bring in the new year

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

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

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

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

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

Enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, I'm tagging LAR and Matt Holman.

oh there's no place like home for the holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hallelu Yah.

firsts

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

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

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

Then I called my landlord and left him a voicemail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love

Yesterday's Itinerary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Jesus.

...and counting

No change for the better.

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

Hopefully the morrow will bring word of good health.

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

Day 14

This marks the second full week of unending cranial pain.

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

Boo.

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

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

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

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

church

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

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

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

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

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

please, no more

This was the ninth full day of constant headache.

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

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

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

Time to find a chiropractor, I guess.

sing a song of sixpence

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

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

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

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

Ow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bits of Catching Up

I have had a headache for four days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A good year, this.

The Lord's Late Breakfast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

whole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it's getting alarming

I spent all of yesterday hoeing out and organizing the bedroom closet and the pantry. I don't think I came fully awake until I was up to my knees and elbows in clothes I don't wear anymore. I blinked, looked around the room, saw it looking like Taz had thrown a birthday party for all his friends and progeny in it, and looked down at my hands busily emptying drawers and folding socks.

"How did I even start doing this?" I inquired of the cat. "All I meant to do was unpack!"

So today I threw a fit of rebellion against whatever force is rising up in me to make me incurably and frighteningly domestic and did nothing. The only productive (i.e. involving money) event of my day was buying a few groceries. Then I goofed around on the internet and knitted.

No! I wasn't knitting on my last day off! I wasn't! I was throwing candy wrappers all over the apartment and ordering pizza!

Okay, fine, I was knitting.

My trip home for Thanksgiving was marvelous. My extended maternal family was as crazy as expected, but, as my mother said, I was "serene and out of the way," so I didn't come to any harm or frustration. And the rest of the visit, with my parents, was great. I haven't been home in almost a year, and I haven't seen my folks since April, so it was a long time coming. And it was really, really nice.

It's an added bonus that when I go home, I get my own queen-sized bed. That's a considerable upgrade from what I'm used to.

home again, home again

The past few days have been marvelous.

MP threw another of her marvelous feastie occasions last night as a pre-Thanksgiving celebration, complete with stuffing, an enormous picnic table dragged in from the backyard, and a twenty-pound fresh Farmer's Market turkey. She and her cousin Tom and I spent the weekend shopping, rearranging, and cooking to prepare for it. It was, of course, a smashing success. I had a moment of pure longing (in geek form) made real as all ten of us sat down to gabble and pass huge bowls of food around: At the end of a rather poignant Firefly episode all the characters, most of whom don't usually get along (but part of the poignancy was the episode's arrival at solidarity), sit down around their big, homey dining table (on a spaceship, of course) and begin to talk and laugh and pass things around, and when I saw it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I teared up, missing so badly having that sort of experience in good company. And last night the wish was fulfilled. I almost teared up again, but my mind was distracted by the turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoe pie, squash casserole, mashed potatoes, and gravy. Mmmmm.

Everyone should have Thanksgiving twice in a week.

And today more wonderfulness occurred. Because again, I have a wonderful boss. He called the day after his wife had knee replacement surgery to ask if I wanted Wednesday off to go home. So now I get a five day weekend to travel to the traditional Thanksgiving site at my maternal grandparents'!

I find myself looking forward to it. I haven't seen my parents since April, and with Christmas being a little different this year (I'm spending a couple of days prior to Christmas at home, and then Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at my sister's), it's going to be really nice to see them for a little more time than I had expected. I'll get even more time because I'm driving home, then riding down to southwestern PA with my parents, driving back up with them, and coming home from there.

AND MP's teaching me to knit in the round tonight, so that I can work on my leg warmers in the car and all during Thanksgiving. (As I'll be the only "kid" there, and a lot of the conversation centers around people I don't know/don't care about, it'll be good to have something to do with my hands, and yet be able to participate peripherally in what's going on...or at least look like I am).

Maybe they'll even let me help with the cooking this year!! My grandmother makes the best stuffing EVER.

That whole side of the family is riotously dysfunctional, and I've been kind of sad the last couple of days, thinking I'd have to miss it. There's nothing like my cranky and slightly inebriated alcoholic grandfather yelling at my alcoholic uncle to PUTAWAYTHATBEER. And my grandmother is wonderful -- a no-stuff-and-nonsense woman full of humor and heart. This is the side of the family that argues and yells a lot, forgets about it five minutes later, and then yells about something new. Somehow it's warm and comforting, and makes me feel like I'm not actually a frigid northern European whose still icy waters run silent and deep, occasionally exploding like a geiser. Or makes me feel like my usual spirit of righteous indignation is in excellent company.

So my boss said, "It's a family holiday, and you haven't seen your parents for a long time, and I hate to keep families apart if I can do something about it."

That's what you get for having a former priest and a family man for a boss. It's the bestest thing ever.

When the cat's away, the mice will...make a lounge

Yup. My boss and his wife are out of the office today and all next week, so the part-time employee and I spent the entire morning rearranging the upstairs offices. The front one in particular needed work. It was being used as a spare room for all sorts of junk. So we condensed all the junk into boxes, threw a lot of boxes away, and turned it into a lounge, complete with recliner, TV/VCR/DVD player, microwave, coffee maker, rug, and fake tree.

Now I can't wait to bring my lunches and sit around watching movies and knitting during that precious hour of not having to work.

I just need to wait for Target to get another shipment of that bag I want...then I'll be all set.

sweet convenience, sweet crock pot

So MP and I made an innocent trip to Target on Sunday. All she wanted was a hat. I was just along for the ride.

But Target seduced us with its sparkling kitchen accoutrements. As we wandered through the gadget aisles, I saw, illuminated by under-the-counter spotlights as by a ray from heaven, a crock pot. A red crock pot. A red crock pot on sale for seventeen dollars.

I ooed. MP saw and aahed. Of their own accord, our hands reached out and seized the boxes. We left Target balancing a crock pot under our arms.

"Now we just need a slow cooker cookbook," MP declared.

"...Wanna go to Borders?" I asked.

So we pilgrimaged to Borders and came away with NOT Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook. I also bought 150 Best Slow Cooker Recipes.

