successes

Yesterday I...

1. Successfully made it to church;

2. Successfully made delicious rosemary garlic bread in flowerpots. I was exceedingly relieved, because I fiddled with the recipe, and it came out PERFECTLY. The loaves are very rustic-looking, the crust is so crisp and fine as to melt in your mouth, the texture light and smooth, the flavor subtle but rich;

3. Successfully cleaned my apartment (it's gross when Simon gets up off the floor with particles of whatever all over his fur, although this can be attributed in part to the lurking presence of static, since it hasn't been that long since my last vacuuming);

4. Successfully went to bed relatively early, which was really great considering I had gotten up only twelve hours before.

All right, Monday. Let's circle each other warily and have at it. Watch out. My left uppercut is nasty.

unexpected fulfillment

I'm trying an experiment with pancakes. I ran into a woman the other weekend at the Farmer's Market who was selling bits of antiques and pretty junk, and when I saw a gorgeous, heavy cast iron skillet in her stall, I paused to oooh and ahhh appreciatively. She eagerly came around to the front of the stall and started expostulating on the glories of cast iron skillets, with which I just as enthusiastically agreed. "I have a Griswold," I said, "my family's from Erie." "Don't EVER sell that," she said. "They're worth a LOT." She then told me one of her favorite ways to make pancakes is to pour them into a cast iron skillet and bake them in the oven. I've been dying to try it, but pancakes seem somehow opulent for a weekday, so I've been waiting till today. Saturday breakfasts beg for a break from the week's austerity and hurry.

I had to guess at the temperature, so we'll see how it goes. I have the timer set every few minutes so I can check on it. (Seems to be doing okay so far.) I'm hoping this will circumvent my usual charred cinders method of griddle-frying them on the stove; I usually have to air out the apartment when I make pancakes, and it's cold today.

I also decided to make them from scratch using the basic pancake recipe found in The Joy of Cooking.

Anyway. I've been realizing over the last few weeks that I love my job. I've been there seven months now, and instead of getting restless and bored (that was the six-month mark) and continuing in an escalating sense of displacement, I find I'm settling in. My boss's very shy standard poodle, who usually jumps in fright when I enter the room, has come around and now follows me everywhere, begging for attention (and biscuits). My boss and his wife (who is almost the same person as I am, just a few decades older, and who runs the financial aspect of the office) are like family, and we have a lot of delightful conversations throughout the day; there's a lot of joy and joking that spreads around and leavens the focus and stress that comes with the legal field.

And I've been enjoying my duties. When I first took the job, I thought, I'm way too good to be a secretary, but whatever, I've gotta pay the rent. That sensibility persisted for quite some time, but in the last few weeks, I've found myself humming contentedly as I go about making copies and getting people on the phone for my boss. I don't think I'm above it anymore (although I know I could be doing anything I wanted to); I like it.

There's a lot I'm responsible for, and most of it involves making sure my boss's life and daily duties run smoothly. If I'm really good at my job, he's not even aware that I'm doing it, and there's a certain a-ha satisfaction to that. And now that I've been there for awhile and gotten to know his habits, I can anticipate what he wants and have it ready or get it done.

And yes, I make the coffee every day, and deliver it to my boss, his wife, and the clients. (I take orders from some of the clients, which is exasperating but funny; the coffeepot lives upstairs, where the clients can't go, so I have to do all the pouring and stirring and carrying.) This should be stereotypically humiliating, but the great thing is that no one expects me to do it for them; my boss only very infrequently asks me if there's any coffee. Plus it had been so long since I'd had to work with a drip maker that it's been fun adjusting the amount of coffee to the perfect proportion to make an excellent cup. And I do make good coffee. I know it, and everyone says so, and it's fun to showcase my coffee-making skills.

The thing is, I love to help people. I love to make their lives easier in practical, small ways. That's a lot of how we express love in my family -- Dad will make the bed once in awhile, which is Mom's usual task; or Laura or I will stay up late washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen while Mom's in bed so she can come down to sparkles and shine in the morning; Mom will tidy up our rooms or do our laundry when we're visiting; and when we're eating in front of the TV in the living room, if someone gets up to get more food or more water, he or she always extends a general offer to get someone something, or take their plates to the sink. That to me is real caring, and I'd like to perpetuate that in my own family when I have one. Romance in the form of flowers is nice, of course; but I most prefer the little tasks of thoughtfulness that make my day unexpectedly easier.

And since it's almost impossible to do this well outside of a nuclear family (the folks, particularly men, that I've done this sort of thing with have tended to take advantage of it without reciprocating), this job is the perfect outlet for those natural expressions. It helps that I really like my bosses. And they've been so good to me. They advanced my sick time in December when I was Queen of the Killer Headache, they pay me hourly so I get compensation for all the hours I work, they're charming and delightful and fun and take an active interest in my personal wellbeing. Doing my job well and being as helpful as I can is the least I can do.

Is my job prestigious? No, of course not. I'm a secretary. But I'm a pretty, well-dressed, wide-smiling, fun secretary who bonds well with the clientele and has a knack for making even sad or stressed people laugh, and angry people calm down.

And I'm happy. And that matters more to me than anything else.

Pancake verdict: Very promising. I need to play around with the temperature, but on the whole? Mmmmm.

my latest cat story

Simon would be a vegetarian's dream come true.

Now, he will eat meat scraps if he can get them; the other day I had to chase him off the coffee table when I caught him stealing mouthfuls of shredded pork and running into another room with them.

But the cat loves his vegetables.

I knew he had strange, uncatlike tastes to begin with -- he loves a good chickpea or a lick of hummus -- but I was mindboggled last week when, in the process of preparing Thai curry, I knocked a piece of green bell pepper to the floor...and Simon ate it. In fact, he liked it so much that when it kept skidding out from under his chin on the linoleum, he picked it up, carried it to the hallway carpet, and finished it off.

I tried with orange bell pepper last night while I was making a salad. (I don't ever feed him "people food," but if something "accidentally" falls to the floor from the counter while I'm making it, it's fair game.) He loved that even more. The piece fell on the rug next to my feet and he devoured it.

And yet one day I forgot about an entire stick of butter that I'd left on the coffee table, and when I came home it was untouched.

So I know in the future that if I have to leave the room with food on the table, I can peacefully ignore the butter, but I'd better take my salad with me.

moneymoneymoney

I was FINALLY under budget this week for groceries. This was even with a few luxury foods, like bacon. (Mmmmm, bacon.)

Of course, with how OVERbudget I was last week, I just might -- might -- even out. I really hate skimping when it comes to good food. And, unlike my childhood years, cooking with the good stuff is expensive. One of our splurges used to be Kraft mac'n'cheese; now homemade mac'n'cheese is the bigwig. Kraft? Three for a dollar.

I'm beginning to rejuvenate my interest in cooking after a month-or-so-long reluctance. Sunday night I experimented with making pita -- the oven wasn't quite hot enough to make them puff-pocketed, but they're still delicious, and go wonderfully with the hummus recipe that I'm always on a quest to perfect. This weekend's project is Welsh clay-pot loaves. I love the idea of bread baked in a flowerpot. The recipe in the book wants chives, parsley, and sage, but I think I'm going with rosemary instead. I've been hungering for a rosemary garlic bread.

Yesterday something interesting happened. I woke up with a bad case of the Mondays, felt inexplicably stressed, anxious, doubtful and depressed, and went to work with a dread of the day...but the foul cloud dissipated as I went about my working tasks.

It's been a long time since going to work made me feel better. And it wasn't like it was a breeze-along day; it was insane. But I enjoyed myself. And was thankful.

And even the snow has morphed from midwinter snows to early spring snows. The difference is palpable. Come on, sunshine!!

living with a schizophrenic central heater

My house is old. It doesn't take much to figure that out. My tub is cast iron, claw foot, and enamelled (I LOVE it. My feet when I shower are never cold); the bathroom sink is also cast iron, and the enamel is wearing off in blue streaks near the drain. Valance windows are painted shut over the doors. There's a badly patched hole in my living room wall where a stove used to connect to the chimney. Half of my walls curve up into the ceiling, instead of having sharply delineated corners. It used to be a one-family home.

So it has a central heating system, which no one has converted for the individual apartments. And since the landlord does not live on the premises, the thermostat lives in...the basement. The raw, dirt-piled, half-bricked, bare, creepy uninsulated Michigan basement.

This is a stupid place for a thermostat. Because it's always cold in the basement. So when the thermostat is set to, say, sixty-four, the central heat attempts to heat the basement to sixty-four. The result? I'm tearing off my clothes in my upstairs insulated apartment and sweating like I've just run a marathon because the temperature hits eighty-five or more. And since the basement doesn't have any heat vents opening into it, it never hits sixty-four in the basement. So the fan keeps running, and running, and running. Forty-five minutes at a stretch.

And when I use the stove, or particularly the oven, I pretty much want to get it over with and die of heatstroke.

See, I grew up in a heat-conserving home. We kept the central temperature at sixty-eight in the day; fifty-six at night. So I'm used to sleeping under ten blankets and wriggling into my socks, slippers and robe under the covers before I actually get up because the cold makes the tip of my nose ache and I DON'T want to expose my whole body to instant hypothermia. Now I can sleep under a sheet. And me no likey.

So at the beginning of the winter I sealed off the register in my bedroom with some handy-dandy adhesive foil my landlord gave me. That keeps the bedroom at a fairly reasonable temperature. But the living room has two vents, and last night with the heat from the oven for baking pizzas and all the living room lights on, Meg and Jess and I were enjoying a pleasant summer vacation in the middle of the Sahara.

It continued through the night, so that when I got up this morning and opened my bedroom door I walked into a wall of heat and had to kick off my slippers. I love wearing slippers. So then I got mad and snapped the kitchen vent shut and plunked down cross-legged in the living room in front of the register blasting me with heat from the bowels of hell and sealed it with the foil.

