they should have an AA equivalent for spiritual things.
love, me
dear you,
they do, hon. we call it church.
even more love, jesus
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Guttering and Baseboarding
Why do some days seem so long and others so short?
Today went by soooo slooooowly! We got a lot done, but it just seemed to really drag. T and I started to go all crazy at 3ish (highlight: T telling me "lean on her!" and then when I did... dropping me, and herself. Quote: "That wasn't leaning! That was your whole weight!")
There was another day, too, that was even worse. We all wanted to eat lunch at 10am, and by 2pm, it felt like we had been in Mrs. Sandra L's kitchen for at least a week. When you're so disconnected from time that the morning of the same day seems like it happened at least three days ago, it's a bad day.
But today wasn't really a bad day. We put up gutters around the whole house, just in time for it to start raining, and for us to get to see if they worked (they mostly did. More leaks than were anticipated.). We ate at DQ for lunch, which was a super exciting adventure (also hard to tone ourselves down for going out in public - we laugh a whole heck of a lot at work, and when we get around people, we have to remember to Get Normal for them). And then we put in baseboard everywhere. Kitchen, living room, hallways, bedroom - and I got to caulk a lot of things. I'm covered in white goo still. So we got a lot done, and felt productive, but - oh my, we were putting up gutters and putting down baseboard for a long, long, long time. A couple years, at least.
Today went by soooo slooooowly! We got a lot done, but it just seemed to really drag. T and I started to go all crazy at 3ish (highlight: T telling me "lean on her!" and then when I did... dropping me, and herself. Quote: "That wasn't leaning! That was your whole weight!")
There was another day, too, that was even worse. We all wanted to eat lunch at 10am, and by 2pm, it felt like we had been in Mrs. Sandra L's kitchen for at least a week. When you're so disconnected from time that the morning of the same day seems like it happened at least three days ago, it's a bad day.
But today wasn't really a bad day. We put up gutters around the whole house, just in time for it to start raining, and for us to get to see if they worked (they mostly did. More leaks than were anticipated.). We ate at DQ for lunch, which was a super exciting adventure (also hard to tone ourselves down for going out in public - we laugh a whole heck of a lot at work, and when we get around people, we have to remember to Get Normal for them). And then we put in baseboard everywhere. Kitchen, living room, hallways, bedroom - and I got to caulk a lot of things. I'm covered in white goo still. So we got a lot done, and felt productive, but - oh my, we were putting up gutters and putting down baseboard for a long, long, long time. A couple years, at least.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Ode to Kentucky Mud: A Journal
We're building a new house! I'm super duper excited. This is what I wanted to do in Kentucky - learn to build houses. So here is how we lay a foundation in Kentucky.
Monday: We ripped up the old foundation with a backhoe, then dug out the new one. I got to use the little thingy that checks if you're level, and use my thumb to tell Steve, on the backhoe, whether the hole should go deeper or stay put. So we hacked out the footer and went home, tired and happy.
Thursday: We got to the footer and the sides had sort of collapsed. So we dug out the collapsed dirt, which wasn't much, and then put in the rebar - long round metal pipe-things that you put in a pair all around the inside of the footer. We also put in rebar stakes in every corner, and spent a lot of time hammering them down, pulling them up, and then doing it again, trying to get every single one exactly level with every other one. We got sort of muddy, but enjoyed ourselves. Next up - call the inspectors, get inspected, then pour the concrete!
Monday: The inspector couldn't come before Friday, and it rained over the whole weekend. The footer has a foot of water in one side, and the other side is filled with collapsed, fine Kentucky mud. This is less fun than the first time. It's heavy, caught up in the rebar we had planted so studiously. The mud is so deep and thick that it keeps pulling our boots off when we move. Spleltch, spleltch, spletlch. My neck hurts, T's back hurts, and Steve is still good humored (is he ever not good humored? A question) but has started complaining - good humoredly. Plus, the rebar is getting in the way, and the stakes are sinking deeper (all that careful measuring!) and it's just a mess. But it's DONE!
Tuesday: Inspector comes. He says that we need to "get the mud out of the footer." But we did that! We did it yesterday! Waaaah....
Wednesday: We dig more mud out of the footer. This is REALLY not fun. Also, I notice that the station that plays "Hits from the 60's, 70's, and 80's!" has never played a Simon and Garfunkle song! What's with that? Bigots! Small-minded Stones fans! Lennon-lovers!
Thursday:I wash my pair of jeans from yesterday twice, and they still crackle when I bend them. It looks like Kentucky mud is in this relationship for the long haul. (No comment on my boots. I think I'll have to toss them. Now accepting: Boot donations!)
Friday: Cement arrives. Cement truck gets stuck in the mud on the side of the hill. How many wheelbarrow loads does it take to fill half a house foundation? Seven hours worth.
