your big brother, the elf December 5, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, sarcasm.4 comments
As always, I find my trips to the bus stop enlightening, and the other mothers find me surreal. I present for your amusement the scene as we await the bus on Friday, December 4th.
Kiddo#2 waits for the bus in the morning with two other kids the same age as herself (though in a different grade due to different cutoff dates between Angeltown and Angelborough.) One is a boy, one is a girl. I’ve mentioned the other moms before: they’re stylish, classy, smart, and probably wonder what evil they did for God to have inflicted me upon the neighborhood.
The boy said something about an Elf On The Shelf, and how they sell them at Barnes & Noble. “But they can’t be real,” he said. “Mom didn’t get ours from there.” I was half paying attention. He looked so earnest, though, and then he said, “Ours just comes to our house.”
Ooh, a spooky preternatural best friend? Sounds interesting. So I asked him about this elf.
The girl shot her hand into the air, and I said, “Yes, Miss X?” and she said, “An Elf on a Shelf sits there during the day to watch you, and at night it goes back to report to Santa.”
At which point my mouth, which operates independent of my common sense, produced the words, “Oh, like Big Brother?” and the mom of Miss X flinched, with a strangled laugh.
I’m fortunate in that Miss X hasn’t read 1984, and shortly the bus came. But the horror still remains. And the amusement.
First the amusement: the boy knew those elves at B&N that looked exactly like the ones in his house couldn’t be the same kind his mom had because of his absolute faith in his mother and how deeply he’d bought into the story. He’d reconciled the appearance of this thing competitively priced in B&N with his understanding that we don’t buy and sell actual people — and done it by deciding those were fakes, but his house elf just shows up.
But then the horror: that these kids think this elf is sitting there, daily, watching them. Creeeeeepy.
“And if you want to get in trouble,” I later said to my Patient Husband over lunch, “wouldn’t you just go into the next room? Have we gone back to a 3,000 year old idolatry where if you want to sin, all you have to do is sin in the next room where the idol can’t see you, and your god doesn’t know?”
Moreover, what if you want to be bad in the same room as the elf? Wouldn’t it make sense to have your older brother create a distraction so the elf was watching him while you went into the drawer and snuck out the candy?
But here I am, being cynical, and I shouldn’t. Parents, you can buy your own personal paranoia-inducing-kid-monitor for about eleven bucks and make it into a touching family tradition. Merry Christmas.
There, I fixed it December 3, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, sarcasm.12 comments
Two weeks ago, I showed my son There, I fixed it! which is a website devoted to “epic kludges and jury rigs.” Kiddo#1 was laughing so hard he was crying at some of the ways people “fixed” things.
(I’m sorry, but this is another major-backstory post because it doesn’t make sense unless you know all this stuff, and I assume you guys don’t remember the time I told God I needed a new car-repair story for my novel about the auto mechanic, and the next day my battery died because God loves me.)
About a month ago (more backstory) I was working again on that novel about the auto mechanic, and at the same time, our toilet stopped flushing. I opened it up and figured out the flush lever had cracked, so the next day I toodled over to Angelborough Hardware And Other Crap, purchased a flush lever, and returned home to install it.
While doing that, I heard my auto mechanic character telling her niece, “The best thing a woman can learn to do is fix a toilet by herself,” which later led to not one but two amazing scenes for the novel, one of which is quite possibly the most romantic toilet-fixing scene in the English language.
(Or, not.)
Because, you see, God loves me, and He knew the book needed a much better ending sequence than it had.
And now we advance the calendar to Thanksgiving Day, when we were making Thanksgiving dinner. Guests were to begin arriving at 1:30.
At 1:25, the main floor’s toilet’s flush lever snapped.
Remember what my Toilet-Fixing Mechanic Heroine told me? That the best thing a woman can learn to do for herself is to learn to fix a toilet?
I opened up the toilet, diagnosed the problem, then told my Patient Husband, “Find me some beading wire, some baling wire, or as a last resort, some string. Oh, and something I can use as a handle.”
I removed the defunct flush lever. I tied a string to the chain attached to the flush valve. I fed the string back through the hole where the flush lever would have been attached to the outside. I replaced the ceramic lid and gave the string a tug.
And it flushed. After that, I only needed to find a handle, which turned up in an unlikely place and conveniently said “Handy.”
