February...or that shortest longest month

This February was a long month for me. It was a month of waiting. Would I get into that midwestern school and at long last start the course towards my PhD?

(Spoiler alert: I did not.) (Which made me all the more grateful for this project.)

I think I have to blame Lilly for this one: she is all about creating projects, often during Lent. Since this month would be a time of waiting, a time of hoping, I decided I needed a project. Something tangible. I love making collages and I had been making them more often since I realized making them was something I used to love doing. So my assignment, should I accept it, was this: to make a collage every morning for the month of February. I could only use new magazine clippings, since part of this project was reducing my stash of magazines. As I read the book Yarn Harlot, I realize all crafters have our stashes. There ARE some magazines I will never cut up. But then there are the magazines that I buy willy nilly, with the sole purpose of cutting them into these:

(Yes, this is the product of my month of collages.) I started February 2nd, but since this was a leap year, I would still have 28 collages at the end of the month, whether I got into grad school or not.

Collages may not be your thing. Find something that is. But make it manageable, and preferably tangible. One poem per day. One blog post per day. The key is to set a short time period. Few of us can make a collage every morning until the end of time. But the discipline of one a day, for a short period, helps the focus, helps with the desert, helps with the waiting for what may come.

Here are a few of my favorites: 

 not officially part of the set, but a precurser that inspired the project

 First one.

 (detail)

 I made use of strips of color, like the aquamarine from a Tiffany ad on the right edge of this collage.

 (detail) I liked using words like stitches to "mend" a seam.

 Did this one on the day I woke up to the news that Whitney Houston had died.

 an early one, with spinning thoughts in my head concerning my new relationship.

 Left side: diptych

 Right side: diptych

I did a few with Emma Stone as the "face"/background.

And on the back, I journaled a little, either about my feelings, or about the collage, or both. It was a great exercise in craft, because I wasn't making these as art pieces, they were for my own consumption. They taught me a lot about making collages, as I had to create daily. Best of all, in the deep of a Pittsburgh winter, this project got me out of bed every morning. And, that, my friends, is worth a lot.

"I hearby bequeath...": the Sophie Kerr Post

Unless you went to Washington College [Sophie Kerr page on WC site], you've probably never heard of Sophie Kerr [Baltimore CityPaper]. No matter. (The CityPaper article linked is a great introduction.) Sophie Kerr was a romance writer in the 1930s and 40s who bequeathed her estate (over $500,000) to Washington College, my alma mater. She stipulated that the money be invested and each year, the interest would be split: half would go to bringing authors and literary speakers to the college, and half would go to a student writer. The year I graduated, I think the sum was around $20,000. I didn't win. But it did not diminish my love for this woman, who provided so much richness to the reading and writing community in Chestertown, Maryland.

So imagine my delight, when one day at work, among the antique magazines that sometimes show up at the Book Nook, our little bookstore, was this copy of Cosmopolitan, with "Fiction by...Sophie Kerr"!!! I had never read any of Sophie's works and this was just such a thrill.

HAIR!!

Hey you guys!! My hair is finally long enough to put up in a teeny tiny ponytail. Which is wonderful since the WALLS in my apartment are hot. Thankfully, the a/c hellps...some.

But no Lego tonight, the front room was just too warm.

Earlier today I was cleaning out and found some pictures of me with long hair. These are not they, but here are a few from the same time period--Montana for my dad's 65th birthday. He turned 70 today.

 Lake Jenny

 Glacier National Park

My dad. The greatest guy I know. Happy Birthday!!

Penelope thinks about Odysseus, as she unravels her father-in-law's shroud for the nth time...

Yes. I am scared as crap that our last conversation was a joke. That the next time we talk you'll say "oh, you thought I meant x? Oh, well, I figured you'd understand I meant y."


***

There is a certain glee (as well as sadness)  in tearing apart a Lego house that you just put the finishing touches on this morning. It was too hot in the front room (think sauna) to complete the job, but all that remains is green, gray, and white rubble.

Bile.

I'm too tired to be angry. And it's too hot to get upset. So I guess I'll eat some breakfast and draw my morning bath.

But if I was going to be angry, this is what I'd say: What right do you have? 

And I'd probably be mostly talking to the person in the mirror.

it's a two posts kind of day

so...summer reading has begun at our library. Which means everyone and their momma is at the library, wanting to know if we have more movies, books on Engineering as a career, hair braiding books, how do you sign up for summer reading, how do you sign up for summer reading, booklists for 11-12 year old boys, books on whales, I got a special prize, how do you sign up for summer reading, are there any computers free?

My favorite questions are the dear sweet people that think we have any copies of the Hunger Games books (dream on) or that we might have the movie in. No, it JUST left the theaters. We keep up with new materials, but even we aren't that quick. 

All that PLUS a bomb scare. Yep, right in the middle of the afternoon, we get an announcement to evacuate the building. So that was fun. No, there was no bomb. But we all fussed and fretted about the fact that our purses were inside, because we didn't grab them when we were told to "evacuate immediately." Forty five minutes later, we were open again for business as usual, and I went to dinner about 10 minutes late.

I churned out a Classic Books for boys in 4th to 6th grade  book list, to go with my Classic Books for girls (same grades.) Basically, if a book was 15 or more years old and we had more than 3 copies, it got on the list. I am eternally grateful to Great Books for Boys by Kathleen Odean, but for my next book list (books that aren't so old) I'd like something that was published more recently than 1998. Looks like Great Books for Girls was revised in 2002.(Dear Ms. Odean, I would LOVE a revised edition...luv, Sarah Louise.)

