I announce the arrival of Wm. Had a Headache Day Eve!
I've told the story several times over the past years, and rather than repeat myself, I will link to the archives, for your convenience (since it's the end of the month, they're all at the top of the page; this computer won't let me view individual posts with their own links):
http://prettypuddleglum.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_archive.html
http://prettypuddleglum.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive.html
http://prettypuddleglum.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html
Now that you're up on your holiday history and obligations, I charge you to go and get drunk. Please. I will be spending the evening with a group of Baptists, and I must know that someone, somewhere out there, is celebrating the holiday in the solemnity of its due reverence. A great man 207 years ago had a bad night's sleep and a headache, and we owe it to all of humanity and great literature to keep his vigil and mock him for it.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
latest music obsession
A few years ago, I received a music recommendation from MP, who'd received it from the inestimable Kelly: Funnel Cloud, by Hem. I purchased the album on one of my summer music sprees (I know this is a world of downloading, but call me old-fashioned: I like to be able to hold the things I own. I like tangibility) and loved it, and subsequently bought two of their previous albums, Rabbit Songs and Eveningland.
But I never got around to seriously listening to those other two albums, until now. And I can't get enough of Rabbit Songs.
This album in particular sports a gorgeous Aaron Copeland influence, full of open chords and fifth intervals and stringed instruments that carry your mind somewhere else. So I love it for that. Lyrically it's gorgeous, and Sally Ellyson's voice is peerless. The other attribute of this work that makes me love it even harder is its authenticity: There is absolutely zero digital screwing around. It's all recorded and produced full-bodied and present, with real orchestral instruments which one of the head members sold most of his possessions to obtain because he believes so strongly in actual, as opposed to digital, music.
Fabulous stuff. Very Americana, delicate and lovely, with a hard bedrock of real life in the lyrics and a longing in the chords. Incredible.
But I never got around to seriously listening to those other two albums, until now. And I can't get enough of Rabbit Songs.
This album in particular sports a gorgeous Aaron Copeland influence, full of open chords and fifth intervals and stringed instruments that carry your mind somewhere else. So I love it for that. Lyrically it's gorgeous, and Sally Ellyson's voice is peerless. The other attribute of this work that makes me love it even harder is its authenticity: There is absolutely zero digital screwing around. It's all recorded and produced full-bodied and present, with real orchestral instruments which one of the head members sold most of his possessions to obtain because he believes so strongly in actual, as opposed to digital, music.
Fabulous stuff. Very Americana, delicate and lovely, with a hard bedrock of real life in the lyrics and a longing in the chords. Incredible.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
the land I love
On my way home from work the other week, stopped at the intersection of State and the Bayfront Parkway, I was arrested by a revelation that drove itself like Judith's tent peg into my skull. I was lucky the light was a long one.
The typically gray winter day had caught my attention a few minutes previously because of the clouds. Erie clouds are like nowhere else. In my high school days my best friend Hillori and I would spend hours staring up at the clouds and wishing that we could make a living simply painting the daily sky. Each day provided a new panorama of collected particulates and water that did something to set the heart at ease.
That day was no exception. As I left the office I had noticed the heavy cumulus formations hanging low over the city. They stood just far enough apart, like the narrow houses below them, to let the watery winter sunshine slide through the cracks and leak a little daylight on the buildings. What really snagged my attention was how obviously they were lake clouds. You can't see the lake from 12th Street, where I was hunting down the post office, but just looking at the sky, you knew there was a body of water, a big one, somewhere close. The clouds had a saturated shimmer about them that reflected the shallow light like they never do inland.
As I pulled up to the end of State, where the road runs into the dock and the dock drops into the Bay, and waited for the light, I stared at the clouds some more. You could soak in a little sunlight, but you couldn't see any blue. Not from the naked sky, that is. I felt my lungs stop working and barely noticed as I drank in a sight I haven't seen in years, one I once took completely for granted. The underbellies of the clouds were blue.
They were reflecting, in a paler, smokier simulacrum, the water. I thought how the water was supposed to reflect the sky, not the other way around, and blinked back the swift lancing of tears: It was beautiful. In a "perfect circle for infinity," the clouds reflected the water reflecting the clouds, and you couldn't quite tell which one came first. The sky and water go together like a lovers' gaze, absorbed, unending, inseparate.
The light changed, and I shifted gears and turned the car east toward home. Every few seconds I craned my neck to the left to stare at the sky some more, allowing myself for the first time in five years to bask in the sudden sun of joy that swelled up from the pit of my stomach. I love my home. I have always loved my home, and when I ran away from it almost five years ago I abjured that love, having determined never to return. I thought to love the beauty of other places; instead, I stopped noticing beauty. What bowled me over that day, watching the clouds in my rear and side view mirrors, was the realization, dizzying like a breath of free air after sitting for hours in a stuffy closet, that this was the first time in five years I had actually seen something. In hardening my heart against my love of homeland, I stopped seeing. I made myself look, every once in awhile, but I didn't see.
I flashed back to a conversation that Hillori and I frequently shared in our girlhood days, as we awoke to our fierce but particular patriotism and spun theories that explained human history and ruminated on the Civil War. We often said that even if we might not die for America, we would die for Pennsylvania. We would give everything for the soil on which we were born.
In South Bend Meg and I had a friend named Jess who hails from Philadelphia. Jess and I would talk for hours about the awesomeness of Pennsylvania, and Meg often told me, shaking her head, “You Pennsylvania people. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen anyone in the world who love their state as much as Pennsylvanians do.”
