Brief

I'm about to leave for a family reunion this next week... so I won't be posting again probably until Sunday.

I met with "Father Bob" this past week, and I really liked him. But much as I liked this parish and the rector, and much as people assure me that I would be good at it, I have a hard time seeing myself doing youth work full time. But I'm glad I gave it a shot.

Trip to Wisconsin

I took a mini-vacation to see my old friend, Monica. I needed a weekend away... I've been spending too much time in front of computers and mired in transition. It was good to actually be a transition and fly down the highway in a car, concretely in-between for three hours each way. And then to live suspended in someone else's apartment, life, and group of friends. A place where I was supposed to feel liminal.

Mostly, I truly do feel content and at peace in all this, but this has been a tough day. Probably because tonight I'm going to have a conversation with a local priest about a youth position at his church. I like what I've heard about this parish, but I really don't want to be a youth pastor. I hope this is not because I'm being a snob. I just don't feel called to it. I never really have. It's strange, I feel deeply sad! Deeply sad about a nice drive to Suburb Z to meet with Rector Bob, who is really a neat person, as I hear. But sad, all the same. We'll see, maybe God will surprise me - it's always possible.

I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meanwhile, here are some shots from Madison:

American Players Theater - outdoor Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chehkov, Wilde....
we saw Shaw's "Misalliance."
The view from the concessions courtyard, over the Wisconsin hills,
an hour outside of Madison.

Me, armed with blankets in case it got cold.

Me and Monica, in our seats!

And in her backyard, lounging... another important way to be liminal.

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.
(overquoted from Julian of Norwich, I know.)

The biggest rubber duckie ever

Looks like some kind of bad dream, doesn't it? I wish I could claim my alma mater had something to do with it, but these folks in New York City have nothing to do with Wooster, Ohio... The Wooster Collective website with duckie

I think this could be called postmodern art, although who ever really knows what that is.

Dogsitting

This is Baxter and Thisbe - neighbors' dogs that I'm taking care of for a few days. They're fantastic. Baxter, as you can see, likes to carry his own leash.

And something funny from our walk... the USPS repainted a bunch of mailboxes when their Star Wars stamps came out this spring.

Blessed are those who wait

Well, I heard from St. X the other day. I sent in my essay questions and sermon - worked hard on the questions, felt good about the sermon. But I got an email yesterday saying that they won't be able to get back to us (there are six applicants now) until after August 20! That's over a month. Sigh.

But I'm getting used to my patchwork life... work on this, work on that, go to church, walk my neighbors' dogs while they're away, see my boyfriend when he's in town, miss him when he's away, see my brother and his girlfriend, go to the beach, see friends, come and go, etc. I worry about money, but so far, it's not too bad.

Ok, this is a totally boring post. I'll write a better one soon, hopefully today. I have to leave for a church meeting soon, and I'm a little anxious about driving in the severe rainstorm that's supposed to be opening up any minute.

Everyday sacred?

This is just a litany of boring everyday stuff... I suppose it's sacred, but it's also just a slow news day, as my parents like to say.

We got a big storm that cooled things down, finally. Here are the clouds rolling in...

I also took a photo with the contrasting blue-green of an old glass insulator (from an electric pole) I have in my window. I found it at Gould Farm, where someone must've once made it into a hanging vase. I hung it from a rafter in my cabin there because I thought it was beautiful, but my friends and I were always banging our heads on it. I never put flowers in it - they'd have to be tiny, and plus, I'm lazy and poor.

I made a quiche to eat all week. But eating a whole quiche by yourself is daunting. See, I have a bad habit of getting bored with things, and having eight slices of the same thing to finish before it spoils may not be possible. Anyone on the Block interested in helping me out? Let me know. It could use more salt, btw.


I finally used up all the hours Frank had to give me to work on his index... I did a person and places index, a scripture index, an authors cited index, and made a stab at a subject index. I could have spent like 10-15 more hours, I think (I've spent at least 38, so far). And now I know a lot about narratives of rape in the Hebrew Bible - Dinah, the nameless concubine, and Tamar, if you're curious. This is my working copy, peppered with notes.


And this is kind of gross, but I have plantar warts that I've been doing battle with for over two years now. My poor left foot. The latest remedy was recommended by the first dermatologist I've seen, just last week, after two years of nurse practictioners. He prescribed an extra strong salicylic film with lactic acid, and suggested I slap some DUCT TAPE over the top. Eat that, bandaids. It's sort of fun, actually. And I think THIS time they're going to go away. Otherwise, I have to have these awful, painful shots. No thanks.

So, that's my life lately, mostly. I think I'm going to be spoiled when I really get a job. My brother is already making fun of me. "Some of us are W-O-R-K-I-N-G." And I AM working, it's just part-time and inconsistent. I'll probably start babysitting soon to supplement things - I'll get to feel like I'm in high school again. So yeah, sometimes I'm bored here, but I also get to spend a lot of time over ordinary things, like meals, books, walks, and phone calls. It's pretty great.

Bless the Lord, fire and heat

It's hot in Chicago. It's supposed to cool down tonight... but it's been a tough couple days without air conditioning. I've inherited some disdain for AC from my dad, who loves to remember his adolescence in Iowa, sweating on his front porch, drinking lemonade, and watching summer thunderstorms roll in. My mom doesn't understand this at all. So, every year my dad puts a window unit into the living room for her, and she spends most of July and August there, reading, sleeping, and drinking ice water. She always tells the story of her first day in America, getting off the airplane in 1949 in New York City, fresh from Oslo. She was six years old, and her first breath of American air felt, she says, as if someone had just opened the door of an oven - a slow draft of hot, suffocating air. It was 99 degrees that day. Her Viking blood just can't handle it.

