God's House

Over the summer, Doodle attended the child development center at our parish 3 days/week from 9-2:30. She was in a class with 2's, 3's, 4's, and 5's, in a Montessori-like environment. After a while, I started noticing something. . . Doodle would occasionally tell me about Jesus. "That's Jesus!" with a nod and wide, knowing eyes, pointing, usually I think, to a crucifix. Sometimes she would say, "A Jesus. A God." ("A" or "ah" approximating "it's" or "that's" until recently.) A day or two ago, she found a reproduction of an antique print of the Last Supper. Jesus is holding up bread, in the shape of the Host, representing the institution of the Eucharist. "Who's this?" Doodle asks. "Jesus," I reply. "Yes, Jesus," she says with certainty, nodding. She then proceeds to ask about the apostles, who occupy the edges of the image, though with less interest.

This evening, we got pizza from Papa John's. The franchise we ordered from, for pick-up, was a scant block away from the priests' residence, not two blocks from the church that is the student parish for the university and community college in the area. As we were waiting 5 min. before going in to check on the pizza order, the church bells rang. Doodle perked up, eyes wide, and said, "Listen!" Then she said something through her pacifier that sounded kind of like "God." I wasn't sure, but I started telling my husband about the influence of the church preschool. Then she said again, with excitement, "God! God!" So I asked, "God?" "Yes!" As my husband turned the car around to pull alongside the pizza place, she caught sight of the church (where she and Chiclette were baptized--and me, too!--and my son in the chapel, which is also where we were married. . . so many Sacraments, so many memories!). "There it is!" she said, pointing. "God!" Why yes, yes it is! :)

Remembering What I Like. . .

I love poetry. I love talking about poetry and teaching poetry. I only enjoy rhetorical analysis insofar as it resembles close readings of the language of poetry and discussion of how the poem "works." I like that poetry comes in small packages (usually, that is), and can be read quickly, even on the spot, and yet packs in so much meaning that you can spend hours pondering words and ideas, and always have something to come back to. I love the rhythm of poetry, the way sounds work together. I have not spent so much time working with poetry that I no longer enjoy it--and I don't think that will happen. I fact, I'm not entirely sure I could write a long, conference-style paper on poetry. It's not something I've had the opportunity to try, actually. So the irony is, I'm not technically "qualified" to teach poetry. But I do love it, all the same. . .

Families in the Abstract

Human relationships are difficult. Painfully difficult. The only thing that makes them more difficult than the intangibles already present are material things. I think that there are a number of different ways we can attempt to understand these difficulties--one of which is simply "offering them up". . . Except that that's not really simple. I have walked away from a number of friendships in my life, as I've mentioned before. Indeed, my tendency to cut ties or have people drift away was so pervasive, I feared on more than one occasion that the same would happen to my husband and I when we were dating. At any rate, circumstances did not permit me to screw that one up! I can ask of other relationships what I don't ask of my marriage (because I think the answers are both profoundly simple and simply profound)--what causes relationships to continue? Frequently, the answer is need. Perhaps it is a feature of post-lapsarian relationships that we must need each other in order to overcome difference. But material needs, while binding people together, do so in unpleasant ways. People neither like relying on others, not being relied upon, at least when the understanding is incomplete. Bad feelings fester. Breakdowns ensue. And the temptation is to run away. I am tempted to run away. To never have the bad feelings come up again because I am so far removed from the people and situation that I can happily block it from my mind and get on with my life. And never to be confronted with the judgment, scorn, and misunderstanding of those whom I have helped. In short, the temptation is to end the relationship. For those relationships that I have not been able to simply walk away from, I am grateful. For those I have been able to reconcile, if not mend and rebuild, I am also grateful. I hope to be grateful one day for not being able to flee from the relationships I would like to sever. I'm not there yet.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
it is in dying that we awake to eternal life.

~St. Francis of Assisi

Sometimes I Get the Feeling. . .

That by choosing to study and pursue what I love, I have lost the opportunity to enjoy what I love(d). To have a mundane job, and to read for pleasure. . . It seems a bit of a luxury.