I tried out my wonderful new kitchen companion yesterday with a recipe from my Mediterranean cookbook: Provencale Beef and Olive Daube. A gloriously fresh enormous cut of meat from the Farmer's Market, marinated in a simmered concoction of olive oil, red wine, onion, shallots, carrot and garlic, went into the pot. So did half a pound of bacon, half a pound of sliced Heirloom carrots (one of them was purple!), a can of stewed tomatoes, and two cups of black olives. I turned it on Low and went to work.

And came home to a delicious bubbling meal. MP came and partook. Afterward we sat about talking and knitting.

As she was putting on her shoes to leave, she glanced into my bedroom to see NOT Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook on the floor by my bed.

"Are you reading this in bed too??" she demanded.

We laughed. "We really need to channel this into something that makes money," she said.

After she left, I tidied the house and got ready for bed, thinking about the marvel of the crock pot -- that I can have something to do my cooking for me. When I come home tired and hungry, there's dinner waiting on the counter, hot and ready to serve. I no longer have to spend my weekday evenings working two and a half hours to cook a meal, so that I eat at eight-thirty and then have to go straight to bed on a full stomach. Nor do I have to sit around making a meal of cheese and fried eggs, or whatever junk food I have lying around. Forget being a busy soccer mom -- this could be the saving grace for singles!

When I crawled under the covers, the kitchen was sparkling clean, all the dishes were put away, and the leftovers settled in the fridge.

I am turning into Betty Homemaker.

Now why won't someone marry me?

embracing the girly arts

I have begun learning to knit. MP taught me last night, and now I have two and a half feet of bright pink scarf, only a little raggedy.

Oh yes...I am turning into that single woman, with a cat, who knits. Next I'll be wearing glasses that come to points at the corners, with big thick black rims, and flannel nightgowns with high collars.

But really, knitting is awesome. MP was reading me the intro of Stitch 'n' Bitch as I struggled with purling and knitting and not dropping stitches, and the woman has incredible points. Particularly how, as I've been ranting for some time, the idea of women's lib has devolved into turning women into men, and losing all the feminine arts that make life lovely and comfortable. And furthermore, men have not been encouraged to take up the tasks traditionally done by women. So what we have is an overmasculinized society, where everything is prefabricated and food comes ready to pop in the microwave so everyone can spend grueling hours focusing on their careers, going to the gym, and going to bed.

What's with that? All it's saying, in the end, is that "men's" skills are still better than "women's" skills. And there have been too many centuries of that same old attitude. This era is no different. Instead of men's and women's traditional roles becoming fluid and ambisexual -- where a man and a woman alike can have a career and play soccer and cook and sew, the tasks of cooking, cleaning, making clothing, and raising children have been given almost entirely over to factories and take-out services.

Boo hiss. I like the new trend that defies this, and I know a goodly number of men who are experts in the kitchen. MP says that men in Ashville knit all the time, and in public. One of my favorite men taught his wife to crochet (I think I have that right). Now that's progress.

And within the next few weeks I'm going to learn to shoot. I'll be the Gunslinger-Who-Knits.

Maybe I'll knit my own holster.

the latest news

If you're my friend:

All generic acetaminophen in your possession, NOT labeled with the brand name Tylenol, you might consider throwing away, as it has been found to contain fragments, shards, and strands of metal wire which could, at the least, give you stomach pain, and at the worst, rip up your throat. This includes acetaminophen sold by Wal-Mart, CVS, Safeway, and, according to Fox News, "more than 120 other retailers." So please pitch it all into the nearest child-proof wastebasket, even if you bought it up to three years ago. It's bad for you. I don't want to get a phone call from you to hear your voice gurgling on the other end due to ruptured blood vessels in your throat from contaminated generic pills. For all of our sakes, stick with Tylenol, the brand name we all know, trust, and can't afford.

If you're not my friend:

I have a lot of acetaminophen I'm giving away.

the note on my door

This year I've finally been found by door-to-door religious groups.

It's not that I dislike them; but I do dislike being proselytized. Give me an honest, open discussion between two people of differing viewpoints any day; but please, spare me the rhetoric with the intent to convert me to exactly your point of view. I don't share a like point of view with most people of my own faith, let alone anyone else's, and I lost interest a long time ago in getting into one-dimensional arguments where there is no intention to arrive at a deeper mutual understanding, or to broaden both people's perspectives, or to make both people think. I also don't believe I can change people's minds, any more than I believe I ought to go banging on my neighbors' doors trying to change their minds for them because I or my beliefs say that their beliefs are wrong or false or misguided. Attempts from strangers to persuade other strangers based purely on word and symbol are generally fruitless.

Also, in order to answer the door, I have to go downstairs, making sure my keys are in my pocket in case I get locked out. Oftentimes the keys are lying in some place I've never put them before, and I can't remember where they are. Then when I find them I have to kick off my slippers and put on shoes, and now that it's getting colder, I have to don a coat in case I wind up standing in the stairwell for awhile. Answering the door is rather an elaborate process. So when I hear the bell ring, and think perhaps it's Kevin or MP or some other friend, and I get downstairs to see someone holding a pamphlet, it's a disappointment.

After my last hit-up on Sunday, I politely disengaged myself almost immediately and marched back up the stairs and sat down at my computer. Taking a cue from The Meg Formerly Known as Boss, I printed and posted on my door the following text:

"Please Note: If you are calling to solicit, without our direct, specific and personal request, anything material or immaterial, including but not limited to goods, services, politics and religion, kindly refrain from ringing the doorbell, or knocking on the door, and continue on your way. We appreciate your concern, but are not interested.

"Respectfully thanking you in advance for your cooperation, and with our best wishes,
"The Residents"

I may feel a bit mean and take it down in the future, but for now there it sits.

My boss was proud.

even if

Since the first of June
lost my job and lost my room
I pretend to try
even if I try alone
~Sufjan Stevens

For the past month or so I have felt increasingly emotionally paralyzed. Which is at least a change from the quiet, persistent mental agony that has been going on since June; but it troubles me.

I’m certain it stems from two things. First is the upped dosage of antidepressants – far from being "happy pills," antidepressants stabilize your emotional state, so it reaches a plateau of non-ill-being. Again, this is better than suffering constantly. But it leaves you feeling a bit dead.

Second is that, as my sister pointed out on the phone this weekend, blocking memories and emotions from traumatic experiences is one of my primary coping mechanisms. Sometimes she’ll bring up something painful that happened anywhere from four months to twenty years ago, and I’ll have forgotten about it completely.

