More proof that we tend to make things more difficult than they are...

Ancient Chinese Secret!

Have you seen that commercial where four nearly-middle-aged women are in an elevator and they spontaneously break into the old-school hand-clapping game Miss Mary Mack? (I can’t even remember what product the commercial was advertising, so kudos to the marketing department on that one.)

Hearing the Miss Mary Mack song for the first time in like 30+ years got me to thinking about other games we used to play when I was a kid in the 1970’s…..Kick the Can, Ringoleavio, Red Light Green Light One Two Three….(then we got PONG and childhood as we knew it came to an end...)

The playground game we used to play the most during recess at Catholic school was Chinese Jump Rope (a detailed description of the game can be found here. )
All you needed was three players, an elastic band, and the ability to jump chest high with your legs spread-eagle whilst jumping on the rope and yelling “Kill It!” (a skill that is highly prized in today’s job market).

I couldn’t quite remember the nonsensical chant that we used to say during the game…it was something Chinese sounding (at least to our Americanized ears) like “Itsy Me Si Gi Loco Hotsi Totsi Kill It”….so I did an internet search and was surprised to learn how obscure our little version of the game was. Apparently most children chant “In, out, side, side, etc”….how boringly unoriginal!. I did find one variation of our chant - Itchy me, star shee, Logo hutsy yutsy. - kill it' - and a reference that called the game ‘Itchy me’ and traced it back to Oxford England circa 1985. And then lo and behold, after numerous Google searches, I found a posting on a message board by a woman who linked the nonsensical chant to the Japanese numbers for 1-10 - Ichi, Ni, San, Shi, Go, Roku, Shichi, Hachi, Kyuu, Juu – it’s not exactly the same but close enough to conclude that our little playground chant was a bastardized version of Japanese counting. So there you go. Mystery solved.

So much for the 1985 Oxford, England origin, we were doing it on Long Island as early as 1973….so nannie nannie pooh pooh! (of course, where we got it from I have no idea)

I suppose the only reason why this crazy game sticks in my head is because I experienced one of my most humiliating grade-school moments while playing it. I was airborne getting reading to execute a waist-high Kill It when my foot caught on the rope and down I went in a heap, landing face down in a puddle. My uniform jumper was soaked, and after being berated by the nearest nun I was forced to spend the rest of the recess period sitting in the classroom next to the heater. With plaid wetness sticking to my thighs I could only stare out the window at all the other kids having fun, knowing full well that I would be the object of ridicule as soon as the other kids came pouring into the classroom at recess’ end.

Sigh…I should have stuck to Miss Mary Mack…

Yet another reason why NYC was a bad idea...

You Should Live in the Suburbs

Like many people, you like the city - but you don't want to live in it. For you, the suburbs is the perfect compromise. You can enjoy the city as much as you want, but you have a quiet, safe neighborhood to come home to.

Where Should You Live?

It's official, I'm doomed to live my life in a cookie cutter house with a postage-stamp sized lawn. Anyone up for a trip to the mall? We can stop at The Olive Garden on the way...

Random cattiness...

see more crazy cat pics




see more crazy cat pics




see more crazy cat pics




see more crazy cat pics

I don't wanna work, I want to bang on the drum all day...

Now that I finally know where I’m headed in the fall I’m anxious to get this party started.
Especially with spring springing up like gang busters this week, I’m more than ready to clear out the old and make room for the new. We had a tag sale at church over the weekend so I hauled over a load of crap….ahem…I mean “fine, sellable goods”…..and I’m happy to say that most of it is now cluttering up someone else’s closet. The box of foot and body lotions that someone re-gifted to me many Christmases ago – Sold! The Mo Vaughn bobble head (a baseball player who is no longer with the NY Mets and who sucked when he was) – Sold! The 9-year-old printer that came with my first desktop computer and hasn’t been used in 5 years – Donated! (My pastor snatched it from the remainder pile at the end of the sale….please God, let it still work!)

Between the tag sale, Worship, and the Ministry Council meeting I’ve spent six out of the last seven days at church, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. If I didn’t have to work last Thursday it would have been 7 out of 7. My hours at the bookstore have been cut down to 1-2 days a week and quite honestly, that’s 1-2 days more than I want to work.
I took the job so I could pay down my credit card debt before starting school but now I’m working so few hours I have to ask myself: “Is the aggravation and soul sucking that I experience at this job worth the $50 a week that it’s bringing in?”

There are things that I love about the job – shelving books, opening the new shipments, helping the customers – and there are things that I hate about the job – having to deal with an incompetent and overbearing manager who just leaches the energy right out of me, and the endless heap of promotional “chatter” that we’re expected to dump on every customer who walks in the door (that’s the part where the soul sucking comes in).

First, we have to approach/accost every customer entering the store, ask them if they need help and tell them about our weekly promotion whether it looks like they’d be interested or not… “Excuse me sir, I know you’re only killing time while your wife is in Lord and Taylor, but all of our Chicken Soup for the Soul books are Buy-1-Get-1-Half-Price this week!”

