Considering a life of crime

Yes, today I have been considering a life of crime. I take complete responsibility for even entertaining such a notion. Clearly, I'm a step up from the average criminal, though: I am willing to take responsibility for my actions rather than blaming someone else for causing me to be a bad person, which then caused me to consider being a criminal.

Here's what happened. I drove Annie to school this morning. As we simultaneously open the car doors, a rank odor permeated the garage. "Ewww. Mom. What is that?" My weenie little heart sinks. The likewise weenie little brain recollects that I had gone grocery shopping yesterday. Liz's weenie brain plus grocery purchases in the past 24 hours sometimes equals a rank odor, signifying groceries left to fester in the trunk.

Now, was this completely my weenie brain's fault? Well, that depends on your perspective. Bringing in groceries is a family affair. All hands on deck. I call to alert the family that I am on my way and expect to be met at the garage with willing hearts and strong shoulders.

Stop laughing. It actually happens fairly often.

Yesterday was no different than other grocery days. I called. Carl answered. Jonathan came and helped. I tend to leave return trips to the car to my helpers while I unpack the treasures. I tell my family that this is because I know where everything goes. The truth is that this subterfuge allows me time to hide anything really good from the voracious young man who eats us out of house and home.

Thus occupied with hiding the candy corn, I didn't notice that Jonathan didn't bring in the bag that had $50 worth of meat in it, leaving it to overnight in the 50 degree car producing the morning rankness. Now, wouldn't it be easy for me to blame Jonathan for this? He did, after all, leave the meat in the car. As much as I'd like to foist responsibility onto his broad shoulders so that his dad will be ticked at him instead of me for wasting that much money, it really wasn't his fault.

In my infinite wisdom, I'd stuck them inside the refrigerator bag in the trunk. Wanted to protect that meat as I was going to make a money-saving Walgreens stop. But I didn't close the refrigerator bag, and it looked empty. Nor did I tell Jonathan to check the bag, as I don't usually use it so he would have no reason to check it.

Hence the stinky morning encounter. After I dropped Annie off, I retrieved the expensive smelly bag and stuck it in the fridge. In a flight of fancy, I emailed my feminist moms list, pleading with them to reveal a hitherto unknown method for saving meat that has gone bad. No such luck.

But before I tossed the smelly bag, I entertained my criminal thought. I noticed that I still had the grocery store receipt. And the weenie brain was suddenly ablaze with a money-saving notion: I could take the meat back and claim it was bad, not mentioning the fact that the meat had spent the night at 50+ degrees.

I confess that I considered this criminal act for at least 15 seconds. In my defense, it was a lot of meat. Two huge pork tenderloins and a roast beast. No matter that the pork tenderloins were BOGO (bet you didn't know that I speak fluent frugal housewife) so I'd only paid $30 for $50 worth of meat.

More importantly, my occasional forgetfulness is legend in this house. I am known to search for my glasses and find them on my head. Or Annie's face. Which is in front of my own face. It was to save face that I considered crime: I hate adding to my own legend.

After due consideration (ok, it might have been 30 seconds), I firmly carried the stinky meat out to the garbage can and tossed it. Aren't you proud of me? Not only did I reject a life of crime; I'm sure that by tomorrow morning I will have made at least one city varmint a very happy--and full--creature.

Liz

near verbatim brain sloshing at a Sunday afternoon organ recital

Is there significance in the following detail noted during the aforementioned recital, held at a local church? Jesus looms over us, and the altar, barefoot. OK, it is possible that he wears sandals, though clearly not Berkis. Either way, we can see his toes. And from my pew, it is very clear that Jesus' 2nd toes are longer than his big toes.

Is this a universally recognized physical trait on His part of which I was previously unaware? Is it one indigenous to the LCMS? The particular LCMS church in which I heard said organ recital? Is it a Da Vinci Code signal of some kind, uniting all long 2nd toed people to some kind of ancient bloodline of Christ?

And why must Jesus so often look so pale and wan? There is not word one mentioned in the New Testament to indicate ill health on his part. Is this a Victorian left-over, indicating that the frail of body are somehow closer to heaven? I prefer my deities healthy and robust, thank you very much.

And what's with the curtain behind the altar? Is this a dorsal curtain like the one we have at Grace? This version makes me distinctly uncomfortable. There's plenty of space between the curtain and the back of the altar area (sorry, I'm sure there is a proper name for this but I don't know it.) The Wizard of Oz comes to mind. I fear some smart-mouthed pipsqueak is going to dart from behind the curtain to announce that the altar before us is all smoke and mirrors.

