Company Christmas Party

...The family-owned local chain of garden centers my dad works for, that is. We just got in (my dad and I, that is), and I am deliciously tired from dancing for the past two hours with Sam, one of my dad's co-workers and Sam's girlfriend, whose name escapes me now; somehow, I managed to out-dance Sam, according to my dad, who was watching from the sidelines. Since the company was holding the party over at the country club within whispering distance of our house, there was no excuse for my dad and I *not* going. Of course, my dad's co-workers, who shared a table with us, were kidding him about the "Horrible, long drive" we had to make getting there. ::Grinning:: Of course, certain aspects of me were in full snark mode at some of the guests (snarking behind their backs, anyway), including the goofy guy who wore a red felt fedora and a red shirt with a white tie: he looked like a cross between one of Santa's elves and a Mafia goon!; and the woman who wore a length of gold tinsel garland like a mink stole; and the goony guy who danced like a cross between a pogo stick and an egg-beater. I am not making any of this up!

::Signing out early since she's literally falling asleep at the keyboard::

Thankfully short shift at work

My calves are killing me after last night, so I've been walking a bit stiffly for the past three hours. Thankfully, I'm off my feet now and I'm planning on taking a nice warm bath after supper/washing the dishes. My reward to myself for not squishing the bottom of a bag of chips belonging to a particularly unruly customer today, and not freaking out once during the Christmas Eve rush: a nice long MxO session. Plus Sieges is bugging me something awful: anything to let her get out of my headspace and away from the unwelcome guests.

Notes on yesterday that didn't get posted because I was too tired last night: I had some business at the Lowell library/emails to print out for my mother (which is thankfully coming to an end, since my dad's Christmas present for me is the printer/scanner combo I need/want). While I was there, I finally got my hands on two popular but good books people, including my therapist, reccommended to me:

--Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime", which appealed to me since it's a kind of murder mystery told from the POV of a young man who's an autistic savant. I've started reading it and by turns I love it and find it a little frustrating. The writing is excellent, don't get me wrong: the author once worked with autistic young people, so he has a better idea of how folks with autism spectrum conditions think and feel (yes, we do have feelings: we just have odd ways of showing them or not showing them.) than the so-called average person would. My only problem is that I find the main character's lack of empathy a bit grating on the nerves, but then again, I find that annoying in general. One bit where the main character described his favorite dream, where all the so-called normal people have died and only people like himself are left alive, frankly scared the crap out of me. Now mind you, there's days when I wish the so-called normal people would just plain back off, but having them all just gone... that's scary. Us autism spectrum folks need so-called normal folks, to handle the stuff that drives us mad. They just need to learn to respect us. ::Stops her Aspie train of thought from going off on wierd tangents, comparing the plight of AIs to the plight of autism spectrum folks, otherwise this post will be too long::

--Yann Martell's "Life of Pi", a quirky novel that manages to show the paralells of religion and zoos, seen through the eyes of a very perceptive Hindu lad who's stuck on a liferaft with a tiger, following the wreck of a ship carrying a collection of zoo animals and his family. My therapist had read it and thought it would appeal to me since I'm so fascinated with religion and its place in human experience. One line of it has already burned itself into my consciousness: "I have heard nearly as much nonsense about zoos as I have heard about God and religion"; this from the beginning of an apologia for zoos, pointing out that the animals in zoos are rather better off there than out in the wild where they're subject to the perils of predators and bad weather and hunger. Not to say that they aren't subject to problems in zoos (there's one section where the narrator points out that the human visitors are arguably more dangerous beasts than the zoo animals who will attack only if provoked, or if an intruder breaks into their territory, ie. their enclosure), but if the zoo is well-designed and well-maintained, the animals are content with their environment. How this ties in with religion is going to be interesting to find out.

EDITED TO FIX: Got the title of "Life of Pi" wrong. ::Headdesk::