In fact, my memory has been getting worse and worse. Not so much as far as my job is concerned (in fact, the job is going remarkably well – I got a raise last week!! Hooray!!!); but as far as the events of the summer go, I can’t remember much of them. And I have a scarily far-reaching memory. I can remember moments from when I was eighteen months old. When I was working at Ann Taylor and putting new client information into the computer system, for mailing lists or shipping addresses, occasionally I would hit a wrong button and everything would vanish; but within twenty seconds I could enter everything back in, remembering birth dates, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and all but three or four digits of their credit card numbers. I would only have to say, "And can you verify your credit card number one more time please?" and they’d never even know anything had gone wrong. My coworkers used to look over my shoulder as I did it and mutter in my ear, "That’s freaky, Sarah."

But I can’t remember things from this summer. I forgot that my sister had come to visit shortly after I lost my job. I forgot a lot of things that were said to me during and after the losing of the job. I’m forgetting names of people who worked and lived there, whom I saw and spoke with every day.

And it’s bleeding into other areas too. Sometimes I wake up and forget what day it is, or I forget that I signed up for the GRE, or I forget to pay bills, or I forget to write to my grandparents, or I forget to fulfill minor social obligations. This weekend I forgot to pick up my antidepressant refill, remembered only after the pharmacy had closed, drove around frantically looking for one that was open later, cried when they couldn’t help me, and cried when they could.

I’m forgetting everything.

So, getting back to the original point, which I had also forgotten, I tend to block memories from difficult experiences. I also block emotions. So, in the aftermath of grief and loss from this year, I’m feeling next to nothing.

It’s been surging toward an eruption. I don’t think the numbness is going to last too much longer. I think I’ll be relieved when it breaks.

It’ll be nice, when it does, to care again. The only things I can focus on much are work, and my TV shows. I don’t care anymore about being single, or dating, or finding someone, although there are certain indications of certain guys beating their chests at each other around me. I don’t care about my future. I don’t care about my hobbies, or my passions.

I’m tired. I’m tired from the struggle to find or hold onto faith, hope, love, and joy, which seem to be running between my fingers like Presque Isle sand. I’m tired from the effort to keep my head up, and keep trying. I’m tired from the effort to pretend that I’m fine. I’m fine, and I’m not fine at all, and I don’t care either way, and whatever is wrong with me is almost inarticulable (despite the above articulation), because I don’t know exactly what’s wrong, and I’m indifferent to it. It’s my indifference that bothers me the most. I’m not indifferent to that.

But then there are little moments – like today at McDonald’s, when, tired and sad and lonely and ready to buckle down with a few pieces of paper and process my problems, I was beginning to sit down when an elderly couple called over, "Hey, lady – do you want to come eat dinner with us?" So I sat down with them, and listened to parts of their life stories, and was amazed to discover that such a spry, alert, humorous couple are in their mid-nineties, and celebrating their seventy-second anniversary this month. Those are the moments that simultaneously assuage some of the sadness, and deepen it, and give me hope. And at the very least, it was so lovely to have total strangers ask me to eat with them.

And there are other moments too – like my raise last week, or today when I caught my reflection in a storefront window as I walked past on my way to drop off office mail, and realized that after a gawky, awkward adolescence, in which my mouth bristled with braces, my hair was odd and my pants too short, I have become a serene-looking, lovely young woman, all grown up.

So I know I’m going to make it. Growing up isn’t all peaches and cream – I don’t have enough money to shake a stick at, I’m single and far from family, and life has snapped a few vicious curve balls this year – but adolescence was no vacation either, and I don’t believe in life without struggle. And this, on the whole, is much better for me than I might have otherwise chosen for myself. Even if I don't understand how. Even if it's often difficult, harsh, or sad. Even if I spend most days trying not to lose myself.

Even if I try alone.

Touched by an Angel

I get really attached to my TV shows.

Growing up, my main show (aided and abetted by my family, of course) was Star Trek. Wesley Crusher was my first crush (though now it’s switched to Data). Dad would tape it when it showed in the evenings, which was past my sister’s and my bedtime, and we would watch it as a family the next evening, munching our dinners in the living room in front of the TV.

In my adolescence our family switched to The Pretender. I have since bought the first season of this show, which completely enthralled me when I was younger, and found it to be far more obvious with its undercurrents than I remembered, but still palatable. The thing is, it was VERY mid-90s, and feels distinctly dated. The opening lines of the theme boom out in an Unsolved Mysteries voice over a black screen with the lines verbatim represented in white letters: "THERE ARE PRETENDERS AMONG US." I mean, ack. We lost interest in the show when it prolonged itself beyond reason, and became pointless without resolving any of the undercurrent conflicts.

College was the era of Dark Angel. This remains one my all-time favorites, and every time I watch it through till the end of its brief life, I grow enraged at Fox all over again for cancelling it after only two seasons. Leigh Ann and I agree that one of its major appeals is its dystopic setting, with a kick-ass heroine just trying to make it in a harsh and beat-down world. Leigh Ann and I began saying, "Dark Angel is life" due to the gorgeous and relevant themes that this show focuses on – nearly all dealing with social justice. And then "Dark Angel is life" became a catch-phrase for the frequency with which we would see cast members in other movies, TV shows, and commercials. Those actors are everywhere, especially the small bit part actors.

The first year of post-college was House. I maintain that it has an excellent first season – the brilliancy of the indirect characterization of House through his associates, and some of the more amazing episodes which play with narrative structure, make it an incredible watch. But the second season failed and boiled itself down to runny melodrama, and I underwent a bitter divorce from the show.

This year, nearly a decade after missing its first airing, and all its subsequent airings, I fell in love with Buffy, and then with Angel. Leigh Ann had purchased every season, and became my own personal Netflix administrator, mailing me the seasons as I went through them. With a few several-month breaks in between viewings, I managed to finish all twelve seasons of both shows combined (with Leigh Ann, of course! She took a few trips out to South Bend for the express purpose of watching the shows) in just under exactly one year.

Angel sustained me through the summer. Heartbroken over my job loss and the betrayal of good friends at work, alone, terrified of the future and hard-pressed to find employment, I spent a lot of my days curled on the couch escaping to L.A. (Haha.) I found a great deal of strength and courage from the events, characters, and themes of the show, particularly as it progressed to Seasons Four and Five. Episodes dealing with disillusionment, doubt, the death of idealism, and the necessity, always, of fighting encouraged me not to give up.

