hey nonny nonny

“So we’re floating in the pool, and my uncle said, ‘John, you can plan your whole life out, and it won’t turn out the way you planned. Look at me. I planned out everything perfectly, and it still wound up like shit. So I say, As long as you can make your monthly payments, go out and have fun.’ And all of his sons knocked up girls in high school and are living at home, and one of them just got out of prison.”

I smiled, cradling the phone to my ear and chugging another half-glass of water in the heat as John told me about his weekend in Pittsburgh. I like his uncle. I have fuzzy memories of visiting his house a few years ago, and when I learned that he’s a retired cop, I sat with him awhile swapping yarns of my dad’s with his own tales of life on patrol.

And John’s story got me thinking. I had Shakespeare’s timeless advice – “converting all your sounds of woe / into hey, nonny, nonny!” – looping through my head already, and this morning, on Over the Rhine’s The Trumpet Child album, Karin Bergquist sang gaily, “I can’t be bothered / I’m gonna roll.”

All of those thoughts converged as I toweled my hair. My mind started pulling from other sources, and finally selected a line from Blood and Chocolate (yes, I’m eclectically inspired), when Aiden, encouraging Vivian to live her life according to her own choice and not her family’s expectations, tells her, “You only get one life.”

We only get one. I only get one. And yes, there are a lot of things I want to do with it. Some kind of greatness has always called to me, from as far back as I can remember (and that’s a long way; my consciousness seems to have kicked in early), and I look forward to it with purpose and eagerness; in my strange ways I’ve been pursuing it all my life.

But over the last couple of years I’ve started to lose that single-mindedness, and listening to Josh Ritter’s “For the Dogs or Whoever” on the way home from work yesterday, having been reminded of it in a conversation with Hillori, jolted some of it back to me:

Joan never cared about the in-betweens
Combed her hair with a blade, did the Maid of Orleans.
Said, “Christ walked on water, we can wade to the war
You don’t need to tell me who the fire is for
Oh, bring me a love that can sweeten the sword
The boat that can love the rocks or the shore
The love of an iceberg reaching out for the wreck:
Can you love me like the crosses love the nape of the neck?”

That song is about driven women. Women called to something great, whose eyes are always drawn outward and upward, who go to meet their fates aggressively, single-mindedly.

Hill and I talked about how we have always known we are one of those women. The particulars might still be cloudy, but we know we're meant for more than a two-car garage and a picket fence, although we want those too, in whatever form they come. My difficulty has lain in reconciling the future then with the present now. And honestly, it’s hard not to feel stuck in the present when the future is calling so insistently. But I have always believed that everything is connected, and so, however disparate my now feels from my then, I can’t get to my then without going through my now.

It was easier when I was sort of floating on the breeze like a dandelion seed, the last five years in the Midwest. I had no clue what my future held long-term, and so I could more or less relax in the easygoingness of the present. As long as I could pay my bills, I had fun. (Once upon a time I did live Uncle J’s philosophy.) But now that my plans have been generally shot to shit and I still feel no closer to that elusive destiny that haunts my every momentary awareness, on top of the weight of depression, I’ve been pretty miserable.

But all of it has a purpose. Coming back home has a purpose. Making almost no money has a purpose (at least I have a job). Bouncing around from no-account job to no-account job has a purpose. And I chose my purpose.

It’s not going to suddenly turn everything into daffodils and sunshine. Some days I’m still going to be dragged under by depression; but I’ve returned to the point where I can fight back, and today my thoughts toward it are, So maybe some days the only thing I can enjoy is the sunset. Well then, I’m going to enjoy the hell out of that sunset. It’s like what Harry thought after one of his more amazing conversations with Dumbledore: It’s the difference between being dragged into the ring and walking into it with your head held high. And that’s a huge difference.

In the end it all boils down to two quotable phrases: “If you love something, give it away,” as Conor points out; and, infinitely better,

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. (2 Corinthians 4:9-12)

Death and life simultaneously at work. And I don't have any control over a lot of it, but I can make the call as to what I do with it. I wrote to Meg this morning, in discussing how I still don’t have many of the things I want, and still haven’t reached many of the places I want, “I don't have to be like, Oh goody, I got an onion when what I really wanted was a steak, hooray! but I can say, Okay, I've got an onion, what can I find to go with that?”

(And if all else fails, I can trick other people into helping me make Stone Soup.)

I might not always be happy, but I’m working toward content. I’m reading fiction again, writing again, getting along with my family, eating lunch with MD and her husband today, and soon I’m going to try my hand at turning this town on its head.

Somehow all of that will lead me where I need to go. And since the road curves away out of sight behind a ridge, instead of craning my neck with frustration at not being able to see over that ridge, I might as well take in the open sky and find pleasure in the road at my feet.

Yep. Tomorrow might be stormy and crappy again, but today is fine, and I'm gonna roll.

too darn hot

I'm sleeping in the refrigerator tonight.

tea and books and cartoon laughs

It's as hot as the bowels of hell in the office and I'm tired to begin with, so it feels like my eyeballs are sagging backwards in their sockets and trying to sink into my chest cavity.

Yay, Monday.

Yesterday I made tereré for the first time, because it was too damn hot for mate. Verdict: Icy and refreshing, but not as good as mate. (I really need to convert someone around here to the wonderfulness of the yerba. I enjoy it very much all on my own, but it’s meant to be a social drink, and I miss my mateadas with Rica back in South Dormitory on lazy summerish afternoons at Grove City.)

Saturday I finished reading the first book I haven't read before in months (most of my reading lately has been comfort reading, immersing myself in old favorites as in the company of old friends) -- Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. I really enjoyed it, particularly the rich lyricism of her prose. It doesn’t rank up there with favorite books I’ve ever read, but it was certainly a worthwhile read. After I finished it, I surveyed my shelves to see what I should tackle next, and settled on Umberto Eco’s Island of the Day Before. (I bought this book for four reasons: 1. It cost a dollar. 2. It was by Umberto Eco. 3. It has an awesome title. 4. The cover is gorgeous. I was thoroughly seduced.) I skipped The Name of the Rose and missed Foucault’s Pendulum, so this is my first Eco novel, and it already has me grinning over the way he plays with language and constructs deconstructible characters. A wry narrative sarcasm permeates the writing and I can’t help but love it.

And then last night I indulged a whimsical mood and started watching one of my parents’ Looney Tunes collections, which I haven’t watched probably since I was an adolescent, and I really love the brilliance of Bugs Bunny’s character. I’m going to start emulating that cool nonchalance when things run amok.

That’s all, folks.

squeeeeeee!

I'M GOING TO SEE SUFJAN!!!

I have wanted to see him in concert forever, but have never lived close enough to a venue where he toured to make it feasible.

Yesterday I got the newsletter email from Asthmatic Kitty with the glorious news that Sufjan is finally going on tour again, and, glory of glories, one of the venues is in Cleveland -- just an hour and a half away.

The limited tickets went on sale this morning, so I rolled out of bed, made a cup of coffee and sat at my computer gripping my mug and staring at the time, waiting, waiting...

...and waiting...