I hadn’t thought of it as a state-wide phenomenon until then, but I started to take notice after that, and it always seemed to me that Meg was right: We’re crazy in love with our home state, even if we never plan to live there again. We get so excited to run into other Pennsylvanians that we can hardly contain ourselves within our own skin.
It’s weird.
Dustin corroborates, though. He’s the only other person I know who left PA never planning to come back and then came back, and we spent awhile swapping stories and comparing notes. He told me that there’s a Steelers bar in just about every town in the South, and that all of the friends he made in his time there happened to originate in PA. We grinned and patted our people on the back for taking over the world, and sheepishly admitted how happy we are to be back in Western PA.
There’s no explanation for it. Pennsylvania is crumbling, old, and economically depressed. There are no jobs and no money. And yet we come back, and we come back, and we come back; and when we don’t, it seems that we wish we could. As Dustin put it, “If there were jobs here for people with degrees, I don’t think anyone would ever leave. They would just stay here forever.”
I think it has to do with the land itself. There’s something in the soil here that fills you. I find myself looking around as I drive, drawing a deep breath when I lift up mine eyes to the hills, and relaxing into a surge of the peace that only comes from being home. The land grabs you, here. When I agreed with Hillori, long ago, that I would die for my native soil, I meant that in the most literal possible sense. I’d rather hold a handful of Pennsylvania dirt than own an acre of land anywhere else.
Maybe I ate too much of it as a kid. But it’s in the bone, and coming home has brought it out in the blood. When I moved back in October, I thought, panicky, that I wouldn’t stay for long. I didn’t want to be trapped here. I wanted broader horizons and more dramatic vistas. But instead of prison I found freedom, and while I’m still open to living elsewhere in the world, I find myself happier and happier to be here, and minding less and less the thought of a long-term stay. Bigger horizons and broader vistas are just a plane or a road trip away, and I can’t wait to indulge my wanderlust. But the best part of wandering is knowing that at the end, you get to come home. Home is what keeps the wanderer from getting lost.
I don't remember ever being this happy. I love the land, I love my faith, I have two good churches, I have friends, I like my jobs, I'm poor as dirt but scraping by, I'm settling more and more into myself and learning that I don't have anything to prove. I had to leave for awhile, and I had to suffer those growing pains that form the lines around a person's mouth and eyes and are called experience...and I had to come back home. It was the best decision I ever made. I love my life, and I can't wait to see what it brings me next.
* * *
I am holding half an acre
torn from the map of michigan
and folded in this scrap of paper
is the land i grew in
think of every town you've lived in
every room you lay your head
and what is it that you remember
do you carry every sadness with you
every hour your heart was broken
every night the fear and darkness
lay down with you
a man is walking on the highway
a woman stares out at the sea
and light is only now just breaking
so we carry every sadness with us
every hour our hearts were broken
every night the fear and darkness
lay down with us
but i am holding half an acre
torn from the map of michigan
i am carrying this scrap of paper
that can crack the darkest sky wide open
every burden taken from me
every night my heart unfolding
my home
~Hem, "Half Acre"
The typically gray winter day had caught my attention a few minutes previously because of the clouds. Erie clouds are like nowhere else. In my high school days my best friend Hillori and I would spend hours staring up at the clouds and wishing that we could make a living simply painting the daily sky. Each day provided a new panorama of collected particulates and water that did something to set the heart at ease.
That day was no exception. As I left the office I had noticed the heavy cumulus formations hanging low over the city. They stood just far enough apart, like the narrow houses below them, to let the watery winter sunshine slide through the cracks and leak a little daylight on the buildings. What really snagged my attention was how obviously they were lake clouds. You can't see the lake from 12th Street, where I was hunting down the post office, but just looking at the sky, you knew there was a body of water, a big one, somewhere close. The clouds had a saturated shimmer about them that reflected the shallow light like they never do inland.
As I pulled up to the end of State, where the road runs into the dock and the dock drops into the Bay, and waited for the light, I stared at the clouds some more. You could soak in a little sunlight, but you couldn't see any blue. Not from the naked sky, that is. I felt my lungs stop working and barely noticed as I drank in a sight I haven't seen in years, one I once took completely for granted. The underbellies of the clouds were blue.
They were reflecting, in a paler, smokier simulacrum, the water. I thought how the water was supposed to reflect the sky, not the other way around, and blinked back the swift lancing of tears: It was beautiful. In a "perfect circle for infinity," the clouds reflected the water reflecting the clouds, and you couldn't quite tell which one came first. The sky and water go together like a lovers' gaze, absorbed, unending, inseparate.
The light changed, and I shifted gears and turned the car east toward home. Every few seconds I craned my neck to the left to stare at the sky some more, allowing myself for the first time in five years to bask in the sudden sun of joy that swelled up from the pit of my stomach. I love my home. I have always loved my home, and when I ran away from it almost five years ago I abjured that love, having determined never to return. I thought to love the beauty of other places; instead, I stopped noticing beauty. What bowled me over that day, watching the clouds in my rear and side view mirrors, was the realization, dizzying like a breath of free air after sitting for hours in a stuffy closet, that this was the first time in five years I had actually seen something. In hardening my heart against my love of homeland, I stopped seeing. I made myself look, every once in awhile, but I didn't see.
I flashed back to a conversation that Hillori and I frequently shared in our girlhood days, as we awoke to our fierce but particular patriotism and spun theories that explained human history and ruminated on the Civil War. We often said that even if we might not die for America, we would die for Pennsylvania. We would give everything for the soil on which we were born.
In South Bend Meg and I had a friend named Jess who hails from Philadelphia. Jess and I would talk for hours about the awesomeness of Pennsylvania, and Meg often told me, shaking her head, “You Pennsylvania people. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen anyone in the world who love their state as much as Pennsylvanians do.”
