the thorn in my head

The headache is back. I stayed home from work yesterday. My boss's wife is taxiing me up to Ann Arbor today to see about getting a referral to a specialist. These don't seem like normal migraines. I'm wondering if they're somehow psychosomatic, stress- or depression-related, and what can be done to avert them.

I think I need to get back in therapy.

Looks like money's going to get tighter. But that's okay; I need to get better.

Anyway. Looking at a computer screen hurts. I'll keep you posted.

i will never challenge Monday again

Do you hear that, Monday? I give up. I surrender. I will slink through your corridors with my head meekly down and try to stay out of your way. I will keep my gloves off and my fists tucked in my pockets. I will wear a raincoat and a suit of armor. But I'm out of the boxing ring. You win.

Because my right uppercut is nasty, but Monday's left hook is worse.

Last Monday and the Monday before it were hell. I spent each minute writhing in internal agony. There was definite gnashing of teeth. This one isn't too much better -- after a weekend of nonstop activity (however pleasant, nonstop activity just plumb wears me out) and one missed dose of my antidepressant, I woke up with that never-ending headache and an exhaustion that would drop a bear.

Fortunately my visit to the new doctor went very well. I was favorably impressed with his personable professionalism, his brisk pace, and his apparently instant understanding of my headaches and allergies. I am now on a daily preventative migraine medication, and am armed with a stronger dosage of the as-needed migraine meds I already had (because the bad days will come. I get that; even on an anti-d, I get what I call Bad Head Days), and am going back on my old, beloved, faithful allergy medication that I had to stop taking after college because I had zero/crappy health insurance. Yay!

The phones are ringing off the hook at work, I have no time to get my other tasks accomplished, and everyone who calls has been saving up all their panic over the bad things that happened to them on the weekend to pour into my ear today. Which is fine; a lot of these people have to deal with some serious crap, and I don't mind being a listening ear. It's just hard to do the juggling act.

But I did have it out with my sworn enemy, FedEx (oh yeah -- their incompetence with an auction incident regarding the Center last year was on the list of Bogus Reasons For Letting Me Go -- I spent WEEKS on the phone tracking a Huge Expensive Package that they, oh yes, lost, which became somehow my fault -- because I'm in charge of a nationwide company's royal screwup in losing Muhammad Ali memorabilia in Utah), about an invoice for an item we never shipped. The package was sent from somewhere in Texas to somewhere in Texas (we've never done business with anyone in Texas) by someone who's never worked at my office. And I won that round. So that's a feather in my hide-from-Monday camo cap.

I've been making some huge life decisions this weekend, and I think I'm finally finding some direction in my What Do I Do With My Life dilemma, which has been plaguing me for three years now, so I'm terribly excited about that. It means another year or two in the Bend, and then...possibilities. It also means I'm going to be getting a lot more involved at church, and writing a whole lot more.

And with that teaser, I bid my faithful audience (whoever remains) adieu for the remainder of Monday. I have to put on my Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak and duck out into the hall.

there aren't enough apples in the world

Why is it so hard to find a good physician?

Let's take a quick survey, shall we?

High school: A crazy woman with an extremely uncomfortable physical presence who never told you what she was doing until she did it (first mammogram = blechy, scary, freaky, etc.).

College: A grumpy volunteer physician who hated his volunteer hours at the college clinic and overprescribed Vicodin for me in the days when I knew nothing about narcotics, thus sparking an unnecessary and terrifying detox period that I had to do on my own. (The stuff is addictive after three DAYS. He prescribed it to me for four WEEKS.)

South Bend Year 1: A series of free clinics (nod to no insurance), most of them actually not all that scary, but run by basically powerless doctors who could barely prescribe antibiotics.

South Bend Year 2: A doctor at a cheap clinic who told me I was bipolar after talking with me for two minutes and sent Mormon missionaries to my door.

South Bend Year 3: A doctor who did everything (chiropractic adjustments on my neck, prescriptions for mild pain relievers that made me sleepy at work) except prescribe a migraine medication...for my migraine.

This last gent isn't all that bad, but he isn't all that great either, and thanks to double-booking bumped me out of my appointment today (his secretary was exceptionally snotty in informing me. Okay, yes, I was late, I got what I deserved, but I didn't deserve that tone of voice. And I object to double-booking on principle). Which I made because the migraine is back. Grr.

