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.

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.

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.

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?

I wish I could go to the doctor for an ultrasound of my soul.

“Hey, look! it’s right where it should be. Development is a little small over here. I need a better picture of that part…your patience is a bit small but this other part is doing fine…turn a bit so I can get a better measurement… Oh, look, you have to see this! This is the light of God in you. Just get a look at that for a minute, and then I’ll keep taking measurements. What a beauty. It’s small now, but the further you go, the brighter that’s going to get.”

At least, I hope that’s what he’d say.

And I’m not talking about Adam or Cain. I’m trying to decide if my new book should be written in first person or third person.

For the non-writers, first person is when the book is told from the “I” perspective (“I paced the hall”) and third person is when the book is told from the “he”/”she” perspective. (“She paced the hall.”) For the most part you don’t see second person, although I’ve written it (“You pace the hall. Look in the mirror to find a grey hair. Pivoting, you stalk back to the kitchen.”) And I’ve talked about the one time I’ve encountered a first-person plural narrator.

One agent said about the string quartet novel that it’s a lot of everyday stuff, and on balance, I believe that’s true of that particular book. The tensions emerge from the interplay of the characters, not from external stressors. So in the planning stage for another book, I devised a compelling external question that will cause a lot of plotting and a lot of non-everyday living.

I’m using Randy Ingermanson’s snowflake method for this, a departure for me because I do all my planning in-head. But I’ll try anything once. I’ve just finished step four (a one-page synopsis) and realized this is the place I’d normally start writing. I don’t use an outline, but I get to know the characters intimately, know the conflict and the major steps on how it’s going to get resolved, then turn them loose.

I’m not starting yet — I’ll give Ingermanson’s method a shot. What’s stumping me now is whether to tell it in first or third person. Do I want to be in my MC’s head? Or do I want to see her from outside herself?

First person appears more intimate, but readers don’t trust a first person narrator as much as third. You actually get closer in third. But if a lot of this is intuition, I don’t want to be telling too much. (“Her spider senses were tingling!” — hah) and intuition is easier to show in first person. (“No matter how often I tried to pay attention to Martin, my gaze kept returning to the bookshelf.”)

I want to write in third simply because I haven’t in so long. The book feels more like first.

Oh, decisions. If you’re not a writer, you never realized we angst about things like this, but a tiny decision here changes the flavor of the whole book, like beginning a soup with beef stock instead of chicken stock. I know a writer now who’s rewriting a book from one person into another, and she says it’s like writing a different book.

I may do a few pages in each flavor to get a sense of how it flows. The result will, I hope, turn up one version that feels just-right in how no one could possibly imagine it any other way.

Imagine my surprise to learn that despite my Italian heritage, I have no idea how to cook pasta!

I picked up bags of pasta, $5 for five, at the Entenmann’s Thrift Store, aka The Very Dangerous Place. Those crumb cakes, the ones I dream of? They’re like a dollar there. They fit nicely in my freezer. I’m in trouble.

Yesterday while cooking the pasta, I turned over the bag in order to see how many minutes they recommended cooking. Apparently I’ve been doing it wrong. Have you?

1. Pour 3 Lt. of water into the saucepan and leave it to boil. (12 glass.)
2. Once the water has boiled, add a sufficient quantity of salt and one soup-spoon of liquid oil.
3. Discharce Macaroni in the saucepan and cook it for 10 minutes on intense fire by keeping the saucepan open and stir it by the time of time. (For Italian type live macaroni 8 minutes will be sufficient.)
4. Then strain and wash with a glass of cold water.
5. After the addition of butter, margarine or sauce, serve it hot.

Click for a ridiculously big image you can read yourself

The package goes on to say “Plain Macaroni, Non-compose.” And if you were wondering, it has 75 grams of carbonhydrates.

My Patient Husband and I decided this is what happens if you have Babelfish translate your pasta instructions. You can kind of see it: 12 cups becomes 12 glass, a tablespoon becomes soup-spoon. This pasta is a product of Turkey, it says. And really, who am I to make fun of the translator? I myself speak only one language, and barely that.

And so, I leave you with one final piece of wisdom: “Produced continuously by using 100% durum wheat semolina from south and it’s quality control has done periodically our fully laboratuary.”