I'm exhausted. I came home, ate some cheese, and have played many games of Free Cell, read Twitter, checked FaceBook, checked my mother's email about the family vacation (looks like August is a go), and basically just fretted through all of those. I think the best thing is to just push A Few Good Men into the VCR, take my bed meds, and pray for sleep. Because tomorrow will be a full day too.

Goodnight, sleep tight.

Don't let the bed bugs bite.

If they do,

hit them with a shoe.  

(Anon.)

"Writing is making sense of life."

(Nadine Gordimer)

When I was in college, Nadine Gordimer won a literary prize. My friends, who knew that I liked books, bought me her book, in hardcover. I never read it. I don't even have it anymore. The thing is, I have always liked children's books better. Where life is still within the provinces of parents and siblings and there isn't all the complexity of romance broken up, adultery, dysfunction. Yes, Maurice Sendak brought out the demons, the Wild Things, but he still placed them in a child's world. And there are plenty of children's books with dysfunctional families. Those are the ones I tend to avoid.

My dad had a newspaper route in Bergen County, NJ, when he was a kid. He saw people go off to jail for being in the Mafia, he got great tips from those still in. He didn't understand a lot of it until later. When people ask him, "Did you see the movie the Godfather?" he says, I saw the play.

I was never abused as a child. I didn't live in squalor. But I knew people who had been abused, though I didn't piece it together until later. And I saw many people living in squalor. And my mother wanted more children. She had miscarriages and then two angel babies, children that were so premature they never left the hospital. The doctors at Georgetown let my parents hold Joy Cherene as she died. When Peter died, we got a phone call from the hospital. And I said, "Oh, rats." I was in second grade.

We all have pain. We all have sorrow. I always got mad at people who said, "I haven't suffered enough." Well, as the saying goes, "Everyone either just had a crisis, is in a crisis, or is about to have one." The happy moments are in between. The happy moments are what make the suffering have meaning. Only focusing on the squalor helps no one. But only focusing on the beauty misses the point. And there isn't really enough beauty to focus on it all the time, anyways.

A friend asked me, in follow up to an earlier post, how I got help after my mania took over. Was I hospitalized? Did my family help? I was one of the lucky ones. I did spend an afternoon in the ER, waiting for a psych evaluation. But then I was sent home, because I wasn't a danger to myself or others. I was a "rule out" for bipolar, because at that time my only symptom was depression. I started a day program that met half days. I saw people there who had it so much worse than I did, and I thought, I don't belong here! Eventually, I quit the program and my dad came to get me to take me home for Easter. This all happened before my mania (see Stanley Cup Fever, sort of.) I went home to Virginia and Easter was nothing to me. I felt nothing. The term used in psychiatric circles is "flat." It's a good descriptor, as everything had one dimension, my complete disengagement.

In Virginia, I started meeting with a psychiatrist and a psychologist. We started to work towards getting me back to myself, and ultimately, the goal was to get me back to Pittsburgh. Which happened. But when I got back to Pittsburgh, I had a bad experience with the psychiatrist that had been chosen. He didn't have me in his appointment book, I waited for hours in a dark hall, and the first thing he asked me was a question that I thought was not at all appropriate or germane to my mental health. That experience was a trigger, and coupled with the new drug cocktail I was on, I cycled into mania. Which brings you up to date with my former post.


(to be continued...)

It takes 15 minutes to destroy a house. It takes 6 days to put one up....

 ducks at work. you can tell we are waiting for a book order by how empty the shelves are.

 Um, how will the next level attach to this SMOOTH surface? 

 Seriously, it's a SMOOTH SURFACE.  But oh, look pretty rose bushes.

 Yes, this is supposed to be the next story on this building...

 OH! Ye of little faith, there is more than one way to skin a cat 

(or attach a story to the next story of a Lego building)

 Look Ma! Architectural integrity!! Oh, and check out the WORKING see-saw.

 This is how the roof attaches...

 Dormer window!

 Finished!!

 Side angle.

So. I have now finished all of the Lego houses that I have instructions for in this particular kit. Every time I demolish a house, I feel like Penelope destroying the weaving from the day before. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who fended off suitors while her husband was on his way home from (where did he go?). I think I'll start back with the first house. There is a new set, a beach house, but Mama does not have $50 to just throw at a new Lego kit. Tomorrow I take my car in for a new serpentine belt.

Stanley Cup Fever (sort of)

[I did not hit publish on this one lightly. I'm not proud of everything you are about to read. But I own it. It is a part of me, of who I am today.]

I don't remember what year it was. It was 1998 or 1999.

I was back in Pittsburgh, "better" we thought, from a scary depression which had started in March, gone through April, and into May. And now I was back at work, in Pittsburgh, and it was June. The Stanley Cup Finals were about to start.

Innocuously, a co-worker at Fox Books asked me why I was still living in Pittsburgh.* And because I didn't know I was on the verge of a manic spree, I thought the reason must be my ex-boyfriend. All of a sudden, I had an obsession with all things yellow. Post-it notes, the colors on the Newsweek cover that featured Michael Jordan (my ex's hero) and before you could say "crazy like a fox," my shift was over, I was out in the rain, over to Burlington Coat Factory to buy some sneakers, because the weather was iffy and I needed shoes that I could wear if it continued raining. I was chatting up EVERYBODY as I got on a crosstown bus, brandishing my copy of Newsweek, (or was it Sports Illustrated?) telling them that tonight being the first night of the Stanley Cup finals, my ex would be so glad to see me. As I walked towards his apartment, I noticed that his roses needed pruning. I just pushed into his apartment, without even knocking. I suppose if this had happened today, I would have warned him with a text.

