For Something Completely Different: 2012 Week 3

My husband is about to lose his job.  It feels shitty to write that, but it’s doesn’t make me sick like I thought it would.  It’s doesn’t feel liberating either.  It feels shitty and stupid because it’s senseless.  The company he works for has the government contract for the work.  It’s a done deal.  They say there is money for projects that are not getting released to the office.  If they get released then my Mr. and his co-workers will keep their jobs . . . at least through February.  Right.  Or how about you just use that as the sideways reasoning to close your little Iowa office and get rid of those paychecks and benefits so the stock looks even more awesome. 

I hate for him to have to start over again.  He hasn’t had to really look for a job for ten years.  On the other hand, he drives 45 minutes each way, and that’s a lot of gas usage and high stress in bad weather.  I’d love to have him closer to home.  He’s a talented graphic artist with a lot of skills, so I think it can be OK.  I’m hoping so.

Our daughter turned 17 this week.  I’m thankful that she is growing up so well. I think she was born with an old soul, but I know we’re raising her well too.  She has maturity beyond her years.  A lot of adults don’t have the emotional maturity or grace that I’ve seen in my child.   She has her first job this year, and she knows that we’re facing some tough times.  She’s making her own car payments and knows that she may be called on to pay for other things down the road.  It scares her less than the idea we might get divorced, which we’re not by the way, but if we have a fight she gets plenty wiggy about it.  “Hey, we’re having an argument, not dividing our assets and looking for separate apartments.  Relax please.”  Divorce is a major concern for her.  She has a lot of anxiety and guilt over something that happened once, a topic for later thoughts.  With less spare time, more homework and an actual work schedule, anxiety attacks are much less prevalent, and I think she sleeps better.  

My sister has either lost her mind or is collapsing into some kind of midlife crisis that hinges the realization that her life is empty and meaningless.  Either way she’s taken a virtual lover in Australia, attends but refuses to participate in marriage counseling, and believes that my brother-in-law should move out of the bedroom if not the house.  

8:00 am, the day before Christmas Eve, my phone rings.  My husband and I are still in bed.  My parents, who are staying with us for the holiday, are barely awake yet.  My sister is on the phone.  She says, are you going to be home.  I say yes.  She says, I need to talk to you all, I’ll be there in an hour.  Thus begins the revelation of her end-of-marriage awakening, displacement of feelings onto her husband, denial of actual infidelity and usual “I’m not sorry for how I feel or what I’ve done” spiel.  I’m still sorting out all my thoughts on this matter.

Final lines for the entry: from Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Toons and Lunacy: 2012 Week 2

Cartoon Network is running old Warner Bros. cartoons again. I can’t believe how much I love and laugh out loud at Bugs Bunny, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and the rest.  Last night, Foghorn was babysitting the little egg-head kid with the big glasses who challenged and demolished every project and game with his science, slide-rule and calculations.  Like hide and seek.  Foghorn hides in the feed bin.  Egg-head uses his slide-rule, scribbles some equations, digs a hole and pops out Foghorn.  Foggie goes back to the feed bin and starts to open it then says, “No, I might still be in there.” 

I have nothing against cartoons these days.  Though some are completely stupid, quite a lot are funny and wonderful and very worth watching.  The quality of Looney Toons cannot be underestimated though.  We heard opera for crying out loud!   We learned to recognize a great deal of classical music from those cartoons, even if we couldn’t name it or the composer.  At first glance it seems that humor is based solely on misfired guns, TNT gags, falling off cliffs, frying pans to the face and other violence.  In fact a great deal of the true humor in Looney Toons is created through puns, spoonerisms, witty banter and the really clever uses of dialogue and song lyrics.

Sir Loin of Beef, Earl of Cloves, Baron of  Munchausen, Milk of Magnesia, 

Quarter of Ten . . . 

(Rabbit Hood, 1949)

Rabbit au gratin du jour under tubed leather. Drool Drool!  

 (Rabbit Fire, 1951)

Keep your eye on the ball- Eye!  Ball!  Eyeball!  That's a joke, son. 

 (The Foghorn Leghorn, 1948)

Promenade across the floor. Sashay right on out the door. Out the door and into the glade and everybody promenade. 

