Part two of two. Yang: light.

...and yet, it isn't all sadness; there are hours and days in which the sadness doesn't come, and making a last-minute run to the store to buy crayons leaves you laughing, marveling at how the streams of light from the snarled traffic on the other side of the road remind you of nothing but a long string of Christmas lights.

Life's like that.Or, as gleefully said to Heather earlier today:

me: Oh dear. We get both IFC and Sundance.
Heather: Are you ever going to leave your living room again?

After much ... well, okay, perhaps not so much debating, and more like grumping about our quality-free cable TV service, we had direcTV installed today. Afterward, I began the tedious task of removing the channels we couldn't or wouldn't watch from our channel listing, turning close to a thousand channels of barely-differentiated TV minutiae into perhaps a hundred of vague to intense interest. (Not to mention surprise, since according to the website, I was assured that we'd get IFC, but not Sundance.)

Or, as said to my spouse: "Oooooh! Ok, I think I'm gonna like IFC. Remember when we watched that black-and-white movie that was Christopher Nolan's first movie?" (A shake of the head. Pity. I really liked it.) "It's showing this afternoon."

I didn't watch it, but just knowing that I had the opportunity to watch it gave me a curious thrill of satisfaction as I cleared out everything from an extreme sports network to three thousand football-only channels from our channel guide. After years of wanting and wishing, there it was - HBO, right in front of me. No more complaining about how I had to wait for the various HBO shows I follow to come out on DVD.

Chris, during last night's phone call: "I figured you were a closet Sex And The City fan."

Me, with much amusement: "Well, yes, but I wouldn't describe myself as a 'closet' fan."

I spent part of the evening beginning the prep work for this year's Christmas cards. I'm preparing a set that well represents the schism in my personality; half are spare, simple cards with no color, no glitter, just a bit of embossing and then my traditional scrawled message inside.

The other half will be done in crayon - because I can, because some part of me tells me that I should. Most of the time, I avoid doing Christmas cards because I spend too much time in the dreary ritual of envelope-addressing when, in fact, I would rather luxuriate in taking out my memories, one friend at a time, and incanting the remembrance of love and friendship into a tangible stream of ink. (This year: address labels!)

Tomorrow I will wrap up a long-standing mitten project, and put the finishing touches on my Halloween costume. I am thinking of packing the cards in my bag for my next-week sojourn to Atlanta, and spreading out the remembrance, writing, and inevitable hand cramps (!) over a period of days.

The scent of crayons still makes me sneeze, but, thankfully, it also still makes me smile. It makes me think that given time, a few tablets of construction paper, and a few sunny days, I'll find a way to make that precarious line between remembrance and sadness a bit less precarious, and a bit easier to tread.

Barring that, there's always IFC.