He was NOT happy to see me, he was on his way out the door to see someone he was dating. I convinced him to drop me off at a nearby shopping center where there was a Fox Books, not the one I worked at. I remember going into a now defunct restaurant, Abate, where I ate some pizza and watched the game. I talked up the waitress, discovered it was a good place to work, and did everything short of applying for a job. Eventually, I called a friend (this was in the days of pay phones) who came and picked me up just as the Fox Books was closing. I tried the patience of many friends that week, as I unraveled.

Eventually, a few days later, in a not so pretty way, my boss walked me out of the door of the Fox Books where I worked, and said, "don't come back until you are better." I fled again to the South Side, to my boyfriend's apartment. He wasn't home. I thought I could prune his roses. I bought blonde hair dye at a drugstore, almost got run over as I crossed the street, picked up free pamphlets about the Catholic Church in a thrift shop. I was thinking about that thrift shop today, since I no longer own a rosary and find myself a revert to the Catholic Faith. I was an adult convert in 2003, and in 2005, I was at a healing workshop where the Catholic Church was reviled and because I liked carrying my rosary beads in my pocket, they were with me. I threw away my beautiful pink rosary beads in the bathroom trash. Eventually I got rid of the other rosaries I had--one with baby blue plastic beads that a friend had given me in college and one with navy plastic beads that I chose out of Sister Bernadette's box of rosaries. Sister Bernadette was the nun who conducted my RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, how you convert to Catholicism these days.) I couldn't attend the group class because it was on Thursday night, when I worked, so she worked with me individually on Wednesday evenings.

That boyfriend got engaged later that summer, that boss came into my library a few months ago with her husband and brand new foster sons, two brothers. I couldn't tell you who won the Stanley Cup that year. But I can tell you this. The madness I experienced that week was the beginning of my sanity.

Madness is never just madness. It is a way of coping when sanity will no longer do. --Renita Weems

_____________________
*(It's a vapid hobby of people who don't realize that this town is a diamond and not so much in the rough, people that have lived here all their lives and wish they were living in New York City.)

A cupcake season...

Hearts are breaking all over the place. While there are exceptions, it seems like a lot of us on Twitter and at work are lovelorn. Fortunately, I am still being simply strung along. And at the moment, I am pleased to be so...if this swoonworthy man is going to say goodbye, I hope he waits until August. I can't do heartbreak AND Summer Reading Club.*

So I'm handing out cupcakes. And I wonder, if in this season, I'm partially lovelorn so that I can be a comfort to my truly lovelorn friends. Because encouraging is one of my favorite things to do. Even when I'm in the worst of moods, telling someone they are wearing great earrings makes ME feel better.

I guess that's why I love giving out cupcakes. What's new, cupcake? Muffin much! They are so cute, they just make people smile. You can't get angry at a cupcake. Well, you could, but you'd look pretty silly. Why don't you pick on someone your own size?

***

I have started reading the Liturgy of the Hours. It's not the official one, but a little book that I bought at the library's bookstore, The Book Nook. And there is something about reading a bunch of prayers and some scripture and then reading those two scary words: "silent meditation." I tend to only remember every other day, and I have never done all three readings in one day, but today I got two in, Morning and Vespers. During Vespers, today (missed Midday prayers) I realized that this brave thing I was planning to do was not brave, it was selfish. It's so hard to distinguish between those two! My wanting to invite a friend to go a concert was not about my wanting to go to the concert or wanting to spend some time with my friend. It was because I figured out that my friend might have gone to a concert that we might have gone to with each other if we weren't currently on a break. My friend is going through a rough spot and I just wanted to say "ME! I'm over here!! I need your attention, NOW." Which is not true. Want attention, yes. But need? No. Those might have's sure had me tangled up, though.

Tonight on Twitter, someone said that they had gotten a bit of wisdom from the Cake Boss. I got NO wisdom from TV tonight, I shut it off to only end up reading a mediocre book that I would have tossed across the room except it belongs to the library. I've read so much better books by this author!! The piece of wisdom, it turns out, was that the light of God shines through us all. Which made me think of the song by Leonard Cohen, "Anthem," where the chorus goes, 'there is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.' So off I trotted to Youtube to find LC singing some. He does not have a beautiful voice, but like Dylan (who was first?) the words cut to your heart. 

________________
*Summer Reading Club: when all the kids who have been in school come to the library for reading and prizes and programs and it is madness -- just ask any Teen or Children's Librarian that you know. The only way I can describe it is two months of "Retail Christmas" except there is no Christmas at the end.

Sarah Louise forays into real estate...Lego style

A fireplace!

Cute light on the outside

a bush!

color coordinated tiles

Now I can organize 6 pages of instructions at once!

So. I'm learning a lot these days. Two of my girlfriends have BOUGHT homes, egad. I have gone mini, by building Lego houses. This one is my second home. I think I like it better than the last one, which is hard to believe, because I really liked that one. This one is cozier. More on what I've learned, later, mayhap. Now I need to get ready to do what every Pittsburgher fears, crossing a bridge. I'm okay with the North Hills. But the South Side? Are ya kidding me?? Mt. Washington?

Late night writings...

When my mind won't turn off, like the it has been the past couple of nights, I write.

The old dresser is out (of my apartment.) It's still in the foyer, to be taken for the Highland Park yard sale on Sunday. The new dresser is in. And oh does it have a story. Which I won't tell you. Maybe someday.

It is beautiful. It is the dresser I imagined when I imagined a new dresser. When I saw it at Goodwill on Wednesday, it was the dresser of my dreams. It looks a little odd in my apartment, it is almost too pretty for all my other old furniture, but the fact of the matter is, I will use it, it will be functional, and it is beautiful. The dresser I got in 1993, when I moved to Pittsburgh, the one in the foyer now, hasn't been functional for me for years. It was the wrong dresser for this apartment. But I loved it so much, it had so many good memories. Finally, I realized that it no longer worked, and memories be blast, I needed something functional. But something so BEAUTIFUL? I am humbled. No, sorry, no pictures. You can make them in your mind.

