Shawn Mullins was right.

Remember that wonderful 90s pop song, "Lullabye"? I don't consider myself any kind of objective when it comes to judging 90s pop songs; saturated in a glowing nostalgia -- weird because it wasn't like I was a happy teenager -- they always seem amazing to me, the power chords, the scratchy grunge voices, and I can't be convinced that they're crap.

"Lullabye" is no exception. I loved the chorus; it became a mantra I used for myself, and then later for my sister: Everything's gonna be all right...Rockabye... I kept the words close, sang them silently to myself at night. Everything's gonna be all right. Mostly I clung to them, to the idea, so desperately because I only believed it in a blind zeal for wish fulfillment, a last starveling hope.

Well, I forgot all about it in the last few years. I'm doing the usual year-end review in my head, and weighing 2008 in terms of its pleasantness and unpleasantness, and, as always, I give thanks for the sometimes severe, sometimes tender mercies that made themselves new throughout the past twelve months, and bid a nonregretful farewell to another year. New Year's always comes to me with a sense of relief: one down, x to go. The future once again becomes an unbroken, snowy field, a tabula rasa where the wind blows cold and clean and the naked trees hold promises and the untouched ground begs me for snow angels and the things I left behind me, the lostness, the scraped knees, the grief, fall to powerless memory like the substance of Echo, and there is nothing but now, and nothing but what's to come, and the cold scorches in tongues of wind stirring my blood like flame.

Over the past week I've been completely engaged in a momentous internal struggle. Christmas was thought provoking in its singular misery. For three years now I have thought that my growing disenchantment with Christmas had to do with long hours driving, with always being a guest among the members of my family; yes, being single is no fun around the holidays, but I figured that the real root was distance from my parents and my sister.

Wrong. Or rather, only partially right. I had a nice time this Christmas with my parents, waking up early and exchanging simple gifts and eating Mom's fabulous coffee cake and drinking Dad's fabulous lattes; but I preferred to sleep. Holiday retail exhaustion did no favors for my perspective, but I found myself unutterably depressed, and unwilling to express it for fear of hurting Mom and Dad's feelings. Because the trouble wasn't with their company, and also wasn't quite with Laura's absence. I didn't identify the problem until the next day, and it was a relief finally to recognize it, to hold it up to the light and examine it and decide what to do.

The trouble is that the magic of Christmas that I loved in my childhood is gone, and I didn't get to trade it for anything. I don't get to spend Christmas in the cozy intimacy of my sister and her husband, or the passionate and deep knowledge, forged from long commitment, of my parents, or in vicarious joy watching children of my own tear into presents. In its spiritual aspect, by far, of course, the most important, Christmas keeps growing in beauty, in joy, in profundity. Midnight Mass was incredible. But in its other cultural observances, Christmas sucks.

Yep, I said it. Christmas sucks. But all that means is that I could be doing different things to observe it better, to eliminate suckage. In that light, I'm embarking on another experiment. Living far away and driving home isn't the answer; living near enough to be present all the time doesn't work either. The most enjoyable Christmas of my adult experience was the one I spent with the Sommervilles four years ago, and from that I draw the hypothesis that spending Christmas away and doing something new might be the answer.

To test that hypothesis, I decided to take a page from the book of a certain Traveler I know, and save up enough money, by scrapes and pennies, to be somewhere else next Christmas. Right now I'm thinking somewhere tropical. Beaches, hammocks, sunshine, margaritas. Somewhere I've never seen, someplace where no memories exist that could hurt me with the longing for unfulfilled dreams. If I can't have everything I want, I'll do other things to make my life as amazing as possible. I'll make my own traditions. I'm not settling for a half-life anymore; I'm going to make it new, and love the process. No more Christmases of bitter nostalgia; what a pointless way to exist. I want life. I want joy. And the beauty of joy is that you get to make it in your own way; there's no script.

While that happy little flame glimmered under the bushel basket, other thoughts began flickering. Extensions of that decision. Looking honestly at why I hate Christmas spurred me to looking honestly at other things. The issue with the deepest impact, of course, is my struggle with depression. Naming it the devilfish was one way for me to identify it as something foreign to me, something alien, something essentially not me. Because, having lived with it since my adolescence, sometimes I can't tell where its tentacles stop and my limbs begin. It got all intertwined, and I fell into that mindset I've always despised -- the love of the desert-exiled Hebrew for the old slavery, the fear of the unimaginable Promised Land.

But the way I've been living sucks. This is no life. No matter that I barely remember a time before the depression; no matter that I am, in hateable but undeniable ways, afraid of life without it. The questions crop up: Will I still feel things as deeply? Still see people as clearly? Still be me? But I know the answer on all counts: Yes. Yes, and then some. So maybe I can't exactly wrap my head around the concept of living free of this thing that drags me under. But I believe it will be better than what I have. Bring on the unknown -- bring on the storm. I'm declaring war.

There are a lot of front lines in this war, already amassed against me. There are the basic four, of course: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Social and financial also factor in. I have my work cut out for me here...but I know I can do it. Guerilla style. I wrote in my journal this morning, "From here on out I am no captive, no inert prisoner twisting blind on the torture table. I am a soldier. [...] I have no mercy. My body is covered in wicked scars, but they don't hinder me -- they testify to my determination, they strengthen my knowledge of my enemy, they mark me a survivor. [...] I will emerge victorious. I know this because this war has already been won. My Captain has overcome the world."

I'm a little afraid that some of this sounds insane itself, that crazy Christian fanaticism I so deeply despise. But overall I don't care. In more normal terms, my new mantra (for which my sister would undoubtedly yell at me; something about unhealthy self-classifications) is "What Would Normal People Do?" Part of my task is to name things properly, to sort what is me from what is the devilfish. For example, I'm a procrastinator. That's part of who I am. I don't need to attribute my procrastination to depression; depression can make it worse, but the procrastination is itself not a manifestation of the devilfish. Which makes it easier to do things like putting away the dishes and cleaning out the catbox -- putting those things off is of the devilfish. But putting other things off, like preparing to teach Sunday School this week, is just my ordinary procrastination. Not a great habit, to be sure, but not part of psychological disorderedness. Just an ordinary bad habit. (Ah, you beautiful, ordinary bad habit.)

Because I want to be normal. I have a couple models that I didn't have before (thank you, 2008), of what life without depression can actually be like, and let me tell you, it looks pretty damn good. I'm not satisfied with coping anymore; I don't want to live with this. I want to live without it. I don't want to cope; I want to eradicate.

I read Ephesians 6 yesterday, and savored it all over again this morning, letting the ancient words fuel this growing heat smoldering in my blood (a smoldering wick he will not snuff out...), sharpen me to my purpose:

Finally, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground. So stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (vv. 10-17, New American Bible)

So, with all the gains and losses of the past years decorating my skin, all the hard and bitter, and light and sweet, lessons I have learned, while one part of me is frolicking in the snow (I'm so excited! I can live without this thing! Maybe it will require more concentration for me than for people who aren't afflicted with depression, but I can be okay. I can be normal in the ways I should be normal. Everything is going to be all right. And -- best of all -- I can love people more. This thing won't be suffocating my responses to others. I can love), another part of me is standing on a ribbon bridge of stone in a dark chasm facing an ancient evil, a sword of flame. That part of me, legs braced, sword gleaming, still, ready, sweaty, dirty, determined, is glaring up at the thing, welling up with four words, four simple words that say everything that can be said:

You shall not pass.

restoring my soul

All I could do today was sleep.

Well, not all I could do; I've grown tired of living like a troll, with the equivalent of hobbit bones and rags and garbage strewing the floor of my cave, so I'm in the process of cleaning. When I'm seldom home and exhausted when I do find myself within my own four walls, it's easy to let things go, things like folding clothes and stacking papers and books. I defend myself by thinking how difficult it would be for a burglar to make it within range of my gun before he or she tripped on something and broke a bone in the dark and woke me up with the howling and screaming. Of course, the way things are going, I'd probably have a civil suit on my hands when his or her insurance failed to cover the accident. Maybe the gun should make an appearance in that scenario after all.

I've decided that I need to listen to more music. This made itself clear to me when I dreamed about it last night -- I was telling a good friend, I don't remember which one, how much it sucked driving my parents' car because it has neither cassette nor CD player (and I am iPodless) and I can't listen to my glorious repertoire of music few people enjoy but myself. So when I woke up, I thought, Why, thank you, subconscious! You're so much more observant than I am. That is one of my problems. I can't live without music, and I've been trying to live without music.

It's like forgetting to breathe; I don't know how it didn't occur to me. Probably because it's something I usually only do in the car -- when I'm driving it doesn't matter how loud I make the volume, and I like the surround sound of the car stereo; at home I only have my TV. I can really belt out the harmonies when the music is all around me and louder than I am; it's thrilling. In my house I usually prefer some state of libraryish zenlike quiet. So when I stopped driving my own car I just stopped listening to music.

Which is dumb. I always feel much better listening to music. My albums, in some respects even more than my books, are my friends. I call the artists by their first names -- Conor, Sufjan, Josh. Different friends for different moods. And few things make me feel better than cranking the volume way, way up to until my heart and my lungs contract in time to The Crane Wife, or Cassadaga, or The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter.

Mm. Music heals. I'm so glad we as human beings were created in the image of a creative God. We come up with some truly wonderful music.

we can finally laugh about it

After a late night (or early morning, depending on whether you classify yourself pessimist or optimist -- and then there's the argument of which is which), I skipped out on the Baptist service and slept until it was time to drag myself to noon Mass.

