First Day of Summer

Today is the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the first official day of summer and the longest day (and shortest night) of the year. It's also the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. Calling today the "first" day of summer seems odd to us here in the south, and I suspect anywhere else that has been experiancing extreme draught and 100 degree weather over the last month. There is something about that amount of heat that simotaniously slows the world down and hightens expectations of adventure.

So today is the solstice, the day the North Pole is tilted toward the sun. The term solstice comes from the Latin words for "sun" (sol) and "standing still" or "stoppage" (stice). On this our longest day of the year, the sun appears as if it were standing still in the sky. One of the biggest destinations for the summer solstice is Stonehenge in England; today it is the place for New Agers such as neo-druids, neo-pagans, neo-christians and Wiccans to gather, along with college-age revelers, wholesome families, romantic couples, and shoestring backpackers. And it's the only day of the year the park service offers free parking, free admission, and the opportunity to stay at the monument overnight.

The Summer Day


Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

By Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems, 1992
Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Wednesday of Quiet Love and Ashes

Today is Ash Wednesday. My evening will end with a service in which a United Methodist Minister will ask the congregation to come to the altar. People will go to the altar and kneel and the minister will dip the side of his thumb in ashes. He will take the purported ashes of last year’s palm branches and spread them on congregants’ foreheads in the form of the cross. The gathering of unholy sinners will leave the red carpet and stained glass windows of the sanctuary with ashes emblazoned on their foreheads and feeling just a little holier and just a little subconscious about flipping the bird at the guy who cuts them off in traffic. You can’t flip someone off if you are holy.

I do not start this day a holy person. I woke up well rested having fallen asleep at 9:30. Being a secretary is exhausting. Handling ten tasks at once for eight hours is exhausting, but soaking in a hot bath for thirty minutes proves restorative so I soaked. I soaked and talked on the phone and went to bed and slept soundly. Waking up at five o’clock in the morning is easy when you have slept soundly and so this morning I woke up and was ready for the day to begin. I anticipate lunch with an old friend as I eat my Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast and marvel at the quiet darkness as I drive through the neighborhood, depositing my daughter safely with her grandparents. The road out of town was quiet and soft in the early morning glow of street lamps. My car drives itself as I listen to James Naughton read the words of Earnest Hemingway's Moveable Feast in his deep baritone voice. Heading east into town I am hypnotized by this baritone and I listen even if I did not care for Hemingway’s words and I wonder how many people in their twenties even know who Gertrude Stein was or why his portrait of her is so stunning.

This trance is broken when I finally slip out the door of the downtown garage and onto the street that is full of people and the air that is full of garbage and bus fumes. These streets are not quiet. Cleaning women are making their way home and typing women are making their way to work. The only men I see are wearing hard hates and blue jeans. Men in suites don’t come to work this early or else they never walk on the street.

And so this day begins. This day, the first of the holy season of reflection and preparation, begins like any other with simple peace. In the quiet God’s simple assurance of unconditional love speaks volumes. In placing ashes on our foreheads we wear the grace of God and Her love feels absolute and forever. So what happens between the quiet and the ashes? What happens when I walk through air that is full of garbage and bus fumes? God's love is total, unconditional, absolute and forever. The state of grace—God's attitude toward us—is eternal. I am the one who changes with fumes. To receive the love of God is to recognize it is all around us, above us and beneath us; speaking to us through every person, every flower, every bag of trash, every trial and situation.

For the next forty days I give myself the challenge to remember this simple statement once written by the Franciscan monk Richard Rohr - Stop knocking on the door: You’re already inside!

Red Shoes Go With Everything

This fall I quiet haphazardly bought a pair of new red shoes at half off. I bought them not sure when of if I would ever wear them, but they were cute. Cute and half off. The longer I owned these particular shoes, I began to realize something magical. That red shoes go with everything.
I know that it is said that things can't make you happy and perhaps that saying is often true, but I draw the line at my red shoes. I am happier when I wear them. They bring an extra spark to any day, and I'm happy when I think about the fact that God made me the type of person who dares to own a pair of red slippers, Hans Christian Anderson's ghastly tale not with standing.

