It

Yikes! Kate has tagged me to tell five things about myself that not many people know. This task is difficult because I do not as a rule have many secrets, I have led a rather conventional life, and in the course of keeping this blog, I have leveraged every even potentially interesting fact about myself.

But, anyway, here goes:

1. My family is Italian.

2. I am afraid of going bald.

3. I have never seen A Midsummer Night's Dream and haven't finished reading Pride and Prejudice . . . yet.

4. I have never dated anyone whose name was more than one syllable.

5. When I was little, I had not an imaginary friend, but--get this--an imaginary husband. His name was Beanpicker, and he worked at Burger King.

I tag PJ, the artist formerly known as the MC, and Sam, though my hopes for compliance are somewhat low. Surprise me, guys!

Crock-Pot Christmas

Well, that last post was not exactly true. I did do one thing of note in the weeks leading up to Christmas, which was to host my first annual drop-in Christmas dinner and white elephant gift exchange. I had been wanting to host such a thing for several years now, and I finally got around to it. I cooked a big turkey dinner and set it all out in Crock-Pots that I had borrowed from various guests in the days before. It worked surprisingly well (it wasn't my idea--the woman who organized the potlucks at my old church had come up with it). So we had turkey in gravy, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing, and treats brought by various guests, including a reputedly world famous chocolate silk pie. We wreathed pine garland and crystal around the chandelier in the dining room for sparkle and put lights and more garland around the mantle, plus more pine up the stair railing. It was festive and fun, and I scored a beverage warmer from the white elephant.

Why I Didn't Get My Christmas Cards Out This Year

Classes ended on a Friday, and that left me two good weeks to send out my Christmas cards. It's a tradition that I really enjoy--I still handwrite them (at least, I have until now), and I love receiving them: I keep in touch with a few people almost exclusively via Christmas card, and I look forward to the annual exchange of news, whether good or bad, exciting or mundane. I had big plans for my two weeks--I was going to spend the evenings decorating the house, baking cookies, shopping and wrapping gifts, and sitting in front of the fire drinking hot chocolate and writing cards.

But what is it that they say about the best-laid plans? Sam invited me out for dinner, and that was the end of my doing anything except finding out how much I liked him.

So, sorry everybody. I'll be in touch shortly. ;)

Questions and Answers

The Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet had her first book published without her consent--her brother-in-law took it to England, shopped around for a printer, and presented her with the bound volume. Embarrassed by the errata introduced into the manuscript and by what she considered its unfinished state, she wrote a poem titled "The Author to Her Book" in which she describes the poem as a baby that was taken too soon from lying by her side in her childbirth bed. On the final exam for my recent class, I asked the students to identify the poem's first line: "Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain."

Here is what I got: "Lincoln writes this to the people who subject themelves to holding slaves. He wants to insist that the blacks and whites are similar because of their offspring. He writes this as a response to his First Inaugural Address."

I think I laughed out loud. Would Lincoln really address Southern slaveowners as "ill-formed offspring of [his] feeble brain?" And yet that wasn't even the best wrong answer. For your reading enjoyment, I give you:

1. Who said, "Travel is a fool's paradise," and what did s/he mean? (The correct answer is Emerson, who believed that our independent character is more important than our surroundings.)

"Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography asserted travel is a fool's paradise. The line means that it is paradise to see the world, but many dangers lie ahead if one was to travel considering them a fool."

2. Compare and contrast the depiction of slavery in Work X and Work Y.

"Someone once asserted that truth is a continuation. Truth is consistent, in that it never changes. Slavery is a truth in that it happened."

3. Discuss the author's point of view on the protagonist in Work Z.

"He is not a bad man nor a very good one. For his position he was quite good, but in the scheme of things it is not quite so good. Man needs to be just and good, yet they can only be as good and just as circumstances allow."

Desire and Surrender

When I think about how God has moved in my life, especially how he has led me forward at different junctures, I see this impenetrable knot, where His inspiration of my desires intertwines with His call to surrender my will absolutely to His. This combination feels almost impossibly paradoxical in that it requires an appreciation for the majesty of mystery and a tolerance for the anxiety of uncertainty, two states of mind indicative of a receptive disposition toward experience, and yet that very disposition feels most impossible when we have to make decisions about things that are important to us. It's easy to relax and tolerate uncertainty in trivial matters; in German, the idiomatic expression for "it doesn't matter" translates literally to "it's all equal to me." But if desire is anything, it is the emergent salience of our implicit preferences, the awareness of the inequality of outcomes to ourselves. Sometimes, in this respect, becoming aware of desire feels almost cruel, for we believe that we have been moving along just fine, adequately surrendered, and now we are presented with the possibility of the sin of disobedience in following desire's miscue, or the sting of disappointment in choosing something that feels immediately less desirable. We might even wish that we had no desire and no free will; that, we think, would make surrender and obedience so much easier. And yet our experience of this conundrum foregrounds those motives that are always driving us, even beyond the reach of our consciousness, and opens them up in us at a moment when they are most alive and softest to his touch. And I think that this is God's gift to us when we do, nonetheless, surrender: not the annihilation of desire, but its perfection.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel

A number of people in my church believe that God may have called us all here for some reason, for some work that He wants us to accomplish. Perhaps His people everywhere have that feeling, or should--that they're called to the place where they live. But it seems even more evident here because our town offers so little in the way of enticement to people who come from other places. I don't mean that as a slight, but it's true--it's not the kind of place that draws outsiders. It has neither the cultural opportunities and great shopping of a big city, nor the charming downtown and trendy restaurants of a hip small town. As one of my colleagues recently put it in his dry and perceptive way, "Basically every restaurant downtown has the stench of death about it."