I hadn’t thought of it as a state-wide phenomenon until then, but I started to take notice after that, and it always seemed to me that Meg was right: We’re crazy in love with our home state, even if we never plan to live there again. We get so excited to run into other Pennsylvanians that we can hardly contain ourselves within our own skin.
It’s weird.
Dustin corroborates, though. He’s the only other person I know who left PA never planning to come back and then came back, and we spent awhile swapping stories and comparing notes. He told me that there’s a Steelers bar in just about every town in the South, and that all of the friends he made in his time there happened to originate in PA. We grinned and patted our people on the back for taking over the world, and sheepishly admitted how happy we are to be back in Western PA.
There’s no explanation for it. Pennsylvania is crumbling, old, and economically depressed. There are no jobs and no money. And yet we come back, and we come back, and we come back; and when we don’t, it seems that we wish we could. As Dustin put it, “If there were jobs here for people with degrees, I don’t think anyone would ever leave. They would just stay here forever.”
I think it has to do with the land itself. There’s something in the soil here that fills you. I find myself looking around as I drive, drawing a deep breath when I lift up mine eyes to the hills, and relaxing into a surge of the peace that only comes from being home. The land grabs you, here. When I agreed with Hillori, long ago, that I would die for my native soil, I meant that in the most literal possible sense. I’d rather hold a handful of Pennsylvania dirt than own an acre of land anywhere else.
Maybe I ate too much of it as a kid. But it’s in the bone, and coming home has brought it out in the blood. When I moved back in October, I thought, panicky, that I wouldn’t stay for long. I didn’t want to be trapped here. I wanted broader horizons and more dramatic vistas. But instead of prison I found freedom, and while I’m still open to living elsewhere in the world, I find myself happier and happier to be here, and minding less and less the thought of a long-term stay. Bigger horizons and broader vistas are just a plane or a road trip away, and I can’t wait to indulge my wanderlust. But the best part of wandering is knowing that at the end, you get to come home. Home is what keeps the wanderer from getting lost.
I don't remember ever being this happy. I love the land, I love my faith, I have two good churches, I have friends, I like my jobs, I'm poor as dirt but scraping by, I'm settling more and more into myself and learning that I don't have anything to prove. I had to leave for awhile, and I had to suffer those growing pains that form the lines around a person's mouth and eyes and are called experience...and I had to come back home. It was the best decision I ever made. I love my life, and I can't wait to see what it brings me next.
* * *
I am holding half an acre
torn from the map of michigan
and folded in this scrap of paper
is the land i grew in
think of every town you've lived in
every room you lay your head
and what is it that you remember
do you carry every sadness with you
every hour your heart was broken
every night the fear and darkness
lay down with you
a man is walking on the highway
a woman stares out at the sea
and light is only now just breaking
so we carry every sadness with us
every hour our hearts were broken
every night the fear and darkness
lay down with us
but i am holding half an acre
torn from the map of michigan
i am carrying this scrap of paper
that can crack the darkest sky wide open
every burden taken from me
every night my heart unfolding
my home
~Hem, "Half Acre"
Thursday, January 22, 2009
outrage
The other day my father informed me, his mouth barely suppressing a sadistic glee, that they're making a live-action movie of one of my all-time favorite shows, Cowboy Bebop.
"Really?" I said, trying to decide if I were more skeptical than excited. (I have vaguely formulated opinions that unless Frank Miller is in charge of the project, anime or graphic novel series, in the interest of philanthropy and respect for the arts, are to be left strictly alone.)
"Yeah." The glee began to push its way out the corners of his mouth. "And guess who they're casting as Spike?"
I eyed the evil shining from his eyes. My stomach told me something bad was coming. "Who?"
The glee erupted from his mouth and ranged all over his face like a swarm of beetles. "Keanu Reeves."
I don't really remember the next couple of minutes. In a hazy mental montage, I remember anguish, and screaming, and pulling my hair, and my dad's evil laughter flinging my littls sobs of pain in splatters all over the interior of the car.
Whichever casting director is in charge of that one should do jail time. Casting Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel is like spitting on the Mona Lisa, and someone needs to pay.
Meanwhile there's a special campfire built somewhere for mean people like my dad.
"Really?" I said, trying to decide if I were more skeptical than excited. (I have vaguely formulated opinions that unless Frank Miller is in charge of the project, anime or graphic novel series, in the interest of philanthropy and respect for the arts, are to be left strictly alone.)
"Yeah." The glee began to push its way out the corners of his mouth. "And guess who they're casting as Spike?"
I eyed the evil shining from his eyes. My stomach told me something bad was coming. "Who?"
The glee erupted from his mouth and ranged all over his face like a swarm of beetles. "Keanu Reeves."
I don't really remember the next couple of minutes. In a hazy mental montage, I remember anguish, and screaming, and pulling my hair, and my dad's evil laughter flinging my littls sobs of pain in splatters all over the interior of the car.
Whichever casting director is in charge of that one should do jail time. Casting Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel is like spitting on the Mona Lisa, and someone needs to pay.
Meanwhile there's a special campfire built somewhere for mean people like my dad.
it's the little things
I think I'm allergic to my sweater.
It's like my skin is erupting with fury, a torturous itch, and I get all absentminded and scratch, and then my skin (absurdly sensitive) blossoms into all these truly horrific welts that look like someone beat the tar out of me.
The tag SAYS it's acrylic and wool (I know, I know, acrylic sucks; I don't usually opt for it, but this sweater was pretty and really on sale), and since neither of those usually bothers me, I'm wondering if the wool is angora...I hate angora...
