Anencephaly (and prayer request) January 30, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family.add a comment
Most of you know that my second baby, Emily Rose, died two hours after birth from a condition called anencephaly. Anencephaly is like spina bifida except it happens right at the top of the head. The top of the skull and most of the brain simply fail to form. It is universally fatal.
A woman contacted me through Emily Rose’s website (the Carrying To Term pages) about her baby. She’s keeping a weblog for her daughter Faith Hope, and I’m passing it along to you. I know she’ll appreciate any prayers or good wishes you send her way. Faith is due at the end of next week, but as many babies with anencephaly don’t trigger labor on their own, she may go longer than that.
Please keep Faith and her mother in your prayers.
Quotable January 30, 2009
Posted by philangelus in how-to.1 comment so far
Over at Happy Catholic, Julie has a quote from Salman Rushdie about how the way to defeat terror is not to be terrorized.
When I was about 13, after a particularly tragic bombing in the Middle East, the news interviewed a man local to the devastation, and I immediately wrote down his response.
Giving in to terrorist demands creates only more demands and more terror.
I have no idea who that man was, but I find myself drawing on his words from time to time even in my very-safe non-terrorized life. Maybe in Heaven I’ll get to thank him in person.
The money-school goes to church January 30, 2009
Posted by philangelus in Asperger's, family, kiddos, religion.7 comments
Kiddo#1 is still at “money school” and is doing splendidly. To recap: he gets a ten-dollar allowance but must budget that to purchase any hot lunches he wants at school. Lunches from home are free.
Thus far, he’s never run out of money for the week and wanted to purchase more than he could afford. In fact, he’s gone the other way: he’s built up quite a surplus, enough that he wants to deposit some in his bank account; and he’s figured out how to do the lunches he wants “on the cheap.” He’ll break up some a la carte rather than buying the whole meal. Some days he’ll get the soup rather than the main entree.
By george, I thought, the kid’s got it.
(Funny note: soup is a dollar, and soup crackers are five cents per pack. Each pack contains two saltine crackers. One of the Kiddo’s friends came out of the lunch line with a tray on which he had twenty packages of soup crackers. And that was the boy’s lunch. Kiddo#1 was laughing his head off when he told me about this. Ah, yes, the wonder of the tween-age mind. I’d probably have done the same thing when I was a kid.)
The last three weeks, Kiddo#1 has brought a dollar to put into the collection basket at church. I hadn’t told him to do this; neither had his father. But since the beginning of the year, he’s been getting a dollar every Sunday before church and making a point of bringing it.
I’m guessing in part that it’s imitative behavior; right before church every Sunday is the “Oh, I’ve got to get the check” moment, and with his systematic mind, my son may simply have figured That’s What You Do Before Church. It’s not just the joy of putting something into the basket, because he hasn’t been doing that for years now. (Kiddos #2 and 3 are the ones who get the envelope and a spare dollar. Kiddo#2, who gets a dollar a week allowance, began also bringing a dollar to church, but I stopped her as that’s unfair.)
I said to him yesterday, “At religious education, did they tell you about tithing?”
He said, “I don’t know. What is it?”
I replied, “If you don’t know, then they didn’t tell you.”
Because that’s what he’s doing: ten percent of ten dollars is one dollar. It’s probably that a dollar bill is the most convenient thing for him to grab on the way out the door. Regardless, he’s started a precedent (without us telling him to do so, and without him knowing the details of our own contributions) of donating ten percent of his income to charity.
It’s possible he’s seen the amount written on our envelope. It’s possible he’s heard us discussing the subject. But for whatever reason he’s doing it, I’m just letting it go as a good thing. He’s got his priorities in order; he’s got the money; he’s got the safety net. And it’s a habit I hope he continues nurturing throughout his life.
The difference between sinful and boneheaded January 29, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion.add a comment
On Tuesday, I secured a front-runner place for the Golden I Award (that’s for idiot of the year) by backing into a parked car in the church parking lot.
