the daily grind

I just found the end of a pretzel I'd been looking for this morning. In a rage of hunger I was chowing down on pretzel roddy goodness when Boss-Man came up to the front office needing copies of something made, so I hastily swallowed pretzel powder and threw the rest of the pretzel somewhere on the desk and pretended I wasn't eating anything on the job. (Not that he cares. He eyed me with the stern glare of a sumo wrestling coach this morning and demanded to know if I'm eating, and informed me that he wants me to gain thirty pounds. I'm not turning into Elephant Girl to suit you, I retorted.) But still, unprofessional. "How bay I hep oo?" "Waw ovvice. Coudoo hold pweeze?" So I lost the rest of my snack, but there it is, next to the typewriter. Now, however, it has become by definition "gross" and must be thrown away.

Things at work are vastly improving thanks to the magical appearance of COMPETENT PART TIME HELP. It's like -- it's like -- springtime in spring. (And if you don't know what a miracle that is, come visit me in northern Indiana/southwest Michigan in April.) It's the unexpected bliss of things happening when and how they're supposed to. I didn't know such a wonder could be.

And, better yet, I'm getting this amazing little gem called MY OWN OFFICE. Yes, my own office. Four walls. A door (sort of. The door is upstairs somewhere). The big copier. My favorite typewriter. Drawers. Shelves. Cupboards. My Own Space. A place to work. The receptionist will answer the bulk of the phone calls, deal with walk-in clients, and the intake of new clients.

And I will be able to do my actual job. Drawing up documents. Organizing files. Keeping an eagle eye on deadlines. Learning more about law to be a better right hand to the Boss-Man.

I actually look forward to going to work these last couple of weeks. For a while it was horrible with the old incompetent help, and then it was stressful with no help at all, and then it was the letdown and fallout from not having to be stressed anymore, and now it's evening out. The new gal is fantastic and really enjoyable, fun to talk to, and fits right in. On top of being competent, smart and efficient.

Vast sigh of relief.

I need another pretzel.

My Five-Hour Dog

Friday morning I went downstairs to drink my coffee on the porch, have devotions, and journal, according to my usual summer custom. The new neighbor's kitten had left a couple of kitten droppings on the porch, so I stuck my head in the door to grab the broom, and when I turned around, a large, powerfully built dog was coming up the steps to greet me, ropy tail wagging madly, tongue lolling in joy.

"Well, hi there!" I said as I bent down to her. She immediately covered my face in kisses and panted eagerly and anxiously. I looked her over. She had a collar, but no tags, and the collar had the remnants of a broken chain snapped off at one end. She waggled all over while I ran my hands over her short, shiny coat to see if she were too skinny; she wasn't, but looked a little hungry, and more than a little thirsty, so I went back upstairs to grab a loaf of moldy bread I hadn't gotten around to throwing out, a plate of cottage cheese, and a bowl of water.

She followed me up the stairs like she belonged there. She whined and scratched at the door when I shut it on her. She followed me back downstairs and ate some of the cottage cheese and drank a lot of the water, and when I sat back down to continue my morning routine, she sacked herself out at my feet and went to sleep.

I petted her while I read, watched her breathing slow down and even out, and thought. Occasionally her paws would flex as she stretched and sighed. She slept with her hind legs crossed in an adorably dainty manner that contrasted with the sprawling abandon of her front paws.

She was a pit bull.

When the next-door neighbor took his dog out to the car for a vet appointment, my new friend shot off the porch and was on the street meeting Shannon before you could blink. I ran over to pull her away, but she wasn't being vicious, just sniffy. Dan, the neighbor, confirmed my pit bull suspicions. The dog (I called her Bella -- she really was a beautiful animal) and I returned to the porch. She went back to sleep. A squirrel came up to the remnants of the bread not six feet from her nose and she just watched it idly. I looked at the sores on her side and didn't know what to do.

The temptation to keep her was overwhelming. Never mind the landlord's objection to dogs. Never mind that my apartment is too small, let alone my income. Never mind any of it. When I went inside to shower, I let her follow me up and into the apartment. Simon was not happy. I never heard a louder hiss come out of that cat in my life. Bella just wanted to play; he just wanted to hide. I pulled her away from him and shut her out of the bedroom where he was holed up under the bed. I showered. I got ready for work. She followed me all over the house, happy to be doing whatever I was doing. I thought. I called Animal Control and reported her found, and learned that if I kept her for a week and nobody claimed her, she was mine. I also found out that pit bulls can't be adopted out once an officer comes to pick them up.

I took Simon to work and left her at home in the apartment all morning. (Yes, I know. I am insane. I allowed a strange pit bull the run of my apartment. Even my crazy neighbor thinks I'm crazy.) I did some pit bull research online, and learned to my regret that pit bulls are highly energetic and require (as the fake Professor Moody from HP4 would say) CONSTANT VIGILANCE with other animals, as they can't be trusted not to fight, even though they are sweet and even-tempered with people. And I could never do that to Simon. Kitty comes first.

So I called Animal Control again and asked them to meet me at my apartment at half-past noon. They said it was highly unlikely they'd be able to, in case they had to respond to an emergency; but when I pulled into the driveway, they were just arriving.

So they took Bella away. I would have named her Lyddie, if I'd kept her. But she was someone's pet -- probably not ill-treated, if she was so sweet. And she didn't destroy any of my stuff. Not any of it. It looks like the only thing she did all morning was take a long nap on my couch.

Oh yes, and pee on my floor. Four times. Evidently not a housebroken dog. So I spent my Friday night glamorously scrubbing baking soda and vinegar into the hallway carpets, and handwashing all my rugs in the tub (and understanding anew how much washing machines have revolutionized modern life). But that was a small price to pay, I think, for inviting a stray into my house, and for having gotten to meet such a lovely dog.

Simon has settled down. I was afraid he'd begin to abandon his litterbox in favor of remarking his territory, but I underestimated his good kitty manners, and all is well.

I hope that the good girl gets her owners back, if they deserve her. I hope she doesn't get put to sleep. It was wonderful to have her, if only for five hours, and even if my carpet is still drying out from all the stain and odor treatment. She was fantastic.

Ciao, Bella.

"These Mashed Potatoes are So Creamy"

I had the privilege of serving this recipe to a couple of friends last night, and judging by the rate at which they disappeared (the potatoes, not the friends -- I'm not running a cannibal camp or a Cooking House of Horrors here), I thought I ought to share.

Ingredients:
3-5 lbs. Idaho baking potatoes
1/4 c. milk
1 stick butter
1 package Philadelphia cream cheese
plenty of salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Directions:
1. Wash and peel the potatoes and cut them into eighths. Place in large saucepan and just cover with water. Sprinkle with salt. Bring to a boil, turn down the heat to medium, and cook, uncovered, until soft (20-35 minutes).
2. Drain. If you're a cheater like me and have a Kitchenaid, place the potatoes in the mixing bowl. If you're a psycho antique shopper like me and happen to have an antique potato masher (those things are THE CURE for lumpy potatoes), use it to mash up the potatoes until thrillingly smooth. If you're a normal person, use a fork. It won't get out all the lumps, but it will be close enough.
3. Add a splash of milk, half a stick of butter, and the entire package of Philadelphia cream cheese to the potatoes. Put the mixing bowl in the stand mixer and use the whisk-like mixer head. Set the mixer on speed 3. (Or, if you're not a cheater like me, use a hand mixer.) Once all the ingredients are blended, add the rest of the butter, and begin to add the salt and pepper.
4. Adjust the seasoning and add more milk as desired.

The result? A dish worth dialoguing about in Hollywood. Perfectly reheatable. So creamy.

undesperate houseperson

Since getting my Dyson from my wonderful parents when they came to visit, my housekeeping has been revolutionized. Suddenly it's fun to vaccuum, and the broom is facing indefinite retirement. The bare floors are cleaner than they've been in a long time, and my back doesn't ache afterward with bending over the dustpan. Sweet.

Well, one is never satisfied with merely one kind of convenience, so this week I broke down and bought a Swiffer WetJet. Anything to make the mopping of the kitchen, entryway, and bathroom floors easier. I put it together just now and mopped -- and what a cinch. Delight! Joy! Time savers and efficiency untold!

It also eases that part of my mind that has always been unquiet about dumping Lysol water down the tub. I know there are earth friendly cleaners out there, but I've never found them to be terribly effective. The Swiffer-ma-bobber sponge pad thingie absorbs all the liquid and the dirt, and you just dispose of it when you're done. (Yes, I know, it's still waste, but it's not toxic liquid waste that could easily seep through the century-old piping systems of my historic neighborhood into the surrounding soil.) My mind is more at ease.

And my house is cleaner quicker, and the floors drier faster! Huzzah!

question

Why do dead jade leaves glitter?

A quick search on the trusty favorites, Google and Ask.com, revealed nothing but bad poetry and cheesy short stories.

What mineral is in them that makes them all sparkly when they're dead?

in the land of the living

I woke up this morning with the vestiges of a migraine still wrapped around my head. I'd been popping Imitrex like candy all week, to no effect; so yesterday I called my wonderful, fabulous, amazing doctor, closed the office early (with Boss-Man's permission), and went to get shots from one of the nurses. (I hate getting shots in the arse, by the way. I turn into this puddly fully-grown baby.) Then, to my shock and wonder and gratitude, the nurse said the doctor wanted to know if I wanted him to write me a scrip for steroids, since he remembered that those had worked against the Killer Migraine of December. When I first went to his office in January, I was told he hated prescribing steroids and wouldn't do it. Of course I said that would be wonderful, and a minute later she came back with the magic slip of paper.

