ungh

I taught my neighbor the phrase "existential weariness" the other night.

Things are going, generally, exceedingly well. Now if only I could banish this lingering exhaustion...sleep doesn't seem to help. Maybe it's just that it's that point in my monthly cycle where I'm losing more iron than I'm taking in, and caffeine isn't a sufficient supplement.

Or maybe it's my dreams. They're perennially weird, filled with the threat of loss, and I feel like even when I'm awake they crouch in the shadows under my eyes.

Or maybe it's the persistence of the hot weather. I'm ready for fall, like I was ready for summer, like I was ready for spring, like I was ready for winter. The seasons have felt out of joint this past year, and the not-rightness weighs on me. I can deal with life being chaotic and nonsensical, because that's life; but the seasons, well, they should do what they're supposed to -- they want to. What's wrong when they don't? So then the whole world feels cosmically off kilter.

But there are such beautiful moments. I've always loved autumn best of all the seasons, although I reiterate for the thousandth time that I love each season in its turn, and I've discovered something here in the upper midwest that I'd never seen before that's made me love it, and autumn, even harder: the beanfields. I love the beanfields in fall. They turn all kinds of different yellows and greens and golds and coppers, while underneath the leaves the stalks turn bronzes and browns, and this pied beauty runs all the way across the fields to the woods. We don't have beanfields at home, and every September my soul goes all shivery-wild at a glimpse of them here.

And this morning was cold and misty and sunny, and the sunbeams shot the world with these brilliant rays of light exploding from behind every tree and bush and cloud, so that the drive to work was like getting close to the resting place of the Holy Grail, or the announcement of the Second Coming like it is in the Bible, not Yeats. And the highway was bare and my window was down and the air smelled of field and mist and stone, and I thought, Some days all I want is a cold sunny morning, and a clear highway ahead of me. Nothing more.

It lifts the weariness for awhile.

bones is back

Finally. My favorite show has returned. Its third season is airing. And I feel like my life has settled back in to some comfortable, life-giving niche, like the click of a key settling home in a lock.

I don't know what it is about Bones that does me so much good. I do get attached to shows, but not ordinarily as they air -- I watched Dark Angel for its first season, but didn't finish the second season until it came out on DVD. I never finished The Pretender. I love Buffy and Angel, but I never watched them once while they were on the air.

And it's not like I'm a crime show lover. NCIS? Bah. CSI? Shoot me. Law and Order? Forget it. The half-baked plots, the insipid characters, the vapid writing, all conspire to bore me to the state of glazed eyes, tongue half-hanging out of my mouth, little spots of drool at the corners.

But Bones. I'm in love with all the characters. The dialogue is great. The story arcs are wonderful. Nothing in it is particularly true to life, but I couldn't care less. The writers are incredible, and I've come to trust them. The show is steeped in a close-knit sense of family, a deep and unspoken love among all the principles, that reaches out and wraps me in it, too. When I watch that show, I feel like I'm home.

It's great too that I watch it on the phone with Leigh Ann. We've been friends for ten years, have gone through all shorts of rough and bright spots together, have similar temperaments, similar dreams, similar ways of relating to the world and to people and to God and to ourselves. So every week hitting the "Send" button on her speed-dial number, or picking up her call, to settle into my big-cushioned chair and tune into Bones and laugh and oo and ahh and screech and squeal over the turns of events in each episode is another anchoring ritual in my weekly life. Especially since the network always puts me about three seconds ahead of her (drat you, Fox!) and she can usually guess what's going to happen by listening to my reactions. And there's something magic about sharing a present, connected now with a close friend who lives a thousand miles away.

So after the episode finished last night, and we said our goodbyes, I went and sat on the porch for a few minutes to enjoy the long-awaited coolness of a rainy night, and laughed my head off with Luchenne as she related her temper tantrum at her boyfriend for overflowing the toilet, and then, for the first time in weeks, I went back upstairs and had the emotional energy to wash my stacked-up dishes before I turned in for the night.

For whatever reason, and as strange as it might be, Bones has a good effect on my psychological wellbeing.

I'm so glad it's back.

i hate doing dishes

Anyone with me on this? There are other household tasks I find enjoyable, soothing, relaxing; or, if not exactly fun, at least matter-of-fact, businesslike, things that just have to be done and that's that.

But dishes. I used to like doing them. Now they're just...hateful. Glowering at me from the sink. Threatening me with the inevitability of foul odors and mold if I ignore them. Refusing to go away or to be put off. Getting worse the longer they're let go. Giving me tight shoulder and back muscles when I finally get around to them -- not to mention dry skin.

In short, dishes are entropy at its most top heavy. Most undeniable. Most EVIL.

