I have a migraine. I've been battling it off for weeks (maybe that's where the bad mood comes in -- I keep trying to identify sources. It's going to spin off into ridiculousness. My head itches. Maybe that's why Bad Mood. My cat missed the litterbox again. Maybe that's why Bad Mood. The phone rang. Maybe that's why...etc.) but at some point there's bound to be a system failure and the migraine will come surging through the cracks like a vicious, clamping flood tide.
I'm headache prone anyway, and often enough they aren't migraines, but I'm pretty sure this one is. There's this inability to concentrate, the light hurts my eyes and so I feel this compulsion not to wear my glasses (I don't know why this helps, maybe being nearsighted means that my eyes can't focus the light as well when they're left to their own devices), and, most importantly, I've noticed myself absently pressing on my cheekbones and sinuses -- something I only do when there is Migraine. My right cheekbone in particular seems to have some kind of pressure point in it.
At the same time I tend to associate migraines as harbingers of, or accompanists to, good and new developments, as much as to stress and hormonal shifts. Migraines & goodness just seem to be a pattern repeated significantly over the last year. So who knows.
I know this blog has sounded like Doom, Catastrophe and Misery lately, but really that's because those are the only things worth reporting. The rest is same old same old: Get up. Eat. Go to work. Answer phones/make copies/write letters/run around like a crazy woman. Go home. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. It's not at all bad, just a bit...humdrum. I'm examining ways to enliven things a little. (Write, Sarah. WRITE.)
Looking forward to the visit of the 'rents, which approaches by the hour. Also looking forward to plenty of sleep. And hoping the weather gets nicer so the occasional escape outdoors is possible if two additional people in my tiny house starts to get me claustrophobic. I'm used to my empty, solitary, quiet space. (If this goes on much longer I will be impossible to live with. Roommates have been out of the question for years -- I don't Play Well With Others when it comes to sharing space. I'm looking forward to a houseful of tumbling, noisy children someday -- that will obviously be different, exciting, and lovely, negotiation with a purpose. In the meantime my solitude and introversion are creating a terrible host. "Hi. Go away. There's too much of you for my living room. That loveseat? Decorative. Bye-bye.") As I woke up to half an inch of sheet ice covering every molecule of creation this morning, I'm skeptical. It's starting to melt, though -- definitely a spring sun. It has strength and function.
I'm REALLY looking forward to seeing my parents, actually, not the least reason being that I'll get a much-needed fill up of physical contact. No one touches me here. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration; people seldom touch me here. And I'm a touchy-feely, physically very affectionate person. I miss touch. Not just hugs either -- those little absentminded caresses, like when you're walking past someone and kind of run your hand across their shoulderblades as you go by, or ruffling someone's hair, or tapping someone on the arm to get their attention. All of it. (Hugs are really great though -- there was once this guy I stayed with for far too long because he gave fabulous, life-giving hugs. The moment when your ribs start to creak and all that deep pressure runs through your shoulders and back is just...is just. I miss those kinds of hugs. And you can usually only get them from guys, but I don't hug guys generally. That's where Dad comes in.) There have been times lately when the craving for touch makes it hard to breathe. So hooray, parents!
Oo! (Girly Moment Alert.) I usually get my skin care products from my Mary Kay consultant (who occasionally peruses this blog -- so I start this little ditty with an apology to you, K.), but I've been having issues with a.) tight money and b.) my own procrastination and running completely out of stuff before I think to order more and then have to wait for the post. So earlier in this Winter of My Discontent I ran out of moisturizer and money, and fell back on some Burt's Bees I'd had lying around. I smelled strongly of weird herbs, but my face didn't crack and fall off, which was the main point.
Well, the other day I was imminently in danger of running out of that too, so I made a stop at Mishawaka's organic grocery (Harmony Market) for more. ACK! They were out. I wanted to cry. But then I meandered into the beauty aisle and began sniffing out and squinting at various other brands of skin care products.
I found one that I think I love. It's for the oily skin which will one day turn out to bless me with lovely smooth skin in my craggy old age. It smells pretty. It minimizes the shine. It Feels So Good.
(Again, sorry, K. I WILL be needing more of your Mary Kay magic in future; it's just a matter of time. Nothing else will do for summer.)
Die, migraine.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Thursday, March 27, 2008
the bleakest month
Weird twenty-four hours.
Last night I learned via voicemail that my high school youth pastor had died that afternoon. It wasn't exactly unexpected -- he's been suffering from a brain tumor for ten years, although it was pneumonia that took him.
But even so, it was...weird. It's not easy to write about. It's complicated. He's been the strongest influence on my life so far (reaching well beyond the time when I last saw him, seven years ago), and it was a harsh and difficult influence as well as a good one. But still, the strongest. It's hard to process a passing with that kind of a convoluted history.
Add to that the fulfilled prophecy of bad weather and I've been in kind of a gray suspension.
I did learn the value of being forgiven, however. That was a bright spot. The human understanding of God's forgiveness gains strength when it's expressed through His people. I can be an extremely unkind person from time to time, which I'm noticing vividly and trying to correct -- a task made easier (easier? more encouraged, rather) by forgiveness.
I'm tired. I stayed up 'way too late last night reading The Time Traveler's Wife (the person who said I should buy it advised me that if I slogged through the slow beginning it would be a fabulous read, and upon beginning it I have no idea what he was talking about -- the beginning is excellent. But I like spliced narratives, and maybe he didn't), trying not to think how March seems to claim someone of pneumonia at one point or another -- eight years ago it was my grandfather. I don't see death as a permanent state, but it still casts a shadow.
But tonight is more housecleaning (the wild life I do lead), and tomorrow my parents are coming to visit, and I'm anticipating a nice weekend. Whether or not the weather clears up.
Last night I learned via voicemail that my high school youth pastor had died that afternoon. It wasn't exactly unexpected -- he's been suffering from a brain tumor for ten years, although it was pneumonia that took him.
But even so, it was...weird. It's not easy to write about. It's complicated. He's been the strongest influence on my life so far (reaching well beyond the time when I last saw him, seven years ago), and it was a harsh and difficult influence as well as a good one. But still, the strongest. It's hard to process a passing with that kind of a convoluted history.
Add to that the fulfilled prophecy of bad weather and I've been in kind of a gray suspension.
I did learn the value of being forgiven, however. That was a bright spot. The human understanding of God's forgiveness gains strength when it's expressed through His people. I can be an extremely unkind person from time to time, which I'm noticing vividly and trying to correct -- a task made easier (easier? more encouraged, rather) by forgiveness.
I'm tired. I stayed up 'way too late last night reading The Time Traveler's Wife (the person who said I should buy it advised me that if I slogged through the slow beginning it would be a fabulous read, and upon beginning it I have no idea what he was talking about -- the beginning is excellent. But I like spliced narratives, and maybe he didn't), trying not to think how March seems to claim someone of pneumonia at one point or another -- eight years ago it was my grandfather. I don't see death as a permanent state, but it still casts a shadow.
But tonight is more housecleaning (the wild life I do lead), and tomorrow my parents are coming to visit, and I'm anticipating a nice weekend. Whether or not the weather clears up.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
bits and pieces, odds and ends
Ugh. Spring is coming and not coming. Today is gorgeous, sunny, the temperature in the high forties, that perfect feeling where the air is still cool but the sun is forcefully warm, and I know I'll have to park on the far right side of my unpaved driveway to avoid a bogdown like the snow has never given me. But tomorrow it's supposed to snow, sleet, plunge down into the twenties, and be generally sour and nasty.
This seesawing hurts the human psyche -- or, at least, mine. To have a taste, just a taste, of that Perfect Spring Day and think, It's here!, and then to have it snatched brutally away -- it leaves me feeling exhausted and mildly ill. This winter has been long. I loved it up until the end of February -- give me all the seasons in their turn -- but now I just want it to GO AWAY. Bring on the flowers. Bring on the bugs. Bring on the little baby leaves and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and the daffodils and the tulips and the brand new grass. Bring on the mud and the warm rain and the sloppy front porch and Saturday afternoons lounging around in shorts. Bring on SKIRTS and pretty sandals and painted toenails and the little shiver that comes from wearing them all when it's just a little too cold. Bring on jeans with the knees torn out and long walks on the weekends.
Bring it on.
In the meantime I'm subsisting at work and trying to get more sleep. Tiredness (which I tend to allow myself to fall into when I'm distracted by Things, and the Things have been numerous and tangled) annihilates all sense of perspective. My parents (yay!) are coming up this weekend (I can say "up" now, and not "over," because Michigan lies north of Pennsylvania) and I need to spend the next two evenings shopping to restock my spartan shelves, and cleaning with a Valkyrie's avenging fury. Die, dirt.
In the spirit of spring cleaning, which appears to be a chromosomally based seasonal disease, I'll paraphrase (as I do not have the source at hand) an idea of Annie Dillard's from For the Time Being: When we houseclean -- when we sweep and dust and get rid of the dirt that settles inexplicably over all of our possessions -- we are literally preserving our civilization. She notes that the ancient cultures didn't shovel dirt over their cities and move away; getting buried is something that just happens. It's why a city has, mysteriously, many many layers of prior generations or millennia of human life -- burying is something that the earth does to us over time.
