Polyhedral Monk

and one last link for this afternoon, I'm heading out to office depot and probably try to snoop around the evidence van parked at the top of my block--anyone? Any clue? Anyway, Mike just sent this to me. A monk at St. John's Abbey in Minnesota has decided to build every polyhedral he can think of out of colored paper. Over on CT2. That's my kind of monk.

Teachers should not act this way

Hildebrand Road has more to say here about teachers trying to dance to Soulja Boy. I know a lot of my writing has been derivative lately, based on other blog entries I've been reading, but I am terribly busy with new job (which is mystifying to say the least on occasion) so bear with me. She writes about an article in NEA Today that has teachers performing the Soulja Boy Dance in public. I wasn't sure what this was, so I went on seeqpod...and the moment it started, I knew what song this was. I had seen this dance before.

I went to a festival last fall at a central Illinois junior college. They were launching the Big Read, during which everyone was invited to read Joy Luck Club at the same time and meet in reading discussion groups, etc. And since I teach mah jongg, they invited me to demonstrate and teach Chinese mah jongg (which is easier to play and harder to score than National MJ). So there was this big kick off for Joy Luck Club. All these central Illinois folk, I'm probably related to them through marriage if we look hard enough.

But it was also the fall festival, which was a sort of non-sports-themed homecoming kind of thing. And there was a talent show. Dumb stuff you'd expect--people line dancing, other people line dancing, a sad attempt at swing dance that devolved into line dancing. And then three students got up and this song came on. They danced, did a good job. The sound system was too dirty to really hear the lyrics (super-soak that ho). A few of the instructors got up and joined in. It was embarrassing to watch at that moment, these three young black men trying to teach the dorky insecure 40-something white teachers how to dance. And now that I know what the song was, now that it connects, it's even more so. I wonder how the folks from the English department would feel if they knew what they'd participated in. Or maybe nobody cares about that kind of stuff anymore. Maybe media isn't important. Lament moral decay but don't take a stand.

Best Meeting Ever

Last night was parish council. It wasn't the best parish council meeting ever. Parish Council itself is the best set of meetings I have ever attended. The folks I spend time with there once a month, seven of us plus my pastor and Sr. Mary, are such a nice group of people. But last night, we started talking about the next parish council. Because starting in January '09, there will be a new set of 7 people sitting around that table. And that started to make me miss it already. Like in Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury when summer was officially over the moment that the stores put school supplies in the store windows. Yeah, there's still time left, but the end is in sight. We will still see our building sold this spring, one way or another (school building, not church), and we will spend the summer and fall working together on new projects, but it feels like we're wrapping up. We were here when our pastor arrived, sort of a transition between pastors. It was an important time to serve, probably second only to the council that served right before us, who saw us threatened with closing and helped work to keep us open back in the fall of '04.

And it's not like I go away at the end of this--I'm in RCIA and I clean the church and whatnot. I'm actually rather deeply entrenched. But I will miss this meeting. Probably the only one I can say that honestly about.

Folks Out of Context

So Wednesday, I went to coffee with Ann and Janet as is my habit. And I got to meet Lisa of Clearview. Funny--we live in the same city and we met via my non-St. Louis blog. And she's an architect and knew people in common with Ann (whose husband is an architect). Biggest small town again. We each know folks at my daughter's school and it's like meeting a fictional character and having coffee with them. Couldn't have been nicer. Unless it were warmer. But the moment itself was great. Too bad I can't get up to Canada and meet some of my other readers. Or down to Melbourne.

Speaking of daugher's school, everything is starting to get intense with enrollment. Busy few days ahead of us. I need to get a move on.

My Favorite Bishop

Wilton Gregory is my favorite bishop.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops just finished their current edition of Faithful Citizenship. This, from Whispers in the Loggia:

------------------

In his remarks to the Social Ministry Gathering, Gregory encouraged Catholics to carry several messages to Capitol Hill:
• “The lives of unborn children need protection”;
• “Poor children need justice”;
• “Families need affordable health care”;
• “Immigrants need to be treated as brothers and sisters, not enemies”;
• “The hungry of the world need food”;
• “Those living and dying with HIV/AIDS need compassionate care”;
• “The people of the Holy Land need a just peace”;
• “The unending war in Iraq requires a responsible transition.”

“In supporting the basic right to life, we cannot allow mothers and children to be forced into poverty, malnutrition and hunger because the resources are not made available,” Gregory said.

Gregory conceded that some people have been surprised and even angered by the bishops’ position on immigration – “including,” he said, “even some Catholics.” He lamented what he called a “coarse and polarizing” debate on immigration policy.

-------------------

I know Belleville misses him. What a great example to other bishops. What a shame he seems to be such a rare jewel. So fair and gentle. Not there to draw a line in the sand. But not so openminded his brains fall out, either.

From the same entry at WITL, he quotes John Carr, who sounds so familiar but I cannot place him. He assisted the drafting of the Faithful Citizenship document on behalf of the USCCB. And was quoted as saying,

"We don’t need Catholic Pat Robertsons or Jesse Jacksons,” Carr said. “It’s not about religious leaders telling people how to vote.”

I think there's a couple other bishops who'd better sit up and listen.

February Drags On, Housewife With It

Watched the Shipping News with Kevin Spacey the other night. It is a beautiful amazing depressing heartwarming film. All at the same time. A lot of depressing but quite a bit of the others, too. One of the themes that continues through it is Kevin Spacey's voice as the narrator summing up bits of things that have happened thus far as headlines. This is my headline. I'm not complaining about this lovely, real winter we've been having. I'm just noting that I'm done. The kids are done. The girl scouts in my house this week are done. Even the dog is done.