Then once we have the customer at the cashwrap (corporate speak for “cash register”) we have to ask them the following:
“Did you find everything that you were looking for?”
“Will there be anything else today? Any candy or gift cards?”
“May I have your Rewards card?”
“Oh, you don’t have one? Here, it’s FREE! Just fill out this form with your email and phone number and you’ll get great coupons, in-store specials and earn rewards!”
If they say NO, we have to say “Oh, but it’s Free, it only takes a second to fill out and we keep all of your information confidential!" (but we will bombard your Inbox with junk email every week). If they say NO again, and it’s my manager that’s helping them, she’ll slam down the form, give them a dirty look, and talk about how “rude” they were once they leave the store.
If they already have the card but didn’t bring it with them we have to say….”I can look it up for you!” (at which point they give us six variations of their email and phone number none of which we can find in the computer, which means they don’t get the Rewards and all the people on line are pissed because it’s taking so long to ring up one customer)

After the Rewards push is over, we have to note what they’re buying and suggest other titles that they might be interested in (as if they’re going to get off the line to find our suggestion and go through this process all over again)
We also have to push a weekly “cashwrap” item that is propped up in front of the register (and leaves little room for the customer to put their purchases on the counter). It’s either a book that the company is overstocked on or a special “Rewards Member Only" item like a tote bag or cheesy recipe gift set.
After pushing that, we often have an “end of sale promotion” like “Would you like to donate to the First Book foundation that gives first books to children?” or “Would you like to purchase a book for us to donate to the local Women’s Shelter?” Both of which are great causes, but at this point in the transaction most people are secretly shouting “Enough!” as they politely grit their teeth and say “No thank you, not today.”

The kicker is, we’re expected to do this with every customer, regardless if it’s a teenager buying a magazine or an overwrought mother who’s dealing with three screaming kids and who just wants to pay for her book and get out of the store.

Finally, every couple of months we have to hand out “Customer Service” survey forms, and instruct the customer to call the phone number on the form, take the survey and get a 15% coupon. During the survey the customer is asked if the bookseller asked them all of the above questions and if they say “No” (whether it’s true or not) our store’s “CSI” scores plummet beneath the desirable “response/positive percentage” level. Then the District Manage berates our Manager and she berates us for offering bad customer service. It doesn’t matter how friendly we are or how much time we spend helping the customer and making sure they’ve found what they’re looking for…..If we fail to push every promotion that the corporate office expects us to we can be written up or fired.


Our monthly job performance reviews are based on our UPT score (units sold per transaction) and our Rewards percentage (how many people use their cards or sign up for the card when we’re on the register). My Rewards percentage is hovering around 54% while my manager consistently brags that she has an 89% and “if she can do it, we all can do it” – Never mind that she often picks and chooses who she rings up (someone carrying a pile of books who’s likely to already have the card) and will continue to push the card after a customer says “No” until they finally say “yes” just to get out of the store.
My fellow employees have percentages in the low 70’s but they’ve outright admitted to me that they cheat. They scan the card and stuff it in the customer’s bag even if the customer says ‘No’ or, if they can’t find the customer’s info in the computer they choose any email on the list that pops up so they get credit for the sale but some other customer is earning the rewards. I have vowed never to stoop to cheating regardless of how much the manager berates me because she “knows that I can do better.”
What do I care?… I’ll be gone in a few months, but my fellow employees (who are all great with the customers) are almost forced to be dishonest in order to keep their jobs.

Each employee is also required to read the company’s daily online “E-News” which is full of mind-numbing corporate speak like “increase your upsell” and “Correct placement of EGC and the RDC is critical to fourth quarter earnings elevation.”

Can’t you just hear my soul being sucked out as we speak?

I’ll take church aggravation over corporate aggravation any day…
At least parishioners arguing over the choice of carpet in the sanctuary will never say things like: “The impending selection of ground level covering is not within the parameters of our previously requisitioned selection, therefore we will need to move forward with an alternative product to satisfy our core base, otherwise revenue intake in the coming quarter will suffer a reduction, thus affecting our intake/outtake ratio”

Translation: “Pick a different color rug or the offering plate will be empty this week”


Somebody get me a drum, I gots me some banging to do!

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name...

What was it that T.S. Elliot said about “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time?”

It was exactly one year ago this week that I received the dissapointing news from the Boston school that put my seminary plans on hold for a year. After stomping my feet and pouting because I didn’t get the scholarship that I was so sure I was going to get, I decided to take my business elsewhere and began looking longingly at a school in NYC. I deferred my admission to Boston…and then surprise, surprise, one of their scholarship students got shipped off to Iraq and the money earmarked for him landed in my lap. But alas, my loving gaze had already shifted to NYC, and Boston was moved into the “maybe, but only if I don’t get a scholarship from NY” column. With Boston set as my safety school, I tossed both balls in the air and decided to wait until the spring of ’08 to see where they’d fall.

Well, I’m happy to say that they’ve finally fallen…
….and they didn’t land where I expected them to.
And all I have to say is: “Thank God for that!”

I’m going to Boston!

I knew from the start that anything short of a full scholarship to NYC would have me packing my bags to Boston. Between tuition, housing, food, transportation and books, the price tag for NY hovers around $98,000 for their three-year M.Div program. That may be doable for someone on the path to academia and professorship (and the tenure/salary that goes along with it), but at that price those of us who’ll be cashing the paycheck of a clergy person will most likely be paying off student loans until the day we die.

But even if NY did come through with a full scholarship I didn’t want my choice of school to be based solely on money.
So, being my usual analytical/neurotic self, before I received my admissions letter from NY I sat down and made a Pros and Cons list for both schools - on an Excel spreadsheet complete with multi-colored fonts and shadings - and in the end I concluded that Boston is really where I want to go.
Just to be sure, I arranged to take a second look at the Boston school and after taking a trip up there two weeks ago I feel confident that I’ve made the right choice.

The curriculum has a good balance between the practical and the theoretical, the new chapel is beautiful (and now has the daily worship services that drew me towards NY), the classrooms have been renovated and updated, and the students that I met had nothing but good things to say about the quality of the professors and the closeness of the community.

But in the end there were two areas in particular that drew me towards Boston and away from NY:
The campus, and the people.

The campus: As much as I loved the beautiful gothic architecture of the NYC school and the fact that it’s closer location would make it easier to come home every weekend, I had to admit to myself that I’m just not an urban kind of girl.
I commuted to NYC from Long Island when I went to Audio Engineering school in my twenties, and again when I secured an internship after I graduated. But as exciting as the city was I needed to leave it behind every night. I needed the greener, wider open spaces of suburbia. And now that I’m living in more rural western CT I need space and greenery even more.
I need trees, the sound of birds during the day and crickets and peepers at night, a peaceful space to study and recharge. The school just outside of Boston has all that, the one in the center of NYC does not.

