Happy Boxing Day

Christmas is over, but of course it actually isn't, because everyone and their dog is shopping today, returning badly thought out gifts and spending gift cards and taking advantage of sales. Meanwhile Jews everywhere are celebrating day 2 of Chanukah, a holiday that celebrates the struggle for religious freedom, while contending with a new upsurge in religious intolerance and fundamentalism that threatens the very freedom to worship that we hold dear in this country.

That's about where we are at this moment.

Yesterday I went over to my parents' house for Chanukah dinner before heading to a Christmas party thrown by some friends of theirs. One of their neighbors had put yard signs up with the words "Happy Holidays" with a "no" slashed circle around them and the words "Merry Christmas" written below. My partner remarked that he wanted to go knock on their door and wish them a happy Chanukah every day for the next eight days. That would be funny, and it would prove a point.

I've already covered the whole "War on Christmas" nonsense in a post on my other blog, but the whole issue really hits home with me quite hard.

Look, we live in a country whose founding principles were, at least in theory, based on the idea that everyone should have certain freedoms--freedom of religion being paramount among them. And now a small group of the people who have the most religious freedom in this country, that would be Christians, are complaining because some folks are choosing to say "Happy Holidays" instead of assuming that everyone they meet is Christian and needs to hear "Merry Christmas" everywhere they go.

Now, people have been saying "Happy Holidays" ever since I can remember, and it's never caused a major problem that I can see--till now. Nutjobs like Pat Robertson and Bill O'Reilly are constantly looking for a new justification for their twisted view that Christians, who, I remind you, make up about 90% of the United States population, are some kind of persecuted group of cultural and religious outsiders. To do this, they constantly have to seek out "threats" to their narrow vision of Christian "morality." We know the villains in their little morality play: homosexuals, the pro-choice movement, Hollywood, the "liberal media," which is an odd phrase considering that most major media outlets are owned by right-wing corporations.

Well, it's my view that they're running out of ideas, and this whole war on the phrase "Happy Holidays" is kind of a last desperate plea for attention. I believe that most Americans are intelligent enough to see through this frankly mindless propaganda campaign, and to pinpoint the underlying social agenda of the radical right: to turn America into a mythical 1950s Pleasantville where everything is black and white and easy and, well, pleasant.

Those of us on the other side of the argument really don't see what all of the fuss is about. I wish Christians a Merry Christmas, they wish me a Happy Chanukah. Or they wish me a Merry Christmas if they don't know that I'm Jewish. And frankly I don't give a damn. Wish me a happy blue monkey day if you feel like it.

Look, the point is that at least in theory, we live in a country based on the notion of religious freedom, which was a pretty radical idea when we started this whole American experiment. And we've done a pretty good job of keeping to that idea as a whole. And I believe religious freedom means more than what someone says to me when I go to buy a sweater. I believe religious freedom means the freedom to worship whatever God you choose to worship and to celebrate whatever holiday you choose to celebrate. And it means the freedom not to worship a God and not to celebrate a holiday, and not to force other people to be wished a merry holiday they don't celebrate.

So to Bill O'Reilly and Pat Robertson, I would like to wish you both a very happy Chanukah, and to the rest of you, please, lighten up, have a drink, and really, look up the definition of the word "merry" and take it to heart. If anything, idiots who think there's a war on Christmas just need to be laughed at, in a very merry way.

Birthdays, Fortunes, and Wheels

A few months ago I went to a mass audition for Wheel of Fortune, which was held at this flea market in the middle of nowhere. I don't know why it was held at a flea market in the middle of nowhere, but that's where they held it. Anyway, they gave everyone standing in line waiting to audition these little audition cards where you were to write down your pertinent info. All of the cards were then put into a hopper and then drawn randomly.

Through sheer blind chance, my name was called, and I went up onstage and put on my best "vapidly excited, happy and outgoing" face and mugged for the camera. I never thought I'd have a chance of actually getting picked to go up there, but such is fate.

The procedure from there was, hypothetically, that the Wheel of Fortune people would evaluate the contestants who made it onstage, and a few random people who didn't quite get there, and pick people to attend a final audition. I never thought I'd get a letter inviting me to a final audition. But then today in the mail I got a letter informing me that I had been chosen.

Amazing.