There. I fixed it.
The epilogue:
My mom bought a new flush lever the next day and replaced it herself. I guess she didn’t like my string. Or, she has common sense. But it was good while it lasted.
hat, scarf, me December 2, 2009
Posted by philangelus in knitting, religion.13 comments
Since May or thereabouts, I’ve had no knitting mojo whatsoever. I don’t know why. I finished the last thing I made back then — a hat, I guess — and I lost all urge to knit or crochet. I worked for a while on a prayer shawl that’s been an unfinished project for two years now, but it petered out, and despite a gorgeous yarn stash, I felt no urge to knit any of it. I wanted to, but whenever I tried swatching something, I couldn’t even do that.
I’m sure this stuff goes in patterns. About a month ago, after something disappointing happened, I put some yarn on the needles and started a scarf. You can’t beat that: no swatching, just start. I had four balls of this yarn: three for the scarf, one for the hat.
I am no good at measuring balls of yarn and turning them into projects. In the final outcome, two balls became the hat. The scarf turned into a keyhole scarf, a shorter version of a scarf but with a slit so it stays tight without needing to wrap all the way around, and rather nice-looking I think.
They went into a baggie, got tagged with care instructions, and then I froze solid. I knew where I wanted to donate them (they’re going to a homeless shelter because they’re nice and warm) but just like last year, I was afraid. And it makes no sense, because all I’m going to do is drop the things in a bin at a neighboring parish.
The thing I’ve realized is that I hate for people to suffer, and I similarly hate the idea that I’ve helped these people. It’s a tragedy that someone should be so badly off that he or she cannot afford a hat and a scarf, that someone cannot find a place to live, that someone who wants to work cannot get a job. These things are wrong. And in the face of such hardship…I made a hat. Hooray, we’re saved.
When I knit, I pray for the recipient (which is why it’s so hard to knit for myself) and I pray this person’s life will turn around, that when he or she puts on this hat and scarf, the wearer will feel loved. Will know that God loves him and that the world is not entirely cold. Let that hat on his head be a blessing and the scarf on his shoulders be a hug.
God will bless this person. I have nothing more to do with it once the items are in the bin. And yet, I still feel shaken because in a very tiny way, God will have used my work to bless this person, and that Creator-to-creature relationship is not something I deserved to be a part of at all.
bleed-through December 1, 2009
Posted by philangelus in pensive, religion.2 comments
While at my mom’s and stepfather’s house this weekend, I came across the pad of paper my stepfather uses for writing letters. He uses email (in addition to making Galapagos Island calendars for charity, which you need to buy) but I guess for real correspondence he still has paper, pen, envelopes and stamps.
When I found them all together, I also found this:
At first glance, that’s clearly a letter (and you need to know, I would never read someone’s letter, even if it were left lying like this on the table-top) but after half a second I realized it’s not actually a letter.
Instead, this is the backing sheet my stepfather places behind the sheet of paper on which he’s writing, to prevent the ink from bleeding through the page he’s writing onto the next clean page. If you click this, you can take a closer look:
It’s nothing more than the dots left behind by dozens or hundreds of letters, the same page placed behind the letter every time, in the same place. There’s a definite shape to the dots: the top where there’s bleed-through from a date, the first line which is clearly the salutation.
That is to say, none of it is clear, but the shape is there. The bits left behind.
My instant thought was, this is life. That’s how we know we’ve been in the world. Because the content of ourselves, our heart, is the actual letter. But this sheet of paper is our impact on the world: you can measure the breadth of a life by the bleed-through left behind, by the shapes of the impressions we’ve left on others. The ways in which our excess drips out into the ones we didn’t intend to touch.
And my next thought was, it’s pretty. This cluster of dots that makes up a letter written to everyone my stepfather has written to in the last year: it’s just very, very pretty. Not intentional, but the work of art made unknowingly by the actions of one’s soul.
Mr Putter & Tabby Jump The Shark November 28, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, writing.3 comments
You can tell I’m a mom of four because I jumped in place when I saw the library had a new Mr. Putter And Tabby book. Cynthia Rylant has three series my children have all loved: Mr. Putter & Tabby, Henry & Mudge, and Poppleton. We’ve read every one of them we can get our hands on, and they’re reading staples.