Evidently the venue hadn't activated its link.

So then it became a cat-and-mouse game. I opened up multiple windows the better to refresh with in case web traffic got too heavy for going forward/back, loaded the link onto my phone, and kept on checking while I made breakfast (Eggy in the Basket, yummm).

In the end, I win. My former bookstore coworker Steph also discovered Sufjan this past winter, and when I texted, Wanna go? she responded, I'm so there! Which is awesome, because, though I would gladly have gone alone, I prefer to share great experiences.

It was a roughish kind of week, mostly (Meg told me she's been reading my blog in the morning while she eats breakfast, and I said, "Oh, no -- that's some heavy morning reading," and she said, "I've been getting concerned," and I laughed and told her, "And my posts have all been upbeat compared to how I'm really feeling," to which she said, "Oh no..." But laughter is healing and it was good to talk with her), and getting to see the musical artist I most revere (I love Conor. I adore Conor. I identify with Conor. I adulate Sufjan) has me excited to be gaining something that almost looks like a life, and an enjoyable one at that.

And the tickets are so fricking cheap, too. One more reason to love Sufjan.

Yay yay yay!

I am Jill's glassy eyes.

Last night I didn't get more than two and a half hours of sleep at a time; fricking Simon hates that the window unit air conditioner has taken over his favorite window in my room, and woke me up several times banging the door in its latch to get out. (The flipside curse of the blessing of feline independence is its total disregard for human commands. I wanted to kill him.) It wouldn't have mattered so much if I weren't already dog tired, but I was, and still am, and the nightmares when I did manage to grab a few naps throughout the night were hardly conducive to rest. My mind won't shut off, and the only time I feel free of it is in my writing.

(If I didn't have to work, I would be locked in my room writing all day. It's the only thing I can think about with any kind of focus; when I get into that world, that writing space, everything else goes away and I write like something's driving me. It's been so long since I felt the Muse's sting that I'm almost feverish with it -- so often writing is about blood and sweat and tears and strenuous effort, and it's not effortless now, but there's a sort of metaphysical purpose to the effort that keeps me from noticing the strain until I stop writing -- somewhat like the exhilaration from running that overrides the body's expenditure of energy. It's difficult to come back.)

So today I'll be downing huge quantities of nature's sleep substitute, coffee, and propping my eyelids open with toothpicks.

I can't wait to go to Pittsburgh next weekend. There's a Rifftrax movie being simulcast into select theaters all over the place, and I'm taking an extended weekend to go see it, visit with old friends, bebop around my favorite city (I think it's long past time I visited the Carnegie Museum of Natural History -- oo, dinosaur bones! -- and the Carnegie Science Center, too), enjoy being in a place where I have absolutely no responsibilities and take a break from everything that's wearing me out and eating into my rest here.

Right. Monsters, Inc. Totally asexual and clever and cute and distracting, right? Okay. Maybe that will help.

Later: Cold shower. And maybe...um...maybe some more John Adams tonight. That's sufficiently boring, right?

And I will hurl myself into my story-writing. (No world exists beyond that world. No world exists beyond that world.)

I can do this.

(Breathe, Sarah. Breathe.)

TMI? (TFB.)

(Okay, just a heads-up: This post contains some frank thoughts regarding my own fertility. Generally I restrict discussions of this nature to a private sphere of female friends and family, but I am, as ever, something of an exhibitionist; and this blog is a steam valve for siphoning off excess internal pressure; so...yup.)

So my iPhone has this really nifty little app for tracking menstrual and fertility cycles. (MD, formerly MP, has told me about this great book she and her husband are reading that she said will work for any woman to understand her body better, but while I'm being lazy this will do nicely.) I put in all the data from the last six months, and it not only predicts when the next cycle will hit, but also when I'm at my most, um, fertile.

So, wondering why I felt so restless, edgy, caged and, well, prowly, yesterday, I pulled up the app and checked...and oh, yes. That explains everything. Fertility peak.

Intellectually I'm completely fine with not presently having any cuddly babies or grass-stained children running barefoot across my floors. I have chosen and maintained some moral boundaries that have led to my not having children yet, and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that my choices will one day vindicate me when the timing is right for a family, much as I might occasionally really, really want cuddly babies and grass-stained children running barefoot across my floors right now.

But, despite the zen attitude of my mind, my body has its own ideas. And every year that it doesn’t get to be an incubator for a little human being, it gets angrier. I think it thinks I’m a little slow on the uptake, so every year it intensifies its efforts to send me the message.

And so the result is that for a few days every month I’m basically climbing the walls and locking myself in the house for some kind of prayerful meditation (either that or I stand there yelling at my abdomen, It’s not my fault!) and fleeing the company of men to reinforce the famous self-discipline that has served as an absolutely brilliant touchstone separating the wheat from the chaff of my dating life, and, I maintain stubbornly, preserved me from much harm, however temporarily frustrating (make that, today, excruciating) the denial of certain biological drives.

Not that my body really gives a damn about my reasons. Right now I’m looking and breathing through a fiery hormone-glazed fog and fidgeting like it’s five minutes till Doomsday. But mind over matter. And fortunately my mind is quite strong, and my singleness renders the overwhelming temptation more general than specific. (Hooray for small favors.)

i'm wide awake, it's morning

Bad Head Day.

I'm not going to go on about it. They happen, they suck, they pass.

The relevant thing is that, desiring to channel the tired, boring grief to something more impassioned, I popped in I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning on the drive to work and skipped to “Poison Oak.” I’ve listened to that song hundreds of times, and as I tiredly absorbed the beauty of the Pennsylvania landscape I can’t quite appreciate I focused on a space of bare acoustic strumming toward the end of the song, anticipating the upcoming line delivered into the emptiness that precedes a particularly intense lyrical-musical climax: “You’re the yellow bird that I’ve been waiting for.”

I thought in impulse fragments about the yellow bird symbol that crops up a couple of times in that album, and its multilayered and not entirely differentiable meanings, and in the instant when the music cut to silence before Conor sang that line, a goldfinch flashed across the road in front of me, the morning sun behind me glancing off its breast.

And I felt better and worse all at the same time, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and something important, because nothing is an accident, and I felt the suddenness of an undifferentiable presence, and I started to cry.

inquiring minds get more confused

"I am loving the heat!" Hill wrote from a business trip to Arizona. "It is a little like standing near the open mouth of an oven. I think I could fall in love with the desert very easily. The mountains and catci are amazing!!"

"Take pictures!" I wrote back. "I want to see cacti!" Squinting at the spelling of cacti, because something in me always wants to add an extra i, as in Hawaii or Pompeii, I decided that one i is correct for pluralizing the suffix -us. Then I thought it was odd that cactus is Latinate, when a lot of our American plants, while possessing Latinate scientific names, are colloquially referred to by names of a more American, or at least Anglo-Saxon, origin. "What a weird word," I added. "'Cact.' What kind of root is that? Why is it Latinate? Now I'm going to go look it up."