So, being the hot-headed, proactive me that I am, I zoomed back to the office in a transmission-roaring rage and found a new family doctor. I see this next specimen on Monday. God only knows if that will be any better, but it's worth a shot.

Finding a good doctor is almost worse than finding a church. (Almost.) You never know what kind of person you'll run into -- a quack, a creep, an asshole, a fool, a blowhard, a megalomaniac, an incompetent -- the list goes on -- but you keep trying in the effort to find SOMEone who can actually help you, and whose staff utilize professionalism.

Of course, as I was informed by the accounts manager at one of the hospitals I'm paying bills for, medicine isn't an exact science. There's a lot of trial and error involved, and I get that. But surely a migraine medication for the worst headache of someone's life isn't too big a diagnostic leap? Particularly after the doctor has informed the patient that ongoing migraine disorder is a common development among women in their twenties?

Anyway. Now I have to check with my insurance to see if they cover the newbie. (They don't cover much of the current guy either.) I hope I wasn't rash. (Har.) I'm tired of being unthrilled with my physicians. The best one I've ever seen, and with whom I'm still a patient, is 3.5 hours away, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; but seeing him and missing an entire day of work just isn't practical unless it's an emergency.

Le sigh.

one of those weeks

I hate those weeks.

And this one was one of those, especially at work. That week where I didn't really do anything right. Where every beginner's or careless mistake I've made in the past six months came to a boiling head all at once, in the midst of massive hearing and trial preparations that had to be done on top of reorganizing my entire system. Where I worked my ass off and stayed till almost seven o'clock each night and came away feeling like I was rowing against the current and getting nowhere.

Grr.

Top it off with my worries over Simon and the now-glorious migraine pressing down on my skull and it's been great.

But there were a few perks. Like realizing that from time to time that I enjoy the fracturing stress. I was running around finding this and copying that and answering phones and talking to annoying clients and I realized, This is just like theater. Like production week, where the mics are broken and the sound system blows and we run out of man-blush and people are sleeping through their call times. Which made me, in spite of everything, grin. I can get a lot done under pressure. It's the gift of the procrastinator.

And God has always been unreasonably good to me in those times when nothing ought to work out. But a lot of it does. And I tend to be clever, and tenacious, in yanking solutions out of thin air when there isn't any other choice. I got by this week mostly on sheer stubbornness and ridiculous amounts of grace.

And slept eleven hours last night.

I'm exhausted. But since I can't seem to get caught up on the backlog of stacks of papers that need filing, and that one damn letter that never seems to get written, I'm heading into work for a few hours this afternoon, where I can slough around unshowered in a sweatshirt and jeans and ignore the phones and make a huge mess and put it all back together without being at anyone's beck and call. Of course, it's my job to be at everyone's beck and call, and when I'm caught up I don't mind a bit, but at the moment there are things that I desperately need to get done, and I DON'T want to walk in Monday morning to the same chaos I walked out on Friday night.

Screw the headache. Screw the exhaustion. I don't have any plans anyway, and when you're single your job is the one visible thing that gives your life daily meaning, right? And my bosses have been so good to me, and done so much for me, that working hard is the one thing I can do to repay them.

I won't deny that it's a form of self-flagellation. Sometimes the hardest thing about being a Christian is the utter, irrefutable dependence on God's grace. It goes against the human grain. What? My sins, my debts, my flaws, my mistakes are all forgiven? Just like that? (Not that that -- the brutal death of the incarnate God -- is simple. But we can't do anything; He already did it.) And there's nothing I can do to make any of it better myself?

Nope. And sometimes it drives a person crazy. Because we want to fix it, we want to make up for it. We want to atone. But we can't, and like it or not, there it is, the grace on which we stand, and we can't add a single act or deed to it. We can't tip the balance one way or the other. And it's such an incredible gift, we feel guilty for having to accept it continually and unconditionally. Like every day being handed something expensive and amazing that we did nothing for -- a house, a brand-new car, a whole new season's wardrobe from designer outfitters, a four-carat diamond necklace, a state-of-the-art, gleaming grand piano, a fur coat, a pedicure, a gorgeous garden, when you're, at worst, mean, dirty and derelict, and at best just average or mostly decent, and you're looking the giver in the face with your hands loaded with things you didn't even ask for, and saying, But what can I do? And getting, Nothing, I love you, this is for you, as an answer.

