The Egoist's Miscellany

I caught bronchitis within two hours of the beginning of my Christmas vacation. I'd thought my body was past being able to do anything with any level of excellence, but it showed me that when push comes to shove, it can put my nose to the grindstone and produce something really spectacular.

I was given a hair clip for Christmas, and the giver pointed out that it could be used to hold chunks of hair out of the way while blow drying other chunks with a round brush. I'd lost my enthusiasm for that subject. Then I felt badly because she'd gone out of her way to purchase this very useful gift for me, and it's not her fault that the Death of Flannery comes for me with a blow dryer, so I ought to just use it. I devoted 30 to 40 minutes of my morning to the subject yesterday, and it did look great for about five minutes, which really worried me. Like Mendel's pea plants, too much change causes me to revert to type, i.e. my 10-year-old belief that bathing is a waste of time since one just gets dirty again anyhow. Luckily my hair looked just the same as ever within an hour, so I have an excuse for not pushing my luck.

I found myself in the kitchen today thinking of Solzhenitsyn and humming, "I've got your love to keep me warm."

I produced 21 thank you notes in an hour and a half this morning, and not all of them used the formula "Thank you for X I love it and you."

Super Model

Today as I drove back from the bank, I reflected happily (but with a sober recognition that this could lead to strange new places) that I was now a high-maintenance woman. I’ve been wearing makeup (eye makeup because face makeup makes me suffocate) almost every day for ages, and I totally plucked my eyebrows a few weeks ago. Not totally in terms of no eyebrows left, but in terms of I almost totally tidied them up—I put off finishing them for tomorrow, which fortunately hasn’t come yet. But the pièce de résistance was that I blew dry my hair using a round brush this morning.

Now the beauty industry has tragically suppressed the fact, but 87.3% of women younger than 40 who have died of old age have done so while blow drying their hair. (All blow driers have a “Warning” tag to this effect, but the real danger is hidden under the highly unlikely possibility of dropping the thing in water). I’ve never been the kind of person who takes unwarranted risks (unless it involves jettisoning all aspects of my life and moving across the country), so I’ve taken this warning to heart. When I feel myself within time’s bending sickle's compass come, I click the Machine of Danger off and head out into the rain, secure in the knowledge that I’m not going to be any the worse off for a few more pints of water in my hair.

But today I really amazed myself, and almost expected to be wearing pointy shoes and haute couture by the time I got out of the van. My boss failed to notice right off, though, and I started to wonder if I’d wasted my ten minutes. I pointed out how beautiful my hair was (to help her along), and explained.

“Ah, yes, I see you dried the front and not the back."

“What?!” Outraged at this base slander, I reached back to exhibit the silky softness but found my enemies had substituted chunks of damp hair.

Oh well, I don’t like dating rock stars anyhow.

Dont Cha

I just spent a couple of days with my brother. At one point he told a hilarious subway tale (initially observed by a friend), but he prefaced it by saying that this friend's stories were always unable to be beaten. But them's fightin' words, so we may have a spate of stories from my time commuting on the Seattle public bus. I felt a little sad over the scant opportunities I have for gathering such stories now. However, I've been good lately, so God felt it was time to reward me. The blessing sat on the seat in front of me on the train ride home.

She caught my attention by emitting deep-throated groans at irregular intervals. At first I was concerned for her well-being, but then realized that the groans were somehow influenced by the music we were all listening to (she evidently felt that the ipod was intended for communal use, and had it set to an appropriate volume, after a brief interruption at the insistence of the conductor). In the end I figured out that the noises were her involuntary and uninhibitedly sensual response to the music, which let all of us know she was One Hot Mama. She didn't seem to feel that this image needed to be restricted on a need-to-know basis, so we all got it full in the face.*

She had a channel-surfing approach to listening to music, being not so big on finishing any particular song as she was on returning frequently to it and then singing along with the chorus ("She used to be the sweeeetest girl/She used to be the sweetest girl Ev-AH!") The first leg of the trip was spent with the Inland Northwester wrestling with the tricky subject of Northeast public transportation etiquette. The girl exuded more attitude than sexuality so I opted for not asking her to return the device to the volume the conductor had requested.