So much for the banality of housecleaning. As thankless as it can be sometimes, it's also one of my favorite things to do when I'm feeling edgy, irritable, restless, bitter -- "anger speaks best / through the stiff bristles of a brush / and the slow pull of shoulder muscles tired / after housecleaning" -- it wears me out and gets something constructive and civilization-preserving done at the same time. Everybody wins.
I've said for awhile that the woman's basic, stereotypical duty -- which appears to work itself out rather frequently even in today's enlightened marriages -- is to fight entropy. Which, since entropy is a law of physics, makes woman's one of the most basic and noble fights of humankind.
Just in case you loathe the very idea of housecleaning. Come on, pick up that Swiffer! You're saving the world as we know it. And resetting the entropic clock. And that's all in a day's (or a lunch hour's, or an evening's) work.
This seesawing hurts the human psyche -- or, at least, mine. To have a taste, just a taste, of that Perfect Spring Day and think, It's here!, and then to have it snatched brutally away -- it leaves me feeling exhausted and mildly ill. This winter has been long. I loved it up until the end of February -- give me all the seasons in their turn -- but now I just want it to GO AWAY. Bring on the flowers. Bring on the bugs. Bring on the little baby leaves and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and the daffodils and the tulips and the brand new grass. Bring on the mud and the warm rain and the sloppy front porch and Saturday afternoons lounging around in shorts. Bring on SKIRTS and pretty sandals and painted toenails and the little shiver that comes from wearing them all when it's just a little too cold. Bring on jeans with the knees torn out and long walks on the weekends.
Bring it on.
In the meantime I'm subsisting at work and trying to get more sleep. Tiredness (which I tend to allow myself to fall into when I'm distracted by Things, and the Things have been numerous and tangled) annihilates all sense of perspective. My parents (yay!) are coming up this weekend (I can say "up" now, and not "over," because Michigan lies north of Pennsylvania) and I need to spend the next two evenings shopping to restock my spartan shelves, and cleaning with a Valkyrie's avenging fury. Die, dirt.
In the spirit of spring cleaning, which appears to be a chromosomally based seasonal disease, I'll paraphrase (as I do not have the source at hand) an idea of Annie Dillard's from For the Time Being: When we houseclean -- when we sweep and dust and get rid of the dirt that settles inexplicably over all of our possessions -- we are literally preserving our civilization. She notes that the ancient cultures didn't shovel dirt over their cities and move away; getting buried is something that just happens. It's why a city has, mysteriously, many many layers of prior generations or millennia of human life -- burying is something that the earth does to us over time.
So much for the banality of housecleaning. As thankless as it can be sometimes, it's also one of my favorite things to do when I'm feeling edgy, irritable, restless, bitter -- "anger speaks best / through the stiff bristles of a brush / and the slow pull of shoulder muscles tired / after housecleaning" -- it wears me out and gets something constructive and civilization-preserving done at the same time. Everybody wins.
I've said for awhile that the woman's basic, stereotypical duty -- which appears to work itself out rather frequently even in today's enlightened marriages -- is to fight entropy. Which, since entropy is a law of physics, makes woman's one of the most basic and noble fights of humankind.
Just in case you loathe the very idea of housecleaning. Come on, pick up that Swiffer! You're saving the world as we know it. And resetting the entropic clock. And that's all in a day's (or a lunch hour's, or an evening's) work.
Friday, March 21, 2008
this Friday Good
IV
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
V
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
~ T. S. Eliot, from "East Coker," Four Quartets
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
V
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
~ T. S. Eliot, from "East Coker," Four Quartets
scarred for life
I.
Fluorescent ceiling bulbs light the room with a sour glare. Even in their harshness I'm dazzled. I stand clinging to my father's hand, still reeling a little from the jostling of foot traffic clogging the corridors. It's Christmastime, my rubber boots leave dirty salt-streaked tracks on the tile floors, and I have to step wide to avoid the puddles left by bigger feet.
The lines are so long I don't think we'll ever get there, and my stomach snarls at me. I bounce from foot to foot, eight years old, unable to decide which is more inviting, the tall clean counters next to the cash register that promise the novelty of fast food, or the secretive darkness of the Play Room filled with plastic balls and slides where I've never been allowed to go. I grip my father's hand as tightly as I can and lean straight back away from him, seeing how much pressure I can put on his arm.
We finally reach the register, and my father places the order in the authoritative voice that I find impressive. I'm proud to have a father who can cause people to run around doing what he wants. I'd decided long before we even got to the mall what I wanted, and when the cashier whom I can't really see pushes our tray of food across the counter, I'm wiggling with delight. It takes forever to negotiate seating, and the wafts of fries and that perfect Fillet-O-Fish are torturous.
My parents sit, direct me to sit next to Mom, and Dad starts distributing the food. My fries land in front of me, and my orange pop. Mom gets her hamburger meal. Dad arranges his Quarter Pounder in front of him. I start to reach for my Fillet-O-Fish, hoping Dad won't notice; but he says, "Wait," and I sit back, disappointed, and watch as he unwraps my sandwich, squeezes the excess tartar sauce -- my favorite part -- from the fish, and eats it. Then, as always, he hands me my Fillet. I don't even bother asking anymore; the answer will stay the same: "You'll make a mess." I stare at my stripped sandwich and long for the day when I'm grown up and can eat all my tartar sauce all on my own.
II.
My ears sting hotly with their new pearl studs, and I knew it would hurt, but most of the girls in my class have had pierced ears since second grade, and I've been waiting on pins and needles for my tenth birthday so I can have them too. My uncle's girlfriend, who works at the Pagoda, did the piercing, and I feel a little stomach-warmth of gladness, because strangers terrify me, and Bonnie was nice. Mom spends her time looking after my little sister, who loves to dart off, and Dad and Uncle Mark joke around, Dad laughing his head off when Uncle Mark grabs a mouthful of helium from the balloon stand and starts gabbling like Donald Duck, and Mom looking horrified and twisting around on the alert for security guards. I hold Mom's free hand and wonder how much my earlobes have swollen.
We grab lunch at the McDonald's in the Food Court; I'm still awed by the size of it -- our mall doesn't have a Food Court at all. As we sit down in a corner and Dad takes my Fillet away from me and starts to unwrap it, a revelation blazes through me brighter than the fluorescent lights.
"Hey!"
Dad starts and freezes where he sits, looking guilty, his hands still in the process of unwrapping.
"Give me that!" I say. "I'm not going to make a mess. You can't do that anymore!"
Mom starts laughing as Dad grudgingly hands it over, saying, "Darn. You know."
I feel a growing balloon of triumph in my chest. The tartar sauce has never tasted so good. And it's all mine.
III
I don't remember the last time I felt this rushed -- production week of Jane Eyre during college theatre, perhaps. All week something has taken up my free time, and it won't let up for another few days. Holy Week demands a lot of my time at church with cantoring and choir practice; I've begun tutoring a kid who needs an unbelievable amount of help in math; the trash service starts tomorrow and Mom and Dad are visiting next week and I have about a thousand pounds of garbage piled up which I just spent my lunch hour hauling to the roadside. Now I have two minutes to get back to work and I haven't eaten yet.
While talking to Mom, for the first time in about a week, which is unusual, I swing into the McDonald's Drive-Thru for a quick bite I can gobble down at the office.
"Hang on a minute, Mom." I shift the phone and lean out the window as the speaker buzzes a request for my order.
"I'd like a Number Thirteen with Coke, please," I say. "And extra tartar sauce."
In my other ear I hear Mom say, "What?" and burst into hysterical laughter. Dad's thievery of my tartar sauce has become a key family joke which we dust off and tease him about several times a year; but I never bothered to mention that when I discovered the possibility of ordering extra anything, I took advantage of it.
"Extra tartar sauce?" Mom's laughing so hard I can barely understand her. "Your dad has scarred you for life, hasn't he? You're warped!"
"Yup, and you can tell him that," I say as I pull up to the window and reach for the bag. "My deprivation as a child has made my appetite insatiable."
When I arrive at the office I say my goodbyes to Mom and make a beeline for my desk. The Fillet-O-Fish is sending steam out of its box and I'm nearly out of my mind with hunger. I grab it up and bite in.
The tartar sauce has never tasted so good.
Fluorescent ceiling bulbs light the room with a sour glare. Even in their harshness I'm dazzled. I stand clinging to my father's hand, still reeling a little from the jostling of foot traffic clogging the corridors. It's Christmastime, my rubber boots leave dirty salt-streaked tracks on the tile floors, and I have to step wide to avoid the puddles left by bigger feet.
The lines are so long I don't think we'll ever get there, and my stomach snarls at me. I bounce from foot to foot, eight years old, unable to decide which is more inviting, the tall clean counters next to the cash register that promise the novelty of fast food, or the secretive darkness of the Play Room filled with plastic balls and slides where I've never been allowed to go. I grip my father's hand as tightly as I can and lean straight back away from him, seeing how much pressure I can put on his arm.
We finally reach the register, and my father places the order in the authoritative voice that I find impressive. I'm proud to have a father who can cause people to run around doing what he wants. I'd decided long before we even got to the mall what I wanted, and when the cashier whom I can't really see pushes our tray of food across the counter, I'm wiggling with delight. It takes forever to negotiate seating, and the wafts of fries and that perfect Fillet-O-Fish are torturous.
