Vacillating Velocity

Christmas occupies this weird place in my life, in my head. It doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, in one way – my family is neither traditional nor close-knit enough for it to be a big deal, and I’ve been poor enough for the last few years that the consumerism aspect of it has been pretty minimal for me. But the season still triggers something in me, the romantic aspect of it, thoughts of togetherness and warmth and love amongst people.

Tonight, Christmas Eve, I went with my father to Christmas Eve service at Stanford’s Memorial Church, something I’ve never done before, just for the experience. It was nice, and all, but it mostly felt touristy – almost everyone there for the same reason as I – for the spectacle, no real idea what was going on. It was nice but hollow, and now that I continue my loneliness at home (my roomates off visiting family and the house to myself) I think back to recent Christmases past. Last year this time I was throwing a party at my new house in Colorado, having invited over all my friends who were similarly without family to have a Christmas celebration to make up for the ones we were missing. We drank Brazilian cocktails and wore Santa hats and did some blow. The year before, it was boxed wine and Veronica Mars and the dread of waking up in the morning to operate a chairlift.

I’m still, as happy as I mostly am, a bit lonely here, a bit out of place.

I live on a fairly busy street. While I’ve re-accustomed myself to locking the front door (which I spent the entirety of my stint in Colorado not doing), I’d been frequently leaving my car window rolled down while parked in the driveway. After 15,000+ miles of roadtripping in the past couple years and my general tendency to treat my car like a large trash can that I don’t have to empty very often, it could use the fresh air, and I figured I had nothing worth stealing to worry about. The problem, though, was that I was using my own standards of “worth stealing.” It turns out that someone else decided that the approximately $3 in loose change in my ashtray warranted theft – not just of the coins, but of the entire ashtray.

So I took to locking my car up tight. Well, perhaps as some sort of repentant act by the thief, perhaps an unrelated benefactor, perhaps my roomate messing with me, but for whatever reason, I went out to my car today to find, propped up on the driver’s-side window, a single arcade token. I don’t know what it means, other than I kinda want to play Donkey Kong.