If that doesn’t make you feel better about your pasta, what will?

—

(Note: I guess a laboratuary is what happens when a laboratory and a mortuary meet and fall deeply in love.)

Over at my Patient Husband’s weblog, he’s got a review for all you Calvin and Hobbes fans:

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes by Nevin Martell

Enjoy!

Last year I spent a few weekends cutting and clearing vines that were choking my trees and cluttering my woods with debris. I was able to make a little headway, but not much.

Over the summer, every so often I’d go into the woods and pull up the fallen branches or uproot the little dead trees (really — some were only loosely standing there, and I could push them over) and I’d make a big pile.

Behind our house, just where the woods take over, the previous residents created a Graveyard of Sticks. It’s creepy back there, but I’ll go there long enough to dump dead trees or broken limbs, and then I dart back out. The main feature of the Graveyard Of Sticks is a tree, sixty feet tall and choked with vines, that looks as if it’s going to fall over. At some point, either we have to take it down, or else nature’s going to do it for us. I’d prefer that not be on top of one of our children.

Similarly, the previous owners left a half tree standing upside-down, braced against the still-living part of the tree. It’s creepy, like a fork stuck into the ground by its tines, and I can’t figure out how to get it down.

A few weeks ago, I cleared a lot of brush and dead wood from alongside the driveway,  making a pile. And I asked the landscaper (whose services we won back in May) if he could haul that stuff away for us. Instead he came to take a look, and I said, “That’s way too big a job to get all of it out of here.”

I showed him the Graveyard of Sticks, and he became animated: he’d  have a burn!

Huh? You want to set a fire on my property, in my woods?

Indeed, he said they love jobs like this “because they make terrific before and after pictures.”  They’ll make lots of little piles of dead sticks. They’ll plow through about ten feet of my overgrown woods, pulling up all the dead wood and clearing out all those thorny brushes and the vines. They’ll leave the healthy trees. They’ll haul it over to the Graveyard, which he says it the perfect place to spend a couple of days burning things. They’ll even take down the half tree.

He quoted a price, and I’m there. This dead wood has been a bugaboo in my head for a long time, and I knew I couldn’t do it alone.

But I admit, I’m a little jealous, because I’d love sometime to take a walk with God through my soul and hear God just as animated as the landscaper: “We’ll haul the garbage out of there, cut that stuff back in this section, mow it clear up to here, and for a few days we’ll burn everything right here at the center. You can’t even see the scenery now because of all this garbage. But next fall, when all those leaves come down, you’ll see — it’s going to be beautiful. It’ll be just beautiful.”

I’ve mentioned this book twice before on my blog, once because it impressed me with its starkness, and once because of the whole imperfections versus sins difference.

FTC ALERT! This book is being reviewed through the Catholic Blogger Book Review Program via The Catholic Company. They sent me this book for free not as a bribe, but in order to facilitate my reviewing of the book, which until the perfection of orbital mind-control lasers, would be impossible without a copy.

—

The book: How To Pray Well by Raoul Plus

The review: Anyone want to take a guess as to what the book is about? Anyone? Yes, you in the back. Yes, that’s right, it’s about how to pray well.

The book is divided into discussions of four different types of prayer: adoration, thanksgiving, penitence, and petition. Each of those types is then defined, discussed, and the history given. The chapters are well-researched, and each kind of prayer is explained in relation to the Christian life in terms of why it’s necessary and some common misconceptions about it.

The discussions are thorough and go from a high-level overview to a low-level analysis. This book is dense. I was unable to read more than a chapter at a time because everything requires a lot of digesting. There are bundles of insights on these pages, and although it’s a small book, it isn’t a fast read. Don’t bring it on an airplane.

The author backs up all his assertions with quotes from scripture and from saints and other religious authorities.

The author assumes a certain familiarity with prayer, scripture, and the teachings of the church. I’m uncertain if this was written primarily for seminarians or professed religious (it was written almost a hundred years ago) but it might well have been.

Overall, I’d recommend this book for those who are ready for an in-depth examination of prayer after having gotten down the basics, but who feel they need a better understanding of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.