My parents sit, direct me to sit next to Mom, and Dad starts distributing the food. My fries land in front of me, and my orange pop. Mom gets her hamburger meal. Dad arranges his Quarter Pounder in front of him. I start to reach for my Fillet-O-Fish, hoping Dad won't notice; but he says, "Wait," and I sit back, disappointed, and watch as he unwraps my sandwich, squeezes the excess tartar sauce -- my favorite part -- from the fish, and eats it. Then, as always, he hands me my Fillet. I don't even bother asking anymore; the answer will stay the same: "You'll make a mess." I stare at my stripped sandwich and long for the day when I'm grown up and can eat all my tartar sauce all on my own.
II.
My ears sting hotly with their new pearl studs, and I knew it would hurt, but most of the girls in my class have had pierced ears since second grade, and I've been waiting on pins and needles for my tenth birthday so I can have them too. My uncle's girlfriend, who works at the Pagoda, did the piercing, and I feel a little stomach-warmth of gladness, because strangers terrify me, and Bonnie was nice. Mom spends her time looking after my little sister, who loves to dart off, and Dad and Uncle Mark joke around, Dad laughing his head off when Uncle Mark grabs a mouthful of helium from the balloon stand and starts gabbling like Donald Duck, and Mom looking horrified and twisting around on the alert for security guards. I hold Mom's free hand and wonder how much my earlobes have swollen.
We grab lunch at the McDonald's in the Food Court; I'm still awed by the size of it -- our mall doesn't have a Food Court at all. As we sit down in a corner and Dad takes my Fillet away from me and starts to unwrap it, a revelation blazes through me brighter than the fluorescent lights.
"Hey!"
Dad starts and freezes where he sits, looking guilty, his hands still in the process of unwrapping.
"Give me that!" I say. "I'm not going to make a mess. You can't do that anymore!"
Mom starts laughing as Dad grudgingly hands it over, saying, "Darn. You know."
I feel a growing balloon of triumph in my chest. The tartar sauce has never tasted so good. And it's all mine.
III
I don't remember the last time I felt this rushed -- production week of Jane Eyre during college theatre, perhaps. All week something has taken up my free time, and it won't let up for another few days. Holy Week demands a lot of my time at church with cantoring and choir practice; I've begun tutoring a kid who needs an unbelievable amount of help in math; the trash service starts tomorrow and Mom and Dad are visiting next week and I have about a thousand pounds of garbage piled up which I just spent my lunch hour hauling to the roadside. Now I have two minutes to get back to work and I haven't eaten yet.
While talking to Mom, for the first time in about a week, which is unusual, I swing into the McDonald's Drive-Thru for a quick bite I can gobble down at the office.
"Hang on a minute, Mom." I shift the phone and lean out the window as the speaker buzzes a request for my order.
"I'd like a Number Thirteen with Coke, please," I say. "And extra tartar sauce."
In my other ear I hear Mom say, "What?" and burst into hysterical laughter. Dad's thievery of my tartar sauce has become a key family joke which we dust off and tease him about several times a year; but I never bothered to mention that when I discovered the possibility of ordering extra anything, I took advantage of it.
"Extra tartar sauce?" Mom's laughing so hard I can barely understand her. "Your dad has scarred you for life, hasn't he? You're warped!"
"Yup, and you can tell him that," I say as I pull up to the window and reach for the bag. "My deprivation as a child has made my appetite insatiable."
When I arrive at the office I say my goodbyes to Mom and make a beeline for my desk. The Fillet-O-Fish is sending steam out of its box and I'm nearly out of my mind with hunger. I grab it up and bite in.
The tartar sauce has never tasted so good.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
get it done
This week's itinerary daunts me a bit:
Tuesday: Attend Chrism Mass at the seat of the diocese in Kalamazoo. Return home after eleven o'clock p.m.
Wednesday: Tutor.
Thursday: Cantor the Holy Thursday service at church. (Squeeze time in for practice, which has not yet occurred, between Wednesday evening and Thursday evening.)
Friday: Sing with the choir in the Good Friday service at 1 p.m.
Saturday: Rehearse for Easter Vigil Confirmation in the morning. Easter Vigil at 8:00 p.m.
Sunday: Sing with the choir for Sunday Mass. Celebration to follow.
* * *
All of these things are wonderful and good. There are just a lot of them to accomplish at an extraordinarily fast pace. Meanwhile other things need to happen, like dishes and laundry and housecleaning and assuring my mother that I'm neither mad at her nor dead, quite a task considering I've been in a Godzilla mood with no rational cause for the past three weeks and haven't wanted to bite off the heads of my family members.
I've been working on the housecleaning stuff when I get up in the morning, and on my lunch breaks (I love love LOVE living three minutes from work). Today's lunch break featured the monumental task of rebagging four months' worth of trash which had been sitting in the snow next to the garage until the snow melted, and looked generally...well, trashy. Especially because the Critters had had a field day with my leavings; but, anticipating that, I purchased disposable vinyl gloves along with a box of thirty-gallon trash bags at the local grocery store before heading home to get to work. Best idea ever, by the way.
The thing about depression, which hammered me into the ground from October through December, and from which I've been in gradual recovery ever since, is that the aftermath is fairly matter-of-fact and cheerful. As I grabbed up handfuls of disgusting sopping-wet nastiness and stuffed them into the new bags, I looked it all over and said, This is just the result of your temporary disablement. Mea culpa. Get it done.
Returning to a state of having the energy to do things again is invigorating. I trash-hunted, rebagged chewed-up kitchen bags with their guts strewn all over, hauled sixteen fresh bags of trash to the roadside (a good forty yards -- my driveway is long), then stuffed what appears to be the last tenants' scary swimming pool into the actual garbage bin and dragged that up next to the bags, in under forty minutes. I had to do it at lunch because I'm tutoring tonight, the trash goes out very early tomorrow morning, and I had no desire to touch icky pulpy things in the dark, vinyl gloves or no.
And when I finished, I felt satisfied. Not proud exactly -- I certainly wasn't proud of having waited so long to set up the trash service and lived like a skunk in the meantime -- but glad to return to a state where I can perform my normal duties and then some -- not only fulfill my ordinary obligations, but clean up in the wake of my zombie state and discard the remaining evidence that I'd sunk humiliatingly low. Everything was clean. Incredible. Satisfying.
Even on medication, depression is like riding a wave. Good meds keep you at a normally functioning level most of the time, and I'm a pretty functional person to begin with, particularly where others' expectations are concerned -- I may avoid my bills (although I haven't since the start of this year, a lovely new discipline) and let my house turn into a landfill, but I show up at work and do my job competently. But the pills, as Dr. Asshole once told me, don't stop the occasional bad stretch from yanking the rug out from under you. It's just one of those things to be endured and dealt with to the best of one's capability.
I don't make it easy for myself. When times get tough, I don't call out for help. I don't even tell people what's going on. I hole up and disappear, and reemerge once the worst of it has passed. This is a stupid way to deal, but it's one born of many years of conviction that no one can do anything (so why trouble them), the fear of showing people what I'm really like when I'm under the wave and causing them to despise or hate or get sick of me, a nausea at the self-absorption characteristic of that phase in the cycle which is bound to show through if I talk to anyone, and a natural and instinctive introversion which turns to isolation for healing.
It's less of a turtle drawing into its shell and more of a hibernation. At this stage in the game I'm open to growth, but still not convinced that talking about it while I'm going through it will do anything profitable. There may be a trigger, but there's seldom a proactive solution. This last time around, for example, I believe was triggered by the suddenness of a move that I didn't want to make: While I hated the environment surrounding my apartment, I loved the apartment itself, and I had to pack up and leave it in ten days' time, which included, in addition to the basic stresses of moving (exacerbated by the short time frame), the necessity of setting up new utilities accounts and getting all those pragmatic ducks in an orderly row. I was overwhelmed, distressed, sad, angry, out of place, and generally miserable.
The only answer for that, though, was time. Time always heals, and so I usually wait out the bad spell and it eventually dissipates. What good would talking about my feelings do? When it's at its worst, I don't feel anything at all beyond a dull psychological pain, so there's nothing to talk about; and if I try, my brain grinds to a halt and my tongue can't get anything out. So a response to the question What's Wrong is a shrug. It simply takes time.
I will, however, notify my parents and sister and close friends that I'm going into hibernation phase, so that at least they know what's going on.
I am glad to be getting back on my feet. My house is the cleanest it's ever been, my bills up to date, my bank account managed, my job productive and efficient, and my attitude improved. I feel like I can uncurl again and start to breathe the air. I can mop up after the mess I left behind and start over again.
Yes, depression can be crippling. Obviously I'd rather not have it; but on the other hand it comes with its compensations. The waking up part is lovely, and I have an enormous appreciation for the Normal Days. I've also seen progress in myself this last year (particularly these last months -- the recovery phase is like those first few minutes when you wake up in the morning and lie in bed, awake but barely conscious, only stretched out over days or weeks) in how I cope -- paying my bills regularly, attending to my finances, budgeting, keeping up the house even when I don't give a damn. I'm satisfied with that, hopeful that I will continue to grow through it as the years go by.