Her cellphone screen saver (held up high, so it was easily seen from the seat behind her in accordance with her Share Me With Everyone policy) was of a cartoon elf, from the perspective more generally seen by a toilet than by me. Then we returned to the music sampler.

But then we headed into the express portion of the trip, and I grew desperate. As the conductor walked down the aisle one last time, I caught his eye, smiled, and pointed to the seat in front of me. He kindly went back and asked the lady to turn her music off. She stared blankly, so he repeated himself a couple of times, finally slipping in, "music isn't allowed if it disturbs others." Seizing the important point, she interrupted to say, "Some-body comp-LAIN-in?" The conductor returned to his purer theme, and after the same amount of time had passed as before her initial response, she turned her music off.

I spent the rest of the trip debating my immortal soul over which was the wrong side of the tracks (for the most part they are indistinguishable) in blessed silence.

*Whereas the response I'm hoping for from passersby is a combination of "My, isn't she clean" and "Hellooooooo Mild-Mannered."

Jesse Tree Pictures

List of Jesse Tree Symbols (in roughly chronological order, from creation to the birth of Christ.)

Week I
Sunday: Introduction (Isa. 11:1-10)
Monday: God—Creation
Tuesday: Adam and Eve—The First Sin
Wednesday: Noah—The Flood
Thursday; Abraham—The Promise
Friday: Isaac—Offering of Isaac
Saturday: Jacob—Ladder to Heaven

Week II
Sunday: Joseph—God's Providence
Monday: Moses—God's Leadership
Tuesday: Israelites—Passover Lamb
Wednesday: Exodus—Pillars of Fire and Cloud
Thursday: God—Giving the Torah at Sinai
Friday: The Ark of the Covenant—Prefigurement of Mary
Saturday: Joshua—The Fall of Jericho

Week III
Sunday: Gideon—Unlikely Heroes
Monday: Samuel—The Beginning of the Kingdom
Tuesday: David—A Shepherd for the People
Wednesday: Elijah—Threat of False Gods
Thursday: Jonah—Doing God's Will
Friday: Judith—Faith in Action
Saturday: Isaiah—The Call to Holiness

Week IV
Sunday: Jeremiah—The Exile
Monday: Habakkuk—Waiting and Watching

Dec. 19: John the Baptist
Dec. 20: Mary
Dec. 21: Zechariah and Elizabeth
Dec. 22: Joseph
Dec. 23: The Magi
Dec. 24: Jesus
Dec. 25: The Christ

Okay then.

Today we were in the studio audience of "Emeril Live." It was kind of interesting to see how these things work. Among other things, there is a professional rabble-rouser who tells depressingly slick jokes to try and get the audience all revved up. The commercial breaks are very very long, and the band plays a crucial role in getting the audience through them. At no point did I feel like the person jollying up the crowd found any actual enjoyment in the presence of the great unwashed.

The food looked okay, most of it being of the Triple Bypass variety. Emeril used ham hocks, but didn't explain how to serve them (I just cooked one and ended up throwing it away after a half-hearted attempt to decide which parts were edible—of course most of the good stuff had already cooked into the soup.) I didn't sample the food (which was a relief), but somehow the whole experience served up a super-sized portion of existential ennui.

Jesse Tree

Two years ago I came across a friend frantically shaping ornaments out of Sculpey. I immediately found out enough about the project to be waist-deep in it, and it was only after I'd finished that I realized the question of "whether this was worthwhile" could be asked and may even be assumed by others to have been answered in the affirmative. The project was a Protestant/internet take on the medieval Tree of Jesse. The medieval form is a genealogy of Christ, but the modern form is more of a summary of salvation history from creation to Christ. One makes an ornament for each day in Advent (it turns out that felt is a more common media than Sculpey, which just proves the existence of Fate, as I never would have taken a second look at stupid chunks of felt.) There are lists of suggested symbols, and EWTN provides a Catholic version (though not enough entries for the entire season).