I had just enough time to drop the scrip off at the pharmacy on my way home from getting the shots before the extreme drowsiness of the drugs set in, and then Meg later came and drove me back to pick up the 'roids. I started taking them this morning, and I think they're going to work. God bless my wonderful doctor, God bless Meg (no offense, Meg), and God bless God.

The AL came this morning to pick up his rent check, so I was able to follow up on the midnight phone call of the other night, and he has already spoken with the neighbors. When he left I sat on the porch drinking coffee and enjoying the perfect morning. South Bend in summer is quite a thing. My porch is on the side of the house and faces the long and narrow yard, and not the street, so I get a lovely view of the trees and the other houses, and it's incredibly peaceful. Everything is green and gold in the sunlight, and quiet.

It got me thinking about blessings. I love the house I live in, love the neighborhood, even, today, love the landlord, who noticed all the weight I've lost and was worried about me and recommended his church's food bank if I ever find myself unable to afford anything but cereal again. The new neighbors who moved into Kevin's old apartment seem like they're going to work out and be fairly quiet themselves (at least so far; I'm, as Mom put it, "cautiously optimistic"), and it's more wonderful than I realized not to have Pslightly Psycho Kevin lurking just behind his door to spring out and talk to me whenever I just want a private cup of coffee and some time to journal and read the Bible, or to bristle with resentment when I have a friend over (he was very propertarian and it was irritating and weird).

I have a guitar, for absurdly cheap, many, many months before I expected one. I have a cat who responded to his medication in ways I hadn't dared to hope. I have a bank account with money in it again. I have a job that is mostly satisfying, working for people I love, and who love me. I have Meg and Phillip, without whom I wouldn't have made it through last summer -- without whom, in fact, I wouldn't have stayed in the Midwest at all -- and who have become, not just family, but anchors of solidarity, good times (and "good" in its deepest send, not just "fun," although that's there in abundance too), trust, and affection. I have red coffee cups to drink from in the mornings. I have my parents and my sister, who, though far away, are always with me, and whose love I can count on at all times -- we've walked through fire together, and God has burned away a lot of dross over the years, and forged us more closely together, and it's been incredible to experience and to witness. I have Leigh Ann, the one person who is so much like me it's one of my greatest blessings, because I know I'm understood, and whose laugh is infectious. I have a church that preaches the Word truthfully and passionately, that looks to the needs of the community. I have a comfortable bed. I have medications that help me face and overcome depression and headaches, and I have the Holy Spirit to bolster my courage on the days when they don't work as well and I have to power through.

In short, I have a full, rich life, and I'm thankful for it. It's a little life -- I don't have swarms of people that I'm always spending time with, and in fact, most of the time, especially in summer, when the grad students are gone, the only people I see from week to week are the bosses and Meg and Phillip. But I keep in touch with the people I love who are farther away, and I write, and it's a good life. As God sees fit to expand it, so much the better: so much more to be thankful for.

Meg said yesterday, and I think she's right, that whatever I do whenever I find out what it is I'm supposed to be doing, it's going to be writing. I can't stop writing. I can't not write. As soon as I finish this post, I'm going out on the porch for my second cup of coffee, in a red mug, and some journalling.

A long time ago, just coming out of one of the deepest periods of despair I'd undergone, when I realized for the first time, in a personal and visceral, and not just intellectual, way, that God was good, and that truly "all things work for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose," this became one of my life's Psalms:

I love the LORD, for he heard my voice;
he heard my cry for mercy.
Because he turned his ear to me,
I will call on him as long as I live.

The cords of death entangled me,
the anguish of the grave came upon me;
I was overcome by trouble and sorrow.
Then I called on the name of the LORD:
"O LORD, save me!"

The LORD is gracious and righteous;
our God is full of compassion.
The LORD protects the simplehearted;
when I was in great need, he saved me.

Be at rest once more, O my soul,
for the LORD has been good to you.

For you, O LORD, have delivered my soul from death,
my eyes from tears,
my feet from stumbling,
that I may walk before the LORD
in the land of the living.
I believed; therefore I said,
"I am greatly afflicted."
And in my dismay I said,
"All men are liars."

How can I repay the LORD
for all his goodness to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the LORD.
I will fulfill my vows to the LORD
in the presence of all his people.

Precious in the sight of the LORD
is the death of his saints.
O LORD, truly I am your servant;
I am your servant, the son of your maidservant;
you have freed me from my chains.

I will sacrifice a thank offering to you
and call on the name of the LORD.
I will fulfill my vows to the LORD
in the presence of all his people,
in the courts of the house of the LORD --
in your midst, O Jerusalem.

Praise the LORD.

~Psalm 116

the door at the base of the stairs

My neighbors have developed this distasteful habit of leaving the bottom door unlocked whenever they go anywhere.

Backtrack. Begin again. The saga is a little more involved than last night's incident.

The two second floor apartments in my house share an entryway on the side porch. So we have one common key for the bottom door, and our own keys for our apartments. This bottom door is old and kind of crummy, but it's still a barrier, particularly because it's noisy and you have warning when anyone comes and goes. I've had problems with its lock before...like the time it fell out, and I had to call the AL to come and screw it back in. But it's got a couple of interesting latching features -- the one where if you push it one way from the inside, a person on the outside can't unlock it, even with a key; and the one where if you push it the other way from the inside, it stays unlocked.

My neighbors like that feature.

They tend to forget their keys. Two months ago they forgot them so often that they became masters at jimmying the lock to their upstairs apartment door. I would watch them through the peephole and thank all my nurturing as a paranoid cop's daughter that I had made the AL install a deadbolt on my door when I moved in (I've been told that my door, with all its locks and chains, resembles that of a New York apartment). They borrowed my kitchen knives on a couple of occasions when their hairpins or whatever didn't do the trick. And when that failed, they invented their own backdoor, thanks to the broken-down basement door.

Side-story. Two and a half months ago, someone (we all think it was the neighbor's boyfriend, whom I've never found personally threatening, but who has beaten the living crap out of the neighbor on occasion) broke down the basement door. Why? We don't know. Nothing valuable was taken from the basement. The only things stolen over the course of two months were garden tools and my beer. Oh yes, my beer. And of course the AL took his sweet time fixing the damn door. I finally called and chewed him out because

Loop-around. They couldn't get back into their apartment one night, so they went into the basement and brought up a ladder. They leaned the ladder against the roof and climbed in through a window. They then proceeded to leave the ladder up at all times, giving them and anyone else who wanted direct access to my own bedroom window. I, of course, freaked. I tersely told the AL what was happening (he said that they said they were using the ladder to "clean their windows" -- "No, they're using it for a back door when they forget their keys," I snapped), had Kevin lock the ladder in his apartment, and arranged with the AL to rent the basement all to myself for a ridiculously cheap price so that nobody else could be down there. He finally padlocked the door. I am the princess.

Fast forward. The neighbors have still been leaving the bottom door unlocked. Annoying, but not too frightening, so I called the AL and asked him to talk to them about it, which he said he'd do "if he remembered," meaning he almost certainly forgot as soon as he hung up the phone. I've privately fumed about it a little, but figuring it wasn't too big a deal, I just clicked the latch back to the lock position whenever I noticed it was unlocked, and went about my business.

Begin story. Last night at 11:45 p.m. as I was getting ready for bed, I heard someone start to pound on the bottom door. Since it wasn't accompanied by the boyfriend shouting to be let in, I knew it probably wasn't the neighbors, and they seldom have visitors. (I really do get along with them, by the way. These spurts of weird drama are few and far between, and most of the time I enjoy having them around. They're entertaining and generally good-natured.) The pounding went on for a few minutes while I waited tensely in the bathroom.

And then...I heard the bottom door open. And someone (two someones) came up the stairs. I slipped to the peephole to see -- yes -- the back of an unfamiliar man's head in my stairwell.

Disbelieving is an apt word for how I felt at that moment. This shady guy just walked right up the stairs to the neighbor's door. Just walked right. up. the stairs. No one has EVER done that in the two years I've lived there. They knocked on her door for a minute, then left. At that point, I was feeling that my space had been violated. I was feeling a little frightened. I waited till I heard the car pull out of the driveway, then I grabbed my Maglite, the really big one that could break someone's skull, and with rising ire and the question How did they get in? Did they break the door down? Or...? beating time with the blood in my head, I shut off the stair light (damn the neighbors for always leaving the stairwell lights on at night, are they retarded, don't they know that anyone outside can see anyone inside when the lights are on?), tiptoed down the stairs and examined the lock. Unlatched. [Insert. Profanities. Here.]

So then I was...furious is a good word. I sat down on the porch and pulled out my phone. I was angry with my neighbors for leaving the fricking door unlocked whenever they go anywhere. I was angry with the AL for being lazy and uncaring. I was angry with those strange creepy men for just walking up into my territory without a by-your-leave. Then -- isn't this stupid? -- I flipped open my phone and hesitated about calling the AL. I actually hesitated about waking him up at close to midnight. Then my brain kicked itself and said What? So I called, and the aftermath of terror gave my voice an extremely short edge as I informed him of what had happened, that the situation was unacceptable, requested him to please speak with the neighbors about leaving the door locked at. all. times, and that if it did happen again I would call the police.

Then I waited up until the neighbors came home and told them that the door had to stay locked whenever they left, because of the two strangers who had just walked up the stairwell. They took it pretty well; they usually do. And I'm a nice person who is generally pretty easy to get along with. So I don't anticipate problems with it in the future.

But sometimes I get so irate with my landlord that I think my head is going to explode.

Oh yes, and the headaches are back.