There seems to be a balance between accepting it (or being resigned to it) -- a sort of "Why should the pot look to the potter and say, 'Why did you make me this way?'" attitude -- and seeking to, if not overcome it, at least master it. Depression runs strongly through both sides of my family; I got nailed by the genetic code, and my temperament seems to incorporate depression easily. But also running through my DNA is a strong stubborn streak and an upbeat cheerfulness that help combat it. Not to mention my faith. So while there's no point in denying the condition or railing against the heavens for having it, there's also tremendous room for growing strength and greater maturity in dealing with it both internally and socially.
I really only meant to talk about my monumental feat of hauling trash while on lunch break. But one thing leads to another, so here you are. People don't talk about depression much, whether because there's a huge social stigma still attached to it, or because a lot of people with depression refuse to take meds for it and get crazier and crazier, thus reinforcing the stigma. But it bears discussion, because a lot of people have it, and there are still enormous misunderstandings about the condition running amok through the general populace, the Christian evangelical populace particularly (not my parents, nor their friends; but plenty of others).
I sometimes worry that when I talk about it (not in the Hibernation Phase, when I can't talk about it) it's going to render me single for the rest of my life; but plenty of crazies are happily or unhappily hitched, so whatever. And I'm too old and too single to worry about the consequences of disclosure -- much. Besides, plenty of depression sufferers are fairly normal, and there are lots of us out there.
People who've never been afflicted with clinical depression appear to think that those afflicted with depression are sad, and need to focus on what they should be thankful for, and all the good things in their lives. Actually this makes the bad stretch worse because it doesn't make you feel better, and then you feel like a pretty bad person for not being thankful when your life is so much better, objectively, than a refugee's in Africa. Depression actually feels less like sadness and more like a static roar of nothing. It's the void that's so awful. Yes, there's a feeling of pain with it, but it dulls you to emotion. You don't care about anything. You can't do anything, and even when you can't do anything and don't do anything but sit in a chair and stare at the wall or the television, you still feel exhausted and bored. Nothing has savor. Nothing sounds interesting or attractive or fun. Ordinary duties like laundry and dishes become impossible.
And it can have absolutely nothing to do with the objective circumstances of your life. A well-meaning friend once said to me, "What do you have to be depressed about? You're beautiful, you're young, you have a great job and good friends!" I told her, "It doesn't matter whether or not I have anything to be depressed about. I'm just depressed. There's a chemical imbalance in my brain that makes it impossible for me to feel happy sometimes."
A simplification. Because again, it's not about happiness. I can intellectually be satisfied with my life, but get no joy of it. It's a little to do with the absence of happiness; more to do with the absence of joy. Happiness I can live without. I do for long periods of time, and have for most of my life. But the inability to experience joy, which gets a person through the daunting, difficult, or painful circumstances that life hands you sometimes, is really what's crippling, is really what causes the exhaustion and inertness.
Medication helps. Enormously. Not that joy is a chemical response; but it brings your chemical levels closer to what non-depressive people have. It aids you in functioning. You might not experience joy for awhile even then, but at least you can get through your daily tasks with a little energy.
And then the cycle resets itself, and you're okay for awhile, or for a very long time, and the next time around, if you work at it, might not be as bad. It has seasons, like the weather. I'm coming into my spring, and I feel pretty eager for it. Joy comes in flashes, and I'm looking forward to the sun. And you can bet I'll get a good dark suntan of the great things, for as long as they last, this time around, to try to build up my resistance for the next hibernation. And clean the house like nobody's business in the meantime.
Tuesday: Attend Chrism Mass at the seat of the diocese in Kalamazoo. Return home after eleven o'clock p.m.
Wednesday: Tutor.
Thursday: Cantor the Holy Thursday service at church. (Squeeze time in for practice, which has not yet occurred, between Wednesday evening and Thursday evening.)
Friday: Sing with the choir in the Good Friday service at 1 p.m.
Saturday: Rehearse for Easter Vigil Confirmation in the morning. Easter Vigil at 8:00 p.m.
Sunday: Sing with the choir for Sunday Mass. Celebration to follow.
* * *
All of these things are wonderful and good. There are just a lot of them to accomplish at an extraordinarily fast pace. Meanwhile other things need to happen, like dishes and laundry and housecleaning and assuring my mother that I'm neither mad at her nor dead, quite a task considering I've been in a Godzilla mood with no rational cause for the past three weeks and haven't wanted to bite off the heads of my family members.
I've been working on the housecleaning stuff when I get up in the morning, and on my lunch breaks (I love love LOVE living three minutes from work). Today's lunch break featured the monumental task of rebagging four months' worth of trash which had been sitting in the snow next to the garage until the snow melted, and looked generally...well, trashy. Especially because the Critters had had a field day with my leavings; but, anticipating that, I purchased disposable vinyl gloves along with a box of thirty-gallon trash bags at the local grocery store before heading home to get to work. Best idea ever, by the way.
The thing about depression, which hammered me into the ground from October through December, and from which I've been in gradual recovery ever since, is that the aftermath is fairly matter-of-fact and cheerful. As I grabbed up handfuls of disgusting sopping-wet nastiness and stuffed them into the new bags, I looked it all over and said, This is just the result of your temporary disablement. Mea culpa. Get it done.
Returning to a state of having the energy to do things again is invigorating. I trash-hunted, rebagged chewed-up kitchen bags with their guts strewn all over, hauled sixteen fresh bags of trash to the roadside (a good forty yards -- my driveway is long), then stuffed what appears to be the last tenants' scary swimming pool into the actual garbage bin and dragged that up next to the bags, in under forty minutes. I had to do it at lunch because I'm tutoring tonight, the trash goes out very early tomorrow morning, and I had no desire to touch icky pulpy things in the dark, vinyl gloves or no.
And when I finished, I felt satisfied. Not proud exactly -- I certainly wasn't proud of having waited so long to set up the trash service and lived like a skunk in the meantime -- but glad to return to a state where I can perform my normal duties and then some -- not only fulfill my ordinary obligations, but clean up in the wake of my zombie state and discard the remaining evidence that I'd sunk humiliatingly low. Everything was clean. Incredible. Satisfying.
Even on medication, depression is like riding a wave. Good meds keep you at a normally functioning level most of the time, and I'm a pretty functional person to begin with, particularly where others' expectations are concerned -- I may avoid my bills (although I haven't since the start of this year, a lovely new discipline) and let my house turn into a landfill, but I show up at work and do my job competently. But the pills, as Dr. Asshole once told me, don't stop the occasional bad stretch from yanking the rug out from under you. It's just one of those things to be endured and dealt with to the best of one's capability.
I don't make it easy for myself. When times get tough, I don't call out for help. I don't even tell people what's going on. I hole up and disappear, and reemerge once the worst of it has passed. This is a stupid way to deal, but it's one born of many years of conviction that no one can do anything (so why trouble them), the fear of showing people what I'm really like when I'm under the wave and causing them to despise or hate or get sick of me, a nausea at the self-absorption characteristic of that phase in the cycle which is bound to show through if I talk to anyone, and a natural and instinctive introversion which turns to isolation for healing.
It's less of a turtle drawing into its shell and more of a hibernation. At this stage in the game I'm open to growth, but still not convinced that talking about it while I'm going through it will do anything profitable. There may be a trigger, but there's seldom a proactive solution. This last time around, for example, I believe was triggered by the suddenness of a move that I didn't want to make: While I hated the environment surrounding my apartment, I loved the apartment itself, and I had to pack up and leave it in ten days' time, which included, in addition to the basic stresses of moving (exacerbated by the short time frame), the necessity of setting up new utilities accounts and getting all those pragmatic ducks in an orderly row. I was overwhelmed, distressed, sad, angry, out of place, and generally miserable.
The only answer for that, though, was time. Time always heals, and so I usually wait out the bad spell and it eventually dissipates. What good would talking about my feelings do? When it's at its worst, I don't feel anything at all beyond a dull psychological pain, so there's nothing to talk about; and if I try, my brain grinds to a halt and my tongue can't get anything out. So a response to the question What's Wrong is a shrug. It simply takes time.
I will, however, notify my parents and sister and close friends that I'm going into hibernation phase, so that at least they know what's going on.
I am glad to be getting back on my feet. My house is the cleanest it's ever been, my bills up to date, my bank account managed, my job productive and efficient, and my attitude improved. I feel like I can uncurl again and start to breathe the air. I can mop up after the mess I left behind and start over again.
Yes, depression can be crippling. Obviously I'd rather not have it; but on the other hand it comes with its compensations. The waking up part is lovely, and I have an enormous appreciation for the Normal Days. I've also seen progress in myself this last year (particularly these last months -- the recovery phase is like those first few minutes when you wake up in the morning and lie in bed, awake but barely conscious, only stretched out over days or weeks) in how I cope -- paying my bills regularly, attending to my finances, budgeting, keeping up the house even when I don't give a damn. I'm satisfied with that, hopeful that I will continue to grow through it as the years go by.
There seems to be a balance between accepting it (or being resigned to it) -- a sort of "Why should the pot look to the potter and say, 'Why did you make me this way?'" attitude -- and seeking to, if not overcome it, at least master it. Depression runs strongly through both sides of my family; I got nailed by the genetic code, and my temperament seems to incorporate depression easily. But also running through my DNA is a strong stubborn streak and an upbeat cheerfulness that help combat it. Not to mention my faith. So while there's no point in denying the condition or railing against the heavens for having it, there's also tremendous room for growing strength and greater maturity in dealing with it both internally and socially.
