I dreamed I was in a big room charged with removing all the old stuff from the walls. These old posters and educational prompts were thumb-tacked into the wall going right up to the ceiling. This was supposedly at FaithAction, but it wasn't my work now-- we don't have such a room. At one point, I woke up and realized that I wasn't dreaming about any space we have at my work. In fact, I don't recognize the room from anywhere. It did occur to me, both in the dream and out, that when you have things on the walls, they become invisible after some time.

This is what happened to the messages at work about making sure the water was off at the tap and that the toilet had stopped running water. But it's true for all sorts of signs and pictures. In fact, even things that aren't on walls become invisible. There's a beach towel half-draped over the window to my left. Its purpose was to block out the sun coming in during the afternoon. But I haven't sat in this chair in the afternoon for months and months. And the towel has become invisible until now.

I've FELT invisible at times. It happened to me again at the Rotary Club Christmas party. There are several members that I am already speaking to, greeting, exchanging pleasantries with, on the path to becoming at least nodding acquaintances. But there are a few that, while they know me, did not introduce me to their wives, and did not acknowledge my existence. From the Emily Post point of view, that is a failure of the hostess, whose job it is to introduce people around, to make sure that people know each other. In large parties, the hostess is supposed to simply make sure you are connected with SOMEONE that you're likely to talk to. But in a party that size, there should have been some effort made to see that everyone was introduced to everyone else. As some of you know, I'm pretty fearless about introducing myself and talking to strangers. But I'm also capable of freezing...and just not able to pull it off. When I'm aware of feeling invisible, that's when the paralysis sets in.

This happens to me less and less lately, fortunately.

When I left my dream, I had finished getting all the stuff off the walls and was rolling up sleeves to start painting. I wish I could remember all the details, though. There was an emotional content, there were people I know but are not connected with work, there was some sort of opposition going on, I think...

Natasha comes in tomorrow. After noon on Thursday, I've got 10 days off. Well, sort of... I have a couple of things I need to get done while the office is empty, so I'll probably sneak in when Natasha leaves on the 28th.

Merry Christmas everybody.

This is the dress that Amina, my dear African sister, gave me. I wore it this night to their party, and I wore it again at the Gala Premiere of the Movie-Making Class.

I reckon it's been about ten years since I sent out Christmas cards. I've collected cards at garage sales for a pittance, but I just never got around to sending any. This year, something went click...and I just put a batch of cards in the mailbox. What made the difference? The cards. I happened to be at the West End Thrift Store when Brenda was hauling out some extraordinary cards from National Geographic, a wreath on the front made with different kinds of birds. Just beautiful. I bought them on the spot, and I've proceeded to address, stamp and then WRITE on them.

The lucky recipients are not representative at all of the hierarchy of friends, family and acquaintances that populate my life. They are, simply, the people who are still sending ME cards after all these years. I felt that their persistence and loyalty MUST be rewarded. So if you send me a card last year, you get a card this year. There are a couple of exceptions. My new best friend Mary Jane in San Francisco went on the list. She's the Servas hostess who was such a doll to me, hauling my cold-ridden self around the city, not giving a FIG when I told her I had a cold, even though she's 75 and living alone. I loved her energy, the hot flame of life that I felt every minute in her company. And Pam got one because she's my birding buddy.

Going through my paper address book was a trip. I kept this loose leaf marvel for years and years, painstakingly marking every time I sent a letter or a card off to someone. This is the same me that kept a running list of every book I read. All this is gone now, swept away by the computer, the internet and the kind of 40-hour-week I work. But I was astonished to read some of the names in my book, people I only vaguely remember, people I've basically lost. I never used to lose people. I remembered them all because I went through that book regularly. Who the hell is Kim Zumwalt? I remember that her father was the famous Zumwalt, an admiral in the Navy, or maybe it was her uncle. But what was my relationship with her? I am clueless. The same is true all through that book. People whose names are a complete mystery or practically.

I used to be amazed that other people would simply LOSE close friends. Just stop seeing them or calling them or getting in touch with them. I think it used to puzzle me because I was constantly moving from one residence to another, one town to another, and so held fiercely to the people who meant something to me. I didn't make casual acquaintances much. What Gladwell in The Tipping Point calls "weak relationships." As a teacher in a boarding school, those few years I wasn't writing, we were too much in each other's business, and as a lonely writer, every friend counted...until the last one died or moved away and I spent several years feeling quite frantic and bereft. I'd always had a BEST FRIEND and now there just didn't seem to be one to be found.