I will be spending the weekend reconstructing my apartment, as I have to dismantle my apartment every time I move furniture. That is because I have a beautiful piece of furniture that sits on the landing of my stairwell. And if you live in a third floor walk-up, as I do, well, the only way in is up. So right now, my landing is naked. All the porcelain figurines that sit on the piece of furniture are in newspaper, in boxes.

After all the drama of the past couple of days, I feel like I have nothing to say. It has all been said. It has all been done. It is time to rest, to regroup. Something shifted, and it's time to say goodbye, time to say hello.

But first, I sleep. Sweet dreams!

Sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite!
If they do, hit them with a shoe!
                                         (Anon.)

"where's the shepherd for this lost lamb?"

 Someone to Watch over me, sung by Ella Fitzgerald, written by George & Ira Gershwin

All that courage I had yesterday? Dissolved like so much powdered laundry detergent in hot water. (Which reminds me, I have some laundry down in the basement, I imagine it is dry by now.)

Today was a plod day. One foot in front of the other, eat when it's eating time, go back to work at whatever it is, details, details, details. Walk through the valley, do not listen to the voices all saying you won't get anything done, you aren't getting anything done, why is it taking you so long to focus?

Only old Scratch could get away with saying I got very little of consequence done today. No, I do not have a product, except for more work tomorrow on the summer reading software. I had meetings and appointments and I dealt with people issues. No cataloging was performed, my cart overflows...

This is a crazy week for me. The amount of socializing I did over the weekend is more than I usually socialize in a month! Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my brother-in-law... My "feelings" for the Catholic Church have become a heart desire and now it's not if but when do I just go to confession and rejoin? (Yes, I'm petrified...a little bit like when Anne Lamott said, but I can't be a Christian!!) Yet, as the Lord is my shepherd, I know that this lost lamb will be found found found when I can finally stand and take the Eucharist during Mass. OF COURSE there's more to it than that, but if you boil it down to its smallest parts...

The dresser story in yesterday's post is playing out again, with new players, and a larger dresser, which is what led to yesterday's post.

Three women: Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy. They're following me, I can't get them off my tail. 

Moving furniture in my apartment (third floor walk-up) requires dismantling my shelf of porcelain dolls, etc. on the landing of my stairwell. And I will live in the well-furnished house of the Lord forever.

I hope at the end of tomorrow, I can be as at peace as I was at the end of the day in this post, from 2006. 

These are the days of miracle and wonder, 
this is the long distance call 
the way the camera follows us in slo-mo
the way we look to us all
the way we look to a distant constellation 
that's dying in the corner of the sky
these are the days
don't cry baby
don't cry.

--Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble

One step. One step. One step.

."..a wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold..."

from Tapestry, Carole King

There are threads in my life, things that seem to circle back...the first man I thought was a cutie pie when I moved back to Pittsburgh in 1993 was a Duquesne graduate student, studying philosophy. I met him at a table at the South Side Street Fair. Though I never saw him again, I had a crush, and I often thought of that man across the picnic table, as we ate our street festival food. Years later, I dated a Duquesne  philosopher or two. I only remembered the cutie pie recently, and it gave me a start, to think.

The summer D and I were not dating was a hard time for me. I took walks every morning, praying. I didn't know if I wanted us to get back together or not. But I didn't have a lot of friends, work was hard, and so God was the one I poured my heart out to.

There was a dresser that his roommate had, that D had said I could have. I didn't get the dresser before I hastily broke up with him in April. So the dresser was a question mark.

At that time, I didn't own a car. I took the bus everywhere. A friend lent me her car for an afternoon, and I called D, said, I can come and get the dresser this afternoon. He said, um, today doesn't work for me. Oh.

So we figured a time that did work. And the night before, I couldn't sleep at all. I didn't know I was going through a change and that change would soon manifest itself in bipolar disorder. I had about one night of no sleep per month, so by this time, I was used to not being able to sleep and I just used the time to wash dishes and talk to God.

I remember thinking, why God? Why did I get no sleep before going to get the dresser? I took the bus to Kaufmann's, walked across the Tenth Street bridge. But the fact was, the lack of sleep softened me. (I do not recommend it.) But at that time, it helped me. D was not overly glad to help me, but he did. That gruff kindness, the willingness to help outside of the pain we'd caused each other, helped me heal years later when Max and I broke up and he still lived on the first floor and I lived on the third, with no one on the second for a while, so that the house echoed every time one of us came or left, slamming the front door open, closed. He took the trash Sunday nights, and he shovels the walk when it snows.

D and I did eventually get back together. He gave me a ride home after a Memorial Day party, and eventually we were tentatively talking, and we were back together by the Fourth of July. We had a good rest of the summer, and an autumn of wrestling as I wanted to break up with him as he tried to get more serious. I got bronchitis. I was trying so hard to get ahead at work that when I had permission from my doctor to not work on Christmas Eve (I worked retail!) I went in anyways, because I was feeling better. I sat on the floor in the gift area and sorted out the pretty journals our bookstore sold. It wasn't a busy Christmas Eve, but I felt, YES, I had proven something by showing up. I wore my green velvet Liz Claiborne dress to the Christmas Eve service. Eleven months prior, I had worn it in my friend Sally's wedding.

As I think back on that time, almost fifteen years ago, I think, I can do this. Whatever is next, I got this. 

"I'm supposed to attach a brackety thing to the side things, using a bunch of these little worm guys. I have no brackety thing, I see no worm guys whatsoever and -- I cannot feel my legs."