At my parents' house afterward, I was frying up a couple of eggs when Dad came into the kitchen.

"Hiya, heathen!" he greeted me.

I flipped the eggs and said, "Oh, I went to church."

"Burn you at the stake," he told me, grinning.

I reached for a plate. "Ummmm....that would be you," I said.

And then we laughed. Which means that the rift begun a year ago has begun to close.

It's good.

Immanuel

~~~

Let all mortal flesh keep silence

And with fear and trembling stand

Ponder nothing earthly minded

For with blessing in His hand

Christ our God to earth descending

Comes our homage to demand

~~~

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.' " From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known.

John 1:1-18 (NIV)

driving in a winter horrorland

To the ladies and gentlemen of Erie: I'm sorry. This weather is my fault. I wanted a white Christmas. I didn't expect the weather, in the holiday spirit, to be so giving.

So the past five days have been ridiculous, and, despite the life-hazarding conditions of the roads, I'm kind of loving it. Every road is now paved with a broken sheet of ice that wants to throw the wheels in four different directions at once. The wind has blown so hard that occasionally one must aim one's car through three-foot drifts. Sunday night I got out of work at 12:15 a.m. (technically Monday morning) and the five of us braced ourselves and walked out into a blizzard.

That was the second worst driving experience of my life. At first it was fun. Driving along the Bayfront, almost alone on the road, with the old factories brooding under the bluffs and the masts of the sailboats glowing spookily in the light from the wharves, I watched tendrils of snow rippling in waves like mist across the pavement, eerily, playfully, occasionally whipping into a dervish, a reverse tornado spiraling up ex nihilo from the ground. I felt like an accidental witness to a different world, an elemental world of bodiless spirits that emerges only when human eyes hide in sleep. It gusted around me, slightly malicious at my intrusion, teasing, showing off its ghostly powers to the puny mortal creeping among the players of its weird and beautiful symphony.

I wouldn't miss this for anything, I thought as I turned onto 955 through Lawrence Park. It was a little like driving through water, if one could see the individual molecules. Where the streetlights glowed, a little light illuminated the crystals of snow, throwing everything into spaces of rich and shallow orange.

But that's when I almost changed my mind. Suddenly I felt I was in the middle of Alaska. (A presumptuous feeling; I've never, oh-so-sadly, been to Alaska. Somehow that fact is more bitter to me than the fact that I've never been to Europe; I've always wanted, Shasta-like, to head North.) On Route 20 the weather tore off all pretext of playfulness and howled around me. In that instant any anthropomorphic imaginings vanished; this was the Nature of Stephen Crane, utterly indifferent, impersonal, with a power that rendered all human attempts at civilizing the planet absurd, a child attempting to make an umbrella out of cellophane and kindling in the face of a hurricane.

I couldn't see. In places the snow erased any visibility at all, and on an open highway I slowed to 25 miles per hour and peered at the road immediately ahead of me, which could only be recognized by the treadmarks of former traffic in the snow. I used them as my guidelines; I couldn't see the edge of the road. I didn't know where I was. The wind buffeted my parents' light little foreign car in any direction but forward. I didn't know if I drove in the right lane, or if I was on the wrong side of the highway altogether. I only knew that I was driving roughly in the direction of home.

I mumbled prayers under my breath, gripped the wheel, and kept driving. Somewhere I passed familiar landmarks, but they were invisible and I was blind. I only relaxed a little bit once the lights of the strip at the head of the Valley leading into my town began to glimmer into view; and then I stared in utter amazement as the snow blocked even the light farther than a fifth-mile ahead.

I parked in the driveway with a breath of relief, bundled up into my warmest pajamas, turned on the electric blanket, and sipped scalding tea in bed. It was idiotic to attempt the drive home -- forty mintues on a clear day -- I had been offered a couch at the house of a coworker who lived much closer to the store than I. But unless conditions are completely unbearable, I have this compulsion to sleep in my own bed, use my own toothbrush, bury my face in my own pillow, wake up in my own home. Couches are seldom long enough for me to sleep comfortably (Meg and Phillip's is the one grand exception), and there's the problem of the absence of my happy pills.

Gah. Speaking of which. The devilfish got me by the throat this past weekend. A combination of exhaustion, stress and hormones threw me into the kind of tailspin that only happens a few times a year and completely wipes me out. I felt badly for my parents; I kept it bottled in in high school, went more or less catatonic at times in college, and in the four years of living independently far from family I learned how to deal in my own way: I would vanish, drop off everyone's radar, and curl in on myself alone in my apartment until I was well enough to reemerge and let everyone know where I'd been and that I'd recovered. So this weekend was the first time my parents have really seen me in that state, and I didn't know how to handle their seeing it any more than they did. Uncomfortable all around.

I found myself, though, really looking forward to church on Sunday. I woke up weepy and dragged myself around the house getting ready, wanting only the compassionate eyes of the girls with whom I've reconnected in the Baptist church. And I prayed. I prayed and prayed and prayed. And dealing with it in terms of community (the girls at church were wonderful) and in terms of flinging myself at God brought me through it much more quickly than usual. The entombment generally lasts three days; this time I was more or less fine in twenty-four hours. For which I'm grateful. A sentence popped into my mind as I readied for church that morning, wondering who on earth would put up with me like this, how I could even ask anyone, anyone at all, to love me in such a broken condition, how God could possibly use me for any good whatsoever when I was such a mess (Laura says I need to engage in more healthy self-dialogue. She's right, of course), and the sentence came visually into my mind's eye: You don't have to be whole to be effective.

Ironically -- or no; paradoxically, as all of Christianity is a glorious paradox -- it was relaxing in that knowledge that brought me to a quicker temporary wholeness. Grace is sufficient. And God loves me, has always loved me, when I've least been, or thought myself, loveable. Which (again the paradox) frees me more to let other people love me.

Ah, the strangeness. Ah, the growth. Ah, the healing -- constant, slow, up-hill.

intimations of migration

I was reflecting today, as I tidied the living room with my favorite candle burning (Balsam Fir by Yankee -- they don't make it anymore because it's pretty much like inhaling pine pitch, but I've always loved it and I've nursed this one slowly through about six winters) and the lights respirating among the branches of the Christmas tree, that one of the aspects of marginal employment which I enjoy is the ability to pick up and move without much entanglement or hassle.

I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence yearning for stability, and once I sort of settled in South Bend I was completely unprepared for the painful waves of restlessness that swamped me every year -- the almost irresistable urge to pack up and go, go anywhere, go see someplace new, go take in the beauties of unfamiliar landscapes and write stories about unfamiliar people. Fighting against that urge, I think, contributed to the depression.

My destiny, or what-have-you, keeps tugging me somewhere else. Every time I've moved somewhere, hoping it was for good, God only ever told me, For now. Other, more typically successful people would probably tell me that getting a really good job allows you just as much freedom to transfer all over the place; I'm sure they're probably right, but I don't know it firsthand. I do know that marginal jobs are everywhere, and that working them, for the time being, seems fitting. I always have the promise of freedom, which matters far more to me than it used to. And I like moving. Moving into a new place is like unwrapping a great big present piece by piece, like putting together an intricate puzzle in infinite comfortable ways, like performing the marriage ceremony of function and beauty in a brand new chapel. (Once you sweat and swear your way through boxes until you've found things like clean underwear and your toothbrush.)

I felt it today -- that tidal surge of restlessness, the pull to somewhere I've never been. God hasn't told me yet that I'm leaving; but I know my time in Erie is relatively short. Every contingent plan I make keeps getting struck, and I don't know what the next step is, but I know it's coming. So while I'm here there's the labor of unifying the churches, and the earning of an adequate living, and writing, and getting my feet back under me, and studying (I have Lewis' The Four Loves next on my reading queue, and after that Kierkegaard's Works of Love, with Kristeva's Tales of Love woven throughout; she's pretty dense reading) -- plenty to do.

But still...the call is coming. And as I shelve the latest stray books at work, or plug in the lights on the Christmas tree in the trailer, or wake up to a bewhiskered furry black face rattling my skull with purrs, I grin with the anticipation of an updraft under my wings. The air is crackling with it. As I bend my head to my current given tasks, a building breeze ruffles the feathers on the back of my neck, whispering that it's almost time.

I is a genius.

I've been working till close a lot the past couple of weeks at work, so I'm back on my night owl schedule, staying up ridiculously late and sleeping in correspondingly (the more to look at the tree all glowing in the dark, of course). This morning I rolled myself out of bed a little earlier in order to get to work on time -- middle of the day shift, according to my memory.

So I got to work, clipped the wired walkie to my pocket, and walked around helping people find books, cheerily greeting customers and coworkers alike, establishing a new merry Christmas nihilism, and folding (and folding and folding and folding) the Twilight T-shirts on the front table, which keeps hurling me back into my Ann Taylor days gritting my teeth and wondering why people are compelled to unfold and fling about every article of clothing they see.

Knowing the store had a steady line of traffic, and wondering when my break appeared on the schedule, I went to the information desk to check. And was confused. I was only supposed to be working till 6:30 and my break was scheduled for 9:00...

Waaaait a minute.

Oh crap. I'm not on for 12:00 to 6:30; I'm on for 6:00 to 12:30.

I hied myself back to the break room and explained, laughing, to the managers. Instead of getting mad, they laughed and told me to come back at six.

Yes, the dyslexia...