Working is like Exercise for Me

I came to this conclusion yesterday, at the end of the long weekend, after an unexpected holiday on Friday for the hurricane that went away east. Because for 3 weeks I've been pretty well into the swing of things, managing to get the course prep done, grading a reasonable number of things, and enjoying the classroom dynamic. Admittedly, I'm getting worn down a bit from always being on the go. I have classes to teach 5 days a week, just like in the summer, except that in the summer I gave them Fridays off, and it was only 1 class, not 2. Having 2 classes makes it easy in a way--I don't have to come up with material for one class to fill 5 days' worth of discussion/lectures/activities. On the other hand, when I'm finished with teaching one course, it's time to turn around and work on the next one for the next day. This would be more of a pain if I was less familiar with the material. Although I am teaching from a new syllabus for composition, I have taught composition a hundred times. So I have activities ready-made that I can slip in as necessary. Also, there is a set of ready-made lesson plans to go along with the standard syllabus, though I have problems with some of the examples used, which introduce bias into the discussion in a way that has potential to be used well or poorly. Teaching children's lit similarly requires less prep than it did over the summer, though the classroom dynamic--35 students instead of 10--is vastly different and does not lend itself to the same kinds of activities. Many of my students come from education, and have a very different way of thinking about children's literature, so I have to steer them almost constantly away from the, "This is a good book because it can work well in a classroom in this way. . ." and try to induce them to think about it as literature, not as a prop for teaching. Also, spending the same number of class periods on a topic, but having those class periods spread over 2-3 weeks instead of concentrated in a single week gives everyone the feeling of going nowhere fast. And it's getting depressing. So I'm looking forward to moving on to poetry. But I'm feeling a little discouraged all the same.

So how is working like exercise? Well, when I'm in the middle of it, in the "swing of things," so to speak, I feel pretty excited & good about what I'm doing. It energizes me. After a good class, I'm on a kind of "high." I talk about the class for hours. My husband gets sick of hearing about it! ;) But when I'm away from it, even for a long weekend, especially if I have unexpectedly "gotten out of" teaching for one day, it feels impossible to get back into it. The same thing happens to me with exercise. The same thing happens to me with research and writing. It's why the dissertation seemed to drag--I spent more time dreading the work than actually working on it. Even blogging is like this for me--if I've missed checking on blogs for a number of days, it feels like a huge task to get back into them, even though I know I enjoy it!!

I know this is not the case with exercise, though it can be time consuming, but one of the things that research, teaching, and blogging share is a huge commitment of mental energy. Answering emails is the same. I know, quite often, that if I let myself get started with a blog or an email, I will keep going until it's done, expending a great deal of mental energy and becoming engrossed for hours at a time sometimes. So sometimes, I prefer not to start. Research and writing are similar--the mental effort is considerable, the time commitment is significant, and there doesn't ever seem to be an ideal time to start. Truthfully, sewing is the same for me. When I start a project, I want to know that I can finish the project in a reasonable amount of time--a few days, usually. And that means from cutting out the fabric to pressing the finished item. If I leave something just slightly unfinished, I hate to go back to it. Doodle has a jumper without loops to hold the loose ends of the shoulder straps, and a dress that needs a hook-and-eye above the zipper to look "finished"--minor details, and not very time consuming, but if I haven't gotten the details finished with the rest of the garment, I don't want to go back. I would rather start something new. And if I put a project aside earlier--watch out!! I have to force myself, trick myself, reward myself with the prospect of starting the thing I really want to work on--or it never gets done.

Looking over this, it seems like I have a strange combination of procrastination, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and perfectionism--the kind of crippling perfectionism that leads one to avoid starting the project for fear of being engrossed in details. I never completed an incomplete because I couldn't find the "perfect" topic to write about. I had set pretty high standards with another paper for the same professor, and didn't want to fall short. So I couldn't do it. The mental block was huge. I think I stopped writing poetry because I stopped thinking that my ideas were poem-worthy--I rather got out of that way of seeing the world.

I got over this to a degree with the dissertation. Remember Dori from Finding Nemo? She sang, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. . ." Eventually, I just had to force myself to keep writing, reminding myself that my mediocre writing was usually sufficient for the job I was trying to get done. Teaching has its built-in motivation, thank goodness. The students will keep coming, the semester continues to progress. I can't just stop and dread what needs to be done. Then there will be good days, and I will think, "How is it that I dreaded this so much?" I will go the library to do my archival research and return home excited by all of the ideas that I have had while reading and try to hold on to that enthusiasm until the next week. It's about rhythm, really. It's about routine. Like exercise. But I never can stick with it, somehow. . .

