|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| So I still haven't registered to vote, but I'm thinking I might. After
watching the debates last night, I've got this whole thing figured out.
We just need to put Obama, Huckabee, and Romney in a blender! Romney
and Obama on foriegn policy (war on terror and Africa respectively)
Huckabee on life and family, Obama on the enviorment and illegal
immigrants, and Romney on health care. VOLIA! The perfect President. | | |
| Somehow, it's impossible to let January 1st go by without saying
something, resolving something, drawing some meaning--if you do, it's
like a whole year wasted. But I really have nothing to say, and I'm not
really making any for real resolutions like the kind you tack up on
your wall and actually make a point of keeping. The changes I want to
see are so much deeper.
Fact: you can watch North and South in like... an hour and a half if
you put on subtitles and just do the whole thing in DVD fast forward.
It's like reading a book with lots of illustrations.
I have nothing else to say. Happy New Year!
| | |
| Saturday night Vigil Mass at my parish has been termed "the saddest
mass in the world." This is because there is a stark need for
musicians. Every other Saturday, a lonely but very brave woman gets up
in front of a microphone and leads the congregation in unaccompanied
singing. The other Saturdays St. Cecilia's Chorus, a small but lively
group of the guitar-playing, hand-clapping sort gets up and sings, much
to the traditionalist's chagrin. (Breathe, people, breathe--worship
music may be beyond annoying, but it's not intrinsically evil.)
I've sung with St. Cecilia before, and it's alright, although I never
feel like I've created anything beautiful with the sort of music we
sing. It's fun to sing, but I'm afraid, for me at least, that that's
about as far as you can throw it. It doesn't throb with that deep
internal joy that real music does.
So I've gotten it into my
head that I would like to join the Lonely But Brave Soul and talk her
into doing a chant mass--like, I don't even know the technical,
liturgical definition of "chant mass." Sing, in other words, the
ordinary parts of the mass using the chant settings in the front of my
hymnal. I've never heard anything like that done before (my experience
is very limited, heh), and my knowledge of it is very limited (also
heh). But I was exposed to it in my Music History course this semester
and I can now sort of fake-read neumes. Yet the chants I like best are
some of the more elaborate--is this kind of music even appropriate?
Suffice to say that I have no idea how or what I would be getting into.
Does anybody else have a clue? | | |
| I turn twenty TOMORROW. This is a fact. This is a fact that presents
itself in all it's reality to me, at this factual hour that is
factually eight twenty, factually some-odd (I never was a
mathematician) hours away from that factual... I think you've got it by
now. Twenty is a fact. But Facts seem to be just what in life is so
hard to accept. That one is not as funny as one thinks (shut up). That
one is not as smart as one thinks (also shut up). But what shall I do
when I have no more excuses for bad behavior? Now I'm young and it's
expected. But now I feel very, very young and inexperienced, naive and
stupid, and the number begins to belie what I feel. I feel just as
awkward and pimply and odd as thirteen. But at twenty, I should be out
of the awkward years, I should nearly know what I want in life, and I
should be (as I am) about to graduate from college (in two years, to
keep the record straight) and be ready (as I am not) to face the world
with guns blazing adultly.
I've been entertaining myself all
year writing a book about womanhood. That is, a children's book that
allegorically lays out what I believe it is to be a woman. But I found
out today when I scrapped the eighty pages I labored so hard over and
actually started writing honestly, that I have no idea how to be a
woman, at least the kind of woman I know I'm supposed to be. I can
write the questions, but I don't know how to write the answers, because
I haven't experienced them.
At the beginning of the school
year, I ceremonially chopped all my hair very short because a good
friend of mine told me I should keep it long because "guys dig long
hair." It was gesture, a gesture that one shouldn't sell out to the
opposite sex and do things "for" them. If they don't like you basically
the way you are, it's too bad (this story has actually been told to far
more people than I ever thought it would or desired it might; I think
all of my professors--at least from my freshman year--have heard it by
now, even Dr. Gibson, who I don't think has ever made a mistake in his
life. This made me feel very guilty whenever I got a B in his class).
But the gesture was rather more than the practice. I vainly want
attention, I vainly wish someone--anyone--would notice me. Yet I know
that I and especially they would really, really regret it.
But
really, I'm not a confident or complete person, and I'm amazed that
anybody is my friend at all. That's a complex feeling for a woman to
have, especially an over-verbal woman like myself. It's something it's
not something you normally waltz up to your girlfriends and share. You
can't say to people, "I'm really glad you have a large enough heart to
put up with me and forgive me (over and over) because I'm so full of
faults. You're my friend because you're a good person, not because I
am." If I ever do say such a thing, I usually end up turning on the
same friend a week later and screaming that I want to be liked for who
I am and not as some sort of mission project. We all would like to
believe the warts are just as attractive as freckles. But people spend
far more time consoling one and telling one that one actually is not a
bad person (when it's plainer than facts to me that I am), than just
praying for me (but not in front of me, that's Baptistly beyond
embarrassing). Really, I can use all the prayer I can get. I might
start paying a quarter for every time you...
In short, I'm a
mess, and the only consolation in the middle of the wreckage is that at
least I get it. I see most of the mess (I'm sure more lies beneath),
which is half the battle. And that is all I have to say about my
nineteeth year. | | |
| I know it's very far from Christmas Eve; but Advent is about to begin,
Christmas is already running in my blood. Advent is different from the
Christmas season, rather as Lent is different from Easter, though not,
I think, so stark a contrast. Advent is a time of anticipation,
preparation, fasting, and prayer as we prepare ourselves for the birth
of the Lord, prepare to receive him into our world anew.
For
as long as I can remember, I've had a very distinct picture in my mind
of what Christmas Eve should look like, probably at least partially
thanks to years of Christmas cards filled with cryptic signatures from
long-lost relatives. Christmas Eve is a deep nightliness, midnight
blue, scattered with brilliant white stars--it has to be a clear night
for the wise men and their super-speed camels (to get there in time for
Christmas, you see). And it's still--a marvelous stillness and silence
as the earth gathers herself for the coming of the child of Christmas.
If
there is one thing we learn on the silent, silver blueing of Christmas
Eve, it should be to drink of the marvelous silence, and not just of
the angel chorus, so alarming to the shepherds. That smallness of
intimate silence is our humanity and the largeness of the bursting
angel glory is the divinity; both are the mystery of Christmas. It's
what's so wrong about a very loud Advent--we pass the stillness by. We
don't meditate on this coming Lord, and crowd him out.
| | |
|