Perhaps that sounds silly. But story has always been paramount in my interpretation of life and the world, and good television can be easily as powerful as good fiction, with just as many layers to unwind. Leigh Ann and I spent hours, days, and weeks on the phone talking about the show. I’m not sure that I would have survived well without it.

Now the show du jour is Bones. Leigh Ann and I started watching it, of course, because David Boreanaz is the co-star, and we were sad and let-down after the abrupt finish of Angel (Damn you, Fox! Cancelling all my favorite shows!). But then we fell head over heels in love with the show itself, with the interplay and deep, mostly unspoken intimacy that develops between Booth and Brennan, without putting them in a relationship; with the supporting characters; with the writing; with the skillful way the show avoids the formulaic trap into which House fell by focusing on the characters without sacrificing the strength of the episodic plots; with the even more skillful avoidance of melodrama by placing the characters’ most deep-seated issues (Brennan trying to locate her father, who has been missing since she was little; Booth dealing with seldom seeing his son, and his gambling addiction) at a low boil – occasionally they rise to the surface for some fantastic drama, but mostly they stay underneath and undealt with, while the characters go through the daily business of their lives.

And the show is pure and wonderful escape. It went on hiatus while the World Series aired, and I really think that the recent deepening of my depression partially stems from the inability to escape every week into the world of Bones. I’m excited beyond belief that it’s coming back tonight – and dealing with the Jon Benet case – AND casting MP’s very own cousin as the slain girl!

Then last night I started watching Firefly. Another of Joss Whedon’s, it takes place in the space-traveled future. And I fell hard in love. It has the best pilot I’ve ever seen, fast action, humor, poignancy, good characters.

There have been other shows, of course. I watched and loved most of Sports Night, and have been slowly and delightedly working my way through Arrested Development and Veronica Mars.

I love books. I’ve been reading a lot of my old favorites lately, particularly Madeleine L’Engle’s works. But I also love TV. Clearly science fiction and fantasy are my dearest genres -- partly because they tap directly into myth, the are myth, and myth is the human race's oldest way of telling stories. It's the First Art of Story.

Whatever gets you through, right?

Why I Love Ace Bandages

While hugging the carpeted walls of my high school in my too-short pants (in the days when floods were an anathema) and bulky sweaters, trying to escape the notice of my peers, I often saw the district’s celebrated athletes crutching their way down the center of traffic, sporting their sprained ankles and blown-out knees packed in ice like donor organs. As the weeks went by, the ice disappeared to be replaced by mid-calf sports socks pulled up over the bulge of Ace bandages.

I helped the district’s physical therapist for a few weeks, exploring a possible (and long-discarded) gateway to the future. I learned to unroll and reroll Ace bandages over rainbow-colored puffy joints, tightly enough to provide support without cutting off all circulation. I learned to view Ace bandages as stinky extensions of their wearers, saturated with foot and ankle sweat and the slightly putrid smell of injury.

Then in college I had the opportunity to personalize my Ace bandage experience. A flying high-kick leap in flip-flops through the doors leading into the dorm lounge resulted in a popped ankle which swelled to the size of a grapefruit in about twelve seconds. My friends, all of whom, might I add, I dwarfed by about a foot, made a chair with their Superman-strength arms and carried me back to my room. I was on crutches for six weeks. I used a lot of Ace bandages. It became a form of art to wrap my ankle just so while it turned all shades of green, yellow, purple and black.

But my favorite Ace bandage experience topped off my senior year at Grove City: Children’s Theater. I was cast by the inestimable Hannah Fischer as Otter in The Wind in the Willows – a character distinctly male, robust, middle-aged, and jolly, complete with a "man gut." To transform myself from tall Amazonian woman to tall boisterous man, I pinned a few half-bolts of cloth together, held it to my middle, and had my friends wind me up from neck to Abercrombie waistline in Ace bandages. It was so successful that I even had a little bit of cloth pudge hanging strategically over my belt, and a small dimple that, under a shirt, looked like a belly button.

I obtained six bandages from the Nurse's office in order to be a successful man-mummy. Of course they didn’t want them back; so when Earl the Man Gut had to return to the scrap pile from whence he came, I rolled the Ace bandages into a plastic bag and kept them. You never know, I said.

Since then I’ve used them infrequently. Sometimes the old sprain acts up and I have to wrap it. And when, last night, I melted the skin on a small section of the heel of my hand taking biscuits out of the 450 degree oven by leaning briefly on the rack, I used a bandage to make a mummy of my hand around a Ziploc baggie of ice cubes for about an hour. Eating creamed chicken and biscuits with one working hand and one club with a thumb was interesting.

And today the burn, while rather ugly, is not even blistered.

And I couldn’t have done it without the Ace.

Tremors

This morning I woke from strange dreams involving revival-type meetings in a faux outdoor arena, complete with Astro turf, and Peter Cava, to the sound of footsteps in my hallway.

I jerked an earplug out and listened closely. Underneath the carpet right outside my bedroom door, which I keep mostly closed at night, I heard floorboards shifting, softly but unmistakably.

I lay awake in a flood of terrified sweat, breathing as quietly as possible in spite of the hyperventilating gasps my lungs were attempting. While the back of my mind sent up a stream of frantic prayer, I considered my options. The house phone was in the kitchen. The cell phone was turned on but would make a noise. The Maglite, my only realistic instrument of defense, was next to my bed. Was it wiser to try to confront the intruder, or to lie still and hope they were only after my TV and would go away?

The floorboards shifted again. Thirty seconds later the cat leaped onto my face to wish me good morning. He seemed unalarmed. I risked a glance at the clock. 6:15. An unlikely, though not impossible, hour for breaking and entering.

Now, I know from daily routine that the cat has a heavy tread. He climbs all over my chest and torso and shoulders in the mornings, rolling around on my abdomen in an ecstacy of affection and anticipation of breakfast, and some days I can barely breathe. But I did not know that his tread was heavy enough that he, when not galloping around like a mad giraffe, could sound like a human tiptoeing down the hall.