I did all this before even drinking my coffee.

Now the house is beginning to feel deliciously chillier. My toes are cold and in an hour I might even need a sweatshirt.

Of course the inverse of this situation is that when the weather warms up and the basement is at sixty-four, the fan will never kick on. So spring and fall are very very cold indoor seasons at my house.

Ah, the charms. I love it though. There's something delightful in having to outwit and trick your own house at every turn. You have to argue with it. You have to win its respect. It's like a step beyond Man vs. Nature. It's Man vs. House. And, if you have the occasional control-freak tendencies, and you can't tell your neighbors when to turn off their TVs or when not to stomp down the stairs, or you can't find them to tell them to put your patio chair back on the porch, or you have to bite your tongue instead of knocking on their doors and chewing them out for taking up too much parking space in the driveway again, it's a great outlet for some frustration.

i will awaken the dawn

[Stretch, yawn, grunt] I did it.

It wasn't as hard as I'd thought it would be. Of course when you're trying to get to sleep early, you never can -- all sorts of weird noises were happening last night -- dogs barking, Simon knocking things around in the kitchen, the neighbors coming and going, water dripping from the crappy gutter onto the roof outside my window, something scrabbling in the wall next to my bed -- so I finally put in earplugs, and when the alarm went off I was having an unpleasant dream, so it was actually a relief to open my eyes, although I felt my body going unnnnnghh, you want me to do WHAT?

But here I sit, it's nearly seven, I've been moving around for nearly two hours, and it's been marvelous. I had time to sit down and read my Bible and pray (I'm in Luke right now, one of my favorite Gospels, and I love Jesus' heart for women), put away last night's air-dried dishes, write a letter to my sister, make a grocery list, and savor my coffee.

Now I'm going to go play with picture frames. I have to drill holes in a couple of them.

a season of discipline

My Lenten vows:

1.) Get up every weekday morning at five o'clock.

2.) Spend NO money on anything that does not directly relate to food, bills, or basic necessities. This means I won't be buying, renting, or going to see movies; buying books of any kind; purchasing home improvement gadgets, knick-knacks, or antiques; paying for new music. (That last one is going to hurt -- well, they're all going to hurt, but music is on deck for what I start buying next.) I'm trying to include eating out, although that directly relates to food; I want to exercise more hospitality in having people over to eat fabulous food in my homey apartment.

I'm going to attempt to observe the Lenten season in the no-meat-on-Friday deal as well, which will be an excellent opportunity to prepare some of the mouth-watering fish dishes I've been eyeing out in my various cookbooks but have been too cowardly to attempt.

So I went to the store today and bought a lot of picture frames (hey, people drink a lot on Fat Tuesday, right?) to settle down with. I want a Dali Wall in my bedroom. And that'll be it for awhile.

I guess if I really wanted to hurt myself, I'd start hanging out a lot at Borders and Barnes & Noble; but I'm not THAT ascetic (or that disciplined). I'll just avoid those places like the plague and pretend they never existed, and all of my cookbooks appeared ex nihilo in the kitchen.

picture perfect...and young and restless

No, no, I'm not picture perfect.

But my apartment is. Or nearly so.

I spent all weekend working on the Picture Wall. I've exhausted my supply of attractive antique postcards and cute greeting cards, so on Saturday when out with Meg and Phillip I bought two itsy-bitsy calendars at a remarkable discount, one full of black-and-whites of New York from the 30s/40s, and one full of Van Goghs. I used the black-and-whites to finish the Picture Wall...well, almost finish; I need to hang about three more, but my drill battery died...and hung the Van Goghs in the hallway around a larger Van Gogh already there. It's not like anyone really looks at pictures in the hall -- there's no "step back and appreciate" space -- but you can see it at angles from the living room and entryway, and the effect is nice.

But what is this restlessness? I find it creeps into me every six months or so. There's this inexplicable desire for something new and different, something more, and it's not diminishing with time, this time around. Maybe it's the kid in me rebelling at the laid-out steadfastness of daily routine, when for the first twenty-two years of my life I had new classes every year...or, in college, every semester. And then for the two years after that there was a job change roughly every nine months. And now things are pretty straightforward. I have a nine-to-five. I'm here for awhile. Every week is basically the same.

So I go insane on the weekends with projects at home. I obsess about every little detail in my living space. I even worked up the energy to clean for the first time in forever -- the basics, scrubbing, sweeping, vacuuming, mopping -- but now that that's done I'll probably go all out and start washing the walls, which hasn't been done since I moved in almost two years ago. When I go home tonight I plan to rearrange the wall opposite the Picture Wall to get a little more feng shui out of it.

It's not that I want to go back to school. I don't. I enjoy the routine, I love my bosses, I'm more or less satisfied with my work. But there's something missing.

Of course there is, you might say. It's what you're always clamoring about. You're single.

Well, yes. There's always that. But that doesn't pang quite so badly lately, or else I'm just ignoring it. I had a great date on Friday night, so the awful loneliness eased for a few hours in fun and conversation. And meantime I'm regaining my center in myself.

But something else is missing. My best guess is that I'm bottling up my writing. It's always so easy for me to say, I'm going to do this; but when the "this" is as monumental as overcoming my own fears of rejection and vast inertia toward laziness to send things out for publication, I lag at following through. And I've been working out a lot of stuff, and fixating on my messy apartment, and that's been absorbing my attention.

The good thing is that my Lenten vow is to get up every weekday morning at five. (I know Lenten vows usually involve giving something up -- and I'm giving up later hours and later sleep, and necessarily some social time during the weekdays -- but what I really want to build is discipline, which also ties into the Lenten season and the preparation to observe the passion and the resurrection of Christ who was always disciplined in submission to the Father.) I used to get up absurdly early in high school, and I loved it -- something about sitting in a robe sipping coffee and journalling, reading the Bible, or writing while the earth blinks and begins to open its eyes is calming and invigorating simulataneously. So I'll begin to see some changes in my morning routine, and some time before the wear of the day during which to channel my energy into the craft; and maybe thereby an ease some of that restlessness.

I also need to cultivate a greater involvement in church. I'm hungering for some kind of ministry. I want to do something, not just think about it, or talk about it, or write about it. Fortunately I saw a few opportunities in the church bulletin, so I'm tackling that this week.

Meanwhile I'm making endless lists of things I want to accomplish at home, and trying to make myself file all the papers running loose about the office like a flock of madcap sheep. I hate filing. But it needs to be done, and so I have to do it.

i deserve flowers

So Valentine's Day started out wonderfully -- I had the morning off work because of the roads, so I spent it on home improvement in the kitchen. I purchased a pot rack the other week to hang over the stove (and got it half off because it was a display -- which still seems like an astronomical discount, but I wasn't about to complain; quite the opposite: I danced in the car all the way home), and as the darn thing is heavy it's currently sitting on the floor. But since it will be hung soon, this morning I took down the pots and pans that have been hanging on one wall, spackled all the holes (badly, but it was my first try, so what the hey), and washed and screwed in a couple more old crates to use for shelves. The two form a rough "L" shape on the wall, and are now sporting my extra cookbooks, an assortment of tea tins, my recipe box, teapot, loveliest mug, and new ceramic nesting bowls (red, of course). The effect is neat, and I'm so glad to get some extra storage space in my storage-space-challenged kitchen.

Plus using my drill is somehow relaxing, comforting -- like talking while working with an old friend.

The day is beautifully sunny, so I drove in to work with a light heart and light work load.

The only canker in the hedge was when the florist next door brought in an enormous flower arrangement for my boss's wife -- bursting with gorgeous roses of all different colors. Because I'm just as happy to spend the evening at home sipping a glass of White Zin, working in the end pieces of yarn in my knitted blanket, and talking on the phone with Leigh Ann while watching Bones (that's a pretty much perfect evening), but I really, really love roses.

I felt an unexpected wave of blueness surging toward me. And thought, Nope. I'm not going to let it get me. This holiday is ridiculous enough.

And put on my coat, walked next door, and ordered a half-dozen pink and yellow rose arrangement for myself.

They're going to look so pretty when I get home tonight. And (hopefully!) smell delicious.

Then I gave the twelve-year-old kid who lives on the other side of the office a dollar for shoveling snow so he could get his girlfriend of three years a flower. As I told him, "Dude, you've been dating longer than I have!"

But it was totally cute. He's one of those freckled, cowlicked, open-faced, polite, eager to help, do-work-for-money kinds of all-American kids. He looks like he should own some scruffy, rascally dog that follows him everywhere; but he's usually by himself, grinning and earning change to buy things for his mother, who just had a baby. He could easily get himself in trouble, I think, but he's simultaneously delightful.

Yay for flowers.

winter wist

You know what I miss about grade school? Snow days.

Once upon a time the promise of overnight snow showers was like the promise of Christmas: I went to bed with visions of snowmen and mugs of hot chocolate dancing in my head, hoping, just hoping, that when I awoke there would be seven feet of snow on the ground and I’d have to dig tunnels from my doorway just to play outside, and school would blow away on the frozen wind like a shattered icicle.

Of course, my dream of seven or twelve or fifteen feet of snow never came to pass; but still, a good foot or so would get you what you needed: that blessed, unexpected day off, when the school board decided that everyone should play hooky.

And now? I know that the only way I’ll be able to get my own snow day is if there really are seven feet of snow on the ground. I listen to the overnight forecast with great hopes of blizzards, even now, but every morning a few more inches only means an extra twenty minutes of struggle to scrape off and dig out the car, and maneuver it precariously down my drifted driveway before I brave the badly plowed roads to work.

And I need more rest now than I did when I was seven. I’m not around to drive my parents crazy, and I would love the extra time to clean the house and sleep in and take a nap and bake bread and cook something yummy for dinner (I’ve been ravenously in the mood for my mom’s homemade mac and cheese) and watch a movie or two and sip some hot cocoa and burn a few candles and hang out with Simon and enjoy the fell beauty of winter from the warm cozy comfort of my own nest.