This reminds me of a recent Thursday morning discussion of whether or not the virgin birth is essential to one's belief in Jesus as divine. Must Jesus be all human and all divine? Though I can understand these questions as theologically fundamental, I can also drift into hearing them as just so much how many angels fit (let alone dance) on the tip of a pin.

The word "construct" comes to mind, probably due to the interesting Sunday school class this morning, full of discussion of Freud, Jung, symbolism, money/religion/faith and media. The leader was extremely facile, the topic intriguing. Yet after floating a bit in the wordy bubble of that 35 minutes, I was left with the following thought: this was perhaps the first time I'd heard the word "turd" meaningfully uttered in a classroom that wasn't full of diapered toddlers.

Our organist is playing Langlais now. The first great organist I knew studied with Langlais. She was an artist. An temperamental artiste. The choir surrounded her in the organ loft each Sunday. And we had to sit very, very quietly. No movement. Breathing was optional during the prelude. You did NOT want to be the person who distracted Great Organist.

I think this was the era during which I became addicted to all and sundry forms of hard candy during concerts or quiet, lengthy services. As long as I have hard candy in my mouth, I will not disgrace myself by coughing excessively while listening to the panoply of musical offerings we attend on a regular basis.

Though I do not fear this organist's temperament, still I very quietly suck on Lifesavers while he moves through his program and my mind finally shuts up. Finally, all was blissful silence, save organist and organ working together through the glorious Bach St. Anne Fugue. As is often my wont, I have moved from blasphemy to worship, all in the space of an hour and my cranium.

Liz

It hurts, damn it!

Pain and I are not friends. I neither court nor seek it. For example, I am not a runner, though I used to play at being one. But running never felt good. That "runner's high" so bandied about by others? Never knew it, never met it, never even caught a glimpse of it. After 5 years of running 4 to 5 days a week, the best I could say of the experience was "I'm so glad it's over."

Even my discomfort tolerance is low. I was the kid who whined incessantly on our cross country ski weekends: Are we done yet? How much farther? I've got blisters on my feet. I need a drink. And that whole old husbands tale about women having amnesia regarding the pain of childbirth? Ha, I remember pretty clearly how hard both of my labors were! I point all this out lest someone accuse me of being a masochist because, these past few days, I seem incapable of not injuring myself.

Incident #1. The One Where I Cut My Finger With The Electric Hedge Trimmers.

If you drive by our house, you can see exactly where I stopped cutting my bushes and started cutting my finger. I was two thirds of the way through the job, just starting on the last and biggest of the bushes in front of our house. Careful was my middle name throughout this process, as I didn't want to cut the extension cord yet again and so have to practice my splicing technique.

In fact, I was just congratulating myself on having successfully avoided this operation when I absentmindedly reached down to the base of the trimmer. While it was on. It became apparent within moments that I would not be able to finish trimming the bush, as I was too busy swearing while decorating the front porch with avant-garde red splotchies. 6 stitches and a few days later, my right index finger is back in business.

Incident #2. The One Where I Apparently Ripped A Toenail Off.

Not much to tell about this because I don't know what happened. Yesterday, I noticed more of those avant-garde red splotchies on my kitchen tile. Upon further investigation, I determined that I was in pain and had only 9 toenails left. No further clues how or where or why this occured.

Incident #3. The One Where I Fell While Roller Skiing.

Falling happens. It really is inevitable. You are, say, 5'7" from the ground. At some point you are going to meet the ground in rather quick and involuntary fashion, traversing that 5'7" in short order. Some of us are destined to traverse said (or even greater) distances on a regular basis. Rocks happen. Cracks happen. The Grand Canyon of Oak Park happens. And you fall.

Some of us who exercise on roller skis, traipsing down alleys and city streets find that there is no soft way to traverse this inevitable vertical distance. Me, for instance.Try as I might, there is no good way to fall down that does not involve road rash, gravel in your skin, pain, and more of that avant-garde red splotchy stuff.

This morning, while skiing in my alley, I traveled that very 5'7" vertical distance. And, yes, acquired all of the aforementioned accoutrements of such travel.

Today, Jan and Tehra respectfully requested unless I DO enjoy pain, I should spend the rest of my day applying neosporin, taking a nap and avoiding the use of power tools until further notice.

