My Patient Husband’s bicycle March 31, 2009
Posted by philangelus in Biking, sarcasm.11 comments
I blame Calvin and Hobbes: my Patient Husband wants to bike to work.
The reason we moved from Angeltown to Angelborough was his commute. The simple act of uprooting our lives, doubling our mortgage, throwing away a third of our things and getting an ulcer having to deal with many, many stupid mortgage officers and a couple of stubborn attorneys reduced his commute by 90 miles a day.
Well, now it’s time to pay the piper. It would be great exercise to bike to work. Great for the environment. Wouldn’t it be cool. The whole world would love him.
I said, How are you going to get all your things to work? Your lunch? How will you change into clean clothes after biking ten miles? Can you even bike ten miles? How are you going to make it through That Intersection in Northtown?
My Patient Husband had all the answers to this: he Googled them up. I’m not convinced. Because all the answers boil down to, “Well, they say *this* but I’m not sure how it would work out.”
This morning, he said, for example, one website says to keep a change of clothes in the office. Sounds nice, right? For one day. Then what? His office fits a desk, a filing cabinet and a tiny book shelf. A wardrobe? Not so much. There’s a fitness center on the jobsite, and he could keep toiletries there, but what about his towel? Shouldn’t that get laundered every so often?
So I said, here’s what you do. You call Zoots.
I didn’t need to go any further: he was already laughing. (Zoots is a dry-cleaner that delivers.) But since I can’t refrain from running a joke into the ground, I went on.
I said, you wear clothes on Monday, then call and have them picked up at the end of the day, biking home in your biking clothes. On Tuesday, they bring them back, and while the delivery guy is there, you say, “Wait a minute,” and you strip out of your clothes and put on the clean ones, and have him take away the dirty ones.
The downside: his office mates will think he only owns two sets of clothes.
He said, “I could keep two spares there,” but I pointed out that the whole aim of this was not to have extra clothes in his office at all, since he has no room.
Yeah, we’re still working out the logistics of the bike thing. But the first hurdle will be the purchase of a bike. And next, as my Patient Husband points out, he needs to remember how to ride one. Finally, I need to get over my fear of him being sideswiped or doored by some malicious driver. Guess which one will be the hardest?
No, I’d rather not save your life March 30, 2009
Posted by philangelus in Monday Morning Question, pensive, religion.13 comments
There was a rather long thread on one of my forums, since locked, and I wanted to see what you guys had to say about it.
Here’s the post in a nutshell: a woman is asked to be screened to donate bone marrow to a relative, but in the past this relative has bullied her and been mean to her. The woman decides that she does not want to donate to someone who’s been that wicked to her, as she doesn’t feel it’s right that they’re treating her like a spare parts factory. In other words, she’s only worth anything to them inasmuch as she’s useful.
My first thought was, it depends on how “mean” the relative was. There’s a difference between “You always laughed at my clothes” and “You bilked Grandma out of her estate so she died penniless.”
My next thought was, Don’t we have a responsibility to save a life if possible?
And then I thought, Donating bone marrow is an “extraordinary measure,” and we’re not required to take extraordinary measures to prolong a life (ie, we’re not required to intubate a patient or perform invasive surgery, but the Catholic Church does require hydration because drinking is an “ordinary measure.”) So maybe there’s not actually a moral imperative to save a life if it requires extraordinary action.
And then I thought, But what life-saving effort wouldn’t require extraordinary action?
I could go round and round for hours, but I’m wondering what you guys think. If it affects your opinion, bone-marrow donation is no longer invasive and painful; it requires taking drugs to stimulate cell production, and the process of removing those cells is via filtration, like a long blood transfusion done two or three times over several days. You might be achey as if with the flu, but not usually worse. No drills involved.
And how low down the scale do you go? What if you only had to pay a hundred dollars to save your enemy’s life? How much benefit does the person have to reap: six more months? Five years? And how irritating is a person allowed to be before you decide the pain of saving the person’s life is only going to prolong the pain of having to deal with that person?
Where in all this do we become little gods, dealing out life and death based on the worthiness of the recipient? And really, do some lives not require saving? Or conversely, should we make an extra effort to save a soul who truly isn’t ready to face God?
Answer in the comments box or on your own blog. I’d like a wide range of moral/religious/social views because this whole thing seems rather tricky.
Writing your tragedy March 26, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, religion, writing.12 comments
Well, now you see how close to the ragged edge of disaster I run on a regular basis. Between trying to write ♥My Book♥ and being sick over the weekend (and I’m still not 100%) I’m burnt out, and that’s why you got two somewhat-spacey mystical blog entries. Usually I try to be sarcastic and practical here. Now you know.