So it was that last night I slipped on my shoes to join the New Years count down with friends old and new. We ate too much food and had just the right amount of wine. We laughed and joked and pushed each other on to stay at the party until midnight. There is nothing quite like celebrating New Years in the middle of Bum-Fucked-Egypt. In the city they have things like laws that keep hooligans from shooting bottle rocks at each other in a misguided attempt at celebration. In BFE every one's a hooligan and there are no laws against setting off fireworks in your back yard, right next to that huge oak tree. The mayhem starts at midnight and we old battle axes drag ourselves out to the front porch in equal amazement and fright because even unsafe fireworks are magical and I'd rather be outside when the roof goes up in flames.

A lot happened in 2010. The Olympics and Jo at A Majority of Two introduced me to Vancouver, CA. And I feel head over heals for that beautiful city and the not a mascot Muk Muk. I also learned about vuvuzelas, cheered for Spain's World Cup win, and said fair well to Paul the Octopus.

This year I didn't listen to a lot of new music, or the new music I listened to all sounded the same, but I did see a lot of movies. I saw the Lisbeth Salander trilogy and loved it. The final Harry Potter, Part I was spot on. The Twilight movie I was sucked into seeing sucked more than I thought it would. Disney Animation's Tangled was good, but Disney/Pixar's Toy Story 3 was better. If we are talking best film I saw this year I would have to hand it to The King's Speech. Not because I just saw it or it stars the ever sexy Colin Firth, but because it was the first movie I left, having paid nearly $10 for and wanted to turn right around and pay another $10 to see it again.

In 2010 I discovered E.L. Koningsburg's wonderful stories and Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Finished reading Stieg Larrson's Lisbeth Salander Trilogy and finally read Harper Lee's magnum opus, To Kill a Mockingbird. My favorite non-fiction works include Neal Gabler's telling of Walt Disney's life story, Karen Armstrong's A Case for God and Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

I was laid off in October which was great because I had the chance to do some random things I normally would have passed on like visiting the Menial Collection and eating lunch in all kinds of trendy restaurants with my not so trendy friends. I found joy and courage in relaxation, art, journaling, prayer and loved every minute of being a stay at home mom. Still, if one is to buy red shoes, one must have an income so I was grateful to Elaine for retiring and to the people at the French oil company for hiring me on as her replacement. I finally responded to God's nudging and turned in my application for seminary and sat through necessary interviews with key Church people about pursuing a path towards ordination. That all sounds like I've worked out what I'm doing, but this is still just the preface. God is still preparing me for this journey. Ask me next January if we've reached the exposition.

So here we are. We lost a lot of good people in 2010, but you and I didn't die. Reason enough to celebrate. You and I go on. We dance our little dance and pursue the circuit of our dreams insofar as the hours of daylight permit. Love, courage, justice, faith, hope, charity. God bless you all.

Self Portriat

For the Greater Good

In honor of Banned Book Week I thought that I would sit down and read two banned books. No, not really. Really I was locked in a room for two days to monitor people who were going through 70 boxes full of documents. (Take heed future litigators... hell awaits you.)

I was locked in this room and I was in between books so I decided to read books that have been on my shelf for quite some time, Yuppie Sister's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and my copy of The Catcher and the Rye that I think, if I'm remember correctly, I acquired from an old boyfriend.

I could give you my review of the works, but I'm afraid that once I start bashing Salinger's glorified whine fest I won't be able to stop. For the record though, I believe that Mockingbird has earned its place as one of the great works of American literature. The fact that I managed to earn a college degree without ever reading it (I never picked it off the reading lists because everyone was picking it and I stupidly had to be different) is just horrid.

