One at a Time, Please!

So, in the high school where I teach, students were just half a day past wearing their “sexy _____ “ costumes or prom dresses (the Halloween costumes of choice for high school girls and boys, respectively) when there was an announcement encouraging students to participate in this years “Holiday Sharing” program, whereby we provide toys to kids in need for the holidays. I assumed they were referring to Veteran’s Day presents for less fortunate kids, but NO! They were talking about Christmas (or Hanukkah, or the non-existent, December gift giving holidays for Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Zoroastrians).

I love holidays a lot. They make the other days bearable. And I am certainly NOT one of those curmudgeons who says that because we live in a wonderfully diverse country, with many ethnic and religious cultures, we should not celebrate any one particular holiday out of fear of leaving someone out. I say celebrate ALL of them!

But, there’s gotta’ be a line somewhere! I would like to offer a suggestion that we limit ourselves to focusing on only one holiday at a time, whatever that holiday is. And along those lines, to acknowledge or pre-lebrate any holiday before an earlier holiday has passed (such as Christmas before Thanksgiving), would be considered a social crime punishable by ostracization and utter banishment from the larger culture. Seems harsh, but I really can’t take listening to carols before I’ve even finished my hand turkey or extinguished my Diwali lights.

Christian, might a beg a farthing of your thoughts on this one?

Christian: I see your point but don’t Hanukkah and Christmas overlap one another? How are you supposed to only focus on one at a time if they are occurring at the same time? Same goes for my birthday month and Valentine’s day. If everyone is just focused on celebrating my birthday month then you can pretty much kiss Valentine’s day goodbye.

Seems like this plan of yours is full of holes.

Pat:  Oh, Christian. I think you’re suffering from “goylexia”. It’s okay...apparently a lot of us gentiles are ill-informed ignoramuses!

Christian: So Hanukkah and the 12 days of Christmas aren’t the same thing. Who knew.

Pat: But you raise a good point, and I should have clarified. IF two or more holidays overlap, then I think it is just fine to celebrate BOTH simultaneously. For example, when Ramadan extends over Columbus Day, then I think it is perfectly appropriate to eat food we stole from Native Americans before sunrise or after sundown. See? Multi-brations can be easy!

And with regards to February? Well, I think it stands to reason that a certain fellow blogger of mine should be receiving kisses all through the month! Are all you ladies out there ready for that?

Christian: OK, but what about Canadian Thanksgiving? It is in October and since they don’t celebrate American Thanksgiving, that means they could start celebrating Christmas in November but Americans wouldn’t be allowed to do so until December. 

I don’t know how Canadian Thanksgiving is traditionally

celebrated but I’m assuming it’s something like this.

This plan of yours seems kind of racist.

Pat:  I thought we’ve covered this in earlier blogs. I have no problems with Canadians, other than them as people, their oddly valued currency, and their latitudes. They don’t count in this discussion.

If you’d like to pose another question I would be happy to answer it.

Christian: Oh yeah. I forgot about your unnatural uneasiness towards Canadians (don’t forget, our glorious Canadian readers, I still love you. So direct all hateful comments towards Pat, eh).

Don’t get me wrong. I do like this concept of yours of only celebrating one holiday at a time. But it’s just one of those ideas that seems too good to actually work without any negative side effects. Like Cat Stevens.

Let me Google something really quick.

*several weeks later*

Aha! OK, what about Arbor Day? In my extensive research to prove your idea bad, I learned that Arbor Day can be celebrated on different dates depending on which state you are in. Typically they are in April.

So Mr. Big Shot Idea man, let’s say hypothetically Easter falls on April 20th for a given year.  What about people who live in a state where Arbor Day isn’t until, say  April 24th but are traveling to visit family for Easter in a neighboring state that had already celebrated Arbor Day. Under your rules they should all be killed. Oh wait, you said banished didn’t you? Not killed. Either way, with your rules this family can’t spend easter with their relatives.

This plan of yours seems very anti-family.

Pat:  Do we have a day honoring Cat Stevens? If not...that’s a really good idea. Before daybreak we could all gather together to watch morning break, and then sing out together (because we WANT to), and the big finale to the day would be when the Tillerman visits your house and deposits magical tea in your pot. Don’t read too far into that last idea.

I’m all for family, by the way. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for families to split apart and live in different states. And if they do they should not be able to celebrate holidays together. That’s all.

Christian: OK, I’ll concede. For now. We can go with your plan of only celebrating one holiday at a time, but I still feel like it’s too good to be true and will eventually lead to impending doom. In the meantime I’m just going to light up my Cat Stevens tree and enjoy the holidays.

Origins Of This Blog

Performativity!  A little background: We wanted the first word of our new blog to be something exciting and powerful (like our sex appeal). Or if not exciting and powerful, maybe something shocking or controversial (more like our sex appeal). We pondered on it a bit but couldn’t come up with the right word. We considered Might! Dynamo! Shazam! Waffles! But none of them seemed to be the right one.

