NP-Complete

I wrote this around Christmas 2009 or 2010, when David Tennant had only recently turned into Matt Smith.  Tongue was in cheek. Enjoy!

All I Want For Christmas ... Is Ten
(To the tune of, "All I Want For Christmas Is You")

I don’t ask for much this Christmas;

There is just one thing I need;

One announcement that I want

To turn up on my Twitter feed:

I just want him back once more;

Opening the TARDIS door:

Bring him back again:

All I want for Christmas … is Ten

I don’t want that much this Christmas:

New Year’s rumors are just fine

Posted on to Tennant-Love

Or turning up on io9;

I don’t want a newly-issued

special-feature’d Season Five;

I just want a quote or picture

leaked to keep our hope alive:

David Tennant, just once more

Peeking out the TARDIS door

There and back again,

All I want for Christmas … is Ten

(bay... bee...)

All the lights are flashing

So mauvely, everywhere;

And the sound of TARDIS

Vworping, fills the air;

Everyone is squeeing;

I see those Daleks fleeing:

Santa, won’t you bring us what will make our Christmas bright:

Won’t you please bring the Tenth Doctor back, Christmas Night:

I know what I want for Christmas

I won’t be contented with

Rewrites of “A Christmas Carol”

Karen Gillan, or Matt Smith

I want just my one true Doctor;

I won’t ever ask for more

Not for Nine, or Five, or Seven,

Three, Two, One, Six, Eight, or Four;

 

I just want new content, please

Unrestrained by S&Gs;

With us once again

All I want for Christmas, is Ten.  

 

Someone I liked a very great deal, and hoped I might someday fall in love with, died in December.

He was a wonderful person, full of life, knowledge, joy, enthusiasm, hope, and love.  He cared about music, philosophy, books, and other people.  

He liked me.  He cared about me.  He made me feel special and beautiful.  The last time I saw him, in October, he gave me a hug and asked if I was going to be all right.

I wish I'd hugged him tighter.

We'd written back and forth, about music, and books, and the concert we'd gone to, and current events, and about the activism we planned to do.  He said that love and joy were activism, were defiance.  Let us live and love bravely, and with joy. 

He died December 18, 2016.  He went into cardiac arrest at his home, and the EMTs couldn't revive him.

I didn't know.  I'd noticed his silence, but I thought perhaps he'd found another woman, or was too busy.  I eventually sent him an email.

His sister wrote back to me, yesterday, and let me know that he had died.  She'd notified his Facebook friends, but of course I'm not on Facebook.

I've decided to donate to the scholarship fund of the Philosophy department at the University of Colorado at Boulder in his memory.  That's where he got his bachelor's and master's.

And I will be as much help to his sister as I can, if she wants it.  They have the job of cleaning out his apartment, the many, many years of records and CDs and books and art and musical instruments.  I'm going to ask if I can be any help with that.

I'm ... heartbroken, really.  All I can say is:  I really, really, really liked him.  I didn't know yet what I ultimately wanted him to be to me, for us to be to each other, but I knew he was a special, rare person, and one I wanted in my life.  

I was already missing him.  I'll miss him forever.  

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, 
and let perpetual light shine upon him. 
May he rest in peace.  Amen.

Early this morning, Jack and I went to the vet.  He was supposed to get a steroid shot (he has a chronic inflammatory condition) and, if the vet had time, his annual checkup.  She had time.

One good thing that came out of the checkup was that I got an explanation for why Jack likes to extend his right foot to one side, in "cat yoga" positions like this one:



Apparently his kneecap is loose.  If you have ever had a small dog, you probably know all about that.  It's endemic among poodles, I'm told.  And sticking his leg out is apparently his way of trying to manage it.

There's surgery you can get for this, but we don't have any reason to think Jack is actually suffering as things stand.  He's at higher risk for arthritis, so he's going on chondroitin (sp?) chews.

BUT.  The big thing that happened, wasn't that.  Things took a dramatic turn for the worse while he was getting his annual rabies shot.

Somehow - I didn't see how it happened - a squeeze bottle of alcohol was knocked over, and dribbled or squirted right into Jack's eye.

OUCH.  The vet rushed off to get saline solution, and they flushed his eye.  This -- water in his face -- was about as welcome as you'd expect.  Jack struggled (the vet assistant was already holding him down) and wailed.

Next came an ointment.  Finally, there were eye drops:  3 times a day, or as often as we could get them in.

But I am not a good cat wrangler, and Jack was already highly agitated.  So the vet is keeping him at the animal hospital for the weekend.  If nothing else, they've got multiple people on site, and sometimes numbers help when you are dealing with an upset cat.

I'm calm now (this was all about eleven hours ago) but it was upsetting to witness.  I can only imagine what it was like to go through.  My poor kitty.

I can tell he's not here.  I miss him.

I learned to cook in England, but the methods I learned were French.

I was a vegetarian at the time.  I had several vegetarian cookbooks by Martha Rose Schulman (whom I consider greatly underappreciated.)  Though I didn't know it at the time, her early cooking was greatly inspired by Beck, Bertholle, and Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

So I made lots of roux-thickened soups, vivid with greens and white beans I'd soaked and cooked the night before.  Tomato and potato soup.  Open-faced vegetable tarts with crumbly wholemeal pastry.  You get the idea.

My vegetables were always browned in butter, because butter was cheap and olive oil expensive: this was England, subsidizing their dairy farmers, creator of the "surplus butter mountain" of the 1980s.

So diced onions going gold and translucent in butter - the smell takes me back to early adulthood, and English kitchens.

I only just realized this morning that that's a French thing, that while I learned to cook in English kitchens, what techniques I know are French.  Funny old world.

I'm not as smashed down as I was a few weeks ago.

I still have a certain grey baseline of gloom, like a raincloud a long way away, low on the horizon.  But I'm staying active, doing things, exercising, making positive change.

I am still going to keep that appointment with my doctor next week.  It's nice to have rebounded a bit, but I'm not back to where I was in, say, December.

I was planning a short vacation (Friday to Monday) next month, but for various unrelated family reasons may wind up making it a "staycation" instead.  There are some things I need (and want) to do for a family member.

( Theory about DW S9E01 and E02 )

In other news, I have done my last performance review 'til November.  I am greatly relieved.

The sun is shining, and I am home at a reasonable hour.  I intend to take a walk and then do some un-f*ing of my habitat.  

I found out last night that someone in my circle of friends in college has died, of a heart attack.

She was always in ill-health - she had been diabetic from the age of 3, and I'm told had had two kidney transplants - but any such death is always a shock.

I didn't know her well, and we hadn't kept in touch:  the last time I saw her was probably around graduation.  I'm not sure she would have remembered my name:  I couldn't remember her surname.

I guess I'm feeling guilty because, out of touch as I was, and not very well acquainted, my first reaction was, "Oh.  Huh."

I think for many of our friends, this is the first time that a contemporary known to us has died of natural causes.  I lost a high school friend to AIDS, many years ago, but that has receded into the past.  It's strange to realize that we are all people of an age to have heart attacks now.

I volunteered to call F. and let him know.  He and she had some kind of romantic history, back when they were students.  He was much more openly upset.  He thanked me several times for making sure he knew.

She was an ardent champion of animal welfare, and the obituary suggested that we donate to our local animal shelter or the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation in lieu of flowers, so that's what I'll do.

I feel as if I ought to have a more overtly emotional reaction.  Yet, it would be wrong to call me unaffected.