Instead I wanted to say a general word about the dangers of censoring access to literature. I think we all know that banning books is bad show in a democratic nation. The fact that parents and school boards all over the U.S. of A. successfully limit library and public school access to books that might invite conversations or question a community's way of thinking is maddening. Sure, I personally think that if you want to read a book about a young person who is questioning society's definition of normal you should skip Catcher in the Rye and turn to Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, but my personal preference for good writing and well developed story shouldn't stop those who prefer mindless drivel.

The thing that gets me about these self proclaimed keepers of culture, is when they protest literature they tend to invoke The Greater Good as if I should be subjected to their values. Challenging the books that are placed on public shelves does more than simply express a privately held point of view, it denies individuals the freedom to think for themselves. In fact, this year's Banned Books Week theme (sponsored by the American Libraries Association) is "think for yourselves and let others do the same."

I think one could probably argue, especially in a world that includes Amazon.com, that simply banning a book from a library does little to reduce the book's circulation. Case in point, the books that I read this week are both considered American classics. However, well as being widely banned, both books are also widely taught in schools. Still, as a poor person who gets 90% of my reading material from a public library, I think its important to know the practice of challenging books exists. Its important to know that just as a wacko is allowed to challenge books, the thinking public is allowed to challenge the wacko right back - for The Greater Good.

Last Word on Words

Let's just take a moment to soak in the sexiness of this picture. Honestly is there anything more magnificent than Mr. Darcy Colin Firth in a tux? I didn't think so.

Moving on... I did find this quote which is attributed to Colin Firth and I felt it was worth commenting on given the recent banter about words.

"The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think." ~ Colin Firth

Let's just break this down shall we? For my part I have to agree with Colin. Americans tend to believe that all Englishmen attended Eton and then proceeded to read at either Oxford or Cambridge. Its a well known fact in American that if you are English you must be smart, and sexy. For whatever reason the English accent is a million times sexier than any other accent found on planet Earth. Australia and New Zealand don't hold a candle, even the Scottish and Irish leave something to be desire. Don't ask me why. I don't pretend to understand. I'm only stating facts.

Now, Colin is right. Obviously. It would be ridiculous to really believe that any country, no matter how sexy and small, could possible produce an entire population with a fondness for good literature. There are normal people in England, I would even venture to say that England has their fair share of total morons. Its just that England, unlike America, doesn't broadcast that message to the world. Compare the people portrayed in the British TV shows and movies most Americans have seen. If their characters are the least plebeian, they are in such away that sets them apart from every other character in the script. Their town is full of Oxford scholars and they are the loan town fool.

Taking that a step further lets look at the British actors that are known to most Americans. They are all extremely smart and articulate people. Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, the loathsome Kenneth Branagh, even the comedic Ricki Gervais and the Monty Python crew were all well educated. Can I be brutally honest for a moment and speak directly to Colin...

Firth, who uses the word philistine in idol conversation? Honestly, how do you expect to paint your fellow country man as raging morons if you run about dropping SAT vocabulary words on unsuspecting Americans who are used to newspapers written on a 3rd grade reading level?

I think Americans all grasp the concept that the collective British Isles is not soaring above the average of the universe. We know this is true, in the abstract. Its just that while Americans seem to broadcast our idiocy, the British have, by some miracle, managed to keep theirs off the air waves.

Sorry Colin. In time we may come to see just how philistine you English are, but in the meantime you will just have to carry the burden of being labeled intelligent.

* Photo courtsey of AP

Creative Reading

I recently read this book. Its a children's book, written in the 1960s, but I had never even heard of it until I found it, sitting on a bookstore shelf a few weeks ago. I'm glad to have discovered this great work of E.L. Konigsburg as an adult. I don't think I would have understood or quite appreciated the layers in this story if I had read this first through a child's eyes.

The publisher's summary reads: Claudia knew that she could never pull off he old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that's why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

I dare anyone with an imagination to pick this book off the bottom shelf, read that summary and then not buy. I don't often buy books and I certainly don't buy them new, but when I saw the last and only copy of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler I felt that lightening bolt that always crashes to earth when true love finds its match. I can't help but muse about the novelty of cherishing an honest-to-god, in-your-hands, ink-printed-on-paper book. There is no other feeling like it in the world. Are we seriously going to replace this kind of thing with electronic devices? In my tiny apartment I have two bookshelves filled with books and more piled on the side. I love the way these works of art look and feel. They catch your eye and your hands all at the same time.