Me so smart.

i couldn't help but laugh...

...when the "conversation starter" question printed on my beer label at dinner tonight read, "Would you prefer to be a vampire or a werewolf?"

Ah, the odds. (And duh, the answer.)

Which reminds me...as I helped people find, and then straightened and reshelved, books yesterday, a growing fury made it hard for me to concentrate. Vampire books are everywhere. The problem is that they're all complete and utter crap. The mythology, the folklore, of blood drinking immortals the world over are absolutely fascinating, and the more anthropological the better...but this? This is horrible. Romance novels, bad teen fiction, supposed interviews with "real" vampires: affronts to the power of what the genre could actually be.

Gah. Oh well...at least the market is ripe for the one I have planned.

I keep thinking that it's strange...the fascination in the 90s was with angels; now it's with demons -- only the twist is that they're demons who act more like angels, at least in the exceptions on which the stories focus. People seldom write about vampires as a blanket evil anymore, except for Kostova. My rudimentary guess is that as a society we long for something supernatural, long for something that outlasts the powerless passive drudgery of the average working citizen's life, long for something to reach us at our deepest natures, long to become immortal ourselves, long, in short (and this is where the "good" vampire comes in as an idea), for redemption.

The 90s were bleak but, as I recall from the attitudes that pervaded my high school experience, also attempted to deny the nastiness evident in human nature. I like that, in this new century, we seem better able to recognize cruelty, injustice, pain, harshness, despair -- and yearn to overcome them, to make them right. In that vein, while the cropping up of vampires in totally trashy literature really bugs me from an artistic standpoint, I also find extremely interesting the centrality of the archetype of the evil being rejecting its nature and living for good, and the centrality of the archetype of eternal life. I would posit, then (and I have by no means really begun to ponder the subject in depth), that the popular preoccupation with the intelligent, powerful, self-controlled and redeemed undead Other, and particularly the unsubtle yearning to become that Other, reflects a purer search for God than our society has seen for many decades.

and miles to go before I sleep

I had a couple of conversations today that put me in a thoughtful headspace -- challenging when I had to keep shaking myself back into the present to help customers; my headspace twines around my consciousness like the forest of A Midsummer Night's Dream, pulling me in, enchanting, unwinding in little eddying paths that break off here and there, going nowhere in particular, beckoning me deeper. A fine place to exist in my mind, jungly and beautiful, but, unfortunately, instead of looking quiet and serene, I probably look a bit mannequinesque, a girl with her mind gone, gazing vacantly at nothing.

Oh well. Today's thoughtful headspace centered around busyness. The first conversation came about as I helped an older gentleman (courtly this time, instead of creepy) place an order for a book we didn't have in stock. As I scribbled the titles down and proceeded to tap on the keyboard at lightning speed, he said, "I can tell your age just by your writing and your typing."

I grinned at him. "Terrible handwriting, fast typing?"

"No," he said; "everything's fast. You write fast and you type fast. It's the mark of your generation."

As I smiled, pleased with myself -- I was typing beautifully -- he added, "I feel sorry for your generation, to be honest."

Oh. "Yeah," I said. "Me too."

I knew where he was going, but I forget that other people aren't as quick to pick up on my knowing, so he paused, just long enough for me to have asked, "Why?" and continued, "You don't know how to slow down. You have all this technology you know how to use, and it makes you work even harder. I have three grownup children, and they work all day, come home to fifty more emails they can't get away from, get text messages from their bosses at eleven o'clock at night -- it's breakneck. You can never escape."

I agreed. "Yeah...I used to work in a law office. Back in the day, you mailed something out and it took at least a week to get back. Now? With email and faxing, it's all instantaneous and you wind up doing three times as much work because you don't get to delay anything."

As he talked, elaborating on how things used to be, I felt wistful, perhaps a little sad. It's not like we can trade it off -- if it weren't for technology, I wouldn't be able to keep in as frequent contact with my dearest, who are not, for the most part, my nearest. I have people of whom I'm especially fond whom I would never have met were it not for all this newfangled technology crap. My life would have decided holes without the internet, the cell phone.

And yet sometimes I wonder if it's killing us, to be instantaneously connected, at all times, to so many forms of communication, so many avenues for information. With just my cell phone, I can call people, email, text message, take pictures, record short videos (really crappy ones, but nonetheless), blog, surf the internet, even text* while I'm talking. I mean, Geez. And turning your cell phone off? Taboo. On the one hand, as isolated as our lives tend to be, that kind of connection relieves most boredom, loneliness, and mildly frustrating trivia questions. On the other hand, we know how neither to relax nor to wait, and there's no excuse for taking it easy when it comes to one's job. For anything. As a result, we carry a lot of stress and don't know where to put it or how to channel it.

So I was feeling a little bleak about our generation -- talk about a Catch-22; I wouldn't sacrifice my close long-distance connections for anything, but I have always hated getting work calls while on vacation, and really, thanks to this "easy" instant information trading, we cram three times as much work into our weekly forty+ hours as our grandparents did -- and wanting to sneak away from modern society altogether, maybe find some faraway island to found a new commune (anyone?) to drive the softness out of my muscles and the franticness out of my sinews, when the other conversation came up.

This one, with a touch of delicious irony, took place utilizing instant communication. Phil and I were trading Ben Franklin quotes (one of these days I'll post pictures I took of this Ben Franklin statue my grandmother gave me -- it's totally creepy and I don't know why I love it so much) and disliking in particular the, as he put it, pithy aphorism, "Do you have something to do tomorrow? Do it today," and I observed, thinking of my earlier conversation, that without today's technology, the pithy and virtuous had less to do (my text message was less witty), and he said he'd love more time to putter and invent.

And isn't that, really, the dream? It's not just about slowing down in general and having less demanding jobs, though that is certainly part of the post-postmodern yearning; it's about going beyond earning a living -- about the freedom really to live. In my ideal life, the one based on pure fantasy, the one I have with a great big MAYBE LATER stamped across it (like PAROLE GRANTED or DISCARDED), I don't even have a job. Given my pure druthers, in a world without violence or the need for money, I'd be a hobo. Maybe a Johnny Appleseed-type character, scattering seeds, walking barefoot with a pack slung over my shoulder and a cooking pot on my head. (Well, probably not on my head. In my ideal life, I'm a hobo who maintains a ragged sort of attractiveness.) Then, of course, I'd hobo across a bunch of countries, learn every language known to man, put it all into many beautifully written books, and relax periodically in my airy and light-filled "home base," reading books by other people and cooking food no one's ever heard of.

In reality, I've never even taken a real vacation.

This isn't me putting myself into a state of despondency or wallowing in self-pity; a girl does what she must, and I'm quite happy with my life so far. Things are good, I've grown and I'm growing, I'm going places I would never have dreamed when I was a child. As for the rest, there's always later. But at what point does later become never? If I follow all of the edicts of modern society, I'll only have enough money to do what I want to do when I'm too old to do it. What, am I going to take to the open highway barefoot with my walker? Throw my cooking pot in the basket of my mechanized wheelchair? Gah.

I don't know. I look around at everyone frantically spending money on elaborate Christmas presents for their family members in a time of economic crisis (okay, eighty percent of this is sour grapes for being able to get my family next to nothing this year), and I wonder about the meaning of it. We buy each other books we'll be too busy to read, movies we'll be too busy to watch, music we'll be to busy to listen to, board games we'll be too busy to play. It's like everyone is stockpiling their MAYBE LATERs a little bit at a time, like all of these little tidbits are part of a kind of hope chest we pass on to others, wishing they'll have a chance to relax someday and live the good life at a slower pace with a little less pressure.

There's really no answer; this is pretty fruitless speculation. Good with the bad and all that. I plan to work a little harder at squirreling away a penny here and there, building up a small hoard of living money so that maybe one of these days I can see the many places I've never seen, tailor my hobo dream a little bit to reality. In the meantime, I have my family, and, thanks to technology, my Especially Fonds, who, in using modern technology, help me remember the richness of the meaning of life, which is love, which is God.

_______________
*I know, I know, it's not a verb. But I defer to my favorite anarchist and his philosopher tiger friend: It got verbed. With all the ways in which the growth of the English language is slowing down even faster than our birth rate, I'll take what shifts and changes I can get.

in a minute there is time

I must say, I'm loving my plunge back into the vaccuum of retail. I didn't realize what a difference it would make liking the products I'm helping people buy. I mean, yeah, clothes are great, but books...

Speaking of clothes, I had forgotten how easy it is to look fashionable in Erie. (Which means that I was an absolute fashion horror in high school.) I've had lavish compliments from fellow employees the last three work days in a row, and I've done nothing but don a couple of moderate, respectable sweaters hardly worth much notice, and most of them at least four years old; I bought my wardrobe to outlast fads, trends, the Apocalypse and cockroaches, hearing a penny saved ringing in my ears. And while I'd like to flush out my wardrobe with some really striking pieces -- my exhibitionist tendencies from my early childhood are returning with a flourish, and I want a change; I haven't bought clothes in so long -- I'm glad, at least, to look slightly better than presentable in my surroundings.

Or more than slightly better than presentable, depending on the beholder. Yesterday as I walked toward the back room on my break, a much-too-much-older man almost cracked his spine whirling to appreciate something when I passed. "Yes!" he said, sounding like he'd just walked into a restaurant and found his favorite sandwich on the menu. I turned my head toward the voice -- far too exuberant for a bookstore, where people mostly talk the way they do in libraries -- and saw that I was the favorite sandwich. I thought, What? and, in the interest of not being completely rude, I settled for a broad, amused, disbelieving grin instead of peals of hysterical laughter. It was ludicrous. His hair was the same color as my grandmother's doilies. "Yes"? Who does that?