Some Words about Not Allowing Comments

I like comments. Waaaay too much sometimes. I will sit on the edge of my seat sometimes and wait for comments to come in. Well, not really, but it feels that way. Especially when the comments don't come. I watch and wait for a day or two, then I gradually forget that I've written anything at all. With more controversial posts, it is a bit different. It's not the excitement of having someone contribute to a discussion, it's a morbid fascination--the proverbial train wreck. With anxiety, anticipation, and dread, I wait for the lashes. I do the same when I follow heated comments on others' blogs. I can't help myself. This leads to my not posting on certain topics sometimes, until the bottled-up thoughts come bursting forth. And then, the waiting, and the contradicting, and the endless explaining. And that takes up a lot of time that I should be using for other things. Like class prep. Or the job search. Or sewing. Or cooking. Cleaning. Taking care of my kiddos. (Not necessarily in that order. Sewing is first.) This might look like an attempt to avoid a fight. Well it is, but not the way you think. Had I an endless amount of time, and if I really enjoyed that semi-agitated state, I would engage cheerfully in the debate (well, maybe not cheerfully--that's part of the problem). But I don't. And so I was mulling this over, and I thought about something:

All of this commenting really underscores the differences between print and electronic practices of literacy. Some of the age-old accepted properties of written language have been its relative permanence, its separation from the human life-world, its separation from its creator and consequent inability to answer questions that are posed to the text with anything other than the words that were originally set down (with the possible exception of updated editions, but once updated, they are still silent and static). With online communication, much of this changes. Online communication is certainly not permanent. Content is ever-changing, sometimes according to the will of its author(s), sometimes not. I would suggest that in some ways it is still detached from the human life-world, which is one of the problems or dangers of online communication as well as one of its liberating qualities. When discourse is not taking place in real time with real people, one can disregard all of the usual constraints on the content of our discourses, but we also have the freedom to disregard all of the conventions of civility. People are not people online; we have the ability to treat them--individually or collectively--with contempt, disregard, and intolerance. But the most significant difference is that the author is not necessarily separate from the product of his/her literacy. When we imagine someone reading a book, we hardly expect the writer to be standing next to us, answering our questions and objections, tit-for-tat. And that's as it should be. Because if the author knows that anyone who has questions about his/her work will have only the work itself to consult for the answers, s/he has to be more careful about what s/he writes in the beginning. Unlike speech--when we speak, we usually don't have everything perfectly prepared, logically considered. There's a lot of "off the cuff" discourse in face-to-face interaction. Not so in written discourse. But that is changing. . .

When we visit blogs, we generally know that nothing but a computer screen and a semblance of anonymity separates us from the author--or the reader. The semblance of anonymity protects or exposes us, depending--protects us from being exposed personally for our thoughts or beliefs, protects us from being linked with our words; exposes us to the thoughts of others, for better or worse. The proximity allows access. As an author, I know I can be questioned. That I may be called on to explain myself, argue my position, hash out my beliefs. This can be a good thing. As a reader, I know that I can challenge a position, ask questions for clarity, make my alternate theory heard and demand recognition for my alternate theory. I am also free to support, reinforce, or acknowledge others' ideas. Or not. This can make me (or my counterparts) hesitant, aggressive, timid, bold, or. . . lazy. Discourse that can be questioned, after all, and from which we can expect a new answer, does not have to take itself quite as seriously, to be as complete, as refined, as polished. On the other hand, it can be more natural, more accessible (in multiple ways), more tentative, and more mutable--both in terms of its appearance and in terms of the ideas that are expressed, which might stand to change from contact with others.

So, you might ask, did I turn off comments in order to produce more refined, more complete, more polished discourse? Nope. But it made me think a lot about literacy in an online environment, and I decided to share.

Why is "Religious" a Dirty Word?

You see it paired with nasty words like "ideologue" and "conservative," it is not a far reach from there to "extremism" and "theocracy." All who are religious oppose sex ed, endorse book burning (at least metaphorically), probably endorse heterosexual monogamy, or at least pay lip service to it, support the NRA and the death penalty, and want to impose their backward morality on other people's bodies. I think I forgot to mention stupid or ignorant, generally opposed to science and rational thought more generally.

This pretty much sums me up--don'tcha know--so I'm not really qualified to judge the alternative. I just know that they're much, much better than me. Every now & then, you'll hear about someone who claims to be religious and yet still opposes war--another thing religious people don't do--or agrees that permitting abortion is okay. That puts them in the "decidedly not wacky" category.

I'll admit to looking down on Evangelical Christians in my own elitist way, particularly in the past, but lately I feel like I can understand and accept them more in theory, although theoretically I am not an understanding and accepting person. I still shudder at the more touchy-feely types. And I'm still put off by those who declare their love for Jesus above all things in classroom introductions. But they're simultaneously witnessing and being counter-cultural, and who can argue with that?

Anyway, I don't like cultish behavior any more than the next guy, but it really bothers me when just acknowledging that religion plays a significant role in one's behavior, philosophy, politics is enough to invoke scorn, derision, disgust, mockery and, finally, fear. What are they all afraid of? That at the end of the day, those moronic religious (Christian) types might be. . . *gasp, shudder* . . . right about something?

I've been there, my friend.

Equal Opportunity Campaign Humor

This is hilarious. Go see. You will laugh.