Easter Memo

Even though malls pollute my soul, I did venture into one today. Almost anything that is normally off limits is ok if you do it with someone who has cancer. Did you know that? It’s true. We went in search of hats from the Gap (for her) and sandals (for me). Also, as I told some people at the love feast yesterday, it's ok to shop on Good Friday if you boycott shopping on Black Friday. This maintains the natural balance of commerce and religion. Or something.

While there, we saw a strange sight. A human, dressed in a bunny suit, was taking pictures with children while their parents looked on in approval. One baby was so new, it actually scared me that the bunny was holding it. It was just too odd, a huge fake rabbit with large solid black eyes, holding a tiny, tiny baby. Memo to parents: bunnies eat (their) babies!

Plus, real rabbits/bunnies don’t like to be touched and often run from humans. I hope that any child of mine will understand the disparity between the truth and what we saw in the mall today.

Some Questions

Some questions that I would like answered:

Is Mark Noll's departure of Wheaton College for Notre Dame symptomatic of general Christian brain drain in higher ed? Is the typical Christian college able to retain quality professors? (Answer must be in the form of a sentence.)

Is my newly-developed tendonitis because of my addiction to spider solitaire/texttwist? Is this a punishment from God for occasionally engaging in such pursuits during work?

Will Barry Bonds tell the truth before he breaks Babe Ruth's record?

Will Moussaoui be sentenced to death? If so, is this because humans long for vengeance, a scapegoat, anything for some closure?

Why didn't someone buy me tickets to these concerts?

Why do people gravitate toward the same seats in a classroom or meeting room for weeks and months at a time, yet get so bored during said meetings that people are text messaging one another, doing whatever it is one does with a blackberry, checking e-mails, etc.?

Hair!

So since I have to post a picture in my blog in order to have one in my profile, I'm going to show you my progression this year. From left to right, it is my default hair style, something new, and my current shorn state.

Typical Saturday Morning

Obviously this is abnormal for me, but I am blog addicted! I can’t stop. So for now I’ll keep going since this will peter out by…next week, probably.

Typical Saturday morning. I wake up, lounge around. Because I am on a writing kick, this means that I awoke with millions of thoughts and couldn’t wait to get them out onto—er—cyberspace?

Write a blog entry. Write a song. Talk to friends who come by. Amanda goes out to workout. Tim, Steph, and Dru go to a united against racism workshop (there is something so wrong about sitting around on the couch in your pjs when your friends are going out to an anti-racism workshop. How do I live with myself?) Renee sleeps off her night shift. Alissa will get up soon to work out, too.

I am eating Life cereal. Mmmm. If I wasn’t so lazy or had someone else to do it for, I would make pancakes. If this was pre-Amanda's workout kick, we’d both be downstairs watching VH1 top 20 music countdown. But I am glad for the change because it is more peaceful and fun to start the day this way. I feel healthy and content. Plus I mostly watched in order to hang out with her and experience something I never did as a highschooler (which seems like the appropriate time to be music video obsessed) and we’ve moved on to other pursuits, like lurking at our favorite coffeeshop on random afternoons or evenings.

At eleven a.m. I may turn on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, my favorite radio show after This American Life.

Spooning

It’s the kind of morning where the rain is pouring off of the roof, into the gutter, so loud that it woke me up. But since this is one of my favorite sounds in the whole world, I didn’t mind. Plus, Buddy came into my room and asked to get on the bed, and I said yes, so we lay there and cuddled for awhile.

Confession (Don’t you hate it when people say “True Confession?” Why would a confession be anything other than true? Why would anyone bother?):

I spoon with my dog. And I like it.

First, a caveat: anytime that Buddy sleeps with me, he’s on top of the covers. I’ve come a long way, but I still can’t bear the idea of a dog IN my bed. Gross. Also, it took me a very long time to get here. I never grew up with a dog that liked me enough to follow me around and want to sleep with me. At first, I thought it was weird and not hygienic. But Buddy is a) very bad at night if not supervised, since he’s a street dog(g), so since his usual bedtime partner is working night shift, I decided to take matters into my own bed, and b) he is deathly afraid of thunderstorms and there is just nothing so heartbreakingly satisfying as comforting a creature when it is frightened by something you’re not scared of.

Living with Buddy has made me a dog lover. I can’t help it. He is a very ill-behaved dog so it just crept up on me. Now I think he is beautiful and I find myself more and more likely to forgive him for the awful things he does. This will sound both cheesy and irreverent, but he truly is an example to me of what grace means—he is too dumb and beaten by life to know that he’s not supposed to:

-eat fresh banana bread off the counter,
-consume an entire grocery bag full of left over chocolates from a bridal shower (and then puke them up all over the house for an evening),
-eat our tomatoes and apples,
-defecate in random places around the house,
-etc., etc., you get the idea.

And we are all too stupid, too willful to make good decisions all the time, to choose the God-honoring path. We respond to the lessons life has taught us, often in selfish, destructive ways. It almost seems like we can’t help it. But God is going to let us back into bed to spoon with Her during the thunderstorm anyway.