I really only meant to talk about my monumental feat of hauling trash while on lunch break. But one thing leads to another, so here you are. People don't talk about depression much, whether because there's a huge social stigma still attached to it, or because a lot of people with depression refuse to take meds for it and get crazier and crazier, thus reinforcing the stigma. But it bears discussion, because a lot of people have it, and there are still enormous misunderstandings about the condition running amok through the general populace, the Christian evangelical populace particularly (not my parents, nor their friends; but plenty of others).
I sometimes worry that when I talk about it (not in the Hibernation Phase, when I can't talk about it) it's going to render me single for the rest of my life; but plenty of crazies are happily or unhappily hitched, so whatever. And I'm too old and too single to worry about the consequences of disclosure -- much. Besides, plenty of depression sufferers are fairly normal, and there are lots of us out there.
People who've never been afflicted with clinical depression appear to think that those afflicted with depression are sad, and need to focus on what they should be thankful for, and all the good things in their lives. Actually this makes the bad stretch worse because it doesn't make you feel better, and then you feel like a pretty bad person for not being thankful when your life is so much better, objectively, than a refugee's in Africa. Depression actually feels less like sadness and more like a static roar of nothing. It's the void that's so awful. Yes, there's a feeling of pain with it, but it dulls you to emotion. You don't care about anything. You can't do anything, and even when you can't do anything and don't do anything but sit in a chair and stare at the wall or the television, you still feel exhausted and bored. Nothing has savor. Nothing sounds interesting or attractive or fun. Ordinary duties like laundry and dishes become impossible.
And it can have absolutely nothing to do with the objective circumstances of your life. A well-meaning friend once said to me, "What do you have to be depressed about? You're beautiful, you're young, you have a great job and good friends!" I told her, "It doesn't matter whether or not I have anything to be depressed about. I'm just depressed. There's a chemical imbalance in my brain that makes it impossible for me to feel happy sometimes."
A simplification. Because again, it's not about happiness. I can intellectually be satisfied with my life, but get no joy of it. It's a little to do with the absence of happiness; more to do with the absence of joy. Happiness I can live without. I do for long periods of time, and have for most of my life. But the inability to experience joy, which gets a person through the daunting, difficult, or painful circumstances that life hands you sometimes, is really what's crippling, is really what causes the exhaustion and inertness.
Medication helps. Enormously. Not that joy is a chemical response; but it brings your chemical levels closer to what non-depressive people have. It aids you in functioning. You might not experience joy for awhile even then, but at least you can get through your daily tasks with a little energy.
And then the cycle resets itself, and you're okay for awhile, or for a very long time, and the next time around, if you work at it, might not be as bad. It has seasons, like the weather. I'm coming into my spring, and I feel pretty eager for it. Joy comes in flashes, and I'm looking forward to the sun. And you can bet I'll get a good dark suntan of the great things, for as long as they last, this time around, to try to build up my resistance for the next hibernation. And clean the house like nobody's business in the meantime.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Trash
Yesterday I finally set up my trash service.
Life is astronomically more expensive renting a house outside the village limits than renting an apartment in the city. There are a lot more little tasks that you have to accomplish on your own as well. Trash service is one of them. But as I'd accumulated quite a pile (I can be a right pig when the depression bogs me down), I decided it was time.
Setting up trash service, in my mind, involved dragging the two-ton garbage bin that had been lurking behind the garage, filled with strange things like hoses and sheets of plastic, and, presumably, anvils, up to the road. My shoulders are telling me today that this was a stupid thing to do; but I'd rather hear it from my shoulders than my back, which seems to be reasonably content, so all is well.
The former tenants of my humble abode were horrifyingly dirty. I still stumble across their leavings in unexpected places and have to stifle a gag from time to time. When I first moved in, I spent a good day and a half getting the cupboards and drawers into a state habitable by my measuring cups and dry goods. They all brimmed over with ancient flaky pellets of what looked to be either cereal or hamster food topped with mouse droppings. I vacuumed them out before practically unscrewing the bottle of the Antibacterial 409 and pouring it over their floors. I also found keys, sticky pennies, dog licenses, bottle caps, and other assortments of weird and nauseating junk.
The cupboard above the table, which could accommodate a football player curled in the fetal position, and which serves as my pantry, was the worst. I swept boxfuls of what can only be termed filth from it. The best that I could tell was that the filth comprised mainly chewed-up pieces of cardboard and sawdust, but that was only a vague guess. And when I say swept, I mean with a broom. The Dyson couldn't even manage it.
So my move-in was interesting. There's other stuff they left that I don't know about, mostly because I refuse to. I won't go into the basement, which contains scary and lurking bits of large machinery that stopped working decades ago and blankets of masterpiece cobwebs that rival the ones draped all over Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I avoid the corners of the garage. And I've skirted that garbage can, which looks like the Jetsons had a cleaning day and decided to toss their robot.
I don't know what those freaky weirdos were up to in that house. All I know about them from the landlord was that they lived like that, with two enormous dogs (who left their smell embedded in the carpets and their toothmarks on the baseboards) and an infant.
Up till now I've been little more than faintly nauseated and scornful of them; but now, at the onset of spring, when a young woman's fancy turns to thoughts of cleaning, I'm getting angry. Anger is one of the most useful emotions in the human range, I've found. It's motivating. It's stimulating. It crushes ordinary inhibitions. So getting angry with the last tenants is my way of rolling up my mental sleeves to pitch myself wholeheartedly into the work of eradicating any proof of their prior residence in my house. Time to get rid of the Filth Ghosts once and for all.
Life is astronomically more expensive renting a house outside the village limits than renting an apartment in the city. There are a lot more little tasks that you have to accomplish on your own as well. Trash service is one of them. But as I'd accumulated quite a pile (I can be a right pig when the depression bogs me down), I decided it was time.
Setting up trash service, in my mind, involved dragging the two-ton garbage bin that had been lurking behind the garage, filled with strange things like hoses and sheets of plastic, and, presumably, anvils, up to the road. My shoulders are telling me today that this was a stupid thing to do; but I'd rather hear it from my shoulders than my back, which seems to be reasonably content, so all is well.
The former tenants of my humble abode were horrifyingly dirty. I still stumble across their leavings in unexpected places and have to stifle a gag from time to time. When I first moved in, I spent a good day and a half getting the cupboards and drawers into a state habitable by my measuring cups and dry goods. They all brimmed over with ancient flaky pellets of what looked to be either cereal or hamster food topped with mouse droppings. I vacuumed them out before practically unscrewing the bottle of the Antibacterial 409 and pouring it over their floors. I also found keys, sticky pennies, dog licenses, bottle caps, and other assortments of weird and nauseating junk.
The cupboard above the table, which could accommodate a football player curled in the fetal position, and which serves as my pantry, was the worst. I swept boxfuls of what can only be termed filth from it. The best that I could tell was that the filth comprised mainly chewed-up pieces of cardboard and sawdust, but that was only a vague guess. And when I say swept, I mean with a broom. The Dyson couldn't even manage it.
So my move-in was interesting. There's other stuff they left that I don't know about, mostly because I refuse to. I won't go into the basement, which contains scary and lurking bits of large machinery that stopped working decades ago and blankets of masterpiece cobwebs that rival the ones draped all over Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I avoid the corners of the garage. And I've skirted that garbage can, which looks like the Jetsons had a cleaning day and decided to toss their robot.
I don't know what those freaky weirdos were up to in that house. All I know about them from the landlord was that they lived like that, with two enormous dogs (who left their smell embedded in the carpets and their toothmarks on the baseboards) and an infant.
Up till now I've been little more than faintly nauseated and scornful of them; but now, at the onset of spring, when a young woman's fancy turns to thoughts of cleaning, I'm getting angry. Anger is one of the most useful emotions in the human range, I've found. It's motivating. It's stimulating. It crushes ordinary inhibitions. So getting angry with the last tenants is my way of rolling up my mental sleeves to pitch myself wholeheartedly into the work of eradicating any proof of their prior residence in my house. Time to get rid of the Filth Ghosts once and for all.
Yay!
My favorite author has a blog! (I've linked to it in the sidebar.)
I love Robin McKinley for her sense of humor, her vivid prose, her fabulous heroines and her dedication to life. I also love her for her proliferation. She just came out with Dragonhaven last year (which I loved), and this September is coming out with a new one! (Her books tend to come out around the time of my birthday, when I can buy them with my birthday money -- it's a fabulous present.)
She and Madeleine L'Engle are the authors I tend to turn to in default -- the books I read over and over until the covers are worn and the pages raggedy and the spines fall open to my favorite passages as soon as you lay them on the table. The worlds which McKinley creates are the ones I hate most to leave. I just want to stay there. So as soon as I finish with one I either mope around for a day lamenting the fact that I can't actually go to Damar, despite having read that same book about three hundred times, or I immediately dive into another one to stave off the Reentry Sorrow and manage to pack all the agony in for a really whoppingly bitter end. Nevertheless, any time I'm reading one of her books, I'm happy. Ridiculously, nothing-else-exists, I haven't eaten in ten hours but I don't want to leave this book for even a piece of cheese happy.