I got up, shivering as the chilly air attacked my soaked pajamas. My covers as I left them felt as though someone had gotten in bed straight out of the shower without drying off. I flashed the Maglite around the apartment for certainty’s sake, concluded that I was in no danger and that all the windows were sound, and fed the cat in a zombie-ish state of post-adrenaline rush.

I don’t often consider the possibility of danger; and while I don’t live in a savory neighborhood, I’ve never felt threatened beyond the first terrors of living alone when I first moved in. But it’s Halloween, possibilities are always there, however remote, and I hate being defenseless.

I’m not going to be that afraid again. My boss is now going to spend a few weekends teaching me to shoot, and I’m buying a gun.

politically shaded ramblings

I've discovered a love for NPR. Maybe it's the upcoming elections, but something in me wants to tune into the news, and if you listen to NPR you can also get fabulous music, Guy Noir, Writer's Almanac reports, and Science Friday. I was grinning this morning because I knew every author in the Writer's Almanac who was born today (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAXINE HONG KINGSTON!).

One of the news reports from this morning concerned the gas prices, which are expected to remain lower than all summer but will still (surprised?) bring the profits rolling into the oil industries. An audio file of a company respresentative speaking in ecstatic tones about the "record profits for the third quarter" almost had me wrecking the car yelling THAT'S BECAUSE YOU HELD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HOSTAGE ALL YEAR, YOU UNPRINCIPLED FREAKS.

I could have understood the high gas prices if the oil companies were barely scraping by with what they've been paying and what they've been charging. But for God's sake. And I know, I know, Europe has been paying through the nose for years. But Europe has a.) smaller countries and b.) outstanding public transportation. The bus lines in South Bend don't run after eleven at night. The only trains running through most small cities and towns and villages carry freight. Most Americans commute long distances to work, rendering cycling absurd. I once saw a news report saying, "And now a look at how Britain has been dealing with the rising gas prices," with a shot of hundreds of people on bikes in the city. I choked on my water. England is pretty much the size of New Jersey, and the population tends to be more dense due to the limited available space. Of course biking is a great option. But not here, if you're one of the average middle-class suburban-dwelling commuters. There's not that much leeway for creative options.

Obviously suburbia sucks (and I don't understand the range in gas prices any more than the next averagely aware individual; but I'm tired of it jumping up and down twenty or thirty cents every three days like some demented sugar-high kindergartener). When MP and I visited Pittsburgh the other weekend, it enforced to me how much I'm coming to love city life. There's always something to do within a short walk or shorter drive; car pooling is excellent, recycling regular; there are fabulous family-owned businesses to frequent, markets to support, and political buzzes to listen to. In short, you can be pretty "crunchy."

I have MP to thank for introducing me to crunchiness. South Bend has a way to go before it's a truly crunchy city, but it's not that big and not that old, so there aren't as many creative opportunities to postmodernize, say, an abandoned stone church by turning it into a coffee shop and arts center (as in Pittsburgh, where we bought coffee and locally made mugs on our Homecoming trip). But it's a start. The Farmer's Market carries every kind of imaginable produce (including skinned rabbit), most of it organic, all of it local; I've even begun buying my milk there, which is the kind of milk that makes all other milk seem like skimmed blue shadows of what milk really is. Nearly every Saturday morning I roll out of bed, don a pair of jeans and a hoodie, and head to market with MP.

I still shop at Wal-Mart for the things in bulk that I need, or for housewares (n. v. crunchy). But I also have to live within my means, which I became very bad at this summer, and sometimes you just need chicken stock at forty-seven cents a can, instead of a dollar-fifty.

And at least once a week we wander around the worn brick streets of our incredibly, beautifully conscious neighborhood and revel in the fact that the houses are so old and that we live so close to everything in South Bend.

every once in awhile...

I decided that, like it or not, my introvert batteries need some serious recharging. I've been on the go constantly for two months, and my resources are significantly drained. So, starting Friday, I began a period of a recluse, hermitish existence whereby I go nowhere except the grocery store and hang out with virtually no one. And it's been splended so far. I'm not sure how long this period will last -- hopefully I'll be ready to rejoin the social world again by Sunday, since I'm supposed to host Sunday dinner.

Chris Pipkin coined a term last weekend: "socially hungover." And I've had it bad.

So this weekend I did nothing but sew my curtains. I finally figured out the darn sewing machine, and I spent a good period of forty-eight hours kneeling on the floor sticking pins in seamlines. I used no pattern but the ideas in my head, which fluctuated every hour or so. And by eleven o'clock last night I was finished. And they look awesome.

They're made of panels of a dark red, plush-ish fabric and a cream faux linen fabric. As I have three windows in my living room, two of which are in the same wall, I tried a little organic-type design, so that each window has a different kind of curtain. The outer windows have the red at the outside, the cream at the inside; the middle window has the red at either side and the cream in the middle. I sewed tabs on them from which to suspend the curtains, and then tied the panels together into a knot at the very center of the window.

The result: phenomenal. I wish I had a digital camera to share.

I've also been losing weight. I don't know how much, since I don't have scales, but the belt I couldn't buckle a month ago now fits comfortably at the second hole, so that's at least an inch gone. And that's good: After the Summer of Existential Despair, I started porking up like a pig for the slaughter, and I reached again the weight I was in college (v. bad). But now I'm feeling more comfortable with myself (and my clothes are more comfortable too -- it's so freaking expensive to replace a wardrobe), and another five to ten pounds should do the trick admirably, so that I'm at a healthy, attractive poundage.

My second home decorating project has been the appearance of my walls. I've forestalled painting them (again), but I've begun collecting old postcards at the antique stores in Edwardsburg, and this weekend I purchased a lot of cheap-yet-interesting picture frames, and have been arranging them in the corners behind the entertainment center -- heretofore a vast empty space of sterile white, now a pleasing array of strategically placed pictures. I even figured out how to hang some of them IN the corner, so that they face out and bring the two walls more smoothly together.

Some of the postcards are of local places, some of places far away; and some of them are postmarked with notes -- one of them from 1910, and another rather nasty one from some crotchety-sounding Aunt So-and-So, who wrote to her niece, "This warm weather must be rough on fat people like you. Got your postcard. I was forgetting some of the childrens' names." Others are funny, or rather sweet -- one from an apparently ten-year-old kid to his sister on a trip to the Alps, with a picture of skiers on the front and a note on the back reading, "Dear sister, I had some of those snow shoes on at the top of that mountain, but I couldn't slide with them on. John."

