Best 101ing ever

The annotated version of this story runs as follows:

(She) I just realized my faith was kinda Gnostic. Wow. This changes things.
(He) Why do Christians worry so much about being heretical?
(Me) Because heresy leads to horrible consequences.
(He) I get that, but why are horrible consequences bad? Even liberal Christians seem to reject them for no good reason.

There's always a relevant xkcd.

 And by the time I finished responding, it was nearly sunrise the next day.

When you write something that breaks you

It's the third week of my first Lent, and I'm feeling it. Oh, am I feeling it. This is a raw season, and I am going to come out of it a very different person than when I went in. It's a scary feeling, at once sobering and intoxicating, feeling myself dissolve in the chrysalis of time and waiting to see what will emerge when the stone is rolled away in three Sundays.

I've lost a bit of weight. More than that, I've been having moments. One after the next. Several of them back-to-back. And they're starting to get scary.

Take the one that happened last night, when I wrote this:

Neil's a softie. I'm a Christian here, and I *do* have problems with what you do in church. Because by the time somebody has to tell you to "keep it in church," your theology's gone very, VERY bad.

There were two likes, and one comment which I replied to, and that was that. Except that it wasn't.

Second week of Lent

In my last post, one of my Lenten fasts was from driving to church. Today marks ten days since Ash Wednesday (eight not counting the Sundays, as is proper) - I'm 20% of the way through the season. And I have not honored that fast once.

I tried, today. I even got off to a decent start, waking up at the right time to get out the door... and then promptly rolling over to go back to sleep. Dragged myself out, got into the shower, and was out the door... about fifteen minutes too late, so I hopped in the car to go...

...but as I was leaving, I was asked, very abruptly, if I could run across the street and pick up ten (10) rolls of paper towels and cranberry juice. Why didn't they get them last night, when they were at the grocery store? Bugger if I know, but it's never the day to argue this stuff.

So I ran the hell across the street, picked up the ten (10) rolls of paper towels, and eight-pack and two loose ones, and the bottle of cranberry juice, and made haste to church, letting them know that the change was in the bag.

By the time I arrived, I was fifteen minutes late. Just late enough to completely miss out on the video that was being discussed, and to sit in silence as my fellow parishioners discussed grace, the past catching up with us... prison. And I dwelled on the gracelessness of that night in Miami, when I came on vacation and left on probation.

For all that I contributed, I could've - should've - just walked it like I was planning to.

Lost my wallet

First thought to cross my mind when I remember being fully awake: fuck. What time was I meeting with P. again? And so I showered, shaved, toweled off, dressed up, hopped in the car, pulled on my coat, and made for the center of town as fast as I possibly could.

I remember looking at my watch and realizing it was 12:30-12:40ish. I also remember looking at the sign on the library door, CLOSED - and feeling like a fool, for forgetting that it wasn't even open until 1:00. And so, since I had the time, I decided to take a walk. I wandered to one end of town, and put this year's last overseas letter to the Love in the mail; I stopped at a few places en route to the other side of town, wondering if they had any college-ruled paper to refill my supplies, much depleted from the start of the school year by averaging 10+ pages of correspondence each week.

Then I realized that I couldn't find my wallet. I furiously backtracked, as fast as I could - no luck. Scoured the car, turning both of the seats up - not there. Got down on all fours and ducked my head to look under the cars in the parking lot - not there either.

So I drove back home and furiously searched my coats, my shirts, my pants. Not there. And on that note, I made back for the center of town as fast as I possibly could, for the appointment with P.

And the appointment with J. after that.

And then I drove back home again, and resumed the search. Cleaned the floor - nothing. Rearranged the stacks of books - nothing. I called Mom to angst about it, repeatedly, and to sort out my plans for the morrow, when I would get all of the cards replaced.

And then, at 7:30ish, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. It was AAA, calling to let me know that somebody had reported my missing wallet, and they gave me the number to call her back. And so I did.

It turned out she'd found it at 12:30ish, within minutes of it being lost.

And all for an act of kindness

So I wake up in the morning, scrub the crusts from my eyes, shower, shave, clean myself up... and it's time to make a quick $100, by driving B. down to Springfield.

B. has a gift with lottery tickets. I have never seen anybody win quite so consistently with them, and so often in such large amounts for what was put in. This time was the magic number: $1000 on a single ticket. And that meant no going down to the gas station: we were going to Springfield to cash it with the state registry.

In my name, of course. "Child support owed for nonexistent children" is a nasty problem to have, especially when it defies repeated efforts to correct it.