End story.

the office mascot

Three months ago I brought a grapefruit to work.

It's still there. It's shriveled and not very grapefruit-looking anymore, and in fact more closely resembles a pathetic orange, but it's hung in there. Boss-Lady, in her crusade to make me eat more, found it on the table in the break room, and put it next to the coffee maker a couple of weeks ago, with EAT ME!!! written on it in green marker.

So I turned it around and drew x'd out eyes and a Mr. Yuk mouth in black ink.

It was all downhill from there. The next time I went up to pour myself a cup of coffee, the thing had paperclip ears. I found a kitchen knife and stuck it in the top of the head. A hook nose appeared. I added a coffee filter skirt. She gave it pencil legs. I decked it out in key-tab earrings.

So there she stands in macabre glory in the breakroom, our office mascot, whom I've secretly named Griselda. The grapefruit was so dried-out it didn't run any juice at all when stabbed with all the various things we stuck into it. (Glad I didn't eat it.) I think she's kind of endearing.

Obviously Boss-Lady and I have been under various pressures that lead us to take strange morbid vengeance on innocent fruit. Our office mascot can't be a nice fluffy puppy or a duckling. And we certainly can't display it in the front office. We showed the Boss-Man, after hours one day, laughing our heads off, and he looked worried. I took advantage of the opportunity to summarize the historical premise of Beloved.

it's always funny

Last night while talking to my sister on the phone I watched a squirrel fall off a telephone wire.

She mentioned, and she was right, the similarity between this and the squirrel sequence from Disney's The Sword in the Stone. Except this squirrel wasn't being chased by anything. It wasn't even moving very fast. It was just sitting there, then it started to move slowly along the wire, and it just...lost its grip. It hung on for dear life by its front paws, its little back feet quivering, and then it fell. Into the tree branches directly below it, which yo-yo'd violently under its plump early summer weight while it scrambled for a hold and retrieved its normal squirrel heartrate and, I imagine, its normal squirrel dignity.

It reminded me of me trying to do a chin-up.

Why is someone falling always, always funny? Why is it even funnier when it's an animal? I always expect animals to be more graceful. They have those animal instincts, and those four paws, and that natural agility that we as humans are supposed to lack, and need all these tools and big cerebrums to compensate for. So when I watch Meg and Phillip's dog trip (with two more legs on the ground than I have), or Simon take a flying leap at the bed and ricochet off my leg, or a squirrel fall off a telephone wire, it's hilarious.

On Memorial Day Meg and Phillip and I saw a human act of amazing stupidity, however, which made the squirrel's internal balance, by contrast, look even and regulated. We headed up to Warren Dunes to watch the sun set, which of course involved climbing Tower Hill (entirely made of sand), which, however much eroded it's become since my friends' childhoods, is still a challenging climb (a good thirty-five degree incline toward the top). We then selected a smaller, isolated dune nearby from which to watch the sun and the water in privacy and peace, and were just settling in when, lo and behold, the evidently drunken driver of a white Jeep decided his automobile could make the climb up Tower Hill.

He made it about ten yards.

And got stuck.

And took about five minutes getting unstuck and back down the hill. Sand was flying in lovely graceful arcs from under his tires while his motor roared, in full view of everyone on the crown of the hill, and on the beach below.

As Phillip said, "It was worth the drive just for this."

As I said, "Do it again!"

But apparently he wasn't that drunk.

God bless America.

The Hint Half Guessed

I'm branching out a little bit.

As I'm finding, more and more, that thoughts and questions of God, Christ, the Bible, the church, Christians, Christianity, faith, and the way faith is lived out in the practical and the daily, as well as in the ephemeral and the mind, occupy space in my head, I thought I'd devote an entire blog to it.

As I say in my Welcome post there, I don't want to overwhelm anybody here, and there are times when I could post on four or five related or unrelated topics on the subject in one day. (Plus the part of me who loves your interaction, my faithful readers, is afraid of boring you, and seeing the "0" in the comments section makes me sad. Not that I'm an attention seeker or anything...) But nevertheless, a sanctified space (har har) to reflect upon these things, where you may comment or not as you will, may free everyone up a bit, and leave me to my thoughtful, random, funny, or whatever, personal anecdotes here.

Anyway, take a look-see whenever you like, I'm sure the posts will begin building up fast, though there's not much at the mo...and join in the conversations as you feel inclined! I've linked it on the sidebar, and you never know what you may find...HappyGirl, SadGirl, RantGirl, ThoughtfulGirl, AwedGirl, IrateGirl, JoyfulGirl...it could be surprising!

if the brakeman turns my way

Conor Oberst, under his group's name, Bright Eyes, outdid himself with his newest, Cassadaga.

The kid has made himself a name for being brilliant, bitter, depressed, and prolific, but nobody's heard much from him since 2005, with the dual releases of I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (one of my favorites) and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn.

Cassadaga, so far, blends the best of both albums in a flavor that's digitally bluegrassy. I enthusiastically love it.

Listening to Bright Eyes is an experience like stepping out into an electric storm -- you're not quite sure if there's a center, and neither is he. He uses rich religious imagery wistfully, mockingly, angrily, reverently, and beautifully. The songs themselves, the rhythms, the chord changes, the melodies, are charged with something indefinable. Some kind of longing, enraged joy. It's an experience.

I haven't gotten past track 4 yet. There's so much buried in each song. So I listen to one, put it on repeat, and listen to it for a week. Over and over and over. (I can do this because it's a half-hour commute each way to work, and no one's ever in the car with me. I wouldn't do this to a passenger. Well, except for maybe Meg or Leigh Ann.) Then I move on to the next.

Sometimes I pop out the album and put in something else for awhile -- Sufjan, or Hem. Something soul-uplifting. Bright Eyes is one of those out-of-the-depths artists who can really drag you under after too long, but whose naked stare at the thing itself, wanting to know so badly what the thing is, is amazing.

And the beautiful thing about Cassadaga is that, after all this time of searching and raging and screaming, the first few tracks are about healing and peace.

Just so incredibly cool.

bookends

Thank God for three-day weekends.

Things have been insane on the work front. Unmentionably, and not because of my Unmentionable Screw-Up of last week. No, the office assistant has been, for months, causing undue amounts of stress with constant and quite important other mistakes, which one of the other staff members and I have been pulling our hair out to correct. Fortunately, said office assistant resigned, which has evened things out a little bit -- no new mistakes to deal with -- but I've taken over a number of her tasks, on top of the ones I'm already doing, and it's been, quite simply, wearing me out. I haven't been as sharp, as on top of things, as I usually am, more prone to slips of memory, and a little less energetic.

Argh.

The Boss-Man and his wife are both out on vacation this week, so I'm the boss in their absence, and in charge of the training of the new person we've hired. A little heady, at times, I'm sure, but not exactly a Relaxing, Cat's Away kind of week, where I get to take off my shoes and in a leisurely fashion tidy the office up a bit. So I need this Memorial Day like a fish needs water.

Yesterday I took a three-hour nap...then went to bed at nine, and didn't get up until eight this morning. I'm feeling close to human again, hooray of hoorays, and looking forward to a long shower and some time to clean the apartment. It's beautifully sunny out after a whole weekend of rain, which we certainly needed, but I'm planning on an afternoon outside, and it's much more fun to do that when it's 80 degrees and bright.

I'm still picking away at the guitar. I've named her Saturnina...don't know why, and I'm sure my parents' friends who indefinitely loaned me the guitar will get a hair-turn over that one. But it seems to fit. The lovely instrument stays beautifully in tune. I've taught myself how to play scales. Strumming is a joke still (my rhythm was always a fluid, organic thing; I was much more suited to Debussy than Bach on the piano), but I'm hoping to pick up lessons for that. Right now I'm learning the chords.

The two things I miss most in teaching myself tiny bits of guitar are my piano and all the theory books I hated so much when I was nine. My piano teacher, an old troll of a woman who used to make me cry at lessons (Laura and I would take turns as to who went first from week to week, and the weeks I went first and came out of the piano room with tears on my cheeks, Laura would take one look at me, and her eyes would narrow, and she would march in and deliberately play such an awful lesson that our teacher would come out with tears on her cheeks -- I love my sister), always had me filling in chords and transposing on music sheets and workbooks, and I always wanted to throw them in the trash, and now I'm glad she made me do it, and wish I had them right next to me, because guitar is all theory. I love picking out songs by ear, and it was so simple on the keyboard; I don't get it nearly as well on the guitar, because the execution of the theory is different, and so I have to do it all in my head.

Fortunately Meg and Phillip have an electric keyboard that I just found out about, so when I was at their house on Friday I picked out the chords to a newer rendition of a hymn I love ("When I Survey the Wondrous Cross"), and put it in the key of C -- so easy to work with -- and this morning I fiddled with it on the guitar, and it worked! It's far from perfect, because my fingers haven't learned the chords, so it's slow and fumbling, but the chords are right.

I love music. Writing is the world I live in, but it's a discipline, a craft, it's the work I do, the quest, the compulsion, the fire in my bones, the burden on my back, the blood in my veins, the place where the joy and the despair and the frustration, the succeeding and the failing and the trying are fused into one inseparable thing. Music is the kite, the wing, the wind, the thing that seizes me and lifts me away. When I step into a song, into the melody, the harmonies, the composition, there's no struggle, little effort, and no demand; there's just the listening, the hearing of the strains of harmony, and the joining; when I sing, I shed myself, I expand, I lose, for a few minutes, the burden, the consciousness of me; I go somewhere else, pierced by a joy beyond joy; I become fully alive: free. Writing is the journey (and I live and believe in the journey); music is home.

possibilities

While poking around in Pandora's books with Adam last week, I found a piece of Christian junk mail.