I don't know when I stopped worrying about that. Or, actually, yes now that I think about it... It was when I started working full time doing what I do, loving what I do, being "out in the world," being a social activist, being a tech maven, being myself at last. I hadn't realized that "I" had moved on and that nobody is going to cleave to someone who is not authentic. I remember college parties where I felt totally and utterly invisible. Jean-Francois had painted a picture of me that was not at all the way I saw myself-- a Feminist with a capital F, which wasn't SO bad, really, except that seemed to imply that I "wore the pants in the family," or as my parents-in-law put it, "led him around by the end of the nose." My aesthetic tyrant the docile and dominated one? Ha! I'm just more of a Yankee than he is. And his personality has been distorted by years of living without really assimilating in a foreign country.

In addition to the Christmas cards, I've also done a bunch of chocolate bark with nuts and dried cranberries. lizardek managed to squeak out, "They weren't SALTED, were they?" well after I'd already made the sheets of melted white and dark chocolate with salted cashews and Spanish peanuts. I tasted them and they reminded me of certain crackers you can buy in the bazaars of India and Nepal that are both salted and sweet. It's a really interesting taste phenomenon because each different taste fires on a different part of your tongue.

Every year, the entire female staff of the Modern Foreign Language Department hauls into work little presents of food for everybody else on the staff. Loaves of zucchini bread, nut bread, cookies, etc. etc. Last night we counted 18 people who needed these goodies. Every year, JF feels beleaguered by all this bounty because he never has anything to give back. They don't do Secret Santa, where you only have to come up with five little gifts, leading up to the revelation of who has been putting pencils and erasers into your mailbox. When lizardek showed pictures of this pistachio and cranberry bark with white chocolate, I resolved that this year, JF would have something to reciprocate with.

He's been telling everyone he's bringing in some toxic waste for them. Or maybe he's only saying that to his best friend on the staff. He's still the tyrant, though perhaps he's also anticipating the fact that Americans are not going to buy the "they do this in India and it's really quite good" argument. I did NOT throw it all out, run out to the store, re-purchase sacks of white and dark chocolate and cranberries and UNSALTED pistachios at $10 the half pound, thank you very much.

So this is going to be interesting. For MY people, I made up a batch of chocolate chip cookies that came last year in a gift jar with all the ingredients in aesthetic layers, topped by a square of tasteful Christmas cloth and a nice little golden cord. I got an email from Ryan. All it said was: "Amazing cookies." He's going to miss the white chocolate bark I'm bringing in today. There was one cup left over. Perhaps my reputation will plummet!

There are more polite ways of putting it, but the plain fact is that we have to start contemplating the death of our dog. She has lumps all over her body that are getting more numerous and bigger. A couple of the smaller ones look as if they're open. She has...well...I'll spare you more details.

The real issue is: is she suffering or not? Sometimes, when I'm FORCING her to go to the laundry room where she has her mats and water and food bowls, she acts as if getting up is a terrible ordeal. Then, when she wants to go outside, she trips down and back up the stairs as if nothing is wrong. She is even still playing her getaway games: She heads out on an urgent errand and then disappears and goes silent on the other side of the Avion trailer that now takes up the back parking space. She waits back there as long as possible and then makes a DASH for the other side of the driveway leading to the front, the road and the park. She has a whole routine for how she's going to get away, and she's refined this over the years as the getaway space has narrowed to just this one spot in the driveway. She likes to lurk just behind the garbage cans so that the time I have to see her and call to her is its utmost minimal. Once she's out of sight on the driveway, she's GONE.

I've started going down the steps with her to position myself in the getaway zone and even then she's tried to zip by me. In order to stop her, you have to SEE her and also be close enough to her. Sometimes, I've seen her from the back porch after she's made it to the park, which is on the other side of our privacy fence. She laughs bitterly at me when I try to call her from my perch on the back stairs, as if to say, "My captors, you have no power over me now!"