I sent her the email and, after a quick search on the ever-reliable dictionary.com (specifically the Word Origin & History entry), typed,

"It comes from the Greek -- kaktos (the Latin is cardoon, which sounds nothing like kaktos, but whatever, I'm not Roman) -- for the Spanish artichoke of Sicily (again, why is it Spanish if it originates in Sicily? But whatever, I'm not Greek or Spanish either) which is prickly and apparently some guy named Linnaeus in the 18th century misnomered a group of succulents 'cactus' thinking they were related to the Spanish artichoke but he was wrong."

Then I sat back and laughed for about five minutes.

Poor, misnamed, bastardized cactus and its not-cousin, the not-Spanish Sicilian artichoke.

(Oh, how I heart words.)

NOT a dry heat

Remember that scene in Spirited Away, where No-Face is tearing all over the bathhouse spewing gray-brown-black guck from eating almost everything in the world, until he starts looking gray-brown-black gucky drippy at the edges and then he starts wheezing and sort of oozing along leaving a trail of himself as he goes?

Well, minus the blughgy pukey part, I am melting into a puddle of human goo. It might not be all that hot here according to the thermometer, but it's really fricking sticky, and the thunderstorms, far from bringing relief, are making everything worse. Yesterday Simon and I lay around limp in bed (poor little kitty, and he has to wear a fur coat every day, and yes, I was one of Dali's wilted clocks yesterday, but it was from the force of heat, not depression) trying not to breathe too deeply, until Dad reminded me that I have a window unit air conditioner which spent the last two years moldering in The State of Denmark (as I worked it into the window last night I wondered why I hadn't installed it in The State of Denmark at all, and then remembered that I was too depressed to put in a window unit. That is really, really sad) and then my parents' garage, so when I first turned it on the moldy reek almost made me gag, but it wore off and then I closed the door, turned my room into a refrigerator and went to sleep.

But the office is sticky, and I want to go sit in a vat of cold water. If the humidity is going to be at 100% I'd rather it at least be cool and refreshing. You can drink the air today, and not in a cool and refreshing way.

See? I told you that as soon as it got humid I'd switch from it's-too-cold complaints to it's-too-muggy complaints. (But I don't like being a semi-solid. You're not supposed to be able to get Sarahs in gel formula. This is all very wrong and unnatural.)

simple song

I heard my mother say
I heard my mother say
I heard my mother say
"Give me Jesus"

Chorus
Give me Jesus
Give me Jesus
You can have all this world
Give me Jesus

Dark midnight was my cry
Dark midnight was my cry
At dark midnight was my cry
"Give me Jesus"

(Chorus)

In the morning when I rise
In the morning when I rise
In the morning when I rise
Give me Jesus

(Chorus)

And when I come to die
And when I come to die
And when I come to die
Give me Jesus

(Chorus)

You can have all this world
Give me Jesus


(arr. Sara Watkins)

a new redemption song

Lord, we need a new redemption song

Lord, we've tried; just seems to come out wrong

Won't You help us, please, help us just to sing along

A new redemption song -- a new redemption song

~Over the Rhine

So. Frelling. Tired.

The rest of the visit with the relatives went well. I really enjoy talking to Cousin John, and we covered a lot of intellectual ground, though not nearly enough (everything keeps enforcing my need to return to academia; anytime I have a really great conversation I realize how hungry I am for the stimulation). When he thanked me for spending so much time with the girls, he told me, "You're a great role model for them. I want them to realize what it means to grow up to be a strong, articulate woman who reads and is well-adjusted and normal." He added, when I thanked him, "I know you have a lot you're dealing with right now, but you really have a lot going for you. I think everyone knows how fantastic Sarah is except Sarah."

I almost cried.

The girls were fun; they both were in awe of my iPhone, so I played chess and a few rounds of Tic Tac Toe on it with Jenna, and showed them the "Simon's Cat" videos on YouTube. (The new one, "Fly Guy," had me in stitches. And my very own Simon is at this very minute embracing fully his current identity as Sleepy Sunday Simon, curled half on his back with his eyes closed and his fangs poking out in a smile. As soon as the company left yesterday he looked ten million shades of relieved, although he was really good with the kids, and I don't think he's ever been around children before. If a cat can look giddy, he has looked giddy. My house! No kids! No baying beagle! Just Mommy! So naturally he has done what a cat does best and spent the rest of the weekend lounging on the bed, the picture of indolent contentment.)

They were pretty demanding, and it was good exercise for me to tell them No every once in awhile, which I did pretty adamantly yesterday morning as I staggered around with a mug of coffee and they bugged me to play tag before they left.

"Sorry, girls," I said. "I'm tired, and I've been tired for weeks. But we'll see each other again."

That was when Anna, the youngest, really cracked me up.

"We'll never see you again," she said. "I really wanted to play tag with you." Then she looked up at me and widened her big blue eyes and quivered her bottom lip and said, in a low voice, "I've never played tag with you before."

I laughed. "Wow!" I said. "You're pulling out all the stops!" At which she slumped back and pouted, and Jenna asked, "What do you mean?"

Oh yes. So much my little sister and I at that age. Laura the manipulative, the strategizing and calculating; Sarah the straightforward and oblivious. Both earnest and loveable. But twenty-odd years of dealing with my sister's craft has served to develop an immunity in me, so I comfortably said, "Hopefully next time I see you I won't be as tired."

Before they left Cousin John extended an open invitation for me to visit them anytime; they live close to the DC Metro area, and I do enjoy that city.

But after they left I crashed. Not in a weepy devilfish kind of way -- talking with Cousin John has made me wonder if all the internal horror stuff I write on the blog makes me sound worse than I actually am; I did mention, a few posts ago, that I don't spend my time not-blogging draped over furniture like Dali's wilted clocks; there's more to me than meets the blog, but the blog is useful because these internal horror things I don't really discuss very often, and they may not be my only reality but they're still a part of my reality, and a significant part at that, although maybe not as significant as I've come to believe (I'll have to talk to Jeff about that) -- but in a tired, I-have-no-resources-and-I've-still-managed-to-dredge-a-little-bit-after-all way. I went directly to bed and didn't get up until 8:00 p.m., where I threw together a strange meal composed of what I could find in the fridge, watched an episode of Bones with my parents (I love I love I love I love I love that show), tackled writing a bit more of my story again (with the result that it's now messier than it was before; I've never done "short" with stories, but this one keeps wanting to be longer and more detailed when I try to curtail it, so now it looks kind of like a sweater that you can't tell if it's being unraveled or knitted) and passed out at 12:30.

The thought of going anywhere and running into anyone makes my mind go blank, so I exercised my freedom in Christ and staked a claim in the unconditionality of God's love and the nonnecessity of performance and skipped church (see, doesn't that sound defensive? It's defensive. All right, I skipped church because I felt like it but God isn't mad at me, so why should anyone else be? That's defensive too. I wasn't up for it so I didn't go). I've only left my room to let the dog out and get more coffee, and spent the entirety of today (all two hours of my consciousness) sitting on my big beautiful bed with my laptop and the lovely wooden lap desk Meg and Phillip bought me, working on my story, working on this blog post, reading Dragonhaven and starting to pre-order season 4 of Bones and season 5 of The Office. (My parents delete the DVR eps as we watch them, and anyway, the digital signal really, REALLY sucks in the airing of Bones, and only Bones. NCIS, which my parents love and which I tolerate the way you tolerate your senile great-aunt, always comes across perfectly. Is it FOX? Or just the sniggering cruelty of fate? So I can't wait for the DVD release.)

