CC can't sleep and writes more-or-less stream of consciousness for half an hour.

My annual Christmas blues are upon me.

Also, I had to drop the SmartCar off at the Mercedes dealership where everybody is a complete dick. Now that SmartCars are more well-known (Or maybe because I've only left the DC Metro area once since August) people don't ask me about the car as much as they used to. So now the most annoying thing about owning a SmartCar has become getting it fixed. There's a problem that keeps turning the check engine light on and theCSO thinks that if the car becomes legally a lemon we should have the paperwork to prove it.

And because Mercedes owns Smart and Smart has no repair shops of its own, tonight I dropped the SmartCar off at the Mercedes dealership with a service department that closes at seven in the fastest growing region of the DC metro area, where they don't touch SmartCars on Saturdays, can't fax you a service history and will, eyes gleaming, give you the third degree to make sure you haven't violated your warranty because it would be totally awesome if they didn't have to cover the repair. Oh, and last time they attempted to fix this problem, they freaking LOST my car and Joe-the-Math guy and I awkwardly stood around the service department for like half an hour, calling theCSO to ask him if he was quite certain the guy he had talked to was Jim and that Jim hadn't said anything about, oh, vaporizing the car.

What was weird was that I came home tonight and watched an episode of "Criminal Minds" where there was a serial killer targeting people who drove fancy cars. The juxtaposition might have been funny had it not been the most depressing episode ever. As it was, it was just kinda darkly ironic. Besides, I don't mind people who DRIVE fancy cars, clearly it's the guys who FIX fancy cars in the Tysons Corner area who are complete tools.

My better nature says that probably the root of the problem is that Mercedes customers are, on the whole, complete tools themselves and the Mercedes "customer service" people treat Smart customers like crap as a sort of vacation from the slavish service they give their REAL customers.

Hell, I can understand that. In college, I spent a very unhappy month folding neckties in the men's department of a department store at Christmas time.

This job has exactly two benefits:

1. The long crazy hours keep you out of your house.
2. Everyone who went to high school with you works at the same mall that month, allowing lots of opportunities to sneak off and make out with people whom you shouldn't have dated the first time, either. And now they can talk about economics.

But I digress.

Either because I was really good at folding ties or really bad (I never could tell) I was promoted to running the Coach counter for the last few weeks before Christmas. Thinking back, I'm fairly certain those Mercedes customer service guys all shopped for Coach products that season because half of my customers were exactly like them and talked to me like I was their overpriced-leather-goods-bearing-minion. The other half were annoying rubes who thought that I held the key to the magic status products that they could afford. "Is this wallet on sale? How about this one? Is that the REAL price?"

I longed to someday say "Gee, that wallet is COACH and it's CHRISTMAS EVE. Do YOU think it's on sale?"

But the thing is, I didn't, because I'm not a complete tool.

While we're on the subject of not being a complete tool, a guy in CVS who owed me sixteen dollars in change gave me thirty five because he mistook a twenty for a one. My cognizance of the number of study aids a free nineteen bucks could by a girl notwithstanding, I gave him his nineteen bucks back. In a perfect world, this post would be about how that restored my Christmas spirit.

Ah well.

Perhaps I should be trying to cheer myself up.

Ok, let's think of good things.

For example, thanks to the fact that I celebrate "Epiphany" with my parents and LinguistFriend in January, the first phase of my Christmas shopping is almost done. In contrast to my parents who are impossible to please, theCSO's parents and family in general are easy to shop for. I live out my nonfiction-reading fantasies through my father-in-law, who got, for example, a book about Alfred Hitchcock's relationships with women from us last year along with two other books I wanted to read. He likes insightful biographies and "the complete history of something completely random like flutes or coffee that turn out to have a long and interesting past and a wide-reaching impact on our culture" sorts of books. Also, stuff reviewed favorably in "The Economist."

So basically, smart people books that sound really cool, but are close enough to the type of reading that I do for school that I can't stand to read them when I'm at a semester break and don't have time to any other time.

Which is not to say I didn't buy myself a copy of that Hitchcock book, too. I will have to ask theCSO's dad at Christmas if it was any good.

I have not even done our Christmas card. Sigh. (CC designs her and theCSO's Christmas card every year.)

And I'd really like to throw an open house sort of deal on New Year's Day, but I don't know if anybody would be in town or come.

And work is high-pressure and I'm worried about my grades and... and.. and...

Half an hour is up and I'm going to try again to go to bed.

CC