I came across an email to another writer who had lost a baby. She was disturbed that she couldn’t write anything in the wake of her loss, and I said it had taken four years after Emily’s death to really feel like I could be a writer again. I was writing during that time, of course, but grieving was robbing my brain of its inspiration the same way being sick this weekend did.
Here’s a quote from that email:
You can “scab over” the hurt, but it’s still there, and the trauma hasn’t been resolved enough that your inner self, the introspective part that writes, wants to handle it. You may at some level understand that it hasn’t been resolved and that’s what’s keeping you from writing about it — because it hasn’t been resolved, you can’t create a tidy little package about it.
Have you read “The Forest For The Trees” by Betsy Lerner? In it she writes that writers tend to keep a distance between themselves and the rest of their lives, as if they’re observing their own lives. It puts a slight wall between themselves and what they’re feeling. So that rather than just feeling hurt, a writer notes that he’s feeling hurt and also how that affects him and what that does to the people around him and so on and so forth. It means there’s always a little shell between a writer and his own feelings so that he can analyze himself even as he’s experiencing something. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not how I survived losing Emily at all — by simultaneously living it and keeping some distance on myself. Maybe you’ve got that wall there too and you know it would hurt to have it come down right now enough to write about it.
Looking at what I wrote four years ago, I can see where I’ve coped with other tragedies by doing the same. In fact, sometimes I find myself in the middle of a mess nowadays and thinking, “I should blog about that.”
But is that healthy? It is, and it’s not. It’s an examined life, but is that life examined at the expense of living it? Am I here-but-n0t-here when I dwell in the twilight between feeling and introspection? Am I effectively saying to myself, “That’s nice, dear, but what have you learned?”
Emily died in July and I had her website up by September, but writing something deeper and more reflective took time. I don’t think I fully explored in fiction the emotions of losing a baby until I wrote Winter Branches (in 2005) and you can see even there, the feelings were translated. (Before someone brings up “Damage,” I’ll note that “Damage” had the same situation but none of the grieving. It’s the frame of the house without the furnishings, the carpet, or the drapes.)
My point here is just, if you’ve endured a tragedy, give it time before you try writing. Maybe years. If you want the processed, final product, those precious resolved feelings, you need to resolve them first. Writing in an effort to process the emotions is journaling, and that’s fine. But writing your tragedy too soon because you want to leap right to the end product leads to stalled writing and a burnt-out writer or to a fake-sounding resolution, and it won’t help others in the same situation.
A Good Baby March 25, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, religion.add a comment
It’s the feast of the Annunciation, when Gabriel visited Mary and told her about Jesus.
Quite a few years ago, I wondered what it felt like to be on the receiving end of such a message, and I got an answer.
At the time, I was in graduate school. For years, I’d wanted to join the volunteer community at Covenant House, working for a year with homeless kids, living on-site with other volunteer workers who all got $15 a week and spent three hours a day in prayer. (I’m told that it starts off feeling like a lot and by the end it feels like barely enough.) It’s tough but rewarding work. I’d wanted to do it after college, but I was too young by one year.
But I also wasn’t sure if I should bag the Covenant House faith community idea and get married to my Patient Boyfriend. It’s a long story there, but I had Issues (heck, I had the whole subscription) and I was worried about spending another year apart. We were already long-distance.
I went to visit my Patient Boyfriend in Ithaca. At one point, we were cuddling, and that question popped into my head: I wonder what Mary felt when Gabriel appeared to announce Jesus’s coming.
In the next moment, I felt overcome by Presence. I can’t explain it, but in my heart, I knew:
I would not go to Covenant House.
I would get married to my Patient Boyfriend.
We would have a baby, and it would be a Good Baby. The world would be a better place because of this Good Baby.
In the next moment, I found myself overflowing with tears. I couldn’t have stopped myself: they just started, and I was just transfixed by the Goodness of this Good Baby.
Of course, my Patient Boyfriend was horrified thinking he’d upset me somehow, and I couldn’t get the words out, what had happened, what I’d felt.
Two hours later, after dinner, he proposed.
I did not go to Covenant House. I married my Patient Boyfriend.
I have had five babies, and I still don’t know which was the Good Baby, whether I’ve had the Good Baby or whether the Good Baby is yet to come, whether Emily Rose was the Good Baby who made the world a better place, or whether even the enemy doesn’t know which of my babies is the Good one and that’s why I get into a car crash whenever I’m pregnant (as Satan goes all Herod on me trying to get the baby.)