It's hottish today, and muggy, and we have no air conditioning, but the whole-house fan is running and my parents are out, which means I can minimize the layers of clothing and try to stay cool.

I did learn something interesting this weekend. I've been starting to rant more openly about how much I hate the culture of niceness that has infected Christian society in America. Suddenly being "nice" is this huge value, but it comes from society, and not the church, although the church has sucked it down like a dog devouring chocolate and now it wonders why it's sick. (If it wonders why it's sick.) It's bothered me for a long time, but it really bothered me and started to turn itself over in my mind over the 4th when I visited my sister, who doesn't adhere to any belief system but who has such an unshakeable integrity forming the bedrock of her character that I have long maintained that she has faith but doesn't call it that. She's banking on my being right.

In one of our conversations during the course of my visit, she expressed worry about herself and her condition as a person, because she likes ladling out punishment to people that have it coming to them (I call this righteous indignation and a strong sense of justice, but I've thought for years that Satan will take her out any way he can, and using language against us is one of the things he's best at). "I'm not a nice person," she said.

"But you're a good person," I said. "You're a kind person. The people who need help, you help. You give people what they need when they need it, and yeah, sometimes that isn't 'nice,' but the people who change the world, the people who make a difference, aren't 'nice.' Ghandi wasn't nice. Buddha wasn't nice. And Jesus especially wasn't nice. He gave the insufferable, the arrogant and the unloving what-for, He was actually really mean to them, but that was what they needed, so it was kind. And the downtrodden, the vulnerable and the hurting, he helped, but that wasn't nice either; that was kind. You do the same things."

"That makes me feel better," she said.

And then I went off on a month-long internal processing of rage that the concept of niceness as an important virtue has so infiltrated contemporary Christian practice of theology that it has some of the best people I know questioning their worth or abandoning the faith. (Yes, I need to learn to apply this to myself too, but that's a problem for another day.) In an email to a friend a couple of weeks ago, I wrote,

"It helps to recognize the critical difference between nice and kind. Real kindness is rare, and rarely expressed in the format dictated by politeness. (This is where I get really angry with the Christian trend toward 'niceness'; niceness isn't mentioned anywhere in the Bible, much less the New Testament. Kindness is a totally different animal, because it has substance, because it has its roots in love, because it's real. Niceness has its roots in social order, and while that has some merit, sometimes, it's a mistake to think that niceness comes from, or is commanded by, God. Kindness sees; niceness masks.)"

Niceness is all about not rocking the boat, not making ripples or waves, not causing people discomfort. Kindness is about what people really, truly need, and a lot of times that involves giving offense or going against the social grain. This doesn't mean that we get to be rampaging assholes; it's not the kind of "tough love" that goads Christian parents to shun their homosexual child and then pat themselves on the back for their obedience to God's law, for example. Kindness is about truth and love -- withholding judgment from the hurting, and not sparing the hypocrites from the reality of their hypocrisy. (The only people -- I repeat, the only people -- who received Christ's scorn and wrath and caustic addresses were the religious authorities of the day who made finding God more difficult for the suffering and seeking. Listen up, people: We have become those religious authorities. Jesus hung out with the prostitutes and the tax collectors, the dirty and downtrodden, the wrongdoers, the drunkards and sinners, the marginalized. And now we have become the marginalizers, and we think that in so doing we're doing God's work. How can we be proud that when we "comb the whole world for a convert, and when [we] find one, we make him twice the son of hell that [we] are"? How can we think that following God's law has more to do with righteousness than with love? We can't be righteous; that's why Christ became our sin, to become our righteousness. Righteousness is not a fruit of the Spirit -- as niceness is not a fruit of the Spirit. Righteousness is something we have been given, not something we grow into or achieve. If we seek to be righteous, we forget about love, just as if we seek to be nice, we forget about kindness. Yes, we're to be made holy -- but this means being made into the image of God, and if Christ is the image of God...Yes, we're supposed to be like Christ. But do we even know what that means anymore? Do we? Is it about checking off a list of sins we don't commit anymore, or is it about loving our neighbor -- really, really loving our neighbor -- as ourselves? Which means loving our neighbor in our neighbor's present reality, which is often ugly, and messy, and broken, and scared. But we're all messy, we're all broken, we're all scared. And there's so much beauty in that. We get to be in this discovery of love and redemption together. It's not a competition to see who has the most holiness; it's about linking arms and helping each other to the finish line, it's about one enormous spiritual tie, it's about stumbling across other people who are curled up and can't move and bringing them forward with us.)

I was telling Linnéa this week, when she said that people don't go to the Baptist church functions anymore, like prayer meetings or Bible studies, "But nobody wants to. And sure, maybe some of that's laziness and selfishness and that needs to be addressed; but honestly, if I wanted to tell someone something real, if I had a problem and didn't know how to fix it, the last place I'd go is church. Which is sad. Church is supposed to be the place where we can relax our guard and be real, whatever that means, and it isn't always pretty, because God's love is with us in the unprettiness; but instead, it's where people feel the most guarded. People don't go to church to find healing; they go to church to be judged. And who wants to go to that kind of environment on a Tuesday night when they're already tired from a long day at work pretending to be okay in front of people who have no reason to care about them?"

Maybe this isn't a problem in other churches, or other geographical areas. I hear about some exciting things in other places. But here in my hometown, it's a big problem. It's a tragic and sad problem.

So the thing I learned this weekend, as I discussed some of this with Cousin John (mostly the semantics of nice vs. kind, and how I posit that "nice" doesn't appear in the reliable translations of the Bible), happened when Jenna piped up and said, "Don't you have the Bible on your iPhone? Do a keyword search."

So I did. The Bible app that I have on my phone comes in like twenty different languages, with multiple translations per language, and there are ten to fifteen of those in English. A keyword search of "nice" turned up zero results in the NIV, TNIV, English Standard, Contemporary English, American Standard, Amplified, Holman Christian Standard, World English, KJV and NJKV translations; and in the NASB, New English, and New Century translations, "nice" only appeared in a pejorative context, in terms of flattery, deception and self-deception. (I discredit the New Living, the Message and GOD'S WORD translations as meritorious.)

Fascinating, isn't it? Nice is not a Christian concept.

I can't wait to tackle this in action.

breathe

A panic day? Come on now. What the hell.

