an unknown beatitude

Ladies and gentlemen, the duck hair is gone.

I finally got tired of its length and shagginess, so yesterday I pulled out the scissors and gave it the cut I've always wanted. Longer and full on top, short in back, sloping smoothly down the back of my skull to my neck.

According to my coworkers it's cute.

Blessed are the poor in finances, for they shall discover they can decently cut their own hair.

the finer things, oh yes.

I bought lipstick today.

Now, buying lipstick isn't like buying milk. You don't just go in and grab it and leave. Or at least, I don't. Usually it's been so long since the last time I bought lipstick that they've stopped making what I had before. So I have to start from sratch. Which is usually brand name. Do I do Maybelline or Cover Girl? (Both.) Okay, then I squint at the rows of lipstick looking for the right name or color.

I'm too tired to make this terribly interesting, but I want to say three things. 1.) I'm the skeezy kind of lipstick shopper who marks each potential selection on her hand. Completely unashamed, as well. You think that's gross? Why do you try on bathing suits? 2.) I bought two new red shades, one of which I think I like. 3.) Cover Girl had a shade called Port. It looked terrible on my skin. I was so sad.

(I'm spending Christmas with the Sommervilles!!!)

crazy jane

Wow, random. I talked with Erica Palmisano today and may be visiting her family in Michigan for Christmas! Which would be lovely. I wouldn't feel as much of a lost waif then.

I love not believing in coincidence.

What have I to complain about? I am so blessed.

i made you some trail mix out of rat droppings and hair.

Well, I won't apologize for the outburst of misery the other day. (Outbursts, if you also read my Xanga blog.) Suffice to say, however, that I am better today. Probably I WILL spend most of Christmas Day in tears, but I will endeavor to be happy too. I do have some fabulous blessings here, particularly wonderful coworkers who offer to bring me ornaments for my tree and who invite me to their family gatherings for Christmas dinner. This is still new and still strange and sometimes still scary, but I am well looked after and well loved.

My apartment now has pictures -- beautifully matted and framed -- hanging on the walls; Mom brought them, having framed them all herself during her spare (?) time at the Gallery. So now some of my loveliest prints from my old dorm room have taken up a more permanent-looking residence: "My Sweet Rose," a stunning photograph of a tree taken by Erika Szymanski's father, and several Van Goghs.

My parents also brought me a real Christmas tree! I worked in the lights as artfully as I could, and I like the result. Now it needs a few ornaments and some icicles, and it will be truly a pleasure to look at. It smells like a forest and my dryad self is happy.

So I have much for which to be thankful.

A few more ramblings....

What I planned to do today (as it was my day off): S l e e p.
What I did today: Cleaned. All day. Everything. I vacuumed, I dusted, I swept and handwashed the bare floors (not much of those), I CLEANED MY BATHROOM, and did a fridge purge. I wiped out the microwave, did my laundry, reorganized the freezer, washed the dishes, ran the dishwasher, and vacuumed some more. I took out the trash. (Did I mention I dusted?) The moral of today: If you find yourself bitten by the cleaning bug, give in. You'll feel satisfied and pleased, and you sure as hell won't feel like doing it tomorrow, so reward yourself by being responsible. I don't have to work till 6:00 p.m. tomorrow, and I can spend all that day lounging. And writing. I'm renewing my dedication to the craft, and Clytemnestra has been sitting on the shelf for too long.

Isn't it funny that the ancient dorm couch so ugly it's covered in sheets is the only one we really sit on?

I'm rereading Kipling's First Jungle Book and loving it. What narrative. What fun.

A shout-out to Matt Holman: Thank you. :)

since you inquired...

Well, I was right. I don't exactly want to die, but it's close.

I've been wondering about the answer to Matt's question. What am I going to do since I probably can't go home for Christmas?

I have several ideas. Here are a few.

