Holidaze

Good afternoon, gentle readers!
I hope everyone had a good holiday and that you got what you needed, even if you didn't get what you wanted.
My holiday was fairly chill.  I spent it with family and came home laden with leftovers.
New Year's Eve is this week and, to be honest, I'll be happy once it's come and gone.
Let's be honest, folks: the holidays are bloody exhausting!
Here in the States, things start to get nuts right after Halloween. Thanksgiving starts off the holiday trifecta, leading up to Christmas and then ending with New Year's Eve.
For two months people spend money like it's going out of style, buying presents for people they probably don't know all that well, getting 'holiday cheer' jammed down their throats and ending the whole shebang with a night of desperate, drunken debauchery that would leave the Roman Emperors of old shaking their heads and looking faintly alarmed.
It's all just too much.
Thankfully, some of us chose to opt out of the madness.
Thanksgiving is not a big deal for me. I call my family and wish them a 'Happy Thanksgiving' then eat my traditional dinner of pizza.
Christmas isn't a big deal either. My family doesn't do presents. I spend the day with my mom, who insists on cooking a spread even though she doesn't have to, and then it's home again.
New Year's Eve? I'll see in the New Year, but I don't get New Year's Day off.  Instead, it'll be business as usual for yours truly, up and off to work while a significant majority of people are recovering from hangovers. Or waking up next to someone they don't recognize and hoping they haven't just contracted super-gonorrhea or something.
Yeah. The holidays are a bit much and I'll be glad to see the back of them.
However, with that in mind, I do hope you have a happy new year.
Best wishes! - G.

Bah! Humbug!

Good afternoon, gentle readers.
It's that time of year again.  The time of holiday madness, crazed shopping, traffic jams outside of malls and neverending 'festive' tunes in stores and on the radio.
Yes, that's right.
The holidays have arrived.
Personally, I can't wait for them to leave.
I don't have much Christmas spirit this year.  I haven't decorated anything and, the other day, I walked into a department store playing ear-splitting Christmas carols and immediately left.
I just could not deal with it.
At this rate, I don't think I'll be feeling good will toward my fellow man until February.
Forget about writing.
It's not going to happen this month.
I've got taxes to pay and a leaky tub to fix and a bedroom to try and rent to someone halfway decent.
I'm pretty much ready for December to end, to roll up its relentless cheer and just fuck off.
What's next?
A lie down, a couple of aspirin and a prayer to whatever Yuletide deities might be listening for a season without any new surprises.

To vlog or not to vlog

Hello, gentle readers!

Lately, I've been thinking about starting a vlog on YouTube.  There are a couple of reasons for this: (1) I think it would be fun and (2) there's not really anyone else my age doing videos on YouTube.  The last is really apparent.  I had to hunt for older YouTubers and, to be honest, most of the ones I found were dead boring. A lot of them seemed more interested in using the platform to promote their business or bitch about people younger than them.  Then they were wondering why their numbers weren't going up? 

Hello?

It's the same reason your kids and grandkids don't come around to see you but once a month.

Nobody wants to be lectured at or talked down to or criticized en masse.

Lighten up!

I would probably talk about books or comics or movies. Maybe some random D&D stuff.

And, of course, writing.

Even though I haven't been doing much of that lately.

I could talk about how that makes me depressed, which makes me want to go out and buy a box of Little Debbie Donut Sticks and eat the entire thing in one go.

Which could lead me to talk about food and good nutrition and how I've been on a low-carb diet for the last three months and the twenty something pounds I've lost so far, but how I've now hit the plateau and how I'm thinking it's time to jump off the diet and just dive into a triple-cheese pizza.

I could talk about guilt.

I could talk about love.

I could talk about sex, and then death.

Oooh! Maybe I could do a collab with Caitlin Doughty from Ask a Mortician!

That would be cool.

But even if I did the video thing, I wouldn't abandon this blog.  

Did you know that this will be the 270th entry, I've done here? And that I'm super close to 10,000 hits?

I'm pleased as punch that I've lasted that long and even more pleased to have regular readers.

But do y'all want to see my face? Do I want to show y'all my face?

Anonymity is liberating.

I could do a vlog about that too!

See? The ideas just roll off the tongue at this stage. 

What next? Who knows?