Of course, later on, after I'd returned from my break and stood behind the information desk looking helpful, he came walking slowly up, his eyes locked on me like I'd stolen the last of his free will. Oblivious in Customer Mode, I said pleasantly, "How can I help you?" and he wordlessly handed me the books he held in his hands. "Oh," I said -- recognizing him at the same time -- "if you want to purchase these, the checkout line starts over there." I returned his books to him and he blinked and then managed to look both awed and incredibly creepy and said, "What's your name?" I told him, in my formal, professional, Don't Mess With Me tone, and he said, "Are you the girl...from before?" I smiled and said in my No Really Don't Mess With Me tone, "Yes, I am." "I'm Denny," he said, reaching his hand across the counter. I shook it at the same time that I took a slight step backward and thanked him for shopping. He told me what a pleasure it was to meet me. Yeah, I'll bet.

After he drifted away, I turned, coughed out my suppressed laughter, and, hot-faced, told the story to a couple of my coworkers who were staring curiously.

Ah, retail.

I also feel that I owe a general apology to my fellow Western PAers, as I have returned to the world of customer service in their midst. For the past four years, I have said, over and over, that the people of my native soil are unfriendly. It wasn't the proper classification. They're guarded. Hardly unfriendly, and, as I work among them, I keep finding myself struck by how very well bred we generally are. I do not come from a people who open up readily to others -- I'm no exception; my gift for openness doesn't eliminate the guardedness; while I don't hide much, the things I do keep, I keep close -- and who do not readily trust, but who do the decent thing, who utilize courtesy, and who, when they give of themselves, give of themselves completely and without reservation. This giving can occur in five minutes or fifty years; there are people at my church whom I will never know well, though I've known them fifteen years; at the same time, last week in the store, a middle-aged couple, perfect strangers, slightly gruff at first, told me all about how this is the three-year anniversary of having lost their son, and told me all about him, about the things he collected (major Trekkie), and cried.

Gruff, yes; guarded, yes; but above all, genuine. The people in this region aren't all nice, but they're up front about it. Most telling of all is how people respond to a greeting. When I ring people up at the register and ask, "How are you?" they always, nearly without fail, no matter what mood in which they appear to be, respond, "I'm fine; how are you?" I still haven't gotten over my delight at the reciprocation; it didn't happen often in Indiana or Michigan.

So my new conclusion is that people in the Midwest are nice; people in Western PA are kind, or, at least, well-bred. Hey, breeding still matters here; I suppose that only makes sense. And between "nice" and "kind" lie a vast universe of difference. "Nice" tends toward the superficial; "kind" goes down to the bone.

Teenagers, of course, present a raging exception. This past week a local choral group performed for awhile in the store, and I thought I would leave that night with Band-Aids on my palms from the cutting my fingernails gave them as I walked around pasting a smile on my face and mentally begging anything that might hear me to make the agony stop. I really, really don't like teenaged girls in groups in any event; then put a bunch of spoiled primadonnas together and make them sing as a "chorus" and you have a hideous cacophony of girls trying to outsing each other and sounding, as a result, like the screeching brakes of a steam engine, or a caroling group of Harpies. I spent a little time straightening the CDs on the wall farthest away from them in the store just so I could glare and make faces without giving bad PR.

But the spirit of sarcasm and cynicism finds allies everywhere. During the torture session, I went up to one of my coworkers, who warned me, just before I read it, that Eclipse was "a flaming pile of dogshit" (she wasn't exactly wrong, though I enjoyed it against every better literary judgment I possess), and muttered, "Make. It. Stop. Please, just make it stop."

"What?" she asked.

"The singing."

Instantly her eyes both cleared and lit with the black light that told me I'd found a kindred spirit. "I hate Christmas," she said. "I hate it all."

Had I had enough quiet to think, without nails flogging chalkboards as the girls went into a nauseating medley of meaningless Christmas pop, I would have started humming "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch." Later Steph asked, "Did someone tell you I hate Christmas?"

"No," I answered; "I just saw a fellow cynic in your face."

She laughed.

So I'm thoroughly enjoying this job while I have it. Since there's no guarantee for how long, considering that my title reads "Seasonal," I dropped off my resume to the Erie County Bar Association a few weeks ago -- apparently PA does its legal workers a service: The Bar Association would pass on my resume and letter of recommendation to any firm looking for legal support staff. Last week (I really can't believe it was just last week; time goes by so much more quickly when I have things to do) I received an email asking for an interview. I interviewed last Thursday, and then again this past Monday, and walked away with another part-time job that starts in early January.

Still a lot going on -- but all of it good. I'm tired, still not sleeping well, still having odd half-remembered dreams; but on the whole, I can't complain. With my immediate surroundings, I'm largely peaceful, almost happy, if not quite satisfied. I still don't have everything I want; but I suppose all things come with time, and in the meantime, I'm glad to have tasks to which to put my long-useless hands. Not quite enough, sometimes. But sufficient.

(Oh, that reminds me, that word, sufficient: I was thinking of 2 Corinthians 12:9, My grace is sufficient for you, last week, and what that meant, because I have heard that verse so often used to try to guilt people out of wishing they weren't suffering, like sufferers should be happy about their sufferings. But "sufficient" is an interesting word choice. (And oh, how I wish I knew Greek! I can only ever talk about the translations and sometimes it drives me crazy.) "Sufficient" doesn't imply an overflowing abundance; it implies, "enough on which to get by," or, according to the dictionary, "adequate to the purpose." Obviously grace is more than merely adequate, but I think in this verse God is acknowledging how difficult we find our circumstances from time to time, and isn't telling us that we shouldn't hurt in the things we suffer, isn't trying to make us "grin and bear it"; God isn't that callous. He just says, "My grace is sufficient. It's enough to get you through it. It will be more than just enough when you've had a little time and have grown to trust Me more. But for now, even though you don't understand, even though this really hurts you, my grace is sufficient. It's enough, because I love you. It's enough." And I found that thought extremely comforting.)

bing bang boom

1. I am the Unapologetic Geek (But I Still Laugh at Myself)

So I read Twilight in one sitting last night. I got absolutely no sleep, and I'm sure the circles under my eyes this morning rivaled those of any vampire, but even so, I woke up feeling alert and really great. Getting lost in a story heals me. Story heals me. I have always regarded my books as friends, not as mere vehicles for escape, and friends comfort, soothe, humor, encourage, entertain, share, and sustain. I have missed the burning popularity of the Harry Potter books, and I'm delighted to be a late-coming hop-on to yet another bandwagon book feeding frenzy. I don't subscribe to such an event often, and I like hovering on the outskirts of the buzz, the high, the mayhem, the shared obsession, the wide eyes and high voices as fans squeal and gush together, incoherent, unified by insanity, in love with literature.

Of course I have a long-standing yearning for good vampire fiction; paranormal lit seems to be growing at an astronomical rate, and I plan to ponder the social implications of the phenomenon later; but for the most part, the subject, while inspiring and creepy, generates terrible fiction -- lousy ideas, poor execution, deplorable writing. Bad all around. (Two shining exceptions: Sunshine by Robin McKinley, my favorite book of all time; and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.)

But Twilight wasn't bad. And while vampires have a strong macabre appeal generally, what I like most about the well-developed ones is their amazing vocabulary, their dextrous, intelligent syntax. Gorgeous, immortal, fast and strong, yeah, that's all well and good, very nice...but the vocabulary. When a guy knows how to use language, it's just....um. Very, very attractive. (Very.)

So, I'm a complete and utter dork. I embrace this. A girl can't help the way she's wired; and besides, it's funny. Today at work I helped a woman pick out dictionaries for all her grandkids, and regaled her with stories of how in my grade school days the assignments that took me the longest were my vocab lessons, because I spent hours reading the dictionary, pop-corning from one entry to the next, distracted and seduced by the guide words at the top of the pages. I had to break off my stories because when I pointed to the mammoth unabridged Websters on the top shelf and began an animated love story focusing on my own unabridged dictionary printed the year I was born, I saw that I was starting to scare her.

I really love that dictionary. Aside from containing a lot of words and the power to kill someone with a well-aimed fall, it has glorious etymologies.

2. My Lungs Thank David Sedaris

I read When You are Engulfed in Flames earlier this year, and "The Smoking Section" grabbed me. All of his books detail how much he has loved smoking, and I felt a deep and loyal affinity for this man who stubbornly went against society's norms and realized that some vices are better than their alternatives. So when I started this essay and read of his determination to quit smoking, I took it like a blow to the stomach. No, David! I thought, panicky, If you quit I might have to, because I smoke for similar reasons! You were my last justification!

His most striking method for quitting: move to Tokyo. I wasn't about to hop the ocean to give up a beloved habit, but the thought still lingered in my fumigated brain: Moving is a quitting trick. Hm.

Moving back to PA coincided with a desire to quit smoking -- a desire that hit me suddenly, unexpectedly, irrationally, and hard. The reversal was weird. I tried to go with it, but, lonely and miserable as I'd become accustomed to having my days be, the going was rough. I improved, but I didn't really quit. Not until I moved back home, where I had no associations with the habit. Nothing in town, anywhere in town, shouted, You used to smoke here! because I hadn't smoked anywhere, around here.