I seized on it like a treasure hunter in king Tut's tomb. I hate Christian junk mail. The envelope was already open -- scribbled on, in fact -- which I guess was kind of like discovering, as the openers of Tut's tomb did, that it had already been visited by grave robbers, but still, I unfolded the insanely long cover letter with relish to read, across the top, NATIONAL REPENTENCE DAY: SEPTEMBER 26, 1997.

This piece of mail is ten years old.

I was astonished at the poor taste. Here I've been thinking that the Christian approach has gotten worse over time, not better, but in reality it's not as bad as it once was. I was so offended by the big flier with an old lady's surprised face on it that said SHOCK YOUR MAMA: GO TO CHURCH THIS EASTER which I found in my mailbox this year that I set it on fire, right after the Kingdom Hall pamphlet illustrated by dragons and the whore of Babylon that I found fluttering in my door...and that church (with the shock-your-mama flier) had the excuse of my having once given them my address.

But this ten-year-old piece of exhibitionism appeared to have no preamble. Just a long diatribe about repentance to a pair of strangers. Enclosed was a piece of sackcloth, with a self-addressed, postage-prepaid envelope inviting the addressees to return the sackcloth if they wanted to participate in National Repentance Day.

The truly glorious thing is that this will be the tenth anniversary of this bogus holiday, which I can't find is regularly recognized or practised.

I'm trying to come with ideas for how to use it. I have to do SOMEthing with this little piece of sackcloth -- it's too perfect.

But what? I'm toying with the idea of mailing it in with some kind of note. Nothing horrible, mean, cruel, or nasty; just something funny.

Hm, maybe that Comcast flier -- which I also passionately hate -- about discovering the Buddhist secrets of the universe by getting cable.

more reasons to celebrate

Less hair came out in the shower this morning. Hooray!

the silent alarm

For over a year now, I've barely needed the electronic alarm clock that I nonetheless faithfully set every night. I have a failproof backup that no weather or blackout could fool: my cat. Or rather, his stomach.

He knows his breakfast time. So, anywhere from six o'clock to seven in the morning, I wake to the incredible heaviness of cat paws treading all over my back. (When he hits the right sore spots, it's like a very nice massage.) He lays his head on my shoulder and purrs in my ear. When I grunt and roll onto my back, he prances across my chest and flops onto me and rolls around with happiness. He shoves his head into my face -- his equivalent of a good-morning-I-love-you-I'm-so-happy-you're-awake-please-feed-me kiss. He mrrrows.

It's all very sweet. But lately it hasn't been as effective. Kind of like the radio alarm gets to be ignorable.

So he's invented the beeper setting: chasing his tail. On me. All over me. At six o'clock in the morning.

This is hilarious, but much less endearing. So I've invented the snooze button: a good swift scissor-kick under the covers, which effectively sweeps him off the bed. And five minutes later he's at it again. I can never decide if I'm furious or deeply amused.

I can see it in the history books: And the Breakfast Wars carried on well into the afternoons on Saturdays...

off balance

My inner ear has gone AWOL. While I spent the morning getting ready for work, which usually involves a lot of darting through the narrow doorways of my historic home because I've forgotten to do three or four things in the same room at the same time before moving onto the next in a sensibly systematic fashion, the walls and doorframes and corners of my bookshelves kept lurching at me and catching me hard on the shoulders and shins. Mean old house, I thought. Has it in for me this morning.

But no, it's my inner ear that decided to curl up in bed and stay behind while I did the responsible thing and went to work. All the walls, doorframes, filing cabinets, and desk corners ambush me every time I turn around. So I'm going to arrive home tonight with some stunning new bruises. On the day I decided to wear a tanktop and skirt, too.

Maybe it's the earplugs. I wear them sometimes at night because the neighbors across the hall get noisy from time to time, and as my bedroom borders the stairwell, I can hear them stomping up and down the stairs as they come and go about their God-knows-what nighttime business (they appear never to sleep), and last night they were fighting. So in went the earplugs. But apparently the pressure inside my ear canals did my balance no favors.

But it does make for some funny moments. You don't realize how much you rely on your perception to line up with reality until your perception's out of whack and reality smacks you a good one. It's especially embarrassing to bounce off a wall that's quite obviously and solidly there in front of a client. I kind of half-spin a pirouette and laugh at myself and offer them more coffee.

In other news, I feel like I've taken another step toward settled adulthood. When Kevin moved out, he gave me his recycle bin. At any time during the past two years I could've asked the City for one of my own, but since the City is so lackadaisical and accepting about recycling -- they'll take it in trash bags -- I never bothered. (And, really, South Bend recycling is great. You don't have to sort anything, and they'll take everything. Plastic, paper, cardboard, dead rats, whatever you want. Well, not actually dead rats.) The recycling is so great that the garbage men are evil and won't take cardboard boxes. If you pack them carefully into the city-supplied bins, come Thursday morning, trash day, you'll find them tossed back, rejected, onto your lawn. Evil.

Anyway, since the garbage men come up and down the alley on Thursday, there's no need to go dragging the garbage cans around, and since I've been for two years without a recycle bin, I've just thrown my recycling into other people's bins or into a box or garbage bag and let the containers get recycled too. But yesterday was my first recycling day using Kevin's old bin, and when I got home from dinner with Meg and Phillip, there it was sitting by itself on the curb, and I thought, Oh. I have to bring in the recycle bin.

So there it was. Something that ordinary grown-ups do that I've never had to. And now I do. And I was excited.

turn, turn, turn

Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

Strangely, after Wednesday, things began to stand on their head, in the best way possible. The Anti-Midas got out a box of baby wipes and began to clean up after himself, while I peeked through my fingers from where I'd collapsed on my extremely comfortable easy chair.

First, after dragging myself through the thickest sludge of exhaustion I've endured since the crash-and-burn my sophomore year of college, I decided the problem was my medication schedule and went back to taking the antidepressant at night. I'd been taking it in the morning since my doctor put me on the new stuff, because it was giving me fitful sleep and the weirdest dreams I've ever remembered (fun, but really weird. Loony Tunes variety dreams). And for the past four days I've felt like a new woman. Chipper, perky, energetic, able to concentrate, able to do stuff again, able to eat, able to sleep, able to work, able to relax. Amazing.

Second, I got all my tax refunds back, paid all my bills from last month and this month, including the medical bills (just the monthlies, not all of them off altogether), and still have enough leftover to eat, and maybe buy some new clothes, for the first time in well over a year, next month -- hooray!

Third, I've been eating real food on a regular basis for the past ten or eleven days. I'm no longer starving. My hair is still falling out, but that should (I'm hoping) stop soon. I've greatly increased my protein intake, switched from soymilk to whole dairy milk, and no longer have cereal for dinner. At all.

I also cleaned the house this weekend, am becoming obsessed with my Dyson vacuum cleaner (it does BARE FLOORS, happy happy joy joy, bye-bye broom-that-never-picks-up-cat-litter-and-cat-hair), and washed all my dishes. I think I can keep the apartment clean. I am Very Happy.

Best of all, I had a perfect weekend spending time with a person I greatly enjoyed.

So while I had very little to do with the residue of the crap being alchemized into green pastures (which are, I think, much better than gold), I'm happy and exceedingly grateful.

is the alarm going to ring soon, or did this day actually happen?

Bad day. Really, really awful. I did a terrible screw-up at work -- I can't even articulate how bad it was -- and my boss was great about it, as always -- but I spent most of the afternoon on the verge of tears and wished I could turn myself into something about an inch tall so I could hide under the copier or get eaten by the dog.

I knew it wasn't going to be a good day -- I woke up twenty minutes before I had to leave, so no shower, no coffee, drove to work in a blazing hurry through the dissipating fog of bad dreams, had this awful sense of forboding all day, the temperature plummeted forty degrees overnight and was windy and sour and overcast. N.g.

Won't know for another month how bad it really was. So I'll be kind of on tenterhooks until then.

I need something very strong to drink.

It was one of those days of which I like to say, "This one was planned at a board meeting in hell. And somebody got a promotion."

the horizontal compulsion

Gravity appears to be stronger at the center of my bed. I'm almost positive a close atomic inspection would reveal compacted matter approaching the density of a black hole, and, thus, an extremely strong gravitational pull. This has to be why it draws me to it straight upon walking through the door after work for ridiculous things like six o'clock naps, and why rising in the peaceful, birdsong-sweet summer mornings has become a feat worthy of Atlas. Maybe the poor guy shouldn't be sculpted holding the world anymore. In our modern era, that's almost too dramatic. Maybe he should be depicted holding a bed.

home, home on the range

Mom and Dad came out to visit this past weekend, and it was fantastic.

Visits in the past have been kind of touch-and-go, depending on how I'm doing, and as I haven't been at my best lately, there was, perhaps, some trepidation on all sides as to how this one would fly. But my parents were wonderful. I didn't have time or energy to clean the house, and they didn't care; Mom washed all my dishes, and they were happy just to sit around and hang out with me. And I really needed that cup o'parental love filled up. It was perfect.

Friday night we went out to eat with my bosses, and then went back up to their place to go shooting. Both my parents are good shots, and I did well, and everyone was proud of me, and we all had fun. (I learned a few more things about my style, as my boss bragged on me man-to-man to my dad. "Do you know what kind of revolver this girl likes?" he said to my dad. "An N-frame." "What's so special about that?" I asked. "Honey, that's the massive one. The biggest kind," my dad said." "Oh," I said. I had thought it was the one for smaller hands. Nope. And then my boss was laughing at me because, after shooting off a round of .38s, I said, "Gimme the .357s." He looked over at my dad and said, "Can you believe her? She's bored with the .38s!" I asked my dad later what a .38 is equivalent to in the semiautomatic world, and he said it's about a 9 mm, what you shoot from a Glock. A man-stopper. Oh, I said. Well, what about a .357? Dad said you can drop a deer with a .357. Ha! Heeeere, Bambi....)