The people: The students I talked to at the Boston school seemed happier and more energized, and had fewer negative things to say about their experience at their school.
The people in admissions were much friendlier and seemed to actually care whether I chose to go to their school or not. Something as small as receiving a personable email from Boston asking me if I’d like to visit again, while NY remained either silent or provided me with stock answers to questions that did not address my unique situation.
Unlike NY, the people in the admissions department at Boston remembered me from when I visited and thus treated me as an individual; I wasn’t just a name on an application….and that made all the difference.

I finally heard from NY last week and while I was accepted into the M.Div program, I did not get a full tuition scholarship. I received a half-tuition grant, which is still a good amount of money, but it would leave too much of a balance to be covered by student loans.
But in the end it didn’t matter, Boston is where I want to be.

A*ndover N*ewton here I come!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!

You Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy fans out there may remember that the Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything is "42."
A number produced using the hypercomputer, Deep Thought, after a very long computation time (7.5 million years).

Well today I have reached that magic number.
So in the coming year I hope to obtain the knowledge, the wisdom, and the solutions to all of life's conundrums that have up until this point eluded me...

What is the meaning of life?
Does God exist?
Why is there suffering in the world?
Is the addition of Johan Santana enough to give the NY Mets a World Series win this year?
and...What the hell was Elliot Spitzer thinking?


I will keep you posted as the kernels of wisdom begin to force their way to the surface in this my 42nd year.
I suggest you check back frequently as this blog evolves into the oracle of knowledge that it is destined to become...
(of course, with a plethora of kitty pictures, cute kid videos, and blasphemous cartoons thrown in to keep the mood light...and because I just can't help myself...)

tick...tick...tick...tick...

Well, it has now been THREE MONTHS since I mailed off my application to the NYC seminary so I went ahead and contacted the admissions office today to see why I haven't heard anything as of yet and they said it will be another two weeks before the acceptance letters go out...maybe....they're not making any promises....everyone in admissions is on spring break right now so they can't confirm anything....call back next week.

grooooaaaaaannnnnn.....

Unfortunately I have to let the Boston seminary know ASAP whether I'll be accepting the admission/scholarship that I deferred from last year.
They gave me an April 2008 deadline, with no specific date, but I'd like to let them know as early as possible. Should I decide not to go it will free up the scholarship for another student who's probably home biting their nails right now just like I am.

Two weeks.
Maybe.
Excuse me while I go watch paint dry...




"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."
Will Rogers

I'm so going to Hell.....

(click on the cartoon to enlarge)

I just don't get it....

Our friends in the Episcopal Church continue to have their hands full with those rouge congregations who have carried through on their threat to quit the ECUSA. After pouting and holding their breath because the bible-busting liberals had gone and ordained (gasp!) gay and lesbian clergy and then (shriek!) had the gall to push the bar even further by installing non-celibate gay bishops, and (ack!) don’t even get me started on the fact that they went ahead and elected a WOMAN as the grand-poobah of the whole ECUSA shebang….the dissenting congregations finally threw up their hands, took their ball, and announced for all to hear that if the lefty-libbies didn’t play the game by their rules then they would just march on home and find someone else who would.
So off they went to join the renegade cool kids gang, known as the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, and they now bow to the will of Nigerian archbishop Peter Akinola… a lovely little man who believes that all homosexuals should be rounded up and imprisoned for the hateful crime they have committed against society…you know, the crime of loving, living, breathing…

Not content with removing their bodies and their pledge units from the ECUSA, the 11 congregations who dissented in Virginia are now embroiled in a court battle to keep the 30 million dollars in church property that rightfully belongs to the ECUSA (see story here.)
In other words, they don’t want to play with the liberal leaning Christians, but that doesn’t mean they should have to give up their pretty little church buildings and all the shiny baubles contained within that they’ve come to know and love.

The dissenters expect to spend as much as 3-5 million dollars on litigation that could take as long as three years to complete.

Does anyone else recognize the cognitive dissonance that arises with this little situation???

Here we have a group of religious people who are so committed to following the literal and inerrant Word of God as presented in scripture, that they’re willing to uproot entire congregations and spend millions of dollars to ensure they stay on the course that God had intended. The problem is, they’ve chosen to hinge their entire point of battle on a handful of biblical passages that (supposedly) declare homosexuality as a sin and prohibit the ordination of women.
In all, we’re talking about less than five scriptural passages.
...One line in the priestly laws of Leviticus, the explanation of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, one paragraph in Paul’s letter to the Romans, and the line in 1 Corinthians that prohibits women from speaking in church…(which BTW contradicts Paul’s earlier assertion that women as well as men were meant to prophesize God’s word and has led some scholars to declare that 1 Corinthians was not written by Paul but by a later follower with a different agenda).

So, on one side of the scale we have a set of passages that are either of questionable origin or are open to multiple interpretations, and would fill only a half a page if listed together.
On the other side of the scale we have all the biblical passages that speak directly of compassion, love, mercy, judge-not-yet-ye-be-judged, the unity of the church, how one hand has to work with the other not against it, not to mention all the flat out commands contained in both the Old and the New Testament to give to the poor, feed the hungry, liberate the oppressed, etc. etc.

This is a lopsided scale indeed.

Yet somehow our rouge ex-Episcopalians have chosen to ignore the heavy side of the scale and have placed all their energy and righteous rage on the side that could be blown away in one breath.