I had so much fun that Stalin would have started World War III just to be able to stop me, and I am relying on my impenetrable blogger anonymity to protect me from the Al-Qaeda's fatwa. My only regret is that I couldn't include ninjas. The ornaments have now been liberally coated with Sculpey varnish—in the vivid world which is my imagination, this will not only make them shiny, but also protect them from breaking when they are accidentally thrown across the room. And although reality and this world may not overlap as frequently as my friends and well-wishers might desire, I have never been unhappy with it, and I expect great things of the shiny unbreakableness. When the ornaments dry, and when I feel like the great effort required, I will take pictures and post them so people can guess over which is my favorite (and where the ninjas would have been most at home). Done.

Part 1

J owns a CD of "Pink Love Songs." The cover shows a highly colored sunset. They range from the cloyingly sweet to the outright disturbing (“Sometimes I want to break you, and drive you to your knees!”) They are all undeniably pink. Most of them make me wonder how our culture could have gotten to such a state that these are the kind of words that fall out when people want to talk about love without using their minds.

At the moment, Frankie Valli’s star is ascendant (but not Oh What a Night, which exercises an unfortunate fascination over me), and under his influence I have frequently found the words “Let’s never listen to anything but Pink Love Songs” in my mouth and about to escape. (Go Mr. Positive! Express the exact same feelings while avoiding harmful negative energy!) Luckily, no one has the staying power of Kenny Rogers, and a series of inoculations in the form of three years listening to the soft rock station in grade school has given me lifelong immunity to him. (He is also troubling, though. Why would I want to be loved by a man in such a way that he'd be the last to admit my faults? I don't see how that would bring me closer to Christ. Why would I want a man who'd turn his back on his best friend and wouldn't ever think of anything but me? Think how boring the conversation would be after the novelty wore off:
"Honey, can you think of an alternate proof for the Pythagorean Theorem?"
"Well, darling, I just can't get my mind off you."
"Get the heck away from me, you non-Euclidean freak.")

To be continued when I feel like it and when J finds Pink Love Songs so I can include the play list.

This is for you, Mrs. Bear

A nice all-purpose prayer from my own pure brain (this is more of a disclaimer than a brag):
Oh Jesus, please grant that all this person's suffering be the highly salutary kind that brings them ever closer to you, and give them handfuls, scatterings, and showers of happiness.

Inspired by Mrs. Bear

I recently went to a wedding where the groom had kept the honeymoon destination a secret from the bride. Of course this seemed like the perfect setup for the all time coolest honeymoon spot, but the groom foolishly chose Maui instead.

Now, if he had known how crazy cheap it was ($250 one way!), he probably wouldn't have been able to pass it up. In fact, until I read the wikipedia page, I thought this was a trip reserved for the extremely wealthy. Now I'm wondering how I can afford not to go.

And since the subject of italics has come up, I'd like to take a moment for a tribute to Robert Ludlum, aka Man Who Got Paid For Writing "...overworked, overrisked, underpaid..." I had to take a moment to gnaw on my knuckles from pure suspense over that one.

Jump on the bandwagon

Get a Cash Advance

I saw this on Helene's blog, assumed it would be a fun quiz, and went ahead with it. It actually applies an esoteric calculus to your blog and then pops out the answer, so it's a little unsatisfying.

Not getting anywhere, but having fun

Sherlock Holmes : Sensing :: Miss Marple : Intuition.

Need I add that Miss Marple has no need of a sidekick who says, "Brilliant deduction! How the devil was it done?" in order to impress the reader?

On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes is eminently more quotable. Which really shouldn't follow.

You don't want to know how many times I had to fiddle with the above proportion before I hit on the best order (I didn't want to rely too heavily on the reader automatically alternating and inverting it).

Discuss

Does personality type belong to the soul or the body? Why?

Funny Nunny!

I still don't feel quite up to writing, but I got to make some Halloween costumes and wanted to show them off. (These were originally bedsheets, and all the patterns came from my own pure brain, aided by two Google image searches and a saints book for children. The secret is that I don't let the fact that I don't know how to do it stop me. And yes, I am bragging, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.)

Two cheers for the person who can guess both saints correctly!