Anyway, she has a blog. I'm so happy. She's sarcastic and sardonic and wry and self-mocking and others-mocking and compassionate and human and normal and just delightful and funny.
I love Robin McKinley for her sense of humor, her vivid prose, her fabulous heroines and her dedication to life. I also love her for her proliferation. She just came out with Dragonhaven last year (which I loved), and this September is coming out with a new one! (Her books tend to come out around the time of my birthday, when I can buy them with my birthday money -- it's a fabulous present.)
She and Madeleine L'Engle are the authors I tend to turn to in default -- the books I read over and over until the covers are worn and the pages raggedy and the spines fall open to my favorite passages as soon as you lay them on the table. The worlds which McKinley creates are the ones I hate most to leave. I just want to stay there. So as soon as I finish with one I either mope around for a day lamenting the fact that I can't actually go to Damar, despite having read that same book about three hundred times, or I immediately dive into another one to stave off the Reentry Sorrow and manage to pack all the agony in for a really whoppingly bitter end. Nevertheless, any time I'm reading one of her books, I'm happy. Ridiculously, nothing-else-exists, I haven't eaten in ten hours but I don't want to leave this book for even a piece of cheese happy.
Anyway, she has a blog. I'm so happy. She's sarcastic and sardonic and wry and self-mocking and others-mocking and compassionate and human and normal and just delightful and funny.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
please won't you be my
Neighbors. I keep forgetting, and then remembering, the joys of living in a dinky little town.
My landlord pulled through on the refrigerator's impending catastrophe and bought me a new one -- and by new, I mean brand new -- not a top-of-the-line by any stretch, but not a bad brand either, and it came complete with frost-free freezer and (wonder of wonders!) storage bins for produce and cheese and whatnot, which my old fridge conspicuously lacked.
My landlord had arranged with the company to have it delivered today; they called to let me know they had arrived with fridge in tow.
As I hurried out to my car to drive over there, one of the guys who works for the shop across the street came running over. (All the guys over there love me.)
"Are you expecting a delivery at your house?" he asked.
"Yup; I'm on my way over there right now to take care of it," I said. "Why?"
"Jeremy called," he said. "He said there was a big yellow truck parked in front of your house, and that I'd better call you to make sure you knew about it."
I thanked him, laughed and drove off. Later this afternoon I ran into Jeremy, who asked about the truck.
"Yeah, I saw your car wasn't there and this great big truck with two sketchy guys hanging around. Just wanted to make sure someone wasn't breaking in and taking all your stuff!" he said.
Yay, small towns. And yay for people who have your back. I had people who had my back in South Bend, too, but it was more in the sense of, "If my boyfriend's scary associates bother you, I'll kill them." (I really don't think she was hyperbolizing.) There wasn't any of that calling someone across town to tell them about what's going on in their backyard.
It's nice.
My landlord pulled through on the refrigerator's impending catastrophe and bought me a new one -- and by new, I mean brand new -- not a top-of-the-line by any stretch, but not a bad brand either, and it came complete with frost-free freezer and (wonder of wonders!) storage bins for produce and cheese and whatnot, which my old fridge conspicuously lacked.
My landlord had arranged with the company to have it delivered today; they called to let me know they had arrived with fridge in tow.
As I hurried out to my car to drive over there, one of the guys who works for the shop across the street came running over. (All the guys over there love me.)
"Are you expecting a delivery at your house?" he asked.
"Yup; I'm on my way over there right now to take care of it," I said. "Why?"
"Jeremy called," he said. "He said there was a big yellow truck parked in front of your house, and that I'd better call you to make sure you knew about it."
I thanked him, laughed and drove off. Later this afternoon I ran into Jeremy, who asked about the truck.
"Yeah, I saw your car wasn't there and this great big truck with two sketchy guys hanging around. Just wanted to make sure someone wasn't breaking in and taking all your stuff!" he said.
Yay, small towns. And yay for people who have your back. I had people who had my back in South Bend, too, but it was more in the sense of, "If my boyfriend's scary associates bother you, I'll kill them." (I really don't think she was hyperbolizing.) There wasn't any of that calling someone across town to tell them about what's going on in their backyard.
It's nice.
Friday, March 07, 2008
your title doesn't impress me.
In the time I've worked at the law office, I've discovered that male lawyers bring catty to an art form that puts the most stereotypical woman to shame.
Perhaps the tendency that disgusts me the most is the one they have of, when irritated with my boss for something unreasonable, dispensing curse words liberally in their communication with me.
Now. I'm no prude when it comes to language. But course language is distinctly out of place in the professional arena, especially amongst the educated and erudite elite of which lawyers fancy themselves the pinnacle. When men of intelligence find creative and subtle ways of insulting each other that don't include conversational terms you'd find in a gutter, I am impressed. When the same men are irate with my employer yet treat me with dignity and gentlemanly respect, knowing I'm not the dog to kick because their feathers are ruffled, I am also impressed. I am not impressed when they resort to schoolboy mouthing off. I am expressly underwhelmed most especially when they feel that, because they're mad at my boss, and I'm just the secretary, any kind of language will do.
I am a lady, thank you. An educated man with a difficult-to-obtain degree can rely on other methods of expressing his anger than punting it at me swaddled in four-letter words. And no, Attorney Swearsalot, I am not cowed by your impressive degree. Treat me poorly because you think you have some kind of right to do so licensed by your two-year graduate degree and I will patronize and condescend and speak overly sweetly to you, with exaggerated and pleasant patience -- as I treat any five-year-old having a temper tantrum. The fabulous thing about my kind of response is that you can hardly accuse me of being rude, and you're probably too stupid to know that you're being insulted, not catered to.
Education has less to do with a diploma and much more to do with humility -- and by humility, I mean the recognition of the inherent dignity of every person, regardless of social stature. A truly educated man reveals himself by his courtesy. Pretensions and arrogance nullify any personal importance attached to his degree.
Perhaps the tendency that disgusts me the most is the one they have of, when irritated with my boss for something unreasonable, dispensing curse words liberally in their communication with me.
Now. I'm no prude when it comes to language. But course language is distinctly out of place in the professional arena, especially amongst the educated and erudite elite of which lawyers fancy themselves the pinnacle. When men of intelligence find creative and subtle ways of insulting each other that don't include conversational terms you'd find in a gutter, I am impressed. When the same men are irate with my employer yet treat me with dignity and gentlemanly respect, knowing I'm not the dog to kick because their feathers are ruffled, I am also impressed. I am not impressed when they resort to schoolboy mouthing off. I am expressly underwhelmed most especially when they feel that, because they're mad at my boss, and I'm just the secretary, any kind of language will do.
I am a lady, thank you. An educated man with a difficult-to-obtain degree can rely on other methods of expressing his anger than punting it at me swaddled in four-letter words. And no, Attorney Swearsalot, I am not cowed by your impressive degree. Treat me poorly because you think you have some kind of right to do so licensed by your two-year graduate degree and I will patronize and condescend and speak overly sweetly to you, with exaggerated and pleasant patience -- as I treat any five-year-old having a temper tantrum. The fabulous thing about my kind of response is that you can hardly accuse me of being rude, and you're probably too stupid to know that you're being insulted, not catered to.
Education has less to do with a diploma and much more to do with humility -- and by humility, I mean the recognition of the inherent dignity of every person, regardless of social stature. A truly educated man reveals himself by his courtesy. Pretensions and arrogance nullify any personal importance attached to his degree.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
monday on thursday
You know, like breakfast for dinner. Something traditionally assigned to one recurring point in time that happens at another.
So today is Monday on Thursday. (Anyone remember Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?)
I was awakened in the wee hours of the morning by the sound of my refrigerator buzzing, grinding, whirring, and whining at the volume of an approaching Howitzer. I tried to go back to sleep with earplugs. I slept late. The noise was vibrating the entire house. I called the handyman. No answer. I called my landlord. No answer. The coffeepot at work stopped working (doooooom). I spent twenty minutes hunting down a file from 1981 which resisted discovery because the people who had filed it in the moldering cobwebby basement could neither read nor spell. I went to McDonald's on a coffee run for everyone in the office and waited so long at the drive-thru that I lost patience, parked the car and went inside and paid at the counter, which also took too long; and they screwed up the order.
Great stuff. When Monday isn't as bad as it usually is, I've learned to tread cautiously, because that means that the spirit of Monday has decided to resort to guerrilla tactics and will spring out at me from the cover of some other day.
The good news is that if my landlord won't return my call or replace the fridge (I hate the fridge anyway; the freezer doesn't self-defrost and the fridge has no drawers for convenient storage, the seal around the door is basically broken like worn-out elastic, and when I defrost the freezer it leaks water everywhere which is ruining the floor, so bring on a new fridge; it's just the timing that's poor because I have food stored in the freezer that I really, really need in order to eat over the next seven days, and my landlord notoriously dodges my calls), I'm going shopping this weekend and paying it out of the rent money he would have gotten over the next few weeks. The lease holds him responsible for repairs, and my lawyer said that's what I should do.
Reason number 842 why I would love to buy a house. But all in good time.
So today is Monday on Thursday. (Anyone remember Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?)