The weather is supposed to be baaaaaad tonight, and, ever the optimist, I’m hoping...

Because I’m all stocked up on food, and as long as the power is operative, I’m ready to snuggle in.

creating is hard

So, I was talking to a friend on the phone this weekend, and we were discussing creativity and art. I quoted (or paraphrased) from Dorothy L. Sayers' The Mind of the Maker, saying, "The first thing -- the very first thing -- we learn about God from the first verses of the Bible is that He's a creator. And, if we are made in His image, that means we're creators too."

On a bigger, broader scale, this means that I'm going to begin more ruthlessly honing my own gifts as a writer to submit articles, fiction, and poetry for publication; but today, I was content simply having gone to church, and came home determined to recreate my apartment, which in the wake of a month of dragging sluggishness has fallen to crap.

But since I actually hate cleaning, I narrowed my eyes at a few large white spaces on the wall that I'm slowly covering with small, cheaply framed photographs and old postcards (and I mean old. Some of them have hit a hundred) and decided to hang a few more.

The problem with cheap picture frames is that most of them, inexplicably, aren't made to hang from walls anymore, but to clutter up flat surfaces; so you have to drill or pick or poke or scrape nail and screw holes (screws for some because I kept running into studs) into the wood or cardboard, and hope you can get the balance right. (My dad spends hours hanging pictures, measuring and drawing lots of x's on the walls in pencil; I have a sort of whimsical approach born of sloth and impatience, and bang the nails in helter-skelter, and pull them out if they don't work the first time. I like trial and error.) I'm also creatively incorporating one corner into the overall effect, and fitting nails in such a way as to allow pictures to hang across the corner, facing out at an angle.

The look is neat, if I do say so myself, but the problem with such precarious hanging situations in the no-wall-holes/balanced-on-nails-in-the-corner frames is that every time you start to pound another nail in, about five pictures come crashing off the walls.

I managed it all right, with a lot of grumping and stubbornness, but it made me think that making a workable, attractive something out of a conglomeration of somethings is hard enough, let alone a unified, diverse, interdependent, beautiful, perfect something out of nothing. Talk about awesome.

And I'll bet Mars didn't keep hitting God in the forehead while He was working on the exact angle for Earth.

Valentine's Day

So Valentine's Day is coming.

I've had violent reactions to the advent of this holiday before. It stops being all cute once you graduate high school -- sure, there are the occasional college sillies where you give your friends valentines and candy hearts, but usually in the face of people who are getting their significant others flowers and dinners out to nice restaurants.

I've done AlternaValentine's before, where a bunch of girls get dressed up and go out to eat somewhere fancy, since no one else is going to take them; and I've done the wearing black bit, and I've done the sitting at home eating too much chocolate and watching some romantic comedy and sniffling. Oo, and last year was viewing a performance of the Vagina Monologues, so I've done the feminist underground thing too.

But this year? I actually feel kind of warm and fuzzy about it. I have no prospects on the horizon, am recovering from the latest attack of bitterness, and will almost certainly be spending V-Day home alone reading Sunshine and sipping a glass of cheap champagne. (Or maybe I'll celebrate by going to see Blood and Chocolate, which I'm told is a wonderful guilty pleasure for the paranormally obsessed).

I think I exhausted my ability to feel jaded and bitter at Christmas, when I had to drive about a thousand miles in a four-day stint just to visit people I'm related to, and had no one in the car with me, and cried because Simon spent Christmas Day at a boarding facility. I broke down then, and haven't been feeling quite that low since.

In fact, some of the nice Valentine's memories have been playing through my head. Don't get excited; none of them have to do with any romantic relationships of my own. But my daddy always got my sister and me a boquet of carnations to put in vases on the table with Mom's roses, and my grandparents always send cards.

But probably the best Valentine's Day happened my sophomore year in college. My roommate at the time and her boyfriend and I hung out together in our teeny dank cave of a dorm room (yay MEP) once in awhile, and at the beginning of the academic year, Erika and James and I were discussing gardening. I didn't have much to contribute to the discussion, really, except for my lovely Midas Touch rosebush which I received as a graduation gift from a high school friend who worked at a greenhouse, and which puts forth enormous yellow roses three times a summer, with a fragrance that haunts with its sweetness. The conversation went on explore roses and other shrubs and flowers, and that was that.

But come Valentine's Day, I got a phone call from the front desk saying there was a boquet for me. Puzzled, I went up to retrieve it...and it was a half-dozen beautifully arranged yellow roses. The card was signed by James.

I ran back to the dorm room and showed Erika, who had her nose buried in her dozen reds from him, and I could barely speak, I was so touched and close to tears. She smiled and said, "He was actually really angry that he couldn't find any Midas Touch roses; these yellows were the best he could do."

So that was my most thoughtful Valentine's Day experience -- when a guy I wasn't even dating remembered my favorite flowers and expressed an act of kindness to a single friend of his.

Sure, I'm sure I'll feel a little blue come Wednesday, but that memory will help tide me over. It's good to remember the agape love, which assuages the absence of eros.

winter games

Evidently a favorite winter pasttime in the Midwest is driving around in your municipal vehicle or pickup truck with your plow up.

It's like a Best in Show Exhibition of Cleanest Plow Blades on Most Blocked Roads.

why today was great

1. I got enough sleep, and woke to a warm kitty curled up next to my hip.

2. I purchased a hundred-dollar pot rack (to hang all my pots and skillets above the stove) at half off because it was a display.

3. I talked to Meg and Phillip.

4. I bought Much Ado about Nothing (Kenneth Branagh) and Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann) as a two-pack for ten dollars.

5. I got out of the house to (half)watch the SuperBowl with some awesome girls.

6. It wasn't yesterday.

7. It is no degrees and snowing.

Sufjan is the glue

Leigh Ann and I discovered late this past summer that we both share an enthrallment with the music of Sufjan Stevens. We tend to go through similar spiritual depressions and doubts, and through the past few months have been listening almost exclusively to, and talking to each other about, this music.

Because this man speaks our language. His album from last July, The Avalanche, was my first exposure. From there I've gone on to buy everything he's done solo – an endless supply of songs upon which to fixate and meditate, and in which to find healing.

His songs tear me apart. The lyrics and instrumental arrangements and vocal ensembles dive past my consciousness and hit me right in that semiotic area of unspeakability. I can't describe exactly what it does to me to listen to him – it calls up a joy so intense it's pain.

One of the sources of his power is his use of repetition. Some of his songs repeat a single cycle of lyrical and musical phrases for three minutes or more, and, far from irritating, it strips away the automaton, the careless listener that evolves from too much casual listening, and forces a sharp confrontation with the music. Repetition does something to the human mind and soul. Some of the Psalms repeat one phrase over and over; hymns have choruses. Repetition is one of the backbones of human understanding.

To use a pop culture reference, the climactic moment of Good Will Hunting underscores the force of repetition to dismantle psychological walls. The first time Will hears, "It's not your fault," he responds with an automatic, "Yeah, I know." The second time, he repeats, "Yeah, I know," but gets agitated saying it. As he continues to hear, "It's not your fault," he gets progressively more upset – because the repetition of that powerful truth pierces through all of the shields he's used since childhood to cope with his abuse and anguish, and brings him face to face with a reality so intense he almost can't bear it, and it calls out the grief and brings him to peace.

That's what Sufjan's music does for me. I've buried a lot of spiritual hurts and damages, have watched them scab and scar over, and have gone on with my life; I came to an intellectual understanding of the forgiveness and love of God; but it was never really healing. The repetition in Sufjan's songs holds me firmly by the chin and directs my face toward God – a God whose love is so persistent and all-consuming as to be terrifying, and whose tenderness brings me back to the simplicity of my identity as His child. And it breaks me down. And holds me together.

It's been a strangely depressing and uplifting winter -- full of violent turns for the good and the bad: spiritual reawakenings, physical illness, amazing resurrections in familial relationships, money troubles; moments of joy, contentment, restlessness, despair. And through it all I keep turning to God, and to Illinois, Greetings from Michigan, Seven Swans, The Avalanche, and Songs for Christmas. (There are two others -- A Sun Came and Enjoy Your Rabbit -- which I have yet to listen to, although I have them; I'm half-afraid to. When I put in one of his albums to hear the first time, I have to put it in first as background, to get accustomed to it, before I'm able to sit down and concentrate on it, because otherwise the power would bowl me over.)

His art taps into the wellspring. And it's terrifically fun to live near the states after which he named two of his albums -- to drive past Ypsilanti, Michigan, to plan trips to the Sleeping Bear dunes, to turn the car toward Chicago. There's a weird visceral connectivity with place.

And, on a more frivolous note, I love hearing the Midwestern dialect in his pronunciation of the short "a" sound. "aa."

*Credit to Leigh Ann for the title of the post.

Happy Wm Had a Headache Day, everyone!

So I've been caught in a swirl of lethargy and forgot about this grand holiday almost completely; hence the no blogvertisements.

BUT this year WHHD went international! Yes, a dedicated group of people headed up by the incomparable Laura and Glen held their celebrations in the great nation of Canada. It can only go up from here!

If you forgot to celebrate last night with plenty of toasts and poetry, there's still time! Have a mimosa for breakfast; have a beer at lunch; have a glass of wine with dinner. Or, since those things probably won't give you a headache now, konk yourself on the noggin with an Acme hammer.

Here's to Wm's longwinded verse! Here's to all the poets who followed and proved themselves better! Here's to Murphy's Irish Red and WHHD celebrations in a South Bend blizzard, where the plows only come out once it's stopped snowing!

i don't care what your political affiliations are, this is funny

Saw it with MP on a trek to Grape Road. We laughed for ten minutes.