But eventually, Pat came across Performativity. It’s confusing, hints at a measurement of action, and only has a slight suggestion of something positive (exactly like our sex appeal!). It was perfect. But what does it mean? The drunkards over at Websters claim performativity is not a word, but google yields this definition:

Performativity is an interdisciplinary term often used to name the 

capacity of speech and language in particular, but other forms of 

expressive but non-verbal action as well, to intervene in the course 

of human events.

Some may find this a little confusing but the gang at wikipedia clears it all up:

Performativity accounts for situations where a proposition may 

constitute or instantiate the object to which it is meant to refer, as 

in so-called "performative utterances".

Exactly. Now that we had our first word out of the way we could begin figuring out what our blog would look like and less importantly, what it would be about.

Pat and I decided to meet for beers at a local drinking establishment to hash out ideas. Armed with a laptop and our wits, we brainstormed, conceptualized, and plotted. The ideas flowed like fancy seasonal beers from a tap. Pint after pint. To ensure none of this mental gold was lost we took notes and Pat e-mailed them to ourselves that night. The next day we found two e-mails in our inbox. The first one just contained one sentence:
    
             We're high on ourselves and people like us.

The second contained the following:

more ideas (I didn't mean to hit "send"

Debbie Harry was naked in Videodrome

links

Do I need a phone for that?

Useless. What does any of that have to do with blogging or even mean for that matter? As you can see our intoxicated selves severely let us down. Damn them! It’s frustrating how irresponsible they can be, not to mention their arrogance. Who do they think they are anyways?

Since the brainstorming while drinking plan didn’t work out, we began e-mailing back and forth to try and figure out what we were going to do with this whole blog thing. Here’s our e-mail exchange discussing what the format should be:

Christian:  As for the blog format. One idea would be to do a back and forth thing within the same post vs. you writing a long post, let’s say on lawn mowing, and then me writing a long response and posting each of those as separate blog posts. So the idea being that the literary dynamite we end up with would be one blog post of us going back and forth. Each response could be just a few sentences or just a few words or longer if desired! Hopefully I'm making sense here. I'll try and think of more ways to ramble on in my explaining of it and get back to you if you need further rambling. I've also decided not to go back and reread this message, for clarity and ttypos, before sending it to you. 

Pat: So...are you thinking our posts should be longer or shorter than

your instructions on how long our posts should be?

            Christian: I was picturing our back and forth comments going into
            a single post vs. posting each of our comments as individual single 
            posts. Or we could also do back and forths as single long posts too 
            and post them as individual single posts. I don't understand why this
            isn't clearer to you.

Pat: huh?

Christian: Cool. I'm glad we are on the same page now.

After more deliberation we realized figuring out a format was just too hard. Therefore we decided to narrow down our format to having no set format. Meaning it could take any format we wanted to write in at the current time. We now needed to figure out what our blog would look like.

            Christian: How about for our logo we show a picture of the two of us

            surrounded by a bunch of cool guys like Han Solo and George

            Clooney or Aragorn from Lord of the Rings?

Pat:  Can it be girls too because I would like Maya Angelou. 

Christian: umm... OK, how about this? We split the screen in two
            with me on one side surrounded by cool guys like Han Solo, George
            Clooney and Aragorn, etc. and you on the other side with Maya 
            Angelou and whoever else you want?

Pat:  Also, don’t you think there should be some kind of kick 

ass unicorn too?

Christian: Of course. A kick ass unicorn goes without saying.

The logo above is what we eventually came up with. If you are reading this in the future it may have changed by then, but since you are probably having this blog telepathically implanted into your self-consciousness as instant memories, what do you care spaceboy.

Next we needed a name. This was hard but we eventually settled on Point Counter-Point Point Point. Mostly because we couldn’t think of anything better. My thoughts on it were that it somewhat describes what we will be doing here: discussing our different points of views on various topics (The Point Counter-Point part) in addition to writing out our individual thoughts and ideas on our own when we desire (The Point Point part). Pat on the other hand thought the Point Point part was signifying how we tend to really ramble on when trying to make a point.

Lastly, we needed to figure out what we would actually write about. We did some research and found out that about nine out of every ten blogs weren’t about anything specific and were basically just the random ramblings of the author(s). Therefore we decided that the obvious thing for us to do would be to do the exact same thing in the hopes that we could eventually reach that elusive 10 out of 10! Thus our blog will be about nothing specific...uh... I mean our blog will be about everything! Current affairs, parenting, frisbees, grocery cart detailing -- any topic! You name it and we now have the freedom to write about it. Take that terrorism!

There you go. The origins of our blog and our first blog post. If you are wanting to learn more about us as individuals, we have an About Us page for christsakes.