Step right up you're doing fine. I'll pull your beard you'll pull mine. Yank it again like you did before. Break it up with a tug of war. 

(Hillbilly Hare)

How many of us can quote dozens of lines from Looney Toons?  I’m willing to bet, most of us who grew up on them.

I never want to reach a point where I can’t laugh out loud at Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester the Cat.   

I just wish I had a better knowledge of all that music!

Unbelievable: 2012 Week 1

Some big things have happened over the last few months.  I agreed to chair the Membership Committee at church, the UUFA.  I haven’t actually been on a committee for several years, and I’ve never chaired one, but apparently I was recommended for it, and the people I’ve asked to join with me agreed because they think I’m a good choice and want to be a part of it with me.  I feel very flattered by that and grateful to have such wonderful friends in our UU community.  We have a big task ahead of us:  restructure and build our membership services to create a more welcoming and stimulating environment for our members.  I’m hoping to get more involved in adult religious education.

My parents stayed with us for eight days over Christmas.  We saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie, ate out a couple of times, spent Christmas Eve with my sister and brother and their families.  The big deal is that not once did we have any arguments or altercations with my father.  He was not too provocative or defensive, and we have learned how to not bite the hook!  My mother’s health was sketchy, mostly because her doctor is tweaking medicine again.  It is difficult to see her weak and unstable on her feet, plus it feels like she’s just wasting away.  It’s like hugging a little bird, she’s all bones.  I was feeling very stressed before they arrived.  They don’t sleep in the same bed, or the same room for that matter, and my mother can’t climb stairs very well, so she slept downstairs on the futon, and my father slept upstairs in the spare room.  I was starting to make myself feel stupid worrying about sleeping arrangements and my mom using a walker and the house being filled up with two more people’s stuff.  Then I decided that I can’t change my mother’s disease, but I can be with my mother.  I can’t change my father’s eccentricities, but I can be with my father.  Favorite line from my daddy this visit:  “He fled the country.  We heard he’s in Illinois.”

The most upsetting development is the marriage trouble of some close family members.  There is mistrust, falling out of love, no common goals, infidelity, perhaps some mental illness, certainly mid-life crisis.  More on these topics later.

We spent a long New Year’s weekend with my best friend in Hartley and her family and their friends, and it was terrific.  Then school started again, and it’s back to work this week.  At the UUFA we’ve kicked off another round of Small Group Ministry and started on Tuesday with a topic I wrote, “Nothing is Sacred.”  

As the Christian mystics state, 'God is Nothing' He is Utterly Other; He is the VOID.' Eckhart proclaims, 'Thou shalt love God as He is, a Non-God, a Non-Spirit, a Non-Person, a Non-Form.'  Tauler describes God as 'The divine darkness, the nameless, formless nothing.'  In Jewish mysticism we find frequent reference to the conception of God as Nothing.  It is when these mystics proceed to making affirmative statements about the nature of God that misevaluation occurs.  God cannot exist in the sense that we normally mean existence.  As with things, whatever we say God is, he is not. 

                                                                          Harry Weinberg

Heretics and Spirituality is meeting again, and we’ll be reading The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic for the next several weeks. 

The novel takes the form of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias, each compiled from the sources of one of the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). In his introduction to the work, Pavic wrote:

"No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary. Hence each reader will put together the book for himself, as in a game of dominoes or cards, and, as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it, for you [...] cannot get more out of the truth than what you put into it."

In personal reading I’m more than half way through the fourth Barker and Llewelyn book, The Hellfire Conspiracy, by Will Thomas. 

No resolutions yet this year.

Something So Beautiful It Hurts

Something So Beautiful It Hurts

Have you seen this thing so beautiful it hurts?

A white gravel road calls out ahead, threading up

and down the lazy hills.

Shaggy ponies graze, seem to swim,

spotted sable and cream, in the golden green

too-tall grasses.

Mid July, corn of dark green waves

in the breeze, a confusion of edges and leaves

and rows and rows.

Sunshine breaks open my heart with longing.

The plural exhalations of corn fill the air,

humid and heavy, breathy reminders

of my own.  Have you reckoned

your breath with that of the living corn,

the living earth, the hot breeze?