Reparation

Given time, desires breathe
their final colored lights and flick
to flakes of gray: white unfruitions
scattered on cement.

Hopes’ betrayals peel
from the pale cores of old loves
that, blown, roll into the cracks
of memory to endure
beyond significance.

So the comfort in yearning
is the anticipation of yearning’s
end, when longings no longer
hurt the lungs, but rest
in a film of wet ash
under the breath.

Inferences at Bedtime

Faucet water from the iron sink
scalds and freezes lather
from the stripped skin of my face.

A rhythmic cry, a half-sung growl
sound a cacophony of wrath or foreplay
down among the cinder blocks.

In the dark I balance on the toilet
and breathe the clean chemical smell
of snow through the rusted screen.

A cat shadows through the yard.
On the other side of the bathroom wall,
the neighbors’ voices sharpen.

(slightly) broader horizons

So, I joined eHarmony today. There's this really logical, well-thought-out-process as to why. Basically I don't meet anyone new, because my work circle is very small, and the things I enjoy doing most don't involve leaving my apartment; so, in the absence of matchmaking friends and neighbors, if I'm to expand my skyline even a little, I should probably look to the online community, where other people are looking for the same thing I am.

Does this mean I'm writing off and ruling out the guys I already know? Absolutely not. Should one of them ask me out, I would almost certainly accept. (I have this policy, you know. A very liberal one. If a guy isn't unwashed or creepy, and if I don't definitely dislike him -- evidenced by my hesitancy to speak to him -- I say yes to at least a first date. Some that have asked, I've liked a lot; some I've barely known; and "you never know until you try.")

But since, for whatever reason, I haven't been asked out in a long time (and for once I'm not throwing rocks -- you won't find me asking anyone out, although I have the justification of a role that traditionally allows me the right to expect pursuit), I'm opting for a slight expansion of my available selection. I'm not stacking all my eggs in the eHarmony basket; but at least with that service, I know that the men I meet there are looking for a relationship themselves, which makes it potentially a little easier to start one, and you can skip the stage of excruciating existential questioning -- Do I like him? Does he like me? Just because he talks to me, does that mean he's interested? Should I play coy? Should I make the first move? Should I just kill the crush and get it over with? Do I wait for him? How long? Will it ruin the friendship? Blah blah blah -- and move right on to Do we date or not?

So we'll see. No guarantees, no grandiose hopes or plans. Just a new way to meet people I otherwise wouldn't. And hopefully a few funny tales along the way.

Ice

I

Oh my heart has
returned to Sister Winter
~Sufjan Stevens

It was fourteen degrees on Wednesday morning. The air was so crisp and dry you could have cracked it with a hammer. I wanted to dance down the crunchy-snow-covered sidewalk on my way to the car, but having awakened disoriented and dizzy (I really can't get away with not sleeping anymore; I'm too far past seventeen), I took it easy on my inner ear and settled for a deep, contented sigh...that set me coughing.

Southern Michigan had an ice storm last weekend, and the drive to work, over the back roads and highways, had me staring arrested out the window so often that it was a good thing those roads are sparsely traveled. The trees glittered like glassworks. All the snow had melted on the ground, so the contrast between the brown-and-yellow stubbled fields and the ice-coated trees limning their edges and covering the low hills almost hurt -- like a good haiku.

Everyone but my parents and sister eyes me like he would a crazy woman for saying I love winter, but it's not a masochistic obsession. I dislike cold toes, wet socks, wind-snatched breath, and icy roads as much as the next person; but what I get from winter more than compensates for the inconveniences and the dangers.

I like that everything hibernates. I like the austerity, the beauty of starkness, the stillness that comes from the snow. It's a time that mandates rest. And it's one of the only times in the turn of the seasons when you can step out anywhere and be truly alone. No one's around, and when you're standing in the middle of a field, or a stand of trees, you're far more alone than you would be in any other season, because nothing around you is growing or dying; everything sleeps. The only active life you might see are a few birds, and their presence underscores the emptiness. It's just you.

So you can walk down the sidewalk, or through a field, or along the river, and soak in the quiet, absorb the stillness of everything around you -- the trees, the snow, the ice, the river. You can be by yourself, and in that solitude you can be yourself.

II

Oh my friends I
apologize

To everything there is a season. The Christmas season this time around was a hard one. Illness, loneliness, a yawning sense of purposelessness all robbed me of the childlike joy that usually takes over me like a sizzle of static. I did a lot of traveling, and I came back tired. The lack of wintery weather hurt me. I didn't feel that sense of magic, and when January wore on without a hint of snow -- with weather so warm you didn't even need a coat most days -- it bogged down my spirits. It wasn't seasonal. It wasn't right.

So I have been glad for the snow and ice. I may need to get up earlier in the morning to allow for time to put on boots and scrape the crystallized precipitation off my car and let the engine warm up so it doesn't stall out, but something about walking into that shock of cold brings me alive.

I love people. I love to be around them; but cyclically I need to be alone (there's a season for that, too), and winter is exactly that call to solitude that I've been missing. It's a time also to process a lot of the things I've refused to deal with from the past year. While life was busy and the landscape was lush I put everything away, like sweaters into a bin, and now that everything is silent I can dig them out and hold them up and look them over.

When spring comes, I'll be glad of that too, but this is the time for things to be still, and I like the stillness to have a blanket of snow. It's cold, and sharp, and beautiful.

And when the trees are stripped of their leaves, you can see them for what they are -- all of them throwing their branches up to the sky. If you pick out one, just one, while you're driving (or riding with someone in the car; that's probably safer) and watch it as you go past, it seems to spin, with its arms thrown up, like a dancer. In praise.

out of control

You know those weeks when you are just really not with it? And how it takes at least two weeks to clean up after them once you start to get back on track? I'm having the aftermath of one of those.

I spend a great deal of my time in a state of comparitive sanity, but every once in awhile everything breaks down and my life skills disintegrate and I find myself completely forgetting simple and important things at work, while my apartment goes to crap and my sleep goes out the window.

So this week I'm playing hard-ball catch-up at work, feeling stressed and stupid and frantic -- how could I have forgotten to record that hearing date? -- but still determinedly optimistic. I'll just work my petutie off all day, and by the end of the week I'll be back on track.

The other fly in my ointment is that the headaches, which have taken a tremendous backseat since the last hospital trip, are resurfacing. Stress, I'm sure. Blargh.

of horses and pieces, or pieces of horses, or horses in pieces, or...no, never mind

Living in the Midwest brings to the mind of a Western Pennsylvanian the odd quirks in her own regional dialect.

Particularly to a girl hailing from Erie -- the land of oxroast, pepperoni balls, and uninflected questions that come out sounding like irritable statements -- the Midwestern speech patterns are nasaly and off-puttingly pleasant. (Don't be offended! It's an all-American dialect here, and I love it.) "College" sounds like "callege," for example. And everyone's speech pattern is so friendly. They actually ASK questions here. And they'll say hello to almost anyone. I'm accustomed to greeting only people I like, and glancing or grunting at strangers and acquaintances.

So some differences already exist; but the idioms are what really intrigue me. I've noticed certain things, certain terms and phrases, that didn't travel from Western Pennsylvania to northern Indiana. "Gum bands" never made it. "Red up the room" died before Ohio. "Run the sweeper" gets you skeptical glances from people imagining brooms hooked up to motors, while "my hair needs cut" or "my room needs cleaned" or "my brakes need fixed" makes English majors from other regions cough.

But these, while a little odd, seldom break down communiation completely. Hearing one of them might require a little more concentration or forbearance on the part of the non-PA-er, but the point goes across the gap and interprets itself well.

The kicker, the one that knocks the neurons all askew and drops an anvil on conversational understanding, appears to be one of the primary phrases of my childhood: "it's a horse apiece."

I've said it indifferently once or twice, once to a friend who was born and raised in Michigan, and once to a friend who's more or less from the East Coast, and both times I received a flat, "What's that mean?"

"You don't know?" I was incredulous (and probably looked insane).

"No. I've never heard that before."

"Oh." I had to pause, and came up with, "Well. It means two things are the same."

A synonymous phrase is "half a dozen of one, six of the other," which to the Western PA mind takes WAY too long to say. So when a friend calls to ask if you'd rather go out for pizza or Chinese, if you don't care either way, you grunt, "horse apiece." Or if someone asks you for advice on which of two courses of action to take, and both options are grim, what do you say? "Horse apiece."

Where does it come from? I have no idea. A quick google search identified some old gambling game called "horse," the rules of which I didn't understand; or trying to select the best of two bad ways to get to one place on horseback, both of which will ruin the horse before you get there. Apparently the phrase was first found in a DARE dictionary in 1980, but related phrases go back to as far as 1846; and none of these references identified a region of origin.

Which leaves me curious: Has anyone else ever heard, or used this phrase? Where? Is it limited to Western PA, or are there pockets of use elsewhere in the U.S.?

In a land where English is one of the most common languages, it's sometimes startling to be brought up short only four hundred or so miles away when someone asks you to translate a childhood phrase you just used.

Another reason why I love my native state. Even if people say our grammar needs fixed.

still waters

Being friends with MP involves, at least once a semester, some insane off-the-cuff epic outing, unpremeditated and fluidly conceptualized. This is one of the perks of being her friend. Also one of the perks of still being twenty-something and able to keep up.

Our most recent epic adventure involved a sudden trip to Pittsburgh with Cousin of MP, tallying twenty hours of driving in the span of two days, to visit the intrepid K. Flanagan and the Gentle Giant Linus, view an art show (featuring K. Flanagan's photography), see a concert by Army of Me and Like Summer -- both fantastic -- and then have the pleasure of listening to Like Summer's From Arlington Heights, with Love all the way home.

