We're Going to Find Out Who's Nitty and Nice

Merry Christmas!

That is a sincere and hearty holiday greeting, celebrating my first Christmas:

a) devoid of palpable tension and broken logistics
b) where I am not forced to eat the traditional Polish meal of breaded carp
c) not freezing my ass off
d) surrounded by many of my favourite people.

Had a lovely time with my sister and her family, despite some unexpected visitors. Let me elucidate.

Scene: December 24th brunch, after pancakes. We're sitting around, full, content and looking forward to a calm and savoury Christmas. The older child, a handsome boy of six, sports a giant loaf of hair that has not been cut in a few months. His scalp is itchy. I comment on this.

Dad: He's never had his hair this long before. He must be entering the itchy stage of growing his hair out.

His dad has been bald for almost 20 years. It occurs to me that he does not know what he is talking about; I answer that it's only with growing out a shave that one itches. Pause. Dad plunks son on knee to take a good look at his head. Dad's eyes grow wider, then narrow more intently, then widen again. Very gently, his right eye begins to twitch. He is silent.

His four-year old daughter, sitting beside them, makes an observation.

Daughter: He's got ants in his hair...ooooh...

Dad: Those aren't ants.

No, they are soon admitted to be lice. This discovery prompts a range of responses, from bewildered tears from the wee ones at the thought of creepy crawlies upon them, which soon gives way to curiosity to see the "Sea Monkeys who live in our hair", and of course, much revulsed laughter from the adults.

Mostly, though, we all begin to scratch. We cannot stop our hands from creeping towards our heads, and every itch seems to herald infestation. My sister apologizes profusely, a look of hilarity and horror in her eyes, and then quickly assures me I'm likely safe as I had only just arrived. I, remembering my nephew clubbing his hairbrush against my head the previous night, am not so sure.

The infestation seems strangely appropriate to the time of year. A revival of an overlooked detail of the biblical story, as it's likely that headlice were also carried to Bethlehem by the Three Wise Men in addition to gold, frankincense and myrrh. Then again, the homeless family featured in the story of Christmas was living in a stable, not an upper-middle class home in one of the most expensive cities in North America.

It galvanizes us all into action, collecting stuffed animals to send to the cleaners and doing endless loads of laundry and researching Pediculosis humanus capitis ("Hey, did you know that a louse can take on the colours of their surroundings, like a chameleon?") and vacuuming and running to the store for a family pack of Nix shampoo and fine-toothed combs.

Then we all bond over treatment and applaud my nephew's very short haircut given by dad, who is gloating in his baldness, and pick at each other with special combs. Being vermin-free (and treated anyway, thank you very much), it falls to me to prepare the Christmas Eve feast while my family groom each other, attentive as baboons.

Opening the wine at the first hint of darkness, I propose a round of scabies for Family Christmas 2010. Silently, I plan a holiday by myself on a remote and sterile island.

Happiest of holidays to you and you and you,

Ms. Gretchen Rutte

Putting the O in 2OO9

www.globalorgasm.org

In case you missed it yesterday, it was Global Orgasm Day. I inadvertantly celebrated it (before I knew the significance of the day) so if there's a truce declared in one of the wars, you can thank yours truly for the effort. Seriously, it's nice to have a selfless, pseudo-spiritual reason to tickle your fancy...though reading below, it would seem to exclude orgasms brought on by hate- and/or pity-fucks.

Here's their rational for getting off on the winter solstice, Dec. 21:

To effect positive change in the energy field of the earth through conscious dedication of orgasmic energy to the vibration of Peace. Our minds and our biology influence Matter and Quantum Energy fields, so by concentrating our thoughts before, during, and after orgasm on peace and loving-kindness, the synergy of high orgasmic physical energy combined with the power of positive visualization could help reduce global levels of violence, hatred and fear. Orgasm is the largest possible instantaneous surge of human biological and spiritual energies. It is a biological gift! What better way to achieve your resolution for Peace?

Terminus: A Good Year

"Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television."

-From a speech by Gretchen's Favourite Person She Does Not Know Yet of 2009, Paul Hawken. To read the whole commencement speech to the University of Portland (about 10 minutes) check out http://www.up.edu/commencement/default.aspx?cid=9456&pid=3144

As the end of the month approaches, so does the end of the year. As the end of the year approaches, so does the end of the decade. Think about it: the end of the Noughts or Os or whatever lame moniker was once applied to the first few breaths of this new millenium.

