It’s cold and snowing outside right now. Not so much that I expect any real accumulation — it’s more like a wet dusting — but I’m nonetheless glad I’ll be working from home tomorrow.
It was an unexciting weekend. Yesterday afternoon, we set up the outdoor Christmas lights, making us one of the last people in the neighborhood to do so. Every year I get to feel more like a Scrooge because I don’t want Christmas lights and trees and songs until it’s actually Christmas. I’ll even be generous and say let’s have it all for the two weeks beforehand, and keep the lights up until New Year’s. And during that time, go for broke. I like Christmas a lot. But maybe we don’t need to adorn everything with holiday decorations months in advance. Maybe Christmas doesn’t have to start while we’re still eating Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe that, which was once just a joke or a come from retailers, doesn’t have to be the new rule. Maybe what makes holidays special is that they aren’t every day of the year.
Then again, just about an hour ago, I heard somebody setting off fireworks, which now seems to happen year-round in this neighborhood. So clearly I’m in the minority with this whole “celebrate everything all the time” thing.
It’s a shame, because I do like Christmas.
So anyway. Last night I watched Zero Dark Thirty, which is decidedly not a Christmas movie. It’s well crafted, if a little more pro-torture than I was expecting, but I can’t necessarily say that I enjoyed it. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, but part of it’s the torture thing.
Today I did the crossword puzzle and went to my Sunday writing group. I was thinking I might continue working on the thing I wrote last week, but, as I think will become quickly evident, the writing prompts that were given to me kind of made that impossible:
The Panther leaped from the rooftop to the busy street below. He’s not even looking, Jodie thought. What a show-off. She’d be leaping tall buildings too if she had super-powers, if she’d been “infused with the mighty spirit of the jungle†instead of being tasked with finding them a parking spot nearby and feeding the meter. She didn’t like driving in the city on the weekends and the Panther knew it, but “evil doesn’t sleep in on Sundays, chum,†was all he’d said. She’d asked him to stop calling her “chum,†but apparently that’s what he called all his sidekicks, super-powered or not. No wonder every one of them had up and quit.
She didn’t need this. She could probably go back to MIT, get her old teaching job back. She still had friends in the computer science department, the same ones who’d been so happy to have a techie whiz kid like her on the faculty, then so shocked when only three years in she’d said she was going to turn her talents to crime-fighting instead. They’d bought her a cape as a going-away present, and the dean said, “come back anytime,†but it was obvious they didn’t approve.
Three years into this, Jodie couldn’t say she blamed them. She’d tried to make a go of it as a lone avenger — never with the cape, but only because she worried about dry-cleaning — but she had neither the mutant powers nor gymnastic skills it seemed like every bank robber, hostage-taker, and even petty thief in the city had nowadays. She’d bounced around for a while through different identities and costumes, tried to solder together some weaponry from old computer parts, but in the end the best she’d had to show for it was a couple of cracked ribs and a bruised pride.
Enter the Panther. His last sidekick had just left — turned to super-villainy was the rumor, but the man himself wouldn’t confirm or deny. Jodie’s tech skills didn’t seem like an obvious fit for a man raised from a boy by the jungle, who could scale twenty-story buildings like they were vine-covered trees, then back-flip through a hail of on-coming bullets. He was still using a dial-up when she met him. But he’d seemed nice enough — she’d liked that “chum†back then — and she couldn’t deny they’d had a shared enemy in common.
Dr. Werewolf.
God, it sounded stupid now even just saying his name, remembering a time when a nerdy rocket-scientist-turned-lycanthrope had been the closest thing she’d had to an arch-nemesis. The Panther and Werewolf had had their own run-ins, and somehow the evil doctor had managed to escape at the last minute each time. Maybe if Jodie and the Panther pooled their resources?
It hadn’t taken long after that to find the Werewolf’s lair…
And that was my weekend.
