p.s.

As an indication of how much reading I'm not doing for the intensive (which begins on the 2nd), the 'Things I've Been Reading Recently' list is updated. None if it comes from my reading list for the worship class.

I love break. And Peter Berger.

Currently on Pandora: Theresa Sokyrka, Turned my back
And I can feel my fire burning longer, feel my strength getting stronger...
It's good to be on the flip side of the solstice, regreeting the sun.

and for the trifecta

...a day after Christmas poem:
------------------------------

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

The Work of Christmas, Howard Thurman

and a poem for Christmas night

God loafs around in heaven,
without a shape
but He would like to smoke His cigar
or bite His fingernails
and so forth.

God owns heaven
but He craves the earth,
the earth with its little sleepy caves,
its bird resting at the kitchen window,
even its murders lined up like broken chairs,
even its writers digging into their souls
with jackhammers,
even its hucksters selling their animals
for gold,
even its babies sniffing for their music,
the farm house, white as a bone,
sitting in the lap of its corn,
even the statue holding up its widowed life,
even the ocean with its cupful of students,
but most of all He envies bodies,
He who has no body.

The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes
and never forgetting, recording by thousands,
the skull with its brains like eels-
the tablet of the world-
the bones and their joints
that build and break for any trick,
the genitals,
the ballast of the eternal,
and the heart, of course,
that swallows the tides
and spits them out cleansed.

He does not envy the soul so much.
He is all soul
but He would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.

The Earth, Anne Sexton

conversation between my sisters

Kim (holding the phone): Linda, it's Julie on the phone.
Linda: Julie who?
Kim: What? She's your sister!
Linda: Oh, that Julie. I thought maybe it was your friend from school.

Moral of the story: I should call home more often.

poem for Christmas Eve

Copied off Aaron's poet-tree:

It was beginning winter
An in-between time
The landscape was still partly brown:
The bones of the weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.

It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed-crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.

Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The wind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

-Theodore Roethke, from 'The Lost Sun.'

pandora!

I just realized that I can share my stations on Pandora with other people. Go here if you want to listen.

Now playing: Banana Pancakes
I'll make you banana pancakes
Pretend like it's the weekend now
Well, it is the weekend. And a particularly lovely weekend, at that, aside from this.

PS: Why is this album only available on amazon.co.uk?

question

Christian A: the Spirit told me to do X.
Christian B: the Spirit told me that X is wrong.

What keeps us from saying that either this Spirit doesn't exist or can't communicate very well, and skipping church to watch football instead?

bouyancy

I float.

This public service announcement brought to you by: sick of this stupid paper... and also a sense of hope that apparently needs to be expressed melodramatically.

Oh, and this by Kate has me thinking, although not about my paper.

oh, and this!

Lyrics courtesy of Brian: Dear Catastrophe Waitress

If I knew the tune, I'd sing to myself at work, or at least whistle to keep the profanities under control. Maybe I can get Pandora to play it.

humorless woman

Not funny.

Well ok, maybe a little funny, but only in the derisive sense. Presumably, this means that I'm not interested in sex with Christopher Hitchens.

Yeah, sex with Christopher Hitchens. That should get you to click the link.

hat tip: lance

panic break

You know what's great? Planning an allnighter, heading home to get food, and then blankly playing solitare for five hours straight, sitting on the floor against the couch. So now my back hurts, my work isn't done, and I lost all the sleep anyway.

I remember, back in the day, when finals week used to involve road trips, yo-yos, and snowball fights, as well as coffee and sleeplessness. Coffee and sleeplessness aren't so much fun on their own.

Hope? Or not? Vote in the comments.

illusion

This is the funniest thing I've seen all day.

Well, not really, but that would be gossip.

vocab control

(swear word alert)

Saturday night was a rough one at the Roadhouse. We got hit with a lot of large parties at once, and the kitchen ran behind. I had one table with a twenty-seven minute wait for their food; they were understandably pissed. I'm not sure why they were pissed at me- it's not like I cook the food- but that happens all the time. I'm wearing a Roadhouse t-shirt, and thus can serve as the representative of the institution at which to direct derision.

Left at that, it would be a boring story. I like most of my tables, but there are a few every night that are jerks.

I tried to fix it, though. My people-pleasing desires took over my ability to read hopelessness in a situation, and I kept trying and trying to make them happy. "More lemonade? More rolls? Anything else I can get for you?"

We put our salad dressing in little plastic cups at the side of the salad plates, presumably to further contribute to landfill problems. (Hey, it's a steakhouse.) There was just such a container of honey-mustard dressing sitting on the table, and in my flusteredness I sat a glass of lemonade down in the container.

"Oh, shit," says the distraught waitress.