Never have I longed more for that bastion of cleanliness, that fortress of sparkling surfaces -- the dishwasher. This is one desperate housesinglewoman.

And the desperation keeps building. Not of singleness, no. Of dishwashing.

Dishes. A housekeeper's homework. The Chore That Doesn't End.

Oh dishes! Oh dishes! I hate you! You stink!
I wish I could blast you all out of my sink.
If only a rock would explode every glass.
Oh dishes! Oh dishes! You're a pain in my ass.

I'd rather do taxes late into the night
or replace a blown fuse with a broken flashlight,
scrub toilets barehanded, dust shelves with my face
than wash the plates lying all over the place.

Oh dishes! Oh dishes! You grow like a weed.
My hands are so chapped that they're starting to bleed.
If you'd just wash yourselves, I could love you, I think.
Oh dishes! Oh dishes! I hate you! You stink!

nothing to do but frown

Bad Head Days followed by Bad Headache Days just bring a girl down. Like rainy days and Mondays, man.

ironies

They upped my credit limit again.

The notice I got in the mail, which wasn't a statement and which I therefore ripped open in a panic, read, "Your outstanding credit management has earned you a credit line increase..."

Ha. Yes. What they mean by that is, "Your ceaseless monthly payments at just over the minimum in a desperate and futile attempt to outstrip our ridiculous interest rate while juggling the rest of your bills on your limited resources because you maxed out your former credit limit on medical emergencies for your cat have gained us enough additional income that we want to entice you to use some more."

How kind.

What kind of outstanding credit management would they be praising me for if I actually used outstanding credit management and could pay off the whole damn thing in one go?

Still, I guess this means my credit isn't horrible. Always a bonus.

Although I'm half-tempted to take the business reply envelope they enclosed with the thing, in case I want to pay for more services, and write, "Dear Sir or Madam: Mightn't you consider the use of 'superb' or 'excellent' in the opening line of your credit line increase notices, rather than 'outstanding,' so as to avoid association in the minds of your customers with the negative use of the adjective when paired with such nouns as 'bill' or 'account' or 'balance'? Or is the ambiguity deliberate, in which case I must congratulate you on your cleverness?"

Once an English major in Narnia...

the scourge of the midwest

A fluke of genes had rendered her left-eyed. As if to offer compensation, Nature had also made her ambidextrous, but her parents during her childhood had trained her to use her right hand, so when it came to learning to wield a gun she found herself up a slimy creek with the butt of a shotgun for a paddle.

But not for long. She'd always treasured her little quirks, savored them slowly like horehound candy, and so, while other students were passing notes in class, she, a self-proclaimed loner since the age of ten, had practiced writing with her left hand. It was never too pretty, but hell, if doctors could get away with it, so could she.

The first time she held a pistol in her hand she felt like she could see clearly for the first time in her life. The haziness she shrouded herself in like a cloud of flies buzzed off in all directions, and the only things in existence were her body, the target, and the sight down the barrel of the gun. Being left-eyed and right-handed with a handgun, she found, didn't matter.

Shotguns and rifles were a whole different story, the difference between Cinderella floating her foot into the shoe and Jack pelting hell-for-leather toward the beanstalk to get out from under the feet of the roaring giant. Her dad had told her about a guy he knew who was left-eyed and right-handed like her and had learned to cope and was a brilliant shot, but no matter how she worked it, she couldn't get comfortable bending her neck over the stock like the snapped stem of a daffodil.

Till she switched shoulders and started shooting lefthanded. Then everything fell into place like Paul Bunyan stumbling over Babe the Blue Ox in the rain. All those years of taking needless notes in class left-handed paid off with those first blasted holes of buckshot straight through the heart of an old newspaper. Her eye was straight and her hands were happy, and so, she found, was her heart. Happy and warm. Even her shoulder, sore from the kickback, was happy.

When at last she learned how to wear a holster for her favorite revolver, on the right hip for her right hand, instead of at a cross-draw so that she could comfortably carry a rifle with her left, and strode out easily onto the range, her hips swinging companionably in time with her newfound friends, she fixed her eyes on the distant targets and grinned. Even though the weight anchored her to the ground so that her shoes sank into the last of the summer grass, her feet felt catlike, springy and light, and she thought she could see for miles.

embarrassment

There are many things I love about adulthood. One of them is the regression of the acute embarrassment about everything that plagued adolescence.

Just a minor example. The other night I headed to Wal-Mart, and while I was shopping, my cell rang from its place in my jacket pocket. I pulled it out -- with a tampon. Tampons seem to be dotted about my person in various random and strangely prominent places where I don't remember putting them: jacket pockets, purse pockets, jeans pockets, piled on top of my work bag. I never know when one is going to materialize, but at least one is always handy.