Bah. It's a red sweater, too, which is one of my favorite colors, and now it nicely matches my pink welty complexion.
And I didn't bring a change of clothes to work, of course.
Oh well. Time to haul my itchy ass off to lunch. (Speaking of lunch -- which is leftover chicken and biscuits -- the trick to reheating biscuits is to pop them in the toaster or toaster oven. It's quick and keeps them crisp and flaky instead of turning them all spongy and gross like the microwave does to them.)
I really, really like my new job.
It's like my skin is erupting with fury, a torturous itch, and I get all absentminded and scratch, and then my skin (absurdly sensitive) blossoms into all these truly horrific welts that look like someone beat the tar out of me.
The tag SAYS it's acrylic and wool (I know, I know, acrylic sucks; I don't usually opt for it, but this sweater was pretty and really on sale), and since neither of those usually bothers me, I'm wondering if the wool is angora...I hate angora...
Bah. It's a red sweater, too, which is one of my favorite colors, and now it nicely matches my pink welty complexion.
And I didn't bring a change of clothes to work, of course.
Oh well. Time to haul my itchy ass off to lunch. (Speaking of lunch -- which is leftover chicken and biscuits -- the trick to reheating biscuits is to pop them in the toaster or toaster oven. It's quick and keeps them crisp and flaky instead of turning them all spongy and gross like the microwave does to them.)
I really, really like my new job.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
at long, long last...
Sunday, in a quest for ingredients for chicken and biscuits, I prowled through the poultry section of the local grocery store (the better ones were too far away to make driving in the bad weather worth the trouble) looking for a whole cut-up chicken.
But they only carried whole fryers.
I considered, selected a big fat bird, and took it home almost quivering with anticipation.
Yes, ladies and gentleman. The meat cleaver works. I hacked apart a whole chicken with a great big wicked knife, sustaining no damage to either the knife or the cutting board, but plenty of clean, even, desired damage to the chicken, and it was the pure, visceral poetry of a hunter-gatherer's ancestral idea of a grand old time.
But they only carried whole fryers.
I considered, selected a big fat bird, and took it home almost quivering with anticipation.
Yes, ladies and gentleman. The meat cleaver works. I hacked apart a whole chicken with a great big wicked knife, sustaining no damage to either the knife or the cutting board, but plenty of clean, even, desired damage to the chicken, and it was the pure, visceral poetry of a hunter-gatherer's ancestral idea of a grand old time.
Monday, January 12, 2009
memo
The whole city naps under heavy eyelids of snow. The past few days have seen nearly constant snowfall, reminding me of why I love winter. Roads clogged with snow and salt, churning tires, negotiating streetlights (mostly whether or not to run red lights) represent a challenge, and over everything a silence has settled like a hush in a cathedral, but what I love most, this past week, is how winter, more than any other temperate season, throws man's helplessness in the face of nature into stark relief against the blankness of snow. It's nothing drastic. It's ordinary, the everyday necessity of shoveling or plowing out a driveway, leaving earlier to drive to work, maintaining windshield wiper blades, gauging the depth of snow on the road at intersections and turns to anticipate the slide factor and adjust angle and speed accordingly.
When I see the houses drooping under their frozen weight and people trudging up and down the street in coats and trees holding armfuls of snow like piled laundry, I think it could be any decade from the early twentieth century to the present. Our machines may have grown a little more sophisticated over the past century, but not that much. We can't stop the snowfall. We can't stop the wind blowing. We can't stop the cold. In our struggle to keep roads clear and houses warm, we engage with one of the oldest struggles in the northern climes of human history. Winter is timeless.
This morning after my rush to get to work on time (this new earlier-bird schedule is not settling in well; my circadian rhythm is undergoing indigestion) I reached into the backseat and realized I'd forgotten my shoes. Yesterday evening during a fit of housecleaning I'd tossed them in the coat closet, and proven the "out of sight, out of mind" adage in the fullness of its truth. So today I'm keeping my feet under the desk to hide my fashion crime of wearing brown sneakery lace-ups with black dress pants. Fortunately there isn't a lot of client traffic in the office today, and I work mostly with men.
Speaking of circadian indigestion, my eyes have reached that stage of tiredness where I'm seeing through a film. It's like I'm not wearing glasses, wearing glasses. Also I think that I've drunk so much coffee in the past week that one day when they do my autopsy, they'll find a hole in my stomach like the bottom of a rusted-out can, and coffee sloshing in my veins instead of blood.
I don't expect to get a tremendous amount of rest this week -- I close at Borders three nights, and the other two are booked up with social fun. John said the other day that he's glad I'm out and about so much, because I used to be at home all the time in Michigan. Now I hardly ever see the inside of the trailer -- which saves on the heating bill. I come from a tight-fisted family of penguins. We never turn the heat up, instead relying on old-fashioned methods like sweaters, multiple layers, afghans and electric blankets. (Thank God for the electric blanket Mom gave me -- that bedroom is as cold as the proverbial witch's ear and Simon doesn't generate an appreciable amount of body heat.)
So yes, life is full and busy, and I am tired but happy. (It doesn't help that even after working for fifteen hours I have to take a little down time before falling asleep, which usually involves reading. But necessity is the mother of discipline, so I'm not worried.) I would only like a little time to take down the Christmas tree...it's out of season, and too dried up to plug in without burning down the trailer.