But I fear that books are sitting right next to the polar bear on the endangered species list. I sit here and wonder what the popularity of ebooks and the publishers quest for the all mighty dollar will mean for those of use who are still poor and/or backward enough to frequent the library. What will happen to our quiet days of browsing in actual buildings filled with physical shelves? Will there still be a place where an interesting cover or odd title might catch our eye or will we be forever cursed with lists of "New Releases" and "Best Sellers"?

I feel bad....

I feel bad because I haven't been writing anything of substance lately. I don't feel like I have anything really substantive to say. I'm just stuck in a situation right now that I have no power to change and yet is holding our lives hostage at the moment.

Alex is handling the whole thing rather well. She has managed to steadfastly hold her father on a pedestal through out this whole thing while making sure I know just how much I have failed her by ignoring her all the time. Really. I ignore her. I guess we aren't counting that trip to the country, the day I left work early last week, or that on going Monopoly game we have been playing every single night all summer long. (For the record, I hate Monopoly. I don't play games I hate with people I ignore.)

Its hard to come up with something sanguine to say in this situation. Last night I picked up the book Long Life: Essays and Other Writings by Mary Oliver. It had been siting on my coffee table because I'm really crappy when it comes to putting that kind of thing away. Those kinds of books in which I have fallen in love with the writer's language. I tend to keep these books near me so that I can pick them up and swoon over a sentence or two without care for the actual context of the words. This passage in Mary's introduction reached through my incurable frustration and made me swoon.

"...And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you each morning. 'Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?' This book is my comment."

The Perfect Man

One of the great things about reading great literature is that something different will jump off the page every time the same text is read.

I was recently reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility for the 1,495th time when I noticed that in chapter IV, Elinor gives us the description of the perfect man.

"... his mind is well informed, his enjoyment of books exceedingly great,
his imagination lively, his observation just and correct, and his taste
delicate and pure. His abilities in every respect improve as much upon
acquaintance as his manners and person. At first sight, his address is certainly
not striking; and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the expression
of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his
countenance, is perceived."

Given this description, its no wonder I'm still single. The perfect man is exceedingly hard to spot in a crowd. If you are looking for tall, boisterous and handsome I suppose you'll find your match a lot faster.

A book in review

Normally I post book reivews on my Goodreads page, but when you job is as boaring as mine is, its really easy to obess about things. I have been carring my reaction to this book around in my head for a couple of weeks and I need to get it out (again).

I appreciate the delicate balance between the practical and perfect echo friendly life. I'm living it. I take my own bags, bring my own cup, but then... I throw a bag of Chex Mix into my basket along with my Kraft Mac and(chemical powder) Cheese. There are a lot of echo writers out there who standerds are fair above mine and they have no sympathy for us smucks still holding on to our processed foods.

It was with this mind set that I picked up Vanessa Farquharson's book Sleeping Naked is Green. She is different than most environmental voices out there in that she's young, hip and not without a sense of practicality. She spent a year making one echo change a day. Once she made a change she stuck with it so when she unplugged her fridge at day 28 it stayed unplugged. Not all of her changes were so drastic. There was the day that she decided to use revolving doors and she did the switch from paper towels to recycled paper towels, but I can understand that coming up with 366 echo changes isn't easy.

So what did I think of the book? Over all I liked it. I liked that we saw someone who was freaked out by the stuff she had to do. Things are hard. Let's face it, there is a reason why we call this junk "modern conveniences". They make life convenient. Its not convenient keep composting warms, give up meat, live with out a fridge or bike instead of drive your car.

Okay, that last point leads me to my number one problem with this book. I'll be up front here and say that its a personal issue. Its just me. I know this. I need to get over it, but weeks after reading the book it still bothers me.... the no car challenge.