I was awakened in the wee hours of the morning by the sound of my refrigerator buzzing, grinding, whirring, and whining at the volume of an approaching Howitzer. I tried to go back to sleep with earplugs. I slept late. The noise was vibrating the entire house. I called the handyman. No answer. I called my landlord. No answer. The coffeepot at work stopped working (doooooom). I spent twenty minutes hunting down a file from 1981 which resisted discovery because the people who had filed it in the moldering cobwebby basement could neither read nor spell. I went to McDonald's on a coffee run for everyone in the office and waited so long at the drive-thru that I lost patience, parked the car and went inside and paid at the counter, which also took too long; and they screwed up the order.
Great stuff. When Monday isn't as bad as it usually is, I've learned to tread cautiously, because that means that the spirit of Monday has decided to resort to guerrilla tactics and will spring out at me from the cover of some other day.
The good news is that if my landlord won't return my call or replace the fridge (I hate the fridge anyway; the freezer doesn't self-defrost and the fridge has no drawers for convenient storage, the seal around the door is basically broken like worn-out elastic, and when I defrost the freezer it leaks water everywhere which is ruining the floor, so bring on a new fridge; it's just the timing that's poor because I have food stored in the freezer that I really, really need in order to eat over the next seven days, and my landlord notoriously dodges my calls), I'm going shopping this weekend and paying it out of the rent money he would have gotten over the next few weeks. The lease holds him responsible for repairs, and my lawyer said that's what I should do.
Reason number 842 why I would love to buy a house. But all in good time.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
i feel like it's almost time
Things change. One of the fundamental truths of life, right? And the one to which I've had the hardest time adapting since I was a child. I always wanted things to stay the same forever. That one perfect summer day, scouting out with my best friend the abandoned property on the edge of town, the one with the ghostly English roses and the creepy chestnut tree, trying to breathe through a humidity that crawled under my tanktop and settled over my skin like melting Saran wrap and tried to smother me with the smell of roses. That one perfect moment practicing with the Youth Band at church, after fifteen minutes of frustration trying to remember a chord, when suddenly everything snapped into place and we found ourselves living in music. Years of watching the slide of sun and shadow through the fallow apple orchard across the street.
I've never liked change. I live in routine. When I was little I wanted to be one of the Lost Boys, or Peter Pan, and never grow up; I didn't want to leave home. I didn't want to give up my imaginary friends (who were never human -- no, I trucked with dragons and winged horses and talking panthers), I didn't want to yield to adulthood. I liked a hazy, soft-lens future, where everything was perfect and where reality stayed far away.
College changed my view of change. Some days I even liked change, or, at least, looked forward to what the change was accomplishing. There was a lot of change in those years, and I came on the other side of that monumental upheave the better for the wear and tear. Since then, change has been one of the only constants besides God, and it's on an uphill incline, even when there are dips and snags along the line graph.
I feel like the young twenties are a basic continuation of the late teens, which capitalize on the stretchings of adolescence, which mirror the rapid development of infants and toddlers, which can't even compare to the rapid development in the womb. Everyone grows so much in that first year of life, and then the early teen years hurl you forward into more physical growth while your emotional development is still sleeping in the backseat and it takes you until your late teens to begin to figure out what you've grown into. Then you start into the young twenties, sort of like Johnny Appleseed, with a tin pot of what you think you know on your head and a bag of potentialities slung over your shoulder, and you wander along throwing them wherever they might possibly grow, but sometimes it takes you a few years to retrace your steps and find out if anything's come of the scatterings.
But at some point you need to settle. At some point you realize that a handful of your scattered seeds have grown a little bit together in one spot, and that's the spot where you stay. You buy or rent a little apartment or a little house, and you watch the seedlings mature.
Have you read A Wind in the Door? In it L'Engle's tiny microcosmic fictional creatures called farandolae mature into fara which power a cell's mitochondria (okay, spell check, you don't recognize mitochondria. I will now believe nothing you underline in red). The moment of turning from a larval farandola into a mature fara is called "Deepening" -- and the process turns these flighty, mobile creatures into enormous (relatively speaking) things resembling trees, with roots and branches. If the farandolae don't Deepen, the cell dies. If the tiniest part of the human body doesn't put down roots, the human body sickens.
Like farandolae, we twentysomethings find ourselves, at some point before thirty (hopefully), looking for ways to Deepen. Spinning around in our own little carefree, disconnected ways can only last for a little while. Refusal to accept adulthood has consequences that reverberate much further than our own detriment; as L'Engle was a dedicated Anglican, her writing reflected a great deal on faith and the Body of Christ -- and, beautifully, not in overtly religious or churchy ways. Here, in the example of the farandolae, is a pretty simple statement: When young people choose not to grow up, the body begins to die. However small and insignificant we might like to think ourselves (isn't this why a lot of people our age don't vote? We don't think our one ballot makes any difference, but when thousands of people don't think their one ballot makes any difference, the difference is enormously noticeable), we're an integral part of the church, the community, the state, the nation, the world -- and L'Engle would go further to say the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, because to her everything -- everything -- is interconnected.
So yeah, I feel like it's almost time. Internally a lot of my attitudes and desires have been changing. I've been attending church on a weekly basis for the first time in seven years. I've joined the choir and barely mind the commitment, who used to hate anything that infringed on my time; and people are beginning to know who I am. I've started organizing my finances and planning ways to get out of debt. And I really, really want to figure out a way to help all the kids in the community who receive no attention from their parents and will probably wind up petty criminals and drug addicts without some kind of adult intervention outside the home. I think church is a good venue for this.
These aren't astronomical changes, to the naked eye. But I've been told by several people who know me well that these past few months I've been sounding better than I have in years. And I can take no credit for it. None. It's just...time. It's time to make the most of time. And I know we never stop growing, that life never stops being that process toward perfection that we'll never quite achieve but still must strive for; but there's something to be said for wandering around in the woods aimlessly and then coming to a path. Or, to fit better into my earlier comparisons, wandering in the woods aimlessly and then coming to a clearing with a cabin with your name on the mailbox. There's still work to be done, and there always will be, but you've found your place. Even if it's temporary, you've found your place. I mean, after all, some of us are pioneers.
And lingering ahead, always just out of view, is that tantalizing promise of joy and rest, and the knowledge that eventually we'll get there.
When we arrive, sons and daughters
We'll make our homes on the water
We'll build our walls of aluminum
We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon
Now
These currents pull us 'cross the border
Steady your boats, arms to shoulder
Till tidal pull, or Holy God's
Making this calm harbor now
Home
Take up your arms, sons and daughters
We will arise from the bunkers
By land, by sea, by dirigible
We'll leave our tracks untraceable
Now
When we arrive, sons and daughters
We'll make our homes on the water
We'll build our walls of aluminum
We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon
Now
Hear all the bombs fade away
Here all the bombs fade away
Hear all the bombs fade away
Here all the bombs fade away
~The Decemberists
*Note: I pulled these lyrics by ear, since I listened to this fabulous song on repeat many times over. There are a couple of lines on which the lyrics websites don't agree, so I felt free to put in what I thought they were.
I've never liked change. I live in routine. When I was little I wanted to be one of the Lost Boys, or Peter Pan, and never grow up; I didn't want to leave home. I didn't want to give up my imaginary friends (who were never human -- no, I trucked with dragons and winged horses and talking panthers), I didn't want to yield to adulthood. I liked a hazy, soft-lens future, where everything was perfect and where reality stayed far away.
College changed my view of change. Some days I even liked change, or, at least, looked forward to what the change was accomplishing. There was a lot of change in those years, and I came on the other side of that monumental upheave the better for the wear and tear. Since then, change has been one of the only constants besides God, and it's on an uphill incline, even when there are dips and snags along the line graph.
I feel like the young twenties are a basic continuation of the late teens, which capitalize on the stretchings of adolescence, which mirror the rapid development of infants and toddlers, which can't even compare to the rapid development in the womb. Everyone grows so much in that first year of life, and then the early teen years hurl you forward into more physical growth while your emotional development is still sleeping in the backseat and it takes you until your late teens to begin to figure out what you've grown into. Then you start into the young twenties, sort of like Johnny Appleseed, with a tin pot of what you think you know on your head and a bag of potentialities slung over your shoulder, and you wander along throwing them wherever they might possibly grow, but sometimes it takes you a few years to retrace your steps and find out if anything's come of the scatterings.
But at some point you need to settle. At some point you realize that a handful of your scattered seeds have grown a little bit together in one spot, and that's the spot where you stay. You buy or rent a little apartment or a little house, and you watch the seedlings mature.
Have you read A Wind in the Door? In it L'Engle's tiny microcosmic fictional creatures called farandolae mature into fara which power a cell's mitochondria (okay, spell check, you don't recognize mitochondria. I will now believe nothing you underline in red). The moment of turning from a larval farandola into a mature fara is called "Deepening" -- and the process turns these flighty, mobile creatures into enormous (relatively speaking) things resembling trees, with roots and branches. If the farandolae don't Deepen, the cell dies. If the tiniest part of the human body doesn't put down roots, the human body sickens.