Yesterday after work I drove to drop something off for my grandmother -- she's in an assisted living facility and hates it -- and I'm not a wonderful granddaughter, because I hardly ever visit. Old folks' homes depress me in general, however nice they are -- there's so much sadness and loneliness saturating the walls and the air that I can't breathe and it makes me want to run out the doors and drown myself in the lake. I don't know what our society is doing, but I don't see all these corrals for the elderly as a step in a positive direction. I know it's not a problem with an easy answer -- people are living longer and needing medical care that family members can't give them, nearly every adult works so there are fewer stay-at-home parents to help with their own aging parents, nuclear families (such as they exist) want their privacy and feel tired and worn out by the pointless demands and endless spiritual drains of modern living, etc. And I'm not letting myself off the hook for being a bad granddaughter, either. Most of the time lately I forget (maybe that's even worse than just not going on purpose, but in fairness I forget a lot of things right now), and it taxes a lot of my reserves to visit with my grandmother because she's a real downer, and has chosen to be unhappy, but I should see her anyway.

It wasn't easy, though, yesterday. She looked so longing and wistful and sad when I left that I hurried out to my car fighting tears.

When I arrived home our weekend company was settling in -- my cousins John and Linda from Virginia, and their two daughters, aged seven and twelve. I really like them a lot -- Linda is the daughter of my dad's oldest biological sister (who is fourteen or fifteen years older than my dad), and she married a brilliant man with a quiet, wicked sense of humor, and their girls are lovely. I hadn't seen them in years, not since their oldest daughter was three or four, and I'd never met the youngest.

I wasn't sure how I would react to the intrusion of lively guests; sometimes I'm fine, and other times I turn into a variation of Emily Dickinson and hide upstairs. It was nice, though. I like the girls. They're pretty intense, so I was exhausted by bedtime last night, and their similarities to my sister and me kept giving me weird emotional flashbacks, especially since they both compete for my attention and my heart gets wrung out for both of them -- not because John and Linda aren't good parents; quite the opposite; but because...well, just because. Jenna, the oldest, seeks out my attention in a non-intrusive, self-contained, quiet way (she's like me); Anna, the youngest, makes no bones about how much she likes me and demands to be around me (she's like my sister).

So last night I worked hard to divide the attention equally, because I remember how much I needed affection as a girl, and how seldom I asked for it, and how much it hurt me to feel passed over for my more vivacious little sister; and I remember how much my sister starved for some connection because it didn't come easily to her and she needed to know that adults liked her as much as they liked her hard-working, overachieving, well-behaved older sister.

I was tired enough that I slept straight through the night, but I woke up headachey and exhausted, and I could feel the shakiness coming on (effing anxiety). And again it's not like I'm in a terrible mood; my mood is pretty okay; but I feel generally like shit underneath the okay mood, and if the way my face muscles feel is any indicator, I have an expression that looks like I just walked into a wall. But I took a pill and it has started to sink in, so now I'm just pretty tired, and half-amused, half-frustrated at how this thing is dogging me. (And I'm not a dog person! Go away, anxiety! Shoo, depression! Sit! Lie down! Stay!) I am in a better place, though, because I can laugh at it, a little, though the tears are quivering in the wings. I want a nap.

I'm trying to keep a good outlook on the whole thing -- I'm speaking kindly to myself, and concentrating on not being angry with myself for what feels like extremely slow progress, and praying for Christ's love to soothe and sustain me (Jesus loves me, this I know...), because if God is with me in this, I have everything I need (yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me...), and I want to be at peace wherever I am in this cycle of chemical im/balance.

It can be so hard to breathe, sometimes. Air is something I have to fight for, and focus on; breathing is something I sometimes have to remember to do. (Application of Thich Nhat Hanh's conscious breathing technique is suddenly necessary.)

At least we're doing some family singing tonight, so I should be able to close my eyes and lose myself in harmonies (and take deep, well-regulated breaths). Everything is always better with music.

come on!

I stopped an old man dead in his tracks this afternoon.

It sounds so flattering, right? It's not.

I'm sitting at my desk in the reception area, which is slightly around the corner from the entrance, so that I'm not immediately visible to the people who come in. (That's the way it floats in an old Victorian home converted to office space. We have signs. And don't even get me started on how nobody can read the large, clearly posted, obvious signs directing them to the reception area.) I hear the door open, so I remove the dictation headphones and put on my polite expectant welcoming face (blech) and wait.

He comes around the corner, his white hair commanding the eye. He looks a little grumpy, a little bored, in the way of old men, but I see it happen. His eyes swivel in my direction, focus on me, and...he stops. He not only stops, he jolts, and stares at me speechless for about two entire seconds before he manages, "You're the doll I've been talking to on the phone."

Doll? I smile and say, "That's right." He hands me the papers he's come to deliver, asks me a few questions about them which I'm not allowed to answer, so I widen my eyes and tell him earnestly, "Well, I wouldn't know anything about that, but the attorney certainly will," and he puts his hand over his heart and starts laughing and says, "That look is good enough for me," and I start to gather up the papers when he asks me, "Are you single?"

In the split second before I answer I'm weighing my responses, but I'm always caught off guard by these kinds of questions, and this one seems on the whole harmless, so I say, simply and with a matter-of-fact tone, "Yes."

He shakes his head as if he can't believe it and wonders what this world is coming to, and then he proceeds to ask me if I'm celibate, to which I say, "Well, now, that's a little personal," while thinking EW EW WTF and by now I'm holding the folder of papers at a fan-type angle that hides my chest and my smile has gone pinned at the corners.

He shakes his head again and says, "You should streak your hair, shorten it up a little."

Oh, this just gets better and better. When I tell him, still smiling insanely, rather like Sookie Stackhouse in awkward situations, that I like myself just the way I am, he says, "Well, it wouldn't hurt to look a little more expensive."

You have GOT to be kidding. What's he saying? Am I supposed to be a princess, or a call girl? I have absolutely no idea what to say to this, so I just laugh, still hiding my chest with the folder, though, to give him what credit he deserves, he hadn't been looking at my chest (and he didn't tell me I should lose a few pounds. I'm almost willing to forgive him for that). But one doesn't want to, you know, invite any further scrutiny.

Finally he leaves, telling me to take care. I can't decide whether to laugh a little wildly, indulge in a primal scream or bang my head down on the desk and cry. I hate these kinds of situations in an office setting; they're so uncomfortable. If this were to happen in a bar, well, then, the terms would be totally different. But one can't exactly say, "F*** off," to a client. And I think he only meant to be courtly and sympathetic, in the rough way of old widowers who don't give a damn about societal rules and are a little mad on behalf of pretty women with no husbands or babies. He's also a little nuts.

But...crikey.

I am so glad that I was sitting down throughout this entire encounter. I can still be imposing, sitting down. And this way he didn't have any way of ogling anything below my ribs.

Oh well. What can you do. I suppose I should dig the little nuggets of flattery and funny stories out of this one and call it a day.

whatever my lot

Last night's sunset was incredible. I drove to Freeport Beach, rocky and cluttered (though mostly now with driftwood and dried algae instead of the trash I remember from my childhood -- the environmental 80s had an effect on the local sense of ecology), to wander the shoreline getting my skirt wet, because the last few times I've gone there it was to find some space in the existential sadness, and yesterday I wanted to go because I was happy and the house was too small to contain the happiness. I needed open sky and water.