I inhale, I exhale.  I compound

the humidity and scent

and taste of the hazy July sky.

Crossroads call now, a white plus sign

upon the countryside.  Give over

to the ache and stop, just stop, here.

$14

A man came into the Fellowship tonight while the Mindfulness group was meditating.  He waited until we were done. 

He held a red ball cap.
His wife divorced him.
He has a baby boy named Marcus.
He has a rash on his leg and needs medicine.
He used to be a farmer.
He wore a brown jacket and blue jeans.
He was working recently setting up event tents.
He drives a red, small car.
He is trying to sell his tractor.
He needs to wash his clothes.
He asked for money.
He asked for $14.

We tried to refer him to other resources.  We suggested he come back tomorrow when our office staff are here and may be able to help.

He needs salve for his leg.
His tractor may bring $18,000.
His wife took $480,000 when she left.
His baby boy was born at the end of August.
He asked for money at other churches.
He says he'll go get his family when his tractor sells.
He said good Christian people ought to be able to help.
He asked for $14 to do his laundry.

I had money in my car but not with me inside.  I was uncomfortable and unsure what to do.  Someone else talked with him awhile more, and then he left without money.  I watched him drive away in his small, red car.  I feel ashamed of myself now.  I could have given him something.  I should not have felt uncomfortable or uncertain, but I did.  I could have given him $14.  What difference would it have made?

Contemplation on Eyebrows and Such

I had my eyebrows waxed recently by a young cosmetology student at the salon academy.  I'd never met her before that morning.  I was about to let her cut my hair, so I thought, what the heck, let's do the brows too.  What's the worst that could happen?

Her name is Haley, and she sported an expertly coiffed and sprayed halo of blond hair.  My usual gal was sick, and the second they'd arranged for me was also absent, hence Haley.  There's something to be said for showing up.  After describing how I wanted my hair cut and razored, Haley walked me back to the washing sinks and said we'd do my eyebrows before we went back for the hair cutting portion of the show.

I have dark, full eyebrows, and I like them, so it takes faith and trust to give your eyebrows to a cosmetology student you've never met.  I explained that I like them and just wanted them cleaned up and shaped.  I wish I had something hilarious to relate, but I don't.  Neither is there anything horrible about what happened.  It was pleasantly painful in the way that only eyebrow waxing can be.  I enjoy it.   It's a very present moment experience for me.  The wax is warm and sticky.  I concentrate on breathing smoothly in and out.  I concentrate on not flicking my eyeballs around under my lids and looking like I've entered full-on REM sleep.
All the while she's waxing I'm also thinking about my daddy.

My father is nearly 70 now and needed to have eyelid lift surgery to help him see better.  There was concern about the procedure because he has large, protruding eyes.  Shortening the lid too much would result in him not being able to close his eyelid fully.  The complications are serious.  He was scared about having it done but knew he really needed it. 

The photos of him afterward were terrible.  He was bloody, stitched, puffy, red, yellow and blue, eyes swollen nearly shut.  It took weeks to heal, but he did.  They did not take too much out of him, and he is able to blink completely.  However, the surgeon did not get them even, so his left eye is more open than his right.  He knows it and says he doesn't care.  It's a little hard to get used to seeing him.  I think it will take me awhile, and I feel bad for him, but I'd never say so.  His vision is better, and that's the most important thing.

I think how often I take for granted how much I have to trust total strangers and have faith that they'll do OK by me and by others.  It's a bit alarming and a lot amazing.

Books I've Read So Far This Year

Just thought it'd be fun to review the books I've read so far this year, maybe throw in a favorite quote from each.  In order, starting in January . . .

 "The human factor takes many different forms though . . . It's what drives someone to do something they would never have done in any other situation."
 Tony

"You are my creator, but I am your master."
the Monster

"I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall drive a stake through her body."
Van Helsing

"All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it."

"Moth shadows beat an ever-changing tattoo across the faces of Christ, Buddha, Amen-Ra."

"The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god)."

*****

“You're not one of us.”
"I don't think I'm one of them, either," said Brutha. "I'm one of mine." 

"Of course, just because we've heard a spine-chilling, blood-curdling scream of the sort to make your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's anything wrong."










Books I'm currently reading: