"Tää on taas niin tätä."

Should get up at 6 a.m. to get to the bus station on time. It's now 2 a.m. and as writing usually requires conscious brain functions... Even if I fell asleep right now, I'd still be fucked up to some degree tomorrow. Why is it that when you know you have to get up early you just can't sleep?

EDIT at 3 a.m: Still awake. I'm going to so tired tomorrow...

EDIT at 4 a.m: Wanna guess? I suppose it's time for one of my notorius "wakey, wakey!" marathons again. Shit. This and caffeine to stay awake... a bad combo!

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Another thing I've been wondering for a couple of weeks now. Santa Claus. Why do parents reinforce their relationship to their children by lying to them for years? I mean, Santa as we know him is an American invention. Coca-Cola's invention, to be exact. It serves no other purpose than boosting their sales figures and since then all others have taken advantage on this, too. But why lie to kids? His sole purpose from the parental point of view is that he is some vague authority figure, a dictator, who decides if you've behaved good enough to have presents. Is it that parents play the god-card: shifting the responsibility to something imaginary being the kid doesn't get to question?

The way I see it, this holiday is about spending time with a family, preferably family of your choice (which is not my situation which in turn pisses me off even more than the holiday's commercialism...). This is a time when you give presents to those you care about (again, preferably...), to express the affection, the care, the friendliness. What the hell does a strange man has to do with any of this? Nothing. So why keep it up? Because it's a tradition, it's what has always (and I use the term loosely) been done. Seriously, if we were to do everything as before, we'd still be living in caves wondering if the twinkling lights in the night sky are gods' eyes watching everything we do... and shifting all the blame to them, of course.

And no, I have no bitter memories of the lie being revealed to me in some brutal way. I have no recollection of the time I thought he was real. Actually, my mother -when confronted with this question as a kid and even now!- keeps saying he's real (more or less seriously, I hope...). So as a result I ended up taking the autographs of the two Santas in two years and compared them to each other. Not the same (obviously, since the other Santa was my father's drinking buddy, and the other a friend of my mother's). And still she kept saying Santa's real. I doubt this is the fundamental cause of my trust issues but it sure doesn't help to build a trustful relationship between a parent and a child.

...Perhaps I'll watch 'Grinch'. I wish I had the Bad Santa film... so much nastier and thus funnier. Well, I'll have to settle for Thornton below.