You know what else is a nasty problem to have? Discovering that something's wrong with your taxes, and having them hold the $1000 lottery ticket in your name while and until you get it sorted out. I still haven't, to be honest, because I spent the rest of yesterday moping, and the rest of today editing for the Student.

That was about the time I discovered that B. had not only won a thousand-dollar scratch ticket, but had also committed almost all of it before he actually had cash in hand. I was flabbergasted, and he was pissed. I am now short $820 to keep him in the good graces of his (presumably pistolwhipping) friends.

Oh, and to ice this cake: I also have to report that ticket as earned income and on taxes. That quick, easy $100 is going to cost me money.

One bad week

The seven days spanning from September 29 to Sunday, October 6 were something remarkable: a series of crises and nightmares, one for almost every day. I've blogged most of it (including some of it retroactively, I no longer know exactly what), but I'm going to try putting it into perspective and connecting all the dots to wrap this up and continue writing the things I was intending to.

• Friday, 9/28-Saturday, 9/29: Went out to dinner with A. (which merits a retroactive post tonight, if only for the sake of filling out "one good meal," because it was a good meal.) Played part of a game of LOTR Risk, and watched Looper (which I'm still trying to write a review of.) The first sign of the coming week of fail was after midnight, when I got home and realized that I'd left my umbrella in the car.
• Saturday, 9/29: Alarm clock was set to go off at 8:00, 8:15, and a few other times to wake me up. There was a further alarm set to remind me to get out the door for my car inspection at 10:30. When did I actually wake up? 11:15. Oops.I rushed my ass down to Holyoke to drop the car off, and managed to reschedule for Tuesday - at which point I realized that because of my scheduling I'd be driving two days after my inspection sticker had expired. That meant super-cautious driving, because the cops would be out in force, and if you're pulled over for a bad inspection sticker you're going to be pulled over forever. And so I drove home, super-cautiously, noticing a vibration in the steering column that I hadn't felt before.
  
  On the way back, I stopped and checked at all the places I'd been with A. the night before. None of them had my umbrella. Fuck. 
• Sunday, 9/30: Woke up in time to miss church, and as planned drove up to Sunderland to meet Mom en route from Vermont. Fuck "vibration." By that point, I was driving my own private earthquake. We got out of the car and walked a bit (before it started pissing down rain), and I rumbled my car back to its parking lot to get my first good meal of the day - my first mediocre meal at the little Korean restaurant. (And, after that, some delicious caramel apples.)
• Monday, 10/1: I honestly have no recollection of this day at all.
• Tuesday, 10/2: Accounted for here.
• Wednesday, 10/3: A thankless day, a dreamless night. I ate some breakfast at the Route 9 Diner, which improved things a bit, but then got stuck in front of a computer monitor until dawn, at which point I trekked back to my house, took a Concerta, showered, shaved, lay down, got up, and had...
• Thursday, 10/4: Which was spent walking in the rain, without the umbrella that I'd lost on Saturday. (Isn't it fascinating how these things keep recursively connecting?)
• Friday, 10/5: I drag my ass out of bed and sprint my ass up the street. Late to appointments. Fuck.
• Saturday, 10/6: Accounted for here. Fuck.
• The last Fuck of the week was Sunday, when I slept through church again.

It's not pleasant to write, but it is cathartic at least; now that I've got this off my chest, I can get back to active writing. So yeah.

I had to say no

Saturday came. And with Saturday, the completion of the car work. So the time came to deal with the last logistical headache: "How do I get there from here?"

So I asked H. She was at work, but she'd swing by as soon as she was able. That gave me time to pick up a new umbrella, and wait in the rain for a bit, and such...

"As soon as she was able" turned out to be later than I thought. The bus route wasn't running the right way, and so she had to take a windy one home that ran around the campus once. Okay, no problem. I had time to wait. So I waited, and walked back to the library and such...

...and then got the call that she was in her car and would be on her way, and where did I want to get picked up. "Haigis," I said, and she was okay with that, and F. would be coming with her, and maybe ten minutes later, lo! she was there.

She took the back route to Holyoke. Why I honestly don't remember at this point, although there was a reason for it. F. was gushing about Pokémon number-crunching, and to be honest I wasn't paying anybody any mind. And at 6:00, we made it down there.

And that's when I discovered that the lights were out.

"Maybe they parked it in front?" F. said, and so we carefully backed up and drove over to the cars parked in front of the dealership, gingerly, to see if one of them had the license plate that was mine. Nope. Not a blessed one. My car was parked securely behind the chain-link fence.

At which point, F. asked me directly: "Did you even call to see how late they were open?"

