Excuse me? Excuse-yes? Yes, I’m ready to order. I’d like a cholesterol free life experience, you know what I mean? I don’t want to have heart troubles or feel sluggish. I need to be in peak shape so that I can run the good race, can’t have any heavy stuff weighing me down. So, if you don’t mind, could I have my life made with No Yokes, please?

If you’ve ever placed an order like this, I can relate. Recently at work there was a cafaffle about a locked door. The fact that the printer was behind it was most of the trouble, the reasons of which are largely inconsequential, and I needed to use that printer. Imagine having to waste the time it takes to unlock a door, purposelessly, a hundred times a day to get anything off the printer when you’re doing casework and have to get things off the printer all the time, constantly, ad nauseum, ad infinitim. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, does it? Probably isn’t; Not the point. The point IS that come Monday morning this week, after doing this for about two months, I had Had Enough. I was livid and decided to act like a child. I purposely went in and UNlocked the door at every opportunity hoping that it would stay that way, and when that didn’t work, I just left it standing open. I figured  two could play that whole Drive-Someone-Crazy-About-Something-As-Inane-As-A-Locked-Door Game (What? You’ve never played that one?). I fumed and complained and made a real jerk of myself.

But then something happened. A coworker of mine who was the dumping ground for my vitriol did something that absolutely changed my perspective and my attitude: She prayed for me. I didn’t know it at the time. I had gone outside for a minute to take a break from my rage with a book that just happened to be in my purse called Forgotten God, which is about being guided by the Holy Spirit. Ouch, by the way. And as I read, I thought, Is this Love I’m acting with? Or Selfishness?

And it occurred to me that I was angry because I didn’t have a choice about the way things were being run in my office, but I was being offered a choice about how I was going to run things in my heart and how that heart was reflected in my actions. And I decided I was going to submit to God and run it right, in a way that would please Him and make me, as His representative, be honorable to the great gifts I’d been given, like having the Holy Spirit to dwell within me and guide me. Like having a job, like having the capabilities to work it, like having the income it provides me to support myself, like having all the luxuries in life that make it not only possible but to seem even justifiable to complain. I realized that I couldn’t do anything about the yoke, but I could carry it with dignity and the grace befitting someone who professes Jesus as Lord.

So as I was saying earlier, if you want a life with No Yokes? Good luck finding anyplace that can fill that particular order. But if you care about your heart really, you will (as I am still continuing to) learn to bear them with courage, humilty, and above all else, Love.

I received an email last night from my cousin, asking me to please and and finally return my grandmother’s phone calls. It accused me of not being aware that life is fleeting and can be full of regret if you don’t take opportunities to love people when you can. It said again and again that it was not trying to be offensive, just trying to help, dear, just trying to help. It tried to reassure me that there are still people in this family that care about me.

I found it pretty presumptuous. Not in the least because my gramma hasn’t called me in a good month and a half. But also because no one on my mom’s side of the family calls me ever, at all, for any reason, unless they guilting me into doing something or want to rub in what kind of wonderful people they are. Up on the gossip and doing their good deed. If, that is, by “good deed” they mean speaking in hushed tones and clucking their tongues in mournful disdain. My life? Is none of their business.

Yes, I have a problem with bitterness.

I’m actually just becoming aware of it, so thank God for His mysterious ways. If you’d asked me last week if I was a bitter person, I would have said absolutely not and spouted some meandering life lesson about letting go of the past. Most of my intimates can tell you I’ve demonstrated such at some time or another in life. Yet still, just reading just those few well intentioned lines made me livid. I felt imposed upon and exposed and misjudged and misunderstood and lied to all at the same time.

If I may exhaust my vitriol, I don’t think my extended family still cares for me. I don’t think it matters to them one way or the other what I do or whether I ever see them again, so long as they can feel sorry for me about decisions I’ve made or successes I have yet to have. I’m speaking about them as a unit, not as individuals. Because as individuals, they are always polite, always polished, always chuckling lightly at some joke and laying the coats on their beds. But I’m not one of them, am I? I’m the guest, not the host.  Not the Friend or the Sister or even the beloved Relation. Just the Guest.

Even that line (I typed “lie” at first on accident-do my fingers know something Idon’t?), about there still being people in the family who love me and my sister is alienating. There are people in the group that care for you, O Out Of The Group One. You are being honored by the collective. Will you, can’t you, won’t you please be nice? Can’t you just come over and be valiant and upstanding and obviously pretending to be as perfect as we actually are?

Ugh.