The people at the table completely stopped talking to me. Stopped making eyecontact, even. I apologized profusely, but they didn't even acknowledge that I was standing there.

I went back to the kitchen to find the manager, Derrick, (luckily, the general manager wasn't working Saturday), and instead stood by a glass rack trying to remember if swearing at a table was grounds for firing. Derrick came over to me and said, "so, table 211 says that you spilled a drink on them and swore at them."

Distraught waitress: "I didn't spill the drink!"

So, yeah. Lots of jokes about the resident preacher* needing to go to church and get cleaned up a bit. It was pretty funny, although I hope I don't find out at work tonight that I got wrote up for it.

One of the other servers was picking on me about it in the bar, in front of a funny white-haired man who comes in a few nights a week to flirt with the waitresses. Of course my ministry student status came up, and he expressed the appropriate level of shock that a 'good little minister-girl' would use such language. He also pointed to the beer mugs in my hand, and noted further incongruity. (He was far too sloshed to say 'incongruity,' but I don't remember what he actually said.)

No longer quite so distraught waitress: "I'm a beer drinking, swearing, Pentecostal woman preacher. That's just how it is."

Drunk white-haired guy: "Well, serve me up, sweetie!"

Current song on Pandora: Life Becomes Me, The Nadas
So here's my revelation I am, I am,
I'm all right when you're right beside me.
I'd never heard of The Nadas before. Good song.

*Adriana's advice was pretty good, though: next tine I find myself in a similar situation, I'll say I'm a student at Bethany.

on the up-and-up

Hmmm...

From today's El Tiempo:

"The dollar is down; tourism is up; unemployment, sexual activity, the sale of motorbikes and embezzlement of public funds are all up."

A confusing picture, but one thing is clear: there has never been a better time to be a sexually-active embezzler who is shorting the dollar, especially if you own a coconut stand. It's all going their way at the moment.

Well, Colombia. I only know one Colombian, and she's awesome, so I'm going to assume this is good news.

*Updated to reflect humility in spelling; turns out Colombia doesn't have a 'u' in it.

pandora

I've been playing on Pandora lately, trying to get it to play music I like. So far I'm getting lots of Lindisfarne, Whiskeytown, The Byrds, and repeats of this song by Bread:

Daughter - don't give your love to the first man you see.
Just bide your time so your heart will be free to find the one,
Girl you don't have to run.
Daughter - don't think that love has gone out of style,
Just some folks every once in a while don't understand
How this world was planned.
Now I know you're wondering how
You know when the real thing is comin' your way,
When you live for him and not you
You'll know that it's truly comin' to stay.
Daughter - I know it's hard to make yourself wait,
But when the right man comes it won't be too late
So don't you cry,
He'll be here by and by... and steal your heart away

Was this a really popular song, at one point? I've only been on Pandora for maybe five hours, total, and I've heard this song at least three times.

This Whiskeytown song isn't helping:

...sit around, dream away the place I'm from
used to feel so much, now I just feel dumb...

On the upside, I'm dancing in my spinny chair in the computer lab. "I'm gonna let the bad times roll!" Whee!

wonder

Black Sabbath was mentioned at worship today. I don't remember the context, but running across this album both reminded me of today's worship and made me wonder who I might buy it for as a Christmas gift. Preferably someone who would let me listen, voyeuristically. Or maybe it just made me wonder; I can't imagine what it would sound like.

Speaking of wonder, I had a brief wonderous moment last night in class. Fascinated by a friend's pen, which was clear and swirly, I held it to the light and rotated it to watch the prisms spin. So captivated was I by this brief glimpse of glory that, at first, I didn't notice other putative friends mocking my moment of vision. Contempt, that's all they had for my simple appreciation of beauty.

Community hurts, sometimes- that's my point.

radically both

"It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date[...] I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements."
-from Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case

words in my inbox

1) delate (di-LAYT) verb tr.
To report (an offense), denounce, or accuse.
[From Latin delatus, past participle of deferre (to bring down, accuse, or report), from de- + ferre (to bear). Ultimately from the Indo-European root bher- (to carry, to bear children) that gave birth to words such as basket, suffer, fertile, burden, bring, bear, offer, prefer, and birth.]

2) debouch \dih-BOWCH; -BOOSH\, intransitive verb:
1. To march out (as from a wood, defile, or other narrow or confined spot) into the open.
2. To emerge; to issue.
3. To cause to emerge or issue; to discharge.
Debouch comes from French déboucher, from dé- (for de), "out of" (from Latin de) + bouche, "mouth" (from Latin bucca, "cheek, mouth"). The noun form is debouchment.

Special prize to the first commenter to use these words in the sentence I'm thinking of.*

*'Of' at the end of the sentence? Finals crunch madness!