So in the open view of the public, I opened the cell to pick up the call while moving the tampon nonchalantly, and still in clear view, to the other hand, began talking, and, without bothering to hide what I was doing or what I was holding, put the tampon back from whence it came (in the jacket pocket. Doubtless the event will happen again). From the corner of my eye I saw a man staring at me the entire time.

Was I bothered? Not a whit. Was I embarrassed? Not even a little.

Ten years ago I would have shriveled up into a scrunchy little raisin and died of horror. I invented all kinds of clever ways of disguising the fact that I was going to the girls' room with a tampon. I slipped them up my sleeves. I hid them in the waistband of my jeans. I tucked them down my collar. Anything -- anything -- to avoid carrying my bookbag to the bathroom with me. And ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING to avoid that little plastic-wrapped cylinder from sliding into visibility.

Today? Whatever. Yup, there it is. Tampon. Right next to the spare change, the paper clip, the Kleenex, and the cell. Oh, did you see it fall out of my pocket? Yeah, hey there.

unaccustomed quiet

The phones are down at work. Some idiot driving a car transport ignored the two large signs saying NO THRU TRUCKS and, having further neglected to lower the top rack on his truck, attempted to drive down our small street and ripped all the phone lines down. He managed, somehow, to avoid the power lines. I attribute this to sheer luck.

So for the past twenty-four hours we have had no phone service, and the office is strangely quiet. It feels like a holiday. I'm trying to get a tonne of work done around the office as far as cleaning things up and getting to my neglected piles of papers is concerned, because I know that once the phones are back on line, all hell will break loose. But in the meantime, the peace is nice.

Reminds me of a verse I read on Sunday as I was enjoying devotions on the porch, more rarely quiet than has become, sadly, usual (the shiftless no-good ne'er-do-well son of my neighbor likes to blast his horrible music out of his "room," which opens onto the porch, right behind my chair). The verse kind of took me by surprise, like a lot of things have lately. 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 (NIV) says, "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody."

These are the reasons why I love Paul. In our ladder-climbing world of politics and the American dream of rags-to-riches, we tend connect ambition with greatness -- it goes back, for me, to studying Julius Caesar in tenth grade, to memorizing Mark Antony's incredible speech (and later in college to watching the young Marlon Brando give it...mmm): "But...Brutus hath said Caesar was ambitious, and, sure, Brutus is an honorable man."

Ambition. Brutus worried over Caesar's ambition, called it the serpent in the egg that would eventually hatch and become something evil, and so he rationalized the murder of his friend so that he could crush the serpent in its shell.

And yet here, as with many things in Christianity, Paul takes the concept of ambition and turns it into a paradox. "Make it your ambition," he says, and I imagine the listeners of the letter, as it was being read aloud, were preparing themselves to hear some great declamation on great and holy living; the passage immediately preceding this verse is full of exhortations about sexual morality and encouragements to live in purity. "Make it your ambition," he says, and, instead of telling them to shine like stars, as he says in Philippians, instead of telling them to press on to the goal, instead of telling them to resist sin to the point of shedding their own blood (all of which matter and are necessary and good), he says, "...to lead a quiet life."

Make it your ambition to be quiet. Take this drive called ambition, this pulsion to excel, to be great and to stand above and beyond everyone else, inborn in nearly every person...and turn it inward. Use it to tone things down. Use it simply, to win the honest respect of those who don't belong to the church.

And mind your own business. Work with your hands. Your daily life matters.

Love it. Reading through the New Testament has given me an appreciation of just how often Paul writes to the churches, Remember how, when I lived with you, I didn't ask you for anything; I worked to earn my keep. I wasn't a burden. Do you the same.

I remember the late-nineties emphasis that my home church and youth group put on rejecting the "worldly" notion of "being a good person." "That's not enough!" my youth pastor would thunder. Well, of course it isn't, as far as salvation is concerned; but it matters hugely in the impact a person has on his or her small sphere of influence. That's the thing that makes people sit up and take notice. Not how many Scriptures you can rattle off with a wild Ancient Mariner glitter in your eye, or how involved you are in church, or how self-consciously holier your aura is than everyone else's. What people notice is whether or not you're a decent sort of person. And didn't Jesus Himself point that out when he said "you will recognize a tree by its fruit"? That's not a complicated concept. Good fruit = good tree = good person = belongs to God; bad fruit = bad tree = bad person = doesn't belong to God. Nobody's perfect, but which way do the scales tip? The way you live your life matters. The Apostle John took it a step further when he wrote (and here I quote the King James Version, because that's the one I know best from Psalty the Singing Songbook), "Beloved, let us love one another, for everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love" (1 John 4:7-8, emphasis mine). And, as the Parable of the Good Samaritan points out, isn't love how you treat your neighbor? And isn't that by treating your neighbor just plain decently?