As always, a visit to Pittsburgh did the soul good. Something about that city (I call it America's City of Lights -- if you've seen downtown from the top of Mt. Washington at night, you'll know) restores. I like South Bend, I've found a lot of niches and quirky facets to enjoy, but "I miss those hills," and it's always wonderful to go back. Pittsburgh has layers of sooty industrial history which its contemporary culture incorporates and renovates, the most amazing arts scene (original artwork hanging in many bars and restaurants), tons of crunchy little shops, and fantabulous restaurants, from ethnic cuisines to old-fashioned diners.

So we went, we saw, we admired, we left, all in a whirlwind of nonstop activity. As we caught I-70, heading west, I tried to remember what it was I felt like I'd left behind.

And then I remembered. It was Pittsburgh.

small-town working

So the town where I work in southern Michigan is one of those tiny towns. The only main thoroughfare is essentially a few restaurants and small businesses planted on the banks of one of the State Routes to Bigger Places. "Main Street" consists of two antique shops, a couple of churches, and a school. It's just a little too old-industrial to be quaint; a few abandoned factories are working hard at rusting to the ground along the railroad tracks. And yet it's charming.

I grew up in something like a small town, though it was far bigger than where I work. And being here every day, eating out and frequenting the antique shops, is bringing back to mind the hilarious things about small town life. South Bend living is more urban, compact and yet sprawling, and nearly everyone is and remains a stranger. But not here.

Last week I went to my favorite of the antique shops -- a junk shop, really, where there are things like old bedpans and oil cans (still half-full of oil) mixed in with the dressers and chairs, and everything is unpredictable and cheap -- and I was chatting with the owner, as I always do, and telling him about my apartment woes and my plans to move as soon as I find a decent place.

Then Tuesday as I placed my order at Subway, the girl behind the counter asked me, "Have you moved yet?"

Priceless.

Phat Me on the Back (Or, Don't Read This if You Have a Sensitive Stomach)

Well, it took me about three weeks, but I managed it. I made phat thai (or pad thai, as most of us call it) on Sunday.

I love Asian cooking. Doing it myself is a little scary – the ingredients lists in my Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese cookbooks require their own glossaries. But you get to buy the neatest toys – clay pots, bamboo steamers, woks – and the coolest staples – star anise, dried chilies, fish sauce, shrimp paste, seaweed, jasmine rice, rice noodles – and it makes for an entertaining culinary experience.

I blame the lengthy time to accomplish the making of phat thai on shrimp.

There are some things that take some getting used to. The biggest is raw seafood. Lots of yummy-looking recipes call for clean-your-own whole fish that stare at you while you eat them. I am frustrated because, having scorned fishing as boring and gross in my adolescence, I am now at a loss when it comes to cleaning fish (can anyone teach me?). But I think I could handle it.

Shrimp, now, are another matter entirely.

I’ve only come across one other creature that I had some weird psychological problem with eating. Rabbit. The sauce for my Spanish rabbit stew was exquisite...but the bunny carcass was distressing. It was the same size and roughly the same shape as my cat. Wrong. I couldn’t eat the leftovers, and ended up throwing away the rest of the frozen (and NOT de-boned, might I add) meat.

So I’ve learned that I’m not immune to the occasional revulsion when it comes to food. But I learned that a hundred times over when I bought my own bag of whole ocean shrimp at the Asian market. I thumped them down on the kitchen counter and blithely read the recipe’s deceptively innocuous directions for shelling and cleaning them, then got to work.

It was horrible. The peeling wasn’t so bad, and their little legs come right off in sections with the shell. I could even deal with the eyes. But not the whiskers. You know cat whiskers, right? Long, kind of thick, have a fascinating springiness, but sort of repugnant all the same. Shrimp whiskers = so much worse. Really, really, really thick – the kind you’d expect your bristly aging Aunt Sally to pull out of her chin. Horsehair thick. Longer than your finger. And they stick to EVERYTHING.

So I was already disturbed shelling shrimp with shrimp whiskers clinging to my hands (because they apparently have a goal of detaching from their owners as quickly as possible, and I swear there were way more whiskers in that bag than the number of shrimp could account for). But the deveining and debraining done me in. You have to cut off their heads, and hope you don’t cut it off too close to the end, or this nasty brown semi-liquid the consistency of pus explodes all over the cutting board, and sometimes runs down the mud vein.

I did this sixteen times. Well, a few more than that, since I threw some of the shrimp away as I went, fearing to kill myself with shrimp poisoning from brain matter.

Then I looked at my accomplishment, the little fleshy curlicues of blue-gray rawness snuggled up in the mixing bowl, and covered them and put them away. I made do with chicken soup that night for dinner. My stomach hurt. Then I scraped all the shell and leg and whisker fragments, all the heads and eyes and fluids, into the trash can. I threw the rest of the whole shrimp on top, tied it off, and took it to the trash.

I wound up throwing away the peeled shrimp a few days later.

Once I got over the trauma, using plenty of good, traditional holiday food like cookies and coffee cake, I bought the lovely already-cooked, pink, deveined, headless, eyeless, whiskerless, legless, shell-less frozen cocktail shrimp that the amazing civilization of the West has made possible, and made phat thai with that.

The end result was less saucy then we get at restaurants, but still extremely tasty.

Now I’ve caught the make-lots-of-Asian-food bug.

Seriously. Can anyone teach me how to scale and clean a fish?

adulthood

I was going to tell you all something amazing, something you'd never heard or thought of before, or at least, if you had, and you probably have, not in the words I was going to use. I was going to illuminate for you all some trace of the sublime to tuck in your pocket or hide under your pillow, I was going to pen a phrase so charged with song that it would haunt you for the rest of the week and burn your tearducts when you sat alone in your car, I was going to write the final line of a novel that's never been written, and write the story backwards for you, so that, mesmerized by the end in beginning, you might not have left your computer for hours, forgetting that you're tired and bored, that your back hurts, that your life isn't what you imagined when you were fourteen writing letters to yourself at twenty-four, because when you're fourteen you don't think of bills to pay and pets to feed and apartments to clean and dinners to reheat, or evenings spent curled under the caresses of light and sound waves from the television, or cell phones swallowing their battery power on the coffee table in stillness.

I was going to ease the tension in your eyes by delivering a word of that profound truth most of us can't quit hoping to find, that truth which no genus of doubt or mockery can deny, the truth that kisses faith on the forehead and lays it finally to rest. I was going to do it. I had it all ready.

But that was only what I wanted, and real life is a narrative of a different profundity, and it's time for bed.

on seeing

So I've been thinking about this one Gospel account of Christ's healing. It's fairly unique in the recorded history of his ministry. In Mark 8:22-25, Jesus heals a blind man:

"They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man's eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, 'Do you see anything?'

"He looked up and said, 'I see people; they look like trees walking around.'

"Once more Jesus put his hands on the man's eyes. Then his eyes were opened, and he saw everything clearly."

Weird, isn't it? I don't think there's any other instance in the Gospels where Jesus touched someone twice to heal. It's stuck in my mind since I was little. What did it mean? Did it not work the first time? What was going on?

In Annie Dillard's chapter on seeing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she talks about people, blind from a very young age, who received their sight due to advances in medicine. They had a hard time dealing with seeing; their conception of the world had nothing to do with vision, and oftentimes they voluntarily reblinded themselves (through blindfolds, or shutting their eyes) to get around.

Applied to this passage in Mark, the twice-touching indicates something a little different. Not failure to heal the first time, but two different healings entirely. My guess is that the first touch healed the physical aspect of blindness: His eyes worked. But his brain couldn't interpret what he saw. The feedback from the optic nerve was still "blind," so that to him, people looked like trees (leading me to wonder if perhaps the upside-down/right-side-up switcheroo aspect of his vision hadn't been yet corrected, and people's legs, perceived upside-down, looked like tree branches.) So the second touch healed his perception. His brain could make sense of what he saw, preserving him from disorientation and craziness.

Just a thought. I listened to a sermon recently that kind of demonized science, but I've always viewed science as enriching our understanding of Scripture.

And it's awesome to think that Christ's power, and God's healing, go much deeper than redeeming just the physical. The human body, the human brain, the human mind, the human spirit pose no mystery to God.

Stupid boys being stronger than girls. When Phillip carried my writing desk down to the basement by himself to make room for the tree three weeks ago, he made it look like it was a desk constructed of plastic. Light, airy butterfly-wing plastic.

I almost threw my back out carrying it up the stairs today after disposing of the tree. And I'm no Scrawny Sally. In the words of John Myers' dad, I'm a big, strong Pennsylvania working girl. (Not THAT kind of working girl. Perv.)

Oh well. My back will be telling me the whole sad tale tomorrow. But it's nice to have the writing desk back.

Now if I could just find my living room floor...rumor had it there WAS a living room floor...

2006 in review

Job switches: 2
Apartments: 1
Trips to visit family: 3
Visits from family: 3
Pets gained: 1
Traffic accidents: 0
Dates: 3
Boyfriends: 0
Friends lost: 7
Friends gained: 2
Musicians discovered: 7
TV shows discovered: 3
Spiritual awakenings: 1
Domestic skills acquired: 5
Bad habits quit: 1
Pounds lost: 17
Heartbreaks: 2
Old hurts partially resolved: 2
Trips to the hospital: 4
Great ground-breaking works of fiction written: 0
Journals filled: 1

Conclusions: I dislike the number 6. It was a tough year. But it looks like I came out even.

bring in the new year

The apartment is a mess, the tree sits dead and (for fear of fire) dark in the living room, absorbing the light that comes in through the windows, assorted fantastic presents litter the carpet, my suitcase lounges in unpacked waste on my bedroom floor, dishes pile the counters and sink for the first time in two months, and the cat keeps losing his milk jug ring in the tree. And with an aching sinus from what appears to be an allergy-induced cold, I don't feel like cleaning any of it.

