It’s early Saturday morning on Christmas Eve of the Christian celebration Christmas and the commercial secular holiday of the same name.

I prefer all-year-round good will myself, X-mas if I have to refer to the “holiday” at all.

My girlfriend has been bah-humbugging it for weeks. “Why bother getting all down about it?” I ask her. “I’m just glad to have an extra day off from work and more time to spend with you.”

“I guess I’m not there yet,” she replies. We both laugh.

This morning we are going to shoot hoops. We’ve been talking about it since we moved into this apartment over a year ago. We live across from a neighborhood park with a basketball court that is almost always in use. We can hear basketballs bouncing 24/7 from our bedroom window. However there is often a lull in b-ball players and dribbling action from 7-8 a.m. on Saturday mornings.

This morning we will go out onto the court at about 7:15 with our brand new full-size Spaulding NBA basketball and work it out. However, the catch is this: we don’t want to be caught by the neighborhood kids, especially the teenagers. Why? Two middle aged white lesbians on the court in Bushwick, Brooklyn, come on! Those kids will kick our asses — at basketball, that is, and we’ll be he laughingstock of the entire block.

I’m just kidding about being a laughingstock. But, I really don’t move very fast and haven’t played basketball, or any sport, for decades. I never run, anyone I know can attest to that, not even to catch the bus. So, it will be interesting to see how I handle chasing a basketball. Walking briskly, I suppose. I will say I am vey limber for a not-in-shape 48-year-old woman.

So, it’s about an hour until I wake my sleeping beauty, but I’ve been up for awhile, eager to get the show on the road. I’m also thinking about breakfast and wondering which local eateries might be open early. It’s very casual with my and my gal for the holidays, which I like to spell holidaze, emphasis on the daze!

It seems to me that many people go into a consumerist trance during the time between Thanksgiving and New Years, maniacally spend too much money, eat too much food and use up too much time and brain cells being down because their life is not what they want, all the while not making changes or taking the steps to live the way they want to live.

Being a lesbian is already (somewhat) outside the hetero-normative paradigm, which opens up all sorts of possibilities for living in a manner that doesn’t need to conform to anyone’s expectations. I learned, the very hard way, the only way for me to be happy is to disregard the society line, the family line and even the community line and live according to my own design.

I also need to live as if every day will be my last, not in a religious way or anything, just from personal experience of being depressed and wasting my own time and on and with people who don’t value me.

It’s this line of thinking that makes me eager to get the day underway and start my blood pumping faster with a little early morning sportif.

#winter #solstice #Brooklyn #rockon