Irony

The New York Times today has an article called "Making Your Second Home Green." I'm all for environmentally responsible building methods (and not opposed to vacations), but behold the irony in congratulating ourselves on using green techniques on our multiple homes!

Vestigial

I don't know anyone who keeps gloves in the glove compartment. I wonder if it was named for a time when people like Cary Grant and Nancy Drew used to wear gloves while driving all the time, and not just in the winter. If so, how long do we have with this antiquated name before it's updated to some self-aggrandizing techno-lingo?

Judgment Call

I've been swimming at the gym lately. It's the nicest one I've ever used, but any locker room is of course something of a horror-house for the germophobe. Right now I'm debating about whether I could catch anything unseemly from a machine that spins your swimsuit dry while you take a shower. There's no heat or disinfectant involved--it's basically just a centrifuge ("a centrifuge in which hundreds of other women's swimsuits have had stuff spun out of them" screams the germophobe." Shut up!) Thoughts from any scientists, medical professionals, or even just sane people?

My Heroine

I just took Dottie's quiz for the day: Which classic heroine are you? I am a cross between Elizabeth Bennett and Jane Eyre. It all makes sense--perpetually teetering between comedy and tragedy, sort of.

Elizabeth Bennet Often called Lizzy, Elizabeth is the heroine of Pride and Prejudice. The seceond eldest of five sisters, she is witty and intelligent, though her prejudice prevents her from recognizing her true love when he appears. However, Mr. Darcy, though he appears proud, wins her love and respect, but not before she believes she's lost him forever. Which Classic Heroine are You?

Valentine

Yesterday was like a situation comedy, really, it was so bad. Not in any major ways, but in a dozen minor ones. Sam and I began the holiday of love by having our first real fight, conveniently timed for just before both of our classes. My day then went better than his: my survey students had their best discussion yet, which was a big surprise because we were all grumpy about being there (the college had cancelled all classes until 11:30 due to snow, and ours begins at 11:45). But Sam's computer lab was blowing up or something. Then at 5:00 he got a call about a crisis involving the house he is closing on today, which needed to be solved immediately. And he was frustrated because the gift he had ordered for me didn't arrive, even though it was supposed to have been here by Monday. But he came up with a back-up plan, which was to buy a mug that I had once admired at Starbucks, except that then our Starbucks was sold out of them. In the meantime, I was feeling smug about the perfect gift that I had ordered for him (a personalized embosser for his books), until he opened it and it was so perfect that he already had one.

Cold

When a friend of mine from out of town visited church with me, he noted cheerfully that every person he met had introduced him- or herself as a recovering addict, an ex-convict, a resident of a homeless shelter, or some combination of the three. As I've written before, it's one of my favorite things about our church that everybody is welcome.

At the same time, it raises interesting issues, and ones that have never been part of my church life before. The other morning, it was so cold that my damp hair froze all crackly on my way out to the car. That afternoon, I had lunch with some folks from church, and part of our discussion surrounded what to do about a woman who had left the homeless shelter in town to seek drugs. She'd done it several times before, so she had been told she couldn't return. The shelters have to have strict regulations to protect the other recovering addicts who have sought refuge there--it's important that the places be drug-free for them.

So this woman had moved in with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, who allowed her in occasionally for sex or for some of the money she earned through prostitution. But on this particular bitterly cold day, he had locked her out.

What is a person to do? Maybe Jesus would say, go and find her and bring her into your own home, and if she goes out and gets high and wants to come back, then let her back in. Maybe he would say, if she comes back with some scary "friends" or creditors or clients, invite them in too.

I think the awkward solution that was hit upon was for a couple of people from church, including one guy who is the tallest real-life person I have ever seen (with a heart as large, to match), to go with Lori, who's a gifted counselor, and find her and take her back to the on-again, off-again boyfriend, and tell him that he has to let her in for now.

I still don't know what the right thing was to do. Or maybe I do, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Catch and Release (updated)

This movie was surprisingly good. I thought it would be light and sweet--a good movie for a Saturday afternoon. It was much deeper and richer than I expected. The premise of the film is that a young woman's fiance has died just before their wedding, and the story follows her journey as she and his best friends gently put together the pieces of what they knew about him.

The characterizations are subtle and complex--you haven't seen these people before in every other romantic comedy. And it offers a meditation on what we know about each other and why we choose to keep secrets large and small. The movie also hits what seemed to me to be a perfect emotional pitch--it's actually quite funny, but not without pain. The bittersweetness and the humor reside easily together in a poignancy rather than a discomfort. Well, I guess that's about all I can say without being even more annoyingly evasive--I want you to see it for yourselves and have the whole experience in the theater, rather than while reading this blog.

UPDATE: π writes that I'm bucking the trend with this review and sends me the link to Rotten Tomatoes to prove it. Reading their excerpts makes me realize: I liked it because it turned out not to be a romantic comedy at all . . . it's really a story about loss, gently rendered.

Life, Expectancies

I’ve discovered some surprises about myself as my life and Sam’s begin to intertwine. I trust Sam absolutely, so in some respects, it’s as easy as it possibly could be. But I’ve realized how much of the last eleven years or so of my life have been devoted to learning to make myself happy through independence, and how consciously I have to figure out how to enact that independence in this new context.

