I picked purple for my letters because it's a soothing color.

I'm feeling ragged and achy and plagued by sniffles. I woke up with a cold (or flu) bug chewing on my brain and it has burrowed deeper into my body as the day wore on. Now it's tomorrow and I'm feeling like a sack of Siberian snake sh!#. Ack.

So Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates the holiday. God bless and good wishes, yadayadayada.

This is definitely a Christmas for the books. My mate is struggling with terrible pain from the oral surgery she had done nearly three weeks ago; her mother (we'll call her my mother-in-law) had a knee replacement procedure in late October and she's still suffering pain and aggravation. My mother, I was told, fell and hit her head during a performance of the Nutcracker ballet and, since she's 84 years old, she was transported to the hospital. Doctors ran a battery of tests and discovered that she's developed a heart arrhythmia, though the underlying cause is not so clear. TIA? Tachycardia ischemia or something like that.

Needless to say, the Christmas spirit is lacking around these parts at the moment. And I don't see a glimmer of hope for dramatic change, so I expect that Christmas Day will be spent laughing at corny jokes and trying to console the ladies (who're going to feel like they failed their children). Jeez, I'm really out of it. I feel dizzy and slightly nauseated and I just want to lay down and sleep. But that's not in the cards right this minute.

So, changing subject, "Avatar" looks like a spectacular piece of eye candy, and from the reviews I've read so far, the dialogue ranges from sophomoric to edgy. But it's one I certainly want to see if only to check out the motion-capture technique, which critics have acclaimed as groundbreaking and cutting-edge.

Christ! I'm babbling incoherently. I apologize. I'd intended to share a few thoughts about the holiday season and what it means to me, what it meant to our parents' generation, and what it meant to generation's before then. But, oh well, I'm a blithering idiot at this juncture, so I'll simply mark this entry as a curiosity worthy of analysis at some future date.