I think in particular, when the argument of "being a good person is/isn't enough" comes up, about my grandfather. He died seven years ago this past March. You never saw him rocketing Scripture at people, never saw him immersed in the newest Brennan Manning or Max Lucado book, never saw him lead a Bible study or take an apologetics class at church. But you've never met a better man. My grandfather lived by very simple, straightforward rules of decency. He was honest. He treated his neighbors well. He worked hard. He minded his own business. He loved his family. He went to church. He lived that quiet life, and all of it honored God in the best way possible. He didn't need to prove anything by his words; his life spoke his faith for itself.

So when I hear people mutter against "being a good person," I have to try hard not to laugh. What, we're not supposed to be good people? The contrapositive of James' "faith without works is dead" is that a living faith comes with works. And sure, yes, granted, Christ comes first, but isn't goodness one of the fruits of the Spirit of Christ? So when one comes into the body of Christ, goodness can be expected to follow.

And that's what Paul's saying here. Be thou decent.

I like this passage, because it underscores some of the things I've been working toward the past few years. It's not that I don't have my own ambitions along less humble lines -- those are most assuredly there, especially in the writing arena, and I'm resurrecting those ambitions from their own ash-bed once again -- but what I've fallen in love with lately has been the quietude and simplicity of the life I've stumbled into here, in my job, my apartment, my friends, my cat, my family, my pastimes, the landscape. I love it all, and I'm glad the great Apostle Paul has given me the go-ahead to enjoy it...as quietly, as simply, and as decently as possible.

under new york lock and key

I've heard it said before that my apartment door looks like it belongs in New York. With its latch lock, deadbolt, and chain, it presents a practical puzzle that generally befuddles first-time visitors attempting to leave (or second-, or third-, or fourth-time visitors too...). The door at the bottom of the stairs has its own separate lock as well, requiring a total of three individual keys to gain access to my apartment -- a fun juggling enterprise when I come home laden with grocery bags.

But all that's changed. Now it's even more complicated. Because now there's a deadbolt at the bottom of the stairs as well. So I have to have FOUR keys to get into my apartment, and wow, is it grand.

Actually it lightens my mind a bit. Shady characters tend to haunt the house, and the deadbolt secures the door a lot better than the flimsy lock that was already in place.

Let's just hope I never have to get inside in a hurry.

dreams

I've been having weird ones lately. For most of my life, I haven't been able to remember any of my dreams, but the past year has seen an increase in my ability to retain them.

The other night I dreamed I walked into a doctor's office down the street from the house in which I grew up, only to find it not a doctor's office but a house, and it was freshly abandoned, and there was a tiny baby in it, asleep and limp and dying of hunger. Throughout the remainder of the dream I was coping with all sorts of small and sudden calamities with the baby slumped across my shoulder, all the while trying to keep him from falling asleep, loving the heavy trusting warmth of him, and attempting to make him a bottle.

Last night I dreamed there were a lot of people at my apartment, and we were all trying to agree on a movie while I was apologizing for how much I loved watching previews, and midway through it a couple of my friends got hungry, so I took them to Jimmy John's for subs. I really, really wanted one particular sub, but when we got there we found that the entire joint had been rearranged and the menu changed entirely, and what I wanted was no longer available unless by special request, and I couldn't remember what it was called, and I was anxious and upset and angry, while my friends were really excited by the new salad bar. Then we got back to my apartment and everybody else was hungry, so I got ready to take them to Jimmy John's, too, and then suddenly I was in a dark forest hiding from them all, and from someone else who wanted to kill me, and the trees were charred and dead, and the leaves were curled and huge and dead and flapping against each other in the breeze and making loud dead noises -- "bones on leather," I thought, and knocked a bunch of them to the ground, trying to shut them up.

Weird. The Dream Moods website wasn't entirely helpful in interpreting -- the only point of interest was when it said that starving babies represent some vulnerable, dependent part of the dreaming subject that is in need of immediate attention. (I also think it represents how much I miss holding babies.) As for the rest -- well, dead leaves represent loss, forests are the unconscious, etc., and I'm taking the whole Jimmy John's thing to symbolize how much I hate change, and how much of it I've been going through in the last year, which would account for my existential exhaustion lately.

Sum-up: Me tired. But there's nothing to do but keep on, and keep trying to carve out the space I need to nurture those aspects of myself that haven't been getting enough breathing room -- most particularly my learning and my writing. I have plans for these. Exciting ones. Hopefully the fall will see a calming down, a rejuvenation, and a regenesis.