1. Get really, really drunk on Christmas Eve and sleep through as much of Christmas Day as possible. (Discarded because really, what an awful way to herald the second holiest day on the Christian calendar.)
2. Wrap a present to myself. Wake up early on Christmas morning as I have been wont to do all my life and curl up on my couch in the dark watching the lights on my Christmas tree. Cry a lot because my sister isn't sitting next to me and my parents won't be coming down the stairs and my cats aren't lounging on the furniture. Continue crying as I open the present and drink lots of coffee. (I think, sadly, that this is the best option I have come up with so far.)
3. Get a mail-0rder husband so that I don't have to wake up cold and alone on my favorite family holiday. Maybe kidnap a few nice unspoiled children just for the day, to pretend I have a home and a family. (Discarded for obvious reasons.)
4. Find the local homeless center and eat Christmas dinner there so that I don't feel so down-and-out and miserable. Maybe volunteer to work at such a place so that I don't feel like a useless broken thumb on the left hand of society. (Discarded because I'm lazy and have to work my ass off the next day.)
5. Bake five dozen of my favorite Christmas cookies a week in advance. On Christmas Day, eat every single one. (Ugh.)
6. Quit both my jobs and move home so that I don't have to deal with this anymore. (Discarded because home is now a place I want to visit more often than I get to, but where I no longer want to live.)
7. Get myself a cat. Screw expenses, my roommate's hatred of felines, and Hurwich Farms's prohibition against pets. Then I won't be too cold or too alone. (Discarded because I'm a coward.)
8. Cry and cry and cry and cry. Find a moment when I'm not crying to thank God for the significance of Christmas and rededicate myself to faith in a good future. Spend Christmas dinner with the family of a friend from work, so that at least I'm surrounded by people. Cry some more. (Combined with number two is what I think will happen.)

December 26th is the biggest retail day of the year. Please don't shop on that day for my sake, so that I don't lump you into the large group of people that I hate as the consumers who prevent me from going home.

Any other suggestions? I'm open to options that don't waste good Puffs. Tissues aren't cheap.

just shoot me

I think when my parents leave tomorrow (today) I'm going to want to die. I'm tired of being isolated.

la la la...

I got a phone call today. From a boy. Well, I guess he qualifies more as a man. A young-ish one.

My parents drove across three states with a Christmas tree strapped to the top of their car, all to bring their daughter a Pennsylvania tree since she can't be home for Christmas.

Do I have a great family or what?

three's a drag

They've made a third Blade movie. Speaking of awful vampire films.

a small poem

She sorrow went a-manderwanning
quillious quickly in the spraine;
catretchener and tossing robin
cow-du-queried in the rain.
Luminescent silence and
a-haunting kessle thondergrove:
She listened lightly and summered soft
and manderwanning went anove.

An old old one of mine. The weather today is perfect for it.

wow.

happy. quite happy. very full and sort of...ephemeral...and...happy.

and i say to myself...

My period started a week early. Again. I worked sixty hours this week and didn't get the manager position at Ann Taylor. So...I'm disappointed and a little sad -- not horribly depressed, just blue enough to cry on the phone to Mom about how much I want a cat, change into my favorite pajamas, brew a cup of peach tea, light my balsam fir candle, and listen to Piano by Candlelight. (I haven't done any of that in a week or so.) I also rented Spirited Away, which clinched the deal. Spirited Away is the movie I watch when I need a pick-me-up.

Well, I wanted a sign that I'm not supposed to take too much time off from school. Plus I wanted to be able to attend church every week. I guess this is it.

I do love my job at Ann Taylor. I've become the Oliver Twist of women's retail. One of my coworkers, Jolly, a wonderful Bangladeshi woman whose real name is Sayeeda, brought me a bag of food last week. A few days later she brought me some clothes she didn't want anymore. Today another coworker, Katie, gave me a leather jacket she said was sitting around in her closet that she never wore (it's gorgeous and fits like a glove), and my manager Lisa is going to bring me a phone since mine broke. Again. It's like I fell in the lap of some wonderful huge family with lots of things that I don't have. Part of it pinches my pride since I haven't anything to give them back. The mooch in me is thrilled. The impoverished underdressed college graduate is immensely grateful.

Anyway, off to take my bloated self to bed, after a spot of tea and a few scenes of Underworld. (I do love vampire movies. And Underworld isn't as bad as most. Van Helsing, for example. Nothing can approach Interview with the Vampire, ever, but we'll take what we can get.)

a long grind

This is the third thirteen-hour working day this week. Well, the only real one; but I've worked a twelve-and-a-half and an eleven hour day this week, a ten hour day yesterday, and now this.

I am so tired. This is one of the days where I hate what I'm doing right now. It wouldn't be bad at all except that I'm tired. I got home at eleven p.m. last night and have to work at nine a.m. today.

God save me from a life of this.

Where are those grad school applications?

epiphanies of passion

I read "Ash-Wednesday " last night and wept. It was an odd place to weep, sitting on the toilet, but then again, not so odd. There's something about the privacy of a toilet where you can go escape and hang your head and give the semiotic irruption of tears free rein. I believe it's a tendency developed in large families and cemented during middle school.