I don’t know, and maybe I never will. But I’ve always remembered that power, that moment, the answers, and the raw Goodness of a Good Baby.
Gabriel the Archangel March 24, 2009
Posted by philangelus in angels, religion.3 comments
Today would have been the feast day of St. Gabriel the Archangel (the day before the Annunciation) except that he got moved over to September 29th to share a day with Sts Michael and Raphael. Since I’m still wiped out from the weekend, I’m going to cheat share an old journal entry about the time I “met” St. Gabriel in a dream.
–
4/17/89
It started all weird, with a rich lord of a harem and other people. Then {a friend from school} came up to me laughing, saying, “This guy is in your room — says he wants to speak to you — he says he’s the Archangel Gabriel!”
I felt nervous but I went in anyway, and the next thing I knew, I was talking with the Archangel Gabriel, giggling and having a good time.
In the middle of the revelry I stopped. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said, and my head hurt because it was hard to concentrate, “but I want you to say the Divine Praises.”
I meant to test him, to see if he was who he said. He replied: “Only one.”
I said, “Three.”
He said, “Okay.”
So he said three of the Divine Praises, or maybe he said them all because I can’t remember him stopping. But he said them weird. He said, for example, “Blessed be the Trinity,” and something like, “Blessed be the Patriarchs.”
I remember at one point sitting with him on the floor in my old room at {childhood home}. I was wearing my orange shirt, and I saw myself from outside myself. I was laughing.
I remember what he looked like: his hair was ashy-blond and short, almost a crew-cut. His face was roundish. His eyes were perfectly almond-shaped, and the irises were like smoke-quartz, a watery black-grey. He was almost effeminate, and his voice was soft and not deep.
I felt bad, because at one point I introduced him to someone, and I started laughing at the idea. He talked to {Stepfather} too, but I didn’t tell him who Gabriel was. I was afraid he’d laugh and not believe me. I was a little embarrassed.
I said to him later, in the most vivid part of the dream: “Do you stop by often?” Then, as the dream began to fall apart around me, he looked me right in the eyes and answered, “I pray for you.”
The last thing he said was that it was good I was praying the St. Michael chaplet. But those eyes, those eyes were just locked on mine.
The dream slipped back into the other, and the evil harem-lord and someone else were being boiled in oil. I was joking around with the customer of the restaurant (“I wouldn’t eat the soup if I were you”) but then looked out the window into the street to find Gabriel, but I couldn’t. I woke up feeling absolutely alone, curled on my side, missing him terribly.
Later on, and even during the dream, I thought of things I had wanted to ask him but hadn’t. I wanted to ask him about that flower, but didn’t find the words. I wanted to ask him about the legend that he was once shut away from Heaven, even thought of the words, but he looked sad and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
But it had felt so good in the dream, like I was with a friend, someone who knew me and really cared for me. I think, looking back, that he was actually inside my mind, or I was sort-of within his.
It freaked me out in a way. I’m still a bit touchy inside.
—-
Commentary: This has stayed with me for years. At some point I need to check how many times in the Seven Archangels books an angel says “I pray for you.” It’s probably once per book.
I have no idea what the flower reference was. And back then, due to too much cheap SFF, I described everyone as having almond-shaped eyes.
The night I had the dream was the first time I visited Cornell, after getting accepted but before deciding to go there.
I wanted to see him again. I prayed like crazy for reassurance, and that he would help me out (I was terrified of going away to college) and that he’d keep praying for me. And I prayed specifically that the first night I was in Ithaca, he’d come to me in a dream. I had total faith he would. And then when I went to college, I didn’t dream about him. It was only afterward that I realized this was “the first night” I was in Ithaca, and that if you didn’t exist within a straightforward time stream, you might get this persistent request from a bratty teenager and eventually say, “Sure, it won’t take more than ten minutes,” and punch “first night in Ithaca, New York” into your blackberry and end up there in April rather than September. 
So that’s my dream. What do you think?
An unrepentant food thief March 23, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, food, religion.3 comments
On Saturday night, the baby woke up at 10PM and threw up all over me. He’s not a spitty baby, so this augured Bad Things. Sure enough, when I woke up Sunday morning, everyone else’s breakfast smelled like compost, and that’s where I’m going to end the TMI.
My Patient Husband and I seem to have worked out an agreement long ago: we don’t both get sick at the same time. In general, I wait for a weekend to get sick, whereas he gets sick whenever he feels like it, but never at the same time. I spent Sunday in bed while he kid-herded, until he informed me right around dinner that it was high time for me to get well because it was his turn.