Like farandolae, we twentysomethings find ourselves, at some point before thirty (hopefully), looking for ways to Deepen. Spinning around in our own little carefree, disconnected ways can only last for a little while. Refusal to accept adulthood has consequences that reverberate much further than our own detriment; as L'Engle was a dedicated Anglican, her writing reflected a great deal on faith and the Body of Christ -- and, beautifully, not in overtly religious or churchy ways. Here, in the example of the farandolae, is a pretty simple statement: When young people choose not to grow up, the body begins to die. However small and insignificant we might like to think ourselves (isn't this why a lot of people our age don't vote? We don't think our one ballot makes any difference, but when thousands of people don't think their one ballot makes any difference, the difference is enormously noticeable), we're an integral part of the church, the community, the state, the nation, the world -- and L'Engle would go further to say the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, because to her everything -- everything -- is interconnected.
So yeah, I feel like it's almost time. Internally a lot of my attitudes and desires have been changing. I've been attending church on a weekly basis for the first time in seven years. I've joined the choir and barely mind the commitment, who used to hate anything that infringed on my time; and people are beginning to know who I am. I've started organizing my finances and planning ways to get out of debt. And I really, really want to figure out a way to help all the kids in the community who receive no attention from their parents and will probably wind up petty criminals and drug addicts without some kind of adult intervention outside the home. I think church is a good venue for this.
These aren't astronomical changes, to the naked eye. But I've been told by several people who know me well that these past few months I've been sounding better than I have in years. And I can take no credit for it. None. It's just...time. It's time to make the most of time. And I know we never stop growing, that life never stops being that process toward perfection that we'll never quite achieve but still must strive for; but there's something to be said for wandering around in the woods aimlessly and then coming to a path. Or, to fit better into my earlier comparisons, wandering in the woods aimlessly and then coming to a clearing with a cabin with your name on the mailbox. There's still work to be done, and there always will be, but you've found your place. Even if it's temporary, you've found your place. I mean, after all, some of us are pioneers.
And lingering ahead, always just out of view, is that tantalizing promise of joy and rest, and the knowledge that eventually we'll get there.
When we arrive, sons and daughters
We'll make our homes on the water
We'll build our walls of aluminum
We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon
Now
These currents pull us 'cross the border
Steady your boats, arms to shoulder
Till tidal pull, or Holy God's
Making this calm harbor now
Home
Take up your arms, sons and daughters
We will arise from the bunkers
By land, by sea, by dirigible
We'll leave our tracks untraceable
Now
When we arrive, sons and daughters
We'll make our homes on the water
We'll build our walls of aluminum
We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon
Now
Hear all the bombs fade away
Here all the bombs fade away
Hear all the bombs fade away
Here all the bombs fade away
~The Decemberists
*Note: I pulled these lyrics by ear, since I listened to this fabulous song on repeat many times over. There are a couple of lines on which the lyrics websites don't agree, so I felt free to put in what I thought they were.
Monday, March 03, 2008
Sarah Connor Chronicles Season Finale: 8:00 EST Tonight
Please watch it. Pretty please. I don't care what your motives are. You can watch it because you're curious. You can watch it because you love it like I do. You can watch it because you're really, really bored on a Monday night and it's something to do. You can watch it because you think you're going to hate it and you want to make fun of it. You can watch it because you enjoy watching aesthetically pleasing people. You can watch it because you're my friend and you know how much it would mean to me to have this show run for another season. You can watch it because you dislike me and want to mock my tastes. You can watch it because you want to stick it to FOX which cancels all of its most promising shows as quickly as it can. You can watch it for background noise. You can even just tape it on mute, or with the TV off, and throw the tape away tomorrow. I'm not fussy.
Just please watch it. I'm wearing my most pathetic pleading face with tears beginning to well up in my eyes. Okay, maybe not the tears part, but the pathetic pleading face is really moving. If I saw this expression on another human face I would be reduced to a pliant puddle of mush. I would want to give that person a hug. But since you can't give me a hug, you can do the next best thing and watch the show. (Please?)
Just please watch it. I'm wearing my most pathetic pleading face with tears beginning to well up in my eyes. Okay, maybe not the tears part, but the pathetic pleading face is really moving. If I saw this expression on another human face I would be reduced to a pliant puddle of mush. I would want to give that person a hug. But since you can't give me a hug, you can do the next best thing and watch the show. (Please?)
dead eye
I learned to handle rifles yesterday.
My mentor has been puzzling on how to teach me due to the issues of my cross eye-hand dominance...I favor the right hand, but am left-eyed. This hasn't posed too much of a problem with hand guns, or even shotguns, since you sight down the barrel, and with my ambidexterity it's no problem for me to shoot left-handed. But he was concerned about the cartridge ejection on rifles -- most of them eject the cartridge to the right, which he worried would fly right across my line of vision and cause trouble.
My biggest complaint with rifles is that I have a hard time with the scopes. I had similar issues with microscopes in high school biology -- my eyes just hate to focus through scopes; I usually wind up seeing a big ring of black, and by the time I finally manage to get a clear focus I've given myself an enormous headache. So Boss-Man's solution was extremely simple: iron sights (or "peep sights"). No scope, no cross hairs; just the basic rig of a sighting ring, through which you look to center the sights on the muzzle.
Voila. He started me out with a .30-30, nice and light, long range, low recoil, overhead ejection. I didn't do too badly for my first try -- everything was in the black on the target, though not as close to the red as I would have liked. Still, not bad, and not hard to shoot. The iron sights were working just dandy.
But then he handed me a .45-70. (This was Teddy Roosevelt's favorite big game gun.) It ejects to the right, but he wanted me to try it, just to see.
Well, the recoil rocked me back a step, and my shoulder told me that it had just been hit hard by something heavy. I said, "Ow." Boss-Man asked if I wanted to stop. I said, "No. I think this one's more accurate." I shot the remaining three rounds in the magazine. We walked over to the target to see how I'd done.
The .45-70s had gone right through the red.
I started laughing. He rubbed his face. "You amaze me," he said. "Did you know that the cavalry in the Old West hated this gun because they didn't like the recoil?"
"So...I'm kicking the cavalry's ass?" I said.
He laughed. "I give you a .30-30. You shoot it a few times and say, 'Naw...give me a REAL gun.' Unbelievable."
I shot about sixteen more rounds. Dead on every time. No problem with the cartridge ejecting to the right; when I'm focused on something, I'm not easily distracted. Somewhere in the process, because I kept saying, "Ow," Boss-Man checked the bottom of the cartridge box to see what kind of rounds I was shooting.
"OHH," he said. "That's why they're talking to you."
They were special cartridges that he'd amped up. About twice the power of the normal government rounds.
"Oh," I said. "So I'm not being a wimpy girl. A guy shooting this thinks the same thing, but I can SAY it because I'm a girl."
"Yes," he said.
"Cool." I took the proffered cartridges and loaded the rifle.
I'm my father's daughter.
I'll never have a boyfriend.
My mentor has been puzzling on how to teach me due to the issues of my cross eye-hand dominance...I favor the right hand, but am left-eyed. This hasn't posed too much of a problem with hand guns, or even shotguns, since you sight down the barrel, and with my ambidexterity it's no problem for me to shoot left-handed. But he was concerned about the cartridge ejection on rifles -- most of them eject the cartridge to the right, which he worried would fly right across my line of vision and cause trouble.
My biggest complaint with rifles is that I have a hard time with the scopes. I had similar issues with microscopes in high school biology -- my eyes just hate to focus through scopes; I usually wind up seeing a big ring of black, and by the time I finally manage to get a clear focus I've given myself an enormous headache. So Boss-Man's solution was extremely simple: iron sights (or "peep sights"). No scope, no cross hairs; just the basic rig of a sighting ring, through which you look to center the sights on the muzzle.
Voila. He started me out with a .30-30, nice and light, long range, low recoil, overhead ejection. I didn't do too badly for my first try -- everything was in the black on the target, though not as close to the red as I would have liked. Still, not bad, and not hard to shoot. The iron sights were working just dandy.
But then he handed me a .45-70. (This was Teddy Roosevelt's favorite big game gun.) It ejects to the right, but he wanted me to try it, just to see.
Well, the recoil rocked me back a step, and my shoulder told me that it had just been hit hard by something heavy. I said, "Ow." Boss-Man asked if I wanted to stop. I said, "No. I think this one's more accurate." I shot the remaining three rounds in the magazine. We walked over to the target to see how I'd done.
The .45-70s had gone right through the red.
I started laughing. He rubbed his face. "You amaze me," he said. "Did you know that the cavalry in the Old West hated this gun because they didn't like the recoil?"
"So...I'm kicking the cavalry's ass?" I said.
He laughed. "I give you a .30-30. You shoot it a few times and say, 'Naw...give me a REAL gun.' Unbelievable."
I shot about sixteen more rounds. Dead on every time. No problem with the cartridge ejecting to the right; when I'm focused on something, I'm not easily distracted. Somewhere in the process, because I kept saying, "Ow," Boss-Man checked the bottom of the cartridge box to see what kind of rounds I was shooting.
"OHH," he said. "That's why they're talking to you."
They were special cartridges that he'd amped up. About twice the power of the normal government rounds.
"Oh," I said. "So I'm not being a wimpy girl. A guy shooting this thinks the same thing, but I can SAY it because I'm a girl."
"Yes," he said.
"Cool." I took the proffered cartridges and loaded the rifle.
I'm my father's daughter.
I'll never have a boyfriend.
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