This took fully half of my total costume-making time, partially because metallic thread and felt go together like oil and water.

Yargh

I've been a little bit wiped out lately, so thinking of things to write while also typing and looking at a computer screen has been too much in the way of multitasking. Which is a stinker, because I have had some great things to write about, such as:
1. Hunt for "Pink Love Songs"
2. Something else which I've forgotten because I'm busy trying to type and look at the screen.
But I hope to arise, Phoenix-like, shortly.

Small Talk 2

A few weeks ago, a friend told me how she'd been working on the art of small talk—the little superficial questions which seemed so silly to her, but which were greeted with genuine relish, so much so that she had decided this was definitely an act of charity. I felt inspired, reflected sadly on how little I'd been sowing seeds of God's love among my acquaintances, and resolved to work harder in the future. (I ought to be an expert from the number of times I've made this resolution.)

I had lots of opportunities for mingling with strangers in the next few weeks, because the residents were in a play at a local theater. One night, a cast member sat down next to me as the chorus started rehearsing a scene. She pointed to my sandals in a friendly way and said, "I have the same shoes!"

"Yeah, isn't Payless great?" with a big, amiable smile. (I had actually noticed that she had the same shoes at a previous rehearsal, but sometimes people are freaked out if you've noticed too much, so I suppressed the information.)

"Why no," startled and a bit offended, "mine* are Anne Klein!"

"Huh." I said, reflecting that if the lady were correct about the shoes' origin (which she wasn't), they wouldn't be anywhere near as cool.

Silence descended, with me feeling pleased that I had kept from expressing myself, but with the lady apparently experiencing less enjoyable emotions.

"Or maybe," she said with a nervous titter, "maybe they weren't."

We had to continue sitting next to each other until she was called on stage, so I had time to reflect that this probably didn't count as having shown God's love to her.

* I try to avoid italics, but my interlocutor unmistakably italicized this word.

Comedy

It's amazing how developmental disabilities affect just a portion of a person's brain. J has an IQ of about 40, but her social IQ is much higher. She whips out astonishing jokes now and again.

The other day I offered J some brownies and she sang, "Don't it make my brownies blue!"

I was brushing J's hair today, and when I finished I wanted her to feel how soft it was when it was brushed properly so I said, "Put your hand up..." and she interrupted to say, "What, am I under arrest or something?"

Well, we didn't lose any

This evening we took the gang to the Italian American Festival. This is located in a huge park, but up until seven years ago took place on the streets of The Burg (Chambersburg) in Trenton, when it was known as the Feast of Lights. Now all the Italians (Neapolitans with a sprinkling of Sicilian) are taking their aesthetic of concrete to the suburbs (apparently there has always been a certain deviation in The Burg's economic activities, but recent demographic shifts have led to these aberrations having a more public character than the Italians approve of), and the festival has moved as well.

I hope that the residents had fun, and it's likely they did since we ate junk food, which is one of their all-time favorite activities (okay, I don't cry at the prospect, either). For me it was non-stop count and recount, as the place was packed and all of my little flock has a tendency to wander off. A marionette display snagged one, and I had to fight my way back up the human stream (with another resident attached at the hand, but inclined to plant her feet widely apart and then not budge) to gather him back in. I realize now that I should have been happy over the potency-hovering-on-act of so many lost sheep to find and rejoice more over than if they had never been lost, but I wasn't. The end result is that I saw little of the scenery. Of course, it was all vendor tents, so it's no huge loss.

I wonder a little bit at what the point of carnivals is. There is only so much food that one can take on board while still being able to walk comfortably back to one's car. I recently discovered that it is fun to go on the rides, but this one had very few rides, and they were primarily of the go up slowly come down quickly variety. Now the dropping-suddenly-through-space theme is a staple in my dreams, but never yet have I greeted it by clapping my hands and saying, "The only way this could be better is if I paid $4 first!" Maybe if you've lived in that area for a long time you could spend the time wandering from acquaintance to distant relative, which can be fun. Or maybe you could spend it gossiping about but not talking to these people, which is even better.