And the only thing you can give in return is gratitude, and striving to live a better life, and reaching out in kindness and protectiveness to others. Passing on the jewels, as it were: "He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

Maybe that's the root of my feverish ambition to get the office organized this weekend. Gratitude, and a chance, not to rectify my mistakes, but to clean up some of the mess they left behind, and to prevent them from happening again, since I've been so absolutely, unquestioningly forgiven.

And there's a certain satisfaction in hard labor. You feel it has a purpose. That you're doing something -- cleaning the house you've been given, polishing the necklace, tuning the piano, weeding the garden -- and not just sitting still. You can't earn it, you can't give it back, but you can keep it beautiful, small as the ways might be.

worse cat story

I had to take Simon to the Animal ER on Monday because he fell on the floor and started shrieking in pain. I usually get a grumpy "mrrwrrr" out of him, but never screaming.

So I took him to the ER, was told something was wrong with his hips, probably wrenched them jumping down from something, and I have to keep him quiet for the rest of the week and if he didn't improve by tonight I'd have to schedule him for X-rays.

Fortunately the meds they gave me to administer to him seem to be working, although I can't imagine he's happy about being locked in my bedroom while I'm at work (with litterbox and water dish, of course). He never holds a grudge, though, the darling.

The only last concern, besides of course "will he heal?" is his excretory system(s). I am again the Monitor of Cat Waste, checking his litterbox obsessively and panning through the litter looking for little nuggets or large clumps that will tell me he's going to be all right. Because if something's wrong with his hips, it's hard for him to, well, squat to get the job done. And he's had urinary blockage before (although they did a partial urinalysis at the ER and said everything looked just fine).

But on the whole he seems to be feeling well and full of his usual vinegar and demands for food.

I hate when something's wrong with him. He's currently my only Life Companion, and he fills my whole day with such indescribable joy. Like when he picks the one spot on the bed that it's most awkward to bend my body around, but no matter how much I shift around or shove my legs under him, he won't move; or when I wake up periodically throughout the night to find him working his way up the bed bit by bit, snuggling down close against my calf or knee or thigh or hip (when he used to HATE close contact with anybody); or when I first hit the alarm and fall back asleep and he knows I'm not getting up, but as soon as my eyes open for real, he's walking all over me, shoving his head in my face, purring so loud I can hear it through the earplugs; or when he tentatively steps onto my lap while I watch TV and, looking like a fish out of water, hunkers down and starts to purr, because he wants to be nearby; or when he thinks he deserves food and I walk right past him and he gets mad and swats my ankles; or when he finds me out of his sight and yowls to know where I am; or when he ambushes me from behind the chair and I KNOW IT'S COMING but he scares the crap out of me anyway, and I shriek, and he struts away all proud of himself with his tail waving, and flops down on the ground to look up at me and his eyes are saying, "See how cute and clever I am?"

Or when he's perfectly happy, and stretches his whole length as far out and back as it will go, and he looks like a big black hairy piece of elbow macaroni, which earned him the nickname Noodle.

Or when he follows me all over the house, and brings his toys into the room where I'm standing, and plays with them there.

Well, he looks all right at the moment. I'm praying, of course, and I know my parents are, too, and my sister is sacrificing chickens, so I'm hoping all will work out the way I'd like. Where he's all healthy, and happy, and his sweet Simon self.

successes

Yesterday I...

1. Successfully made it to church;

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

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

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

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

unexpected fulfillment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

my latest cat story

Simon would be a vegetarian's dream come true.

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

But the cat loves his vegetables.

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

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

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

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

moneymoneymoney

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

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

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

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

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

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

living with a schizophrenic central heater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did all this before even drinking my coffee.

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

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

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

i will awaken the dawn

[Stretch, yawn, grunt] I did it.

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

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

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

a season of discipline

My Lenten vows:

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

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

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

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

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

picture perfect...and young and restless

No, no, I'm not picture perfect.

But my apartment is. Or nearly so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i deserve flowers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yay for flowers.

winter wist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

creating is hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentine's Day

So Valentine's Day is coming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

winter games

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

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

why today was great

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

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

3. I talked to Meg and Phillip.

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

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

6. It wasn't yesterday.

7. It is no degrees and snowing.

Sufjan is the glue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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