While I begged to differ, there was no choice. I dragged myself downstairs and informed them that instead of the nutritious home-made meal their father had planned, they were having “a terrible diner,” which would consist of sandwiches, a bag of Those Coveted Chips we save for guests, and a fruit. I listed three choices of fruit.
Kiddo#3 said, “Pears are fruit.”
Pears also weren’t on the list of suggested fruits.
But you know those lightning bolt moments? Where something just sounds right? Suddenly, I knew I needed a fruit. And not just any fruit, but canned pears. I have no idea why: don’t sick people want toast and tea? But after five pregnancies, I firmly believe that the human body tells us what it needs, and I had been told.
Despite the fact that I hadn’t eaten a canned pear in maybe five years. Quite possibly ten. While I like them a lot, I simply don’t buy them. It’s easier to just eat a fruit.
But, because God looks out for fools, drunks, the United States of America, and me, guess what was in the basement? A BJs-sized case of canned pear halves. Because when I’d been at BJs last week, I’d seen them and thought, for the first time in years, “Those would be good for the food pantry.”
I had one. (Kiddo#1 had one pear-half too.) There were four more in the can, but while I believe in the wisdom of the body, I’m also not stupid. On the other hand, that one silly canned half-pear turned the corner for me. Within an hour, I felt fine. Tired, but fine. Two hours later, I’d eaten the rest.
Call me crazy, but I bet God wanted me to “steal” that can of pears. To prove a point after all the hullabaloo about last week’s ketchup. Because God wants good things for the poor, definitely. But I guess, sometimes, God also wants good things for me.
Please pray that the rest of us don’t get sick.
Editing versus creating March 20, 2009
Posted by philangelus in The Boys Upstairs, The New Novel, writing.4 comments
I had to take a second literary pause from ♥My Book♥ because the publisher of my Christmas novella wanted pre-edits.
The pre-edits took three or four days. The first day, I was able to write my thousand words for the day anyhow, but I didn’t make very much progress on the novella. After that, I spent a morning fiddling with edits on ♥My Book♥ as opposed to actually writing it, and then I went full-tilt on the novella.
The Boys Upstairs is now fully pre-edited and has been passed along to the editorial staff at Lilley Press. Meaning I can get back to writing the novel.
Except that this afternoon, when I could, I had no energy to write the book. No reason why: it was just as if I put a bucket into the well and it came up empty.
I shouldn’t be surprised: writing and editing use different parts of the brain.You can actually see that in how the second day I went to the novel and edited parts of it rather than writing. And, you ask, why?
Creating involves your imagination. More importantly, creating involves shedding the limits on your perception. Whereas editing involves imposing limits.
The first creation story in Genesis shows God as an editor: he separates the light from the darkness, separates the upper water from the lower water, puts the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea, and so on. It’s as if he’s tidying up the place. The “formless void” in the first sentence of Genesis seems to have been written in sentence zero. Maybe that’s how writers work it too: we spill out our creation in a formless gush and then we sit around for hours afterward, shaping it.
I’ll set my brain loose tonight and inhabit the scene I know comes next, forming the dialogue and rehearsing the little tensions. I’ll play with the restaurant it takes place in, the things the characters choose to eat, the interplay, the minor annoyances, the sense of plunging forward. It’ll come back, and I’ll get to spend time with Josh and Joey again.
I’ll spill out my formless creation and gush with the wonder. But not right now. Tomorrow, tomorrow.
fire and smoke March 19, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, religion.3 comments
My Patient Husband’s mother returned from vacation last week to find there had been a house fire in her absence. Somehow before it burned too much, the fire department got it extinguished, and no one was hurt, but there’s damage to the roof, water damage, and so on.
She’s alone out there dealing with the insurance company and contractors and the like. She’s staying at a hotel but hadn’t given anyone the name or number, so it was impossible to reach her unless she happened to be in the house when we called. Power’s been shut off, so there’s no way to leave a message.
On Monday night, my Patient Husband finally reached her, but it only made things more stressful.
Tuesday morning, for that and other reasons, I was emotionally washed out by the time I got to daily Mass. The baby was being an utter pain, so I ended up standing in the back. I was the last up to Communion, meaning I had just enough time to say, “God, let me offer this for {BIL}, and ask him to pray for his mom.”
(If that’s confusing to you, the idea is that if you pray for a departed soul, the soul might pray for you in return. I was saying, have him pray for his mom instead of me because she could use it. And I knew I had no mental capacity right then to really pray in a sustained fashion for anything.)
My youngest brother-in-law died under tragic circumstances about eight years ago. I’ve been thinking of him off and on for the last two weeks, but I hadn’t thought to pray for him recently until right then.