So I stood in the waves up to my knees and stared at the sinking sun and the colors it streaked across the sky and smiled...and saw, off to one side of the sun, caught perfectly in one tiny shard of refracting cloud, a fragment of a rainbow. I've blogged before about how rainbows are a sign to me of God's love, vis a vis Isaiah 54:6-10. So I smiled even more broadly, and swallowed a few tears, and looked at the blue-beyond-blue of the mostly calm water and thought, Yes. Of course there's a slice of rainbow, a sign for me, today. Anything is possible, today.

Then of course I woke up sticky-eyed with poor sleep this morning (the teeny little gargoyle I bought at the Ren Faire -- I think his name is Nelo but I'm not sure -- seems to be doing his job of frightening away most of the nightmares, but a few slip past him anyway) and got lost in my head while putting on my makeup. Lost in my head usually involves intensive thinking about three or four or five things simultaneously but not in words while mentally replaying music, so it gets kind of crowded and noisy in there, and moves far, far away from language (I let myself go into the semiotic order and forget about the symbolic for a little while; I really need to read Black Sun), and when Mom came into my room to tell me something she started talking before I had a chance to turn down the internal volume, so to speak, and come back to the world of words, and I missed everything she said and had to ask her (had to remember how to ask her) to repeat it. This frustrates her, but she said it's because she forgets that it takes me a few moments to engage ("Especially now," I said), and I'm just like my dad that way but she doesn't always remember to apply it to me.

My folks are being great about this whole thing. I've never really let them see it before -- in high school (and man, was I a depressed kid. I was reading over my graduation portfolio which I took very seriously and very seriously overdid, and good grief my writing was all dark and sad. I started laughing as I flipped through pages of old poetry and said, "Someone go back in time and give Teenaged Sarah a Prozac") I never let anyone see how bad it was, except maybe Hillori; during my college years my parents and Laura and I were all angry with each other; and when I moved out to the Midwest I disappeared for days while I dealt with the depressive spells on my own, so my parents haven't really had to watch me deal with this before, and when this particular long stretch of life-in-death started they wanted so desperately to help, and they can't help; and even if they could, I wouldn't want them to.

The best thing they can do, which is what they're doing, now, is to talk to me when I emerge from my room, and otherwise to let me be. I have never asked anyone to take care of me; I enjoy companionship, sometimes, when I go under (Jeff doesn't believe that I'm all that introverted, and he's right; I lie pretty fifty-fifty on the Extrovert/Introvert scale, skewed slightly toward introvert like I'm skewed slightly toward being right-handed though I'm actually ambidextrous), but I don't ask or want anyone to fix it. I just want to be let to be, whatever that means in the moment, and, since my mood cycles tend to move pretty quickly, that changes a dozen times a day (upside: I'm never in a bad mood for long. Depression really isn't all that tightly linked to mood). In some moments I'm laughing and engaging, totally focused on others' company and conversation; in other moments I'm staring at the wall and lost in my head (though the shift from one to the other is hardly instantaneous; depressed isn't crazy).

Lest I sound bratty and ungrateful, I will add that it's a tremendous help that I don't have to care for an entire living space on my own.

I'm kind of worried about Simon. Last night he was angry with me and elected to sleep under my bed instead of on it, and this morning he was listless and curled up on my bed while I got ready for work and just lay there. He still has his appetite, and he purred when I kissed his fuzzy little forehead goodbye (I love his wrinkly fuzzy kitty forehead), but he seemed a little, well, depressed. I think I need to spend more time with my boy; I've been out of the house a lot, and distracted when I'm home, and I think he's in need of some Mommy time. (Needy keetie.)

Anyway, here's a sonnet I wrote my junior year in college, when I was going through my imitative-with-a-twist phase (which resurfaces from time to time), and credit for the first line of this one goes to John Donne. (I was much more depressed my junior year, having just been diagnosed as clinically depressed, and still not sure whether or not my sister would survive her own ordeal, and struggling to deal with a repressed backlash of really horrible stuff that I'd bottled for years. So the thoughts of death, this time around, are minimal, like little cirrus wisps, barely there and mostly idle, whereas then they were thunderheads; but the moments of determination still resonate.)

Life Be Not Proud

Life, be not proud, though some have called you
stark and spiteful. Yes, I know you are;
but you can only nick my skin with scars;
you have no power to slice my throat-veins through
or slick my wrists with blood. That power is mine,
but one that I won't wield. I will to live,
I will to take on all that you can give
and stagger with you on my twisted spine.
Your foot can grind my joints and knob my bones
till, crippled, I can barely smile or walk,
but I'll outlast you. Because in the end,
my praise will rise above the song of stones
and powder you beneath my heel to chalk.
So cram my mouth with dust and blood: I'll mend.


God has been flooding me with encouragement and reminders of His love, from many sources. So this? This isn't so bad. It's just something that is, and I'm learning, and it's not fun, but when He said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," He meant exactly that: sufficient. Not sufficient as in, "so much that you'll be full of happiness even though the sorrow is still there and will jump around for joy"; he meant sufficient. As in, Just Enough. Like Job. Job had faith, and Job was counted faithful (even though he got fed up with his circumstances himself), and he spent most of the book sitting in a heap of ashes with no clothes on, scraping his skin with broken pottery. No one can call that happy. But God's grace was sufficient. God's grace was Just Enough.

So God isn't mad at me, and I'm not doing anything wrong. This is just something that is, and God's grace is sufficient. I will survive it, and I have faith that it will come to good in the end, however much it sucks right now. And even in the more or less constant battle against the Nothing, I still have moments of joy and moments of happiness and moments of connection and peace and presence, and those moments can last awhile. Yesterday, for example, was marvelous. So this thing doesn't always keep me down. And when it does, cosmically, everything is still okay, even when it's horrible.

It is well with my soul.

Also I'm getting in the mood for fall. No matter how far removed from school I am, August brings this sense of delightful expectancy. I keep getting flashbacks of Grove City in the fall, the slow flare of leaves, bright shallowing sunshine, crisp dry-leaf-and-vinegar-smelling air, renewal and change and long afternoon walks with pockets full of apples, and long nighttime walks with leaves whirling like ghosts under the harvest moon, the gladness of reunited friends, the eagerness of learning, the joy of becoming.

This mood calls for Nickel Creek. I first listened to Why Should the Fire Die? on the long drive from South Bend to Grove City for a homecoming four or five years ago, and ever since, that album has quintessentialized fall.

So, the problems are still there. The difficulties, the trouble focusing, the exhaustion. The waves and breakers are still sweeping over me.

But you know what? Today was a fantastic day.

I hate dealing with banks. And mortgage officers. And loan information assistants. I hate calling for one simple fricking number in order to get the sale of a piece of property off the ground because I know it will take twenty minutes and they refuse to clarify their meaningless jargon and the number isn't toll free and I might as well fax them a personal DNA report before they will tell me one. simple. fricking. number.

I can't decide whether I would rather watch The Boondock Saints or Fight Club tonight.

but joy cometh in the afternoon

I'm so glad I had therapy this afternoon.