I can't decide if I want to spend New Year's Eve alone or not. I have a couple of options, but I'm tired and don't feel up to driving the distances I'd have to drive to elect them. Besides, I'm tired of spending holidays away from Simon. I kind of want to knit on the couch, drink a champagne toast to Janus, pet the cat, and go to bed.

Christmas was different this year. It turned out well -- the visit with my parents prior to Christmas, and with my sister and her fiance at Christmas, went wonderfully. It was good to see them. But whether the shock of my experience with the sacred dulled my appreciation of the warm fuzzies that come with the commercial and secular of the season, or whether the travel exhausted me, or whether the change in tradition (not celebrating as a nuclear family) threw me, or whether spending so much time in the constant company of others wore me out, or whether being ill for most of the month of December drained me, Christmas felt weird. Like a good visit, like a pleasant mini-break, but not like Christmas.

Oh well. I'm glad to see the centrifuge of 2006 come to a close. I'm sure 2007 will come with its share of change, but hopefully it will be more pleasant.

Happy New Year, folks! I'm going to go hold a hot cup of coffee against the left side of my face to try to break up the congestion there.

Enough

Now my neighbors panhandle, on occasion, both me and my guests for "taxi money" for their shady friends.

Last night, my neighbor knocked on my door asking to borrow the basement key, since the Absent Landlord had told her she could have one for storage, but hadn’t given it to her yet. I complied; she then disappeared, with the key, for an hour or so. Doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to figure out that she was getting a copy.

I called the AL, to find what my suspicion had whispered to me: He hadn’t told her she could have one. Great. They were up and about well up till five this morning, slamming the occasional door and waking me up. And when I went back down to the basement this morning (having reobtained my key), I found some of my stored alcohol missing (at least, I'm SURE that one crate wasn't EMPTY when I last looked at it). And I know the boyfriend is an alcoholic.

So. Beating, lying, possible theft, and (I suspect) drugs. The porch light is always on after dark. Why would it need to be on? Why do I hear furtive whispers in the stairwell leading down to the outside door at 4:15 a.m.?

I’m finished putting up with this. Done. Terminada. I’ve sent out an email to the neighborhood Listserv, inquiring after apartments for rent. I have a few leads.

There is a fine balance of wisdom in a sticky situation. On one slope, it’s wisest to be stubborn and stick it out and try to complain loudly enough that the situation improves; on the other slope, once all complaints have fallen on officially deaf ears and the situation continues to worsen, it’s wisest to leave.

I think the balance tipped last night. Well, probably it tipped last week when I had to call the police. But having to worry about getting robbed on top of calling the police about domestic violence is, shall we say, too much.

It’s like an abusive relationship. There are plenty of red flags along the way, and if you keep ignoring them, eventually he’ll hit you. I’ve had more than a few red flags, and I’m afraid that if I stay, something horrible will happen.

And I’m tired of being edgy and nervous in my own home.

Five Things You Don't Know About Me (And Were Probably Better Off Not Knowing, Anyway)

MP the Gnome-Killer tagged me, so here you are:

1.) As soon as it's cold enough to wear pants, I stop shaving.

2.) When I'm gone for a day or two, and I'm wondering how my cat is doing, I consciously have to remind myself that he can't answer the phone if I call him.

3.) In seventh grade I invented my own alphabet so that my friends and I could pass notes in class. I continue to use it for personal notations that I don't want people to read.

4.) When I was little I made my younger sister color all over the bathroom door with marker and color her arm black. I then blamed her for it.

5.) Often I find myself singing a hymn or praise song in the car, then breaking off mid-word to yell some terrible profanity at someone ahead of me. I am trying to work on this. Sometimes.

Okay, I'm tagging LAR and Matt Holman.

oh there's no place like home for the holidays

My incredible bosses (I can't believe the people I work for now -- it gets better and better every week) let me go home quite early, so here I am in Erie, typing while my dad naps on the couch and Mom is at work.

Tired as I am of being the single daughter who, at this stage in the game, cannot transition from four-year-old to real adult by means of having some sort of significant male other, it's good to be home. Our enormous gray cat, Alex (a/k/a Greubie) is as moody and delightful and catlike as ever...and, although he sees me extremely infrequently, he was ecstatic to greet me when I came home last night. He's getting old (no! no! he stopped aging at four!) but is still himself.

And I can never stop loving how I get my parents' old queen-size bed, which they put into my room once they upgraded their own. So coming home is like going to the Ritz. I get to take a break from my own ancient narrow mattress (which is, however, the perfect size for a me and a small furry Simon) and lounge around in luxury. And I find myself joyfully taking up the entire middle of the bed.

The tree is up, the traditional decorations are glowing, the usual Christmas music is playing in the background, the cats are curled up sleeping in Dad's LaZBoy, and I'm waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. Just another "break" when Sarah returns to the homestead.

Plus I got to listen to Sufjan the entire trip home yesterday...I had purchased his Seven Swans album for a Christmas present for Leigh Ann, but she bought it for herself a couple weeks ago, so I popped it in yesterday. Really nervously, actually, that kind of nervous excited anticipation you get when you're about to perform a song you know really well, or when you're going to see an old friend you haven't seen in years. Because I know that when I listen to something new and Sufjan, it's going to destroy me (in the best way possible), and I always wonder which song is going to do it, and how. Seven Swans is inspired by Christian church music, so a lot of it is purely acoustic, and purely dedicated to Jesus, and purely beautiful. I spent a lot of the drive tipping my head just right so the tears would run out the corners of my eyes without obstructing my vision.

It's so amazing to feel alive with God again. Like other things still matter -- matter more, in fact -- but nothing matters as much as that aliveness, that awareness, that communion, that closeness. And it's always right THERE.

Hallelu Yah.

firsts

It's 12:55 a.m. And I just called 911 to report domestic violence perpetrated against my neighbor across the hall by her boyfriend.

TV does prepare you for some things, it seems. I heard the argument through the walls -- typical on a weekend night, particularly, for whatever reason, on a Sunday night, and just as I was thinking I would need my earplugs to sleep -- having, you know, work in the morning -- I heard the shouts and hollers turn to horrible thuds and thumps, and then I heard my neighbor scream my name through her door.

So I called the police, flagged them down from my window when they arrived (my house is hard to find), and directed them to the correct door. They resolved everything and sent the beater on his way. Then I talked with my neighbor in the entryway for a few minutes and told her to go talk to the police in the morning while she calmed down.

Then I called my landlord and left him a voicemail.

So now what do I do? I'm sure the boyfriend is pissed at me, and these are not the kind of people you want to be pissed at you when they know where you live. I'd like to be joking, or wry, but I'm not. These are some scary people. I've never had a reasonable sort of fear in my home before. The occasional wild paranoia, yes. Reasonable fear, no.

I don't want my neighbor tossed on her (bruised) ear. I like her. She's not a bad neighbor. But I know the pattern for abusive relationships, and eventually he'll be right back, and it's going to happen again. And each time I'll find myself awake and nervous and sick at some ungodly hour calling the police on some ungodly man, and then worrying about some ungodly retaliation. These things are cyclical.

I love my apartment. I love my home. I could scream at my landlord for this sort of management.

So what are my options? The chances of getting a quiet, solid, untroubling neighbor, with the landlord I have, are slim to none, barring some monolithic act of God. I shouldn't have to move. I have stubbornly refused to consider the option before. It's my right to be here. But it's also my right to be safe. And now that's being called somewhat into question.

But I love my neighborhood. I want to continue to live in it.

And I want to continue living in my apartment. The one I'm paying rent on. The one I'm living in right now.

I don't want to have to deal with crap like this. But now that it's here, how do I deal? Insist on getting rid of the neighbor right now? Give it another incident or two before I really start caterwauling? Wait out the next conveyor belt line of horrifying neighbor selections? Start apartment hunting? Start house hunting?

One thing I will do for sure. After I talk to my parents, I'm talking to my boss. He's offered to write my landlord a letter before. I think it's time to take him up on that offer. My safety is at stake here.

let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love

Yesterday's Itinerary:

5:00 a.m. Get up.
6:00 a.m. Depart for University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
9:00 a.m. Check in to U of M ER.
8:00 p.m. Leave the U of M ER (having had bloodwork, multiple IVs, steroids, examinations by the neurological team which gave my eyes an Olympic workout, and an MRI)
9:00 p.m. Eat a huge steak and mashed potatoes meal at T.G.I. Friday's.
12:15 p.m. Arrive home.
1:00 a.m. Fall exhausted in bed.

Last night I went to sleep with eyes so sore my whole head was aching. This morning I woke up and except for a few faint twinges, the headache is finally almost gone.

I can't decide what the best part of yesterday was. The crazy drug addict on the other side of the curtain during the morning, who wouldn't stay in her bed and kept wandering around demanding Vicodin and whining at the doctors, "What did my urine show?" I nicknamed her Narcotica. She was a heavyset woman with a face like a wet sack of flour and stringy hair. My dad wanted to chain her to her stretcher. I thought it was funny.

Or was it the feeling of blood gushing over my arm while the nurse stuck my vein for the IV? No, that wasn't the best thing about yesterday. Taking a nap during the MRI, using Thich Nacht Hahn's conscious breathing technique to calm myself down? That was interesting, but not the best thing.

The best thing about yesterday was definitely having my parents right next to me all day. They kept talking and laughing and telling stories, getting angry about how long it was taking for my MRI results to be read, and making me feel taken care of and loved. Going up there would have been impossible to do alone. As it was, it was bearable.

And I think my headache is finally (finally!) going away. The good doctors diagnosed me with a migraine. (Still don't know why that was so hard. I'd like to ask the doctors at Memorial in South Bend why they didn't diagnose a migraine to begin with, since that hospital is about two blocks from my house.)

Thank you, Jesus.

...and counting

No change for the better.