And then I forgot about it. I went about my life, posted a griping, whiney message about the situation over at a parenting forum, and that was it.
On Wednesday night, I found an email from someone at the parenting forum who said, “Is your mother-in-law from {location}?” Her parents were neighbors with my MIL, and she was able to identify her based on my description. The internet is, apparently, far smaller than I thought.
The last line of the message was, “My younger brother used to be good friends with {youngest BIL}.”
…
I miss him. I didn’t know him that well, but he was an awesome kid, and he died far too soon. But you guys know how my brain works, and I keep trying to make a connection between my prayer and this email.
Most likely, it’s just a coincidence. I’d say 99% likely.
But in my heart, I wish for the 1%, that it’s a way God’s telling me that BIL is all right, that he forgives us for not being the family he deserved, that he’s praying for us.
Please pray for my MIL as she negotiates insurance and repairs. And please pray for BIL too.
Death by cookbook March 18, 2009
Posted by philangelus in food, kiddos, sarcasm.5 comments
Kiddo#3 saw my copy of the Settlement Cookbook. “Why you have another cookbook?” he asked.
I said that some recipes weren’t in every cookbook, and that this had been Grandma E’s cookbook.
He said, “She gave it to you?”
No, actually, I got it after she died.
He said, “You took it?”
I said everyone figured she’d want me to have it.
He said, “Did you take it by accident or by deliberately?”
No, I said. She had died, and when people die, they no longer need a cookbook. So everyone got together and decided to give her cookbook to me.
He said, “Did they fight for it? Did they say, ‘No, give it to me’?”
No, really, it was pretty laid back.
“Was she mad?” he said, and I assured him that Grandma was not mad, that in Heaven you don’t need a cookbook, so she would be fine with me having it.
“Is my grandma still alive?” he said. I answered that yes, she was, and I couldn’t help but add, “And she has a cookbook.
He said, “Then she could make me spaghetti?” and I agreed that she would be able to do this very thing, because she has a cookbook.
He thought while finishing his lunch. Then he produced this bit of wisdom: If I died, then Daddy would take my cookbook.
I agreed that this was the case. Then he said, “And if Kiddo#2 died, I would take her cookbook. And if Kiddo#4 died…”
It went on from there, him graciously rehoming the cookbooks of the world after the demise of their respective owners, including passing along his own cookbook to his younger brother.
Your takeaway for today:
1) every human being has a cookbook
2) they don’t need cookbooks in Heaven
3) one of the rites of passage involved in dying is giving your cookbook to someone else.
4) His own grandmothers, who are all still living, can use their cookbooks to make him spaghetti.
Any questions?
Why I hope God has a sense of humor March 17, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion, sarcasm.10 comments
My favorite method of food donation has backfired, and I’m standing here with soot on my face. I need help.
A long time ago I read an article that changed my perception, about a family that donated food to a needy family only to need it later themselves. They received back their own donation only to see what awful, useless food they’d donated. Since they, they’ve always donated their favorite and most indispensable foods.
In that same spirit, I use the BJ’s method of food donation: I buy multipacks and donate from that, and thus the recipients are eating exactly what we do. That way, if Jesus asks me to account for myself, I can point to our own family menus.
Over the weekend, I made hamburgers. Our ketchup bottle was out, so I went into the pantry to find the new one. When it didn’t show up immediately, I said, “Well, it came as a twin pack. I’ll just grab the one I was going to donate, and I’ll replace it later with the one in the pantry.”
I even laughed and said, “My scrupulous heart feels awful about taking ketchup from the mouths of starving children.”
Here’s the awful thing: after dinner, we looked again, and the bottle of ketchup has vanished. We have no idea where it went, but it’s totally gone. Poof!
My Patient Husband swears he didn’t use it to pay a gambling debt. My son’s friends did not swipe it from the house in order to fulfill the final wish of a dying great-grandmother to taste ketchup before she passes on. No one broke in and found only a 25 ounce bottle of ketchup to sell on the black market. So where is it?
For this scrupulous soul, it’s a disaster: I took a poor family’s ketchup.
Let me go one worse: what if I already donated the other bottle? That’s the worst case scenario because if it’s already donated, I’ll never find the bottle. Meaning, I’ll never be able to make this right.
(Please, those sane among you: don’t point out that if I already donated it, there’s no wrong to make right. You’re making sense. In general, I don’t.)
In short, I’m in a monumental amount of spiritual trouble here that can only be resolved buy purchasing more ketchup.
Except that then, I’ll feel like I’m “behind” by a bottle of ketchup.
Doomed, I tell you. Totally doomed.