Vanessa decides to sell her car. She lives in the heart of Toronto which has a decent public transit system. She also bikes a lot and then she rents Zip cars when she is in a hurry. She talks a lot about how hard life is without a car is. She does a write up in the magazine she works for about a guy who sold his car and walks because its better for the earth. When she talks to this guy she talks about how amazing and inspiring he is. She puts him on a echo pedestal. *Gag*

There are millions of people in this country living without a car for no echo-self-aggrandizing reason other than they can't afford a car. They have jobs to go to, children to get to school and groceries to buy. They do this on foot, with unreliable public transit and no Zip car. Why not write a newspaper article about them? I'll gladly put them on a pedestal because I can't fathom living in my public-transit-hating-city without a car and yet, people are forced to do it.

I'm not diminishing Vanessa's experience. I get that life without a car is a pain in the butt. I just wish she would stop for a second and realized that when she gave up her car she gave up a luxury item.

Speaking of luxury. Right in the middle of her year long challenge Vanessa got a call from her mom. A really cute newly remodeled townhouse went up for sale right around the corner and she wanted Vanessa to check it out. Vanessa checked it out and fell in love. It was her dream house. She promptly called up the bank of Mom and Dad and got a loan. This again, is a personal issue of mine. I have numerous friends whose parents have bought them things like cars and houses and college educations. I came to this book with a chip on my shoulder the size of Alaska. I don't have parents who could buy me a car, let alone a house. Vanessa spent a good deal of time talking about the stress of buying the most adorable house ever. Why was it stressful if it wasn't your money? Because you had to figure out how to fill out the paper work in between string your compost and going on dates? Wow.

I'm not keeping a compost bin in my apartment anytime soon, unplugging my fridge or selling my car. I'm humbled by everything she did and still does. I enjoyed her writing and loved a lot of her stories. Its a book I would pass on to some of my friends (if I hadn't have checked it out of the library). I just wish she wasn't so flip about what she had and what she was giving up. Weeks later that is what sticks with me more than any else. Be grateful dammit! Its not just her, there are a lot of very nice people with this same mind set and they all bug the crap out of me. I waited several weeks after reading the book to try to separate my own issues from her story and I just can't do it. I'm tainted. I do feel better now that I've whined.

Musing of a Bookworm

We are asked to believe, usually by critics, that the most important factor in our response to a book should be its objective quality – a good book is a good book – but we know that’s not true. Mood and taste are important, self-evidently, but mood and taste are formed by educational background, profession, health, amount of leisure time, marital status, state of marriage, gender, age, age of children, relationships with children, and parents, and siblings, and, possibly, an unfortunate experience with Thomas Pynchon’s ‘V’ as an overambitious and pretentious teenager. All of these and thousands of others are governing factors, and many of them are wildly inconstant.

I am glad that I read Sylvia Plath when I was a student; I had plenty of appetite for misery then. There is already enough anxiety attached to parenthood, without having to worry about coming unglued. The first John Irving novel I ever read was ‘The World According to Garth’, and for some time, even after reading most of the others, I was pretty sure that it was his masterpiece. I re-read it a couple of years ago, and I was shocked to discover that Garth, who inhabits a big chunk of the book, is an insufferable drip. Why hadn’t I noticed? Am I a more observant critic now, or was I simply kinder and more indulgent when I was younger? If we are lucky, we read the right books at the right times, and both the books and the times should be left alone. Have you read 'Moby-Dick yet'? No? Well, don’t go back to ‘The Catcher In The Rye’, then. It was great once, and maybe you’re asking too much of it if you want it to be great all over again. This is not to diminish the books that we read at earlier stages in our lives, not to make the claim that, as we get older, our critical faculties get sharper – the sad truth is that we lose as much as we gain. There are some books that have become old friends and I can return to over and over again like 'Pride and Prejudice', and some, like 'The Bell Jar' I wouldn't mind if I never saw again.