It helped. I broke the habit. But I still struggled with cravings, until a couple of weeks ago, forty-four-ish days after quitting, when, in a fit of rebellion, I bought my own special brand (Camel Lights) during a Girls' Night Out, and lit up.

I was shocked. It was disgusting. I hated it. I stared at the burning thing in my hand, wondering how I'd ever enjoyed it. My companions didn't smoke, so I was all alone outside, in the falling snow, undergoing a complete mental renovation. The practice held no appeal any longer. I didn't want to smoke. It was completely, utterly, and abjectly gross.

Since then I haven't wanted one. Not during the stressful moments at work, not during the lonely moments at the trailer, not during the depressed moments. I've lost track of how many days it's been since I quit. It doesn't matter. I think a key aspect of the transformation was making it public -- had I huffed and puffed in secret, it might have held more sway. But even as I slapped the pack against my palm and fumbled to ignite the lighter with my numb fingers, with G. and B. sitting inside, knowing, slightly disapproving, but accepting, I was horribly ashamed of myself. Not the kind of shame that makes a person crawl back into the nasty hole and keep doing whatever it was he or she was doing, helplessly, secretly, compulsively; the good healthy shame, as if something had materialized in the air next to me with its fists on its hips and was looking sternly at my soul and saying, What are you doing? You decided. Knock it off already! and my soul said...Oh. Yeah. What am I doing? And then I didn't want to do it anymore.

And this, ladies and gentleman, is another reason why we're supposed to live in community, and not in isolation. We bear each other up, and keep each other straight. G. and B., I'm grateful.

I'm grateful to David, too. And I advocate moving as an excellent quitting strategy. It takes most of the power out of the cravings, because the force of habit has a harder time getting its bearings, and instead of raging and roaring, it mewls and nags. Mewling and nagging are annoying, and easier to ignore.

3. O My Prophetic Soul

I knew I should have taken the Bayfront. I knew it.

I thought this to myself a second after the car slammed into the cement barrier separating the left lane of eastbound I-90 from the dropoff of the overpass. The back of my head throbbed and my heart felt weird and the shakiness struck almost at once, but I shut off the tear valve and took a few deep breaths before scrambling for the interior light and the four-ways. My parents' Toyota had wrenched to a whirling halt and now sat facing oncoming traffic.

It was dark, between eight and nine o'clock, snowy, freezing, wet. I had been on my way home from work, exhausted and hungry, and I'd elected to take 90 because the car needed gas, the only gas stations in Millcreek are on Peach Street, and 90 is a lot closer to Peach; getting back to the Bayfront meant doubling back and losing time, and I was sick of traffic, slightly misanthropic, and I just wanted to get home to read New Moon. As I passed one of the on-ramps halfway home the black ice claimed my traction before I had time to react; all I could do, spinning out at fifty-five miles an hour, was aim for the barrier and brace myself for the impact.

I was still all in one piece. I knew I should have taken the Bayfront. I'd ignored a fleeting bad feeling about 90 in the snow and bad weather; my intuition about road conditions is always spot-on, but apparently I'm still young enough to dismiss prudence in favor of the breezy conviction that It Won't Happen to Me. I clenched my fists, shoving any thoughts harshly to the back of my mind that might augment shock and lead to panic, such as how miraculous it was that I'd landed up on the rocks hogging the left lane just at the spot where the on-ramp made an extra lane so that traffic could flow around me. I was alone, nobody was stopping (and I'd have probably sent them away if they did); I could only rely on myself, and I had to rely on myself to keep calm. The car had stalled out when the concrete stopped it in fifth gear with my foot off the clutch; I couldn't remember where the car had struck, but the first thing I needed to do was see if the car would start.

It did. Throwing it in neutral and locking the emergency brake, I stepped out of the car to survey the severity of the collision. The huge bank of snow shoved up against the concrete had muffled my impact, and it didn't look as though the car were much damaged. I looked over the roof and saw, about a foot from where I'd settled, a long clean scrape where the concrete had been slashed free of snow. About twenty feet further down was another. The rear right of the car had taken the impact both times.

The wind was horrible, the temperature bitter, so I climbed back into the car, eased it into first, kept the four-ways and the interior light on, and watched for an opening in traffic. When it came, I eased the Toyota into first and drove it off the snowbank and back onto the road.

The gears all worked fine, but suddenly it totally, completely, miserably sucked that nobody knew, and I decided to pull over to give the car a more thorough going-over in a safer place, and call my parents. After I'd put on the four-ways yet again, I reached for my phone, and couldn't find it. The force of the collision had yanked it free of the charger, and it had disappeared.

The first thing that went through my mind was the answer to an old argument I'd had with my sister, about why I should keep important phone numbers in a non-phone-contact-list place, in case I were ever in a car accident and died, and my family needed to notify my friends. Um, they'd find your cell phone, she'd said. You don't know that, I'd replied. What if it got totally smashed up in the crash? What if all these people suddenly thought I didn't care about them anymore and that's why I wasn't calling, when in reality I was dead? (Hey, I'm a Virgo. I plan for every contingency.) Whatever, she answered. But now, scrabbling around in the front seat, on the floor, between the seats and the console, I thought, Ha! You can't rely on cell phones. Nyah.

Then, still unable to find it, thinking that now nobody knew I was alive, that I'd had any other reason to be otherwise, I felt the panic coming on (that phone has been the only thing linking me to humanity for over a year), and to keep it quelled -- since if I'd been able to call someone I would have been able to turn it into a joke and find the funny in the situation -- I turned off the car, kept on the four-ways, locked it up, and ran back the hundred yards or so to the accident scene, dodging traffic, knowing I was being terribly, unforgiveably stupid, but unable to stop thinking that the phone had flown into my lap in the collision and I had knocked it to the ground when I got out of the car. I needed to move. And I needed that phone.

It wasn't at the scene; I did recover a hubcap. I jogged back to the car, lungs hurting, and got back in and turned it back on for the heat. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't leave without my cell phone; I don't know anyone's number by heart anymore. I fixated on that to stop thinking about the even scarier fact that had gusted over me on my jog, watching the steadiness of traffic -- there hadn't been any other car on the road when I spun out. There could have been.

And then I looked up in my rearview, and, joy of joys, I saw the whirling red and blue of a lightbar pulling up behind me. Cops! I thought, giddy with not being alone anymore, relaxing instantly into the comfortable familiary of my childhood: I'm safe, everything is taken care of, he'll help me. I slowly opened the door and got out, huddled against the side of the car, restraining myself from dashing headlong to the cruiser and throwing myself at the officer only by the knowledge that he'd shoot me if I rushed him. I shivered and waited for him to decide I wasn't a threat, staring pleadingly into his headlights.

He was young, square-jawed, nice. He asked if anyone else were involved, took the report, invited me to sit in the back of the cruiser while he took down the insurance, registration, drivers licence. I leaned the aching back of my head against the headrest and closed my eyes, answered his questions.

When he let me out of the car and handed my information back and wished me well, and I said helplessly, "I can't find my phone. I need to call my parents...I'll just keep looking for it," he thought for a second and offered me the use of his cell. He let me back into his car, I dialed my mom's number, it went to voicemail. He heard it, said, "Voicemail?" "Yeah, but she'll call back and then I'll hear my phone ring," I said. He asked, "D'you want me to just call your phone?"

That had struck me as the most logical, though the most presumptuous step as soon as I'd seen the lightbar in my rearview, and I said, "Oh, that would be great, thank you so much!" and he let me out of the car again and I went back to the Toyota and stuck my head in the door, heard the phone, threw myself on my knees in the slush and dug it out from under the seat, rose jubilant, thanking him for his trouble. He wished me well again, said he'd wait till I pulled out, I got back in the car, eased into traffic, was on my way.

I took an early exit; the black ice was omnipresent. As I guided the car -- running smoothly and with only a dent in the rear panel -- slowly down the long road that descends from The Hill, I laughed suddenly to myself, thinking that I'd managed to give a state trooper my number. All I wanted was for him to help me find my phone.

I kept the phone in my lap the whole way home.

I also decided to wait till tomorrow to unleash this particular story on my parents. By then it will be funny and I can perform all the proper reassurances, and figure out how to help them replace the rear panel. Tonight I'm just grateful that something which could have been truly horrible was instead pretty anticlimactic and nondescript, rendering my delayed panic and shock rather silly. (Though I maintain that my guardian angel must be very tired -- while this is my first accident in which I was the driver who lost control, I've been in plenty others -- and I hope that when I float in through the pearly gates, he gets a vacation. I'll take him to lunch, whatever angels eat.)

The aches and pains are creeping in. My body is going to hate me tomorrow.

who'm I?

Whew. I had forgotten how retail completely drains one. Those who sneer at the profession have no idea how much constant problem-solving is involved, and when you toss customer service into that mix, you have a really challenging job. Fun, though. I get to turn on the charm and smile and help people and forget about everything that exists outside the store.

After days of answering questions and helping people find these products, and after constant "this is where I am in the books" updates from John, I have caved and purchased Twilight. I don't even know why I resisted so long; I've been dying to read this series for quite some time.

My head aches -- I think I forgot to eat today -- my knees would love to kill me -- I can't think clearly -- I close my eyes and see store signage --

Ahh, retail. How I've missed thee.

Funny how many things are so much easier now. I know the basic ropes from my stint in this field before, and...I don't know. Maybe I've gotten used to fudging things and learning on the fly, but I'm a lot more unflappable and ten thousand times more confident. Which is already gaining me more hours.