Velvet has never really been trained. That is, she can perform amazingly at staying out of the kitchen whenever JF is in it. She can even stay almost always on the tiles and not getting on the wood floors...when we are there to see. But there's no loyalty there; she does that because JF has trained her with fear of pain. Despite classes and books and efforts, I've never become her Alpha Dog. She'll come when she's called only VERY SLOWLY and only if I am about 15 feet from her. She continues to use the house as her toilet, sometimes even when we're home and would gladly let her out. Does this mean she has become incontinent? Not really...at least 80 per cent of the time she lets me know when she wants to go out.

So she gets lumpier and smellier. She rolls over on her back and seems to be scratching her back, moaning and whining as if, either it is a profound relief or a pain. It's hard to tell.

Sometimes, I look at her and think, somebody is going to feel this way about me one day. When is she just going to die? As far as I'm concerned, it would be useful for humans to have the tools to do the job that we have for dogs. But I'm not sure that would actually make anything easier for anybody but the one exiting this mortal coil. At least I could put my wishes into words. Velvet can't.

Because we had music night last night, my whole weekend's calendar has nothing on it until 6pm Sunday night, when the annual High Point University Christmas Party will take place. This will be a Nido extravaganza, if it's like former years. When I was in San Francisco, wandering around the totally over-the-top Salesforce convention, I was reminded of Nido and his grand gestures. I'll never forget the first time JF brought home 10 POUNDS of Ghiardelli chocolate.

The social dynamics at music night were especially interesting because there were two couples there who haven't come in months and months, and who really formed the core of the musicians at the beginning.

Now, I do want to say that JF and I have been doing music nights since our poverty-stricken days in Marseille, when we had two little kids and lived on $10,000 a year. We were so poor that even though we owned an automobile, we couldn't afford to GO anywhere in it. Those were eat-and-pay-the-rent days. So we invited our friends over to play music and partake of the canned dinners that JF's father created for us. He used to arrive at our apartment with cases of these quart jars filled with main dishes like "Canard aux Oranges" and "Pot au Feu." There was always some kind of meat in a sauce. We'd break out the spaghetti or rice and a couple of "Boccaux de Papa" and we always had a feast.

Those evenings in Marseille were, for a time, dominated by JF's sister's boyfriend Hakkim. He came to France from Algeria to study painting, but he already had a rich history of playing traditional songs at weddings and other festive occasions. The only thing about Hakkim was that he didn't really play WITH anyone. He simply delivered a concert of Algerian music. But he was a brilliant guitar player and so we mostly just sat back and enjoyed.

Then the music nights went sort of away while we were in Massachusetts (where we landed after we left Marseille) and Texas (where JF was finishing his dissertation and teaching. We reinstituted them here, mainly with these two couples I was talking about, and other people who have since sort of dropped off the social map. (Or moved away, sigh sigh, Traci and Rob.)

There were a couple of things about the dynamics of that old group that annoyed me. One was that while we had sort of agreed to take turns suggesting songs, one of the guys would just launch into songs he wanted to play and sort of, as JF calls this kind of move, "grab the microphone." Not unlike our buddy Hakkim. This meant that we were all more or less hostage to HIS songs, and HIS repertoire. What we've found since is that, in truly taking turns, even among those who don't have guitars, we end up with a richer mix of songs. We find stuff we had forgotten we loved. We get stretched musically.

The other thing that used to really piss me off was that these guys would start a song and be well into the first verse before the rest of us found the words in the songbook. There was the feeling that we could just damn well catch up, that THEY were the engine and WE, the singers, could just keep up as best we could. What we've found since they stopped coming was that it feels much more like a community to spend a little time so that all the guitars can get the chords down while the singers all get on the same page.

The upshot was that one of the guys from the old style (of the two couples that haven't been in months) started making "jokes" on the theme of "there are so many RULES here, and I don' want to violate any of them but it's hard because there are so many RULES." Meaning, I thought, that no, you can't simply hijack the group to sing YOUR usual songs you always sing with your buddy who sings HIS songs that HE always sings and the rest of us are there to follow as best we can.

He also likes to imply, somehow, that I'm the one keeping herd on everyone, though that may be a projection on my part. Well, I did ask the rather largish group of yakkers to pipe down when we were trying to get started. We do a wonderful potluck dinner before we sing at these affairs, and getting the group from eat-and-talk to pluck-and-sing has sometimes been a challenge. But that's also part of the new drift...some of the people there are really wanting to SING and people who talk at the top of their lungs over the singing are not appreciated. After all, there are other rooms in the house to have conversations. So it could be that after I told the peanut gallery to pipe down and got some pushback from one of them, I felt that old feeling of "oh dear, I'm too pushy, too loud, too too too..."