It feels like Friday...

... but for reasons beyond my control, its not. Therefore I am left to make a list of 3 random things you never needed to know.



3) The Walt Disney Company does not own the copyrights to the music for Snow White or Pinocchio. Those first two films were made during a time when Disney didn't have money for his own studios so he traded the publishing rights of the songs to the recording company in exchange for their services. After seeing the killing the copyright owners were making by selling sheet music of "When You Wish Upon A Star," Walt wised up. Still, one would think that Disney could have scrapped together the money by now to buy the rights (after all they just spent $8 Billion buying Marvel), but apparently the owners aren't interested in selling. (Go figure). Over the years there have been several deals made that allow WDC to use the songs in conjunction with movie footage and in TV commercials.

2) One of my favorite literary facts is that Dickens is estimated to have created thirteen thousand characters - an astounding number – that’s always taken as evidence of his extraordinary energy and indefatigable imagination. Every now and again, though, you start to wonder whether it’s not some form of incontinence. For example, he introduces fourteen new characters between pages 209 and 214 of my Penguin edition of Great Expectations – fifteen if you count Mrs Pocket’s deceased father, who gets a couple of pages more or less to himself anyway. Do the Pockets have to have seven children? And two nurses? And two lodgers? And a quirky next-door neighbour? There’s something almost animal about this level of production – this is Dickens as seahorse, popping out tiny creatures apparently uncontrollably, and with very little effort. It’s not his best passage of writing, understandably, those six pages. Maybe someone should have taken him discreetly aside and told him what precautions were available for great novelists.


1) One fact I have found to be incredibly disturbing is that bubblegum is made out of plastic. I learned this from the TV show, How Its Made. Apparently the natural gum from trees they used to use was replaced long ago by modern science. So when you pop a piece of gum in your mouth you are really just chewing on a sugar coded piece of plastic that has been died pink. I don't know why this fact bothers me as much as it does. I chew on pens all day long and they aren't even covered in sugar. I guess I had just always associated bubblegum with candy, and therefore, a cousin of the food family. After all this time, to learn that its more like pen's long lost half cousin once removed is a bit of a blow.

Things I've Read

There are books I like because, despite the fact that they aren't well written, they contain a certain amount of truth that I found intriguing. Such was my experience with Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.

Then there are books that are so full of truth that I can't bare to read them. I pick them up... and put them down. When I pick it up again I skip ahead a few chapters, but soon after down it goes. Up. Down. Up. Down. Until I give up and throw it across the room. Honestly, if I had known what Nick Hornby's book Slam was about when I first saw it, I never would have checked it out of the library. The jacket described it as "a coming of age story". In retrospect I should of been more suspicious of such a broad description. Every book in the Young Adult section is a "coming of age story" isn't it? Isn't that what young adults do? To Hornby's credit, it wasn't just the truth in his story that made me not want to finish it. It was how well written, how excruciatingly real his characters were that made me literally throw the thing. Can I give high marks to a book I didn't really finish and don't ever want to see again?

The thing I keep learning about endings is that they aren't a long time
coming, and they don't sneak up on you either, because endings just don't happen.

Julie Powell - from Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

Age isn't like a fixed thing. You can tell yourself that you're seventeen or fifteen or whatever, and that might be true, according to your birth certificate. But birth certificate truth is only part of it. You slide around, in my
experience. You can seventeen and fifteen and nine and one hundred all in the
same day.

Sam Jones - from Nick Hornby's Slam

I feel like I have been hit over the head....

This morning I started by picking up a book and opening it. Page 171.

Idle Questions
RUMI

A person hit a Worker a good strong blow from behind.
The Worker swung around to return it; and the man said:
"Before you hit me, I have a question for you.
Not this is it: that sound: was it made by my hand or your neck?"
"The pain I am feeling does not give me leave for speculation.
These things are all right to worry about if you're feeling no pain."

