hope, keanu and elves

when you’re unemployed and depressed, this is a bad month. my birthday is coming up soon. i’m not exactly screaming ‘i’m a capricorn’ right now. my zodiac-bretheren would be embarassed.

so this is the week where the xmas thang kicks into high gear. in your face and on tv will be non-stop marthon programming, 24 hours of the chrismas movie classics will air sometime soon i’m sure. as it stands right now i’ve seen ‘matrix’ and ‘speed’ 3 times each on some cable channel in the last 7 days and i’m really not catching the christmas vibe off of it. (maybe it was the way keanu said ‘pop quiz, hot shot. what do you do?)

my favorite christmas movies (besides ‘a chrismtas story’) are one classic ‘the lemondrop kid’ which is an early bob hope movie about a con man who invents a scam involving santas collecting donations for an imaginary old folks home which actually is a gambling hall. the other is more contemporary, ‘scrooged’ because, well… it’s a movie with bill murray in almost every scene and that’s all the reason you need.

i was on tv overload tonight and my music is getting stale, i’m having to rotate the off-line mp3s back onto my hard drive to keep things fresh. i suddenly found the solution to my holiday blues. i found a link that streams the santa land diaries by genius david dedaris. it requires real player (sorry)

if for some reason you’ve never heard it, sit down and take an hour to listen to it. it is the first hand account of david’s two christmas seasons as an elf at macy’s in new york. it is hysterical. this link is actually longer and better than the original npr broadcast. (when it was first broadcated, it became the #2 most requested tape)

if you love it as much as i do, buy ‘holidays on ice’ as an audio book and play it during the holidays wherever you may be. i wish it was on cd or mp3.