"no learning gets done over the holidays"

So first of all I should mention that I did watch My Old Ass, or at least the first twenty minutes of it, at which point I fell asleep. Larry and I are both slightly under the weather, which might otherwise have given me a reason to nap, but it wasn't just that –

It was that My Old Ass offered no new information.

I have seen so many people online gush over this film, specifically because I went looking for reviews and for some reason they were all good ones, and then I typed in "my old ass movie reprehensible" and got one Redditor who was upset that the lesbian main character became bisexual after meeting a male love interest (SORRY IF I SPOILED THAT FOR YOU) but I got nobody who was willing to say that this movie was mind-numbingly boring and served entirely to ratify conclusions it assumed its audience had already come to.

In fact, the one instance of change in the story – an expansion of identity, shall we say, as our main character learns to love – seemed to make people angry rather than hopeful.

I mean, I don't know about you, but at that age I couldn't wait to change. I still can't wait to change, and I'm 43. Larry can't wait to change either. We talk about it all the time: how to get better, how to get smarter, how to become more efficient, how to become more thoughtful, how to move ourselves towards the next nodes in all of our concurrent projects, including the fundamental project of how to live.

Which brings us to THE HOLIDAYS.

"We have a deliverable every day between now and the Saturday after Thanksgiving," I told Larry, a week ago. I should probably tell him that we also have deliverables on every day in December except the 30th, which is to say that in the next two months our only completely free days are Sat Nov 30 and Mon Dec 30.

Otherwise, we've got church services and chamber choir concerts and jazz band sessions and community theater performances and family gatherings and piano teaching and freelance writing and so on, something on every single day, and I already know that this means that the amount of new information we'll be able to learn during those days will be limited.

Because our job, for the next two months, is to perform what we've already learned.

Now – and this is important – there is a type of learning that only takes place when you perform. The process of executing an idea is extremely important, which is why we have all of these community theater performances and chamber choir concerts and so on, and why we ask children to spend the last month of the year doing much of the same thing.

We also ask children to take final exams and in many cases standardized tests, and at this point you start to hear the teachers complain about the whole thing, "no learning gets done over the holidays," and what they really mean is "I've been tasked with this job of teaching new information during a season in which we are asked to perform the information we've already learned, and it is difficult to keep students focused when their priorities are elsewhere."

So I asked Larry whether it wouldn't be better to just go all-in on the idea that November and December are Production Months, that we really should be focused entirely on these details that turn a chamber choir concert (or a student choir concert, as the case may be) from average to masterful, and that we should acknowledge that we won't be adding any new information until we've completed the process of presenting what we've learned to the best of our abilities?

And he said "sure, but how do you get the rest of the world to agree to that?"

And then he started asking whether it might be more palatable to break up these holiday months into some kind of combination of learning and production, could you put the first half of the day towards learning something new and the second half towards perfecting something learned, maybe?

"The trouble is that perfecting takes all your attention," I said.

"Yes," he agreed.

"And you also need time to reflect on what you've been putting your attention towards," I continued.

"Yes," he agreed.

"At minimum, you need an entire day of perfecting followed by an entire day of learning something new," I said.

"Except you'll probably want to spend that second day taking what you've just perfected to the next level," he said.

"Right," I said, "which is really why you have to think about it in seasons, and the holiday season is the performance season."

I am not the first person to say this – Neal Stephenson made a similar analogy earlier this year – nor will I be the first person to note that the holidays are immediately followed by a rapid learning season as the new year prompts us to improve ourselves. There will, of course, be the requisite articles arguing that we don't actually need to improve ourselves, that change is stressful and hard and might require us to rethink our identities and wouldn't it be easier to just watch My Old Ass, but I plan on ignoring all of that and so can you.

But when I wrote my timeline for MELISANDE in those two grant proposals I sent out, and noted that very little musical-writing would get done in Q4 because of "the holidays," this is what I meant.

At least I got a good start in September and October. ❤️

p.s. we also know that the holiday season is stressful because we are tasked not only with performing holiday concerts but also with performing relationships, here comes this test of how well we do when we're with the people we love, did we get the right gift and make the right food and wear the right thing and send the right cards and create the right ambiance and so on, and while I am absolutely 100% behind the idea of considering how your actions might affect others (which you can do year-round, thank goodness) the idea of the holiday gathering as a test you have to pass is repulsive and we are correct to feel repulsed by it

p.p.s. the answer is make food you like, wear clothes you like, if you send a card write a message you like writing and if you don't like the idea of writing a message just send a card with a photo on it and if you don't like that idea don't send cards at all, the more you enjoy doing what you're doing the more people will enjoy being around you, the more you're like "I have to make this special time-consuming dessert because we always have it, grumble grumble grumble" the less you'll enjoy any of it and the less people will enjoy being around you, please let the holiday change as you change and as the people around you change, this solves 90% of your holiday problems

p.p.p.s. the other 10% is gifts, which can be solved by taking the people you love seriously and giving them what they like instead of what you feel like they ought to have (or, worse, whatever's on sale), and remember that one good gift is worth infinity bad ones, quality not quantity here

p.p.p.p.s. and if someone is grumbly about not getting the time-consuming dessert it is a great opportunity for them to learn how to make it themselves