This story made me remember another one, told my Mandy Patinken in a documentary I saw last night about Hal Prince, the great director of musical theater. Now, this isn't exactly what Patinken said, but its how I remember it.

"I was in the middle of doing a scene in rehearsals for a show and Hal interrupted me. 'I need you to be over there [pointing to the opposite side of the stage].' I was young, just out of acting school and all concerned about my character's motivations so I asked, 'Why would my character go over there? What could possibly motivate him to want to be there? What is he doing over there?' Hal's response was simply 'I don't care. I just know I need you to be there.'"

So I thought both of these things over and over in my head while we got ready for the day. It was on the bus, as I was still thinking these two stories over and over again in my brain this line came to me from a great movie. Tremors. Kevin Bacon's character says, "Yeah. See, we plan ahead that way we don't do anything right now."

Isn't that what I always do? Worry about where the pain is coming from and not dealing with the pain. Worried about why I like going to artificial world made by an evil corporation instead of just excepting that that is where I need to be. Being so worried about the next thing on my list that I don't hold what I have right now. I'm so worried about doing the wrong thing, that most of the time, I just don't do anything.

So then, I got to work and read this from Collin Beaven, the No Impact Man. He basically says what I just said only more coherently.

So yeah, I get it. Stop checking to make sure I'm always right. Stop worrying about why I am going somewhere and just make the journey and be in that spot in that moment. Stop analyzing the cause of pain and just hold the fact of pain.

Things Potter Tought Me.

I must have written a million draft posts in the last two days, and deleted them all. Nothing seems coherent. So I am going to re-review a book. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. After the first reading I loved to book, but hated the Epilogue. It was too predictable. Too... nice. (For full details see my review here.)

Recently I saw an interview that Rowling did where she explained why she wrote the epilogue at all. She explained her motives of sharing the fate of her characters with the world and then added, "He survives and goes on to live a normal life." She talked about how a person who can go through the horrors that Harry did and return home and be normal is nothing short of amazing. Living a normal life after a person has been through something extraordinary and painful is the hardest thing in the world to accomplish.

The last year of Harry's life we get to see wasn't easy. He was preparing to fight a dark wizard, but more than that he was learning who to trust. He learned that there is no such thing as pure good vs. pure evil. Everyone is a mix. Even Voldomorte, who was too far gone to ever be good again, could have been good had he made different choices. Had his early childhood been a little bit different.

Perhaps that is why the epilogue didn't ring true. Because life never ends tied up in a nice little bow. Life is messy. Its madness. Nothing is ever simple. Nothing ever turns out the way it should. I think I'm starting to slowly see what Rowling means though. Some times, despite great odds, things do turn out better than you had any reason to hope that they would. Some times good things do happen to good people. And I would agree... that accepting that as truth, and not ideal fantasy, is the hardest thing in the world to do.

Spiritual Window Shoppers

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, How much is that? Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? Nowhere.
What did you have to eat? Nothing much.

Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

By Rumi


I was given this poem this morning. During my time of prayer. I read the psalm. I read the passage. I read something from Keating. And then I picked up a book of poems given to me by a friend. I opened it to this. And the words jumped out of the page. How often do I let myself fail? I often do I do something then later think, well, that was stupid!? I learned this morning that at times I need to just be foolish. Put my foot in my mouth. Go one step too far. Maybe the whole thing ends in failure, maybe I realize latter that it wasn't the best choice in the world, but it was a choice. I did something, and sometimes that is all you really need.

Things I Have Heard, Seen and Read...

At the bus stop:
On fellow passenger helping out another who is blind...
"Our bus is over there."(he points)
"Where?"
"There!"(he points more emphatically).

Alex's comment when she learned she would be going out to eat with my mom...
"She's fun to hang out with, but you don't even know the whole story!"
"What's the 'whole story'?"
"She never lets me pick where we go! END OF STORY!"

For the first time in my life I saw someone get arrested. It wasn't dramatic. They walked the guy out of an office building in cuffs and put him in a patrol car. Still, it was a first.