I'm no aficionado of hot weather, but I guess I prefer to let my body get used to it. Ever noticed how the feel of your body changes with the weather? I feel like the biochemistry of my skin shifts in the summer, and moving from cold to hot all the time screws with that. So, I have electric fans everywhere. I take cold showers. I go to the beach. I make peace with sweat. I drink ice water. And I use a trick my brother and I discovered when we were little and trying to sleep without air conditioning... you take a towel, either a full size or a hand towel, run it under the faucet, wring it out, and then sleep on top of it or under it, and the moisture on your skin combined with a fan = GREAT. I even get cold at night when I do this. Yes, the mattress gets a little damp, but it dries pretty quick.

I'm also addicted to fresh air. One of the 240 things I hated about working for the law firm was being sealed inside a high rise office building eight hours a day, especially in the summer, where it was absolutely FRIGID inside our building. I wore sweaters more in the summer than in the winter. Plus, super hot weather is sporadic in Chicago, so if my windows are sealed up with an AC unit, I don't get any fresh air when it's in the 80s or 70s.

I love winter, but I miss fresh air then, too. A coworker at Gould Farm, Tamsin, used to sleep out on her screened-in porch all year round... even in the winter. She loved it. I don't know if I would go that far, but I would feel like a bad ass if I could.

4th on the 96th

I spent the evening of July 3 with my friend Anna and some of her friends at the top of the John Hancock Building - it was her birthday. You can see the sun furiously setting behind our heads, out over metro Chicago. Most of the party stayed to watch the fireworks, but with my earlybird sleeping habits, I knew I wasn't going to make it that late AND then make the hour-long train ride back to Evanston all by my lonesome and be very happy about it. So I enjoyed the sunset and bid them adieu. I had a great time, though.

I've lived in Chicago for most of my life (saying that always makes me feel so provincial, even though it's a major urban area), but I've never been to the top of the Hancock or the Sears Tower. When we walked out of the elevator, this is what we saw - WOW. The Lake - all that blue with white boat dots - that took my breath away.

More diners, high above the city... with me looking like such a tourist and taking pictures while leaning over the lounge balcony - too bad you can't see me in the huge mirror at the top of the picture.
It was amazing to be up there and look out over the city and pick out all the things I recognize. Makes me fall in love with my hometown all over again. And there's nothing like an eleven-dollar pina colada, either.
Here you can see the dark roof of St. James Cathedral, where I was ordained last month. Nice rooftop swimming pool, too!
Even the view from the women's bathroom is amazing.

Maybe I'll have to visit the top of the Sears Tower after all... although I don't think they serve pina coladas up there.

God is good

St. X in Cute Suburban Town has asked me for essay questions and a sermon! Yippee!!!

Writing

So, as I descend into working day boredom here, I've been trying to think of ways to still feel creative and engaged... and I've been wondering if this summer would be a good time to return to the wrestling match I've had most of my life with the question of whether I'm "a writer."

People have been telling me that since I was in grammar school, when I started writing short stories, mostly about little girls. My family's favorite was "The Floppy Flowered Hat," which was about a little girl whose new hat was eaten by her pet goat! In middle school, my friend Margaret and all my classmates all got really into this fact about me and they kind of made it my "thing." Heidi was the writer. One kid, Brian Lewis, always made me promise that I wouldn't use a pen name he wouldn't recognize, so he could look for my books when we were grown ups. I messed around with writing in high school, but more in college, where I worked on the student literary magazine, did an English major, TAed a creative writing class, wrote my two theses on women's use of language (around their bodies and then politics) and read manuscripts for a professor's literary journal, The Artful Dodge.

Since college, I've messed around with words in my journals, in sermons, and in grad school papers, sort of, but I don't know if this really all adds up to "I'm a writer." I always thought that if writing really was my passion, I wouldn't be able to not do it. I haven't written a short story in almost a decade. I haven't written a poem in years. "Writer" feels like some elusive, romantic label for a person I'm not sure I ever was. Now, I feel this pressure to FIND something to write about - a topic in ministry, a passion, whatever lesson it is I think I have to tell the world about. What am I supposed to sit down at my desk and work on? Nothing like that has ever revealed itself to me. So, I'm not sure if all this business about "writing" is really part of my sense of call or just some kind of pressure that follows me around.

It was easy to "write things" when I was a kid. I just wrote about whatever was around me. I didn't mind that I was unfocused about the whole thing. I remember once, Margaret challenged me to write 100 words about a science experiment in class that was boring us to death - just a piece of potato in a test tube of water. And I did it! And it was fun. I remember she was impressed, and she was excited to watch me do it. That makes me think of preaching actually, take a random, obscure text from the Bible and find something to say about it. Some scripture can seem about as inspiring as a piece of potato in a test tube.

Blogging is really great in that way. I can write about random stuff, just like when I was ten, fourteen, and twenty. I can experiment with all of you, and find interesting things to say about ordinary sorts of things that exist around the edges of my life. I like the photography aspect a lot, too. (Actually, I started begging my dad for a camera when I was about ten, too.)

So maybe I don't need to find a Grand Subject or go searching for my Poetic Voice, so much as I'll keep doing this, writing a blog, taking pictures, and just ruminating on the world. And maybe that's the thing - that this is the kind of writing I can't stop doing?