I have enough mental energy to formulate this and no more. Tonight demands lying supine on the couch with a candle burning and a Grolsch close to hand, eyes riveted on the pages of a new, lovely, fun, absorbing book.

Thank God for language, the written word, and the human imagination.

miscellaneous, random, purposeless and happy

In my regular life, things continue to move apace. I suppose it speaks to my complete and hopeless geekiness, but I love working at Borders. And I do mean love. I enjoy working with people, and the whole world knows I love books, and so far I have found the combination delightful. Perhaps, too, a break from desk jobbing does me good (although I'm looking for one of those too, to supplement my income. I've interviewed for two other jobs this week; this morning's took place at a small Erie law firm. I want the job; it's merely a question of how important a flexible schedule is to my newly called purpose. If I get this job I'll be working many, many hours every week -- basically I'll be one super busy girl, with earning a living and starting a church revolution in my hometown. So I'm not sure what God has in store. Whatever money I need, He'll provide; so we'll see what happens). Plus too -- and this I really love -- a fast-paced, one-thing-after-another kind of job, where people are mostly in good moods and like to chat, gives me zero time to brood. It takes me out of my own head and plants me firmly in the present and in humanity, which is a.) healthy and b.) helpful for gathering further fodder for future reflections.

The weather today typifies Erie -- rainy, overcast, sunless. I had forgotten the grayness. For whatever reason, perhaps because it's bred into the bone, it doesn't seem to be affecting my depression. (Lately I feel like I should give my depression a name; it's like some weird parasite to which I must always refer, and which doesn't really have a pronoun. It's like an evil, sentient, murderous, sneaky pet. Like an octopus. Remember the battle with the octopus in Island of the Blue Dolphins? Karana called it a devilfish. Maybe that's what I'll start calling the depression. The devilfish.) In fact, while the depression still manifests its daily presence, the Bad Head Days have practically vanished. Now I have Bad Head Moments instead, and those have decreased in frequency as well. This irritating condition is becoming, finally, manageable (maybe even soon I'll have the energy to do a Happy Dance about it!). And today, with the weather dreary and nothing on my schedule till the evening, and with my now-busy weekend due to suddenly increased hours at Borders (yay!), I feel that I will spend my time cleaning up the trailer while watching Cars and then listening to Christmas music.

Oh, speaking of cute animated movies...I finally saw Wall-e for the first time last week and LOVED it. Oh. My. Gosh. (Yes. I cried. A lot.) So much heart.

So things are going really, really well. My high school friend Gina had me over to dinner with another friend of hers yesterday; we get together about once a week; and I've been doing lunch and dinner with other gals too, so for the first time in about a year and a half my social cup is starting to fill. Which is remarkably satisfying. (Oh dear. So many italics.)

I actually love gray days, because I can go for walks and enjoy the browns and ochres and seres and muted greens of the woods (one of these days I'm going to hike up the little hill that hems in the west side of the trailer park to the cemetery sprawling over the hilltop to visit my grandfather's grave. I haven't seen it since he was buried there almost nine years ago, and I miss him, and I have always found cemeteries to be restful, quiet places of reflective peace). Gray days in early winter also seem to necessitate the lighting of many candles and the playing of jazz. (I don't know why jazz. It probably won't be jazz today; probably, instead, will be old Christmas records from the sixties and seventies converted to cassette tapes converted to CDs. I shamelessly adore "Seasons Greetings from Perry Como.") Also the stimulating comfort of mate. (Mmm...I can already taste the tea and smell the palo santo...) So I'm looking forward to the afternoon -- somehow being at home on a weekday feels clandestine and makes me smug. (And if you remove all the parentheticals from this paragraph you wind up with three short sentences and a phrase. In college my friends accused my conversations of taking sudden trips around the world before returning to the original point.)

Simon and I had a Moment this morning. I had just settled onto the couch to finish reading Galatians -- this time around, somehow, I appreciated it more than I ever have before; usually I view the epistles as obligatory, "eh" sort of books; but with all the thoughts working themselves out in my head lately, about love and God being love, the focus of Galatians on freedom and living in the Spirit of God, which is to say the Spirit of Love, had a huge joyful impact -- when I looked up and saw my kitty boy sitting on the desk across the room looking at me with round, sad owl eyes: I had forgotten to open the drapes for him to perch on the desk and stare out the window. So I jumped up and fixed the problem, and he turned his head to look out the window, and I bent to kiss him between the ears (he has such a kissable wrinkly little kitty forehead), and he tipped his head back and bumped his nose gently against my nose, purring.

I got all warm and fuzzy inside; I love that cat. I don't know how I would have gotten through the last few years without him; he is unusually gifted in empathy, he adores me, and he's such an intelligent, good cat. He doesn't take advantage of my forgetful absentmindedness on a bad day; I can leave raw meat or cooked meat or butter or cheese sitting on the counter and he'll never touch it. He won't use anything but his litterbox. He has adapted almost completely to his erratic feeding schedule, attaching his understanding of when he gets fed to my routine, and not to a time of day. If I'm wandering around in a kind of haze, he'll hook a paw around my ankle when I walk by to remind me that he's there. He makes me laugh. He tears around the house acting ridiculous and trots up to me to throw himself on the ground at my feet, all proud of himself for his cuteness. He hates when I disappear into the bathroom to shower, and curls up right outside the door waiting for me to reemerge, sometimes sticking his paws under the door, sometimes (less endearingly) sitting with his face to the doorjamb and screaming. Yup. I heart Simon.

And on a less gushy note, I saw a headline yesterday that threw me into serious indecision. I couldn't select a reaction to it -- disgust? derision? mockery? I selected derisive, disgusted, mocking laughter, with a dash of sorrow for the plummeting of modern intelligence.

The headline read, "Illusion Plays Mind Tricks."

No shit, sheriff.

tremors of a coming change

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

~T. S. Eliot

I feel it in the bones of my soul. Straight to the marrow, it's burning -- something coming.

It's like pieces of a puzzle are beginning to fall into place -- not enough to discern the whole picture, perhaps, but a hazy construct of a picture. Things are beginning to make a little more sense.

For instance...over the past few years, God has not called me to a career. He never really has. All my life I've heard whispering in my blood, Change the world. Nothing more. (Nothing less, either.) All my subsequent stabs at ambition and employment have been attempts to figure out how.

I have felt a huge sense of shame in my lack of career drive. Since graduating from college, I've worked in childcare, retail, nonprofit, law; and now I have landed back in retail. I have never really wanted to go further than entry level in any of those fields, and, with all of my friends pursuing academic or professional careers, or settling into steady, important jobs, I have metaphorically tucked my head into my chest and wondered what was wrong with me, that nothing I could think of doing sounded right. Temporality suited me, and bothered me because it suited me, because, above and over and underneath each little crap-paying job the conviction ran like liquid fire through my veins: the call to greatness. The call to something really, really big. I knew it, believed it, and couldn't place it among the completely unprestigious jobs I worked that have never required much of my intellect or gifts.

All I've had to go on has been the call. It comes in various forms at various times and places. Senior year of college, tired of school and casting about for a future, I heard only, Go west. This autumn, exhausted and depressed and desperate, I heard only, Go home. As with my move to South Bend four years ago, so now I know about my return to Erie: temporary, brief: a season. I have something to do here; but in the end, I won't stay. The call will come again.

It wakes me up sometimes. I don't remember when it began, but at some point, just on the verge of waking in the mornings, I started hearing my name. (Apparently nearly everybody hears things from time to time and most people won't admit it, so don't chalk me up to schizophrenia just yet.) Quietly, sometimes once, sometimes twice: Sarah. Sarah. I wake up with a jolt and wonder what it is I'm supposed to do. I heard it the other morning. I'm usually too sleep-stupid to respond as I'd like: Here I am, Lord. But it keeps me alert.

Whatever it is, it's coming. And I think I'm beginning to catch flashes of it. I'm getting a clue. It has to do with the young singles in all the churches in my hometown -- with bringing everyone together in a way that encompasses theological difference and still embraces community-wide unity in the faith. I've blogged about that a little bit before. But here's the crazy part: The groundwork is already laid. I learned from J. the other night that our town has a Clergy Council which represents nearly every church in the community; the reverends/pastors/priests/etc. meet once a month. There's also a Youth Services Council comprised of the heads of the community's church youth groups. My friend L. has a vision of bringing together all the singles in the area to interact, socialize, and study Scripture, and she's a mover and shaker; I have a vision of bringing together all the singles in the area for service projects. (As I said in Sunday school this week, "The church needs to harness the raw power of the singles. We have no real obligations beyond our jobs, and we have a ton of repressed sexual energy that could be channeled to impact communities for the love of God.") We can totally combine all three. Further, the local youth center holds a gathering for college-aged (18-35) "kids" every Thursday night...great venue to begin.

L. and I are meeting this week to put our heads together and start hashing out details. (I'm not oblivious to the problems -- for example, an all-denominations-welcome Bible study has to incorporate some kind of check system to dissolve the inevitable doctrinal arguments that will arise so that it doesn't turn into a war and ruin both the active love between believers and the curiosity of people new to Christianity.) I'd like to come up with a solid proposal, a vision and a plan, to present to the Clergy Council at their next meeting. From there we can gather contacts and get in touch with the right people at each church and start getting these hilltop beacons lit.