It's really going to be okay. I feel a peace that I haven't felt in weeks. Maybe I'm in a more fragile state than I would like, but I don't have to try so hard to be "better," because I need to take my time, I can take my time (there are worlds enough, and time), and if I want to learn to manage the depression rightly, I can't do a slapdash job with it. There's stuff to work on, sure, and things to figure out, but that gets to be exciting and good, not angsty and horrible.

I think the depression gets bad when I feel trapped. So I need to work on getting, and figure out how to get, unstuck. My job right now is to do that, and to come to peace. It's pretty bad right now, but it won't always be that way, and Jeff (my therapist) said a lot of things today that put me in a place of good perspective on myself. He says I'm extremely unique, that I can't be put into a box or fit into a glove, and that that's both wonderful and horrible -- horrible, I said, because I will be so seldom understood and will always feel lonely, however liked; horrible, he said (after nodding in agreement with my statement), because a lot of the conventional techniques for depression management won't work for me.

He noted that I know how to allow myself to let myself go completely into the sadness (because sometimes I revel in the sadness), and he said it with a positive tone in his voice, so I knew he was noting a strength and not voicing a concern. "The million dollar question," he said, "is, How good are you at getting yourself back out of it?"

I thought for a minute. "Pretty good, I think," I said. "I mean, I've done it alone for years -- since I was a teenager -- and I've always pulled myself out of it okay."

"Good," he said.

So yeah -- I don't feel as if everything is sunshine and buttercups and bunny rabbits and cheeping songbirds. It's not okay in that regard. But it's okay in that my perspective got snapped back into place. I'm not a horrible person, I'm not crazy, and I generally handle these things pretty well. So I got knocked back on my ass; so I'm really, really different from almost everybody else (this makes me appreciate all the more the people that do understand me; there are so few of them); so I'm really self-aware and articulate and clever about managing how other people see the things I want them to see because of how carefully and precisely I word the things I say, which can make it easy for me to layer my communication with horseshit that other people believe if I'm not careful in that regard; so I'm tired and lonely and unique and have to come up with equally unique ways to handle this affliction I've been saddled with since childhood. I've made it this far; I've swum against the current well out of reach of the waterfall, and it's okay for a little while if I just kick back onto my back and float with the current and catch my breath. That's not the same thing as giving up, and it's not the same thing as drowning. And if I'm going to be here, like it or not, I may as well find things to enjoy about the scenery (I've always been good at that, too).

I haven't arrived, or anything; I'm not likely to for a long, long time, if ever. But this is still a good place to be. (And much better than yesterday.)

pulling through

It's not even a day-to-day thing. It's a moment-by-moment thing. Or maybe something in between days and moments.

I wake up in a certain mood, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and I settle into the day and write my blog post, and then an hour later my mood has completely changed, gotten worse or gotten better, and the post I constructed earlier has become a stone tablet scratching out a piece of long-gone history. But I cycle back to it eventually, whether it takes moments, days, weeks, months.

Sometimes I hesitate to record my experience of depression in the moments of experiencing it, because I might only write one post per day but it reflects only one of a hundred different moods, and meanwhile I'm not draped over a piece of office furniture like one of Dali's deflated clocks; my personality, my personhood, are more than the slices of one dimension set down in writing here. I joke, I laugh, I tell stories, I listen to stories, I give comfort, I think happy thoughts, I function, and not terribly.

Yesterday was bad, though, legitimately bad, for most of the day, one of those where I lost my sense of humor altogether until I popped in Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn on the way home and fell in love all over again with Conor Oberst's work. Digital Ash is one that's taken me a little longer to enjoy, but as I listened yesterday I drove smiling. Conor gets it. He gets it. Under worse conditions, in bleaker circumstances, and with fewer reasons, he too has made, and continues to make, every day, the same choice: to live.

I've heard him called whiny, self-indulgent and hopeless, but I don't see it. Depression is difficult to express -- by its very nature depression robs a sufferer of expression. And there are many, many ways in which to describe it, but none of them quite touch on the thing itself, on what it is, on what it feels like, on what it means to live in and with and through it. Every day it's a little different. So yes, Conor has written a lot of songs about it, and a lot of them sound similar to one another -- it's looping around a center of nothingness, trying to pin down that nothingness, trying to name the nameless. As Eliot says, "Each attempt is a raid on the inarticulate"; and, as Eliot also observes, words crack and break under the strain of their impossible task. But "for us, there is only the trying," and I resonate deeply with how Conor tries.

He's also something of a writer's songwriter -- his mode of expression, the brilliance of his metaphors, always pierce my soul a little bit. And he's so violently hopeful. His songs contain a great deal of darkness, but in that darkness he's always groping for a way out of it, and his work indicates that there is a way out of it, some bedrock of hope that bears up under the despair and the anguish (which are all the more frustrating because they seem to have no source).

So anyway. Part of the difficulty with this thing is feeling utterly unreachable by humanity and God, and Conor's work is the socket that cradles the plug and allows for the jolt and current of some kind of connection, based in a sort of anonymous and therefore universal understanding. There are no words to describe the relief I feel when I realize that I'm not alone in what I'm undergoing, that someone out there gets it, has gone through it too. We the Depressed don't get together much -- what's there to talk about, when you can't articulate it? So even though you know there are others out there like you, it's hard to wrap your mind around someone understanding.

(And I get that there are consequences when the waves rise up again and I'm reduced to treading water and other responsibilities fall by the wayside. I understand consequences very well. It's grace that takes me by surprise. But that's another post for another day.)

Listening to "Gold Mine Gutted" had me smiling all the more because it reminded me of John and all of our late-night arm-linked walks all over Grove City's campus, sharing cigarettes and talking endlessly about life and literature. I hadn't heard from him in a couple of weeks, since he's been spending most of the summer in Mexico City, and I've missed him; but I didn't realize how much time had passed until last night when I turned on my old phone for no reason and got a call from an unavailable number. Warily ("Unavailable" isn't usually someone I want to talk to) I picked up the call.

"Hello?"

"Sarah. Peters." That familiar and beloved voice yanked a grin out from where it had been hiding all day as John continued, "Where. Have you been. I was getting Very Concerned."

"Oh! I...changed my phone number a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't give it to you yet because I thought we'd just be Skyping till you got back..."

"But you're never on Skype!"

"I'm on Skype all the time! I'm on Skype right now!"

"Well, it says you're offline."

"Um...huh, it says you're offline. I thought you were just busy."

"Well, I've been worried. Didn't you get any of my frantic voicemails?"

"No..."

"Yeah. The last one I left said that if I didn't hear back from you soon, I was going to call your parents to find out how you were. But when I sat down today and looked online, I could only find your mailing address."

As I laughed and apologized, I thought how the years like to throw circumstances back on themselves, because five years ago this conversation (minus Skype) bore the exact same substance, but with the speakers switched. He would change his phone number every other month without telling me, and every other month I would call his parents to get his new number.

Love and friendship are many-splendored things. Odd things, too. So often human relationships seem fragile, subject to change without cause or warning, and I've undergone enough of those to learn to look for and expect them; and then there are the people who come through, like the clear light cutting through Erie's omnipresent cloud cover. I like watching and experiencing the give-and-take that occurs between good friends, the various ways we take turns carrying each other, the strengths complementing the weaknesses, the mutuality.

