Tis the Season to Be Mean?

It looks like I'll be starting work for the new client next week, as I've got a meeting on Friday. The work I'll be doing with them will actually use my degree -- specifically and not just in a general "stringing words together" sense, as it involves writing video scripts. Now I have to think of something to wear. I suspect they're pretty casual, as it's a virtual agency, but I still want to look professional. It's been more than a year since my last business meeting.

And that means I need to buckle down this week to get done with the current phase of the current project. Yesterday was relatively unproductive until late in the day, but I don't have to go anywhere or do anything else today, so I should be able to rock and roll.

I didn't do as much reading over the weekend as I normally would on a holiday, but I did watch a fair amount of TV, and it seems like the theme for this holiday season is "mean." There are ads about gloating to Santa that you've already bought all the good presents (gloating to Santa? Really? Talk about getting on the naughty list). There are ads about being obnoxious to store staff. The car ads are particularly bad, with the parents who run off in their son's car instead of acknowledging his arrival, the entitled rich jerks who hire celebrities as holiday employees, the Lexus driver who wipes out a person with a more common car using a giant snowball so he can get his parking space, and the test drivers who take the salesman hostage by refusing to return the car after the test drive. It's all enough to justify my reclusive nature. I feel like doing a Charlie Brown lament. It was bad enough when Christmas was commercialized in the sense of getting more stuff to make your holiday extra merry, but now it's commercialized in the sense of "I'm getting what I want, and I don't care how that affects anyone else."

It's all very depressing, and it totally harshes the warm fuzzies from watching the Lifetime "discover the true meaning of Christmas while falling in love" movies. But since almost everything I watch is in reruns this week, I can ignore it all and focus on my work.