In direct violation of the words of Christ himself, who said “whatever you do to the least among us, you do to me,” these 11 congregations have aligned themselves with a Nigerian faction bent on exclusion (at the least) and imprisonment and death (at the worst) of those whom they have judged to be morally corrupt (again, on the basis of a handful of scriptural passages).
And to further confound true Christian sensibilities, they’ve chosen to take 5 million dollars that could be spent on the aforementioned poor, hungry and oppressed, and use it instead to line the pockets of lawyers in a fight to keep their buildings and baubles.

This is a group of Christians who have chosen to put their numbers and their weight on the lesser side of the scale in an effort to tip it towards their side, to make it seem as if they are fighting for the sanctity of the Bible, for the Word of God Himself.

Never mind that most of the Bible they’re defending is lying ignored on the other side of the scale…
And that this portion of the Bible contains a weight that they will never be able to counter balance, regardless of how many obscure Priestly laws or suspect Pauline letters they try to pull onto their side….that is the Word, the weight, of Jesus Christ Himself.


It seems overly simple to me, but even if one believes in the marrow of one’s bones that homosexuality is a sin based on a handful of God’s words, one must look at the tidal wave of love and compassion contained in all of God’s other words, and one has no choice but to leave the judging of others to God…and get on with the lifting up of others; those who have fallen and those who have been pushed down by human hands.
And nowhere, NOWHERE, in the Bible does God/Jesus give us permission to be the ones doing the pushing.

That alone should tell us that we have no right to be playing with the scales in the first place.

Wednesday Words of Wisdom - Star Wars style

I couldn't resist posting this one (although Eileen the Episcopalifem beat me to the punch) cuz it's just too darn cute!
Here it is, the viral video of the week:
Star Wars according to a 3-year-old.





And our Wednesday Words of Wisdom:
"Don't talk back to Darth Vader...he'll getcha!"

Zzzzzzzz....

It's good to have Monday off...
Sleep in, go to the grocery store and buy Yodels, sleep some more.
But soon I will have to pry myself out of this chair and go to a Ministry Council meeting at church. Perhaps they won't notice if I nod off half way through.
It's definitely a two kitty-bed day.

Friday (not so) Fun Video

I ran across this clip from the television show ER on another blog and I was surprised at the mixed reaction that I had after watching it. The clip features a confrontation between the show’s hospital chaplain and a dying man - a doctor who had worked as a prison executioner. The man was convinced that God would not forgive him for the ‘murders’ he had committed and he had no hope for salvation.
Watch the clip and then read on:




My first reaction after seeing this clip was: “Oh my God, that’s going to be me.”
During seminary I’ll be required to do a semester of training as a hospital chaplain, and I’ve heard from other pastors that it really is a trial by fire. As in, ‘here’s your name badge, here’s a list of patients who may or may not be happy to see you, now go visit them.’ It’s literally all about walking blindly into hospital rooms, not knowing anything about the patient you’re approaching, what their illness is or what their religious beliefs are, or whether they even have any desire to see a chaplain or not.

When I saw this clip from ER it frightened me.
What would I say to this man?
Being a progressive Christian, my theology is not based on a need to have all the answers.
My theology is of the fluid, ambiguous, we-can’t-possibly-know-what-God-is-thinking variety.
I compare it to the feeling one gets when standing on wet sand at the edge of the shoreline, as the waves roll in and out. As the water rolls past your ankles you can feel the sand shifting beneath your feet. You’d swear that you’re moving along with the waves, being pulled first away from the shore and then further onto it, you fight to keep your balance but when the water recedes you find that you haven’t moved at all.
This is what theology feels like to me.
Constantly shifting and moving around me, occasionally throwing me off balance, but in the end the movement is all an illusion. Regardless of how my beliefs evolve or change I’m still standing right where God intends me to be, centered within the unmovable mover.

I have no need for black and white theological dogmas or set in stone creeds. I don’t have concrete beliefs about sin, suffering, evil, or the existence of hell. I have an understanding of what others believe, and I’m hoping that seminary will help me to solidify what it is that ‘I Believe’ so that I can better articulate it, but I don’t expect to come out of seminary with a renewed certainty about anything.

Do I believe that Hell is an actual place where evil doers are destined to be tortured for eternity while a vengeful God turns his back on them?
No.
Do I believe that Hell is a self-imposed state in which lost souls find themselves when they’ve turned away from God, but all they need to do is choose love over fear and they will be released from their hellish state and discover that God’s love, forgiveness, mercy, and grace had never left them, they had only failed to see it while encased in the darkness that their own fear had created?
Yes I do believe this. At this point in my life.

Does this make me a wishy-washy, new-age, God-is-only-Love type of Christian?
I guess it does.
So how will I respond to those who DO need concrete answers?

What do I say to those who see my ambiguity as a sign of weakness, a symptom of an ‘unreal’ faith?
What would I say to a dying man who shouts out in his pain:
“I want a real chaplain who believes in a real God and a real hell!”
Interestingly enough, when I did a search for this quote from the clip on Google to find out what other bloggers were saying about it, I found it mentioned primarily on sites that are of the more biblical-fundamentalist variety. These bloggers were championing the words of the dying man in this clip, giving each other spiritual high fives over the fact that the man spoke ‘the truth’ and made the wimpy, post-modernistic female chaplain run from the room in tears. One blogger wrote:
“I want to be that REAL chaplain that this man is searching for.”

I’m not sure which scares me more - having OTHERS expect me to have all the answers when I believe I do not, or believing that I DO have all the answers and that God will somehow become ‘unreal’ to me if I do not.

Thankfully, my google search also brought me to the blog of a woman who has been a hospital chaplain for over 30 years. She too was disturbed by the clip, not because the female chaplain was espousing the ‘wrong’ theology, but because she was trying to ease the fears of dying man using a theological language that was not his own.
She wrote:
“I learned early on in my training that it isn’t about me and what I believe. It is about the patient and what he or she believes.”
A ‘real’ chaplain knows to “put aside her personal theology and give the patient what he or she needs to be at peace. If that means going against a personal belief, so be it.”

