Sports cards and Game Cards: So far, so good; Christmas; No Christmas in China; Vieglas Smiltis, Well-Worn Path

• Tony asked me if I preferred Sports Cards or Game Cards. I knew he was referring to Sports Cards as the Hockey and Baseball Cards I collected growing up and those Pokemon cards that Kids seen to like now. I told him, of course, that I preferred sports cards. He then told me how most of his classmates were into the Game Cards and how he was but one of the few or the only who liked Sports Cards.

• Still no posting on WeChat. No one seems to have noticed. Whatever urges prompted my WeChat postings will have be directed to this blog.

• A whole gamut of emotions, from despair to elation, are what I feel in the weeks leading up to Christmas. I despair because I can't say that I have had a good Christmas since I was young. Many of my subsequent Christmases I felt very lonely because of teenage angst and then because I was very lonely. I never got in the habit of doing Christmas decorations. I have never had a season of Christmas party attending. This Christmas, I am hoping that I don't go to any. I would like to be invited to one just so I could refuse and tell the inviter that Tony has to go to school on the 25^th, it being a Wednesday, and so I can't do anything for Christmas because it would be without him which just won't do. But sadly, there will be no invites. But at least, I won't be attending a hotel dinner where you end up feeling like you were a victim of a squeeze-them-in-as-tightly-as-possible-and-extract-money-from-them racket. On the bright side as well, I hopefully won't be attending any Chinese Christmas parties which are all Santa Claus and no Christ. (I cross my fingers.) The best possible Christmas for me will be to stay home on the 25^th, treat it like a day off except that I have to phone my Mom and Brother in Canada, and I will read lots of literature about the Christ and the birth of Christ.

• It may well be that Christmas may not be celebrated by our school because the Chicom powers that be have decreed that the schools don't observe it. This will be fine with me. Chinese Christmas is a poor substitute for a real Christendom Christmas which aren't even celebrated in the West anymore.

• Ingrida, an aunt of mine, married to my father's half-brother, died on December 7^th. Her husband, my uncle, had died in early September. I have childhood memories of going to visit them in Minneapolis in the seventies and eighties. Ingrida was solid Latvian, a type that has gone extinct among my relations. The old Latvians are dying off and aren't being replaced by new ones. Some of like me never thought to embrace Latvian culture and identity till it was too late. Vieglas Smiltis

• I get to do a company class on Wednesday evenings. The interesting part about it is the drive to the company site. It takes about forty minutes and I go through parts of Wuxi that I hadn't been to in a while or just hadn't been to, and it makes me realize how routine and dull my life has become and how well-worn is the path I normally take every day.