In Seattle I qualified as a house-plant, but I think that in New Jersey I am the equivalent of a natural woman. My favorite part of the evening was the night drive home, and I think I would have really enjoyed the park minus the carnival. As we were parking, we saw a small fawn lost among the cars, a bit of the way things should be plunged bewilderingly into the way things are.

You're My Type

The other day at the health food store I saw a homeschoolin', homemade-jumper-wearin', health-food-eatin' mother and her daughters. I walked by thinking they looked frumpy, innocent, and sweet.

As I searched for my multivitamin (it was in a white bottle, with some other colors on the label, and maybe said something about energy), I overheard the clerk tell the mother that they were the best-dressed family that had come in all day.

Dark Nights

A couple weeks ago I saw that Newsweek had an article on Mother Teresa, and within a few seconds was simultaneously outraged and delighted. Outraged by the author ("Christopher Hitchens, her most outspoken critic!") and delighted by the book he was reviewing: the collection of her letters outlining her dark night of the soul (Come Be My Light). Newsweek doesn't post entire articles (this one was in the August 29, 2007 issue), but here is the first paragraph:

The publication of Mother Teresa’s letters, concerning her personal crisis of faith, can be seen either as an act of considerable honesty or of extraordinary cynicism (or perhaps both of the above).

I'm honestly cynical of the rest of the article being worth $2.95 (the online price of a single article), but here's the link, just in case you're more sanguine (or just more foolishly affluent).

I had first heard of this dark night from a First Things article published on her beatification, and was flabbergasted. I had assumed that she was able to live so arduous and comfortless a life because she was given extraordinary spiritual consolations—now it appears that any consolations to be had were in the arduous life!

Last night a friend passed out copies of the Time review, which is much more balanced (I like to think this is Whittaker Chambers's enduring influence). The friend spoke with enthusiasm about how much hope it gave him for his own spiritual life. It is amazing that a whole world of people, most of whom are unlikely to read St. John of the Cross, are finding out about the beauty of faithfulness in extreme and prolonged suffering.

Exactly

M, one of the residents of the men's house, was listening to some CDs the other day and one of them was from my all time favorite, Mr. Johnny Cash. M brought the CD over to me, and pointed to one of the songs, "A Boy Named Sue," and asked, "Now, is this a boy's name, or a girl's name?"

"A girl's name," I replied, wondering if I should even try to explain.

"What?!" exclaimed K, overhearing, "That's crazy! A boy can't be named Sue!"

"Why would you name a boy that?" persisted M.

"Now that boy's gonna be made fun of, he is!" said K. "He's gonna get in fights."

So we just listened to the song.

Ah, Fall

A couple days ago we visited an old man who told us that he'd finally been able to have a fire the night before. I responded by saying that I'd finally turned off my air-conditioning.

A Good Time Is Had by Us

Personality type theories have provided Mrs. Bear and me with an unending source of amusement (the heyday of the humours), but somehow it reminds me of the time in college when I started laughing in class, was enough aware of my surroundings to know that a lot of hearty laughing was going on (and so felt comfortable continuing to what would otherwise have been an unfortunate extent), then after about five minutes realized that hearty though it was, all the laughter was being generated by me.

Facebook / Captain Mixed Metaphor

I've succumbed to the dark side, but will try to keep up with my first love.

Fingertips

Soldiers in Vietnam had "fire in the hole," and paramedics have "code blue," but when the siren goes off in my life, we have a crier. This has the same sort of urgency as the first two, because one crying person can make the entire group fall apart into their own individual vicissitudes in about five seconds. And it happens a few times a day. Now I can count the times I've cried all day in the last ten years on one hand (and could even if two fingers and a thumb were chopped off), and I think that I cry more now than I did as a little girl, so all of this is a strange and alien experience.