I'm off to the couch. :-)

Liz

A few things

Thing One. Today, SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal of the Army's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay soldiers. That sucks, though perhaps a different phrase would be a more appropriate condemnation. More disturbing, though, is that the government filed briefs in support of the policy.

That would be the Government as in the Obama Administration. As in my President who promised me he'd drop this ridiculous policy. Why is Obama dragging his feet on this? Why wasn't this a no-brainer rubber-stamp kind of action to satisfy the liberal masses?

I'm not expecting Obama to do anything about gay civil unions right now. Why should he? The states are, one by one, taking care of this for him at the moment. But, in a United States where gays can marry legally, the notion that they must adhere to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy is ludicrous. Come on, Obama.

Thing Two: this op-ed piece. Someone who knows a heck of a lot more about higher public education than I ever will thinks that the path to improving same includes actions like high pressure tactics to curb truancy, and advertising like crazy to encourage public college enrollment.

I read this piece through several times. And I cannot grasp the logic in the argument that spending beaucoup bucks to encourage college enrollment is going to improve the quality of higher education. Having more people attend college won't make the education they receive there any better.

And encouraging truants to mend their errant ways is a fine idea. But, again, having more children attend and graduate from high school will not in any way improve the quality of higher education they could receive in college. Could it be that the author is confusing the notion that the winner of the advertising wars is usually the best product available?

Perhaps we should encourage public post-secondary institutions to focus on improving the education students receive in the institutions, rather than simply trying to persuade people to attend. Maybe we should send the author back for a remedial logic course, too.

Last thing. Stanley Fish's blog has an interesting discussion today of Obama's allegedly changing use of personal pronouns. I haven't paid enough attention to render an opinion on whether he's right or not. I do know that the dichotomy between Obama's avoidance of "I" and Hillary Clinton's consistent use of same during the campaign was persuasive rhetoric on its face.

I'll have to think more about what kind of pronoun use I expect from my President. :-)

Liz

worship and attention

A friend sent me this speech, highlighting the following passage:

"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

Go read it; it's short. I read it. I liked it. A bunch. In some passages of big blaring prose, Wallace gave us a sliver of what unattended life is (hell on earth) and what the attempt to give attention to life can be (somewhere between better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and heaven.)

He attempts to divorce the discussion from religion or morals or dogma, though for the life of me I can't figure out why. I admit to complete ignorance of his writing which, upon remediation, will probably fix that. But, like most of life, its strands cannot so neatly be separated out or excluded by such labels.

My buddhist sensibilities (or go with desert monastic thought, if it suits you) heard Wallace's words as a logical follow up to "Regard all dharmas as dreams"; all of life and thought is fleeting, a bubble in the wind. All is meant to be seen completely, touched gently, and released, so we are ready to attend to the next moment and the next.

Of course, all these words of attending to now and thinking beyond myself led me to, um, lose myself in my head, examining and thinking instead of being right here right now. When my brain starts to think that it's thinking, reveling in both my words and others, overheating is inevitable. I move from rummaging in my brain for words to ransacking books. I knew that there were complimentary pieces, words that I'd read and tried to store up, that will match up with Wallace's words like parts of a jigsaw puzzle.

I started remembering Scott Russell Sanders and his sense of rootedness in place as part of a spirit-filled life. Reread a bit of Kathleen Norris' meditation on daily chores as potential joyful worship in "The Quotidian Mysteries."

I couldn't quite find the passage I was seeking in one of Pema Chodron's books on buddhism and compassion. Somehow, I ended up in a Barbara Brown Taylor book, reading "(b)e kind, wrote Philo of Alexandria," for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

And so, an hour later, I found myself at the kitchen table, the table hidden under books and my head buried in words. Don't get me wrong. Books are good. Words are good. Thinking is good. For me, though, they are a sure path to the very unconscious living of which Wallace speaks. Lost in my words, I start to think my thoughts are important, something to worship. But they're not.

When I bushwhack my way out of my head, my thoughts, what I think of others' thoughts, I'm left with this: Every moment I can choose to pay attention, and to what I will pay attention. Attention is akin to worship. Where my treasure is, there is my heart also. And to what do I pay attention and treasure this evening? I am embarrassed to say and would rather hide in my words and books.

Maybe tomorrow I will make different choices.

Liz

Goodbye Girlfriends!