(David Schwimmer as Ross Geller, in the "Friends" pilot)

As I search through my cake pan full of Lego pieces, looking for the item described in my instruction manual, this quote keeps running through my mind. It amazes me that these weird looking things are going to make something that looks like a house!

this is where I am storing my Legos--cake pan to the rescue!

This is the "apple tree house" I am building.

This is the foundation of the house.

Note the red mailbox. Eventually, there are two letters that will peek out.

Progress, with mailbox.

Side window!

The garage door swings open!!

So, I needed a project. During the Great Depression, folks turned to jigsaw puzzles, presumably because you could see your progress. Since my apartment really has no good place to start a puzzle and my interest in Legos was rekindled by my recent trip to the Lego store at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City, I decided to use some of my tax refund for a Lego set. 

The one I purchased (as pictured, above) was just under $50, my budgeted amount. It makes three houses, so I figure that triples the value. Unlike collaging, where I am using my creative right brain, figuring out what colors and words and images go together, making a Lego house from plan is extremely left brained. Follow the rules and it will come out like the picture on the box. Which is not generally how I roll, but right now it's pretty exciting to see progress, real progress, I'm MAKING something. 

And any time that I am working on my Lego house is time that I am not watching A Few Good Men. So that's good. I'm varying my home activities. 

If morning ever comes...

I've been coping. I've been watching Aaron Sorkin's movie "A Few Good Men." (I know, he only wrote it, he wasn't the director, but the script is so good that in my mind, it is his movie.) I have been watching it every night for the past few weeks, after it came on TV a few weeks ago. It has been my baseline, my anchor, my background noise. It has nothing to do with romance. And the concept of military law is so removed from any part of my life that it is an escape. And it has beautiful moments of humor, even as events on screen are as serious as a heart attack.

Today, I've mostly just hung out in my bedroom, watching "A Few Good Men," playing Free Cell and Solitaire on my computer, hanging out on Twitter, Facebook, and feeling numb. At some point, I straightened my bedroom for 15 minutes. (I set the timer.) I sort of watched TV for a while, settling on the Country Network, which plays country music videos all the time. And this song, sung by a very old Johnny Cash, came on. And the pain did something: it woke me up. And I started writing this post.

I think what hit me was the truth of it: "I will let you down. I will hurt you." Because it's the truth. We will be hurting and letting each other down from here until kingdom come. Anyone that says otherwise is lying. And Johnny Cash, well he is like the king of pain, he knows from hurting. 

Hurt by Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails). Johnny covered this song shortly before he died.

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way 
--------

The title of this post is from an Anne Tyler book with the same title. If I knew where my copy was, I'd dig out the reference. Maybe tomorrow.

Can poetry help take away the pain?

I believe it can. The Psalms are poetry, after all, and when I am in my "valleys of deep darkness" it calms me down to think that the Lord is my shepherd. The imagery of Psalm 139 helped me get through a dark valley of my last semester of high school.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.  Psalm 139:9-10 (NIV)

Not to be melodramatic, but this has been a dark week. It's a dark season. But poetry, cosmology, story, the routine of a day's work, all these help. And this is how we get by, day by day. If it's not a psalm, it's a song on the radio, or a favorite cartoon taped to our office door.

This is not a coherent post, because my thoughts are not coherent. I'm writing these out for myself, and also for a friend who wants information about poetry and therapy.

A poem I printed out yesterday afternoon, from Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. I was thinking of someone who died, and of people I love who are missing people who died.

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen, or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green striped bag, or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.

And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.

But you do not wake up a month from then, two months,
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say
Oh God! Oh God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
--mothers and fathers don't die.

And if you have ever said, "For heaven's sake, must you always be kissing a person?"
Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window with your thimble!"
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.

Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries; they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed;
they slide back into their chairs.

Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house. 

Yesterday, Maurice Sendak died. He was the man who wrote Where the Wild Things Are. He had an opposite view of childhood, as evidenced in this quote:

"I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You’re going to trip over that for a good part of your life.”

--Maurice Sendak

Also from Maurice Sendak: "I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”

Some resources for poetry with youth: 

• Using acrostics.

• Bibliotherapy and poetry. 

• Transformative Language Arts.

• National Association for Poetry Therapy.

eating my cupcakes...

The only information you need to know about my situation is this: the boy is in a hard place and it's a place I can't follow him to. He needs to be in his cave and figure things out.

And it's really hard, because all of a sudden, I realize I need him. Not in a bad way, but I finally get those songs that say "I need you." The boy has become a part of me in a way that has nothing to do with kisses or chocolate (though I will take both, thank you.)

Last night, after reading a particularly hard email, and writing a response, my stomach clenched up. It was the way my body was freaking out. So I sent out my mayday call on Twitter: "Send cupcakes." (I also called my therapist, because sometimes you need someone who will talk and listen as only a mental health professional can.) Kleenex' stock might have gone up last night for all the tears and snot I was manufacturing.

And the thing that I love is that people know to send me cupcakes and how to imagine sending them because I taught them by example, giving them cupcakes in imaginative ways when they were having crappy days. It is amazing to see something you created blossom, and then feed you when you need to be fed.

Types of cupcake tweets that I send to people:

"Sending cupcakes"
"Sending talented cupcakes. They sing 'soft kitty'"
"Sending talented cupcakes. They sing 'I'm really Rosie, and I'm Rosie Real.'"

Types of cupcake tweets that I send when I need hugs or prayers or just someone to notice me because I'm afraid I'm fading away into nothingness:
"Send cupcakes."