Mr. Putter is an old man, and he owns an old cat named Tabby. The early books in the series chronicle his experiences with Tabby and with his neighbor, Mrs. Teaberry, who despite being Mr. Putter’s contemporary is quite modern and adventuresome. Mr. Putter is conservative and likes things orderly. The charm of the stories arises from the interaction of the characters and how the scrapes they get into are the natural extensions of who they are.
For example, in Mr. Putter and Tabby Bake The Cake, Mr. Putter wants to find a wonderful Christmas present for Mrs. Teaberry,who always finds unique gifts for him. He decides to bake her a cake, but he’s stymied by the fact that he can’t bake. He ends up spending a hundred dollars on cake pans etc, and then has to stay up all night on Christmas Eve attempting to bake cakes (it takes four tries, one of which ends in a flaming cake). Mrs. Teaberry loves the cake, but she has to wait ten hours to eat it because Mr. Putter then falls asleep on her couch.
My father and mother and Patient Husband and I were talking about Our Favorite Cynthia Rylant Books, with all of us laughing out loud at times when we mentioned the different plots and scrapes they get into. We love the characters, particularly the expressiveness of Tabby and the heart of Mr. Putter, and that’s why the unnatural happiness when I saw a new MP&T book at the library.
The previous new book, by the way, had been no good. Mr. Putter and Tabby Spin The Yarn, or something like that. This one was Mr. Putter and Tabby Spill The Beans. And I’m afraid to say the series had officially jumped the shark.
Whereas before the humor arose naturally from the characters’ interactions and their personalities, these last two books have involved the same setup (Mrs. Teaberry proposes an exciting new project) and the same conclusion (Zeke causes a major disaster). None of it arises naturally from their personalities. There’s no heart. There’s no charm.
I’m afraid this series needs to be retired. While I adored the first ten or so books, it’s as if she no longer knows her own characters and is resorting to the easy ending. And when I mentioned this, my father agreed that the later Henry and Mudge books suffer the same way.
It’s sad. But maybe fifteen books is enough for Mr. Putter.
FTC Disclaimer: I received this book for free for two weeks from the Angelborough Public Library and would tell you I don’t recommend it even if the publisher had given it to me as my own copy. But the earlier books in the series are splendid, and I would really encourage everyone to get a look at them, even if you’re childfree, because they make great gifts for kids.
libel against fiction writers November 27, 2009
Posted by philangelus in writing.17 comments
A woman was awarded $100,000 because a character in a novel closely resembled her.
My first thought on reading the headline was, “Oh, goodness no–” because it would seem to open the doors to just about any kind of person walking in to a court and saying, “This person resembles me. Where’s my check?”
Having read the article, I’m not so sure. It appears that this person had a case, that her life really was the template for the author as she designed the character in the novel, and if that’s the case, I’m not sure.
Last year I posted about the t-shirt that said “Be careful or you’ll end up in my novel.” The truth is, I can’t do that. I find myself compelled to change characters if I find they’re coming too close to reality. When I did try to write a character who was someone I knew in real life, it poisoned the book because I didn’t like that person, and why would I want to spend time in fiction with someone I wouldn’t even want to spend time with over lunch?
While I’ll steal real incidents for my stories, I change them significantly enough that you couldn’t say anyone’s character got defamed. In Honest And For True, a lot of the auto repair stories are my own experiences (and when I needed a new one, you’ll recall, God gave it to me). I’m defaming my car. It’s not going to sue.
As writers, we’re tight-roping all the time. Readers need to feel they can identify with our characters, and so we simulate reality for the characters. Real people are real, so we use the gestalt reality for information. When I’m writing about a woman losing her best friend, the circumstances aren’t the same, and she isn’t me, but I’m drawing on the experience of losing my daughter, and that gives the character the backbone of reality.
Some situations are universals. E. A. Miller told me in a creative writing workshop, “The only four things worth writing about are love, sex, God and death.” And yet when you effectively paint one of your childhood friend’s sins across the sky, you’re responsible for her humiliation. We’d all like to think we made someone else’s life better when they read our story and find inspiration to improve their lives. $100,000 for their pain is the other side.
Philangelus versus the exploding tooth November 26, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family.1 comment so far
Last night, as I was making dinner, I bit down on something and heard the most lovely sound ever: a CRACK that shot right through my skull, followed by a tiny grinding sensation.
Well, no, not a lovely sound at all. What I felt, in fact, was that numb-from-the-shoulders-down sense where you’re in sudden terror.
My first instinct was to pretend nothing had happened, and then I pressed my tongue cautiously against the tooth. It seemed to still be there. But it shifted, again with that gritty grinding.
“Um, sweetie?” I said to my Patient Husband. “I think something terrible just happened.”
Well, as it turns out, it’s something terrible, and it’s something not. I don’t have a dentist in Angelborough (well, I didn’t up until then) and I had no idea what to do. I said, “Should I try to call your dentist in the morning?” and my Patient Husband wasn’t sure that was the best idea.
The whole time so far, I’d been waiting for the intolerable pain. My nerves were on edge. And then I thought: is that the tooth that already had a root canal? The tooth that had to get removed because it had exploded?
(That’s a lovely story, involving a dentist who should have been sued for negligence and me mentally composing a story about two detectives investigating the case of a dentist who got shot in the mouth. I never wrote that story, for reasons I’ll discuss tomorrow. Other than the obvious reason, I mean.)
I called the dentist we’d taken Kiddo#3 to when he smashed his face on a pipe over the summer, and the receptionist could hear the stress in my voice. “Can you glue it back in?” I said. And then, “Can I glue it back in?”
They found or made an opening for half an hour from then. I kissed my Patient Husband goodbye and proceeded to drive to TenMilesAway, where I met a receptionist, a dental hygienist, and a dentist who were all very sweet, very considerate, and who thoughtfully laughed at all my nervous jokes. They put me in the chair, and the dentist looked into my mouth to determine whether it was a snapped crown or a second exploded tooth.
While she poked around, I realized I was listening to a song by Survivor. And that when I’d had my root canal five years ago, I’d been listening to the same song. Do all dentists buy the same radio cycle?
And I thought, “I really have to blog about this.”
All’s well, other than needing to apply a thousand dollars to my head. The crown snapped in half. There was already a root canal done, so nothing worse can happen. In three weeks they’ll take a mold to make a temp crown, and 30 days later I’ll get it glued in. There won’t be any pain. I can go to Thanksgiving dinner. I’m thankful to live in a world where your tooth can explode and you can laugh enough to blog about it. I’m thankful for a dentistry practice in TenMilesAway which was willing to squeeze me in just before a holiday.
I didn’t think I’d spend Thanksgiving being thankful for teeth, but there you have it. Simple pleasures, like not being in pain, are the best.
The dry spell November 25, 2009
Posted by philangelus in sarcasm.10 comments
I had a worrysome encounter on Twitter, and I thought it ought to go public. I’m following (and being followed by) a large assortment of people, one of whom speculated aloud that some folks probably leave church disappointed because they’re resisting God. I replied with a question about how many people leave church disappointed because God is hiding from them.
The person to whom I’d replied asked me to explain, and I said that sometimes God will appear to withdraw from us a bit because that silence makes us stronger and effects change in our hearts. While we might be used to feeling joy or consolation when we pray, suddenly it vanishes, and it’s not our fault. It’s because God has pulled back.
Catholics call this “The Dark Night of the Soul,” or more popularly, “the dry spell.” It’s a known phenomenon, in other words, and it’s expected. At times, God will play hide-and-seek in order to deepen our commitment.
This person wrote back and said that Protestants experience this too, but they call it “backsliding” or “growing cold.”
Cue my horror.
Backsliding is absolutely a different breed of bird from the dry spell. One backslides when one stops putting effort into prayer and stops caring about God. We grow cold when we stop investing in a relationship. It’s a failure in us to pursue God.
A dry spell, by contrast, is God’s decision not to respond to us when we come to him. One of the hallmarks of a dry spell is that you continue investing in the relationship, continue putting in the effort, and you feel no results. You haven’t gone cold: God’s taken the wood off the fire. You haven’t backslidden at all. In fact, you’re probably moving forward because you’re operating totally on faith rather than on reward.
That’s why I’m horrified: because in a state of dryness, we need the community around us to keep us in place, reassure us, and support us with confidence. Whereas if you feel your community is going to blame you for God’s self-imposed silence, where can you turn?
I replied to this person that a dry spell is a good thing. A painful thing, but a good thing. If God is depriving us of the sensory reward for relating to him, then we’re staying in place through obedience. And yes, “going through the motions” has its true value in this time, when we don’t feel like doing it but we do it anyhow. I’ve been told a dry spell usually presages a time of great spiritual growth.