At church on Sunday, we had the first scrutiny, which was an overwhelming success from the candidates' and catechumens' points of view. It was lovely to sit in the basement catechism room with them and listen to them hash out the experience. I feel like I've started to end my RCIA novitiate. I see more now that we're coming to a climax than I did at the beginning of the school year when these folks joined us.

Children's Liturgy of the Word, too. Sr. Mary and I talked that over just a bit. Next school year, I'm taking over from a catechesis point of view. Help the other catechists with how to plan, what to plan, how not to do. Now that I've done it a year, I can see it better. I can do an example in front of others and know exactly what I'm doing and what should be done. But I'm not going to do the scheduling and emails and whatnot anymore. Sort of a content expert. I guess.

So i'm working, as this month drags on, on the overscheduling. I almost understand my job now. My father. I have a hunch he's really good at his job. He's just not so great at communicating what one might do in a similar, smaller capacity, with no background knowledge or vocabulary. But it's starting to settle in. I can feel my brain grow. Kind of like the first time I turned a heel on a sock I was knitting. But Ann was a much better teacher. Still, though, I'd be completely lost with him at this point. I can't believe I signed on to do this. Of course, I knew more than the people hiring me. Just enough to be dangerous....

My parents might be on the house tour this spring. And I will be overscheduled again.

But it will be warm then. Flip flops and yoga pants and t-shirts. Shetland wool keeps me warm but I'm tired of itching.

Here's to all you jugglers out there. I hope you're doing it better than I am.

Lo, There I Am

So I've joined a new CSA (community supported agriculture--but you can read all about that in this article too). And then an email went out to all subscribers about a post-dispatch article. So I called the reporter. And lo, yesterday's post, there I am, talking about food safety. Which I'm glad is what she pulled out of my rambling ten minutes, frankly, because I could have been really random.

Article here: Eating Locally Grows New Roots

I'll Rip Off Your Leg And Beat You With It

I think that's how the threat goes. Or maybe it was arm instead of leg. Anyway, thanks to White Trash Mom, I got a link to this story. Which I guess goes to show that every axiom has a kernel of truth. Or something.

Ex-homecoming queen rips her sister's prosthetic leg off and beats her with it. But get this: in an agrument over alcoholism. Outside her "Route 30 trailer". And then she threatened to burn down a neighbor's house, threw raw meat at him, and threateened to kick his pregnant daughter.

Holy crap. Now, I have relatives who live in double-wides. And I have relatives who are alcoholics. And I have relatives, well, nobody has a prosthetic leg, but there is an aunt with a glass eye and an uncle with a pirate patch...still though. One my aunts I could describe as "frosted"--frosted hair, frosted lipstick, frosted jeans. I'm not too many degrees removed from this (those degrees would be "bachelor's" and my parents' "masters").

But even my frosted aunt with too many cats or my uncle with a pirate patch or my cousin with a son named "Mychal" would never dream of throwing raw meat at people and beating them with their own legs.

I'm going to laugh all day about this one.

Look Mom, it's Your Aunt Cousin

This morning before mass began, Maeve said in her loudest stage whisper, "Mom, I see your Aunt Cousin."

None of my relatives go to church with me, and I asked her what she meant. "The girl, in the green sweater, your Aunt Cousin."

She pointed towards the choir. There was my friend Ann, whose last name to a three year old could sound like cousin, especially if you already think her first name is Aunt.

Aunt Cousin: wanna go to coffee Wednesday?

I Wish That Boundary Would Melt Away

Last week, just a stone's throw away, a man walked into the Kirkwood City Hall and deliberately shot 6 people, killing 5. Actually, one of them was a police officer he shot in a parking lot before going in (and took his gun). Kirkwood, for my non-St. Louisans, is a western suburb with a strongly imposed "small town feel." At least that's my urban view of it. Webster Groves has always struck me that way, too. We are a small town community, by God, if you like it or not! Different from real small towns. But still, a relatively safe place to live, expensive housing, good schools, you know, all the reasons to live in the suburbs if you can afford to. None of my urban bias is meant to imply that anyone deserved this. Sometimes it's hard to read tone in print. I'm just saying that when my mom walked in my house Thursday night and said, "somebody shot at the mayor in Kirkwood in a meeting," before all the horrible details and body counts were known, all I could do was roll my eyes.

Because it reminded me of all the other awful suburban things that have happened here and the not-so-subtle NIMBY attitudes that crop up in interviews and call-in talk radio shows (KMOX/CBS and KWMU/NPR, both). I remember about, oh, 10 years ago? There was a girl found decapitated near Lindenwood University, and I remember watching the news...this woman, not her mother, not somebody who found her, just somebody who wanted to be on the news, say that "this sort of thing, you don't think about it happening out here. Maybe in the city..."

Now, I realize that was said in shock, grief, and frustrated anger. And perhaps she didn't mean St. Louis City, maybe just big city living in general. But I still don't see any of my neighbors running out to decaptitate young girls in the park. You know? It may be the most dangerous city in America (don't get me started on that study...) but come on. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Sure, your car is probably in more danger in south city than in other locations. But freakish random spooky crime does not have a strong footing anywhere.