But my wonderful parents are driving up to take me to the ER at the University of Michigan tomorrow. It's about three and a half hours from the Bend, but it sports some of the best specialists in the world. My boss recommended that I go there, since no one here can figure out what's wrong.

Hopefully the morrow will bring word of good health.

Thanks for praying! Or for thinking well of me and hoping for the best, if you're not into praying. :)

Day 14

This marks the second full week of unending cranial pain.

I went to the ER again on Monday night. MP angelically came with her laptop and stories and kept me company and called her dad for advice and kept up a running stream of jokes while I got more shots in the ass and cried, and got a spinal tap and cried, and lay back on the bed for an hour and slept and cried.

Boo.

The good news is that none of the tests revealed anything wrong. Bloodwork: normal. CAT scan: normal. Spinal tap: normal. But the headache and the increasing pain in my shoulders and back remain inexplicable.

My family practitioner also practices osteopathy, so he gave me a neck and back adjustment yesterday, which relieved the pain for about four hours before it slammed back into my temples and rendered me practically useless. I dragged myself through the rest of the working day, and finally broke down and asked my boss for the day off today, just to sleep and rest and (as I'm discovering while typing this) not look at a computer screen, while lounging around out of my mind on Vicodin and Flexeril.

I don't know what happened to make this spring out at me suddenly. Undeniably it's been a horrifically stressful year. I haven't had a chiropractic adjustment since college. I rarely encounter physical contact from other human beings. I suppose all those put together exploded into my present situation.

Okay, ow. Really can't look at the computer screen any longer. So I'm going to thank everyone who has been so remarkably helpful, apologize for being a grumpy, bad invalid (I don't know what to do when people offer to help), and go see what kind of fun I can have stringing lights on my Christmas tree while under the influence of a narcotic.

church

I attended again this morning. I found myself looking forward to it.

I love, I love, I love that there is Communion every week.

The pastor emailed me a few days ago, welcoming me to the church, asking if I had any questions, if there were any areas where I wanted to serve. I plan on signing up for a few things.

The people were just as friendly as last week, and in fact I discovered that two friends of MP's landlord also attend the church, so I have some unexpected familiar faces in the (delightfully small) crowd! My next-door neighbor, also a member, offered after church to let me carpool with him and his kids on Sundays.

It's really quite crazy. Suddenly I seem to be surrounded by a community. And I think I love it.

please, no more

This was the ninth full day of constant headache.

I had back problems in high school that led to terrible, unceasing pain for nearly a year. I was taking Lortab, I wore a back brace, and could only wear awful men's jeans because the brace eliminated my waist. I felt generally miserable, I cried as I did all my classwork at school, held the tears back when I was actually in company with people, and got to the point where my friends whispered strategies among themselves for getting me to smile.

It's starting to feel like a paler shade of that. I can only concentrate partially on what people are saying. My mental alertness is diminished. I'm annoying myself with my slowed responses.

And above all, it hurts. It hurts no matter what.

Time to find a chiropractor, I guess.

sing a song of sixpence

So, my doctor surmises that my intense headache (still not gone, though I'm no longer staying home from work -- being at home all the time with no one to talk to is boooooooooring) stems from my spinal problems. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before. While I was on my parents' insurance, I had regular chiropractic adjustments to help me deal with a genetic condition (I have an extra vertebra...and, yup, it's cracked) and the neck injuries I received from at least three car accidents in which I, the passenger, hit my head on the door. But I haven't had anyone help me with my back and neck in two and a half years.

You may think chiropractors are crap, but I've found them helpful. I just haven't had chiro-practical (HAHAHAHA) insurance until now. So hopefully I can do something about it. Because this headache sucks.

Meanwhile through unforeseen circumstances (i.e. a clerical error) I find that my health savings account, which I began while I worked at the Center, contains considerably more money than I had anticipated. I have taken all the appropriate legal measures to rectify the situation, with the result that the extra money is mine to keep. Now I can get new glasses (worsening eyesight is, I'm sure, also contributing to The Headache That Will Not Die) and pay an outstanding doctor's bill from October, when I needed a stronger dosage of antidepressants to continue dealing with the stressors of the year.

I love how things work out. And I find, through no efforts of my own, that I have a little more than a pocketful of rye with which to care for my health.

Ow.

This is Day Number Six of the Headache That Will Not Die.

I've been home from work the last two days with this, the first migraine of my life. (Those of you who experience them regularly are either wincing with sympathy or laughing at my wimpiness.)

When I woke up yesterday morning, I was so dizzy and weak that I feared carbon monoxide poisoning. I called my parents, packed a bag with a couple of Little House books (I adore Laura Ingalls Wilder) and my knitting, and drove to the hospital.

All of the attendants were pretty grumpy, but after a few cheerful quips and questions (the first always being, "Were you here all night?"), they loosened up. I sat in the hospital bed in my hospital gown (which happened to match my socks) and knitted under the roaring pressure in my skull while I waited for the doctor. The RN complimented me on my knitting. (Way to teach, MP!)

The doctor informed me that I'd get a CAT scan, blood tests, and a shot of painkiller. He looked kind of worried, so as I sat there knitting and waiting to be taken for the scan, I wondered if maybe something were really wrong. Maybe this was it.

Fine, then, I thought. There are a lot of things I wanted to do with my life before I gave it up, and I really wanted to grow old someday, but if this is how God wants me to go, that's okay. I'll get to see Him all the sooner.

But the CAT scan turned out to be normal. I made the technicians laugh when they asked me, as they eased me onto the narrow bench, if there was any chance I might be pregnant. "Pfffft. No way!" I said, with such patent resentment that they howled.

Being wheeled down the hallway on a guerney makes me motion sick, by the way.

And if you want to see me break down and bawl like a helpless baby, just stick a shot of something into my rump. Needles in the arm, in the gums, whatever, I can handle. But not in the rump.

So I declined a narcotic, took the next best thing, and drove myself back home, since there was no CO in my blood either. My boss made me stay home and told me I'd get an advance on my sick time (I can't believe my wonderful employers). So I lay around the house all day with the blinds drawn.

Today the headache is still around, but not quite as horrible, and I'm bored out of my skull, so I'm going back to work.

But I'm really glad there's nothing wrong with me. Except perhaps "adult onset headache disorder," which I've never heard of, but which the doctor told me is common among women in their mid-twenties.

I had to swallow that sharp "And they're all single, right?" that almost leaped out of my mouth.

Well, I'm holding to the hope that this was a one-time deal.

Bits of Catching Up

I have had a headache for four days.

It won’t go away. It was bad all weekend, but today it’s so horrible it’s making me nauseous, and my vision is blurry. I’m not prone to migraines, so I don’t know what’s going on.

I’m trying to reach the doctor’s office, but the line is busy.

Look, I feel so awful that nearly every sentence contains a "to be" verb. Ugh.

In the meanwhile, I forgot to update everyone on my neighbor situation. The past month has seen an increased instability in my home environment. (Don’t worry, Simon and I are getting along just fine.) Smoking Neighbor Ted is gone. His cat of nearly twenty years died in mid-October, and shortly thereafter his family came and took him to an assisted living facility. I didn’t get to say goodbye or wish him well; he just disappeared.

So The Lazy Landlord prepared Ted’s tiny efficiency for new tenants. I waited in dread to see whom he would rent it out to.

My fears were pretty much confirmed when he leased it to a middle-aged woman and her teenaged daughter...and the teenaged daughter’s two-year-old daughter. Three people in a room the size of a generous kitchen. And our house is not built to accommodate a two-year-old. You could hear her every noise right through the walls.

I could have taught myself to live with that. But within twenty-four hours of moving in, they were knocking on my door asking if they could take my patio furniture off the porch and up to their apartment for awhile. I said, "Uhhhh...no. You can borrow these folding chairs for tonight, though." I didn’t get them back until I asked for them, two days later. (My philosophy, and that of most people I know, has always been, If you don’t have something, you buy it yourself, or you do without. Especially with furniture. MP and I sat on the floor for nine months in our first apartment.) Not to mention that every time I knocked on the door I heard a panicked and suspicious "Who is it!" Like I was the police.

I called the LL every day for a week about them. I informed him of the illegality of three people in such a small square footage, particularly with a small child. The next day he told me the teenager and her daughter had gone to a shelter. (Great. These are people to whom going to a shelter is a normal option.) I complained about the cigarette smoke pouring into my apartment from their vents.

THEN I began to see a man around. A big, scary, mean-looking man. He accidentally rang my doorbell one night, and when I opened my door I saw him coming up the stairs from the porch...by himself. You need a key to get in that bottom door. So either the woman across the hall was leaving the door cracked open (scary) or she’d given this strange man a key (terrifying). Since the LL said that she was from Pennsylvania and didn’t know anyone in South Bend, I began to fear a rotating circuit of creepy men. And, for the first time since the week after moving in, I began to fear a break-in, or worse.

Of course I called the LL about that. Finally, a week later, they were gone. Which I take as divine protection, because when the LL called to ask if I had seen them recently, he told me the big scary guy was supposed to take over the lease. (For an associate pastor at his church, the LL takes remarkably poor care of his tenants.)

So I was glad they were gone, and freaked out about who would come next. But so far the new neighbors aren’t that bad. Most of the time it’s a middle-aged woman by herself, and she’s energetic and friendly. Her boyfriend, a man in his fifties, is there quite often, and sometimes her son. She enthusiastically agreed to have the LL give her an alternate heating source, so that her cigarette smoke wouldn’t pollute my apartment. She aired out her apartment this weekend to clear out the smoky smell in the hall.

And if I ever forget her name, it’s tattooed on her neck.

Last night the first signs of trouble brewed...a lot of thumping and the sharp sounds of an argument taking place next door, and someone slamming his way down the stairs at 11:30 p.m. I’m hoping that’s only temporary, because I like her. She doesn’t bother me, or ask for my stuff. And generally she’s very quiet. At least so far.

