrounded by Christmas throw pillows and stuffed knock-off reindeer with green noses, and it would be the most amazing feeling. And then, mom would put on some of that GOOD Christmas music, like Johnny Mathis (don't hate) or the Nutcracker Suite, and life was a pure, perfect, untroubled pool of mercury that reflected all good things and was going to last forever.

I really want that feeling back. I want it back not just at Christmas, but all the time. I had it my last two years of college, when books were begging me to read them and post-it labels were quivering with excitement at the thought of being used. Then I lost it for a long time, and nothing inanimate had much to say for a while. Now I think things are getting ok, because I quit my awful stressful job, started working at a scrapyard 3 days a week, and books are starting to talk to me again. Going to bookstores on my budget is almost unbearable, everybody's hollering at me and I have to make all these promises I don't know if I can keep. That's how I got Alice in Wonderland the other day. It sat demurely on the special table with all the grandfather books, like Wuthering Heights and Kafka's Metamorphosis, and cleared it's throat a little when I walked by. I was impressed with it's restraint.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas didn't say a word, but it did glare at me, and I am the kind of person who allows myself to be intimidated by books. So I got it too.

But anyways. Merry Christmas, y'all. And if anybody has any idea what to get a computer scientist for Christmas, please chime in.