Anyway, then Saturday night we had dinner with Meg and Phillip, and Saturday and Sunday we lounged around. Dad helped me reset the air conditioner in my living room, which was clogged with water, and they gave me some new toys: a Dyson vacuum cleaner (only in Western PA we say sweeper) and a guitar!!!! My furniture is already cleaner and my fingers are already blistered.

Pslightly Psycho Kevin moved out for good yesterday, so the drama begins as to what kinds of strange people the AL will rent out to, since evidently he has decided NOT to become the Live-In Landlord (Yikes!). But as I discussed it with Downstairs Neighbor Jim yesterday, I mentioned that I was going to learn the art of canning this summer, and he GAVE me a 22-quart pressure canner and wouldn't take a dime for it. SWEET!

So my summer is all set for learning new things, and getting my life back in order, and I have my cup running over with family love, which I desperately needed.

I'm hopeful for getting myself back. Work is going to be crazy for the next month while we search for a replacement for the office assistant, who left last week, and train the new person, who will (fingers crossed, prayers fervently said) be smart and competent and a fast learner, but I'm attempting to keep perspective and reserve some energy to myself so I keep a balance and start enjoying my life and my hobbies again.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

more of life

The cat's not feeling top shape again. Boss-Man's in court all day, so I took the morning to take Kitty Boy to the vet (saves me expensive ER visits -- 80 bucks just to walk through the door, plus whatever else they do for him, ugh), and they think he has lesions on his bladder that make litterbox use uncomfortable. So, more medications, new cat food, another hundred bucks kissed goodbye.

I'm tired. I spent most of the weekend sleeping, and I can't seem to get quite caught up. After a month and a half of The Cereal Diet, born of the Bill Catch-Up Financial Plan, a scramble to reintroduce red meat to my dietary intake has resulted in a digestive upheaval that had me in considerable gastrointestinal pain over the past week. Looks like I need to sit down and, for the first time ever, come up with something strategic in regard to my diet. More protein, starting with the white meats and fish, iron supplements, and a slow reintroduction of the red stuff. I'm pretty sure the fatigue, the weakness (carrying one of my air conditioners up from the basement yesterday was really hard), etc., all result from iron deficiency.

Ridiculous. This has got to change. Fortunately, with my Income Tax Return on its way, and my rigid frugality (my Scots ancestors would be so proud), and my upcoming paycheck, the next couple of weeks should see a leveling out of the financial worries that have plagued my waking and sleeping hours all year. I'm hoping that those are the reasons I've been so listless, and that the light at the end of the tunnel will see a happy return to my normal hobbies and activities -- cooking, cleaning, reading, writing, and getting a little more exercise.

I'm seeing my wonderful new doctor this Thursday, so I'll get to discuss all of this with him as well, to make sure I'm on the right track.

There has been some interesting new drama in Sarah's Apartment House of Insanity, so I'll be posting on that soon -- it's much more entertaining than my bank account and the dwindling numbers on the scales.

The Gray-Painted Bus

There is, occasionally, a sort of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, that crops up in my neighborhood, in the form of an old school bus. It’s been repainted gray – even the windows, except for the front ones – boarded shut in the back, and has a cooking-stove pipe sticking out of one side. It appears to be inhabited by a Jesus-looking fellow, all in black, his two androgynous, half-intelligent, heavyset teenaged progeny, also in black, and a snarling pit bull.

I’ve noticed this bus over the course of the past year, as it tends to park itself on the street across from my friend Colette’s apartment, although last year it was emblazoned with the fading insignia of some Apostolic Church. This year it’s just lived in. The other night as she and I sat on her front lawn, talking, our conversation faded like the daylight as we watched the Boarders of the Bus coming and going between their dwelling and the lovely, trim, well-kept house that the Bus is usually parked in front of.

It was an intriguing kind of people-watching. The discrepancy between the house and the bus, and the frequency of the bus’s visits to the house, made for some interesting speculation. Colette says a woman lives in the house. The paint on the house is all new. There’s scalloped wood trim around the eaves. The landscaping is lovely. It has a fence and a gate. She drives a hybrid. She’s evidently earth-friendly. Then there’s The Bus. With cooking smoke pouring from the pipe. Noisy engine and gas fumes. Long-haired people living inside wearing jackboots. Where’s the connection?

Colette surmised the Jesus-looking Fellow is a boyfriend; I thought maybe a brother. She warmed to the theory – maybe the siblings took their earth-friendly natures in different directions, she to a more "upscale" environment, he to a more "hippie" one, working an "honest" job, kind of a drifting, Bob Dylan-style.

But the kids were weird. They looked like twins, and in the half-light you really couldn’t discern their gender. We swore at least one of them had breasts, but their voices cracked and soared, and they both were running around the bus playing hide-and-seek like they were four, when they were at least fourteen, and giggling these really off, strangely pitched goblin giggles. They went into The Bus and lit some kind of lantern, and then we heard the dog yelping. It was disturbing.

When it was fully dark the Jesus-looking Fellow came out, got into the front seat, started the engine, tried to pull out, got stuck in the brick ruts, got out, pulled down the hood, fiddled with the running engine, got back in, ground The Bus back and forth for a few minutes, then tore away. I found myself wondering what it would be like to live on a bus, driving off at night to some new place to park, and some Conestoga corner of my spirit grinned at the thought of the freedom, and the simplicity. But the childcare worker in me thought it had turned out pretty badly for the kids.

annie, get your gun

The past two Sundays, I've gone with the boss-man to a nearby shooting range and learned to handle a gun.

For those of you who know me fairly well, this isn't that surprising. As a cop's daughter, I've been wanting to learn to shoot for a long time. And as they say, what's bred in the bone will out in the blood, or something along those lines. I've been foaming-at-the-mouth-rabid about the Second Amendment for years. I love that Faye Valentine of Cowboy Bebop carries a beautifully animated Glock. Everyone else in my family can shoot.

So now it's my turn.

I got to experiment with all different calibers and all different kinds. I really like revolvers. Interestingly, since I'm ambidextrous (though trained since childhood to favor the right hand) and left-eyed, when it comes to shotguns and rifles, I'm a lefty.

I've had a lot of fun. I'd only been out shooting once in my life before, and that was seven years ago. My first shot since then, last Sunday, was just below the red circle in the center of the target. My boss was amazed, and happy to watch my progress. He's said the following:

1. I'm a natural;
2. I'm better than people who have been practicing for 8-10 years;
3. I'm the most adept girl he's seen;
4. I can go into competitions.

Since he and his wonderful wife (also my boss) have been trying to think of ways to marry me off, we all agree that might be a potential way to meet men. (As long as they know how to read.)

Anyway, I think I've discovered a new hobby. Now when I'm in a good mood, I smell the tang of gunpowder.

the iron hills of Pittsburgh

Whenever I want to revitalize myself, I buy new music. A few months ago, Marianne introduced me to the group Hem, through our music guru Kelly, and so I purchased a few of their albums, and started out with Funnel Cloud. Track 12, titled "Reservoir," is so filled with that strange expatriate's longing for home, even while not longing to live there again, that it makes my insides swell with something close to tears.

For anyone who's been to Pittsburgh and knows those iron hills, how the sometimes beautiful, sometimes plain and downright ugly houses cling to the rocks, how the trees manage to grow where the houses can't and force liminalities of forest amongst the inner city spaces, how the rivers create the downtown and the hilltops make the parks, how the years of soot stain the old churches and factories like watermarks and the streets zigzag over and under and through and around each other like a tangle of gum bands, how the lights at night in the bowls of the hills under the overcast sky are softer than almost anywhere else, this song brings it all back. If you've never been there, go.


Late last night
I missed my train
Walked back to the car and drove home again
Just outside of Pittsburgh
It's really not that far
I saw a light come shining 'cross the reservoir

The sun in California
It drops right into the sea
I took a coupla pictures, they don't mean that much to me
Just outside of Pittsburgh
I saw it from my car
The light shines to the bottom of the reservoir

The starless night
come fall around me
Over all
we left undone
I know a light
that shines forever
Howsoever we may run

The moon hung on a hillside
In eastern Tennessee
With rows of honeysuckle blooming over me
But the iron hills of Pittsburgh
Where all my memories are
Gather in the light around the reservoir

The starless night
come fall around me
Over all
we left undone
I know a light
that shines forever
Howsoever we may run
Howsoever we may run


Incidentally, since all of my accompanists turn out to be tremendous disappointments, within the next year I have a new goal of buying, and learning to play, the guitar. The lead singer's voice is right in my range.

apologia

I've been thinking, the last day or two, about the choices I've made over the last four years, and why I made them.

From the first moment I set foot in my kindergarten class, I wanted to be a teacher. The shape of the teaching changed, evolved, as I grew, until I went to Grove City with a clear vision of myself as a high school English teacher. Without second thoughts I signed up for the double major in English and Secondary Education, and prepared myself to change the world. (This has always been the primary goal -- to change the world. Teaching was the vehicle to that destination.)

And then I hated the education part of my major. The academic aspect of studying literature appealed to me much more strongly than creating worksheets and grading tests. So I dropped education. Teaching took one more evolutionary step: I'd be a college professor, instead.