When I see the houses drooping under their frozen weight and people trudging up and down the street in coats and trees holding armfuls of snow like piled laundry, I think it could be any decade from the early twentieth century to the present. Our machines may have grown a little more sophisticated over the past century, but not that much. We can't stop the snowfall. We can't stop the wind blowing. We can't stop the cold. In our struggle to keep roads clear and houses warm, we engage with one of the oldest struggles in the northern climes of human history. Winter is timeless.
This morning after my rush to get to work on time (this new earlier-bird schedule is not settling in well; my circadian rhythm is undergoing indigestion) I reached into the backseat and realized I'd forgotten my shoes. Yesterday evening during a fit of housecleaning I'd tossed them in the coat closet, and proven the "out of sight, out of mind" adage in the fullness of its truth. So today I'm keeping my feet under the desk to hide my fashion crime of wearing brown sneakery lace-ups with black dress pants. Fortunately there isn't a lot of client traffic in the office today, and I work mostly with men.
Speaking of circadian indigestion, my eyes have reached that stage of tiredness where I'm seeing through a film. It's like I'm not wearing glasses, wearing glasses. Also I think that I've drunk so much coffee in the past week that one day when they do my autopsy, they'll find a hole in my stomach like the bottom of a rusted-out can, and coffee sloshing in my veins instead of blood.
I don't expect to get a tremendous amount of rest this week -- I close at Borders three nights, and the other two are booked up with social fun. John said the other day that he's glad I'm out and about so much, because I used to be at home all the time in Michigan. Now I hardly ever see the inside of the trailer -- which saves on the heating bill. I come from a tight-fisted family of penguins. We never turn the heat up, instead relying on old-fashioned methods like sweaters, multiple layers, afghans and electric blankets. (Thank God for the electric blanket Mom gave me -- that bedroom is as cold as the proverbial witch's ear and Simon doesn't generate an appreciable amount of body heat.)
So yes, life is full and busy, and I am tired but happy. (It doesn't help that even after working for fifteen hours I have to take a little down time before falling asleep, which usually involves reading. But necessity is the mother of discipline, so I'm not worried.) I would only like a little time to take down the Christmas tree...it's out of season, and too dried up to plug in without burning down the trailer.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Almost everything is going splendidly. I would categorize life right now as "good."
Weirdly, I don't feel much like blogging. I've spent a lot of time catching up for real and more or less in person (or on the phone) with friends.
I'm enjoying this.
But still -- I have a lot of friends in the blogosphere, so here's to you, faithful readers! Forgive my temporary silence as I stretch my soul a little bit and begin to notice things like the way the clouds reflect the lake even on overcast days.
Winter is beautiful, and I am fairly content.
Weirdly, I don't feel much like blogging. I've spent a lot of time catching up for real and more or less in person (or on the phone) with friends.
I'm enjoying this.
But still -- I have a lot of friends in the blogosphere, so here's to you, faithful readers! Forgive my temporary silence as I stretch my soul a little bit and begin to notice things like the way the clouds reflect the lake even on overcast days.
Winter is beautiful, and I am fairly content.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
today's blinding revelation
It's very simple. I don't know why it didn't occur to me in such simple terms before.
I was talking with the office paralegal this morning, who, like me, is a book enthusiast and an emotional barometer for the immediate environment. (Most of my life struggles can be summed up in adapting to, and managing, deep and hyper sensitivity.) She said this great thing:
"It all boils down to two things. I know this is simplistic, but here it is: It all boils down to love and fear."
Evidently East of Eden expouds greatly upon this theme, so now I must pull it out of the garage and read it. (And by "now" I mean "sooner than my retirement"; that queue never gets shorter.)
So I've been going through the part of my mind that remains active and busy even when the rest of it is engaged in other tasks, sorting out the goods and evils I know or have read about, and it can all be categorized under love or fear. Because those are truly opposite. Which is why the Bible says, "Perfect love drives out all fear." The two can coexist, but love in its perfection knows no fear. Fear is the opposite of love. Not hate; hate is equal parts love and fear. Even the seemingly neutral concept of indifference relates to fear.
I read once in The Blue Castle (possibly my favorite book of all time, ever, period) that "fear is the original sin." I disagreed for a long time, but, upon reflection, it's not far off. The temptation presented to Eve in the garden was the enticement of knowledge, and she responded in fear of ignorance rather than love of God -- perhaps the suspicion that God was holding out, the nagging feeling that being like God would be better than simply living in the perfection of His love.
(The Shack posits that independence was the original sin, and I concur with that. But fear, in many cases -- and I'm not talking the healthy kind of independence where kids grow up and leave home, or a country refuses to bow to a monarchy; independence is a convoluted concept -- is the root of the desire for independence.)
Today my life philosophy is this:
Everything boils down to love and fear. There is nothing else.
I've been pondering a lot lately on how much I live in fear, mostly the fear of offending others or the fear of driving them away, the fear of doing something wrong in how I relate to others and winding up alone forever. I've been getting tired of it, and realizing that over the past few years my coming-of-age experiences have helped in paring away a lot of my other fears. It's kind of neat to see the progress over time -- usually I'm more adept at focusing on the failures. It heartens me in preparing to lay siege to these particularly stubborn holdouts.
We'll see what love and stubborn choice can do.
I was talking with the office paralegal this morning, who, like me, is a book enthusiast and an emotional barometer for the immediate environment. (Most of my life struggles can be summed up in adapting to, and managing, deep and hyper sensitivity.) She said this great thing:
"It all boils down to two things. I know this is simplistic, but here it is: It all boils down to love and fear."
Evidently East of Eden expouds greatly upon this theme, so now I must pull it out of the garage and read it. (And by "now" I mean "sooner than my retirement"; that queue never gets shorter.)