So I was bracing for the "this doesn't happen here, maybe in the city..." comments. I came home from dropping off Bevin and sat in the living room to watch the live coverage. And maybe it was because the body count kept going up, or because the one reporter also lived in Kirkwood and so he kept getting all choked up, or maybe because two victims were police officers, but I never heard any of that. The only time "The City" was mentioned was in reference to metal detectors. We have them in City Hall; all those small-towny-suburbs do not. That was mentioned. But maybe so many suburban high school shootings, maybe September 11, maybe, who knows? Maybe people are coming to realize that the suburbs do not offer the kind of fantasy island protection they thought they did.

It takes all kinds. I am firmly rooted where I live and I know lots of suburban folks who are firmly rooted in good communities (including my brother down in Cypress, TX). But I think you have to reflect on why you're leaving, if you're leaving the city, or why you're not looking there, if you're looking for a house. There are lots of things to consider. But if safety is your main concern, perhaps think about a tightly knit southside block, the houses 4 feet apart, everybody knows everybody and all the cars are familiar and when something bad happens, people come out of their houses in the middle of the night with cell phones, baseball bats, hockey sticks, and service revolvers...

In the end, what happened in Kirkwood was a horrible denouement to a long-standing conflict. I am within three degrees of separation from the shooter and two from one of the council members who died (weird: St. Louis is a big metropolitan area, and yet it's secretly all a small town). The giant flag in the center of Tower Grove Park was at half-mast. Because although we have a city border and a county boundary separating us, we all live downstream from each other here in St. Louis. Makes me wish those little separations weren't seen as such huge differences.

A little politics, just a little

From Stephen's blog (to the right there), I tracked back to Talking Points Memo, and from there to the original article on MSNBC.

I live in an insignificant state! Thanks Hillary!

The whole article is infuriating and reminds me of everything I hated about the Clinton White House the first time 'round.

I don't like to talk politics--issues, yes, at least some issues, but not candidates because no candidate fully encompasses what I want. Pretty much across the board--congress, president, governer, state senate (well, actually, our representative Jeanette Mott Oxford, kinda does), mayor, alderman--I don't like any of them well enough for a yard sign or a volunteer position for their campaign. I just don't believe in any of them well enough. They don't match me as much as I would like them to.

But the self-destructive panic in the Clinton campaign is turning into a car wreck on the highway. I can't look away, damn it.

And in other news, well, Stephen's religion blog (Emerging from Babel) says it better than I can. Torture is not Christian.

Ok, enough world/national politics for now. Maybe for a long time, being as insignificant as I am.

Rock Out on Valentine's Day

I gathered them all up.

Some live in my dining room windowsill--those are the out of focus ones as my camera gazed longingly at the blue sky through the bare branches of my mulberry tree.

Some sit on a little marble tile shelf in my bathroom. My bathroom has been redone, about 6 years ago, but we kept the original curved wall that hid the old stack pipe. So this little shelf is straight, but the wall it meets has a gentle swoop. I love my house for things like this. They could have put a soffit in, an ugly rectangular box to hide the pipe. But instead, a subtle curve.

Some I stacked up in the old bathroom windowsill--it's still the bathroom windowsill, but now it is one of three in that room. This window was in the original bathroom.

And a few, ones that migrate in the house from dining room table to mantel to coffee table, I gathered up in a bowl I love. Nothing to sing about, a simple glazed bowl with pine cones and needles depicted in the basin, picked up at a resale shop when I needed more bowls to serve meals in, probably right after Sophia was old enough to sit at the table. But the other day Mike informed me he'd found a large crack in the side. Not a chip--we use chipped bowls all the time--but a crack, a place to leak, to grow bacteria. Not for food any longer. It would be easy enough to replace the bowl--it's a common pattern, I'm sure I could find it again. But I'm not quite ready to toss this one. Maybe I'll use it in a mosaic. Maybe it can spare change on my dresser. Maybe it can hold heart rocks for a photograph.

Since this afternoon, I found a couple more. Two in the car--I thought I'd brought all of them in--one in the kitchen windowsill behind the Irish coffee glass from the Buena Vista in San Francisco. Like a little altar to things I love, to look at while I wash the dishes. One sitting on the slice of redbud trunk I keep by the sink in the bathroom--it's heart-shaped, too. But I didn't get their pictures this time. Next time around. They're not going anywhere.

You "Should" Go Here

Thanks to Mary for sending me this "link" to the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. It totally made my morning.

Otherwise, it's Valentine's Day and heart rocks will be posted before dinnertime. My plan is a clean house and an emergency chocolate cake ala Farmgirl. Irish Dance practice, atrium for Maeve, but best of all, it will be 48 degrees today, sunny and melting. Ah.

Easy Like Sunday Morning

Currently in my life, there is nothing easy about Sunday Morning. Used to be, I'd get up about 9:10, get ready for mass, and go. Maybe have a donut afterwards, maybe not. And go home.

Nowadays, it starts earlier than my weekdays. Atrium starts at 8, so I need to be there around 7:35 or so. I know, I know, big whiner I am. But I don't just GO to Atrium. I teach. I have to be engaged. Happy about children, even the two I have a hard time standing. We leave there at 9:45 and rush home, pick up Mike (when Maeve isn't sick, which has been pretty likely as of late), rush to church. Walk in as Fr. John and the servers and ministers are getting ready to process. Grab a bulletin, sink into a pew. And then, most likely, Mike or I have Children's Liturgy of the Word to facilitate. Something else I'm rather good at but get all nervous about and worry and then miss the homily and that's half the reason I come to St. Pius in the first place.