Until I didn't want to go to grad school.

That's where the conscious journey began, the knowledge of the wandering. Really it started when I signed off on the Education degree, and shut the door on fourteen years of certainty; but my senior year of undergrad, watching some of my friends apply for and achieve acceptances to graduate programs, stripped off the remnant insulation of adolescence and left me standing on some windswept plateau with no map but a voice in my head saying, Go to a land I will show you.

I think that was when my faith was strongest, and that due largely to idealism and inexperience. I'd had some pretty arduous tests, certainly -- watching the near-unraveling of my family, the near-death of my sister whom I loved best of anyone in the world -- but I'd seen God pull us "out of the mire and set us on a rock" and I had no question but that he would continue to care for me in my next blind step into the absolute unknown. I'd never had to manage on my own resources before; I'd never been in actual need. So even though I had no plans, very little money, and no prospects, I had faith and that voice in my head and with few qualms I helped my parents pack the U-Haul and I moved to Indiana.

I was excited as well as terrified. Within two weeks I had found two part-time retail jobs and worked those for nine months. I had no health insurance. I managed. I found cheap medical centers when I was sick. Looking back, I think I was insane. But God was as faithful as he'd promised, and when I couldn't cope with the hours and the drudgery anymore, I found a better job at the Center for the Homeless, working with infants and toddlers -- something I'd done a lot for my summer jobs, and, though having nothing to do with my degree, something I enjoyed.

I was terrifically blessed. I met Meg and Phillip through that job. I had a few harrowing experiences, and a lot of laughs. But the kids wore me out; and then I moved up to my job in Events, and then just under a year ago, my fellow coworkers in Development, whom I had grown to enjoy and trust, got rid of me.

That was the worst experience of my life to date. Then I was thrown back on my own resources, then I really had no promises, no guarantees, and then, for the first time, I experienced the frailty of the protection that being a good person affords. The Unsinkable Sarah Peters went under. I was alone, facing unemployment, and I couldn't understand why. (There's this great passage in Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury -- gorgeous book -- that describes, perfectly, my reaction to the blows of life. I'm Will Halloway. Injustice always takes me by surprise, always hurts and confuses me, always wounds me, and I never come quite to grips with it, never quite understand.)

But now I'm working a great job with people who have become a part of my family, I've sorted out a lot of things that needed sorting, and life is on a steady upswing. I didn't have to tuck my tail and slink home. I didn't have to leave my apartment. I have fallen in love with the upper Midwest. I'm coming, increasingly, to be centered in who I am. I'm growing consistently, and rapidly, in my faith. I'm stronger. I have learned to separate some of the wheat from the chaff in my relationships. I still have a long, long way to go, and the journey is almost all uphill (cf. Christina Rossetti), but I'm moving.

In all of those flux times, I still could have gone back to school. But it's only been a temptation when I've been backed into a corner and thought myself without options. The inclination to pursue a degree in English has waned so much since college that I don't think you could offer me a full ride and get me to go.

I'm happy where I am. I still don't know if it's where I'm supposed to stay, but for now, it's good, and it's where I'm meant to be. I knew that for certain, last night.

A long time ago, at the end of my junior year in high school, I was running neck and neck with a guy for Valedictorian of our class. Our high school offered weighted courses (so that, if a student elected to take every weighted class, s/he could graduate with as high as a 4.5 GPA), and he and I were just about tied (I was a teensy bit ahead). When it came time to sign up for our senior year schedules, I had a choice to make -- to take Organic/Biochemistry, which Nick was taking, and which was certainly weighted; or to take Publishing Seminar, our competitive yearbook course, which wasn't weighted at all, but which a lot of my friends were taking, and was ambitious in its own way, and from which I'd learn a lot.

I took Pub Seminar. I knew it would probably cost me my class rank. It did. Nick beat me out by one hundredth of a point. And it galled me, a little bit. He was popular (though not very nice; I had a lot of people come up to me that year and whisper viciously, "It should be you, you're nice, Sarah"); I was picked on and awkward and badly dressed and school was the only thing I cared about or did; but I loved Pub, and my classmates and my teacher, and they were a fantastic support system throughout the year, and I had a lot of freedoms to write articles and roam the halls during class hours without a hall pass and yank people out of class and ask them intrusive questions, and so I didn't regret my choice.

And a few weeks ago my mother called me to tell me that one of the kids in our home church, who is a senior in my high school this year, and who is taking honors English from my favorite teacher of all time, came home to tell his mother the following incident from his English class (his mother then passed it on to mine):

"All these girls in my class were crying about their class rank because they weren't as high as they wanted, and Mrs. C. stood up and said, 'You're looking at this entirely the wrong way. Eight years ago Sarah Peters made a choice. She could have taken an honors course and had the Valedictorianship, or she could have taken a course with no weighted grade that would have made her happy. She picked the one that made her happy, and she made the better choice, and I admire her for it.'"

And of course my jaw hit my chest when Mom told me this on the phone (having this woman's admiration is like having the admiration of Queen Elizabeth I, I wish there were a medal for it), but it also made me realize, since I'd been questioning my decisions, that these are the kinds of choices I've always made. I have a great mind. I would have done well in a graduate English program. But I didn't want it. It wouldn't have made me happy. Or satisfied. Or fulfilled.

Because I've always lived with an eye on the future. Someday I'll be great when --. My life is going to be perfect if--. When this finally happens then--. And I've had a hard time embracing the present. Embracing life. And what I chose to do, when I graduated college, was to build a life for myself, in the now. With nothing but my own hands and eyes of faith. Those eyes have failed from time to time, but God is faithful (as Scripture says, he cannot disown himself), and he's held his hands under mine when mine have shaken, and I'm building that life.

And I would rather have undergone all the heartache and uncertainty and suffering of the past three years than have read about it in a book. I would rather have faced what I've faced than written a paper on someone else's creative rendition of the same experience. It's not that study is meaningless, it's not that writing is bad (I would never in my life say that -- hello, writer!) , or that my friends who have gone on to study are wasting their time; no, they're fulfilling their own destinies and callings, as I'm fulfilling mine.

And in its way, this is my calling. I haven't wasted my time blundering around: Not all those who wander are lost. One of the things I believe in most strongly about life is the struggle, and I find it best in the field, where I am. Working a 9-5. Fighting with hospitals and insurance companies. Sitting in the animal ER with the cat. Pounding out my own taxes. Ulcerating over money. Loving and losing. Learning to stand up for myself. Battling depression. Switching meds. Bouncing from job to job till I find one that fits. Casting about for my ultimate purpose. Waiting for that word telling me I've found it. Listening hard. Hearing a voice that almost sounds like my mother's, early in the morning just as I'm coming out of sleep, saying my name.

Something amazing? This IS amazing. This is living on the edge, where the next wave might bring a shipwreck, or an enemy vessel, or an iceberg, or an island, or a strange country, or home. It's lonely as hell -- there are nights when I cry myself to sleep, wishing so hard for a warm body bigger than my ten-pound cat's in the bed next to me that my whole body aches -- but there are compensations of joy so intense it seems my skin's expanding with the pressure of my soul against it. Simple things -- the silhouettes of pine trees, irrigators and barns against the purple-blue wide-open Michigan skyline just after dusk. Daffodils "on a hillside like a wall of new TVs." The neighbors' lawn mower. Slips of the tongue when I'm arranging to visit Meg and Phillip and I tell Meg that "I'll probably get home right after you do." My boss's wife saying over dinner, "Sarah can do no wrong. Mess with her and you mess with us."

I wouldn't trade any of it for the most prestigious degree in the world. I'm looking at broadening my academic knowledge, though the field has changed to theology instead of English. But I'm still not sure, so I'd start slow. An evening class, next semester. Because I think the difference I can make, I can make outside of school. If school is where I belong, fine, I'll go. But for right now, I'm fine where I am.

It's been a long, hard pilgrimage thus far. But I've walked it myself, and I wouldn't go back and take any other path. Because it's brought me to where I am, and this is where I am supposed to be.

it's a boy! no, it's a girl! no, it's a...well, it's fun, anyway.

This fun little site, which I found on a friend's blog, swallows paste-ins of texts and tells you, based apparently on an algorithm (which works best on exerpts over 500 words), whether it thinks the author is male or female:

http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

Have fun! I found out, to my interest, that while my fiction declares me to be overwhelmingly female, my blog posts and essays tip the scale decidedly in a masculine direction. All I can say is, Dr. Price would be proud. So this one's for him.

fresh(er) starts

X
Mold mouths the rims of the dishes
in the sink.
I should do the housecleaning.

Angels come in unexpected forms sometimes. This week the form of choice was my loud, energetic friend Jess. She has a degree in chemistry. She seldom speaks below a shout. She's always exuberant. And when, a week ago, she heard me mumble that I haven't been able to wash my dishes in about three weeks, she sat up straight and said, "What night are you free? I'll come over and wash them."

And she did. I threw a chuck roast (marinated in oil/red wine/garlic/carrot/onion/bay leaf/thyme/parsley) in the slow cooker with carrots, diced tomatoes, garlic, bacon, thyme, parsley, bay leaf, and black olives for dinner, we watched a couple episodes of Bones Season One, and she washed all my dishes. We folded my clothes. We chattered. It was nice not to sit alone in my apartment all evening. It was amazing to see my countertop. And I was distractedly, exhaustedly grateful.

