Church Blog Down

After spending most of Monday putting up my new blog about my new church, I have destroyed it. The reason I put it up at all is that there's sort of a policy against flogging dead horses. The problem is, I always think the horse is viable. So I thought this would be a good way to lay off the priests and get my frustrations out in the open. But after a nap, I realized that I didn't want to do this. It's kind of like when my little brother and I went to school together. He was in the first grade, and I was in the fifth. At home, we would terrorize each other no end, but when we got on that bus, Chris sat with me. And I wouldn't have let anyone mess with him. So while I may disagree with some things about my church, it's my church, and I don't want to knock it. It makes me feel good, not that you could tell it so far. I've cursed (f word, which I'm not sure is permissible on the blogs) at a priest in an e-mail, and Sunday I had another sort of meltdown. Unexpectedly, I burst into tears and neither love nor Valium could make it stop. My best friend is dying, and I don't have a spare. But that's a lot of what drove me to church. If it's a psychological crutch, then I sure as hell need one. I need a psychological Jazzy Chair. So all you Zen people out there, lay off me. I'm an emotional time bomb.

It's going to be a long time. I'm running out of people to lose.

I Wonder as I Wander

I talked with my mother this afternoon. I talk with my mother on a more-or-less daily basis. She is willing to take my calls once a day. It sounds worse than it is, I guess. I mean, if I had to listen to me go on about nothing every day, I’d never answer the phone if it could possibly be me. Today, I was going on about the guitar and methods to try to use to learn it. She said, basically, that I start a bunch of things but never finish them. To a certain extent, this is true. To a certain extent, it may be a neurological quirk. Whatever the case, though, it is a characteristic my mother believes I should work to get out of. And, I might add, it is characteristic that she believes it. She is very goal-oriented.

“Say something in Italian,” she says, mocking the fact that I have worked at Italian (to read Dante), Spanish (because it’s everywhere) and French (because I am of French descent, actually have college and graduate credits proclaiming that I should know something, live with a French teacher and am close friends with a French woman). I also went through a short-lived Hebrew phase when I was considering converting to Judaism. That venture is a story in itself. “Ciao,” I said. What’s it to her, I ask, if I shift gears now and then? I’m not a great multitasker. I tend to take to one thing for almost my entire waking hours and really immerse myself in it. I am trying to make myself do at least a bit of this or that unless I have a really good reason not to, but I’m not expecting to win a Nobel or anything at this point. The thing is, my mother hasn’t done anything like play the guitar or learn a foreign language. She went from high school to marriage and business school to motherhood to bookkeeper/secretarial work to college to teaching high school to retirement and remarriage. I’m not saying she didn’t accomplish anything; I’m saying she’s lived a normal life, worked very hard, and kept two kids and a husband under control. Well, I never burned anything down or got arrested, anyway. No one’s had much luck keeping me under control, which is what this is about, I guess.

The fact that I earned a BS, BA and MA mean nothing because I am not using them to make money (because I am disabled). She hasn’t said that, but I think that’s what she thinks. My brother and sister-in-law have said as much. While I did expect to be working after graduation (and I did work – for five years as a programmer and seven as a college freshman composition teacher), I went to college primarily because I like to learn. I had hoped to keep learning and helping others learn.

What I devote my time to now is learning. What I try to do is observe and learn the mechanics of things I appreciate so that I can create something. To me, the observation is at least as important as creation. Anything tangential that comes from it is purely that: tangential. To that end, I’ve played at the Personality Forge building chat-bots and becoming obsessed with how other bots work, am studying and gradually putting into play Internet languages and trying to learn usable programming languages, since what I know won’t get me anywhere in Windows, and I did enjoy programming. I was actually good at it once. I’m working on and off with paints, charcoal, pencil, digital camera and camcorders, guitar (leaving banjo, sax, flute, clarinet, piano and recorders on the back burner due to the passage of time), doing close readings of various literary works as well as reading for knowledge and perspective. (I consider pretty much all reading fun.) I play at chess. I watch movies on DVD, and, once every twenty years or so, I go to a concert.

The thing is, I’ve felt pretty bad about the whole “you can’t do everything” situation since about the time I turned forty. Click here if you want to see a typical self-centered English major take on the situation. Suddenly I realized that time is passing and I’m all over the map. I am working on and culling a lifetime to-do list. But I think my mom, who is a responsible, decent human being – don’t get me wrong (she might read this) – needs to have an itinerary for everything, whereas I start off somewhere and explore. For instance, I might start off with the Arlo concert to reading a book about Woody to learning more about Huntington’s disease. Then I might volunteer some time for an organization about Huntington’s disease. I never know what I’ll be up to from day to day.

But what is life for? I wonder as I wander . . .

I Don’t Have Time to Do That

I have just blown the whole day, pretty much, sleeping in and trying to shake the migraine I’ve been semi-ignoring for seven entire days now. It’s not working, so I’m still pretending it’s not there. I suppose there’s the off chance that I have a brain tumor or something real, but that never occurs to me with these headaches. Those things just live for people like me. I don’t know what “like me” means, exactly, but what I’m saying is that I have decided that they are sentient beings and they hate me. Maybe because in the past I have successfully killed them off with one narcotic or another and they see me as genocidal. But my migraine’s probably not why you stopped by.

I called my mother this afternoon. Whenever I mention something that I think is interesting or that she should do because no one should go without it, about 99 percent of the time, she puts on her exasperated mother voice and says, “I don’t have time for that!” You know, when people say this to me, somehow I take it personally. It’s like she’s saying it must be wonderful to be me because “most people just don’t have time to do things like that.” She has time. I checked, and, sure enough, she has the same twenty-four hours a day that I do. And she’s retired! She just thinks I do stupid things, it sounds like to me.

She does some weird things herself, but somehow I don’t say, “Mom, I don’t have time for that” nearly as much to her as she says it to me. I mean, she’s retired and does these sorts of things: go to Lutheran Women’s meetings, go tape next week’s children’s sermon that her husband does for the children, cook, clean, watch news constantly, and, most annoying of all, she substitutes in the schools. To do this, she has to keep up her teaching certificate and go to dumb Mickey-Mouse education workshops (trust me, I’ve been in them and they are pointless). She actually seems to like this. So she doesn’t have time to do whatever I mention.

To be fair, she did give me a hint as to what I could do to get the paragraphs back in the “Here’s to Bill” piece. That’s what was wrong with the layout of my blog today. It was one big chunk of prose, and I had included paragraph breaks. So I went in the html and surrounded the paragraphs with paragraph tags, and that fixed it. I understand those tags. What I don’t understand is why they suddenly became necessary.

So between the migraine and the format issues, this being a new blog and all, I’m haven’t had much time to have a life worth writing about. I hope this trend turns around soon.

I mean, I don’t have time for that.