I'm technically in RCIA, although I've pretty much become a guest speaker, alas. I want to be a part of this, but there seem to be so many things tugging at me Sunday and all these days. All I want to do after mass, after Sophia and Maeve interact with other urchins over a donut in the basement, is go home and take a nap. And that's what I've been doing lately. Sleeping. This past Sunday, I slept for 3 hours. And not because I'd been up late Saturday night drinking and carousing--far from it. Just worn out.

So I get this daily reflection on the Rule of Benedict written by Jerome Leo, OSB. He's a brother, I believe in the northeast somewhere. Many days, I skip it. Too busy. Why do I do this? Why do I fall into this? I don't get it, because everytime I open his email, it's like he's writing to me.

Tomorrow's reading (RB is divided up so that you read bits of it each day, hitting the whole thing three times a year) is on the Night Office on Sundays. Not many oblates, frankly, and not many monks these days, keep a true night office at 3 in the morning, everybody waking up and going to chapel and praying yet again. But the point of this reading for today is that the little details are always different on Sunday. Jerome writes:

Albert Schweitzer once said that the proof that Christianity had
failed in Europe was war. I would say that the only proof needed to
say that our Christian theology of the Sabbath has failed is to take
a look at what's left of Sunday. And please don't blame the pagans
for this one: we are at the root of the problem. Most likely at fault
was our legalistic idea of "youse goes to Church and youse done with it."

Hence, don't go running for some Christian source to read up on the
Sabbath. Check out your library or bookstore for some good Jewish
books on how to keep the seasons, holidays and Sabbath. You're going
to have a refreshing surprise. You're going to find deep holiness and
you're going to find it largely "home-made" by the believers
themselves, in their own homes. If you whine, as Christians can, how
tough it is to run uphill against a secular world's Sunday, bear in mind that
Jews are doing all this themselves on SATURDAY, with absolutely no
cooperation from government or business or society at all.

This Sunday observance, by the way, is not imposing monasticism on your
children: it's making them Christian. Not an optional job!

Thanks, Jerome. Needed the reminder.

Things from the past few days

No big tale to tell. Just some things.

*Mike came home from Little Rock. He's not traveling again for a while so maybe I can stop being crazy for a while. It is really hard with him away from many points of view. Except housework. Somehow, that is easier. I shouldn't say that. He cleaned the house Saturday while I ran errands. Then I vacuumed and it's rather decent.

*I need to keep exercising. Got on the elliptical tonight for the first time since Mike went to Disney World, I realized. And lo, it cleared my head

*Had friends over for Mike's birthday on Saturday evening. Good easy time, very relaxed. Got to play show and tell about various bizarre youtube videos we've all been watching in our snowed-in time the past few weeks.

*Friday morning, I woke up to NPR reporting that Amy Winehouse wasn't coming to the Grammys because she couldn't get a visa due to, I think, drug possession charges. I had never heard of Amy Winehouse and couldn't care less. Except in the background, NPR played her catchy depressing music. So by Friday night, I was having Maeve sing into Bevin's phone: "They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no." I've realized that if Mike is gone too many days, I start channeling my brother Ian and make my kids do stupid stuff so I can laugh. And laugh I did. Since then it's become bigger than rehab. "They tried to make me clean the attic..." and "They tried to make me eat some tofu..." being our current favorites.

*Atrium is hard to wake up for. But it's worth it for the most part. Sophia continues to surprise and delight Therese and me at the things she will come up with. I'm hoping to convince Therese of my Grand Atrium plan--that I will run the 3-6 room at Pius and she can convert hers into a 6-9 and 9-12, removing the youngest children's things entirely. This way, Sophia will be able to receive reconciliation, first communion, AND confirmation via Atrium. Otherwise...I wonder if College Church would be willing to participate in a voluntary deseg program with her or something.

*Work is fun. I can see tangible differences since arriving. I like everyone I work with. And I get to do a little classroom work as well, not teaching, but sort of an aide, and that is enjoyable too. Tomorrow I get the computer.

*This coming week is really busy: work, vet's appointment with Jack, Brownies tomorrow, and my grandmother has mystifyingly set up an appointment to talk to me about real estate. This I gotta hear. So I may be MIA. Or maybe not, if I have enough coffee.

*Oh--and if you live near South Grand, the new gelato place is good. They have coffee in the mornings, too. I'm there on Wednesdays around 8:30. We went there after Mike's dinner on Saturday for gelato. The lemon...oskamina.

Curse the Darkness

Last night, I lit a candle in the living room. I do this because winter, cooped up, Dara the stinky dog, you know, it just is better if a candle is burning. Sophia asked me why and I answered (a bit sassy), "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness."

"Mom," she said like a teenager, "the lights are on. Maybe in the days before electricity it would be better to light a candle."

She has me all figured out. I am a great fool.

Breaking My Heart!

Maeve is learning about hearts this month. Her number graphs have heart stickers now instead of snowflake stickers. Valentine cards and bracelets and so on.

On Wednesdays, we stay for lunch at Sophia's school and then come home a little later. Today is also piano, and I was due to pay Sanja, so I went to the bank on the way home. And then, one more step on this journey, I pay Sanja an amount that is not divisible by the $20 bills that come out of the ATM, therefore, I ran through the Starbucks drive-thru to round out the day.