I love old correspondence.

So yes, my self-imposed isolation from society has been doing me good, and given me a chance to work on some nest-lining projects that are turning out well (now I just need to clean the filthy apartment).

Most of this year I've felt like the Anti-Midas, but every once in awhile, the things I touch turn to gold. Or at least cool, red-and-cream curtains, and nicely pictured walls.

See, and even that was a little melodramatic for how I'm actually feeling. What I'm actually feeling is more like this: - .

All I want to do is go home and sew my curtains (MP and I are on a quest to further our psychotic domesticity together). My sewing machine was giving me fits last night, as I was trying to figure out how to use it, but a brief discussion with my boss's wife had her a.) laughing at me for trying to seam the fabric in the wrong direction and b.) giving me tips for how to fix the problem. So now that's all I want to do.

And the only story I really feel like telling is this one.

When I was a senior in high school, I started dating this guy from my Calculus and Spanish classes. He was very short, very cute, very shy, and very sweet. We used to do our calc homework together as a way of getting around my parents' -- and my -- anti-dating policy. He made me laugh. Holding hands with him was lovely. We went to Prom.

I broke up with him (or stopped talking to him) the summer before college, telling myself that long-distance relationships don't work and unable to get past his nonparticipation in the Christian faith. I think that mercenary decision is one of my only regrets.

But when I think about him, aside from all the passing notes in Spanish class and watching movies at Hillori's and scrambling around in the woods building rock formations with our other dorky and funny friends, I think about how I would get up for school at 4:45 a.m. to use the shower ahead of the rest of my family, and how when I got home from school I was so tired I would fall dead asleep on my bed, and how he would call while I was sleeping, and how Mom would wake me up to give me the phone, and how I would be groggy and stupid and take twelve seconds to mumble a response to anything he said, and how he would laugh and ask, "Did your Mom wake you up again? ... She really shouldn't do that," and how his voice was so warm and affectionate it was like he was sitting next to me, and how talking to him on the phone, even with a sleep-reduced IQ, made me wonderfully happy, and how I would look out the window next to my bed and feel the almost-summer breeze blow over the sheets, and think about how happy I was, because of him.

an obligatory post, by way of apology for my long silence

When will my spring come? When shall I be as the swallow, that I may sing and not be silent? I have lost the Muse in silence, and Apollo regards me not.
~Pervigilium Veneris

This is me. I had a fabulous Homecoming weekend, but now everything seems flat and barely worth going through. I'm alone. I have nothing much to say. I am tired and oversocialized. I have no perspective.

And I can't even talk about it. What is there to say?

but it's only October

Why so early, snow? Now all I can think about is Christmas.

Trash Day

In early August thunderstorms push
flash floods into the car-plowed furrows
of the historic street and lay
two inches of water along the house foundation.

Thursday morning I sit on the porch
with a side view of the swamped lawn
and front-row exposure to the hammer
of rain over neglected gutters.

Tips of grass blades lean over the water
toward the sidewalk, a dirty tributary to the alley
where the garbage truck idles.
From my patio chair I can see
the yellow slicker of the trash man
lurch toward the green city-supplied cans.

In the gray caste of the day
the white bags snap from his arm
into the back of the truck
like sodden sheets jerked free of the line.

leeky boats

In an effort to contain the Bridget Jonesian fat splurging out from our hips and sides, MP and I decided to begin the French Women Don't Get Fat diet, which kicks off with two days of nothing but leek soup. We had planned on making this a weekend thing, but put it off this past weekend, and didn't want to do it this coming weekend (GCC HOMECOMING!!!), and the weekend following is too far away, so we decided to do it yesterday and today.

When Sunday Dinner lasted too late into the night for us to purchase the leeks then, we decided that MP should go to Meijer at 7 a.m. on Monday and then come to my apartment armed with leeks to make the soup.

And she did it. (We do nothing by halves, we two.) We made a gargantuan pot of boiled leeks (throwing in thyme and oregano for some flavor), split it in half, and went about our day. I drove to work with an enormous pot of soup snuggled at the bottom of the car, which infused the office with a strong smell of onions as it sat looking bizarre atop the filing cabinets. I spent the morning gulping ladlefuls of leek broth to pacify my screaming stomach, and the afternoon hating leeks and avoiding them by drinking Coke. I became giddy, dizzy, and half-delusional. Email conversations with MP found her in the same state.

My determination lasted exactly until I got home from work, when I dumped the soup in the yard and went to Fiddler's for a steak sandwich.

It just goes to show that I'm not French (and that one should never panic about splurging fat when one is undergoing the camel-syle water storage of PMS). So I'm doing what I did two years ago and reinstilling the Peanut Butter Diet.

I'm the princess

Neighbors Kevin and Jim and I spent all summer fuming in preparation for the showdown with the Absent Landlord demanding central heating this winter. We've been meeting on and off for months, talking about it and planning our attack.

Preliminary to our planned group meeting with him, last weekend while the AL was at my apartment surveying two bedroom windows which had been broken for sixteen months and ten months, respectively, I asked, with all my usual diplomatic subtlety, when he was going to turn on the heat and which system he was using this year. When he began to say he wanted to keep the heat low and have us use the space heaters, like last year, I interrupted him and said, "Yeah, I'm not okay with that." I informed him of his legal obligation to keep the heat at sixty-five degrees during the day and sixty degrees at night. He then promised to keep it at sixty-four.

Two days later, Kevin told me that the AL told him sixty during the day.

Oh no, I said. This is not going to fly. We're having a meeting.

So Kevin and Jim and I conferenced, and Kevin put in a casual call to the AL arranging to have him come over to Kevin's apartment yesterday evening to examine a ceiling leak. When the AL arrived (very very late), he found the three of us waiting on the porch.

"So," I said. "While we're all here, I just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page about the heat this winter. You told me sixty-four during the day, sixty at night. Is that what we're doing?"

And the three of us pretty much bullied him into it, which wasn't that hard. We just kept repeating ourselves. One of the AL's favorite tricks (as he tends to avoid confrontation) is to tell one of us one thing, and another of us another, and then play us off against each other ("Why are you upset about this, Kevin? Sarah's fine with it"). We decided to avoid that by making him say the same thing to all of us at once. And now three people have heard him promise to keep the heat at one particular central temperature.