But I loved it when the guy started in about all the rules and being afraid of being punished for breaking the rules and chuckle chuckle I'm only just joking tone, that Judy bless her brilliant heart joked right back that there was a time-out chair over THERE and if he didn't behave he'd end up in it.

I do like the guy who used to always hijack the microphone. He had the widest repertoire of all our group until Carl came along. But I also love the new songs that come into the group with our new system.

Thinking about these guys who play guitar (and not counting Kris and Scott who are truly musical and have lived music as long as I've known them and well before no doubt), I'm reminded of something a shopkeeper told me in Eureka, Arkansas when I stopped there on my USA van trip. She described the guys who show up in her little hippie-dippie town on big motorcycles. "They came of age in the 60s, watched Easy Rider, and always wanted a hog. Now they've got gray ponytails, a paunch, and their hogs."

Many of our music night guys came of age in the 60s and really really just wanted to get stoned and play their guitars. They played along with the big name performers, they mastered their moves, and they fantasized about being musicians. But reality intervened and they became doctors and lawyers and department heads. These were the ones who didn't give up their music, even if they gave up being musicians. Since I, too, am an old hippie girl who loved to dance to that music, I'm just happy they're in my life and that, once a month or so, they come together to celebrate song.

For those of my faithful readers who can stand sub-titles, Central Station, a Brazilian movie, is excellent. Tugged at the heart-strings, I tell you!

I had a full day of Geek work, followed by Barbara's annual open house over at Handy Capable Network. Followed by an abbreviated visit to the Y...but better than not going, is what I told myself. After last night's for-EVER insomnia, I wasn't going to get up for yoga this morning, that was a given. And the Y made me feel ever so relieved after pigging out at Barbara's. They always have a nice little feast there. I got some SERIOUS networking in.

Have I talked about how much I enjoy networking? Mary Jane, in San Francisco, took pity on me for having finished all the "literature" I had with me, and so gave me a book called The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about three kinds of people who can influence what happens in the world. Connectors, mavens, and salesmen. The connectors are people who just love knowing people. The mavens are people who love knowing about stuff and sharing it with people they know. Salesmen are people who can persuade people, who can intuit...empathize to the point of being in subliminal sync with them. The book made me think about myself in those terms. I don't think I'm a salesman. If I were, I'd already have the money for the next movie-making class. There are elements of the connector in me. One thing that Gladwell says is that connectors specialize in WEAK relationships. People you know, people you maybe share interests with, people you admire for who they are or what they have done or are doing, but not your inner circle, not your FRIENDS. The French make a distinction between ami and copain... The ami is close, close. If she knocks on your door in the middle of the night, you are glad to see her. If she needs money, you lend it. You tell your ami what's going on in your soul and she tells you back. A copain... I usually translate this as buddy, though that feels like an awkward term. A copain is someone you do stuff with. He comes to dinner at your house. You meet for drinks. You discuss film, football, even politics. You do NOT get into the intricacies of your emotional and spiritual life with a copain. It's a weaker relationship.

The connector's relationships are even weaker, though as Gladwell points out, they are still real. We might figure these people as folks you'd send a Christmas card to, if you were into sending an extensive mailing out. We invite all these people to our Christmas open house. We invite our inner circle of friends, too, but also everybody we "know."

But the more I think about Gladwell's categories, I think I am more of a maven than a connector. I like networking not only because I basically like people but also because I have a lot to offer. I met a young woman at the gallery hop last Friday and she seemed like a perfect candidate for the Idea Exchange at the Center for Design Innovation that I attend some Tuesday afternoons. They love the collision of science and art/design at CDI, and she was talking about having been to college to study biology, but now that she's out, wanting to explore her artistic self. I loved telling her about CDI. I like knowing about technology for much the same kick...It's so fun to connect people and opportunities to celebrate life in some way. When I think of myself, I'm comfortable with the idea of being a maven. I'll go back to the text and see if there isn't more to explore there.

In the meantime, no decorations up yet. I need to sign the cards I addressed last weekend. We are now in the Holiday Party season. Nothing gets done for the next month. The Nepalis have a monthlong holiday season like this. We Westerners grump about it, and then here we are doing it.