We usually wind up, at least before the job started, going to Starbucks on a Wednesday afternoon, me, Bevin, and Maeve. It's Bevin's day off and we usually run errands while Sophia stays for music. Our schedules are currently in flux regarding all that, but Maeve is used to that trip. And, when Starbucks has lemon pound cake with icing, I split a piece with Maeve (she eats the half with icing and then hands it back). She calls it "lemon loaf" since Bevin calls it that (on Bevin's list of ten favorite words, "loaf" would be included). So we're in the drive-thru and Maeve asks about lemon loaf. Sophia doesn't like cake in general, and her wise little mind was already planning on one of the brownies Mike made before leaving town (right before Lent. What's up with that?).

So I ask the drive-thru person if they have lemon pound cake today. No, sorry, we're out today. I tell Maeve they're out, that she can have a brownie at home. Sophia pipes up that this was her plan as well. I tell her that's fine. We drive to the window, I get my coffee, make change for Sanja, and Maeve crosses her arms in front of her to get a good pout going.

"Mom, you are breaking my heart," she tells me as only Maeve can.

I explain again that I'm not breaking her heart, the Kingshighway-Chippewa Starbucks is breaking her heart. And that brownie awaits. No budging. "My heart is breaking."

I put up with this until we're on Gustine, weaving through the neighborhood on the way home. Then I tell her she's being a big Miss Crabby Pants and she needs to give up the sour look on her face and show me how sweet she can be.

She's over it by the time we get home. We walk up the steps in the beginning of the whatever-the-hell-is-falling-from-the-sky, and she takes my hand.

"Sometimes my heart is breaking, and sometimes it is fixed."

I've got myself a couple of deep-feelings girls. One's artistic, but the other is about as verbal as possible without being freakish. Yikes.

Chuc Mung Nam Moi

Happy Tet!


(and that would be the extent of my Vietnamese).

My Good Shepherd Ear is Tuning In

So the 1962 Catholic rite has a Good Friday prayer for the Jews. It used to be, from a nice person's viewpoint, repugnant. They've changed it somewhat, I just read in, yet again, WITL (to the right, blogroll). They took out some phrases like praying that Jews be delivered from their darkness and references to their "blindness." According to what I've read, it now reads:

Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men. Almighty and everlasting God, you who want all men to be saved and to reach the awareness of the truth, graciously grant that, with the fullness of peoples entering into your church, all Israel may be saved.

I read that and thought, first, thank goodness we took out the darkness and blindness and "veils from their hears" phrases. I thought, ok, I guess so. I've gotten used to a new, leaner, meaner Church these days. People like Braxton aside (even people on the opposite end of the spectrum from me are wary of siding with him), leaders in the church these days are disappointing and divisive. They are making Catholics look bad. And while that isn't the point to life, or shouldn't be, they are making us look bad because they're acting in ways contrary to the Gospel. At least how I read it. (This is where the non-Catholics in the audience sigh and say, "when is she going to leave the church?" kind of like I sigh and say that about women in bad relationships--"when is she finally going to leave him?" Ah, but it's not quite the same story).

But here's the text of the 1970 rite, the post-Vatican II version of the Good Friday prayer for the Jews. You can read in whatever you're needing to, frankly, but it doesn't disappoint me the same way. It doesn't make me say, "there we go again, throwbacks to an era that seriously, was it better?" And when I read it, I could feel the spirit of Sofia Cavaletti flowing through it. She obviously didn't write it (hello, male hierarchy), but she was an observer during Vatican II, in the sessions about Jewish-Catholic relations. Good Shepherd Catechesis would have you believe we are grafted onto the chosen people. Not that we stole the title away from them and ran off to Rome victorious. Here's the modern version:

Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant. Almighty and eternal God, long ago you gave your promise to Abraham and his posterity. Listen to your church as we pray that the people you first made your own may arrive at the fullness of redemption.

Yeah, let's go right back to the first one. Why does the word "benighted" keep coming to mind?

Ash Wednesday

From Whispers in the Loggia:


Think of yourself as a construction site. You're a bit dusted up today, or you likely will be in a couple hours. No building rises or stands on its own, and the dust of putting one up didn't just magically appear -- like life, building is invariably a messy process if you're doing it right.

Along these lines, a work-site without dust is no accomplishment; no meaningful work would be getting done there, whether it's the foundations not being adequately driven in, the ground not being sufficiently cleared, maybe both.

A work-site isn't something to behold at mid-project... but the further along it gets, the more specific its work becomes, and the more the dust clears. And then, seemingly all of a sudden, what'd been a mess at the outset is transformed into something beautiful, useful, solid and lasting.

These days can easily become nothing more than a longing for whatever we've given up. But they're meant to be more than that -- and the more dust we kick up in the process, the better the finished product will be.

Bottom line: for yourself and those around you, let God build a better you this Lent.

---
If you're Catholic and tired of sound bites and want full articles and "What did the Pope ACTUALLY say about that?", Whispers in the Loggia is for you. It is rather dry if you aren't looking for that. FYI.

Top Ten Concepts

A few days back I wrote down a list of my ten favorite words. Since then, I've been ruminating upon other things I like, concepts, that didn't make the word list because they aren't fun to say. Just fun to talk about. And while I procrastinate on the following things, I thought I'd write about them. What am I procrastinating about?

1. Getting someone besides Mike to read what I've written thus far (that's also sort of a, hey, if you want to give me several hours of your life you will never get back...)