While we were waiting for the AL to show up, Kevin looked at me (this is a thirty-five-year-old man, mind you, who in the past has appeared to demonstrate no problem with speaking his mind) and said, "I'll follow your lead on this one, Sarah."

"Why?" I said. "Because I'm psychotically confrontational?"

He laughed.

So we get baseline heat this winter (yay!) and Kevin and Jim won't be moving out in the near future (again yay! they're great neighbors -- we're all quiet, considerate, articulate, able to compromise with problems of living in one house, and enjoy little nickel-and-dime improvements around the place, like patio furniture, clotheslines, and now we're planning a firepit in the backyard. I also bought Jim's old bicycle, and Kevin and I are porch-sitters. We all get along beautifully, and the AL has a bad habit of renting to drug dealers, so who knows who would move in?).

And Jim told me yesterday that if we got the heat and he decided to stay, he was getting a satellite dish. "You can feel free to tap in," he said, "I won't charge you. In fact, I'm getting hookup for four rooms, but I only have three televisions, so I'll just give you the fourth receiver."

"Oh. My. Gosh. That would be so awesome, Jim. I'll pay for that receiver," I said.

"Why? I won't be paying for it; it comes with the package. You can just have it."

So I'll have central heat AND Direct TV this winter.

I win.

oh life

What a fabulous week.

I'm finally beginning to settle in at work; I'm not making as many stupid mistakes, and I have apparently worked out an excellent organizational system which allows me to manage my menagerie of tasks without losing track of what I'm doing.

The legal secretary thing is a challenge. On any given day I'm responsible for drawing up documents, transcribing letters, and making copies of said documents and sending them to the appropriate people (with nearly every one of them I sign an affidavit or proof of service, swearing under oath that on that particular date I served the opposing counsel or unrepresented parties the documents by placing them in the mail, which means that if I forget or lose them I can get my petutie tossed in jail). I also have to open and copy the mail, send and receive and copy and file faxes, make sure my boss sees the important ones, file papers in their appropriate files, be absolutely certain to send clients their notices of hearing, manage my boss's calendar, get his office going in the morning, pack and unpack his satchel for court appearances, take his messages and make calls for him. Furthermore, I'm also the receptionist, so I am in charge of answering phones, taking messages, making appointments, putting new clients in the system and helping them complete their paperwork, accepting monies through the mail or in person, making receipts, and keeping track of all charges made for appointments, documents, enclosures sent through the mail, faxes sent and received, phone conferences, and court appearances.

With absolutely no prior training, and so much room for massive errors, it's been a tough change. Add to that my recovery from the trauma of my previous job, betrayal from and loss of people I had considered friends, difficulties with my antidepressants, major spiritual upheaval through exploring Catholicism (which, some days, nearly kills me with stress and uncertainty, and other days fills me with certainty and joy), a sudden sober awareness of the state of my finances and a need to screw down a really tight budget, and it's been a grueling summer and early fall.

But I'm coming along. Very well, in fact.

I'm beginning to work on my writing again; the past couple of weeks I've sat down and begun to revise my poetry, and to consider where to begin to submit it for publication. I'm getting more sleep. Simon has once again become my bedfellow through the cold nights (he stopped sleeping on my bed when I began to be hit hard by depression in April, and I've missed his warm little furry body tremendously). I'm starting to get up earlier and be glad to be awake. The weather has morphed over the past week from rainy and miserable to perfect sunny crisp autumn. I've stocked up on staples for my forays into the world of Indian cooking. I feel like I'm getting myself back.

The past few weekends have been filled with several important home improvement projects (nest-lining in preparation for winter), which have made my delightful apartment even more a beautiful home. The other week poking around in an old antique/junk store down the street from where I work, I found a gorgeous 1920s dresser (for $34!!), which Joan helped me transport into my apartment last Sunday -- finally I can get the majority of my clothes out of the plastic bins under the bed! I also found a heavy old drawer reinforced with rusted iron, once painted yellow but now almost entirely weathered and gray, and divided into four segments; last Sunday I figured out my drill and screwed it into the wall and turned it into a spice rack, and hung my "Chat Noir" pictures on either side of it. I also found an authentic old spice rack, with eighteen empty clear glass spice bottles, so now I have an attractive display for all the Asian and Indian spices I bought, which all come in plastic bags. I battled with the drywall and studs and hung all my pots and pans on another wall. A weathered beer crate has become a shoe rack in the entryway, an old window trough serves to hold my writing projects under revision on my writing desk, and an old wooden box with a worn leather strap now contains all of my stationary.

My house is beautiful.

It's been over a year since I first moved in, and I've fallen in love with the neighborhood, with the local Farmer's Market, and with my apartment. And now, with the additional furniture from last weekend, and with the writing desk and huge armchair I bought over the summer, it feels perfectly settled and at home with itself.

And now that I see Meg and Phillip at least once a week (we spent Friday night eating pizza and watching Star Trek: The Next Generation -- joy! rapture! I love Data!), and Marianne nearly every day, and the grad students who have become like family at the newly-instituted Sunday dinner (a perfect way to pretend Monday is never coming, and to sit down and enjoy a home-cooked meal with wine among familiar company and excellent conversation), and talking to Leigh Ann every Wednesday night while watching Bones, my social calendar is pleasantly filled with people I love in relaxed settings.

So life is settling in and I'm beginning to enjoy it again. Autumn always brings out the best in me anyway, and the changes have reached what appears to be an equilibrium, and all has turned out, indeed, for the best.

And I'm inexplicably content and perfectly happy with being single. I can't actually imagine dating right now, and I'm treasuring too much this refreshing time of loving my life and feeling settled and glad in myself, my God, my friends, and my existence to feel like I have room for someone else. Of course, when the time comes, I'll be glad to greet it. But this is, simply, wonderful.

Oh life.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

stresssssss

I'm wondering if the stomach upsets I've been dealing with all weekend are actually the beginnings of an ulcer.

I'm pretty sure I had one in high school -- I was under constant, slow, elongated pressure from a variety of sources. My stomach hurt all the time, I felt constantly nauseous, and as if butterflies were leaping about with abandon every hour of the day.

It's starting to happen again. I'm hardly ever hungry. My stomach just HURTS.

Not surprising, I guess. I haven't undergone this level of stress in all the combined facets of my life in quite some time, and I've always been one to internalize.

