(no subject)

Thought I'd be leaving in time, just for once, then I managed to smash this potted plant, one of those philodendron things with long vines, which of course then needed to be disentangled, the broken-off vines put in a bucket of water... and it was already 9 am again when I arrived at the stables. Decided to just take the horse out for a walk, faster without having to put the saddle and tack on her and less chilling, too. There wasn't much to be done anyway, with the ground frozen like that.

Cold, but very, very beautiful, hazy sun still low at 9:30, slanting through the trees, casting everything in a pale golden light, giving her coat a reddish sheen. Earth frozen bone-hard, in places white with frost, hooves ringing; long grass on the hill, bleached almost to white, slightly swaying in the wind.

Fortunately only three hours of work; the prospect of Thursday to Saturday pitches me into a fit of depression anyway. To be honest though, so far the Christmas season hasn't been quite as horrible as I expected it to be. Either I'm just getting used to it, or I'm generally more balanced this year and less inclined to make things needlessly stressful for myself by taking everything too personal. My mantra this year - if we've run out of certain books, it's neither my fault, nor my problem. Should be self-understood, but I used to feel personally responsible if I had to disappoint customers.

Only two weeks to go.

But to be confronted day after day not only with the average unavoidable dose of Christmas madness... It's near impossible to see our customers as individual people, who all celebrate their own Christmas, who maybe do consider the gifts they buy; what gets driven home is the equation of Christmas with money, emphasised further by our boss's insistence on the importance of a good Christmas season. Combined with the stress it tends to put you off the holiday generally. I haven't bought presents for anyone yet, because I'm simply too disgusted to enter a store.
I'm not really in a position to moralise about the crass materialism of Christmas though, because after two years of 'woe is me, I'm so depressed, I don't want or need anything' I've put a DVD player and the Babylon 5 DVDs on my wish list, and am already rather looking forward to re-acquainting myself with the early seasons. Nevertheless the mixture of commercials, shopping-tips, economic statistics, and reports about the importance of Christmas shopping for the economy you get from the media is - unsettling; a bit sickening. The way it's made out to be it's almost a civic duty to shop as much as possible. And at the same time only a few days ago I was reading again how more and more young people are in debt. We're living in a system that relies on us buying more and more useless crap. Maybe I'm naive, but that scares me.


Re-potted the plant, it's still looking a little bedraggled, but I hope it'll survive - it's not very pretty, especially as it just lost quite a few leaves, but it's the only one that I haven't managed to kill yet and I'm kind of attached to it. It goes way back, too; the original, as family legend has it, was brought home by me when they distributed the plants from our class-room after our final year of primary school.

Still in the process of tidying up the apartment, because I'm having the yearly maintenance of my hot-water heater tomorrow and my father is coming over to let the guy in, seeing as I'll be working.


:: sigh :: This wasn't really the entry I wanted to write, either... notepad is getting very cluttered up.