My conviction keeps growing that each church's tendency to define "the body of Christ" as the members of its own congregation is erroneous; in any community, the body of Christ is all the churches working together. It has to be. I want to find out how they already do. I want to find out each church's special ministry. I want to get a feel for what each church does, and how each church functions. I want all the young people, all the Gen-X and Gen-Y-ers, to start coming together to tear down the Berlin Walls that separate church from church in our hometown, and start impacting the community with the unconditional, ever-present love of God for every man, woman and child within it. I want to see all of us come together in our universal brokenness and learn how to be loved, and to love. I want to see the real, and not the make-believe. I want unity to be gritty, stubborn, honest, authentic. I want us to live in the total freedom of God's total love.

"Changes, come...Jesus, come..."

I don't know how exactly all of this is going to be accomplished. I haven't been told. I'm only one person. I'm not perfect, I'm not strong, I don't have it all together; but nobody is and nobody does, and that's where big things start to happen, and it usually starts small. And since this is the season where we observe and celebrate the small beginnings of the big -- a slippery human infant lying in a crust of livestock feed, the rescue of the world -- I believe there is no better time than now. (Now is the day of salvation...)

I think perhaps all of this is part of why I have no burning career ambitions. I don't know for sure. But I have a work to do, just my small part, and I don't know where it's headed or how it will turn out, but for right here, right now, in this particle of space-time, this is what I'm meant to do, and low-wage part-time jobs with flexible hours will suit this kind of work. It's time.

Universe, because the Yes is welling up like living fire, because I keep hearing my name, because the changes are coming and the foundations are laid, because I am being pushed, drawn; because of my brokenness, because I'm a train wreck, because I'm small and weak and poor and screwed up and afraid, because I am deeply loved in all of my wreckage, because I am redeemed and learning that redemption means not perfection but learning to hold a bigger hand; despite the backlash, the inevitable failures, the clash of Christian with Christian, despite the difficulties and the obstacles and the wrong kinds of stubbornness; and always, always because of Love...

Universe, I dare.

the still point

It's hard to describe my love affair with my piano. Yesterday I thanked Mom for not getting rid of it; I'm the only person who plays it, and it does take up a good chunk of the dining room. Coming back to it was like...like taking a walk along an old path in a patch of woods bordering a town you haven't visited in years, and just as you stop on the pine-needled trail to look down at the creek pouring through the gorge a remnant of a poem you used to recite from memory just at that spot seizes your brain and you lose track of time completely trying to summon to your consciousness the entire piece. Or seeing an old friend for the first time in many years and watching the past collide with the present, the half-forgotten expressions, the sound of your friend's laughter, the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, and swimming in the wash of what used to be, what still is, and what has changed.

There's a trick to triggering memory. Once again, my technique at the piano was never masterful, and I didn't advance to hugely intricate compositions (more's the pity; I'd love to take lessons again); but I loved expression, and while I went off on a Jim Brickman spree toward the end of my lessons my senior year in high school (my gosh, it's been almost ten years), now as I leaf through the old books and sit down to old music, I find that I still love best the classical pieces. Nonetheless, I started out with Jim Brickman a few weeks ago, for the excuse of playing Christmas music too early, and found that, in his case, the trick is to fudge it. His pieces are fluffy and pretty and easy to listen to, full of eighth and sixteenth notes and tons of syncopation, and having once gone to great pains to place each note just so, metronomically, it's just a matter of getting back into that mindset to gloss over the playing, glancing at a string of notes and seeing the chord they piece together and making of it what you will.

Unfortunately I didn't find that very interesting; fluffy and pretty and easy to listen to don't present a strong compulsion to the player. (Sorry, Jim.) So then it was Grieg for a couple of weeks, and then a lovely simple little piece, "To a Wild Rose," by Edward MacDowell; and finally, tremblingly, this week I returned to my oldest and most passionate love, Claude Debussy.

I love Debussy for so many reasons. As the only Impressionist composer during the Impressionist period of the arts, he wrote his pieces expressly for expression. If you play his compositions in technical, metronomic perfection, you've lost the soul of the music; and finding the soul of the music is what I've always loved best. Kerry selected Debussy for me for that reason, as a way to rescue me from my miserable and terrified method of playing grilled into me by my first teacher. I believe one of the things he told me, opening my book to "La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin," was, "Don't worry so much about rhythm with Debussy. Be expressive."

So in this composer I found a measure of salvation from my own private Reign of Terror by the woman who forced me to play Sonatinas erased of emotion. Debusssy paints portraits in notes and chords as rich, textured and vivid as anything Monet did with paint. I loved "La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin" ("The Girl with the Flaxen Hair") because the notes and chords spun in my mind a scene: a young woman with long, unbound yellow hair walking through a blowing green hilltop field on a late spring day, barefoot, with dandelions and sunshine in her hair, and then sitting on a rock to look over the landscape with her hair moving around her in the wind.

I memorized that piece for a recital, and when I sat down to it this week, I was surprised and thrilled to find that some of the notes, in some of the more difficult spots, hadn't left me; my fingers knew exactly where to go. I couldn't play it perfectly, of course; in some places I had to stop and pick my way through; but on the whole it still sounded pretty. Encouraged, I finally turned back ten pages to my everlasting favorite, "Clair de Lune."

I started it holding my breath. I'd memorized this one, too, and had kept it memorized long after I stopped taking lessons, and I loved this piece with my whole lonely beauty-stricken heart, and I was terrified that I would butcher it, that it had left me, that I had forgotten.

But there's a trick to Debussy too -- at least, in my case, to the songs I'd once memorized and now through which I found myself trying to wade through memory as I sight-read: Let go. I don't know how the physiology would look; but it feels like I stop using my frontal lobe and somewhere in the back of my head -- the part of the brain they say is wired for prayer, the part of the brain that seems to expand when I read good poetry -- I lose the boundaries of myself, step over them, and become a conduit, a radiant filament blazing with the music pouring through my body, and my arms, my hands, my fingers go, not where I tell them, but where the music directs. I vanish. There is only the heart and the soul of the music.

Flawless playing, for me, depends almost entirely on that loss of self. When I think, about the music or about anything, when I become aware of me, aware of the notes on the page, of my uncertainties of getting it right, I fall out of that perfect state of grace and my fingers are my fingers, my hands my hands, and they slip and stumble and then it's just me attempting to play a song. The moment I notice that I have lost myself in the music, I lose the expansiveness and return to this "beating heart...in the walking bones," these boundaries of me.

Usually I can only soar in the arresting of space and time, that still dance, that whirling center for a few seconds; and I can only exist there with pieces I know, or once knew, well. It's an amusingly choppy experience at the moment -- a measure that gave me trouble the last time I played it suddenly blossoms under my fingers in perfection; the next measure, which seemed to reach its perfect embodiment through my playing the last time through suddenly becomes as though I've never played it at all. Which necessitates careful, conscious practice of the whole thing -- frustrating because the moments of remembrance come and go, like being suspended in the ocean and caught between wave and wave: One moment I'm borne along by something much stronger than I am; the next I'm floundering; and then I'm caught up again.

So it's sort of muddy at the moment. But the times when my consciousness doesn't betray me are perfect. I feel vibrantly, gloriously alive; and, because I'm caught in an eternal kind of now, I don't realize how alive I feel until later, like a scrap of poetry I wrote years back (you can tell) to describe the experience of reading, which bears itself out similarly to playing music:

When I read
I am in a bare room

where dust motes drift
over rough pine boards

and a braided rug
draws sunlight into color,
warm on my feet

and where the rockers of my chair
ruminate upon the stillness.

In the light heat
kindled by the twigs of letters
I glow like coals,
so intense
that I do not even know
I am perfectly happy.

My favorite part of "Clair de Lune" is actually the last run of notes, converging in a deep, widely ranging chord, held together by the damper pedal. When that last high A flat drops its ethereal ring into the air, the deeper notes suddenly reverberate beneath it, the middle notes thread throughout, and they all waver, pulse, breathe for a few perfect seconds, and the beauty makes it hard to draw air into the lungs. Something in the pit of my stomach comes untied, and then the pedal and the fingers lift, the notes fall away with a "dying fall," and in the silence something echoes that shivers along the lines of time; and the chest expands, the clock ticks, and everything is ordinary, and at peace.

then sings my soul

So it's been a long year...
~Over the Rhine, Snow Angels

What a year so far. I love that Thanksgiving comes just close enough to the end of the year that the remaining month can fall into a certain peaceful perspective as everyone prepares for the increasing rigors of Christmas. (Although I'm wondering if the state of the economy, and everyone's basic poverty, will make for simpler, more joyful Christmases this year -- stripping things down to the essentials, as it were. Hey, I can hope.) There's always something to complain about, and life is always difficult to some degree; I love, and am growing to love more as I get a little older, the institution of Thanksgiving -- a day consecrated to the pondering of blessings, to the celebration of good things even in the face of hardship, to joy.

So for what am I thankful, this Thanksgiving of my twenty-seventh year? I am thankful for how I have been brought through one of the most difficult times of my life; I am thankful to be home; I am thankful for the weapons forged in my hands against fear; I am thankful for my parents, for my sister, for my brother-in-law, for how miraculously God has raised a phoenix from ash in our family; I am thankful for the work God is doing in me, for the transformations taking place that I hadn't thought possible; I am thankful for a job (yes, a job! I am now gainfully employed at Borders -- hardly prestigious, to be sure, but in many ways I'm looking forward, greatly, to returning to retail...and income!), for God's timely and promised provision.

