New Year, New Goals (mostly)

  • Lessons/Classes

    • Silversmithing

    • Mandolin

    • French

  • Weekly Goals

    • read 1 book per week on average

    • go to the gym (or some form of exercise), 2x per week minimum

  • Finish my Voynich

  • Finish my Quilt

  • Make art I could hypothetically sell at a Con

  • Destash my House

Oh, but how did those 2025 goals progress?

Silversmithing

I signed up for a class, it got cancelled. Another class never quite fit with my schedule between travel and work.

That Reading List?

About 7 books completed. Reading my way through American History is still something I want to do, but I do need to balance my academic book consumption with the leisure books.

Overall 2025 was a kick in the teeth. Here’s hoping that 2026 is less so

Merry(?) Christmas, I guess...

At some point in my life I transitioned from “Christmas is Awesome” to “Christmas is vaguely annoying and I don’t know why”.  I know part of it is the commercialization - but that’s the easy answer, and fairly incomplete. I love/hate snow, depending on whether I’m driving and whether the roads have been salted, and how warm my feet are in a given moment. I actually enjoy finding gifts for loved ones in most cases - though receiving gifts is barely awkward and uncomfortable, especially when the gift is something I largely do not care for and must now feign gratitude in recipe of. I love a good fire, in a fireplace or otherwise. Christmas music is largely hit or miss, and there are so few truly good holiday songs that I think the repetition gets to me before anything else. And largely I do life Christmas decorations - what’s not to love about twinkle lights and glitter?

  • Commercialization - hate

  • Snow - yay?

  • Gifts - neutral

  • Fire - yay!

  • Music - no

  • Decorations - yay

So what gives? Why am I so largely irritated by a holiday that should come out a a net neutral?

I think about this every year, and this year it finally crystalized for me - we’ve taken all of the teeth out of winter.

 

Krampus in Quebec, December 2024

 

Last year, in Quebec - where the cold was real and the scary monsters still lurked in the dark - Christmas was amazing.  Even though the Cramps in the parade was largely a cute huggable beasty, the beast was still present. In the US our beast has been defanged, like the abominable snow monster in that Rudolf movie we’ve all grown up on. 

 

What is an Abominable Snow Monster without any teeth?

 

I can’t help but feeling that when you take all the teeth out of the holiday, the joy becomes too saccharine with nothing to temper it. Kids get told Santa only brings presents to good kids, but no kids actually get coal - though lots of kids go without anything at all.  Family gatherings feel more obligatory than for protection and security, and with the need to live where jobs exist and only travel within the schedule your job does or does not allow - that gathering becomes more of an upper class privilege year by year, at the mercy of capitalism rather than the scary monsters in the dark.

The scary monsters in the dark are slowly but steadily replaced by people, and the god of commerce. All of the folklore has been removed and replaced with paper receipts and empty bank accounts. And while winter itself seems to be dying - it’s a balmy 62 degrees in Kansas City today - and a look at the Christmas temperatures since 1895 does show an upward trend in temperature, how much of this disconnect between weather and holiday has to do with the homogenization of culture? Most of the North American Christmas tradition developed in Northern Europe hundreds of years ago. 

Kansas City Christmas temperature highs from 1895 to 2024, trendline in pink.

In the end my distaste of Christmas as currently practiced seems to be a result of several things - distaste for capitalism and the God of Money, displacement from a climate where any of the Christmas traditions even make sense, and the lack of scary monsters to balance the flavor of too many sugar plums. Even the Nutcracker has an army of mice creeping in from every shadow, these days all we have to fear is corporate greed.

tiny women in tubes

After a prolonged break from it, getting back into the mode of working on my Voynich has been difficult at best - partly because of other distraction that are creeping into my brain - but mostly because I’m getting beyond the plant section and into the astrology section, which is so very full of so very many tiny clothed and unclothed people.

If I’ve counted them correctly, there are 536 of them, and I’ve drawn only 79 to date; and drawn them smaller as the original figures essentially had no necks, and giving them necks makes every other part proportionally smaller to fit into the same space.

Tiny neckless nude ladies in tubes.

And a few gentleman as well.

I have overall been impressed by the expressions on all of the original faces though. Some look bored, some look shocked, others joyful, pensive, or confused.

What I have remaining: 2 text pages, 19 plant pages, 19 nymph pages, 21 astrological pages, and the 16 “pharma” pages. 77 pages left out of the 228 page text. I have two weeks off of work around the end of the year and I’m tempted to take one of them and just dive in and see how much of this I can knock out - although I know the pharma pages are going to be the hardest of all of them, right after all of these tiny people - one of my weak points in art - because of my desire to actually match the plants in that section to the plants in the rest of the book. But first I have to get through all of these tiny women in tubes and barrels and splashing in pools or green liquid.

Something something, [complaint about social media], hypocrisy in a blog post...

A few weeks ago my husband and I went to New York for his birthday. Amongst our many New York adventures we went to visit the Museum of Modern Art, because of course we did. There was a huge line around the museum when we got there to even get inside to purchase tickets, which should have been our first tipoff that this was going to be packed to the gills - still we persisted. Found an elevator up tot he firth floor to do our customary wrk from top to bottom, and in almost the first gallery were met with this:

I didn’t even realize that Starry Night was at this museum.

What this photo doesn’t show, can’t show, is the depth of this crowd - filling half the room in a torso to torso squash to take a photo of Starry Night, when we have Starry Night photos at home. Meanwhile people are bumping into Cezanne’s on their journey in and out of the crowd.

I didn’t even try elbowing my way through it to get a real life peak, it felt like the experience would be ruined by the echoing voices and press of bodies. The rest of the visit wasn’t too dissimiliar - with about 25% of the observable visitors actually looking at things. This all comes off as very judgey, as if I wasn’t also taking pictures; but it was emotionally ahrd to be in a space containing all of what it contains, and not being able to really enjoy it while watching most everyone else also not enjoy it - either because of the crowd or because they appeared to be there to check off an item on a bucket list of things to visit in New York. “See, here’s my video of this famous painting to prove I was there,” while I sit back and wonder if you’d even be there if you couldn’t tell anyone about it.

Anyhow…. here’s some pieces I really liked and want to dig into the creators of:

Also these, which was after the point when I could be bothered to take photos of things:

We go on living

We go on living, because we have survived.

Two weeks ago I received texts from two friends, separately, that a mutual friend of ours had passed away suddenly the previous day. And to not contact his girlfriend about it because she was overwhelmed, having been the one to find him as well as the obvious. And to not post about it publicly, because the family hadn’t been contacted yet.

Sometimes, things happen and they break you a little bit. And I was broken by this, have been broken, will continue to be broken. And I’m pissed that he’s gone without so much as a warning. We hadn’t talked since June - and at the time it was about me designing some tattoos for his LARP character for Drachenfest, and that we needed to get together inJuly when he was back from that to catch up, and making tenuous plans for me to join him there the following year.

We never got together in July, and I’m pissed about that as well. My second friend to die this year, and on the day before the funeral my mom had to put my cat down.

Grief is exhausting.

 
 

I will not be finishing my Voynich Manuscript in October.