As I've gone through my twenties, I have found love in ways I never knew to expect. My idealist dreamer soul has yearned for that two-become-one love all my life; but as I raced around looking for it, and it failed me again and again, I ended up gathering other kinds of love, and sustenance from surprising places. Love isn't a post, or a mast; love is a tree. God is the roots, Christ is the trunk, and the Holy Spirit is the leaves. The branches? They're many, and various, but they share a source, and they bear sustaining fruit. Conor's music is one. John is another. I thank God gladly and fervently for both.

keepin' on keeping on

I keep looking for a blindfold faith

lighting candles to a cynical saint

who wants the last laugh

at the fly trapped

in the windowsill tape.

You can go right out your mind trying to escape

from the panicked paradox of day-to-day

~Conor Oberst

I am tired.

I miss the days when life was simple. I miss college. I miss Grove City in the fall, I miss my professors and my classes and my friends, I miss knowing exactly what each day would hold and yet knowing nothing about what each day would hold. I miss the expectation of new and wonderful truths to learn, the interaction with ideas, the walk from my dorm to class, the slightly different smell of the stony Western Pennsylvania air every morning. I miss days with plenty of gaps in them, time to wander the wooded spots of campus. I miss cutting class just because I felt like it, to take a nap or plunge down the shallow gorge of Wolf Creek to disappear among the trees and listen to the pines talking to each other in a language I could almost understand. I miss the delight of discovery.

I hate the dull humdrum unchanging pointless routine of my life now. I hate feeling like nothing I do matters.

And I'm tired of the force of will I exert every single morning just to get out of bed and face the day. Every single day I choose, again, to persist. Most of the time it seems that there is no reason to do so, except that I've done it so many times before, and the alternative holds no more pleasure than the present choice to keep moving. So I keep moving.

I'm tired. I feel dull and stupid and close to tears, I don't know where my sense of humor went, I can't concentrate on anything for longer than a minute or two (at best). Probably today's little crash came because of the enormous amount of energy I put forth yesterday.

Right. Here was yesterday:

I cantored for the first time in my hometown parish (in the Catholic church -- I can't speak for other liturgical churches, perhaps it's the same there too -- a cantor is the person who leads the singing, which is woven throughout the Mass. I would stake a lot of money on the assertion that "cantor" comes from the Latin "to chant," since before Vatican II chanting is basically all that was done in church. Chanting still holds supreme in the psalmody -- the response psalm -- which is also my favorite part of the Mass to sing). And naturally, because it was my first time cantoring and I had basically no idea what I was doing in specific to that parish, the little procedures being different from parish to parish, the regular music director wasn't there, and a substitute filled in instead. To further complicate matters, the priest was gone too and we had a visiting priest subbing for him. I took comfort in the fact that no one knew what the bleep was going on, so any mistakes I made wouldn't stick out.

It went really well, all things considered -- things like my not having practiced until half an hour before I arrived at the church; my ungodly awful cramps; the worsening of the depression over the weekend; the hideous adrenaline surge (which my body still isn't processing well, or something) from singing in front of the church, particularly the psalm, so that my hands were visibly shaking when I left the lecturn. The little old nun who was subbing in for the music director asked me if I were a music student at one of the schools in Erie (gratifying); when I told her, "Oh...no, I've never been trained," she said, "You can't mean it" (even more gratifying). She also told me that I did a "lovely" job with the ad lib chanting that the psalmody requires. A very helpful young man who apparently also cantors, and who gave me hastily whispered This Is How Things Go If You Have Questions tips, told me after the Mass that an older gentleman leaned over and asked him, "Who is that pretty young lady up there with the beautiful voice?" And as I was gathering up my things after the service, an elderly gent approached me and told me, "You have the voice of an angel."

So all in all, it went pretty well. Music is one of the few things in which I take pleasure when I'm under the dark like this, and I'm glad I was able to go through with it. There's a strong streak of the performer in me which feels really genuine when I sing in front of people, and church music is a good vehicle for my voice.

At the same time, it cost me a lot of effort. I'm not physically managing stress as well as I normally do, and little efforts require enormous exertions of energy, from internal cisterns which have gone all but dry. And after Mass, tired and wired though I was from getting through the service, I jumped into a car and met up with one of my former coworkers from the bookstore and headed to Ohio for the local Renaissance Faire, and didn't return home until 10:30. I really like Steph (who, it turns out, is an NT on the Kiersey temperament scale -- a Rational -- which pretty much automatically means we get along), and she's an easy person to hang out with, so I didn't feel uncomfortable when halfway through the afternoon my brain shut down and I had to grab something caffeinated just to organize cohesive sentences.

I was puzzled by it at the time, but after this morning, when all I felt like doing was dissolving into a little heap of weeping bones, looking back I realize that that was when I dredged up almost the very last of my social reserves to get through the remainder of the day. I had a good time, I enjoyed myself, and now that I'm learning to look for patterns of communication as I interact with others, I recognized with gladness that the easy exchange in conversing with Steph came from the abstractness of our thinking and speaking; but still, I was absolutely worn out.

It's a strange conundrum. On the one hand, I don’t particularly care to be alone, because it’s easier to sense The Nothing devouring at the edges of my consciousness; on the other hand, it’s difficult being with people because I’m not quite up to the demands of interacting with them on what I consider a normal level (in other words, I’m not up to keeping up the shield of Smile and Everything’s Fine; but even more than that, it’s honestly hard to pay attention to the conversation and respond in complete thoughts). Scylla and Charybdis. Which to choose?

Probably sleep.

But I did do one thing this weekend of which I’m proud: I transferred all the photographs from my old phone to my computer. It took six hours on Saturday afternoon, but it did completely absorb my attention, and the completion of that project now allows me to close my old cell service account (having switched, of course, when I bought my new phone). It may not be the most important thing on my list, but it was something that needed doing, and I did it of my own volition. I am proud of myself for that.

I keep telling myself that everything’s going to be okay. I want to be okay. I want to believe that everything’s going to be okay.

I’m just really, really tired. And yet, that I keep making the choice to persist, that any other choice really isn't a question, means that underneath all of this blahness and bleakness the core of my being is holding to a core of hope that goes beyond feeling merely hopeful (which I don't) and really believes something -- "being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see." And it doesn't feel comforting, exactly, but it does comfort. My soul waits for the Lord. Which means that I hope. Which means that everything's going to be okay, even though it isn't okay, right now -- and so, in a paradoxical, block-time kind of way, everything is okay, right now, even when it isn't, because it's going to be okay, which means that in some way it's already okay.

Again, it doesn't feel comforting. But it does kind of steady me a little. Which is nice, because I can't hold on to any objective sense of time, and everything feels weird and blurry, and I'll blink and the clock says an hour has gone by and I look at my hands and wonder if I went into some kind of time warp, or if I'm really that zoned, and is it really noticeable?

I want Simon. And my big comfy bed. And my nice cool sheets. And the blinds drawn. And either birdsong or thunderstorms.

Well. At least the few hours that need to pass until I get those things should disappear before I know it.