2. Figuring out what to do with my part three. If there even needs to be one. I like things in odd numbers, though.

3. Doing some planning work for the J-O-B.

4. Knitting.

5. Cleaning house and folding a dozen loads of laundry.

6. Other "quotidian" things that are far too dull to mention.

7. Working on some Benedictine stuff that is far harder to write than fiction.

8. shortening a blue polyester pleated skirt for Irish Dance.

9. Planning girl scout stuff.

So here I am. Ten favorite concepts. I think I have ten. There's no real rhyme or reason here. Most are from my training as a teacher.

10. TPWSGWTAU. I love this because it demonstrates how little we really know about learning and about the human brain. TPWSGWTAU is "The place where sentences go when they are understood." I kid you not. Strings of letters are decoded as words, words are stored briefly in short-term memory until enough words are stored to create a sentence, and then, well, the sentence goes to TPWSGWTAU.

9. Scaffold-building. I don't mean like when Jeff came up to St. Louis and built scaffolding all around my house to replace my roof. I mean it in a teaching sense, again. It's the effect a teacher has on a student such that a student performs better with the teacher there. The idea that teachers are important. When it's done right, the student doesn't even realize it happened. You set up a framework that guarantees success. Then, you slowly repeat it, taking a bit of the framework away. Show, watch, leave alone. Right? Except, it's more than that. It allows a child or a learner to see that they can do it, and it builds confidence along with skill, and none of that confidence is hollow or fake. They really solved that polynomial equation. And now they can do it again. The better you know your student, the better scaffolding you can build. My favorite tutoring student could soar at my table--and then, pass algebra II in school--because I knew what scaffolding she needed.

8. The Hawthorne Effect. If you tell someone you're watching them to see how they'll do, they do better. If you worsen conditions but tell them you've improved them, they will work harder to prove that better conditions improve work habits. Even though they're really worse. Which, as an aside, is probably why No Child Left Behind was thought to be a good idea. Keep testing, and kids will get smarter! Well, unfortunately, the Hawthorne Effect is a temporary state.

7. Subculture. Obvious. But the more subcultures I brush up against, the more I like them. Mary's dad belongs to this little subculture of people who build 1/12 scale steam engine trains and run them on little tracks. And her family takes it a step further and serves a 5 course dinner on little train cars once a year. The Dinner Train. Subculture. The SCA. Subculture. 365 bloggers. Subculture of a subculture. Intentional communities. Texans. Irish Dancers. Mah jongg tournaments. Number station collectors. Montessori teachers. Vegans. Peace activists. Benedictines. Harley riders. British sports car enthusiasts. Knitters. Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Subcultures.

6. Synchronicity. The idea that things happen for a reason--that two or more related events have occurred independently but in a meaningful way. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that there is far more going on around us than our brains allow us to focus on. When we focus on one thing, other things that are similar seem to connect. Or perhaps there's a larger force at work. Ironically, although these things happen to me all the time, I can't think of a single example at the moment.

5. Math. Specifically, that mathematicians are the scientist most likely to believe in God. Astronomers are the least likely. Or so I've been told. Astronomers look out into the skies and see vast expanses of...nothing. Mathematicians, all they see are the patterns that connect everything together. I also like the idea that biology is applied chemistry; chemistry is applied physics; physics is applied mathematics.

4. Subclinical. When someone is subclinical, they do not have enough test results or symptoms to be fully diagnosed with something. But they might have it anyway. I have a neighbor who is currently subclinically several things, and doctors pretty much don't know what's going on. But something is. I find this fascinating because there is, again, so much we do not understand. I am subclinically hypothyroid, to take another example, although my doctor is wise enough to call a duck a duck. Where I'm truly "subclinical" also involves the philosophical question of where is the line between "personality trait" and "symptom." I have some temporal lobe issues--four specific ones. And a family history. A neurologist who was puzzled. Inconclusive EEGs. But maybe they're all just coincidences. And maybe Maeve will drive us all to school tomorrow on her trike.

3. Learned Helplessness. The basics: if you give a dog no option but electric shock, whether he sits, stands, barks, shuts up, runs, cries, he will eventually lie down and take it. Even if the door to the shock room is opened and they're FREE TO GO. When this is applied to a classroom of first grade students, oy vey. For whatever reason, LH seems to lead to a lack of pattern recognition. Every addition problem is BRAND NEW. If it isn't identical to the one you just solved, it is a total mystery. There is no way to solve it. Might as well give up now. This was most astonishing when I got to St. Pius, in a classroom filled with kids without LH. It made those with it like creatures from another planet. But by then, I could dig it. See: scaffold building.

2. Hypergraphia. The intense compulsion to write. Once I had a word for it, I felt better about it. It started in 8th grade. I remember--I started writing epic letters to friends in different states who could simply not keep up. So I took on twelve international pen pals. And filled spiral notebook after spiral notebook. As I got older, it waxed and waned, mostly depending on how much official writing I had to do. I find if I knit a lot, I mean a lot, it helps if I'm really compulsive. High school gave me a word processor and more people to write to. College introduced me to listmaking. I have a file on my computer called "list of lists". Seriously. The summer Mike and I dated and I went home to Housotn, I wrote him a letter every day. I mean like 10 pages a day. And of course, discovering blogs helped funnel a lot of this. I (here's some purse-spilling for ya) find that in the winter, if I don't write enough, or do other little things with my hands, like knitting, that I find myself air-typing my thoughts as I fall asleep. It's kind of a problem. But I'm trying to tame it down to "personality trait." With fair-to-middlin' success. I've also gotten a lot better at the output, not in amounts, but in quality. Thank God.