Its almost spring. I am starting to see the sun more and more each day.

Yesterday I participated in a discussion about Christianity with Christians of many different points of view. We listened to each other. No one tried to back anyone into a corner. No one told anyone they were going to hell.

I learned that Alexander the Great died of a fever. Some think he may have been poisoned. I always assumed he died in battle.

The other day Alex told me she wants to be Ice Cream Taste tester when she grows up...
"I thought you wanted to test message chairs."
"I can do both at the same time!"

Nick Hornby recently observed on his blog...
"...These words are perhaps the truest and wisest to be found in any contemporary fiction - maybe any fiction from any age:
'The guard barked, ‘No diving’. But the guy, crash-landing, didn’t hear her. He had already gone into the butterfly, the stroke of assholes.Anyone doing butterfly anywhere is an obnoxious idiot, but to do it in a small hotel pool is beyond endurance. Arrogant, preening,beady-eyed little pricks in muscle shirts do butterfly. Marines and state troopers, premature ejaculators. The kind of men who clap between push-ups.'"
~passage from Lisa Zeidner’s novel Layover

I once read... not sure where... (Cloud of Unknowing I think)
"Our need for understanding separates us from God ."

Last Friday the birds downtown by the Alley Theater were dancing in the air.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

So I finished reading this memoir in books over the weekend. (Which by the way, I had an very fun and enjoyable 4th of July.) Before I added my review to my Good Books page, I read through some of the reviews. Have you ever had the feeling when you talked about something you had experienced with someone else and you got something completely different out of it? First I was surprised by all the negative reviews. Some where people complaining that she didn't analyse the books enough.(Um... its a MEMOIR not a book analysis). Other's felt that she was too self-centered or too self involved with her telling of life in Tehran during the revolution. (Um... its a MEMOIR not a history book).

I could go on, but instead of telling you why I didn't hate the book, I'll tell you why I liked it.

For one, it gives a really good picture of what its like to be a person. She paints a wonderful picture of the streets of Tehran, of their culture of the people, good and bad. She lets you into her world and asks you to see Tehran as human, as a town. Not as the Islamic Republic. It gives a face to a place that George Bush calls "Evil". Today (or yesterday?) the Iranian government tested missiles that are capable of caring nuclear bombs into Israel and other places in the regain. As the American and Iranian governments continue to beat the drums of war and push their people into mutual destruction, I'm glad that Nasif had a chance to write this book and publish it in American. I'm glad that "EVIL" has a face and a name. I hope this pushes people to stand up against the foreign policy of "Kill first, ask questions later." (Is that a Rambo quote or something? I'm sure I saw that in a movie.)

Off the Shelf

So Monday I was stuck at MD Anderson all day for an MRI and then I had to see the neurosurgeon. I took A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby with me since a friend lent it to me a while ago and she keeps asking me what I think of it. Basically its a book about four strangers who run into each other on the roof a building in London on New Years Eve. They all want to kill themselves that night for one reason or another, but after talking they all decided to put it off for a while. The story takes off from there.

This is the first books I've read of his. I have to say its the first time I have read a book that I wasn't totally thrilled with, but was interested in reading something else by the same author. I liked the guy's writing style. I like how he developed each character and how they each had their own style of writing. Pretty cool. Not many authors could do that. Some authors have problems changing their style book by book, let alone character by character.

Anyway. I felt there was a lot of bantering that we could have gone with out. In some ways I think it drove home just how pointless life is sometimes. The book group was a good example of that. What are book groups anyway besides ways for people to take up time so they don't have to spend time thinking about killing themselves. The whole book made me think about all the extra noise we fill ourselves with so we don't have to be with ourselves. I don't know if that is what Hornby was going for or not, but that alone saved the whole thing for me. Still, I'm glad I borrowed this one and didn't buy it. I don't see myself ever wanting to pick it up again. So I gave it 3 stars out of 5 instead of 4. (And that is giving him extra points for not falling for so many of the obvious cliches that plague so many stories these days.)