Holidaze

This week in particular I feel like I am living in some kind of parallel universe.

Most people I know are racing around, buying last-minute presents or wrapping things up at work so they can enjoy a week off here or a couple of three-day weekends there.

Or they're remembering how labor-intensive latkes are, having not made them in a year.

Or they're making pilgrimages around the city to see the Nutcracker or the Rockettes or one of the more newfangled holiday shows.

Or they're taking their kids skating at Rockefeller Center.

Or they're standing in line at the post office with shopping bags full of gifts to be shipped.

Or they're hurriedly addressing envelopes for this year's holiday cards.

Or they're decorating a tree and hanging twinkly lights.

And even though we have been going through some of the holiday motions ourselves, even though I hear Christmas music every time I step into a store, even though the lobby of every public building seems to have sprouted a beard of fake evergreen, even though our balmy autumn has finally turned to chilly winter, it just doesn't feel like the holiday season.

The rhythms are all wrong.

Instead of winding down, I feel like I am gearing up.

After a year "off" from work and school, if not from illness, this holiday season is nothing like the breather I used to know. Even last year, in the midst of a fresh diagnosis, two surgeries, and many tests, I had the weight of a semester behind me, and its conclusion lifted a burden I'd been carrying for months. It was impossible not to feel some sense of relief and release—or change, at least—even as a new burden took its place.

This year—of interminable limbo, of doggedly facing the world a day at a time, of never knowing with any certainty what the next week or month might bring—shows no signs of letting up. The calendar feels like nothing more than an arbitrary construct, and I expect that turning the page to 2007 will not yield the sense of renewal to which I always look forward.

For the third time now in six long weeks, it looks like my dad is poised to leave the ICU for a rehab hospital, a most welcome development but also the beginning of another extended phase of the protracted healing process.

Meanwhile, Zach and I (but mostly Zach) are working furiously to finish the house upstate, buying furniture and housewares in a frenzy, against a deadline, while relentless holiday shoppers are systematically depleting inventories all around us. There is so much assembly required, so many tradespeople due to come through, that only two people whose sense of the possible is as distorted as ours would ever attempt the feat. If a camera crew could capture the next two weeks in time-lapse video, I have no doubt it would play as a farce.

And then there is my return to J-school, where classes officially start four weeks from tomorrow, a veritable lifetime away but for the fact that by then I will need to have read six books, done dozens of hours of reporting, and produced the first draft of my 4,000- to 6,000-word master's project. There's a reason the faculty call this the "alleged" winter break.

I'm reminded of a friend who started, but did not finish, his college career at Cornell, where he said the motto was, "School work, social life, sleep. Choose two." That so neatly encapsulates the painful truth that time is a zero-sum game, that everything is a calculated trade-off, that the cutting-room floor of life is littered with dearly held hopes and plans that were sacrificed to the everyday business of living.

Our friends John and Jo (hi, John and Jo!) sent us a holiday card calling this "[t]he time of year when some celebrate, some contemplate, some cope."

I long for things to celebrate.

I crave the time to contemplate.

But at the end of this very, very long year, I will be more than content—grateful, really—if all I can do is cope.