1. Wabi Sabi. It's a Japanese concept I'm going to mis-represent. How I understand it is that well-made beautiful things do not stop being beautiful just because they age and start to fall apart. It's the handmade cereal bowl you use every morning because you love the person who made it. It's the Russian-English dictionary on my shelf with the cover falling off but I don't replace it because it is still useful. It's a house from 1904 with bad windows and creaky floors that isn't artificially gussied up to look like a house from 1996. The wood planes in my dad's workshop that belonged to his father. All the furniture in my house that I like. The stool in my kitchen from a St. Pius V school classroom. Old cemeteries. Original woodwork with dings included. It's not purposefully allowing things to get dirty or bad, it's just accepting that objects age, and can do so gracefully and it does not diminish them. It's all over my life. And, once again, having a name to go along with it makes it seem cozy instead of lazy.

Well then.

Some new little things I've been reading

I'm always looking for new blogs. I like reading blogs of people I know (because sometimes they in turn will read mine! but that's not all). I like reading about people whose life experience is different enough from mine to make it interesting, but not so far off from what I might understand that it makes no sense.

anyway, a few I've started reading. I probably should put them on the blogroll to the right. I will soon. Right now I'm lucky to have them linked to my bloglines feed because I have the attention span of a flea these days.

My neighbor is in the process of adopting a daughter from Vietnam and she writes about this process, nearly daily, at From Bankrupt to Baby. Talk about outside my experience. Yet I can totally envision it.

Sr. Lynn from my monastery (it's so fun to say "my monastery") is keeping an online journal at Day by Day. Very fledglingly, but reading her, it's like a part of my brain is sitting in chapel there again.

and Nancy, who I do not know, keeps a rather focused journal at Nancy's Baby Names. Which is exactly what you think it might be based on that title. I love learning what Scotland's top 10 names for 2007 is, for instance. That sort of minutia.

Ok, that's all I've got right now.

One last big long complaint about the weather

Lent starts tomorrow. Yes, already. So today is mardi gras. Which I've never been a big fan of; I have never once gone down to Soulard, no did I head down to Galveston's Mardi Gras in high school. My brother told a story once about waking up on the beach with the tide coming in after a mardi gras celebration down there. My family is prone to excess and frankly, I don't know if I need a whole holiday dedicated to excess.

That said, I usually try to kick myself into shape spiritually or otherwise during Lent. I am a convert to Lent. Not really been a fan until the last two years or so. Anyway, as a kid we were always supposed to give something up, which i never really stuck to, or add something good to our habits, which I was better at. But none of the things I ever picked made that much of a difference to my basic personality. Nothing really changed me.

But last year. Last year I gave up complaining about the weather. I'm prone to seasonal affective disorder, maybe not diagnosable, but close enough. Winter blahs. And winter blahs tend to trip other wires in my brain that maek me just a tad nuts. Cabin fever, shall we say. Or the general feeling like I'm trying to crawl inside a suitcase and snap it shut.

And complaining about the weather only makes all of this worse. Last year, I realized sometime around Ash Wednesday that every time I opened my mouth in conversation, it was about the weather. How boring is that? so I didn't do it for all of Lent, and by the time Easter is here, frankly, there's nothing to complain about. And it made the early spring so much easier in my brain. I was "offering it up" instead of "suffering the cruel fate of a displaced Texan shaking my fist at the sky". I started telling myself a different story, as my friend Mary would put it. And it helped.

so I'm going to try it again. Because wow. I need to try it again.

I'm sorry, he's not here right now..

We get a lot of wrong number calls. Mostly because our three digit place extension (for lack of a better term, I don't know what it was called at one time, but in my mom's old address book some numbers were listed that way, with letters standing for the place. I wonder what 77 means, anyway. My great aunt Sarah was VE2-), anyway, mostly because the first three numbers in our phone number is also an area code in this era of way too many phone numbers. So if people are too daft to know they must dial a 1 before the area code, they get a local person with my three digit extension. And it seems as though they usually get me. "Is Jimmy there?" "No, wrong number."

"Is Isaiah there?" "No, you must have misdialed."

Then a man named Mohammed Hansa gave out our entire number as his cell phone number. Dentists, doctors, exterminators called looking for Mr. Hansa. Sorry. They were all mortified to find out the number was wrong. Most of the wrong area code folk think I'm hiding something.

Then of course there's Mike Nelson. He's this meteorologist outside of Denver who doesn't pay his bills. And his social security number is close enough to my husband's that a skip tracer thought MAYBE he took our last name as a pseudonym. Because you know, I'd go with difficult to spell German any day. So people would call looking for Mike...and then I'd have to ask them what they thought my husband's last name was. "Nelson," they'd say like I was the idiot here. "Sorry." And then I'd explain. We haven't gotten calls for Mr. Nelson in a while. One bill collecter actually figured it out for me, and told me what to do and who to call. But how does one prove one is not somebody? Huh.

And now. Sam Brownback calling for John McCain. Jim Talent calling for John McCain. "Paid for by Missourians for John McCain" calling for John McCain. Wow. When did he give out our number as a contact? Cause he's never here. And a lot of important people seem to think he lives at our house. And they're rude: just talk right over me when I try to explain that this isn't the McCain residence. Or I wait until they give me the message for him, and then I start to explain, having politely given them their turn, that if they wish to speak to Mr. McCain, they will have to check the number and try again. But they've already hung up. I'm not Mr. McCain's answering service. They should send him an email and find out what his correct number is. Or start saying ON BEHALF OF JOHN MCCAIN instead of "for".