So I've been going through the part of my mind that remains active and busy even when the rest of it is engaged in other tasks, sorting out the goods and evils I know or have read about, and it can all be categorized under love or fear. Because those are truly opposite. Which is why the Bible says, "Perfect love drives out all fear." The two can coexist, but love in its perfection knows no fear. Fear is the opposite of love. Not hate; hate is equal parts love and fear. Even the seemingly neutral concept of indifference relates to fear.
I read once in The Blue Castle (possibly my favorite book of all time, ever, period) that "fear is the original sin." I disagreed for a long time, but, upon reflection, it's not far off. The temptation presented to Eve in the garden was the enticement of knowledge, and she responded in fear of ignorance rather than love of God -- perhaps the suspicion that God was holding out, the nagging feeling that being like God would be better than simply living in the perfection of His love.
(The Shack posits that independence was the original sin, and I concur with that. But fear, in many cases -- and I'm not talking the healthy kind of independence where kids grow up and leave home, or a country refuses to bow to a monarchy; independence is a convoluted concept -- is the root of the desire for independence.)
Today my life philosophy is this:
Everything boils down to love and fear. There is nothing else.
I've been pondering a lot lately on how much I live in fear, mostly the fear of offending others or the fear of driving them away, the fear of doing something wrong in how I relate to others and winding up alone forever. I've been getting tired of it, and realizing that over the past few years my coming-of-age experiences have helped in paring away a lot of my other fears. It's kind of neat to see the progress over time -- usually I'm more adept at focusing on the failures. It heartens me in preparing to lay siege to these particularly stubborn holdouts.
We'll see what love and stubborn choice can do.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
(Re)Tales
Every time I sit down to blog lately I get ridiculously tired.
I had forgotten how completely retail takes over a person's life. Anytime I'm not working I'm sleeping, or preparing to sleep. My favorite time of day happens when I come home, usually at an ungodly hour of the evening, to brew a cup of herbal tea and curl up in bed with the electric blanket cooking the sheets and the headboard smothered in pillows to read for an hour or so before surrendering to unconsciousness.
Christmas doesn't mark the end of the holiday shopping season; it generally lasts well into January, and this year has seen a lot more traffic than even my managers expected. On New Year's Day I dragged myself to work before the store opened at 11:00 a.m. and through a bleary fog I saw people sitting in their cars, waiting. Shouldn't you people be in bed with a hangover? I thought with as much incredulity as my tiredness allowed me to muster. In the few minutes before we unlocked the doors people started lining up, pressing their faces to the glass and staring at us, and in those minutes I objectively hated all of humanity. They looked about to chew their way through the doors just to get inside...and when we let them in (cracking jokes about getting trampled and killed), they bought things like...WWF books. As one of my coworkers said, after our first customer left with his wrestling book safely in hand, "...Really? You had to get out of bed on New Year's Day and make this emergency purchase and it's a WWF book? Really?"
My karma took a stand against me this past week: Anytime I found myself behind the registers, helping cash people out, I got all the evil customers. The company changed its return policy a few months ago, eliminating all returns except those with receipts. This only makes sense to me. In a big store, with tons of media retailers all over the place, people have plenty of opportunities simply to rip something off the shelves and return it (hello, Garden State), or buy a used book or CD and bring it back to our store to make money. Sure, this might not always be the case, but the policy is certainly understandable -- and not uncommon.
But the company might as well have announced that returns must be accompanied by ritual child sacrifice for as reasonably as my customers took it. I seriously watched them devolve a few links in the chain when I patiently explained that they couldn't return merchandise without a receipt. Their faces collapsed into simian snarls and all their words ran together: WhaddayameanIcan'treturnthis? [Breath]ThiswasaGIFThowcouldIhaveaRECEIPT? [Breath] ItwaspurchasedHEREaWEEKagoIcan'tBELIEVEthiscan'tyouCHECK? [Breath] And then, invariably, my favorite: DoyouhaveanyideahowmuchmoneyISPENDhere?
Unfortunately I'm not exactly allowed to respond with things like, "Do you have any idea how much I don't care?" Or, "I am a leeetle cog in a biiiiig machine. I can't do anything for you."
So of course I always delivered the policy politely and professionally, and for good PR I called up the managers and let them handle it when people got really upset. Since just about everyone got really upset -- these people seemed to wait to come to my register, and mine alone: I, the high priestess presiding over the altar of the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey -- after a few hours of this I stalked out from behind the registers and growled at one of my managers, "I need a drink. Of something strong."
"Like...coffee?" she asked.
"No. Like 80 proof."
I can't quite figure it, but the pre- and immediately post-Christmas shoppers render the idea of peace on earth fairly incongruous, while the New Year's crowd so far has bounced in cheerily like children released to the playground. Admittedly tired from the long hours, I nonetheless enjoy this spirit of shopping, as ridiculous as I find all the traffic (don't these people have jobs? And if they don't, why are they buying books?). A certain jocularity pervades the atmosphere -- for the most part. Do people really like New Year's so much? I don't doubt that everyone is glad to bid 2008 farewell (or maybe not farewell, exactly), but this strikes me as odd. New Year's generally doesn't affect me all that much. Once I decided to stop living in guilt, I didn't really care about New Year's one way or the other, except for Mom's amazing pork and sauerkraut dinner which appears to be traditional among German or Polish Americans. But other people seem to revel in the fresh start, the optimism, the buoyant hope that someone invented at some point in history, that a new year means better things.