Something about the love of God has been overwhelming me. The incomprehensibility, perhaps. I have no intention of making this musing a fluffy and nauseating display of puppy enthusiasm that I've hated so much from other people and other people's essays, especially at the Grove (oh God, creative writing personal narratives), but the coffee spoons of the week have featured this unfathomable attribute of the divine regularly enough to be mused on.

It was the subject of Sunday's sermon, and I sat in the pew and cried quietly wishing I hadn't done a purse purge that morning which left me bereft of Kleenex. A freely running nose in church is embarrassing. The love of God is something I haven't quite believed in as applied to myself for the past ten years, when the little bundle of raw nerves that converges into my self heard every week at Youth Group how horrible and nasty and repulsive human nature is to God. Even after I realized that my youth pastor was overzealous, the ideas festered. Anyway, it's been a long time of putting it away and not thinking about it but healing quietly under the surface and it's strange to know that I can be healed. Un-scarred. I've been reading Ezekiel and something semiotic (again that word) about the inexorable passion of God for his people swells in the mind. He says to them, in essence, "I WILL redeem you."

I don't understand the passion of God. I've begun praying on my knees before my bed, because as overwhelmed as I have been, nothing less seems quite expressive enough. I have nothing to give back. My hands are empty. But that's nothing he doesn't already know. Therefore let my devotion be kindled and my hands filled with acts of obedience and love, as my heartfull offering to the One to whom it doesn't matter how little I have to give.



Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

~Eliot, 1930

intimations of immortality

Mystic quote of the day:

"Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split."

That's Annie Dillard, at the beginning of Holy the Firm.

I forget how closely eternity is wrapped in time. I forget how each moment is its own eternity, sanctified to that which is beyond time. I forget that every instant of my being, of every being, of any being, is utterly significant.

It's easier, pretending that each day is mundane, another obstacle to be hurtled, another creek to cross, and that my only aim is to avoid bruised shins or wet feet. It's more comfortable to settle into a mindless routine, to dull my senses and think only of the times when I can go home and fall in bed. It's dangerous, to live in eternity-in-time. The crest of the wave, the question, the threshhold of seen and unseen.

But wow, we can. We're beings of liminality, simultaneously existing in body and soul, held together by mind. A mind that is too often too fragile for the significance of the moment, but the best tool that we have.

Anyway, I'm out of practice with essay writing, but there are my thoughts. My petty resentments needed that kick in the teeth to knock them back into perspective.

all the small things

I think I may break my own record and be in bed by eleven.

TWO young men from church visited me at Ann Taylor today. Not one. Two.

The Muse is riding my soul but the body is too tired to yield to writing and must yield to mattress instead. Thank God for beds.

Sir, I have no husband

Communion was served this Sunday. At the South Bend Christian Reformed Church, the congregation goes to the front to receive the bread and the cup from the elders -- new to my experience, and rather delightful. I had read the line-up instructions printed on the bulletin, where everyone was supposed to exit their pews to the right and return from the left. However, the section of the church in which I was sitting was rather long, so that the line was backed up (I have noticed that churches and Grovers can't maneuver traffic well) while the section next over was smaller and the line therefore shorter. Some decisive people in the rows ahead of me had elected to exit their pews to the left and enter the shorter line.

I was at the very end of left side of the last row, having come in late, and found myself hoping to God that I wouldn't have to make the decision. So naturally I peeked around at the person on the other end to see if they seemed the decisive, take-charge sort. Oh, good, it was a man. A young man. A rather attractive young man. (Thoughts of communion scattered a bit here.) A rather attractive young man who hesitantly caught my eye and refused to make a decision. Damn.

The woman next to me eventually whispered that I should lead the row to the left into the shorter line. So I did, feeling awkward and nervous -- this was only my third time in this church -- and all went smoothly. After the service I noticed this attractive indecisive young man and tried to quiet the bells going off in my head. Did the ring-check; left hand was bare. Hoorah.

Now the embarrassing part. Of course there's an embarrassing part. Between the service and the church school hour are about twenty-five minutes for coffee, cookies, and fellowship, where everyone mills around in the sunny atrium off the kitchen. I went to wait in the coffee line, which was mercifully shorter than the communion lines, and found myself directly behind the attractive indecisive young man. (And God, he was good-looking. I keep forgetting that I can be attracted to someone right off the bat like that. Blue eyes, dark hair, pale skin, and just about my height. Woo-ee.) He seemed shy, but the old man behind the kitchen counter arranging cookies on plates was chatty and asked the young man questions, have you come here long, are you in school, etc., and I of course listened. I learned that he is visiting faculty in the philosophy department at Notre Dame. He poured his coffee and turned to leave; I was smiling at him in what (I thought) was the pre-friendly, waiting-to-catch-his-eye-to-say-hello sort of way, but he didn't quite catch my eye and moved past to talk to some older people across the room. As he passed me I stepped up to the coffee and smiled at the old man, who asked in a not-so-quiet voice, "Are you two married?"