Maybe that's why this morning, as we sang "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," the song felt even more meaningful to me than ever before:

O come, o come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice, rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, o Israel!

I've always loved the heartbreaking solemnity of the song. It seems to illuminate Christ's birth not as the merry culmination of excited anticipation (like waiting for Santa), but rather as a rescue from an abiding and immeasurable grief, an otherwise-endless mourning.

And yet I don't feel exiled here, strangely enough--I feel at home. I feel at home in the way you feel when you are needed and appreciated for all those things that are most important to you and that you can give most easily. You feel like you're some little chime that has been passed from bell-choir to bell-choir sounding wrong or redundant, and now you've found the one that has been looking for your note. I don't know why this is, because there isn't anything that I'm doing at church or even at school that somebody else couldn't do--in fact, I've got another woman all trained on the media stuff now, so I'm totally replaceable--but there's something about the emotional connection. I'm talking about my connection to the church as an organization, an organism, rather than simply my friendships (which have bound me blessedly everywhere I've lived)--it makes a difference. Whatever function I have in the church, I feel as if it's my job to wait and work for the ransom of this place. And in that sense, it feels incomparably right to be in a place that in many ways is all wrong.

No News Is Definitely Bad News

Does anyone else wonder if Julie will ever post again? I would link, but what good will it do? ;)

In Other Food News

Well, apparently it's a good thing that I didn't find green onions for the vegetable dip on Tuesday, as they've been identified as the source of an E. coli outbreak that infected a hundred patrons of a certain very cheap Mexican fast-food chain. The New York Times article says that the onions appear to have been contaminated at the supplier, before reaching the restaurants. Which would mean that the chain in question's food-handling procedures are not necessarily suspect.

Except that the article also states, "In what the company president . . . called 'an abundance of caution,' [the chain] removed green onions from its 5,800 outlets across the United States." Is that really an abundance of caution?

Dinner

Tonight Ed and Jodi had all the college kids who have been coming to our church over for dinner, along with another professor who has been attending, and me. I stopped eating about 3 hours ago and I'm still almost uncomfortably full--it's really delightful.

If I were telling this story to Julie, she would ask, rapt, with a quiet that would belie the casual question itself: "What did you have?"

So, here goes: we had a fruit cup, vegetables and dip (my little contribution), pot roast sliced very thin and as tender as prime rib, chicken breasts wrapped in proscuitto or some kind of ham and cooked in white sauce just until they were about to melt, green beans with bacon and brown sugar, very rich and creamy mashed potatoes (they apparently have sour cream and cream cheese in them, plus lots of butter I'm guessing), and three kinds of pie (Julie would not let me get away with not saying which three kinds): banana fudge, peanut butter, and apple cream. All unusual and delectable choices. Plus the table was beautiful--there were candles everywhere, on the table, in the centerpiece, on the mantel and the fireplace, all around the room, and garlands on the backs of the chairs--all those things that feel like home and Christmas.

At one point, I walked by Jodi as she was getting some dishes out, and I felt so much about her the way I feel about my own mom or sister that I almost reached out and smacked her on the rear end as I went by. Luckily, I remembered just in time that this might take her--not to mention all the college students--by surprise.

But the thing that reminded me of my mom was the extravagance of it--the sheer lavish unnecessariness of the many kinds of food and lovely decorative details. Even when I was making the little vegetable tray, I felt irritated because the store didn't have grape tomatoes, which my mother always includes on the tray when we make this dip. I did get the obligatory carrots, broccoli, and celery, plus a cucumber, three kinds of peppers, and two kinds of olives, but my mom would also have had cauliflower (which I forgot while I was in the store) and green onions (out of season I think).

Since I'm not in the environments that my mom creates as much anymore, I think my standards are slipping. I cook one entree and one dessert. I cut back a little at a time, use a little less butter and salt, and then I forget how wonderful it is until I go home--or visit somebody else's.

Headliner

Atop the college newspaper's recent article on fraternity housing: "Council Identifies Geek Life Issues."

A Cake-Taker

In class yesterday, a student came up to me and announced, "The printer in the library was broken, so I couldn't print out my essay for today." His tone indicated that he was handing this problem over to me to figure out what to do. We looked at each other for a minute, the missing assignment somewhere in the air between us like a hot potato.

Finally, after some negotiation, he agreed to try one of the other thousand printers available and bring me a copy of the essay. When he showed up with it, he handed it to me and said on his way out, "Oh, I didn't know how to cite the text, so I just wrote 'citation' where the citations would go, okay?"

I might have actually burst out laughing. If it were a math test, he wouldn't just write "number" where the answer went, would he?

It's like another student I had recently who copied a lot of information from an Internet source, apparently because he didn't know how to cite it properly. I suggested that he write his own paragraph and incorporate the information rather than copying it directly. "But," he said, "when I read that source, I thought it was the best way of saying what I wanted to say."

Look, dude, this may be difficult to believe, but I don't ask you to write papers so that I can find out the most brilliant statements ever made about 19th-century literature. Believe it or not, I ask you to write essays to to see evidence of your work.

I love my students, but their laziness is breathtakingly adaptive and resourceful sometimes. At least the sheer absurdity of it keeps me supplied with hilarity.

Weather Report

It's raining so hard that it sounds like we're all in a car-wash on full force, and all you can see out the windows are sheets of water gushing over the panes, and gusts of rain billowing by, as dense as snow.

I think this is the end of the 65 degree days we've been enjoying for the last two weeks. Winter wants us to know he is coming back.