Now, if you have to have unwanted vehicular contact, this is the way to do it. I have no one to blame but myself. I knew the car was there. I just didn’t look in the right place (and later, I realized the white car, the salt-encrusted windows, and the booster seat in the back really did make the other vehicle hard to see. Not an excuse.) It’s the first time I’ve ever been at fault in an accident, and the fault is entirely mine.
I found the owner of the car in the church hall and explained, and she apologized to me. I said, “Let’s see. Your car was legally parked, and I backed into it. No, I think you’re in the clear.” There’s damage on her bumper even though I was at lower than idle speed. I’m going to be paying the stupid tax.
Afterward, I went home and did my morning prayers, and about halfway through the rosary I got in my head the words I’d heard once before in prayer, that there’s a difference between seriously sinful on the one hand and boneheaded on the other, and I’d fallen squarely on the side of boneheaded. Which ought to make me feel better, but didn’t at first.
What I found upsetting was that minutes before then, at daily Mass, I’d been praying about my feelings of anger at myself. That those angry feelings are the enemy of true humility, and I wanted them replaced with something else, but only God knew what would be best. And what did I get for that? Humiliated?
The response was no, I’d gotten to see how God responded to me. Because here in this life, I’m not trying to offend or hurt God, but frequently I do something boneheaded, and it’s sinful. And how does God react?
Pretty much the way that woman did. She told me it was all right, that it was just a hassle and not something terrible, that she accepted my offer to make things right and wasn’t angry, she understood it was a lapse and not malice. That I wasn’t a bad person. Without ever saying it, she forgave me for harming her vehicle, and by extension harming her.
I thought about Jesus, carrying a cross up a hill, and her, sitting in a body shop waiting room getting an estimate, and for a moment they were the same thing. She had acted as Jesus to me; I had acted as a sinner to her, and it was going to be made right because I was willing and she was forgiving.
I could see in my head Jesus in that parking lot, hugging me and telling me it was okay even though I’d screwed up. That he could love me anyhow and not be angry with me. Which if he could do it, seeing me as I truly am, then so should I.
Meaning my prayer got answered after all, just not in a way I expected.
They teach me too January 28, 2009
Posted by philangelus in The New Novel, writing.20 comments
I’m up to 20,000 words on ♥My Book♥ as of this moment, and I’m loving it still. I’m not sure what the exact next scene is, but we’re rolling right along.
I’m coming up against two issues I hadn’t anticipated. The first regards one of the main characters. He’s a general all-around nice guy, somewhat prone to being taken advantage of, friendly but a little too reserved sometimes, and witty but quiet about it. If you were on the forum when I asked for help naming him (because he’d named himself after my brother and I wanted it changed) then you might remember we eventually settled on the name Josh. But there’s one thing I didn’t tell you about Josh.
He stutters.
Now, I’m aware that having a stuttering character in a humorous story is a minefield, and my objective out of the gate is that never, under any circumstances, is Josh to be laughed at because of the stutter. Period. But it was important for his character, and the more I researched stuttering the more I understood the things I’d only half-grasped about him before.
As I wrote him, something dawned on me: just how difficult it must be to have reams of thoughts in your head, only be struggling to say them. The banter you want to join in, the joke that pops into your mind but won’t come out your mouth. It’s like speaking a foreign language in your native country. This is a character who can IM and text witty rejoinders within seconds, but has trouble ordering a hamburger.
I realized as I wrote just how frustrating it must be, and as that came into my head, it broke over me like the dawn exactly why Josh’s character was all those things I’d understood before I’d truly understood him.
So right now, I’m lurking at a stuttering-support forum to learn as much as I can and make his experience as genuine as possible.
The second thing I’m realizing is what Betsy Lerner meant in The Forest For the Trees when she talked about how writers become suspicious characters within their own circle.
She mentioned an author who wrote about a protagonist who carries on an affair with his daughter-in-law. And how, she asks, did family holidays go afterward, with him in the living room with his daughters-in-law? Did family scrutinize him, the way he interacted with them, wonder what he thought of them?
My protagonist is going to have a problematic relationship with her parents. It is not in any way based on my relationship with my parents. Quite the opposite. But I know that within an hour of reading it, my mother will ask me if I really feel that way, and I don’t. But I wonder whether I’d be so blase about it if my daughter wrote her protagonist’s mother as a screaming harpy, or if my husband wrote a novel about a very patient man dealing with a woman who lives largely in her own head.
I find myself hesitating before writing the story the way it demands to be written, even though I know it’s just a story. Because in the end, I’m not just an author. I’m also a daughter, a wife, a mother, a sister, a Christian, and a friend, and I don’t want to jeopardize any of those relationships in pursuit of the other.
Your money got left behind January 27, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion, sarcasm.28 comments
Every so often I really want to shake some Christians and say, “Please! You’re making us look bad!”
I’m not sure whether this is a scam or just really…sad. You’ve Been Left Behind asks you for the email addresses of your unsaved loved ones. For a fee of $40 a year, they’ll let you write these folks a letter and upload some files to send them, then hold these items in readiness.
Then, when all the Good People get Raptured, the computer will automatically send them your final email urging them to repent of all their sins, believe in Jesus, and be saved.
(By this point in the telling, my Patient Husband was in stitches.)
My first response was to laugh out loud. You’ve got to be kidding! The Holy Spirit was unable to melt their hardened hearts, but my email is going to do the trick?
Second thought: The sudden vanishing of a billion people wouldn’t be a huge clue that maybe something is up?
My Patient Husband said, “How’s the computer going to know that everyone got raptured?” They have that figured out: if none of the founders logs in for three days, it sends a prompt; if none of them login for three more days, the computer then sends all the stored emails.
Right.
Firstly, I will state for the record that Roman Catholicism doesn’t believe in the Rapture, and neither did anyone else before about 1830. Therefore I feel free to mock this website with all my heart, as it’s a manifestation of the “Jesus is coming to town to kick your butt” mentality you find in neophyte first-phase Christian development.
Any Christian faithful enough to be qualified for Rapturing would be Christ-like enough not to want to leave others to suffer without hope (that’s 3rd and 4th phase development). I can’t imagine Jesus abandoning souls He loves, and the people most like Jesus would say, along with Therese of Lisieux, that they want to spend their Heaven doing good upon the Earth. In other words, the “true Christians” who are supposed to be saved by the rapture are the very people who won’t want to go.
Secondly, people are being urged to upload things like wills and Power Of Attorney documents in order to protect their families in the event of their loss. But if this is a scam, then you’re handing over documents giving control of your assets. Even if it’s not, do you really want them sitting on a server where anyone can hack in?
And thirdly, this scheme is foolproof. If it’s a scam and the rapture happens, you’ll never know your email wasn’t sent. If it’s a scam and no rapture happens, you’ll never know it was a scam.
Overall, I’d rather trust the Holy Spirit to influence the hearts and minds of those I love, not any email from me (no matter how persuasive.) But for those of you who think you can do a better job than God Almighty, they’re standing by waiting to take your forty bucks.
Monday morning question: of courses. January 26, 2009
Posted by philangelus in angels, sarcasm.25 comments
A local college sent us their course listings for the upcoming semester (I guess beginning in February?) and I browsed through it.
Lots of interesting stuff. I would love to have the free time to take a college class here and there, only this time it would be strictly interesting material and nothing having to do with fulfilling requirements or keeping my advisor happy. (Come to think of it, that was my last three years of college. My Freshman year was the nightmare.)
Back at the old house in Angeltown, when my Patient Husband was cleaning out some of the five tons of papers we’d stashed there, he handed me the entire contents of a three-ring binder (weighing about 400 pounds) and asked me to put it into the recycling bin.
Because the separate sections were all stapled, I had to spend time removing staples before it went into the bin, and I saw it was the “textbook” for a course on the way war strategy had changed in conjunction with the changes in warfare technology. It’s not something I would ever have chosen to take in college, and it wouldn’t have worked well with a dual-major in English and Religion, but seeing the contents of the class, I realized it was fascinating.
I thought toward my guardian angel, “I hope there are tons of classes we can take in Heaven. Classes in every subject, and we can just enroll and learn things and study things like this for all eternity.”