All right, that was a stretch. Especially because I am a poor stand-in for God, even in a bad metaphor.

I’ll tell you a secret. When I go away next year, I will miss a lot of people. But I have a suspicion that I will miss the sweet, innocent, pure love of a dog and the cunning, sneaky affection our cats most of all. A year without pets! Quel horreur.

A last day with hair

Written 3.28.06

A very close friend was diagnosed with cancer in February. For me, this was an event that elicited complicated feelings. Shock. Sadness. Worry. This is a rite of passage: for the first time, I am able to relate to the millions of Americans who have also had a close friend or family-member struggle with cancer. I never really got it before. And I don’t think you can read a book to appreciate this emotion. So in a twisted way, I also become an enriched person because of this tragedy. I hope that makes sense and doesn’t sound morbid. Although it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if that’s what you thought I was. Since I kind of am.

Anyway, her kids’ reactions started with, “Wait, are you going to lose your hair? Won’t you be ugly? all the way to the inevitable “You’re not going to die, are you Mom?” Almost anything is more sad when there are children involved. And also more real and true and joyful.

I don’t think it was strange that her hair was one of the first things they mentioned. In our culture, a woman’s hair is her dignity, a major source of pride if it’s beautiful, and a constant source of complaint if it isn’t. Hair products are a major industry here and many women spend a large amount of time caring for and arranging their hair. Maybe it seems frivolous, but I can see why losing one’s hair is one of the hardest things about cancer, for a woman. It means you can’t hide what’s going on within your body. You have no control. You don’t even get to keep your eyebrows. Or your pubes. Even the hair you don’t normally want, you don’t get to keep.

Long story short, another friend and I offered to cut off our hair with her when she starts to lose her hair. And she told me this week that it will be any day now. In fact, she just called to say that it will be tonight. I am sad to report that I am nervous. And scared. What will I look like? It’s all fine and good to offer to do something like this, but the reality is hitting me. My hair is a major asset. If I had to list the features I would rely upon to attract a man, my hair is up there (no pun intended). It’s pretty nice, as hair goes. And I’ve never dyed it.

But then, I guess that’s all the more reason to sacrifice it. Because this gesture wouldn’t mean anything if I had terrible hair that I mistreated and didn’t like anyway. And I really am glad to do it. I like to believe that women don’t need to have hair to be beautiful and that I should be able to attract people with my glittering personality and repartee alone. Especially for my friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter (and of course, for my friend), I think this is a meaningful statement of solidarity and a redefinition of what it means to be cool and womanly and a good friend.

Dear friend, when you read this, know that I love you very much. I wish I could take some of the pain and especially the physical symptoms. You are not alone.

So the most fun thing about working where I work is that most things that I consider normal or acceptable are semi-shocking or distasteful to my co-workers. Some days, this is highly annoying because I hate having to play it down eight hours a day. But today it was fun because, after the polygamy gross-out fest that went on in the room down the hall, I answered my phone ( I can see who is calling me) saying things like, “No. I just don’t even find your husband attractive,” instead of hello.

If I have to choose smart or attractive, I choose smart any day.

A note of explanation

Ummm…so obviously, whether you’re reading this for the first time or have followed my ravings since the beginning, I clearly did not update this very consistently during my first few months of blogship. But a lot has been happening lately and I’ve been writing a lot in my head, so I think I’ll be posting quite a few posts in the next couple days, even though they may pertain to events that have been occurring over the last month or so.

Polygamy: Oppressive or Sensible?

Today our boss suggested that we ought to cover the new HBO series “Big Love” in the next issue of our magazine. All you need to know about our audience is that they’re typically non-cable viewing, conservative Christians. This explains why most of my co-workers thought this was a bad idea to begin with, even though we did review the movie Garden State in a recent issue.

Still, to be fully educated before giving our boss the thumbs down, the editor decided it might be a wise idea to check out some of the clips featured at the “Big Love” website. After lunch, she and two other co-workers checked out a four-minute spot. The cries of “eeewww” and “disgusting!” could be heard all the way down the hall near my cubicle.

What is the big deal? Maybe I live in a morality-free zone, but polygamy is more intriguing than disgusting. I reserve disgusting for situations such as last week, when my dog pooped out a tampon. Whole. That is disgusting. Polygamy is just one more model of family life to add to the mix. And I’ll bet it runs the gamut, just the same way that most “normal” marriages work. Some polygamists are probably strict adherents to the “headship” model, while others may be more egalitarian.

I can see why it makes more sense to have many women and a few men. Most men I know require more care and feeding than most of the women I know. And they have more active sex drives. Women tend to be satisfied with a wide variety of relationships. Children need lots of attention and care, so why not have several women (or several men, for that matter) watching them?

Is it a paradox that I am not so offended by the idea of polygamy (or the idea that there’s a show about it on HBO) but am a pretty strong womanist? Well, I still sleep at night. Albeit, alone.