I hope this one works out. I’ll call the LL again every day if I have to. But I’d rather not have to.

If crap like this keeps going down, I may have to reevaluate my get-a-house-at-the-age-of-thirty-one plan.

Oh and another recent bit of good news is that I quit smoking. (Yes, those of you who didn’t know: I smoked. Full time for about nine months.) Two weeks ago, cold turkey, haven’t looked back. I feel much better, and boy is it going to save me some cash!

A good year, this.

The Lord's Late Breakfast

Today I cast my shadow, for the first time in almost a year, over the doors of a Protestant church.

Some months ago, a Notre Dame grad student named Sarah googled "i hate south bend" and found my blog. We struck up a correspondence about how South Bend is a difficult area, and how fed up and discouraged we've been with the church scene across the board. Yesterday I met her, her husband, and their two-year-old son at the Chicory Cafe, and we had (or at least I had) a great time, sick toddler notwithstanding. The told me they've been attending a Methodist church on the South Side that's pretty good -- with a congregation that believes in sharing itself with the surrounding community. At their invitation, I decided to attend.

It came at a good time: I had set a December 3 deadline for finding some church to attend, at least for the Advent season, because last year I slept through church for the entirety of December and felt not at all spiritually prepared for Christmas. It sucked. So this morning I rolled out of bed, drank my coffee and dressed -- a little nervously! -- and went to church.

It's tiny. Fifty people max. I hadn't attended a Methodist church before, but at least they're Arminian (har!), and this one is liturgical. With which, having gone the Catholic way for awhile, I was comfortably familiar -- and the extremely user-friendly bulletin helped further, even letting you know which word to use in the Lord's Prayer ("debts"). Two of my favorite Advent hymns ("O Come O Come Emmanuel" and "Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus") opened the service, the sermon wasn't bad, and the congregation were engaged with each other and friendly. A lot of people came up to me during the Passing of the Peace and after the service to introduce themselves, shake my hand, and ask what I do and how long I'd been in South Bend. During the announcements at the end of the service, they asked if I wanted to be introduced, so I stood up and Sarah introduced me, saying, "I met her because I read her blog." Everyone laughed.

But I liked Communion best. It's done every week at this church, and people go up in waves to kneel near the altar. The reverend went around and tore off a hunk of homemade whole wheat bread and placed it into each person's outstretched hands. She bent over each person as she did this and said, "So-and-so, this is the body of Christ broken for you." I knelt with folded hands and wondered what she'd say when she got to me, since I was new (and I hadn't yet been introduced to the congregation). She came to me and said, "Sarah, this is the body of Christ broken for you."

She'd taken the trouble to learn my name. Incredible. At the last Protestant church I attended, I shook the pastor's hand at the door at the end of my third month of attendance, and he asked me if I was a first-time visitor. (That ended my church attendance until my brief exploration of Catholicism this fall.)

The highlight of Communion was that the size of my chunk of bread about equalled the size of my fist. After dipping it in the wine, I stared at it for a second, thinking, Well, Body of Christ, what do I do with you? Do I nibble on you? Or do I cram you in my mouth all at once? I opted for the latter because it was kind of crumbly, so while the woman next to me picked at it shred by shred, I forced my lips to close around the huge bulge in my cheek and chewed as discreetly as possible, staring embarrassed at the floor and thinking I looked like a four-year-old chowing down on the Host. I was really hungry though, having not had time to make breakfast before bustling out of the house. The whole experience left me oddly joyful.

Oh, and my next door neighbors attend this church as well. Weird. There are about forty thousand churches in the South Bend area; that's not something one might ordinarily expect.

So now I have a church to attend, at least for awhile, and new friends to sit with. (And eat lunch with afterward!) The people seem warm and involved in each other's lives. Maybe the small size will suit me best.

What's happening to me? Is this a growing up thing? Where finding The Perfect Church isn't as important as attending a decent one? Where weighing disgust with the contemporary Church and the responsibility to participate in the Body somewhere tips the scales toward responsibility?

Probably. Whatever it is, it's kind of great. I feel hugely relieved. Problem solved (for now).

whole

A series of apparently unrelated events, taking place over the course of the last seven years, conspired to change my life on Thursday.

Seven years ago (perhaps eight) I wrote a story that centered around the hymn "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." I wrote it as an extemporaneous application piece for a summer creative writing program at the college that my sister later attended. The only prerequisite was that the story contain a truly cheesy sentence that went something like "her voice washed over me like clear blue water." After the time was up and all the applicants had turned in their pieces and left, I approached the moderators and asked if I could be mailed a copy of my story. I left them my address. They looked at me funny, a little irritated, but I got my story. I didn't get into the program.

My senior year in high school, I took Publishing Seminar, a class that produced my high school's competetive yearbook. That spring, once the yearbook was complete, some ambitious Pub compatriots, including myself, conspired to revive our high school's extinct litmag. Stacy and Christie and Molly slaved over the designs and layouts, and I developed a selection system for all submitted pieces. I also worked hard on my story about the hymn (oh, and yes, it's a crappy story, with a couple of good narrative seeds), and it was unanimously accepted.

So the hymn was running through my mind a lot that spring, as we printed submission fliers to stick into all the carpeted walls. It was running through my mind when my grandfather died of lung exhaustion from pneumonia at the end of March. It was running through my mind when a classmate died from a car accident less than a day later. It was running through my mind as we devoted an entire section of the litmag to commemorative pieces from her classmates, teachers and friends.

And then I shut it off, like I shut off the rest of the trauma, so that I could continue with my life. College was coming up. I had things I had to do.

Eighteen months later an indie pop/folk songwriter and musician I wouldn't hear about for five years began to rethink his hatred of the Christmas season. In December of 2001, Sufjan Stevens began, as a discipline to "make himself appreciate Christmas more," to create his own renditions of traditional songs and carols, and to write originals, as a private gift to his family and friends. This project continued over the next four and a half years.

Meanwhile, that same December, my sister was at her most ill. My family felt fragile. I was frightened and sad. Over the next five years, I witnessed the goodness of God in the circumstantial orchestration of my life. My sister stabilized. My family relationships improved. I graduated college and moved to South Bend. I found all manner of blessings in the jobs I landed. (Oh yes, jobs. I've had a lot of them in the past three years. Yay the rootless twenties.) In the friends I met. In the people who looked out for me as if I were their own family. I stopped attending church, but I kept the faith. I lived the way I knew I ought. I acknowledged God's obvious hand in my life.

But I didn't feel his presence. I used to, when I was little. All the time. Something completely inarticulable -- just a deep awareness of him surrounding me and filling me. It faded as I grew older, of course, and particularly during a difficult youth group experience that left me convinced God would rather not have made me because of how awful I was. I was sad for a long time. But still there were moments of that remembered connection, at retreats in particular, when God was there, when I felt him all through my being, and knew that he loved me.

The moments grew fewer and farther between. They seemed to vanish altogether. But I didn't notice, or I made myself not notice, until this summer. When the absence of connection threw me into a tailspin that almost cost my faith, except that I refused to give it up. I believed even when I didn't feel like I believed.

Then on November 21st, Sufjan Stevens, to whose music I had been introduced in the spring, and whose music I have come increasingly to love, for its genius and its strong, vivid, heartwrenchingly gorgeous undercurrents of faith, released his Songs for Christmas. Seven days later the mailman dropped it in the cleaned-out litterbox that serves as a catchall under the tiny rusted mailbox on my porch. That night I opened it and looked all through it, at all five albums, and rejoiced in the anticipation of hearing what he had to say and write and sing about the titles.

I read down through the track list on the back of the box. My eye stopped on "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." I had forgotten that hymn.

So when I came to it, Track 3 on Album II, I almost closed my eyes while driving the twenty-five minute commute to work. Simple. Choral. Tender, reverent, loving. Gorgeous connector chords between the verses. Lots of unembellished banjo and piano. And sung in the version I had always known and preferred, with the lyrics I especially loved.

When Album II ran out, I cycled it back to Track 3. I put it on repeat. I couldn't stop listening to it. It ran through my head while I made copies at work. It ran through my head while I forced myself to be polite to mean clients. It ran through my head while I knitted on my lunchbreak, alone in the upstairs office. It ran through my head while I cried, for the first time in six and a half years, for my grandfather.

That was Wednesday. Thursday I didn't listen to anything else. I harmonized with it all the way to work. Then, on the way home, as the last shreds of daylight faded from the prewinter sky, I felt some force compelling me to stop singing along. To listen, and be silent. So I did.

And started to cry. I wept the whole way home.

Because I felt God. I felt God beyond all need to grasp at faith, I felt God beyond all need to articulate to myself that he loved me. I didn't need to tell myself anything. God was there, surrounding me, inside me, all through me, and nothing else mattered. Not my stressful week, my single state, the trials of the past year(s). Everything was just God.

Once I was able to start thinking, I started thinking how his love was absolutely present, with his presence. I felt like I'd passed a long, arduous test. And I realized how much I'd missed that deep connection.

And thought about the timing of the events that were laid to bring me to that space in time.

Suddenly a lot of things are different. I have been able to be more understanding of the people who irritate me throughout the day. I've been able to step outside of myself. To stop worrying about the future and to stop being afraid. And to process various things that I haven't dealt with yet.

I feel like something in me that was broken a long time ago is beginning to heal. I know peace.

I don't know what it means, or what's up ahead, and I don't really need to. My longings to know God are being satisfied. I'm happy, and joyful, about the present.

Sufjan Stevens was the catalyst. And I'm immeasurably grateful.

Come, Thou fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace!
Streams of mercy, never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above!
Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy unchanging love.

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I've come.
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wand'ring from the fold of God.
He to rescue me from danger
Interposed His precious blood.

Oh, to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let that grace now like a fetter
Bind my wand'ring heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it --
Prone to leave the God I love!
Here's my heart -- oh, take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above.