St. Brigid of Kildare

Today is my feast day. February 1: St. Brigid of Kildare. My mom wouldn't let my dad spell it like that. Or more Gaelic, either. So of course the logical answer is to take the traditional American spelling (Bridget) and add an extra T. One time in college I got a check from him and he'd spelled it Brigett. Who knows. It ceases to be important to me as I get older, although I do still carry the nickname from college, Bridge-pi, which is a reference to the two t's at the end (BridgeTT, kind of like a messy looking greek pi at the end). And that lends itself to both math references and, well, pie. Everybody likes pie.

Brigid is the patroness of several things, like most medieval saints. Children whose parents are not married. Farmers. Nuns. Dairy workers. Babies. Sailors. Cattle. Blacksmiths. Printing presses--not printers, the presses themselves. Which is interesting since she was long gone by Gutenberg.

Her name, and mine by extension, means fiery arrow. I like that.

I also like the word Kildare. But not as much as winklehawk.

Ten Favorite Words

Ok, this is totally a Bridgett kind of post. A list. About words. Dork.

My top ten favorite words. Some of them are for the concept behind them, but other concepts I really like didn't make the list because they weren't nice words as well (scaffold-building, for instance, is not on the list). None of them are profanity, even though last week when Mike was out of town there was a certain one that would have made my top ten most frequent said words.

Hamartia: tragic flaw. Usually pride. Often used in Greek tragedies. Probably not appropriate to use outside Greek tragedies. But once I heard it from Mrs. Gabel in 11th grade, it was stuck in my brain. To rhyme with Marsha. I often find myself analyzing people I know only tangentially, thinking of what their hamartia might be.

Milieu: I briefly saw a grief counselor when I was pregnant with Maeve, because I couldn't go have this second baby until I got over the birth of the first one, and a lot of my problems with the first one were related, but not caused, but the miscarriage before that. Notice: the counselor was so fabulous, I can just write that all down in one sentence now. She really was. Anyway, as I'm talking about my story, Sophia's story, I referred back to other mothers I knew and birth experiences and she sat back in her chair, put her wood pencil in her mouth, licked the tip (just like I do, why is that?), and wrote something down. And then she said, "you have found yourself caught up in the most fascinating milieu." I asked her to explain. Very jungian. My story is connected to yours, and your story in the past affects my story in the present, and mine has reverberations into the future, just by simply having existed. My grandmother, my mother, my friends, myself, my daughter, and so on. It's a milieu.

Oskamina: Imagine eating lemon chess pie. Or lemon meringue for those who have not had the pleasure of lemon chess. Think about how your mouth reacts to the sourness, the little sharp pain right below your ears in that space between your jaw and your skull. The Russians call this oskamina.

Schadenfreude: a German word. Meaning, essentially, happiness that stems from someone else's misfortune. I fall into schadenfreude a lot. More than I should.

Benighted: intellectually or morally ignorant. I love saying this word. Like, "If Braxton weren't so benighted, he'd realize..."

Companion: We all know what companion means. But its etymology is what always gets me. It means, "with bread." Like, breaking bread with someone. Share your meal, become companions.

Karst: Missouri is a great example of karst topography. Ozark plateau. All of it. Acidic water eating away at the limestone. Losing streams and cave systems and sinkholes. And don't drink the water--you don't know where it might have popped up and fallen back down. Which makes the Weldon Spring Uranium Plant quite disturbing. We are all downstream in Missouri.

Watershed: Related topographical term, obviously, but I like it in the literary sense, as a watershed moment. The turning point after which nothing else is ever the same.

Counterintuitive: what it sounds like. I picked it up in my college education classes. And I use it all the time. For instance, when I teach certain algebra concepts--most algebra is elegant, with each step following easily. It makes sense. It is intuitive. Except in later algebra when you play little games to convert the problem to one already solved. The steps required are counterintuitive. You would never figure them out on your own. They require teaching. And that makes it a lot more like geometry proofs. I hate that.

Winklehawk: Ah. My very favorite word. A winklehawk is an Ozarkian word, although I'm sure it is older than that, since most of their dialect comes from European words nobody else uses anymore. It means a 90 degree tear in woven fabric. A tiny tear that starts in a spot and tears both the warp and the weft threads, making an L shape. I find these most often in bedsheets that have gotten old. Any plain-weave fabric is prone to them. I don't know when I picked up this word, but it's not from childhood.

One of my dialect problems is that I have lived midwest, west, southeast, Texas, St. Louis, mid-Missouri, and a bit of Great Lakes. I'm married into Southern Illinois. Some things, I know where they're from (y'all, reckon, a few grammatical errors I make all the time in speech), but others, they're just in my head. Who knows why? Probably just caught my fancy. Language acquisition can be rather counterintuitive.

It's a Snow Day

The airport says 8.4 inches, but the flat edge of the flipped over kiddie pool in the backyard with a ruler stuck down in the middle says 9.5. No school. No work. Woo!

I even put on layers and my German combat boots and trudged down to Janine's for coffee this morning.

This is a big snow for St. Louis. And you know what the best part is, besides that I still look like a cute grunge girl when I put on my combat boots and roll my jeans up at the bottom? Sunday is rain and mid-forties. Monday is in the 50s. All gone in two days.

My favorite.