Words of wisdom that I will not soon forget.

I may not believe in a vengeful God, an eternal Hell, or the existence of an unforgivable sin, but that doesn’t make the loving, merciful God that I do believe in any less real.
And it doesn’t mean I can’t learn to speak the theological language of those who feel more comfortable with beliefs that are set in concrete rather than scratched into sand, and learn what it is they need to hear to feel the loving presence of God.

Friday Fun Video - Vicar of Dibley

It feels like a Dibley day so here's some Dibley for your day.
Enjoy!

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways?

It was eight years ago today that I received an email that changed my life.
It was a response to an ad I had placed on Yahoo Personals.
The ad was done on a lark.
A friend of mine had asked me to write an ad for her, and as a way to ‘test the waters’ and join her in her adventure, I placed an ad for myself as well.
I never expected to meet the love of my life.
But I did.

I was resistant at first.
She lived 95 miles away in another state.
I had just gotten out of a short, but intense relationship with another respondent to my ad that had drained both my energy and my level of hope, and I wasn’t sure that I was ready to try again so soon.

We exchanged emails at first but in my uncertainty I didn’t respond as quickly as I should. My guard was up.
But she was persistent.

I had just gotten home from work one evening and I was lacing up my running shoes getting ready to go out for a run when I noticed an instant message had popped up on my computer.
It took me a minute to deduce that the sender was my ad respondent and immediately my head began to spin with conflicting emotions.
I’m not ready.
I should let this drop.
I can’t do this again.

I moved the mouse curser over the small x in the corner of the IM box.
With one click it would be over.
I let the curser hover there for an instant,
and then something inside of me said ‘No’
Don’t throw this away.
Take a chance.
Walk through the door that has opened in front of you.

So I did.
IM’s and emails progressed to phone calls, and six weeks later, after she returned from a long planned trip to Scotland, we finally met.

She arrived at my house earlier than expected.
I had just arrived home after working a 72-hour week and was upstairs in a vacuuming, cleaning frenzy when she rang the doorbell.
I didn’t hear it.
For 10 minutes she continued to knock with a rising fear that I was not home, or worse, I had changed my mind and was refusing to answer the door.
As if.
Finally I glanced out the window and saw her car parked out front and in a frantic panic I ran to my upstairs bedroom to change.
Looking completely disheveled in my carefully picked ‘first date outfit’ I flung open the door at the top of the stairs just as she was poking her head in the front door below.
The initial look of fear and uncertainty on her face soon changed to a broad smile and warm and inviting eyes.

My heart leapt out of my chest the first time I saw her.
And it still leaps every morning when I wake up next to her, every evening when we see each other after work, and every day that I get to spend in her presence.
Eight years on and she still makes me feel just as giddy and warm and fuzzy inside as she did when we first met.
She is my rock.
She is my anchor.
She is the love of my life.

There was a time when I thought this kind of love was impossible to find.
Relationships were hard.
Relationships were work.
Relationships were painful.
Relationships usually involved one person wanting/needing more than the other.
Now I know that this isn’t true.
There is love out there for us to find, we just need to look in the right place,
And with the right intention.

And we need to recognize it and be open to it when it comes along.

Twice I left the love of my life waiting on my doorstep.
And both times she took a chance and poked her head in anyway.

And on this Valentines Day, I feel blessed with the opportunity that God has given me to open myself up to love each and every day.

So...
The next time you hear a knock on the door, answer it.
You never know what you’ll find waiting for you on the other side.




How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

One year on....

Well, in my present preoccupied stupor I’ve gone and done it…I missed my own Blogoversary!
January 26, 2007 was the birth date of this mish-mosh of a blog, and while I haven’t been as attentive to it of late, I’m glad I’ve kept it going. In the past 12 months I’ve met a lot of great people, discovered a bunch of fantastic blogs, and managed to unwittingly provoke those who stand on the opposite side of the Christian fence simply by being who I am.
It’s been a fun year!

The traditional gift for a one-year anniversary is paper.
And I still have my fingers crossed that this paper gift will come in the form of an acceptance letter to the NY seminary, preferably with the words “scholarship” and “full-tuition” mixed in there somewhere.

It has now been over 2 months since I mailed my application, and one month since I emailed them to confirm that my application is considered ‘complete.’
Yet everyday the mail only brings more credit card bills and subscription offers for clergy magazines. How sad is it that the junk-mail marketing firms have acknowledged my career intentions while the seminary remains eerily silent.

So I continue to spend my days shelving books, planning Sunday School lessons, and trying to ignore the pangs of uncertainty that come when one is left in limbo, waiting to see which door is going to open next…..and trying not to get my sights too focused on one door, especially when there is a good possibility that it won’t open as far, or as soon, as I’d like.

In the meantime, I will celebrate my one-year blogoversary by foraging for paper in the kitchen….I’m pretty sure there are some chocolate bars in there with paper wrappers that fit the bill.

Friday Fun Video - Wieners for Jesus

This one has got it all...kidnapping, suspense, religious persecution, wiener poopie.

You can't make this stuff up.

Is this Soap Box taken?

They say the two subjects that one should never discuss at the dinner table or in mixed company are religion and politics…..well I’ve already broken that rule here in regards to religion (wave hello to all the Christo-fascists who still stop by here occasionally to see if I’ve said anything worth flaming me over)…so why not wade into the murky waters of politics as well?

I did my civic duty and voted on Tuesday. I went mid-morning to avoid the ‘crowds’ that all the news outlets had said to expect. The ‘crowd’ at my local polling place consisted of five octogenarians and one half-asleep college student holding a Hillary sign in the parking lot. Inside, all of the seniors were crowded around the Republican table, which gave me a clear shot to the Democrat table. I filled out my paper ballot, slid it through the optical scanner and I was in and out in under 5 minutes.

