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.