I heard a reply: Some people would consider that Hell.
I laughed. But I know I’m not the only one because my father often tells me “When you stop learning, you start dying.”
Some of the happiest people I know are people who continue to take classes in new areas no matter how old they are. They just love learning for the sake of learning, even if it’s not “practical” and don’t view study as a necessary evil, like medicine that needs to be dosed out.
When the kids get older, my Patient Husband wants to re-learn how to play the cello. I would love to take classes in drawing, in music. I want to learn to drive a standard-shift car. I want to learn to play the violin for real.
Here’s your question, and answer in the comment box: if you could take any course whatsoever, if time and money weren’t a problem, what would it be? What would you like to learn about? And if you have a preference as to who would teach it, name that too.
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Blogged responses:
Ten Past Midnight
An American in Holland
Walking In The Rain
The Betsy Ross Experience
The New Novel January 24, 2009
Posted by philangelus in The New Novel, writing.3 comments
I’m writing again! Really, honest-to-goodness writing!
I started a new novel a week ago Thursday. I’d had the frame of the novel in my head for about a year, but I never could get the actual story to take shape. It would wander from this thing to that thing to the other thing, but I never could get a sense of the conflict or the characters. Just this nebulous idea: a string quartet, and the protagonist plays the viola. I had a title. What I didn’t have was a plot, and although I’m not a plot-based writer, I still know it’s important to have one.
(Seven Archangels: Annihilation is the exception. It’s very much a plot-based novel.)
It started with an angel, but then I removed the angel. It had an apartment fire, and now there’s no more apartment fire. The protagonist had a nephew she was raising; she no longer has him. The entire story kept getting inverted like a dirty sock, and I never felt comfortable with any of my ideas.
What happened? I’m not sure, except that when the characters finally started talking to me, I suddenly got my finger on the novel’s heartbeat. And once I had its heart, I had the story.
I think the biggest difference is that one agent who rejected me (with an awesome, detailed rejection and suggestions for rewriting the whole thing) said of the rejected novel that it was overcrowded; she selected a couple of elements and said, “That’s plenty for a novel.”
Once she said that, I realized I really was trying to cram too much into the book. It didn’t need a nephew, an angel, an apartment fire, or any of those other things. It needed a soul, and I’d found it.
Since then, I’ve written 16,000 words. I was doing about 3500 words a day the first two days (this is my normal method: there’s a spurt at first and then it settles) and keeping up with about 1500 words a day since then, with the exception of two lousy days where I didn’t break a thousand.
The writing is humorous, but I’m not sure you can call it a comedy any longer. There isn’t the gonzo humor I wanted when I first planned it, but what remains is more touching and more human. I’m enjoying this, and after all that stalling, I didn’t think I would. I’m in love with three of the characters already.
So what’s the problem? The novel is eating the brain space I use for weblog entries. Poor me. Poor you: you may get updates on the novel when I get to the total self-absorption phase of the writing, when I know there’s nothing in the world so interesting as ♥My Book.♥
In the sidebar is a bar marking my progress. If you notice it hasn’t moved in a day or two, email me a boot to the head. I very much want this novel to succeed.
Finishitis January 23, 2009
Posted by philangelus in kiddos, knitting.6 comments
I actually have nothing on knitting needles right now. I have one half-done crochet project I may finish up before starting my socks.
First, here’s my Patient Husband showing off the pair of socks I finally finished for him last week. He says they fit well and are very warm.
He was snowblowing for an hour in them and although his fingers came back frozen, his toes were singing the praises of my socks.
Next, we have the Noro Wavy Gravy Hat (yes, of the hat debacle), in two sizes, and my own matching scarf pattern (two of the chevrons with a three-stitch garter stitch border on the edges) done as a keyhole scarf in order to hide the fact that I was running out of yarn.
The little one is the infant hat that should have been a full-size hat. The big one is the hat for which one of my size 8 dpns gave its life. I have no idea where the dpn went, but when they went into the bag, I had five, and when they came out, there were only four.