This afternoon we had a reprise of the crisis from this morning. K loves food, but (or perhaps I should say "because of this") her mother has put her on a diet (actually, the entire house is dieting). So now when the litany of foods starts, the response tends to be "that's fattening" (rather than "my favorite"). Unfortunately, whenever the syllable "fat" is said in J's presence (as it frequently is, since J and K live in the same house), J thinks that she has been called fat, and begins to cry and glower. If this is allowed to continue, K will lose patience with J and give her something to really cry about. As it happens, J takes an active interest in her own diet (J's figure would make Tweedledum proud, and she accentuates the effect by rubbing "mah bellay" and quiring her immortal soul after her stomach's health) but the response she likes is not "that's fattening" but rather "we're trying to take care of you."

I've been musing on the qualities which make a song a hit in The Party Bus. Tonight the gang was getting down to "I Will Survive" with a touching faith in my driving skills as we careened through mid-New Jersey. We had just shouted alleluia to the heavens along with The Weather Girls, and the niggling familiarity of the selection finally clicked: any song best delivered by a drag queen will be a hit here.

The house cat is pretty sick and possibly running through her ninth life, so we're asking people not to pick her up. One of the guys, S, came over to visit, and insisted on picking her up, swearing that all she needed was a hug. When I finally disengaged the poor cat, S's shirt bore the evidence of the cat's (or her bowels') feelings on the subject. He was so shocked and hurt at the cat's treatment that I managed to hold in all forms of "I told you so," but risked serious internal injury doing so.

When I first got here, I played Bingo with the gang. When M won a game, J (her roommate) told her roguishly, "I'm going to tickle your foot tonight!" The next day I asked M if J had tickled her foot, and they both collapsed in giggles. "Yes!"

Beaten by the Space-Time Continuum

My bedroom only has one table, a small bedside one with just enough room for the necessities (a laptop computer and a glass of water). Now I still don't know what my hand was doing in that sector of the universe, but the other day the glass got knocked over onto the computer.

My computer has recovered, and I dug out my Nalgene bottle.

Book on the Four Humours

A while back I promised the title of a good book on the ancient temperaments. I haven't read it yet, and the publisher (Sophia Institute Press) makes me think the local library will not have it, but here's hoping (or, here's to being temporarily sanguine). It is: The Temperament God Gave You by Art and Loraine Bennett.

Would someone just post already?

I'm just coming off a seven-plus day bout of working, and found out that I get to work tomorrow afternoon and evening, too, so the blogging going on around here is going to be darned limited.

On the plus side, I'll get to take some time off if Guy Crouchback comes to visit.

Don't, don't, don't let's start

One of the residents has had some problems with shouting outbursts, and whenever she gets going her roommate will gesture me aside and say in an urgent whisper, "Don't start!" Frequently she wags her finger at me, too. (The injunction is meant to her roommate, not to me.) Sometimes she'll do this for a while even after her roommate has calmed down, so to break up the tension I'll sing the They Might Be Giants song back to her. The best that I can say of this is that a good time is had by me.

I told Mrs. Bear this, and she said it was awesome. I think the dance that goes with it surpasses awesome, but I can't see it (being as I'm doing it).

Introvert vs. Extrovert

Mrs. Bear's recent post, and a conversation on being introverted with a friend in which she told me that I "hide it well" because I seem to enjoy talking with people, have prompted this small clarification:

Introversion is NOT a pathological state (that crazy Jung—always yukking it up).

Furthermore, the distinction between extroverts and introverts is not "loves people" and "hates people." Rather, it is that extroverts are energized from contact with people, especially large numbers of people, and introverts are energized by time alone, especially with large numbers of books.

And, if you want to get into the four ego functions* (and if you have any sense, you'll be into them like a dachshund and a rat hole), extroverts show the world the function that they use most (making them easy to get to know), while introverts show the function they use second most.

Coming up...the title of a good book on the four classical temperaments.

* Disclaimer: this was the best summary I could find (read: the only), but I'd just like to go on the record as saying that I do not believe that hallucinations are simply alternate psychic experiences. Good grief.

Baby Got Back

One of the residents had a birthday a week ago, and her father gave her the DVD Black Beauty. Everyone was excited and the DVD came up frequently in conversation. However, pronunciation being what it is, the first vowel of "beauty" sounded like "oo" rather than "you." I continually found myself on the brink of telling people that Sir Mix-A-Lot hails from my hometown.

No More Meetings!