The process would have taken even less time if one of the seniors in front of me at the scanner hadn’t had his ballot repeatedly rejected by the machine. The volunteer stationed at the scanner suggested to the man that he may have ‘inadvertently’ voted for two people, and sure enough the woman in front of me held up her ballet to look at it and I noticed she had voted for McCain and Huckabee. The two of them got off the line and had to go back and request replacement ballots. Printed clearly across the top of our ballots were the instructions to Pick ONE Candidate but apparently that doesn’t apply to people who just can’t make up their minds.
I know those of us on the Democratic side have had a hard time choosing between two candidates who are essentially similar (gender and race notwithstanding), but McCain and Huckabee?? From what I’ve gleaned from the talking heads on TV, these candidates are of two different political stripes (moderate vs Christian conservative) and the average Republican voter is either for one or the other.

Of course, that’s assuming that the average voter takes the time to understand who it is they’re actually voting for. One of the 21-year-olds that I work with said he would probably vote for Obama because he “can’t stand Hillary,” but “Huckabee is kind of cool too.”
WTF????
When I explained to him that his choices are on opposite ends of the political spectrum he admitted that all he know about Huckabee came from his appearances on The Daily Show.
Once again personality trumps issues.

Not that it matters in this young man’s case, he was counting down the hours until he turned 21 and could legally drink, but registering to vote isn’t even on his radar screen. He loves to comment on politics and initiates most of the Bush-bashing that goes on at work, but he has no plans to actually participate in the process that would give him a voice in how this country is run.
And he has plenty of company.

The news outlets are touting how this primary had a “record turnout” in the 24 states in which they were held, but those “record” numbers amounted on average to about 30% of registered voters. New York had a “record” 18% turnout at their primary. 18%???? Granted, this was only a primary, registered Independents were not included, and the other 82% of NYers were probably doing their civic duty by attending the Giants Super Bowl victory parade, but even in Presidential elections the average voter turnout in this country is only 50-55%, that puts the US in 20th place out of 21 nations that have established democracies. Only Switzerland is worse than us when it comes to voter turnout (those crazy Swiss, they just love exercising their right to be neutral).

I would expect that the political party that supports our current President and the war he instigated in the name of protecting our American Way of Life, would have a 100% turnout on election day. It seems to me that if one is willing to send young men and women to die in the name of freedom, one would actually take advantage of said freedom and get off one’s keaster and vote. But that’s just me.
I’m just a crazy liberal lesbian who’s undermining the fabric of this God-fearing nation just by existing.
But I voted. Heh, heh. heh, (insert evil laugh here).

American apathy usually takes the blame for our abysmal voter turn outs. People are tired of politics, they mistrust politicians in general, and they don’t have the time or the inclination to educate themselves on the issues or the candidates (that would cut into the time allotted to watching American Idol and reading up on the trials and tribulations of Britney Spears).
So we glean what we can from paid commercials, candidate appearances on TV talk shows, and 5-second sound bites from the 13 debates that we didn’t watch.

And we wonder why people choose candidates based on personality/likeability?
“Heck, this guy may have a voting record that is polar opposite to what I believe, but he made me laugh when I saw him on the David Letterman show so he’s got my vote!”

Aaaaarrrghhhh!

This is how we ended up with you-know-who for eight years.
People voted for the good-old-boy who rode horses and talked just like them, rather than the guy who flaunted his education with all sorts of big words and complex responses to questions that made him look all wishy-washy-flippy-floppy.

We want simple responses and black and white solutions.
We want someone who’ll stick to their guns no matter how unreasonable it is to do so.
We want the decider.
We got him.
And I’m ready to give him back.

So the moral to this little diatribe is:

EDUCATE yourselves and VOTE!

Vote for the candidate who you feel will best represent you and the kind of country you want to live in, be it Democrat, Republican, or Independent.

And try not to be like the woman who came into the bookstore yesterday and asked me if I knew the results of Tuesday’s primary. When I mentioned that McCain had a substantial lead she said “You know, there’s something about McCain that just rubs me the wrong way…I’m a life-long Republican, but Hillary is starting to look pretty good.”
Sooooo…..Bush was good enough for her but McCain is not.
She must like Hillary’s pant suits.

Counting Dimes

I hate dimes.
More to the point, I hate counting dimes.
Part of my responsibilities as a keyholder at the bookstore involves counting the money in the cash registers whenever I open or close the store. It’s a tedious job and it’s a particular pain at closing when I have to balance what is in the drawers with what the daily total says we’re supposed to have. It’s usually the dimes that trip me up. They’re small and don’t take up much space which usually leads to our cashiers thinking they have fewer in the drawer than they actually do, which in turn causes them to open and dump more rolls of dimes into the register. They don’t care. I’m the one who has to count them all at the end of the day. And in my haste to get it done I inevitably end up flinging them into the drawer at too fast a rate and thus miscounting them. Unfortunately I never realize this until my numbers are out of balance and I have to go back and count the drawers all over again.
I hate dimes.

As I was mindlessly counting the change in the register drawers last night I realized that I have been doing this particular task since I was 18-years-old. Apart from a two-year period where I had a corporate job, and the year and a half I took off to finish school, I have been counting cash drawers in one retail establishment or another for almost 24 years. That’s a lot of dimes.