It's not that I don't believe any of that myself; it's that I don't know where this hope received its particular foundation. I find it enjoyable, certainly, and I too love the start of the new, the finish of the old, the shaking out of the yearly cycle like a slightly tired tablecloth snapped free of its crumbs and settled back in freshness over the table. I just find it peculiar. Human beings seem generally given to hope, whether or not there's any reason for it. I like this. I still find it strange.
In any event, I also rediscovered the disarming power of kindness. Mean, nasty, grumpy, rude people I can handle -- I usually brace myself for it before walking in the door. I might get thin-lipped, tight-jawed, rigid with anger and stress (Look, I didn't make the policy, okay? Would you mind not yelling at me? Thank you so much), but I take it pretty much in stride. What can you do? As Pete says in The Muppets Take Manhattan, "Peoples is peoples." Which usually means that peoples is jerks. No surprise there. So you deal. All in a day's work.
But kindness? It comes completely out of left field and launches a javelin in the tear ducts. The other day as I rang people up at the registers, a man in his thirties came up and requested a DVD pack being held for him there (our box sets are kept locked in glass cases to which only staff have keys. Customers are not permitted to carry the box sets around the store with them. So when I remove a box set for someone and they reach for it, I always smile and say, "I'll be happy to put that up at the register for you. What name shall I put on it?" This isn't hard to interpret, right? But some people don't, so then, still smiling, I say, "No, actually, I have to put this up at the register for you. What name would you like me to put on it?" This is received more graciously than I would ordinarily expect). As I retrieved it and started to ring it up, I noticed that it had an old, old sale price sticker on it -- twenty dollars less than the list price -- which shouldn't have been there, and, even though the DVDs have been on sale, the new sale price is more than the old one.
Shit, I thought; I dragged the preparation for rudeness up from my gut and radioed a manager before the guy could cause any fuss. The answer I got didn't surprise me -- the usual, Try to explain the policy first. I raised my eyes to him and started to say, with palpable despair, "Sir, this sale price is an old one that shouldn't have been left here..."
And he waved his hand, sympathy all over his face. "Don't worry about it," he said softly -- I must really have looked upset -- "I didn't think that was right. I'll just take it for what it's ringing up as now."
Right there, for the first time since I started that job, I felt, to my overwhelming horror, tears begin a sudden swim in my eyes. I blinked hard and focused intensely on the box set as I deactivated the security tag. "Thank you," I said.
"No problem," he said.
For some reason, the rest of the day was great. Not smooth, necessarily, but peaceful. You don't expect people to be nice. It catches you totally off guard. Most of the time people seem to think we retail workers live at the store -- maybe we sleep curled up in our lockers in the back room, but surely we don't have lives. We are the omniscient automatons personally responsible for all the store's doings. And yet, after New Year's, I've experienced a lot of jocularity, understanding, sympathy and good manners.
Maybe everyone's just glad Christmas is over.
So the new job starts Monday, I'm enjoying this job, have managed to keep myself out of trollery, and look forward to a return to a more normal schedule. I keep praying about the specifics of my future and keep getting Wait as a response, so I'm casting about for ways to enjoy, and make good use of, what I'm doing now. There's a certain relief to being absurdly busy. Also to listening to music again. Simon's not a fan -- the house usually isn't this loud -- but he'll live. He's a remarkably adaptable feline. And I find myself quite grateful for my surviving houseplants who have stuck stubbornly by me through all the winters -- and springs, and summers, and autumns -- of my discontent. Unsurprisingly, they're all desert plants.
To my delight, I noticed the other day that one of my jades, which I bought at Aldi three and a half years ago -- eight little cutlets sprouting in a circle in a tiny pot -- has, in addition to growing tall, begun to sport woody stems. And, though the watering hasn't been frequent in the past year, it looks happy.
I like green and growing things. I miss pottering around in dirt. Well. Once I get my financial feet back under me, we'll see about restarting my indoor garden. A house full of plants has richer air and brighter light.
I had forgotten how completely retail takes over a person's life. Anytime I'm not working I'm sleeping, or preparing to sleep. My favorite time of day happens when I come home, usually at an ungodly hour of the evening, to brew a cup of herbal tea and curl up in bed with the electric blanket cooking the sheets and the headboard smothered in pillows to read for an hour or so before surrendering to unconsciousness.
Christmas doesn't mark the end of the holiday shopping season; it generally lasts well into January, and this year has seen a lot more traffic than even my managers expected. On New Year's Day I dragged myself to work before the store opened at 11:00 a.m. and through a bleary fog I saw people sitting in their cars, waiting. Shouldn't you people be in bed with a hangover? I thought with as much incredulity as my tiredness allowed me to muster. In the few minutes before we unlocked the doors people started lining up, pressing their faces to the glass and staring at us, and in those minutes I objectively hated all of humanity. They looked about to chew their way through the doors just to get inside...and when we let them in (cracking jokes about getting trampled and killed), they bought things like...WWF books. As one of my coworkers said, after our first customer left with his wrestling book safely in hand, "...Really? You had to get out of bed on New Year's Day and make this emergency purchase and it's a WWF book? Really?"
My karma took a stand against me this past week: Anytime I found myself behind the registers, helping cash people out, I got all the evil customers. The company changed its return policy a few months ago, eliminating all returns except those with receipts. This only makes sense to me. In a big store, with tons of media retailers all over the place, people have plenty of opportunities simply to rip something off the shelves and return it (hello, Garden State), or buy a used book or CD and bring it back to our store to make money. Sure, this might not always be the case, but the policy is certainly understandable -- and not uncommon.