I know what this stems from. I’ve been angry at them for a long time and it’s simply festered over the years. All that time my mother was so ill, all that time her body was wasting away-O goodly, kindly ones-where were you? Where were you while she was suffering? You only came to watch her die, dragging your mass of bodies into my and my sister and my father and my grandmother’s private space. She was ours, because we loved her, and we watched her life either from the beginning of our own or the beginning of hers, and we saw everything she grew from and into. We saw her shrink in ways we had never imagined after she had spent the whole rest of her life growing in strength and wisdom and promise. We cleaned her up and took her out and went to Wendy’s to buy her chicken sandwiches and sit with her, and talk with her, and breathe her same air. We were the ones she called to lift her up when her body began failing her. We were the ones who bound her feet at night.

And where were you? Except for three days after they had assured us that nothing else could be done, sitting in a stale hospice room with your four hundred pint sized relations who were too young to come and look at death like that, whom you sent to go and color, whom you told without saying so that the slipping away of my mother’s life wasn’t something that was worth their notice, that you knew they couldn’t sit down and pay attention to? And afterward, with your arms outstretched toward my sister and I, to ask for a piano for your church.

It isn’t as though my cousin is to blame for these things. She wasn’t even a part of most of them. She isn’t to blame for anything that happened at hospice or afterward and neither is her brother. And neither are the rest of them really. I know I’m being unfair. I’m being grossly unfair. Part of me wants to object and complain that they never talk to me about her. And the other part of me knows that if they did, I would inwardly rebel and shout that they didn’t know who my mother was at all and how dare they make presumptions. I can’t be pleased . . .

But God will ease.

I am praying for strength to let all these things go. To stop clutching at them with righteous indignation. The truth is no one knows what to do with something like that, and that we all make mistakes, and that we all overlook our own. The Truth is that if Christ can ask his Father to forgive for not knowing, I should certainly be able to forgive for doing no worse than perhaps I would have done if I were they and they, I. I praise God that He can make so many lessons out of loss. I praise Him that He keeps revealing and healing and working on me. He certainly knows I need it.

When I started writing, I did so because I was angry. I’m not anymore. God has such a particular way of absorbing the thrashing of my soul until it is spent and soothing me with the duties that I have to preform, regardless of the actions of anyone else. He is . . . He is . . .

He is marvelous.

For anyone who hasn’t heard, my apartment was broken into a couple of weeks ago and I thought that my bank account information was compromised. So I set up a new account. Obvious, right?

Well, I couldn’t actually close my account because apparently there were some transactions outstanding. So I left a little money in there and waited. I canceled all my bill pays and set them up on my new account. I waited some more. I checked my account and nothing was pending to post, so silly me, for some crazy reason I thought that, well, nothing was pending to post. How ridiculous. I was wrong though. Apparently a payment that I canceled and set on my other account miraculously appeared as a charge-and was pre-dated back to the beginning of the month! So, while this divine gift was being shafted upon me, I had spent the little money left in the compromised account that I wanted to close in the first place and surprise, surprise, got four overdrafts for amounts like seven to ten dollars at the high priced tune of thirty four dollars a pop. That’s a hundred and thirty two dollars in case you’re not in the mood for quick multiplication. And of course, when I called to straighten it all out, the charge was backdated so it most certainly couldn’t have been the widdle-biddy-baby bank’s fault. And so, “Sorry, lady”, “Sad to hear it, ma’am”, but “Them’s the breaks”.

I hate National City Bank.

I’m getting my money and getting out.

Get a Voki now!
(actual question posed in class)

What I hate about midterms! They really know how to da-a-a-a-ance!

Wait, I think I got distracted by an eighties tune there. It happens from time to time, or, really, more like constantly. Blame the Sound Disease I have. Anyway, as I was going to begin, and should probably be getting on to by now, is, What I hate about midterms is this One Eternal Question: Do we have to know . . . ?

I think probably that all my students would hate my guts if I were a professor. I mean, of course I would win their hearts with my loveable charm and personable layman’s explanations of deeply complex concepts. But when it came test time, their burgeoning devotion would boil within them, forming a thin but crisp layer of hatred. Sort of like an emotional creme brulee. And the reason for this culinary delight of abhorrance is simply this: If asked the One Eternal Question? I would always say, Yes.

(more…)

The atrium of my apartment building smells like bologna. Don’t ask me why. It’s one of those unanswerable questions, like why would a junior high school boy put deodorant on his face? Unfathomable. Nevertheless, smell of bologna it does, and that isn’t the worst problem.

The worst problem is something that I think I’ve mentioned before. Now, I’m no crazed hermit without furniture except for sixteen computers, wearing an aluminum foil hat so that aliens can’t read my mind or anything. I’m no enfeebled old woman with thirty seven cats to her name mewing around her efficiency apartment. I’m not even a begrudging middle aged redneck who won’t shut up about the Good Old Days, nevermind that he never saw them in the first place and that they weren’t really all that great besides. I mention this disclaimer because what I’m about to say next may make it seem that I am one of these types of people. So here’s the truth: I hate people hanging out outside my apartment.