And they did. On trucks, baked from their ovens, through my skylight, with the colors of the University of Michigan (blue and yellow), *ALL OF THE CUPCAKES", filled with chocolate singing cupcakes with magic, airmailed cupcakes, cupcakes soaked in hard liquor and cuss words, cupcakes and hot cocoa, cupcakes and a happy foot tapping soundtrack (which made me find the Youtube video of the original "Footloose" with Kenny Loggins singing and Kevin Bacon dancing) 

I only follow about 100 people on Twitter, because as an introvert who wants to nurture all my tweeps, I can't keep up with more than that. But I have around 600 followers, and so people that I sort of know came out of the woodwork last night. EVERYONE and their uncle was sending me cupcakes.

And it occurred to me at one point that I had never talked about eating my cupcakes.

Funny, I've never really talked about eating a cupcake. And tonight I have so many to choose from. Thank you, all.
— suziwalks (@suziwalks) April 24, 2012

And isn't that the point of the cupcake? To eat it? They aren't so many stickers to collect in an album (gosh, do you remember collecting stickers??) So last night, as I sat finishing watching "A Few Good Men" on THIS, I ate my pita broiled with olive oil and covered with salsa and pretended they were all the imaginary cupcakes.

The irony in all of this? I have not baked a cupcake in my oven (IRL, in real life) in months, if not YEARS. And the last cupcake I ate (in early March, in NYC) was possibly the first cupcake I'd eaten in months, if not years. But I'm moving towards more actual cupcakes. I am underwriting cupcakes for the upcoming UnCo12. I won't be attending, but there will be cupcakes.

I wish I could come up with a really good way to end this blog post, like, "If Marie Antoinette said 'let them eat cupcakes' perhaps the siege of Paris would have never happened" but I fear I am mixing up my periods of history, and I don't really believe MA even said "let them eat cake" anyways.

So here. Have a cupcake. Have two. They're really good.

There is no fear in love...

There are two important men in my life right now: my boyfriend and my father. As a side note, I am blessed right now to work in a female-run workplace. Both my boss boss and my immediate boss are women. But that is a blog post for another day.

Where was I? Oh yes. The two men in my life. My father, the son of a Reformed Church of America pastor, and my boyfriend, a Catholic who often attends daily Mass. Two men for whom religion is an important part of their daily lives.

And I? A woman who is on a spiritual journey. As a work through it, with fear and trembling and love, I imagine it is one that will take me back to my confirmation into the Catholic church in 2004.

So when I said I was skipping church on Sunday because of the drive from Grand Rapids back to Pittsburgh, the boyfriend says, hey, maybe you'll be back for 7:45 mass. And I said, actually, I was thinking that might work. And he said, oh, I was joking.

Dad version of this conversation:
Me: well, I might be back in time for late Mass.
Dad: (shocked, sort of joking voice) Don't say that!

So, whereas the women in my life are fully aware of the fact that daily, sometimes hourly, I am wrestling with the fact that going to Mass makes me calmer than going to the Presbyterian church where I am a member, the men in my life are sort of clued and really not at all clued.

I'm in Grand Rapids, Michigan right now, visiting Sally (formerly North Hills Sally). While I really miss her, I like visiting her! I'm here on a Christmas present from the folks: The Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing, a biennial conference for writers, readers, and people of faith.

Last night, Marilynne Robinson spoke, and she started with "My text would be, if this was a sermon, 'there is no fear in love.'" She spoke on Calvinism and how it has become a pejorative term meaning everything that is wrong with religious thinking, but she said, "What is essential to you? Embrace it, learn it. Then you can't just toss it over when people say 'you're a what?'"*

And that is how I'm thinking. There are a lot of things to reconcile, but I'm willing to do the homework. Right now I have a lot of books out of the library about dissenting Catholics. 

________
*Note: these quotes are from my written notes and may not be exact quotes.

 Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing
Marilynne Robinson Appreciation Society

Vienna waits for you...

When we arrived in Vienna (Wien) after a week of pre-trips (Dresden, Prague, Berlin), the bus driver had Billy Joel's song queued up on the bus' intercom.

You've got your passion, you've got your pride
but don't you know that only fools are satisfied?
Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true
When will you realize, Vienna waits for you? 

It's such a great song, and a wonderful introduction to this city I had heard about my whole life. My parents went to Hope College, a Michigan institution of higher learning that has been taking students to Vienna under the auspices of "Vienna Summer School" since 1956. When my father saw the roofs of Prague, he dreamed of working as a diplomat and decided to not apply to law school. (A diplomat's daughter says thank you to Prague, and I was able to do so in person, in the summer of 1991.) 

It was in between my sophomore and junior years of college. My parents were living in Warsaw, Poland, and I had been attending Carlow College in Pittsburgh for the past two years. I was transferring to Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, in the fall, and my parents brought up the idea. Did I want to attend Vienna Summer School? Is the Pope Catholic? It had always been a dream of mine, latent, since I had decided in 1989 to not attend Hope College. (Most students that attend the VSS are Hope students.)

My father was in Vienna twice during the three weeks I lived in Vienna, and so he took me out to dinner the night the group was going to see the Magic Flute. I saw the Zauberflaute later that summer at the Mozart Festival in Warsaw (twice!). The second time my father came to Vienna, he took Derek and me out for dinner. An interesting (romantic?) piece of history: when my dad went on the Vienna Summer School trip, he was good friends with Derek's aunt, who was engaged. They were just friends, but good friends. I didn't know Derek was practically engaged, but 28 years later, he and I were good friends during my time in Vienna. Apparently Derek now has five children and lives in Holland, Michigan, but I've always thought it would be a little odd, looking him up after all this time. After the letter he sent saying he was getting married, I never wrote to him again. I just felt that my crush was a crush, and I didn't want to have feelings for a man who would soon belong to another woman.

I was disappointed that either my camera was dying or the supermarket that developed my pictures goofed, but at any rate, all of my pictures from that summer are out of focus. Hard to believe it was twenty one years ago!