Tuesday: Show up to level out the dirt around the outside of the footer, and guess what? The sides had collapsed into the cement foundation! Shocking! Guess what we did? Shoveled Kentucky mud out of the footer.
Wheeee!
Monday: We ripped up the old foundation with a backhoe, then dug out the new one. I got to use the little thingy that checks if you're level, and use my thumb to tell Steve, on the backhoe, whether the hole should go deeper or stay put. So we hacked out the footer and went home, tired and happy.
Thursday: We got to the footer and the sides had sort of collapsed. So we dug out the collapsed dirt, which wasn't much, and then put in the rebar - long round metal pipe-things that you put in a pair all around the inside of the footer. We also put in rebar stakes in every corner, and spent a lot of time hammering them down, pulling them up, and then doing it again, trying to get every single one exactly level with every other one. We got sort of muddy, but enjoyed ourselves. Next up - call the inspectors, get inspected, then pour the concrete!
Monday: The inspector couldn't come before Friday, and it rained over the whole weekend. The footer has a foot of water in one side, and the other side is filled with collapsed, fine Kentucky mud. This is less fun than the first time. It's heavy, caught up in the rebar we had planted so studiously. The mud is so deep and thick that it keeps pulling our boots off when we move. Spleltch, spleltch, spletlch. My neck hurts, T's back hurts, and Steve is still good humored (is he ever not good humored? A question) but has started complaining - good humoredly. Plus, the rebar is getting in the way, and the stakes are sinking deeper (all that careful measuring!) and it's just a mess. But it's DONE!
Tuesday: Inspector comes. He says that we need to "get the mud out of the footer." But we did that! We did it yesterday! Waaaah....
Wednesday: We dig more mud out of the footer. This is REALLY not fun. Also, I notice that the station that plays "Hits from the 60's, 70's, and 80's!" has never played a Simon and Garfunkle song! What's with that? Bigots! Small-minded Stones fans! Lennon-lovers!
Thursday:I wash my pair of jeans from yesterday twice, and they still crackle when I bend them. It looks like Kentucky mud is in this relationship for the long haul. (No comment on my boots. I think I'll have to toss them. Now accepting: Boot donations!)
Friday: Cement arrives. Cement truck gets stuck in the mud on the side of the hill. How many wheelbarrow loads does it take to fill half a house foundation? Seven hours worth.
Tuesday: Show up to level out the dirt around the outside of the footer, and guess what? The sides had collapsed into the cement foundation! Shocking! Guess what we did? Shoveled Kentucky mud out of the footer.
Wheeee!
Saturday, November 5, 2011
fragility
"how do you keep from being preachy?" - rolling stone
"the key is not to contrive it - don't bring the same level of indignation to things you don't feel. as long as you keep it as honest as you can to your own feeling, then you hope it doesn't become a pure parlor trick" - jon stewartso then you are offended, and get to defend something, and feel really good about how indignant you are. but everyone sees that you aren't really indignant, and everyone knows you're just being self-righteous (or at least, everyone that matters).
the alternative sometimes feels like being not human. the alternative means only being indignant when you actually are indignant (i got this from jon stewart so it must be true), which means that you only get to be righteously angry when you actually feel angry, righteously, not just when you know you ought to feel angry because this is a righteous cause. so if you aren't a very nice person, or a very righteous person in general, nothing evil will make you indignant. but if you're also a smart person, this will make you veeeeery uncomfortable, because you'll realize holy crap evil doesn't make me angry i must be evil too. so rather than live honestly with your own emotions, you cue yourself up to be offended when you know you should be offended.
everyone (me) is very fragile it seems like. easily breakable, easily offended, easily induced into a coma of apoplectic indignation. this makes it very complicated to love people, because people that we're supposed to love end up saying things, accidently, that cause us to be offended, and then we chose our own identity (as a righteous condemnationer) over being nice to a nice person.
danny-from-l'abri said that "growing up" meant being more solid and less fragile. this is hard.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
A Little Pentecostal Lovin'
Sometimes it seems like the curtain between spiritual reality and physical reality gets pulled back a little bit, and you're allowed to dance in the sunbeams before it falters down again. Last Sunday, before church, Jesus found me at BC&T, while I downed soy chai tea lattes and read old journals. Ideas that I'd been mulling over for months suddenly connected to each other, too quickly for me to record and leaving me chicken scratching concepts on napkins and making little triangular diagrams - "LOVE - TRUST - JESUS -> SPECIAL GRACE!" - which is like drawing a stick figure to try and express "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss".
I bundle up and head out to my new Pentecostal church family. I bounce up to church so enthusiastically that I fell down a small set of stairs in my new heels (Lesson: Spiritual revelations should not be combined with high heels). I even make it through all of the hugging and introducing and the overwhelming touching of the South with grace and good spirits.