But the company might as well have announced that returns must be accompanied by ritual child sacrifice for as reasonably as my customers took it. I seriously watched them devolve a few links in the chain when I patiently explained that they couldn't return merchandise without a receipt. Their faces collapsed into simian snarls and all their words ran together: WhaddayameanIcan'treturnthis? [Breath]
Unfortunately I'm not exactly allowed to respond with things like, "Do you have any idea how much I don't care?" Or, "I am a leeetle cog in a biiiiig machine. I can't do anything for you."
So of course I always delivered the policy politely and professionally, and for good PR I called up the managers and let them handle it when people got really upset. Since just about everyone got really upset -- these people seemed to wait to come to my register, and mine alone: I, the high priestess presiding over the altar of the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey -- after a few hours of this I stalked out from behind the registers and growled at one of my managers, "I need a drink. Of something strong."
"Like...coffee?" she asked.
"No. Like 80 proof."
I can't quite figure it, but the pre- and immediately post-Christmas shoppers render the idea of peace on earth fairly incongruous, while the New Year's crowd so far has bounced in cheerily like children released to the playground. Admittedly tired from the long hours, I nonetheless enjoy this spirit of shopping, as ridiculous as I find all the traffic (don't these people have jobs? And if they don't, why are they buying books?). A certain jocularity pervades the atmosphere -- for the most part. Do people really like New Year's so much? I don't doubt that everyone is glad to bid 2008 farewell (or maybe not farewell, exactly), but this strikes me as odd. New Year's generally doesn't affect me all that much. Once I decided to stop living in guilt, I didn't really care about New Year's one way or the other, except for Mom's amazing pork and sauerkraut dinner which appears to be traditional among German or Polish Americans. But other people seem to revel in the fresh start, the optimism, the buoyant hope that someone invented at some point in history, that a new year means better things.
It's not that I don't believe any of that myself; it's that I don't know where this hope received its particular foundation. I find it enjoyable, certainly, and I too love the start of the new, the finish of the old, the shaking out of the yearly cycle like a slightly tired tablecloth snapped free of its crumbs and settled back in freshness over the table. I just find it peculiar. Human beings seem generally given to hope, whether or not there's any reason for it. I like this. I still find it strange.
In any event, I also rediscovered the disarming power of kindness. Mean, nasty, grumpy, rude people I can handle -- I usually brace myself for it before walking in the door. I might get thin-lipped, tight-jawed, rigid with anger and stress (Look, I didn't make the policy, okay? Would you mind not yelling at me? Thank you so much), but I take it pretty much in stride. What can you do? As Pete says in The Muppets Take Manhattan, "Peoples is peoples." Which usually means that peoples is jerks. No surprise there. So you deal. All in a day's work.
But kindness? It comes completely out of left field and launches a javelin in the tear ducts. The other day as I rang people up at the registers, a man in his thirties came up and requested a DVD pack being held for him there (our box sets are kept locked in glass cases to which only staff have keys. Customers are not permitted to carry the box sets around the store with them. So when I remove a box set for someone and they reach for it, I always smile and say, "I'll be happy to put that up at the register for you. What name shall I put on it?" This isn't hard to interpret, right? But some people don't, so then, still smiling, I say, "No, actually, I have to put this up at the register for you. What name would you like me to put on it?" This is received more graciously than I would ordinarily expect). As I retrieved it and started to ring it up, I noticed that it had an old, old sale price sticker on it -- twenty dollars less than the list price -- which shouldn't have been there, and, even though the DVDs have been on sale, the new sale price is more than the old one.
Shit, I thought; I dragged the preparation for rudeness up from my gut and radioed a manager before the guy could cause any fuss. The answer I got didn't surprise me -- the usual, Try to explain the policy first. I raised my eyes to him and started to say, with palpable despair, "Sir, this sale price is an old one that shouldn't have been left here..."
And he waved his hand, sympathy all over his face. "Don't worry about it," he said softly -- I must really have looked upset -- "I didn't think that was right. I'll just take it for what it's ringing up as now."
Right there, for the first time since I started that job, I felt, to my overwhelming horror, tears begin a sudden swim in my eyes. I blinked hard and focused intensely on the box set as I deactivated the security tag. "Thank you," I said.
"No problem," he said.
For some reason, the rest of the day was great. Not smooth, necessarily, but peaceful. You don't expect people to be nice. It catches you totally off guard. Most of the time people seem to think we retail workers live at the store -- maybe we sleep curled up in our lockers in the back room, but surely we don't have lives. We are the omniscient automatons personally responsible for all the store's doings. And yet, after New Year's, I've experienced a lot of jocularity, understanding, sympathy and good manners.
Maybe everyone's just glad Christmas is over.
So the new job starts Monday, I'm enjoying this job, have managed to keep myself out of trollery, and look forward to a return to a more normal schedule. I keep praying about the specifics of my future and keep getting Wait as a response, so I'm casting about for ways to enjoy, and make good use of, what I'm doing now. There's a certain relief to being absurdly busy. Also to listening to music again. Simon's not a fan -- the house usually isn't this loud -- but he'll live. He's a remarkably adaptable feline. And I find myself quite grateful for my surviving houseplants who have stuck stubbornly by me through all the winters -- and springs, and summers, and autumns -- of my discontent. Unsurprisingly, they're all desert plants.
To my delight, I noticed the other day that one of my jades, which I bought at Aldi three and a half years ago -- eight little cutlets sprouting in a circle in a tiny pot -- has, in addition to growing tall, begun to sport woody stems. And, though the watering hasn't been frequent in the past year, it looks happy.
I like green and growing things. I miss pottering around in dirt. Well. Once I get my financial feet back under me, we'll see about restarting my indoor garden. A house full of plants has richer air and brighter light.
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