****

References/Further reading:

Billy Joel talks about his song "Vienna Waits..." in a Wikipedia article
The Vienna Summer School Website. 

April is the cruelest month and other vapid thoughts

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering	5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland)

I'm missing Warsaw. Fortunately, I have my Twitter friend Lola to take pictures of things like peacocks. (Maybe insert photo here.)

I miss the pock marked walls, the WWII memorials that have fresh flowers daily. I miss being 18, or 19, or 20. I miss discovering a new place in a city that has been around longer than long, even though so much of it was obliterated by bombs.

I watched the trams go from red and gray to being covered with M&M and Barbie ads as communism's hold went straight for capitalism. The tram stops, donated by the government of Japan? I should have taken more pictures, written more notebooks. Who knew that at 40, I would be longing for those days, when sometimes the depression was too much to bear, I'd sing "Won't you be my neighbor" to myself in the mirror to cheer myself up?

I remember when Derek decided to stay in Spain and not come to Warsaw for his last bit of Europe, the summer of Vienna Summer School. I thought I was going to marry that man. I still have his letters somewhere. Little did I know he was practically engaged. (Not that he really led me on, I just had a wild imagination.)

I remember we took an afternoon to go see Upper Belvedere, the Klimts. There is something about the gold that Gustav painted. We went to the store for dinner after that, got bread and cheese. He let me pick. "Whatever you choose is fine with me." We sat under a tree and I told him how Shawn Colvin spoke to me,

Sometimes I feel so reckless and wild
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
I gave nobody life, I am nobody's wife
And I seem to be nobody's daughter...

I don't understand it now, but somehow the thought of Derek's mother is what helped me get out of bed the day I heard that he wasn't going to make it to Warsaw. I wonder now how he got in touch with me...this is before email, a phone call would have been prohibitive...and I think I would have remembered a phone call, actually. A letter, a postcard? I would have kept a postcard, maybe.

(and how funny that the "i gave nobody life" line was lost on me until just today, now.) My baby blanket is in eyesight of where I usually sit with the laptop and I think I'll give it to my sister when she gets her baby. And then I think...but no. 

***

I have talked about Pittsburgh being the city of my childhood, the rivers of Bonn, the mountains of Tegucigalpa. It is only now that I realize this third floor walk-up, this garret, is my Warsaw third floor guest room, that belonged to me every summer and every Christmas for three years. 

And that is all, for today.

References
Upper Belvedere (wow, I don't remember it being so regal)  (and now I remember Egon Schiele)
Shawn Colvin's song, The Story

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?

PILGRIMS!!

This was my favorite joke in 2nd grade (and forever.) Whenever I tell it or write it, I remember the stairwell at the building where I went to 1st and 2nd grade. I say building because while it was where I went to school, it was just another one of the apartment buildings, with classrooms where the apartments would be. We did have a library, in the basement. We were right near the river, though, and the river flooded, so our library got flooded too. It was the Rhine river. I lived in Bonn, Germany when I was in first, second, and the first month of 3rd grade.

What I remember about first and second grade: my first grade teacher, Mrs. Olson (Miss?) was MEAN. And I was in the slow reading group, so I actually was reading about Dick and Jane and Spot. Whoever thought that was the way to teach reading was nuts, because, c'mon. I didn't care a whit about seeing Spot run. There was a mean boy that teased me, his name was Chase. And then there was this little boy who always wore suits. And he followed me home and would call up to where I lived, in the third floor of one of the apartment buildings. I guess a modern day Romeo, and I was a first grade Juliet? Eventually he quit. (I just wasn't interested.) I should ask my mom about that, if she remembers. I remember one time, I ran home because I had to use the bathroom and then I had to run up all those stairs. (The apartment buildings only went up to three floors, so there was no elevator.)

I remember that there was a piano in the first grade room, and every morning all the classes came together for singing time. We sang "Free to be you and me" and "My Country Tis of Thee." We probably said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were all government kids, our dads and moms either worked for the State Department, the Department of Agriculture, the Air Force, the Army...we had a PX and a commissary. (And a movie theater and a swimming pool.)

In second grade, my teacher was Mrs. Butterbaugh. She was nice. And I learned how to read, in a reading circle, using a book called "A Duck is a Duck." It was a reader with stories. (I think the Dick and Janes were paperback books, not very important looking. I seem to remember that they had the flimsy feel of those early piano lesson books.) We would do "Bloody Mary" in the mirrors in the bathrooms. I never understood that game, but somehow if you said it enough, the you'd see Bloody Mary in the mirror? I learned my first curse word. "Sh plus it spells..." and I went home and repeated this and my mom said, do you know what that means? And I said, no. She said, well, don't go around saying words that you don't know what they are, that's a bad word. I don't think she told me what the word meant.

I wrote my first story when I was in 2nd grade. It was three sentences long, about a butterfly on her birthday. Or a ladybug. And in my head, it was this great story and when I read it out loud it didn't make any sense and everyone laughed. Kids can be cruel. I often wonder where was the teacher? Didn't she look at the stories first to see if they were stupid enough to make people laugh?

Funny the things that come up when you remember just one joke...I wrote this while sitting in the chiropractor's waiting room this morning.

I guess I'm a fool...and it's April.

the bushes with snow, February

my collages, February.

So, Holly asked for a picture of my collages. Unfortunately, just as I was about to do a day by day of that project, my camera died. So here is a mid-February picture, of my collages to date (5 so far, this was taken on the 6th). I haven't decided what to do about my camera. The drug store seems to have some nice ones in the $20 to $40 range but I don't know how many pixels I want.

Things are not so great right now...the boy is going through some family crap and it's breaking my heart to see his heart being broken.