I have always pictured worship and prayer as a kind of dance. Dancing can communicate love without language being necessary; dancing also has this sameness of purpose and direction that seems to unify more than anything else. I read somewhere that "dancing is the music of the body;" I think that worship is the dancing of the soul. So through all this, I'm still, futily, trying to get my beautiful spiritual ideas down in triangular diagrams, when one of my absolute favorite songs starts to play. This is a song to dance to! (Metaphorically: I am a New Englander, still.) So I close up all my diagrams and stand up, super pumped about worship...
A hand on my back.
"Jesus told me to pray for you, sweetheart."
Eh?
"I felt, ever since we said hello this morning, that Jesus wants to tell you something!"
A kindly, grey-haired lady is kneeling next to me now.
"He feels your pain, baby, and I'm gonna pray that He re-leases you!"
Wha'? My pain? What pain? Jesus, are you telling this lady something about my unconscious pain that you aren't telling me?
"Jeeeesus, I pray for my sister! She's sad! She's suffering! She's empty! Her heart is broken and bleeding, Lord! It is broken! It is bleeding! May she know that YOU answer her prayers, that YOU hear her cry, that YOU will heal her brokenness! Re-lease her! Re-lease her! Jeeeeee-sus!"
So on, so forth. And then, that was that. Worship wrapped up, The lady gave me a weepy hug. I sort of patted her politely on the shoulder.
We don't do this in New England.
At first I was cranky. Interrupting worship, to me, is like interrupting a dance right in the middle. And not just any dance - it's like trying to tap out the groom on his wedding day: "I know you just got married, but I sure would like to dance with the bride... right - now!"
But the metaphor didn't help me stay cranky, because if Jesus is the groom here, then he knows that this isn't such a big deal, and I'm just overreacting. And then I had this picture of Jesus, in a tux, standing by the potted plants in the corner of the patio at the reception, watching my desperate face as I get sucked into a wild polka with a well intentioned Southern lady ("1 and 2 and! 1 and 2 and!") ... and he keeps catching my eye and grinning, because the sort of person that I give my whole life up to in a Divine Romance is also the sort of person that thinks that things like that are sort of silly, in a good, get-the-giggles kind of way. And knows that this nice lady doing the polka so vigorously really does mean well, and loves Jesus just as much as me - just in a different way. There'll be plenty of time to dance. But this sure has been a hoot, right, Laura?
Right.
I bundle up and head out to my new Pentecostal church family. I bounce up to church so enthusiastically that I fell down a small set of stairs in my new heels (Lesson: Spiritual revelations should not be combined with high heels). I even make it through all of the hugging and introducing and the overwhelming touching of the South with grace and good spirits.
I have always pictured worship and prayer as a kind of dance. Dancing can communicate love without language being necessary; dancing also has this sameness of purpose and direction that seems to unify more than anything else. I read somewhere that "dancing is the music of the body;" I think that worship is the dancing of the soul. So through all this, I'm still, futily, trying to get my beautiful spiritual ideas down in triangular diagrams, when one of my absolute favorite songs starts to play. This is a song to dance to! (Metaphorically: I am a New Englander, still.) So I close up all my diagrams and stand up, super pumped about worship...
A hand on my back.
"Jesus told me to pray for you, sweetheart."
Eh?
"I felt, ever since we said hello this morning, that Jesus wants to tell you something!"
A kindly, grey-haired lady is kneeling next to me now.
"He feels your pain, baby, and I'm gonna pray that He re-leases you!"
Wha'? My pain? What pain? Jesus, are you telling this lady something about my unconscious pain that you aren't telling me?
"Jeeeesus, I pray for my sister! She's sad! She's suffering! She's empty! Her heart is broken and bleeding, Lord! It is broken! It is bleeding! May she know that YOU answer her prayers, that YOU hear her cry, that YOU will heal her brokenness! Re-lease her! Re-lease her! Jeeeeee-sus!"
So on, so forth. And then, that was that. Worship wrapped up, The lady gave me a weepy hug. I sort of patted her politely on the shoulder.
We don't do this in New England.
At first I was cranky. Interrupting worship, to me, is like interrupting a dance right in the middle. And not just any dance - it's like trying to tap out the groom on his wedding day: "I know you just got married, but I sure would like to dance with the bride... right - now!"
But the metaphor didn't help me stay cranky, because if Jesus is the groom here, then he knows that this isn't such a big deal, and I'm just overreacting. And then I had this picture of Jesus, in a tux, standing by the potted plants in the corner of the patio at the reception, watching my desperate face as I get sucked into a wild polka with a well intentioned Southern lady ("1 and 2 and! 1 and 2 and!") ... and he keeps catching my eye and grinning, because the sort of person that I give my whole life up to in a Divine Romance is also the sort of person that thinks that things like that are sort of silly, in a good, get-the-giggles kind of way. And knows that this nice lady doing the polka so vigorously really does mean well, and loves Jesus just as much as me - just in a different way. There'll be plenty of time to dance. But this sure has been a hoot, right, Laura?
Right.
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