Painted this Christmas card at art class last Friday. It was partly an experiment with throwing salt crystals on to the wet paint to give a speckly effect (the blue bit). It's a copy of an existing card, but I didn't have room for the Three Wise Men, so settled for shepherds with blue sheep (white sheep wouldn't show up) and an angel, feet dangling from under his/her cassock. The baby is little more than a blob, and the stable looks like a pile of twigs. One of my classmates made me laugh when he admitted that his Joseph looked like Homer Simpson!
Not much happening, as usual. In a bit of a funk at the moment, boredom and depression combined. Our weather is rotten, cold and rainy, so I've been staying in bed far more than I should, eating chocolates and drinking coffee. Of course, tomorrow, when I go back to work, the weather is supposed to be fine. Bleh!
Read an interesting but gloomy book "Stranger to history; a son's journey through Islamic lands" by Aatish Taseer. Taseer was born in Delhi, to a Sikh mother and a Muslim father, the result of an extramarital affair that his father was ashamed of and didn't like to acknowledge. Taseer travels through several Muslim countries, trying to find out what made his father consider himself a "cultural Muslim" as he himself phrased it. Taseer finds a Muslim world with deep political and theological divisions, which he finds most chilling in Iran's conflation of religion and politics. An argument for the separation of church and state if ever there was one.
And here in the West we have our own troubles. We have identified an ancient religious celebration with our true religion, Getting and Spending. The malls are full of worshippers at the Shrine of the Perfect Christmas, making sacrifice unto the God of The Economy with this year's earnings and probably part of next year's too. I loathe this time of year, when people have license to do all sorts of noisy, crazy stuff because it's Christmas. Introvert hell! I was kept awake last night till 1.30ish by partying neighbours, and once I'd fallen asleep I was woken up by an earthquake at 2.36! You just can't win sometimes.
The Shrine of the Perfect Christmas nailed it. So very difficult for those of us who are less than perfect with bank balances to match to achieve. Not an aspiration I want to buy into either. And you are right about it being introvert hell too.
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