I have deeply intimate and rich and challenging relationships with friends (a shout-out to Jules and PJ here!), but none of them require me to give up my autonomy really. In fact, they function to cultivate that autonomy further, helping me to shape my preferences and ideas about things. Certainly, Sam does many of the same things. But then, obviously, occasional compromises need to be reached, on issues that for the most part aren’t important enough to warrant large-scale summits. The big things are what’s easy because they’re what have connected us in the first place (morality, life goals, a shared sense of how to treat others), and the small things aren’t a big enough deal for either of us to get worked up about (where to eat lunch, what movie to see).

It’s a bunch of mid-range decisions that have cropped up that have shown me how accustomed I am to running my own life, and to knowing that I can do whatever I want to make myself happy. Yielding some of that may sound like the kind of depressing anti-feminist experience dramatized in “Story of an Hour,” but it's not like that—it’s just a choice to make a different kind of decisions, ones that acknowledge that some part of the way I'm growing right now is in the context of another person and the matrix of the relationship we are creating.

I know it sounds like what I'm saying is, "I can't believe that I can't be totally self-centered anymore." But it's not quite that--or at least, not only that. I guess what I'm saying is that a big part of the way I make decisions has to do with a sense of profound resonance with my own instincts, discernment, and feelings. That's an especially challenging process to integrate someone else's views into, both more and less so because Sam makes decisions very similarly. I guess we deserve each other. ;)

Students on Walden

In one of my classes, my students are reading Thoreau’s Walden, which engendered some interesting discussion (interesting being a relative term and all, and my standards being what they are since I’m an academic). I’m always pleased when students can challenge a position taken by an author, and a couple of them impressed me with their responses. We were talking about the Transcendentalists’ idea that one should look to one’s own conscience for truth—that the individual is a higher authority than society. In most respects, I agree with Thoreau here myself: how else but by my own conscience can I give authentic assent to faith? But a couple of my students articulated the problem I’ve had with Thoreau that I don’t think I could have articulated at their age. They argued that the self must exist in context, that our connections with others (“society”) and with history help to make us who and what we are—and, most significant, that if we lose those things, we lose parts of ourselves.

The ideas the students were talking about are central to my dissertation, which I’m about to start revising more seriously (Godwilling . . . now there is a task that almost no one would consider interesting). But these issues also relate to personal situation that I’ve been thinking about lately, which I’m about to post on in my next blog.

NJ Smells Different

When Sam and I were returning from a visit to my parents' last weekend in NJ, I asked him if the countryside looked different from that of the Midwest. (Before you laugh, South Jersey really is a lot of farmlands) He said it looked very similar but smelled different. This confirmed my deeply held belief that you can smell the ocean about 100 miles inland, which I first noticed driving eastward through Maryland. I love it, and I would have described it as "the salt air." However, I read this morning that it's the odor of plankton decaying or something equally unpoetic.

Revelations

So, a pair of my jeans have gotten tight recently, to my horror and dismay. At first I told myself that I must have dried them at a higher heat than usual, but this excuse seems flimsy. It also does not comport with the bathroom scale, which reports my weight at a few pounds higher than usual. At first I hoped that the scale was not properly calibrated, but then I realized that both excuses, taken together and mercilessly scrutinized, indicated a pattern of denial.

Erin has noted that unemployment is the enemy of pants; Julie has noted that employment, too, is the enemy of pants. It is left to me to make the far less interesting observation that my diet of hastily consumed restaurant meals and prepared foods over the past couple of weeks is also the enemy of pants. An old chestnut, but a good one.

M&M

Did I do my work tonight? Well, some of it. But I also squeezed in some time for making my M&M representation of myself. Hey, it's a Saturday night--a girl has to have some fun.

It wouldn't save, so you have to go to the website if you really want to see me as an M&M.

Gift Inventory

I'm taking the second level Discipleship Training class at church--DT 200. It's been fun, partly because I so enjoyed DT 100, and it's the same group of people. You have to take these little classes in order, and we were the first DT 100 class offered, so we are all moving through together.

This past Monday, we took a Spiritual Gift Inventory . . . sort of like a personality quiz, developed to identify areas in which God may have given us special ability. Not like superpowers (though that would be nice) but those abilities and callings that the Bible suggests God gives to people for the edification of the church. The questions covered our own subjective perceptions as well as more objective measures (e.g., both "I greatly enjoy praying for others" and "I regularly spend more than 15 minutes each day praying for others").

I've taken these tests before, but I don't think I had taken one recently. The last time, I took it right after I had moved to a new state, and I think that state of transition skewed my answers a bit, so I was interested to see how this turned out. What's in my top ones was not nearly as interesting as what is at the bottom: service and mercy (among others).

I think this is pretty accurate. I sometimes get credit for being merciful and serving others, but it's really only people that I love. I like serving people, but I suspect it barely counts as service when it's your own dear ones. Doesn't it say somewhere in the Bible that "even the heathens do this"? Maybe one day, when God has done a lot of work in me, I'll have the true generosity of heart to love serving other people too.