I, for one, am happy to have them out of the way. I'm ready for this century to fall into adolescence, into the wonder years and tempestuous teens. Enough of this New Millenium stuff. None of us alive today will be around for the next new millenium except as dust particles, and none of you reading this will likely be around past 2060. Never having had a Life Plan that extended beyond a hazy few weeks or months, a year is about as broad a time frame as I can comprehend. But I like what I catch glimpses of ahead.

First, some reflections on the year that is passing. Good one, I think. Big break up, still remarkably amicable. This I am proud of. (Why I am suddenly writing like a cross between Yoda and an old Yiddish man, know do I?)

I'm proud of the fact that my ex and I are still able to love each other, with appropriate distance and limits. Recognize that this love is like squinting into the sun, smiling at each other and waving goodbye, one person on the departing ship and the other on the pier. This is actually how it is most of the time, despite flashes of anger and bitterness and sadness and confusion. Prosaically, this love may be possible because I've finished renovating the house and have it listed, and hope to have it sold by the spring. Or ironically, it may be because he listens to me more carefully and with greater respect than ever before.

One day, he will be a fine man for someone else. One day, I will be a great woman for someone else. First, we both have some figuring out to do and some business we need to take care of. If one believes (as I do) that you get the mate you deserve, then I want to be sure I'm fit to be in a relationship with someone I respect and desire.

This has been a great time for me to get physically fit, for the first time in years. This may have been a response to recognizing that my emotional fitness will take an indeterminate time and much reflection. Being in need of action, I can only target physical fitness. Now, if I don't exercise I am driven mad by an unsettling combination of goat-like horniness and bovine anxiety.

Truthfully, I am also vain. I have time for vanity these days, and find I like looking at myself if I have no one else to look at. Vain and rigorous, for I don't want to settle for an unfit body and poorish health as I have no valid excuse to do so.

A good year as well as I gained greater success in my career than ever before, then walked away from it. I still haven't found sure footing, but am unwavering in the rightness of my decision despite the financial hit I've taken, despite the cheap and pretty glories that could've been mine had I stayed in. It's good to have made the decision, and look back and know it was the right one even if the present is still sorting itself out.

A good year to fall in love with my friends, both new and old. I am lucky to have some very lovely people in my life. Thank you.

A very good year to rediscover myself sexually and romantically. I understand how some of you may blush on my behalf when it comes to my descriptions of sex toy shopping, but if I do not take charge of my own pleasure, who will? And why should I be circumspect about it? There's nothing romantic about masturbation--the word even has a smarmy, pseudo-scientific feel to it--but it's good to feel entitled to the control over when and how I get off, when I am alone.

When I am not alone, it is a question of romance, and what an endlessly fascinating question it is. An enigma I'm still trying to figure out, and likely will still be figuring out in the year ahead if I can curb my impatience.

I have a blind spot when it comes to seeing myself through the eyes of the one I want. Other men who want me beyond the comfortable boundaries of friendship are easy to read. It's the one I want that I can't fathom.

In response, my M.O. is to be somewhat inscrutable, friendly and to feign patience. The instinct to talk it out, in detail and at length, is a common one to my sex. But I instinctively have fought it this time, and I persist in thinking it a wise course of action. I've liked to think that I don't play games, have thought I was somehow above the artfulness practised by girlygirls both in fact and fiction. In the end, the direct and passionate heroine triumphs, right?

Well, perhaps. Experience has taught me the virtue in temperance, and the pleasure to be found in patience. I like the idea of each of us not quite knowing what to make of the other, and being interested in drawing the other out, and not having definitions for the feelings we may experience. Pleasure tempered with pain, bitter with sweet, curious and curiouser. Like Alice in Wonderland: not quite a game, more a strategy. Out of necessity, one developed on the fly. So be it, it's what I've chosen and at present, it suits.

Finally, this has been a good year from which to launch myself into a better one. I have no regrets about saying goodbye to it. I am cheerful and foolhardy in thinking 2010 will be full of joys and lessons and hard-earned victories.

Play well in December's wane, little ones. I hope this year has been as good to you as it has to me.

G/night
G

PS Back to the quote I started with, I cancelled my television service recently. The weather's too shit to see the stars, but I rent dvds and am writing a book. I'll let you know how it goes.

One Day

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice.

-Mary Oliver, American poet.
www.poetryfoundation.org

Glüwein recipe (yum!)

Hot Spiced Wine

6 cloves
4 sugar cubes (or 2 Tbsp honey)
Rum to pour over sugar
4 cups red wine (dry)
1 orange to zest
1 lemon to zest
3 cinnamon sticks

Pour red wine into a pot with the cinnamon, cloves and zest from the orange and lemon. Let it warm up (but don’t cook it, just heat it until it begins to steam).

Place the sugar cubes in a metal colander and hold over the pot. Pour a little rum on the sugar and light on fire (careful, now). Let the sugar drip into the wine. (If this seems too unsafe for you, just drop sugar into the wine mixture and add a dash of rum in; alternately, you can add a couple dollops of honey to taste).

Use a strainer, pour the Glüwein into cups and serve immediately. Should make enough for six good size glasses or eight smaller ones.

Build It And They Will Come...Oh Yes.

Madam and madamoiselles,

I'm back home, feeling slightly deflated after being a short time in such a beautiful European town. My ego got stroked by having people want to talk to me, spend time with me and go out to shows due to my being there such a short time. Also, it was flattering to be desired once again, both en route to my destination and more innocently, by a very decent man there. Even on the plane back from Frankfurt I made a cheerful new friend and penpal. I obviously exude a pheromone only detectable to foreigners and the peripatetic.

Coming back, I keenly feel the absence of young and interesting single men in my hometown. Also, people in general seem preoccupied with getting the final weeks knocked off before the holidays. When did the holidays become about as much fun as a hip replacement?

Myself, I am feeling lackadaisical. Perhaps it's the jetlag or the onset of a mild cold today; perhaps it's the short days and woodstove and endless cups of tea, but I'm feeling quite unperturbed about the impending Xmas. I'm going to eventually hack down a tree on my property, and do some baking and make pierogies, but I'm hoping mainly to hang out with friends and family drinking cocoa and gluhwein and maybe even the lethal, legendary Jolly Santa. I concocted this drink a couple of years ago, one night with my ex.

Jolly Santa (one serving)

-hot cocoa
-one shot creme de menthe, peppermint schnapps or Fireball
-one shot cognac or brandy
-one shot creme de cacao
-whipped cream or miniature marshmallows
-cinnamon stick (can be used as a straw!)

One of these bad boys and all ye faithful shall be gunned. These are especially good to accompany a viewing of 'White Christmas', as the drunker one gets the more ribald the commentary. Between the linebacker shoulders of manwoman Rosemary Clooney, the effete Bing and the anorexic whatsherface, only Danny Kaye is spared. Plus, you can really belt out the title track at the end with a Jolly Santa fire in your belly.

Speaking of hot fire below, let me update you on a recent breakthrough made on the sex toy front. Some of you may recall my disappointment several months ago, upon learning that the Big Indian was discontinued, and that only regular Indians now existed, alongside rabbits, dolphins and something resembling an aardvark.

I did the best I could, but the effect had been underwhelming me for quite some time, to the point where I'd been preferring abstinence to the pitiful whine of AA batteries. However, subsisting on just memories of sexual satiety was driving me to distraction, so on a recent trip to a larger town I stopped in at a retail outlet whose Yellow Pages ad proclaimed the largest regional selection.

The saleslady Cindy was very gracious. She patiently listened to me as I outlined my needs: girth, length, swing, stim, all powered by C or D batteries. And being an old-fashioned hetero, something shaped like a cock, not a weird girlyhand or a geometric shape. However, nothing fulfilled all these criteria. I got close to buying one unit, but after being able to stop it cold with only a minor squeeze of my fist concluded that this would not do at all. I pride myself on beartrap-strong Kegels, all part of good core conditioning.

The only solution in the end was to go a little MacGyver. After two hours in the store, I emerged with the raw materials to construct my very own penisthing to spec. Straight vibrating rod, gelatinous cockandball sheath, vibrating rabbit; throw in a cock ring, Hot Oil silicone lube (apparently KY is for shmucks) and I kid you not, Sex Toy Cleaner and Sanitizer (locally made!). Cost: $218 plus change. Spectro gel also works as a cleaner, by the way. With the A-Team theme playing in my head, I slapped together my new toy back home. I have christened him Frank (short for Frankenstein) and I am very happy to report that Ah! It's! Alive!

Anyway, having bought a couple of kits to cannibalize for parts, I have quite a nice Xmas present out of the leftovers. Anyone in need, or stumped for a present for that hard-to-buy person on their list can contact me (gretchenrutte@gmail.com). The kit contains a midsize vibrator, anal/vaginal beads (I can't see myself sticking these up my bum anytime soon, but for you adventurous ladies or if you have that special man in your life...), a trial size lube and a cock ring resembling a small silicone cheese grater. It looks quite nice, in a little box with a slutty blonde on the cover. It could be just what Uncle Bart needs, or a spicy Secret Santa gift at your office party. What can I say? I'm embracing the spirit of giving this holiday season.

Now am curling up with a movie and a box of Kleenex, sniffle.
G