I am thankful for snow, for brown leaves on almost-bare trees, for the brooding half-winter lake, for the hills. I am thankful for friends new and old, for loved ones here and far away, for deepening closenesses, for Meg and Phillip and Josie. I am thankful for Simon, whose cuteness and absolute trust comfort me immeasurably. I am thankful for the redemption of time. I am thankful for new beginnings, for bends in the road whispering of new and thrilling unknowns to come. I am thankful for things and people that are too full to put into words, too deeply moving to render on this blog. I am thankful for language, for love, for mystery. I am thankful for the laughter that prevents me from taking myself too seriously too frequently, that unites soul to soul, that heals. I am learning to be thankful for life in the question. I am thankful for promises, and for change. I am thankful for what I have learned through the difficult things of the past year, and for the beautiful things that have sustained me through the difficult things.

I am thankful for you, my dear and faithful readers, whose encouragement over the past four years has kept me writing and sharpened my vision and my focus. I am thankful that somewhere, out there, the private thoughts that I scribble from a keyboard in Western Pennsylvania are heard and understood all over the country, the continent, the globe. Some of you I know very well; some of you I have never met; but on this American holiday of rendering thanks to the Giver of all good things, I give thanks for, and love, all of you. Thank you, so much, for reading.

the lovers, the dreamers and me

I'd like to say that I've always found them magical and mesmerizing. I'd like to pontificate on how they've impacted my soul my entire life, signified something incredible since my childhood, but none of that really applies. Unlike most of the signs in the created order which I hold personally dear (stars, trees, thunderstorms, dew-decked spiderwebs, fireflies, fog), rainbows, like rain, only began to emerge as reminders of divine promises in my early adulthood.

Rainbows themselves as a scientific occurrence always fascinated me, I suppose -- some of my earliest childhood memories involve Mom and Laura and me dashing outside after a rainstorm and jumping around ankle-deep in wet grass looking for a clear view of the sky (our yard boasts more trees than any on the block) in hopes of sighting a rainbow. Science and art class yielded their own fruits on the subject which I also enjoyed. My favorite source, of course, was Genesis, featuring the rainbow as the conclusion to Noah and the Flood, and also hallmarking one of the only specific origin myths of a natural phenomenon in the Bible.*

But while God's setting the rainbow in the sky as a sign of His promise never again to flood the whole earth is a fabulous story, it never struck me as immediately compelling every time I saw a rainbow. I didn't really think, "Oh, look, a rainbow -- thank God there'll never be a worldwide flood again, I was really worried about that, whew." I was more inclined to ponder prisms and light waves, and the beauty of a dark waterlogged sky alive with sunshine.

Something happened over the past year, though -- I kept seeing them everywhere, far more frequently than I'd ever remembered noticing them before. Possibly the flatness of the landscape in southwest Michigan, and the resultant broadness of the expanse of sky, had to do with it; but it still struck me as weird that they were pretty much everywhere, and cropped up when a rainbow was the farthest thing from my mind. Driving to Meg and Phillip's on a Friday night, looking casually up to check the weather on my way out the door from work, heading south into Mishawaka to catch dinner with Boss-Lady -- quite often the least intentional glances pinned my vision on a glowing ribbon of spliced light hanging between sun and cloud.

They usually materialized (or whatever; although now that they've proven that E = mc squared I suppose I can talk of light in terms of matter) just before, during, or immediately after a rough patch -- a bad day, a bad week. A rainbow sighting began to feel comforting, though inexplicably. I felt that maybe God was telling me something, and my antennae was on the wrong frequency to pick up the meat of the message. I kept casting around in my brain for any reason why a promise not to flood the earth would have any meaning for me in a difficult time. I can be something of a literalist, you see, and worldwide floods didn't seem to have much to do with the difficulty of my little life.**

Then one morning a couple of weeks ago, I didn't feel like reading further in Galatians and, yielding to whimsy, flipped to Isaiah, my favorite Old Testament book (such divine passion, such beautiful promises, such poetry), and let the pages fall where they would. My eyes fell on this:

The LORD calls you back,
like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,
A wife married in youth and then cast off,
says your God.
For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with great tenderness I will take you back.
In an outburst of wrath, for a moment
I hid my face from you;
But with enduring love I take pity on you,
says the LORD, your redeemer.

This is for me like the days of Noah,
when I swore that the waters of Noah
should never again deluge the earth;
So I have sworn not to be angry with you,
or to rebuke you.
Though the mountains leave their place
and the hills be shaken,
My love shall never leave you
nor my covenant of peace be shaken,
says the LORD, who has mercy on you. (Isaiah 54: 6-10, The New American Bible)

Falling as it did in the middle of the beginning of my discovery of God's unchanging love for me, this passage brought tears to my eyes, and I underlined it and read it several times and loved it, savoring in particular "I have sworn not to be angry with you," and "My love shall never leave you."

I still didn't make the connection.

Then about a week later, on the phone with my mother, I noticed that the snow-sleet-rain mix pouring from the sky was lit to glass by a ferocious sun. Running out to the porch, I scanned the eastern horizon and located the rainbow, a broad sash in the sky over the orchard. I told Mom about it, and then suddenly stopped hearing her as the implication bowled me over.

This is for me like the days of Noah...

How had I missed that? How had anyone? How had no one in all my years of Bible study ever mentioned how the symbolism of the rainbow took on a profound new significance in the context of grace and unconditional love? Rainbows aren't just a sign of no-more-flood; they signify a "covenant of peace."

So now rain, which has over the past five years come to signify to me (on experiential, and not textual, basis) the presence and provision of God, has deepened and broadened to include the rainbow, signifier of the love of God.

Which meant a lot to me today, admitting the resurgence of yet another bad stretch (well, I knew it wasn't going to be cured just because I was going home) and taking a deep breath to start fighting again.*** It meant a lot to me particularly because on the way home from a difficult weekend, feeling stretched a little too tightly and brittle in the face of all the unknowns yawning at me, while I talked on the phone with my childhood best friend I looked out the window and there, in the overcast Western PA sky, despite a hazy sun dim enough behind the clouds to look at directly and no precipitation falling at all, hung a clear slash of rainbow, stillness to my motion, but seeming to match the pace of the car, so that as I talked I could stare at the spliced prismic beauty of a multilayered promise, and know that however difficult things are, have been, will be, however I might fail in faith and hope, the love of God will never leave me.


Footnotes:

* Obviously I'm not including the entire Creation story of Genesis, where everything that exists is attributed to the creative power of one God, or the Tower of Babel, which explains the multiplicity of human languages; by "specific" I mean an explanation of why something is the way it is in nature. Greek mythology, for example, specializes in origin myths -- the rebellion of Prometheus explains the existence of fire; the abduction of Persephone by Hades and the subsequent wandering search of Persephone's mother Demeter, goddess of agricultural growth, and her neglect of her tasks explains winter; Zeus' weapons of anger explain thunder; etc. The Bible places the coming-into-being of almost every natural thing at the very beginning, and all from the hand of God. Rainbows therefore are interesting in that they come into being later, and stand as a sign of a promise.

** Yes, you can think me obtuse and stupid, especially when the words I generally use to describe depression involve trying to stay afloat in vast bodies of water without any land in sight. That connection didn't occur to me until just now, which strikes me as amusing; but even so, I'm generally wary of drawing sweeping parallels between a promise to the world about something literal and a promise to me about something metaphorical.

***I decided today that depression is the hibernation of the will and diseased hope, since human beings cannot live without hope and a person mired in depression begins to see life as an endless stretch of colorless unchanging days blank of excitement or interest or companionship or vitality or joy. Of course immediately after that decision I started thinking about The Neverending Story and the Swamps of Sadness, and how death in the swamp came from giving up hope; and then I started thinking about Paul's brief statement And now these three remain, faith, hope and love, and then the author of Hebrews' Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see, and how faith and hope and love are all interconnected and depression swallows all three which is what makes life to the depressed individual so untenable, for if these three are the only things that remain, and they're gone, or veiled, no wonder the void is so horrifying, like The Nothing, which consumes everything, which is worse than death.

And then I thought how fighting depression requires the forcible resurrection of the will -- the will to will, if you will -- which is why it's so difficult. I also thought about despair, which is etymologically the literal absence of hope (the English word "hope" is Germanic in origin, so we don't tend to catch the Latinate "sperare" -- the root for "hope," noticeable in the Romance languages, e.g. "esperanza" (n.) for "hope" in Spanish -- which renders "de" "sperare": to be without hope). Despair is only definable in terms of hope, in terms of hope's absence. And I believe that the will is vitally connected to hope, because the will, which involves volition and desire as well as choice, seems to have little purpose in human terms without hope, because why would one will anything if not for the hope of something good to come out of it? -- and hope also has to do with desire, and hope involves faith, since hope is partially comprised of belief, and love is at the foundation of everything.

But it's funny how, even when everything seems melodramatically to be dead, mired, sunk, drowning, empty, void, remnants of faith, hope, and love still remain (perhaps Paul was talking not just about their existence but their stubbornness -- they remain, as if they choose to remain despite all odds) to buoy the will. Also I have finally admitted to the hilarious, contrary fact that despite all my struggles with this stupid affliction, I am incurably an optimist -- for which I am extremely grateful, and for which I give myself absolutely no credit. Life is too beautiful, and there are too many promises (one of my favorites: I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living...), to allow the will to curl up and die. Sorry; there's too much left to see, too much to do. It will all turn around one of these days. Keep on keepin' on. Keep on tryin'. And then, unexpectedly: joy.