Walking in the rain

I rolled over, on Thursday... oh, who the hell am I kidding. I was on the Internet the entire night, because I got dropped off here, ostensibly to pick up the bus schedules, but really to get away from my life because my sleep had been so unremittingly awful that I didn't want to miss the last appointment of the week that was contingent on waking up early enough to be there.

Namely, the appointment with my therapist.

I got back home at 8:00, as the sun was up, and showered, and shaved, and took another Concerta to keep me moving until I passed out that night. I changed my pants, changed my socks, changed my shirts, and got ready to trek back to the last place I was certain the bus would stop en route to Northampton.

And that's when I discovered that all of my ID was missing.

Car work

On Saturday, I slept through my scheduled mirror repair in Holyoke.

On Tuesday, I drove my car back down there, arriving at the dealership almost exactly 59 seconds late. They didn't care. I handed them the keys and asked them to take care of the side-view mirror (driver's side), and one of the tail lights whose bulb had burned out, and to winterize it a bit. I also asked them to check the engine mounting, because the car was starting to rattle a bit at high speeds, and the steering column would tangibly twitch a bit.

They said it'd be a few hours, and so I sat down, made myself a cup of coffee, and started writing the newest letter to my beloved.

A few hours later, they came back with the bad news.

The reason it was twitching wasn't the engine mounting (as Bennie had suggested.) It was because both struts were worn, much more than they ought to have been, and the rear tire rims had slightly warped (possibly as a result?) This, in turn, had caused uneven wear on the tires, which would've been enough to automatically fail the inspection even if the superficial stuff had been bad.

The total bill comes out to a hair less than $3,000. FML.

Bad by dawn II

Apparently there's a timer with sleeping pills. When you take one, a one-hour countdown starts ticking, during which time you're supposed to actively try to fall asleep. And if you don't try, after that countdown ends a much shorter one starts before you start dreaming while you're awake. Before the hallucinations come.

Wednesday morning, B. didn't realize that and took his sleeping pills. And once again, at 2:50 in the morning, I stepped out of the room to discover that not only were the lights on, but the main room was smoky.

Latin Mass with Granny

Sunday was spent in Pennsylvania with my 96-year-old grandmother. She's feeling her age now, and relying on a walker to get around; going to church is a challenge she doesn't feel up to.

As such, for the first time in my life with Grandma, we didn't spend Sunday morning going to church. We spent Sunday morning watching church on TV. It was the first time I've ever done that before - and, also, the first time that I've ever seen a Catholic service using Latin before.

In which I am a glorified chauffeur

Before I headed home to sleep last night, I settled down in this very computer bay to have some nice quiet time alone. Then, at ten minutes to ten, the phone call came.

It was from B.: "I need you to come over and take me by Jimmie's place. It's an emergency."

I told him the truth: "I'm parked away from the car. I'll be there in half an hour." And dragging my body out of the seat, I started the long trudge back to the center of town.

Bad by dawn

My sleep became erratic this week, after a month of stability. And I knew I had my one scheduled early appointment of the week the next morning. So last night, at 10:30, I sped home.

I wound down and shut down by midnight for an 8:00 wakeup, and... sorta... slept. That's been a problem for a few nights, these experiences of not being sure whether you're starting to fall asleep or wake up at ungodly hours of the morning. ("Ungodly hours" is a really nice concept I've introduced Bennie to, that nobody cares what hours you normally keep, there's a point beyond which you simply do not give anybody a phone call unless the situation is absolutely critical.)

One of those ungodly hours was at 3:00 this morning, or thereabouts, when I woke up and decided to do what I sometimes am able to do: deal with annoying external stimuli. Namely the lights on and the TV yapping in the other room.

That was the least of my problems: the room was half-full of faint white smoke that made the air translucent. And both B. and M. were lying back, mouths open, snoring as if nothing was wrong. On the stove was the root problem: a pan sitting on the burner turned to high, with the faint sizzle of what looked like a fist-sized lump of coal smoldering into the air.

I turned it off, pulled it off the stove, and woke Bennie to see if he was all right. (He was. Apparently I'm not the only one having sleep issues in the house, though; he was tired enough to try to cook himself some hamburger to eat before he conked out and left it to burn.) In the morning, he thanked me for basically singlehandedly saving the house.

And so, with a serious crisis averted, I went back to my room, lay down in the dark, and appreciated that it's really hard to fall asleep when your heart is pounding like a racehorse's and the adrenaline is flowing free.

I was fifteen minutes late to the appointment this morning.