It was like being hit in the stomach with a tennis ball. I lurched at the counter and felt my face go hot and was tempted to blurt, like the woman at the well, "Sir, I have no husband." My internal filter prevented me, however, and I managed a choked-sounding "No -- no. I've never met him." Now, the old man could have spared me further embarrassment by simply shutting up. But he said, by way of explaining his assumption, "Well, you were smiling at him..." I laughed and said I was just being friendly. I ducked to the side to doctor up my coffee. God have mercy.

Now how on earth was I smiling at him? I tortured myself over this for the rest of the day. Was I leering? Looking dreamy and wistful? Stupid? Creepy?

Well, I told myself, if he's visiting someone in the philosophy department, I'll probably never see him again, so there's nothing to worry about. Only to learn, when I laughed about it last night with Marianne over beer, that "visiting faculty" means you ARE faculty, and you're here for at least a year. It's a Notre Dame title. This indecisive attractive young man has a PhD. In philosophy.

Hot damn.

If he even comes back. If he ever talks to the weird young woman staring at him with some unidentifiably creepy stalker expression whom people think he's married to.

Well...I hope he's in church on Sunday. Even though I'll be too embarrassed to look at him. To his face, anyway.

Praising Jesus with a Well-Stocked Bar

Actually the party had no real worship purposes, but it was still like entering a Charlie-and-the-Chocolate-Factory limbo of multicolored weirdness to be at a church function with alcohol. With so much alcohol.

Not that it was even in the church building; it was at one of the member's homes. A Dixon-esque kind of home, with more open spaces in the middle of the rooms. The only kind of alcohol they didn't have was port. As Jen the hostess was showing Marianne and me where to find the food and drinks, she said, "Cider's on the counter. There are a few nonalcoholic things in that cooler, but not many." So it was alcohol or water, baby.

The truly Gene Wilder effect was the overwhelming presence of small children. Mostly toddlers, running around underfoot and rooting through people's purses, while their parents made moderately merry all around them.

No drunkenness that I noticed, which made me feel more relaxed; these were laid-back people gathering together to yak and have a good time. Rather like all of our clandestine alky festivals at the Grove.

But still, coming from a Baptist background where I have to fight for my God-given right to drink alcohol, I found the perfect comfort with the stuff oddly disconcerting.

Needless to say, I'm still attending.

liminalities

This morning is far too bright and sharp for November. The smudgy greenness of the underbrush far back in the woods is shadowy, but the skirt of trees that rim the edge of the woods are standing in hard yellow sunlight, as bright as for a morning in August. The leftover leaves on the pin oaks are glittering in an affronting way, robbed mostly of shadow by the spotlight sun. It looks strangely unnatural, a day caught between seasons, not sure whether to be summer or midwinter, like something from a Ray Bradbury story.

The only thing that anchors the mind in November is the wind stirring the woods. It keeps the day from looking too much like a Dali painting.

premonitions of goodness

Bush won.

I lost my favorite scarf at work -- the one Marianne bought for me in Paris -- and someone turned it into the mall lost and found. I'm still adjusting to the idea that Indianans (I suppose I should start calling them Hoosiers like they call themselves, though no one knows quite why; I've looked it up) are largely decent people. If I had lost my scarf in Erie I would never have seen it again.

I almost had to work through a church party at the home of one of the members of the church I'm attending (it's going to have a KEG), but at the last moment it was changed so that I still have the evening free.

I met this random woman yesterday at Ann Taylor who knows a few grad students in the English program at Notre Dame and called me last night to give me their numbers. She was so NICE.

I've been a whiny little brat this week and God has still looked on me with gentleness. I don't get it any more than I got it when I was thirteen, except to come a little closer to the dumbfounding idea that the basis of all his goodness is love.

election day, election day, won't you speed us on your way?

Ugh. I truly hope that nine months of political contortionism is resolved in a twenty-four-hour period, not the endless hysterical boredom of four years ago.

In other news, I love November.

when in rome...

A desire to leave comments on other people's pages has led me to blogger. I'm a comment monger.