It's been a busy few weeks, so it takes a traumatic event to make me post. And this morning was full of trauma.

OK. Yes. I know. It's not cancer. Nobody lost a job. (Well, except Kathy and Judy.) But geez. Kathy and Judy have been holding down the fort at WGN 720 on your AM dial from 9a to noon for 20 years. I've been listening to them for most of that time--as soon as Carl is off the air, of course. :-)

The Girlfriends will be sorely missed. They surrounded me with adult conversation when I was home with two little munchkins. They made me laugh loud and long on many, many occasions. They made me cry a few times, too. What am I supposed to do at the end of next summer, when I send my girl off to college? There will be no "Letting Go" show for all of us parents to cry with on our rides home.

Being a long-time fan was a great education for me. Helped me understand why people approach us at concerts asking how our children are or if Carl's minding his diet after his heart attack. I didn't realize how connected I could feel to people I do not really know--nor how much I would miss them when they are no longer on the air.

Kathy and Judy's liberal political bent was, of course, nice to hear on an otherwise moderate to conservative station. But what I enjoyed most was the feeling that I had a few friends over every morning to talk over today's news and general life stuff. Goodbye Girlfriends.

And goodbye WGN radio. Putting Gary Meier on in the afternoons was bad. But canceling Kathy and Judy removes them from my pre-sets. I'll still hang with the Cubs and Pat and Ron. But if I want talk, I'll look elsewhere.

We all know where to go when we want music, yes? :-)

Liz

Frenchified musings

I'm always pleased and satisfied to read an explanation of my own behavior writ large in a headline. Apparently I'm fat and tired because I'm an American. Yet another study has made the astounding discovery that the French spend more time eating and sleeping than us, yet we are the wider for our short-shrifting of these two horizontal pleasure sites.

I've been pondering the differences between the French and myself, trying to account for my unseemly behavior. If I merely spoke French, perhaps that would help. I'd speak more slowly. Well, truly I would speak rarely, as my French is terrible and my accent is worse. And if I spoke less, maybe I would sleep more. If I slept more, perhaps my rested self would eat more slowly, thus taking in less food in more time.

But if I spoke French, then I'd have to BE French. Or at least pretend to be. And French women wear very insensible shoes, upon which they totter. I'm not good at tottering. Or teetering. Neither of which are similar to Twittering, which I also do not do. Perhaps I need to wear those insensible French shoes to the dinner table, as they would also encourage me to sit for a long period of time--seeing as how I can't stand up in them.

The French eye roll? That I can do. The shrug? I'm there. And, really, the sleep part would be awfully easy to take on. Yes, I'd do it, pull on my big girl panties and take those 9 hours of sleep as painful medicine. But when would I tackle my big life accomplishments, like the NYTimes Thursday puzzle or the Trib's Friday sudoku, or blog about important politic issues of our times, like studies that waste thousands of dollars telling us that which we already know? Which is more pleasurable, sleep or these things?

The hardest part would be the slow eating. For years and years, I've made family dinner time a priority, as a good rule-following mother should. Slapped those home-cooked meals down on the table at 5:30, gathered the family together for quality food, quality time, and quality conversations. Doesn't that sound conducive to slow eating? Harumph. Not so much.

Why? The boys argue with regularity about any possible topic, as fathers and young men are apt to do. The teenage girl reacts with predictable dramatic flair to the annoying male things that her father and brother are apt to do.

Further, the whole family is so comfortable in their knowledge of my love that they feel free to critique the previously mentioned quality food that I prepare. Well, I am not interested in their critiques. Not one bit. I make the food; you eat the food; you are grateful for the food or you cook it yourself.

None of these behaviors (including my own) seem to lend themselves to quiet family bonding moments. No one is hanging around the dinner table for hours at a time. Rather, I find that I react to these behaviors by eating as much food as I can as quickly as I can. This definitely doesn't fit into the French plan of eat little for a long time. I love my family but I do not want to sit at the table with them for a long time at this stage of our family life together. So shoot me.

Rather than resort to violence (against my family or self-inflicted), I've encouraged a whole new line of behaviors, including reading at the table, grazing, and studiously avoiding eye contact while eating, the better to bypass those pesky social interactions between family members. I find myself feeling more French every meal, as arguments, furious silence or ear plugging are replaced by blissful long moments of shared quiet over good reading material.

Pass the croissants, s'il te plait. :-)

Liz