Things I learned in CPR/first aid certification

#1. 100 chest compressions/minute is an amazing aerobic workout. Don't forget to breathe.
#2. There's actually a specific depth of compression: 1.5" for infants, 2" for everyone else.
#3. Chest compressions for infants involve three fingers and are incredibly painful to do.
#4. You are supposed to pound a choking victim's back (between the shoulder blades) in addition to Heimlich.
#5. AED training is now part of basic first aid.
#6. As a first responder, I'm exempt from legal consequences as long as I get patient consent and don't bill them afterwards.
#7. The classic set of heart attack symptoms (in particular, chest pains) are sexist: cardiac arrest expresses differently for women.
#8. If there are bystanders, one useful thing they can do is clear the way for the EMTs.
#9. It's possible to have pepper allergies. (And it sucks to have them and be Romanian.)
#10. Swelling in the legs is a sign of hyperthermia.

It feels really, really good to be Red Cross certified again. Even if it does involve a $25 fee for getting caught in the wrong parking lot.

In which I am Cassandra

This was me, on August 9, 2012, on Slacktivist:

That's one of the big glaring things I'm not getting about Tony Jones's challenge: what exactly is it accomplishing? The problem with God-talk isn't that we don't do it, it's that it's easily and often dismissed as not Christian enough. Defining the parameters the way he does, it feels like his Storify stream is gonna wind up VALIDATING any future claims that "liberals are weak Christians and suck at God-talk." Because as much as I wish I was, I'm no mystic, neither apophatic or cataphatic. Without that kind of experience, I need to refer to Jesus and Scripture to say much that's substantive. And even if I did have mystical experience, without reference to the Word, in print or incarnate, it still wouldn't make the cut as being Christian enough.

(For the record, I'm gonna answer the challenge anyways.)

Today, Googling, I discovered that not even a week later it's already starting to happen. And to add insult to injury, the first comment was eaten by the Internet and didn't post.

I fucking hate being right.

Phone troubles

My phone died while I was on vacation last week. By Sunday, the touchpad had seized up; I could no longer dial or access any of its messages, and by Tuesday we'd ordered a new one. (It was an enormous hassle.)

It arrived about this time last Thursday, at which point I promptly went to the store to activate it - and discovered that it couldn't be done, because the pricing plan had been changed during the ordering process, and they couldn't activate the phone until the new pricing plan took effect. Which it would, on August 9, after I'd been conveniently slapped with a bunch of fees for not activating within a 14-day period and suchlike.

On my way back from the store, I discovered that I could call somebody after all, with a lot of work - and so I tried calling my mom to talk this through. I got an answering machine, and left a message - and then, realizing that I couldn't hang up, pulled the battery out.

It was only then that I remembered that I couldn't actually turn the phone on either. My phone was well and truly dead - and Mom had no way to reach me.

The Lower Room daily confessional

I have no idea what his name was. He had the kind of hair that comes from having no comb to brush with, the kind of beard that comes from no razor to shave with. I'm not sure if he had a second change of clothes with him.

He knocked on the door, and asked in a lowered voice if he could sleep back here for the night. He'd be okay with the floor. I basically told him I'd think about it.

Regulation, presence, and Thomas Merton

A few weeks ago, I discovered Thomas Merton. I picked up Contemplation in a World of Action from the library; I actually bought No Man is an Island a few days ago, because it was ridiculously cheap. It's like legible outsider art, reading him discussing problems that I will never have the leisure to have.

A few weeks ago, I also decided to commit to regular writing, which (reading back) I realized that I'd never actually defined. This is not the post for that definition (defined here), but it's as good a time as any to say why I wanted to write on schedule: most of the "regular writing" that I wanted to do was disciplinary.

I've never tried to write about specific things at specific times. I've done so - when I sit down I can, for instance, write sonnets without much prior thought - but I've never tried to do so. And that's a problem. Because part of the reason I read my favorite blogs is because they are regular writers: able to write something new consistently. (Charles Dickens was able to write serially. Achieving that kind of consistency is a long-term goal of mine.)

Looking back on it, though, I had a problem: I was writing at cross purposes.

A single tongue of flame

Ever since I got back to Connecticut, I've been rereading To Dance With God, a book I have no memory of my family ever having been without. I remember reading it before, and not understanding a word of what it was saying. Now, 20 years later, aware of the flow of Catholic mass and the liturgical calendar, it means more to me.

Yesterday Mom asked me about how to celebrate Pentecost. "Fire," I answered. By lighting a fire. Windsocks, pinwheels, kites for the wind; but when the sun went down, by lighting a fire.

As was then, as is now

A friend talked to me on Facebook today. Came to me looking for help; and, when I answered, seemed more interested in ignoring my advice than in listening to it. Demanding that I say something, as I pounded out my thoughts.