There were a couple of sticky moments -- not just sticky in the coffee-residue-at-the-bottom-of-the-twenty-first-mug sense. Like when she told me to put in some "upbeat" music. I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and stared at her. "Umm...I uhh....I don't have any." I mean, my music isn't all depressing and glum -- not all of it -- it's just...indie. The best I could do was music that was happy in a sad kind of way. The other sticky moment was folding my clothes when she found this hoodie in my laundry pile:



which she declared she hated, and which, to be fair, I don't wear at all when I'm actually feeling that way. Otherwise I just think it's funny.

But we had a good time, and last night I kept out of the house and talked on the phone for awhile with my childhood best friend Hill and ate out with Megster and Phillip.

So things are looking up. A little headachey today (hm, maybe it was the sangria at Don Pablo's), but the sun's out, and it's almost Friday.

Oh, and according to Phillip, Baliwood's most popular soap take place in a call center. Every week features a call from The Irate American. I find this hilarious.

but joy cometh...

Another sunshiny day in South Bend.

I had a follow-up appointment with my new doctor in Granger. He took one look at me, quickly addressed the headache question, and said, "Are you ready to change your antidepressant?"

I was a little taken aback. I'm used to having to walk into a doctor's office with my own diagnosis, and I've been paying poor attention to myself lately. And my old doctor wouldn't have noticed a problem with my antidepressant if I'd walked into his office with a knife in my hand.

So we're trying something new; I'm a little trepidacious, but hopeful: This guy knows his meds. And he wants to see me back in another week and a half, so he's keeping close tabs. We'll see.

AND I talked to my boss's wife's tax man, who assured me that the Indiana Department of Revenue isn't coming to take me away (haha), and I actually have a ton more money to call my own than I thought, thanks to some strangely lucky breaks. So after a month of hyperventilating money stress, I'm getting a decent-sized check back from the government, and have a nicely padded bank account.

Now I just have to bark at the insurance company.

but not in nottingham

Well, I guess Prince John won't be evicting me anytime soon for nonpayment of taxes. In fact, he'll be paying ME something, which is nice.

Baaaahhhh I hate dealing with the frigging taxes. Fortunately I don't make enough money and don't own enough valuables or any property for it to take more than three or four hours to get through.

The problem with taxes in general is that -- well, that first of all, the government takes your money away from you and then makes you tell them how they did it; explain THAT one -- is that it's all so complicated. I'm becoming a fan of the flat tax. Anything to avoid the foul 1040s. Sure, you'd have to pay almost half again as much for anything you bought, but at least it would all be paid in one lump sum. Or something. I hate dealing with anything pertaining to accounts, so I don't pretend to understand the particulars. But people, this system SUCKS. Especially because, if you're doing your own taxes, and you aren't sure of one piece of information, or you got a wrong piece of information from an employer, you start to worry if they're going to hurl you in prison and strip you of your citizenship if you turn out to be wrong.

But, on a more positive note, YAY, they're e-filed and just waiting for confirmation.

Now if I could just slink out from under the nagging suspicion that the axe is about to fall somehow. TurboTax doesn't make mistakes, does it? And I told them everything I had in front of me, everything I knew...

It's worse than finals.

hrmmr*yawwwn*gmrghMonday

Some days....there just isn't enough coffee in the world.

changes

There are a few, so I'm feeling listy.

1. Pslightly Psycho Kevin is moving out in May, to be replaced by the Absent Landlord and his family, inclusive of a wife, one small (and adorable) toddler, and one or two foster kids. This should be interesting. Good, I think, because things like broken basement doors and wonky electrical wiring will be fixed more quickly. Bad, potentially, because the living room is located directly beneath my bedroom, and I can imagine evenings complete with loud TVs and screaming children. Also I have to come up with a new acronym; AL won't fit anymore. I'm considering the Live-In Landlord (Yikes!), or LILY for short.

2. I've finally gotten mad enough at my insurance company to call and bawl them out tomorrow. I sat down with a pen and piece of scrap paper today and calculated that my medical bills from last December, which, thanks to my own suffocating poverty (until now) and the overwhelming nonsympathy of multiple hospital billing departments, have been threatening my credit (but not actually damaging it -- I do work for a lawyer), have skyrocketed about four hundred dollars beyond my deductible. Unforfuckinggiveable. I looked over my various hospital/doctor's bills and found very little insurance coverage on most of them. This could lead to a tirade about the state of American health plans, but won't; I'm just going to call a few places tomorrow to straighten out some payment plans and then give the insurance company a stern talking-to. (These are things I have been dealing with all year, which have definitely contributed to poor sleep, tight muscles, depression, and headache. But I haven't talked about them until a light at the end of the tunnel appeared. What was the point?)

3. Consternation and much mental wrestling with thoughts of the future have still produced nothing definitive. I have a few embryonic ideas, which are far better than the nothing I'd come up with so far (I've spent the last three years in a limbo of What-the-Bleep-Do-I-Do-Now?, working six different jobs and sorting through my changing passions and constant gifts), but again, no "go here, do this"; just a "wait here, do this," so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, with a twist: buckle my bootie down and start taking my writing seriously. I did pretty well for awhile during Lent with the getting up at five a.m. thing, but that really petered out, and it's time to get back on the horse. There are a lot of things to write about -- some fiction, the church, Christianity, the Bible, etc. -- a lot of things I love, and a lot of raw blog material waiting to be harvested and threshed. Now I need to set down some concrete goals, but I've been sitting on this talent for way too long, and it's collecting no interest.

4. I have a new goal of regular church attendance. Nothing beyond that for the time being; I just want to go every Sunday on a regular basis through the end of the summer, before I look at ways to get more involved. Church is one of my bigger problems. I'm afraid of it, even when I enjoy it and want to go. I'm always sure that at some point it's going to turn out to be terrible, that the people will ostracize me, that I won't fit in, that it will be high school all over again, but in a worse way, because these are supposed to be my spiritual family. When it comes to other Christians, I've tended to feel like the little latchkey kid looking in the candy shop window at everybody else eating jelly beans and having fun. Maybe I'll meet another urchin like me, another Charlie Bucket or Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn or Little Arliss or Caddie Woodlawn or whatever, and we'll watch for awhile and rub our grubby noses against the glass and stick our tongues out and laugh about it and then go running off looking for frogs in the creek, but my "place" has always been on the margins. Sure, wah, get over it; so I've been trying to attend, and wanting to get into the swing, but I'm still afraid it's going to collapse on me and I'll be worse off, more hurt and more disillusioned than I was before. So I'm taking it slow. Baby steps. Regular attendance first. Not counting on finding friends. Then praying a lot and at the end of the summer seeing if maybe there's something more there I could be doing, and particularly some small group or Bible study I could join.

5. Grrr, taxes. (And where did I put the W-2? Where? I remember when it was handed to me. Now where did I put it? And why do I do this? Why?) But yay, later filing date. (Procrastination, hm, that's not a change at all. BUT, I'm doing my taxes all on my own this year, with no help, so that's a change.)

6. More hot baths. Fewer sore muscles. Candles. Book. Mm.

7. Spring.

break

Yeah, a day off, a lot of sleep, a lot of doing nothing, and a deposited paycheck all help. A lot.

So do the Harry Potter movies. I can't seem to get enough HP lately. I've reread Book 6 all the way through this week, with smatterings of Book 5, and now I need to rummage around in the basement to where I think I may have left Book 3 (which was the first HP I read all the way through, and the first to hook me on the story, and will always hold a special niche in my story-obsessed heart).

Sometimes it's hard to watch movies alone. TV on DVD, no problem. I have all of Buffy and all of Angel and a whole bunch of other TV shows and that's always fine. But I have a tonne of movies I'd love to watch but never get around to...some of them are just tough to watch alone. Harry Potter, though, I can do. Readily. Besides, with HP I have this habit of rewinding to catch certain facial expressions or vocal inflections of the characters over and over to help my own interpretations, which would probably annoy a companion.

Can't can't can't can't can't wait for the HP5 movie and the HP7 Book to come out. O.M.G.

Bed.

obliviate

If I throw myself hard enough into my job, nothing else will matter. So I've thrown myself into my job.

And I've been doing it fantastically well. So well, in fact, that I feel like I'm earning my extraordinary raise. So well that I'm managing, with creative ideas, to overhaul a few of the office systems. So well that the front office is becoming, well and truly, my domain. So well that my boss's son, himself going to law school and looking to join his dad in the practice in two years' time, gets panicky at the thought that I might have moved on by the time he becomes a partner.

So well that come day's end I'm too exhausted to process anything but my exhaustion. Which is, after all the goal. I'm becoming terribly efficient.

But there's a catch. It only works when I'm alone. I spent some time with friends last night, and things I thought weren't bothering me had me close to tears, and I realized, it's been a Bad Head Month. A long one.

There are reasons. It's not just the depression. That factors in, of course, but even "normal" (har) people have bad weeks and months. The "understood boundaries of my self" have undergone continuous strain the past four weeks. There's my own health. There are the usual What To Do with My Life and When Do I Do It crises. There's the I'm Always Alone Factor. But those are constants. The headaches wear me down, true. But still -- business as usual.

The burdens that made the harness straps creak were mostly the cat, and money. I'm an Introvert. I receive my replenishment from solitude (yes, I was just mourning my aloneness. But I mean, I need companionship. You can have solitude and still have companionship), and to have solitude, I need a sanctuary, a safe place, a refuge, a hiding place, a hobbit hole, a cave, a hermitage. That's my home. And Simon's sickness shattered the peace, serenity, and safety of my home. Instead of a place where I could retreat from stress and relax, home became my primary source of stress. And after awhile I couldn't deal.

Not to mention that the cat's bills maxed out my credit card and the last of my health savings account. I'm on my own, kids. Without that raise, I wouldn't be able to do it. Which makes me feel both enormously grateful and absolutely terrified. My parents help where they can, but when it comes down to it, I'm my own support system, and I can't count on another human being to bail me out. It's just me.