I can't believe it's April. Hosanna...and April Fools! I woke up from a really bad dream at 5:30, and well, it wasn't worth it to try to go back to sleep.

Psalm 137 (KJV)

¹By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
 ²We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
 ³For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
 ⁴How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
 ⁵If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
 ⁶If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
 ⁷Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
 ⁸O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
 ⁹Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

"We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

(C.S. Lewis)

I'm thinking about change these days. And my mind is a nation of questions.

Do I really want the PhD, or do I just want a job where summer isn't my busiest time?

What would it be like to be an academic librarian? Is there a market for that? Would I need a second master's degree? Do I want a second master's as opposed to a PhD?

What about an archivist? I am tending to like old things more and more, these days. Once upon a time, my dream job was to be a librarian at a museum...this was after I went to see the "Sleeping Beauty" book exhibit at the library at the Women's Museum in Washington, D.C.

I think I want to study women's history as librarians (especially children's librarians) have shaped the field. That is one thing I could have studied at the secret Midwestern school, but why do I need to go there to study it? Research is something I can do anywhere.

I'm finding that as I get older (I know, I'm still pretty young), I'm less interested in the minute to minute trends and more interested in the wide spectrum of change that happens over time. So much of what seems to be "librarianship of the Twitter/Facebook era" is knowing exactly what happened this afternoon on the LJ site (an example.) I don't want to have to be so plugged in that if I miss that, I'm way behind. It's part of why I only follow about 100 people on Twitter. If it's important enough, someone else will tweet or retweet it, I don't need to be "on the scene, at the very minute."

If I did stay in Pittsburgh, what else could I study? My dad apparently discussed with my mother that I should study Education but forgot to mention it to me. So when my mom said, have you thought further about studying Education, I said, "was I supposed to be considering it?"

I'm also starting to have "feelings" for the Catholic church again, yipes. I have a feeling no one from the "old days" is still here, but I've just been going through some of my old posts that I wrote about when I was a Catholic before. From what it looks like, I started the blog after I stopped being a Catholic, which makes sense b/c I remember when I started my blog I had a conversation with some folks at the Open Door.

This is an oldy but a goody post that goes through some of my Lenten feelings from 2006.

"At the baggage claim you got a lot of luggage in your name..."

(Miranda Lambert, "Baggage Claim")

Well, when I went to NYC to visit my friend Andy, I didn't check my bags at the curb. I checked them at the gate, which means you waive the $25 fee and you don't have to wait for the baggage to come 'round the baggage carrel.

But I didn't realize that I had some other kind of baggage. Yes, there's more! In 1997-98, I dated a guy we'll call Dave. And part of his goal in life in our relationship was to spoil me for all other men. Things he did: he ran me a bath with rose petals one time. When I was sick for three months with bronchitis, he sometimes went to the grocery store for me. One weekend when I was visiting my folks in Virginia, I called him to come drive me home b/c I didn't want to take the bus back to Pittsburgh. And the creepiest one: he knew when I got my period (better than I did) and made sure to make me a lasagna b/c he knew I craved tomatoes that time of month. He pretty much made me dependent on him in every way. When we were through, I was more than a little lost. (Oh, and he wouldn't let me break up with him, even though I tried, about once a month for about four months out of the twelve-ish months we dated. What can I say? He was a sweet talking philosophy student, and I did like having a boyfriend.)

He broke up with me, I mourned, I went to live with my folks to deal with my brand new bipolar diagnosis, and I learned how to do things all my self again. Until I started dating Max. Remember Max? I dated him five years ago. He's still my first floor neighbor. Since dating for me = Dave, I expected Max to act like Dave and treat me like the princess I was never meant to be. I only fully realized this today, when due to the fact that NYC airports are mean mean mean (flight delayed FOUR times) and I was going to be with out a ride home from the airport b/c my ride was based on an 2:30 pm arrival in Pittsburgh and I didn't actually arrive in Pgh until 4:45 pm. And the boy couldn't pick me up for whatever reason (it doesn't matter what his reason is--he has a life too.) (I don't know what his reason is.) And I was bereft. And as I ate my airport McDonald's dinner and tried to calm down and sent a tweet to a friend saying "when did I become the damsel in distress?" I thought about Dave. And how that was his goal. To spoil me for all other men. Yep. I got baggage. Throw another suitcase off into the ocean folks, let's get rid of that extra weight.

Because, what would I rather have, a man who controlled me so much that he knew when to cook me lasagna and he broke up with me when I was depressed because "you've changed, you're not the same person anymore," or someone who makes me laugh on a cold morning as I check my email, preparing to embark on a day of travel? I have no clue if the boy is "the one" and that is not up for consideration, but I know that the fact he couldn't pick me up at the airport should have been more neutral than it felt at 4:45 when I got his last text saying he couldn't pick me up, with a frowny face. To me: it felt like a slap in the face, like "I can't take care of you" when it was more like, "I have other things going on."

 As I walked through the airport, dragging my wheelie bags, I thought of Sally; (my Sally, not "the" Sally), who last week while I was trying to figure out rides,  quoted Billy Crystal from "When Harry Met Sally:"

I never take girlfriends to the airport. Because at some point you don't take them to the airport, and then they say "you never take me to the airport anymore." 

I need to watch that movie again.

Learning, every day, learning. And now, dear ones, time to go to BED. Because when you spend over six hours of your day mostly in one airport waiting to go home and a little bit in another airport trying to figure out how you're going to GET home....well, it's tiring, physically and emotionally.

How did I get home? While I was gone, I had lent my car to a neighbor who doesn't have a car. She couldn't pick me up this evening, but her husband and daughter came and got me, IN MY CAR, at the airport. So it all worked out in the end. Oh ye of little faith. Good night.