I don't know how to lower the stress levels, though. Exercise more, I think -- which, surprisingly, I began to do voluntarily last week. Pray more. Eat sparingly (oh good, maybe I can start shedding those ten extra pounds). Sleep a lot. Try my hardest to relax whenever I'm not at work, since my hours at work are invariably crammed with stress.

Sometimes I feel a little trapped. MP asked me, a year and a half ago, what my ideal job was. "Quick, like a Rorschak -- don't think about it, just answer -- what's your ideal job?" Instant response: "Not to have one."

Right, that's doable. But all the things I love to do involve not having a job: writing, reading, nesting, cooking. That's real life to me. These just-to-pass-the-time jobs are wearing me out.

And since I have to provide for myself, my only hope is grad school, which is at least a year away.

As the author of Proverbs declares, "Hope deferred rots the bones."

Weekend pleasures...and pains...and ponderings

Apparently something at a departmental party for MP's program on Friday night yielded up a case of something-didn't-agree-with-me. I spent the majority of yesterday, especially into the evening and through the night, in a fog of ill-being and gastrointestinal anguish.

But yesterday was a lovely Saturday nonetheless. Rainy -- as it has been for most of September in the Bend -- but perfectly enjoyable. MP and I planned a short, simple trip to the Farmer's Market, and it wound up being something like this:

1. Go to the new branch of our credit union in downtown South Bend to take cash from the ATM for use at the Market.

2. Notice the little used bookstore that is never open with its doors...open. Go inside and poke around and find several interesting new acquisitions to bulk up our already crammed shelves (a delight for any book collector. I purchased an anthology of Kierkegaard; a translation of the Tao, including commentary, by Ursula K. LeGuin; a work by Pierre de Chardin, a Catholic priest exiled to the Far East by the Church for his espousal of human evolution, who is quoted extensively in Annie Dillard's For the Time Being; an anthology of American folklore, printed in wartime United States; and an updated version of Love Medicine -- the proprietor commented on my eclectic selections).

3. Drive to the Farmer's Market, getting outrageously lost in what ought to be, after two years, a familiar area of town. Buy lots of delightfully local, slightly unnecessary items such as Indiana- or Michigan-grown Cortland apples, Concord grapes, Provolone, and garlic.

4. Swing by Bamber's, a family-owned grocery store a stone's throw from the Market, which has on its shelves amazing and hard-to-find staples such as bulgur wheat, red lentils, and sherry vinegar (a requirement for the finer points of Spanish cooking), as well as amazing and hard-to-find luxuries such as spicy pickled beans, mini cloth bags for bouquets garni, and cooking twine. I then and there fell head-over-heels in love with small, privately owned businesses.

5. Drop MP off at her apartment so she can begin concocting her almost sinfully delicious spaghetti sauce, and zip up to Wal-Mart for everything I've been running out of lately, which almost put me in the poorhouse.

6. Lounge around for the remainder of the day, nursing my digestive tract.

I've also been pondering, a little, the predicament of Christian singles everywhere. It seems there are a plethora of young Christian women and a dearth of young Christian men, none of whom in much of any kind of ratio are dating each other.

It appears to be a double-edged sword (forgive the cliche). Plenty of the Christian women I know I wouldn't date if I were a man. MP realized yesterday, and I agree, that it's hard enough for us to find female Christian friends, let alone for Christian men to find dating partners -- in the two years we've lived in South Bend, we've only grown really close to one Christian woman. We're becoming better acquainted with a few more, but ironically we've met none of them through church. So for the first time I begin to sympathize with the male predicament. Most Christian men whom I have met through church are simply not friends with any women, and when I survey the available material, I don't much blame them. The girls seem to have impenetrable social walls around themselves, and even if they didn't, those girls and I have very little in common except our shared faith. What then, are the guys to do? Church, despite what our elders tell us, is not a good place to meet future mates.

For women either. I've only had one pseudo-dating experience with a man that I met in church, and he turned out to be much less than what I was looking for -- to be specific, he seemed to be strongly physically attracted to me, which I enjoyed, but ended up calling me only once every three or four weeks, and seemed to expect those few and far between appearances to light up my life.

The flip-side of the predicament for women in situations like mine is that I know a lot of guys, some non-Christian, mostly Christian (which is perhaps unusual, but we are talking about South Bend, Indiana). I count a lot of them as friends. The ratio of men whose company I enjoy actually outstrips the ratio of women whose company I enjoy, if we're talking about group environments. Why, then, is it so difficult to attract a date?

So the situation appears to run something like this: Christian men don't see the trees for the forest, and Christian women don't see the the forest for the trees. Men aren't finding any individuals to inspire their attention because the over-all scene is humdrum and they stop looking, while women get so fed up with the lackadaisical individuals they know that they write off the whole species.

What's the answer? My solution has been a resolution to spend less time losing my mind over the issue, and to spend more time out socially in groups, meeting people, getting to know acquaintances better, and deepening already good friendships, while continuing to cultivate excellence in my lifestyle, skills, and habits. The true frustration lies in the knowledge that in the end there's not much more I can do. I find myself growing virulent towards Christian men in a similar vein to my attitude toward men in general while at Grove City, and I would like to avoid that cutting persona a little -- I don't want to run everyone off.

Plus when it comes down to it (where did that most generic of phrases originate?), I truly have faith that I will find the person I've been seeking, and that no art or cunning or rage on my part will bring him along any faster. At the finale, it's all about the right person at the right time in the right place. There's mystery to it. And it won't be all that complicated when all the coordinates are in place; but I can't orchestrate those coordinates any more than I can pattern the stars. So my part, for now, is to wait, to be patient, to cultivate my talents and to grow in love and virtue, to enjoy all of my friendships, and to be content and really happy with my life as I pray for the future.

Besides, constant frustration gets to be exhausting. If there's nothing more I can be doing than what I listed above, it's futile to "throw effort after foolishness," as Spur says in The Man from Snowy River.

And yet there is a time to express frustration, to shout questions, to shake fists -- there's as much a season for trumpeting warnings from the roofs as there is for waiting for the dawn. So I'm certainly not going to give up thinking or writing about, or discussing, the problems among the Christian single population. For now I'm just tired, and coming off a period of deep despair, and I'd like to rest a bit from all the worrying. And I'm not that unhappy with being single, believe it or not.