Now, mind you, if I get on Wheel of Fortune, then I will either a) bomb completely or b) win billions of dollars. Because I'm damned good at Wheel of Fortune. I can usually guess the clue three or four turns before the idiots on the television even get a clue. But I also have stage fright like a scared monkey being screamed at by a deranged ...insert angry pop culture person here.

The neat thing about getting this letter today is that tomorrow is my birthday, when I will turn the totally unremarkable age of 27. I'm long past the age when birthdays meant something--when it was the first time you could see an R-rated movie, give blood, vote, drive or drink, which are really the only five things that matter in the universe anyway, and now birthdays are just like, "oh, thanks for reminding me about my own mortality. Appreciate that."

It also sucks having a birthday so close to Christmas. Because I hate Christmas. In my version of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge would have been like, "hey, my house is haunted by asshole ghosts. I should move." And then I would have gotten the hell out of there and moved into a small cabin in the woods where I wouldn't have to deal with all of the self-righteous moralistic bullshit that makes up that story.

Bah humbug.

But I do enjoy Chanukah, because it's a great excuse to get together with family, light some stuff on fire, gamble and sing badly. And get presents. Which is entirely thanks to Christmas, by the way. Chanukah was quite happy being an extremely minor, giftless holiday until Christmas came along and shoved visions of sugarplums up our collective tailpipes.

Speaking of giving gifts, here's something that annoys me. Getting a gift isn't really that great of a deal. Because it means that you've got to spend as much money on that person as they did on you. And chances are that person didn't even really get you what you wanted anyway. So essentially you're spending money getting yourself something you don't want, and giving someone else something they don't necessarily want either.

Fun.

Guess it proves the old adage that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Which is an odd phrase, if you think about it. Sure, lunch, but what about breakfast and dinner? Can I have a free breakfast at least? Maybe just a bowl of cereal? Or some toast?

This post has gotten way off track. Did it even have a track to begin with? Yes, it did. Birthdays, fortunes, and wheels. Well, we covered Wheel of Fortune, and tomorrow's definitely my birthday--birthdays are the one time when gifts really are gifts, although again there, you're just spending money later on someone else's birthday, ok, maybe I need to get over myself--but yeah, I think we've covered those topics pretty thoroughly.

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Hi there.

Author Dented is the brainchild of the same brain that brought you lefthook, but its focus will be much, much less political. The stated goal of this blog is to bring out perhaps another side of the writing of Ethan J., a look at life, the Universe, and everything, you know, stuff.

Those of you with at least a few geek points to your name will recognize the title of this blog as a corruption of the name of Arthur Dent, the protagonist in Douglas Adams' great trilogy of five books, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Dent is a bewildered and unsuspecting human who finds himself bewildered and unsuspectingly aboard an alien space craft after his best friend turns out to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford, which is somewhere in England. Anyway, I won't beleaguer you with the details--go read the books, they're very good.

I use Arthur Dent as my muse for this blog because in many ways I too am bewildered by a lot of what I see going on in the world, and I'd like to take that bewilderment and write it down so that you, my dear readers, who don't yet know you're my dear readers because you haven't discovered me, may share in my bewilderment and join me on this galactic....etcetera.

Of course, knowing me, I'll have this grand vision for this blog and it'll go great for a couple of weeks and then I'll just drop it and move on with my sad, pathetic, and frankly exasperating job as a paralegal, when really all I want to do is be noticed and be like Sarah Jessica Parker on Sex and the City, who gets to sleep until noon and write a column for the New York Times and be fabulous and live in New York City.

Yeah, that's realistic.

In any event, if there's an editor or someone in the publishing industry reading this who's intrigued and wants to know more, I could use some positive encouragement. Something like, "hey, I like what you've got, you've got pep and zing and zip and other words like that, if I could read more I might be willing to publish you or give you a writing job so you can quit getting up at ungodly hours and working your butt off for an attorney who doesn't appreciate you and tiptoeing around the rightwingers at the office who have the number for Focus on the Family in their rolodexes and don't know you're gay."

That'd be nice. Though, I must say, the money's good. Ok, the money's not fantastic, but it's good.

Anyway, dear, sweet, imaginary, unsuspecting future readers, I bid you hello, and welcome to this, my contribution to the world of delightful social commentary and other wacky writing in the spirit of Mark Twain, Dave Barry, and Carrie Bradshaw.

Stay tuned. Yes, I do always say that.