In about forty minutes I get to go to the third meeting in as many days. This meeting is an improvement on the other two, as it doesn't fall on my days off. (We all have to put up with meetings on our day off now and then, but I been having a pity party on the scale of a five-alarm frat bash because there were meetings on both my days off.) Further, I managed to avoid sleeping for all but one hour last night, so I'd had my heart set on a little slumber, a little folding of the hands in sleep after the morning's duties, but my boss informed me that this makes the devil's work and that I need to come to this meeting or else look forward to a purgatory full of book groups.

The book group in this life has slowed down to two pages a week ("It's so rich!"), so it will take us three years to get through the 300-page book. I can only surmise that the purgatory book group would start at two pages, but gradually cover a portion of the book that is less than any given amount. Then when you finally gave up your own desire to have a sense of the whole in addition to a sense of the details, Grace would come, jump you to the limit (or asymptote), and you would find yourself in heaven and free to read something else.

So how does your intrepid heroine plan to face the day? First, no more caffeine. I've cut down on it to the extent that I've become super-sensitive, and the combination of caffeine (at any point during the day) and a bad-health night sometimes adds up to a grievous sleep deficit which is all my fault. Second, I intend to read more of Freddy the Politician before the book group commences.

God is Good

I just went to the dentist for the first time in five years, and had X-rays taken for the first time in six years. The dread with which I had approached the dentist's chair had nothing to do with a fear of pain. No, it was that terrible grown-up fear of the bill which lurks, green-eyed and slavering, waiting for the psychological moment to bite in the place where it will be felt most. I have a fair amount of dental pain, and had visions of having to sell organs on the Chinese black market in order to cover the fees.

This dentist actually does the cleanings himself—he says he feels like he gets a better understanding of a person's teeth that way. He's not quite as thorough as the hygienists that have cleaned my teeth in the past, but he charges $45 rather than $150, so I'm not complaining.

But the best news of all is this: I don't have a single cavity! The dental pain is simply due to migraines, and I'm not even grinding my teeth from them!

As we say in this house:
God is good!
All the time
All the time
God is good!

Miscellaneous

This week I registered at a new parish, and was puzzled by a blank marked "family salutation." I wrote down "Salve" but something tells me that wasn't what they meant.

I finished the Harry Potter book and very much enjoyed it. In fact, it reversed the one thing that had most upset me about the earlier books. I'm just going to be pleased and not discuss the legitimacy of this reversal—let's just take joy where we find it.

And speaking of finding it, I'm off to the library to find more children's fantasy books. I think it's just about Prydain-o'clock. If my erstwhile readers have any other suggestions, I would love to hear them. I'll probably check out The Dark Is Rising Sequence (although that has always seemed a bit dark to me).

On Bandaids et al

I was asked recently how I had mended my V-necked shirt with a bandaid, which tells me that my writing is not quite a crystal clear prism of brilliant thought. The bandaid was in fact an unrelated accessory, the result of an attack in the bath by a razor wielding maniac a day or two prior. Now that the hot weather is upon us, and even lukewarm showers are not enough to make balance and coordination simultaneously possible, these attacks are becoming both more common and more grievous. In fact, I am becoming piqued at their frequency, though I've been assured in no uncertain terms that I am not only alluring but sultry when plastered with bandages. (Of course, I do lose a significant amount of weight—albeit from only one spot—with each incident.)

However, razors have also brought happiness to these quarters. I consider the following to be a definitive refutation of those who believe that literature cannot teach:

A Willa Cather character sat down after a long day hiking across southwestern deserts to hack at his callouses with a penknife.

Hercule Poirot, in need of a small, very sharp knife to slice open a knapsack which he suspected of containing smuggled heroin, went to his bathroom for a callous knife.

After reading these passages, I went straight to the drugstore, found that callous knives still exist (though they are more razors than knives), purchased one, and successfully removed the callouses from the sides of my feet. However, something that looked very similar came back as soon as I got to my current residence and the semi-public shower, as noted in a previous post. Now I wish I'd never brought the topic up, as the treatment was not successful, perhaps due to my fabulous disappearing immune system.