There are things that I like about retail – organizing the inventory, creating displays, meeting different people every day – and there are things that I hate about retail – working weekends and holidays, the low pay, dealing with irrational customers – but I’ve been doing it for so long I know that as bad it can get sometimes, I can handle it - I know the good outweighs the bad. For every bad day I have where I’m the only employee in the store with the phone ringing off the hook, deliveries coming in the back door, the registers breaking down, and a line of impatient customers stretching to the back of the store, I know I’ll have good days when I get to spend hours in the back room by myself opening new shipments and sorting books onto the shelves (yes, that it is a GOOD day in my view…I’m a freak, what can I say).

Retail can be hell at times but it’s a known hell.
I can’t say the same about the career I keep telling myself I’ve been ‘called’ to go into.
The ministry right now is a few knowns and a whole bunch of unknowns, and thinking about those unknowns is what causes me to wonder if I’m making the right move.

When I’m stocking shelves and organizing books I realize how much I love these orderly, solitary tasks and I fear that the ministry may be too messy and people oriented for my introverted self.
But then I start counting dimes.
And I feel stuck in a rut, doing the same thing over and over again because it’s easy and ‘comfortable’…..allowing fear to keep me from stretching beyond my current capabilities, denying the God-given talent that everyone keeps telling me I have and holding onto the things that keep me small.

There’s a constant struggle going on in my head between who I am and who I think I’m supposed to be. A battle between my desire for comfort and my desire for change.

In change I find challenge. The desire to challenge myself led me into bike racing, back to church, through college, into the pulpit.
But the ‘challenges’ I take on usually involve setting a goal, designing a plan to reach that goal and taking the necessary steps to accomplish it.
I had a training plan, a racing schedule, a curriculum to follow, a GPA to maintain, an order of service to design, a sermon to craft.
The challenges I seek out rarely require seat-of-the-pants decision making or unpredictable circumstances. What they do require is a huge amount of self-discipline and adherence to a rigid routine.
Some people jump out of airplanes or hitch-hike around the world because they enjoy the spontaneity of these challenges, they like to leave order behind and revel in chaos for awhile. I am the opposite.
I like to take chaos and put it into order.
Which is probably why I love doing puzzles – word jumbles, number puzzles, logic problems, and good old-fashioned jigsaw. Give me a box of pieces and I’ll happily spend hours trying to assemble it into something that makes sense, something that can be identified and labeled.

Even at work I seek out challenges as a means of implementing order.
I’m happiest when I’m squirreled away in a back room somewhere putting piles of random items into organized categories, taking a cluttered and chaotic environment and putting everything in its place.

But what does this say about how I can expect to perform as a minister?
As a minister I will encounter messes that I can’t put into order.
I will encounter situations and problems that are much more complex then fixing a broken cash register or appeasing an unhappy customer.
I will encounter people who will demand much more of my time than the five-minute interactions I have working retail.

Am I going against my personality type and forcing myself into a career for which I am ill-suited just because everyone else believes that I can do it?
Or am I holding onto what I am, who I am, because I lack the confidence and the vision to see that I can be so much more if I let go of the attitude that keeps me small and comfortable, and instead heed the persistent sense of dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment that makes me long for change.
I’ve spent my life trying to reconcile these conflicting inner desires.
My need for comfort and routine constantly butts up against my craving for new challenges, new routines, and change.

Change is growth inspiring.
Change is inevitable.
Change is God’s way of showing us that despite our feeble attempts to create order out of chaos the pieces don’t always fit where we expect them to.

Change is good.


Except for dimes...
I hate dimes.

Blogger down

Fellow blogger Eileen the Episcopalifem is in a funk and requested that we send some good humor her way, so I'm sending the following blasphemous video out in her honor.
Those with more sensitive dispositions are cautioned to avert their eyes towards the end....and for the middle bit....ok well, for pretty much the whole thing.
Enjoy!

Psyche!

Well, our first ‘significant snow’ of the season never materialized.
The weather guys were yapping about us receiving up to foot of snow yesterday and we barely got enough to make shoveling worthwhile.
Of course all the schools chose not to open based on the forecast so my SO had a freebie day off while I had to trudge into work.
Surprisingly, the mall wasn’t as busy as I expected it to be with all the kids off from school and the roads clear. I guess everybody was home eating all the food they stocked up on the day before….. "oh my God, we may be trapped in our houses for a half a day before they plow, quick, let’s go buy a week’s worth of bread and milk!”

What a disappointment.
We even got a phone call from the town’s mayor telling us not to park on the street due the ‘Snow Emergency’....
He promised us 8 inches and we only got 2.
Typical man.


But what we got sure does look purty!

Happy New Year! (10 days late...)

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
For how long, I don’t know. I’ve just been sooo busy…working, writing my seminary essay, leading yet another worship service, playing Mario Carts on my Nintendo DS, eating the head off my Lindt chocolate Santa, doing, you know, important stuff…


The main distraction I’ve had is work. It’s been many years since I worked retail during the Christmas season, and this was my first time experiencing Holiday Hell in a mall. Let’s put it this way, at 10:30 a.m. on January 1st I let out a huge sigh of relief…that’s when the mall stopped playing Christmas music and started playing plain old mall music (which in this case was Sarah McLachlan, which was kind of cool).
By the end of the day Santa’s house and picture station was dismantled and rolled away in crates, the garland strings were gone from the ceiling, and I could actually walk through the mall without crashing into the holiday masses. And masses are what they were…..women pushing huge car shaped carts overloaded with kids and shopping bags, men wearing football jerseys and construction boots clustered around the directories with baffled looks on their faces because they only set foot inside a mall once a year and have no idea what to buy or where to buy it, packs of middle schoolers swarming like schools of fish with giggling girls and self-conscious looking boys, all completely clueless to the fact that there are other people in the mall who may need to actually get somewhere…….and of course when I say “other people” I mean me…..

