“So little of what could happen does happen.” –Salvador Dali

In the next room, my kids are listening to a book on CD about the “dead days of winter” – those days between Christmas and New Year’s – and I’m lying on the couch reading an Andrew Porter short story about a kid who disappears into a backyard hole. Christmas is only ten days away, it’s cold and dark outside, and really I just want to hunker down inside my house and read another story, or watch that documentary on the table about folks who attend balloon-twisting conventions (or “twist-jams” as they’re called).

I’m absolutely serious. These kinds of things give me hope for humanity, the way spotting a whirlygig collection in someone’s yard while on a road trip gives me hope. Yep, what really gets me through the “dead days” of winter is the knowledge that what could happen, sometimes really does, in spite of what Dali says.

So if I have to go out, then bring on the quirky, the uncanny, the spontaneous, the delightful, the unexpected. After the jump is a list of events and outings that have the capacity to get me out of the house and plug me into the alternative holiday grid.

Competitive, hierarchical, physically demanding, time-consuming and under-recognized by the masses, it is a "sport" unlike any other. The demands are great, and rewards often few and far-between: a mention on the third page of a newspaper's arts section, an invitation to a summer residency half a continent away, the applause (no bouquet of flowers for you) as you bow, a moment of transcendence as you float above the stage during a grand jette.

Just ask Rahm Emanuel, President-Elect Obama’s chief of staff, who spent a good part of his life in ballet class. Or the thousands of boys who auditioned last year for the highly-acclaimed new musical Billy Elliot. They might tell you that the hard work never lets up: push-ups after class, endless stretches and lifts to build up the precision and strength needed to support female dancers, and then, finally, a solo, your brief moment to shine.

At first, Illinois seems to have no secrets. Everything is out in the open: the cell phone towers on the horizon of factory farm fields, the cinder blocks at the shallow bottom of an I-57 borrow pit, bright white wind turbine blades turning slowing against a backdrop of black storm clouds. There are no mysterious nooks, crannies or hollers in the landscape, no serpentine roads disappearing between lush private lanes.

Instead, we have electrified grids of city blocks, transparent Mies van der Rohe buildings and wide suburban thoroughfares plowing through endless strip malls. And then the people, who give it to you straight, even when they are lying.

The Champaign Unit 4 school board set a dangerous precedent last week by voting to censor the book The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini from the sophomore honors English curriculum. Certainly, the passage in question, a male rape scene, is disturbing. But so are many, many other passages in great works of literature presented to high school students (works by Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner immediately come to mind). Great literature, and all art for that matter, has a way of expressing the full range of human experience so as to challenge readers to understand what it is to be human and learn in a safe way about the world and its problems.

I admit it. I’m a soccer mom. But not the kind you are thinking of: not a mom who loves to watch her kids play soccer, driving them around town in a minivan for that purpose, but a mom who loves to play soccer. I started playing in high school, back in the 1980’s when girls were first getting turned on to soccer.

I played at Indiana University for a few years, mainly second-string, but still a travel player, and we went to tournaments across the country. After graduate school, I played year-round recreational soccer for many years with the Illinois Women’s’ Soccer League in Chicago. I can still remember the wild soccer parties, the astro-turf rug burns, the ebb and flow of action up and down the field, predicting patterns as a midfielder, feeding the ball in just the right way to create plays, the missed penalty kicks, the smell of Jackson Park south of the Museum of Science and Industry, the teammates I’m still in touch with…soccer was a huge part of my life, like music and books.

But no longer. It isn’t that I don’t love to play anymore. I do. But here in Champaign County, 42-year-old women with three kids just don’t seem to play soccer, not that I have seen. They sit on the sideline in camp chairs with a cooler full of juice boxes or they arrange end-of-the-season pizza parties. Sometimes they play co-rec softball on Sunday nights, or bowl in a league, or go to book club. But they don’t play soccer.

The Champaign Public Library has in its circulation exactly two copies of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, a novel about book censorship, authoritarian rule and the negative influence technology can have on humanity. One would think that Bradbury’s novel, which champions the very existence of libraries and freedom of speech, would have a larger presence in the stacks of our brand-new, 30 million dollar library.

Yet, if you consider that one of the primary messages of the book, that technology can be one of the most destructive forces of our time, the paltry number of copies makes perfect sense. Consider the following statement, made in the 1950’s by Bradbury:

See quote after the jump.