Having said that, now, I may get a divine smackdown while God makes me put my money where my words are. I don’t know. But if it does happen, God is still there. Quiet, maybe. Hiding. But there, and as in any game of hide-and-seek, he wants us to keep looking.
There’s a very valuable discussion of dry spells at Conversion Diary. Make sure to read the CS Lewis quote in the comments, because it’s a perfect encapsulation of what a dry spell is and why God causes them.
one thing at a time! November 24, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, pensive.2 comments
My mom used to say, “I only have two hands. I asked God for ten, but he only gave me two.”
Lately I’ve been realizing how I seldom do only one thing at a time. I don’t know if this is a general American culture thing, a scatterbrained thing, or a mom thing. Yet, at nearly any moment in time, I’m doing two or three things at once.
Cooking dinner? I’m probably also listening to music and negotiating peace between fighting kids.
Driving? Listening to music too.
Eating lunch? I’m making sure the kids are all fed. Or, if I serve them first, then I’m making my lunch while they’re eating and then I’m reading while I eat my own food (with, of course, five interruptions for things that Cannot Wait.)
It goes like this all over the place. To just about every activity you can add “supervising children.” That’s a given. But if I’m alone with the baby, and the baby’s napping, I snag some prayer time — and the cat jumps on me to be petted.
The only time I can say I’m fully doing one thing at a time is housecleaning, since you really can’t multitask scrubbing a bathtub with anything else. Although frankly, if I’m doing something truly monotonous, I’m probably using that head-space for story planning or prayer.
How does that affect our general happiness? It makes me wonder if we’re short-circuiting our own ability to feel joy or sorrow by never being fully present in a single space or a single time. There’s too much to do, yes, but at what point do we say, “Enough,” and that maybe we’re cramming in too much because that way, with everything smashed on top of everything else, it’s easier not to experience anything at all.
thou vile wyrm November 23, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, sarcasm.8 comments
Imagine my surprise to find, along with the hairball horked up on my bed, a single coiled white worm.
Yep, somehow my indoor-only, pouch-food-fed, flea-free cats managed to pick up roundworms. People have tried to tell me it’s because the new cat brought them with her back in April — and yes, she did have them then, but she was dewormed (twice) before she ever interacted with the other cats.
I put the worm into a baggie just to observe it and make sure it really was a worm and not a rubber band or something like that. Later it moved, so we knew what was up.
Of course, we can’t be serious for long. You know that. And the next morning, when I was on the phone with the vet, all hilarity broke loose.
Me: I need to come in and pick up deworming meds for three cats.
Vet tech: Did you save the worm?
Me: I did indeed save the worm.
Patient Husband: {bursting out laughing} Why yes! I always save the things my cat horks up!
That’s when I lost it too. I got ready to head out to the vet, and my Patient Husband said, “I really hope your mom calls while you’re gone, so I can say you’re taking the worm to the vet.”
Right on cue, my mom called. And when told of the situation, she said, brimming with sincere-sounding concern:
My mom: Do you think you can save the worm?
Ah yes, fun times abound. I’m not going to share the disgusting thing I said in response to my mother’s question, but she laughed too, at least (because she gets my sense of humor).
Save the worms! Collect the whole set!
Later:
Kiddo2: Where is Mom going?
Dad: She’s taking the worm to the vet.
Kiddo2: She has a worm?
Me: It’s the cat’s worm.
I headed over to the vet, bringing the worm (after a narrow save when my Patient Husband nearly tossed the baggie in the trash. “Give me my worm! That’s my worm!”)
Me: “I’ll take Things The Cat Yarked Up for four hundred, Alex.”
I wish I could say the fun never ends. In fact, the fun went on a little longer when I was at the vet’s office, making punchy remarks (I’m sure it had nothing whatsoever to do with sleep deprivation) and when they finished selling me three doses of Revolution, I said, “You’ll throw something at me if I start singing the Beatles song, won’t you?”
The vet tech replied, “Well….the vet would love you. He adores the Beatles.”
And now I’ve got three doses of dewormer for my cats, and the baggie full of worm has gone to its final resting place (the Angelborough Town Dump) and maybe we can be sane again.
Who thought parisites could be so much fun?