So all of that makes the Aloneness worse. I don't have anyone around to give me a hug, or to say, Sarah, calm down, you're making this way bigger of a deal than it is, or, simply, cool it, it's going to be fine and you know it, or, I'm here. Because I know I freak out over nothing when I'm tired and stressed, and that when I have a Bad Head phase I keep bad hours and don't sleep enough and don't eat enough (six or seven or maybe more pounds have mysteriously vanished from my person) and imagine the worst possible catastrophes in order to "prepare myself" (except what a ridiculous thing to do, you can't prepare yourself for that kind of stuff anyway) and stop cleaning the house and lose all my energy and stop cooking and that the only things I have the energy for are working, reading, listening to Sufjan and watching movies or TV on DVD and don't feel like talking to anyone or writing or blogging and wish I could have a week off so that I could do nothing but lie curled on my bed and sleep and do nothing and just heal.

Yeah, it's bad, friends. I know it's bad because of everything in the above paragraph, and because at the bottom of it all I don't feel all that sad, I just don't feel much of anything, and that's when it's bad bad. But I get up and I do my job and I distract myself and I'll pull through it. Because God's love is still there, it's the one thing besides the nothing that's coming through still clear. And the weather is bound to improve someday, that will help.

When the night falls
I carry myself to the fortress
Of your glorious cost
Oh how I may seek your fortress
When the night falls,
We see the star of wonder
Wonderful night falls,
We see you, we see you there

I see the stars coming down there,
Coming down there to the yard
I see the stars coming down there
Coming down there to my heart

[Those days, days, days run away
like horses over the hills...]

odds and ends

I had a lovely Easter -- spent it with my boss's family -- my boss, his wife and son Rob and son's fiancee, my friend Stacy -- at the family home in Michigan. We enjoyed heated conversations on the present state of social affairs, an excellent lamb roast (I've never had lamb for Easter, but does anything make more sense?), and a good, relaxed time all around.

I've always been hard-pressed to choose a favorite between Christmas and Easter; I love them both, and the one that's in season is always my favorite. Christmas embraces the joys of everything sacred and secular, as perfectly noted in Sufjan Stevens' "Christmas Tube Socks" essay accompanying his "Songs for Christmas" album released last November. It's a hodgepodge, a mishmash, a fantastic revelry in the holy and the hilarious, and the lines are finely blurred.

Easter, on the other hand, is different. The juxtaposition between sacred and profane is clumsier, the rift between Christian and pagan wider, more easily identified (cf. Eddie Izzard's commentary in "Dress to Kill"). And Easter, preceded as it is by Lent, and followed by Pentecost, is surrounded by a starkness, an austerity, that throws its clearest meaning into sharp relief against the backdrop of bunnies, eggs, plastic grass and marshmallows. Christmas is entirely a celebration of a beautiful mystery: Incarnation. Easter comemmorates three days that encompassed the most terrible despair, and the most terrible joy, of earth's history. Seventy-two hours of gut-wrenching spiritual whiplash.

Bit dramatic if you don't go for the whole faith thing. But there it is, for those who do. Nietzsche got his moment on Good Friday, Saturday, and that very early Sunday: God is dead. Even we couldn't argue with that, if he'd said it then. The disciples didn't. (Well, whether or not they really KNEW Jesus was God, at that moment, is up for debate.) There was a stone in front of God's tomb. And then...there wasn't. Something incredible happened. In seventy-two hours everything turned around. Violently. Darkness fell over the earth in the middle of the day, the temple curtain was ripped in two, there were earthquakes and some of the holy dead came walking out of their tombs, alive, and Jesus was back. And nothing's been the same ever since.

I love Easter best because everything hinges on it. I love it because it's so simple, because thousands of years of orchestration, hundreds of prophecies, nine months of gestation, thirty-three years of life, and three years of ministry contracted to three days...contracted to that one moment, that one second, when the walls of Jesus' heart shuddered with blood and the walls of the tomb whispered with the echo of a breath. When the glory of God that left the temple in Isaiah chapter 6 looked through the newly opened eyes of the once-dead Christ (Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days). And I love it because it foreshadows the fulfillment of his promise when he said, Because I live, you also shall live...

Anyway. Yay Easter!

So work is going well -- it's been kind of consuming my life. I have trouble with balance. My life inner ear tends to go all wonky and I fixate on one aspect and let the other ones go to pot. So right now my house is a disaster zone and I think they might be calling in the Health Inspectors about my dirty dishes, but the office is about to become a phoenix of order and cleanliness. I've been working massive overtime, battling the ongoing sinus problem & headaches, and struggling to pay my medical bills (damn you, medical bills!), but the light at the end of the tunnel is nearing, and this time I'm confident that it's really the light of the summer sun and not the headlight of an oncoming train.

an exerpt from East Coker, in honor of Good Friday

IV
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

V
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

accountability: a survey: take 2

Okay, scrap that last, it was way too specific; I couldn't even answer the questions. Can we try it free association style? Please? (I'm pretending you just gave me a pitying/resigned/I'm-your-friend-and-you're-looking-so-cute-and-beseeching-so-I'll-say-yes-but-I-secretly-hate-you look.) Goody!

Right, so I say, "accountability," and you say whatever comes into your head.

Ready?

Accountability.

Go.

to a recalcitrant friend

Dear Mr. Cold Front:

I really must protest your untimely re-arrival in my neighborhood. I understand that you make your circuits throughout most regions of the world on a semi-regular basis, namely, during the late autumn, winter, and early spring seasons, when I find you a most welcome companion. I further understand that you do not actually violate any law of nature in visiting me at the beginning of April; however, your persistent company, this late into the spring season, is becoming increasingly unwelcome.

You must understand that I have many responsibilities and obligations to fulfill which your sudden presence is rendering difficult. As an unmarried individual with gainful employment, I dedicate the majority of my waking hours to my job. This, naturally, requires a great deal of energy and mental focus, which necessitates copious and regular amounts of rest.

The general depression (marked by a decline in productivity) caused by unseasonable weather would, I think, be reason enough in itself for you to vacate the premises, should you pause to consider your effect on those around you. Also, it is beginning to seem that you need a map to direct you to your next stop, which I would think you would find embarrassing. The Canada geese are enough of a laughingstock across the entirety of the North American continent, without lumping you into the mix.

Furthermore, for the past three weeks, all of the aforementioned requirements for a fully productive life have suffered significant depletions due to the poor health of my cat, who has required continual and watchful care, and also due to my chronic headaches.

It is these last for which I hold you most responsible, Mr. Cold Front. Your accompanying frigid winds have often, in my short trips between the door and the car, reduced me to tears due to intense sinus pain. Said pain persists throughout the day, perceived as tight bands wound along my cheekbones and across my temples, and pressing inside my nose. As a result, my concentration has been sharply limited, as well as my energy levels and enjoyment of life.

It is my hope that you will reconsider your venue in this neighborhood and migrate, in a VERY timely fashion, to a more suitable region of the globe. Antarctica, I believe, is looking for residents such as yourself this time of year. I'm sure your particular characteristics would enjoy a more popular status in that climate.

I have appreciated your presence throughout the duration of February, and I look forward to your return in December. (You were a bit late, in 2006. Please feel free to arrive and unpack your bags somewhat closer to December first this year; I'll always have a mug of hot cocoa waiting for you around that time.) But "for all things there is a season," etc. & etc., and it is my understanding that now is the time for fledgling birds, flowers, and sinus drainage.

Wishing you well on your way, and thanking you for your cooperation and understanding,

Sincerely yours,

Sarah

accountability: a survey

So I was talking with my mom yesterday, and the subject of accountability came up. I was surprised to discover that her experience was vastly different from mine.

So I thought I would ask you, friends, Grovers, random readers: If you have had any experience in the church, or in a "churched" environment such as a Christian high school or college campus, with the idea of "accountability partners," what was it like for you?

I have several particular questions in mind:

(1) Did you ever have an accountability partner yourself, or even a series of accountability partners? If so:
a.) Was it a deliberate arrangement, with both parties agreeing to meet on a regular basis to "be accountable to each other," or did it arise naturally out of a mutually supportive friendship?
b.) How did you select your accountability partners?
c.) Did you share similar struggles, or were your personalities, backgrounds and challenges widely different?
d.) How long did each accountability relationship, particularly of the contractual variety, last?

(2) If you didn't participate in this phenomenon, did you observe it in others? What are/were your observations?

(3) Did you find the "accountability partnership" to be a source of encouragement, support, and joy, or a source of discomfort, discouragement, self-judgment, and despair? Did you look forward to your weekly/biweekly/monthly/whatever meetings as a chance to share joys and progress, or dread them as a time of tallying the good against the bad, with the bad usually winning out?

(4) Do you, if you have some experience with the "accountability partnership," fall into the 12-20-year age group, the 21-30, the 31-40, or the 41+?

(5) What was your predominant religious, or, if Christian (as I'm supposing respondents will generally be), denominational background? Was "accountability" widely practiced, taught, or encouraged by your denomination and/or church, or did you experience it from another source?

(6) Was the idea of accountability important in your family life as a child/teenager?

I'll keep my own experiences and opinions, for the moment, to myself, and follow them up after I've heard from a few people. I do hope to hear from some of my fellow GCCers, since this practice seemed pretty widespread there, and I know a lot of us Grovers came from surprisingly variant denominational backgrounds. But I'm also looking for input from as wide a selection of sources as possible, so if you have something to say, please, chime in!