Our bookstore is at one end of the mall (in the side corridor leading to Lord & Taylor where our only passersby are mall walkers and the elderly) and our seasonal Calendar kiosk is all the way at the other end of the mall. As a keyholder I had to leave the store to pull money out of the kiosk cash drawer on an almost hourly basis and respond to the frequent calls for change, bags, and 10 minute breaks. In addition to this, I had to make numerous trips to the mall’s bank deposit/change machine located down a long dark hallway in the bowels of the mall underground.
If you’re looking to stave off putting on the holiday pounds next year I suggest pouring all the change you have in your house into a plastic bag, tucking it under your arm like a football, and dashing from one end of the mall to the other while trying to avoid crashing into the aforementioned holiday masses…and then repeat this exercise every 20 minutes for 8 hours. I’ve gotten so good at ducking and diving and finding the holes in the crowd that I’m thinking of trying out for the Patriots next year.

Of course I may whine about it about it now, but this is the first year in a long time that my New Year’s resolution hasn’t been to “work out and lose weight”…..work is enough of a workout and despite all the crap I’ve been eating since Thanksgiving I haven’t gained an ounce (send all hate email to stfu_mocat@biteme.com).
I will now go consume the rest of my chocolate Santa and pray that my post-holiday work hours don’t get cut leading to a deflation of my bank account and an inflation of my waistline.



Who says size doesn't matter? Give me the big one baby...

introvert > extrovert

I haven't had a personality test fix in a while so when I stumbled across this one I decided to give it a go (and waste 10 minutes that could have been spent working on my seminary entrance essay).
Surprise, surprise! It says I am an INFJ.
It's that damn "Which do you prefer: going out or staying home?" question...it gets me every time.

Here we go again...

Ahhhhhh, a day off from work.
I’ve spent the morning doing laundry, cleaning out my closet, pulling out my winter clothes, and cleaning up the kitchen.
I did all of this not just because it needed to get done, but because the alternative activity I had planned for today was getting to work on my seminary entrance essay.
Our house is always at it’s most cleanest when I’m in procrastination mode.

My reluctance to get started partially stems from a ‘been there, done that’ feeling that’s hanging over my head. I did this all already. The essay, the recommendations, the financial aid applications, the endless waiting and worrying.

Now the process starts all over again.
And I’m staring at a blank page that will be my admissions essay.
When I made the decision to defer admission to the Boston school and apply to the NYC school for next year I had delusions of recycling the same essay.
After reviewing the application for the NYC school I’ve realized that I’m not getting off the hook that easy.

The Boston school asked for a “Reflection Essay” centered on questions about my faith journey, my career aspirations and the personal/social/political issue that most concerns me. Right up my right-brained alley.

The NYC school requires an “Admissions Statement” that is less interested in my spiritual journey and calling, and more interested in my academic interests and theological struggles. Which requires an unexpected detour to my lesser used (since I graduated) left-brain alley.

Where the Boston school asks the applicant to “describe the ministry to which you feel called and the gifts you see yourself bringing to that ministry,” the NYC school requires the applicant to ‘state a major theological dilemma that you wish to analyze during your studies at Seminary, and explain in detail the importance of this intellectual problem for you.”

Ouch.

While the Boston application seems directed towards those with aspirations towards ordained ministry, the NYC application seems stilted towards those with more academic ambitions.

And therein lies my problem.

I can go on for pages when asked to write about my faith journey and the call I feel to the ministry. Responses to those kind of questions just seem to flow out of me.
But this ‘theological dilemma’ question has me at a standstill.
While I’ve wrestled with theological issues on and off throughout my spiritual journey and as a Religious Studies major in college, I’ve never really sat down and pondered one particular theological issue at length. That’s just not where my primary interest lies. I want to help people; minister to their needs, lift them up and help them move closer to God. While addressing all of the theological questions that get stirred up simply by mentioning the word “God” is fascinating to me, it’s not THE reason why I want to go to seminary.

Sigh.
I’m just whining and procrastinating because writing from the heart is so much easier for me than writing from the head.

So.
Here I sit in front of a blank page pondering whether theodicy, the divinity of Jesus, the effectiveness of petitionary prayer, or the ‘grace through faith or works’ debate is THE theological dilemma that I can’t wait to wrestle with while at seminary.
Then I’ll have to do some reading/research to come up with some wordy, intellectual sounding details to flesh out my position, such as “According to Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, God allows evil to exist so that good may come of it…”

I know once I get started the creative pull will take over and I’ll find a way to tie in both the head and the heart. But it’s the getting started that has me dragging my feet.

You know, the bathroom could use a good scrubbing… and that dishwasher isn’t going to unload itself.

Off to work I go!
La de da de da!

Sickie wickie

Well it has finally happened.
After 3 years of being the picture of health I have managed to come down with a cold. A nasty sore-throat,runny-nose,plugged-ears, chills, feels-like-my-head-is-going-to-explode cold.

This cold conveniently descended upon me last night, on the eve of my scheduled day off which I had foolishly agreed to give up so my boss could take the day off instead (*cough...brown nose....cough*).
I also had a dentist appointment this morning to replace a cracked filling, and I have my period, both of which added to the misery of having to yank myself out of bed this morning.

While the dentist put in a temporary filling and gave me the bad news that the tooth needs a crown and possibly a root canal (ka-ching$), in my sick-induced-fog I managed to make another appointment for next week and head off to work, completely forgetting that I was supposed to stay at the dentist for an 11 a.m. cleaning.
While I was so looking forward to having my gums scraped with sharp pointy instruments, I can't say that I'm sorry I didn't add to my ears-nose-and-throat misery by throwing my sensitive teeth and bleeding gums into the pain pile.

I re-scheduled the cleaning for next week right after the crown fitting/root canal.
By then I hope to be over my cold, over my period, and lucid enough to say "no" to all attempts to relieve me of my day off.

Let's put it this way, I felt so crappy today I didn't even feel like opening boxes and shelving books.
I must be running a fever.