(more…)

Instead of going for the expected, which I may do tomorrow or something when it’s UNexpected (hah-HA!), I thought I would address something that my sister and I were discussing Friday night at Panera before going to see Star Trek with some futuristic space nerds.

I’ve been trying like nobody’s business to find the link to the actual radio program she heard so that I can post it here and you can hear for yourselves, but apparently the idea of making your broadcasts available online for people who didn’t happen to catch it is unheard of on the internet today. Regardless. Apparently last week on WKRQ, there was a program on which a couple of staff at two local Cincinnati domestic violence shelters appeared. They discussed the problem of violence and of course offered themselves as avenues to escape an abusive relationship. But then they said something that I felt a little uncomfortable with. Namely, there is nothing that increases your risk of domestic violence besides gender.

Of course, there are many stastics that point to the fact that domestic violence is primarily directed against heterosexual women by predominantly heterosexual men, and in that regard, I agree that being female would make it more likely that you might experience violence at the hands of an intimate than if you were male. But the only thing?

(more…)

I’ve finally garnered enough support to have a first official re-founding meeting of Writers’ Grope in Real Life. Huzzah! Now I have only to write a dazzlingly spectacular literary dream of a story and I’m in the clear. Speaking of which, if anyone is interested in joining this ragtag band, what’re you doing next Monday at seven p.m.?

I should turn my TV off. I’m supposed to be writing.

But before I do, can I just say that I hate those Above The Influence commercials? They’re about as bad a those anti-smoking public dramas with wind up baby dolls and people trying to mail cigarettes. There’s so much information out there about why smoking whatever it is is a horrible plan with devastating consequences that if someone has already decided to do it, I don’t see how a commercial is going to make much difference. It isn’t as if someone shows up in an NA meeting and says, Yeah, I thought my life was great, but then I saw this PSA about a little boy wearing a million T-shirts and it made me ask myself, could THAT be ME?

Really? When you’re under the influence of drugs you act like a jerk? Didn’t your girlfriend just tell you that yesterday? Really? Blowing smoke in babies’ faces is bad for them? And you’re telling me that the tobacco industry KNEW this the whole time?! Wow. So did everyone.

I know I sound con- and pre-tentious. Maybe I’m just bitter these days. But these messages seem so obvious and therefore a waste of time. A way for people to feel like Something Is Being Done when really nothing is being done at all. I hate the model of, What should we do about this huge problem? We could either become responsible fellow people and talk with specific at risk individuals that we personally know and partner with them and assist them lovingly and thereby reach fewer people perhaps but deeply, or we could make a silly commercial and reach everyone without even scratching their surface. I think we have a winner!

Sigh.

I’m being complainxious. Sorry.

As some of you may or may not know, care, or agree, I have a porn obsession. No, no, not the kind that makes me salivate for the streaming video of, say, The Tipsy Sheep, XHamster, or The Wetplace (the names of which I got from a google of the word “porn”), but the kind that keeps me up all night devouring the research and reflections of people like Gail Dines,  Robert Jenson, and others with the same goal. It’s finally time to come clean and tell the truth: I can’t count how many times I’ve awakened well after noon because I was up all night getting my rocks off to anti-porn sites.

No, no. It’s true. It’s better that you know now.

And it’s why this article that I stumbled across was so disturbing to me. Disturbing in the way that it is pornography apologist while claiming to be scientific. Here are some  juicy excerpts.

Sex drives men from puberty through old age. It is their “raison d’etre”, their purpose in life; to reproduce. Everything else is, well, fluff. It diminishes with age but never disappears. Sex is a primitive – primordial – urge. (more…)

I woke up early this morning, shuffled to the kitchen, and let Emmy out. It had snowed a little overnight and the fluffy whiteness packed itself thickly into the crevaces of the soles of my houseshoes. I walked back to the parking lot to throw away a bag of trash and then swooped back  by Emmy cowering with cold on the front step to let both of us into my apartment. I sat on the couch and turned on BET. My mom used to watch Charles Stanley sunday mornings on this channel. Today David Jeremiah is on, talking about prophesy and why it’s as relevant as topical sermons on be ye kind or tithing or the length of the modern hemline. He raises a good point, which is that if Christians claim to believe in prophesy, specifically the Apocalypse, the Rapture, the Second Coming, it carries with it some serious indications about evangelism.

And now, on a more fallen and human note, I change channels to the Hour of Power and come upon the abject smarmy-ness known as Bill Dallas. Some mangled faced man in a long robe drones on and on about what a great man this is, this man who rose above, this man who’s been in prison and worked his way out, who’s poor little baby company failed. Bill Dallas the Resilient, the Penitant, the Saint. Slime in a suit, my mother would have said. Ugh. I feel like retching on his tailored suit and red patterned tie.

(more…)