The only rational explanation is that Satan stole my knitting needle, so therefore I did the only rational thing a Christian could do and proceeded to knit onto a size 8 circular needle. Which ended up working about 5 times better than the same hat on dpns. I never liked circulars before, and now I do. Take that, foul fiend.
Here are Kiddo#2 and Kiddo#4 modeling the hats and scarf for us. Note how many teeth Kiddo#2 is missing. The tooth fairy has visited our home five times in the last two weeks. It’s insane.
I found out that in the town over from Angelborough there’s a shelter for homeless families (well, I guess previously-homeless, right, since once they live there they aren’t homeless any longer…?) I went over there and dropped off the hats and scarves, despite how nervous I was. The only thing that got me through was imagining someone’s guardian angel seeing the hat/scarf set and thinking, “Ooh! I’ve got to get my charge down here to get that!” Plus, I smelled tea the whole time I was driving and coming back (but not in the building.)
Fun moment: when I was first told about the shelter, I asked where it was, and the person replied, “Oh, it’s on XYZ Road!” Later I found that road, but I didn’t know where the shelter was on the road. When I called to find out if they would like the hats and scarf, I asked where they were. “Oh, we’re on XYZ Road!” I insisted on a quaint little detail like a house number, which they reluctantly gave.
I figured based on this that it would be dead obvious when I got there, with a big sign, huge parking lot, maybe a church next door, and maybe an angel standing over it holding a food basket. Nope. It’s in a residential neighborhood. It’s just a white victorian house. No sign. I passed it twice before I found it, and then once there, I had to walk around the building to find “the other front door.”
But hey, the stuff is there, and they want more. I hope I get some startitis soon.
Pheasants are tasty January 22, 2009
Posted by philangelus in food.4 comments
On Monday, while digging us out from two inches of snow that had somehow turned into a foot, my Patient Husband heard a crack. He looked up to see a pheasant fall to the ground at our garage doors. It had, apparently, flown straight into the side of our house.
Note to pheasants: the house is bigger than you. It will not care that you are coming and will not get out of the way.
It was about two feet away from my Patient Husband and his snowblower, but it didn’t move. Eventually he turned off the snowblower and chased it away. It half-wobbled, half-flew to a cluster of trees in front of the house, near the road.
When he told me, I said, “It’s concussed?” He thought so.
And my first thought was, if it’s dead (because birds have light bones, and that kind of impact might have broken several) maybe I should go get it.
I mean, that’s what Ma Ingalls would have done, right? She’d have gone out, cleaned and dressed the bird, and everyone would have dined on Providence-Delivered Pheasant, the best take-0ut meal. God gave Moses quail in the desert, and we would have received a pheasant.
Of course, I dithered in my head about it all. I’m a city girl at heart, and the idea of eating something that wasn’t grown on a farm (which, as we know, is a sterile environment) and slapped with a sell-by date…well, that’s just weird.
I still had no idea what to do an hour later when I looked out the window to see a pheasant hunting for food in the trees at the front of the house. This made my decision a lot easier. Or at least, it made my cowardice a lot less noticeable.
(Okay, everyone, go ahead and make the pun you’re dying to, about how I chickened out. Do it. You’ll feel better. Really. See now? Isn’t that better.)
This morning, coming back from the bus stop, I passed the stand of trees and realized the pheasant was still there, and only about six feet from me!
And then I realized, it was sitting in a pile of feathers. Oh dear, I though. It must be sick and it’s shedding.
And then I realized, that wasn’t a pheasant. Oh dear, I thought. It’s a hawk.
And then I realized, it wasn’t sitting in a pile of hawk feathers.
Oh dear, I thought.
It was a beautiful hawk. And, I would add, presumably smarter than the pheasant. For, you see, hawks do not dither about wondering whether the pheasant has parasites or a sell-by date or was raised on organic corn. They’re pretty pragmatic.
And from this, I also derived a very important lesson: the world is a dangerous place when you are both stupid and tasty.
Live and learn. Or, don’t do either. I guess. More hands-on learning from Nature’s School.
