Through a Glass, Darkly

I’m leaving early early early tomorrow for New York City for the weekend, so expect me back on Monday with lots of stories to tell.

Women who cackle are almost always superior to women who don’t. -Linda Holmes

I noticed lately that I have been cackling more. (Which, according to the above quote, is a good thing, so I am fine with it.) I first embraced the cackling a few weeks ago, during an episode of The Amazing Race in which Colin completely melted down because of an ox. I had just had a long day of work, and I came home to watch him meltdown. And I cackled.

According to the definition, cackling is not the most appealing form of laughter. But it feels good to cackle when you read something snarky or you see something like Colin’s meltdown. On Sunday when the outgoing music minister was speaking to the congregation and said, “I feel like I just won an Oscar!” and then went on a little too long. I leaned over to Mike and said, “I dare the organist to ‘play her off the stage.’” It’s a good thing it was the end of the service, because it was definitely a cackling moment. I have been cackling at things I read, strange things at work, and stories Mike tells me about his classmates.

There are moments to giggle and moments to chortle, moments to roll on the floor and moments to (unsuccessfully) laugh quietly when you’re not supposed to be laughing. Cackling is a little bit of funny plus a little bit of schadenfreude (which I expect Geof will take as a shout-out) mixed in with a slightly twisted sense of humor. And I have been enjoying the cackling lately. Very much indeed.

Sometimes friendships fade away naturally - you move, or she moves, and maybe she gets engaged and has a job and is still working on finishing her degree, and she’s a few years younger than you are anyway, so you just naturally drift apart. You’ll still go to her wedding, and maybe even a shower if you get invited, and when you see her, you’ll talk and catch up. It won’t be the same, but it won’t be bad.

Sometimes, though, friendships die in a moment. The eighth or ninth unreturned phone call or email. The time she forgot your birthday. A betrayal. Something that makes you realize, “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s not worth the effort, and it’s never going to be what I had hoped.”

I realized today that that happened to me twice this summer. The first was with a friendship that had been floundering anyway. There were unreturned phone calls galore, but what I have realized about unreturned phone calls is that I never figure out the friendship has died until later. I don’t sit around thinking, “After five tries, I am going to give up on this friendship.” It’s after the fact that I realize, “That one time when I called and I had a gift I was trying to get to her and she never called me back, that’s when I emotionally gave up.” But it wasn’t even the unreturned phone calls that did me in this time. It was being somewhere where she gave everyone these fun pictures of things they had done together . . . except for me. I sat there, watching everyone else look at those pictures laugh and cry and reminisce while having none of my own, and something inside of me died. Even with that blatantly obvious rejection, I didn’t realize I had quit hoping for more until today, when Mike and I were planning a dinner party and I didn’t include her on the guest list. It would have been a given to include her a year ago, even six months ago. But today I realized that, unless things change with her, I’m not expecting the close friendship that I once hoped that we would have. And it’s because of the way I felt in that one moment. I didn’t know it at the time, but I can see how, in that moment, everything inside me shifted.

The other incident this summer was when a friend of mine forgot my birthday. I know that forgetting a birthday isn’t that huge of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it was another situation where it was forgetting my birthday on top of several months of neglect. A month after my birthday, I emailed her for her birthday, but I still haven’t heard back. I thought of my email as a last-ditch effort, but looking back, I knew it was over when I didn’t hear from her on (or around) my birthday. She’s the kind of person who is good about birthdays, so it signals more than just forgetting. It signals that I’m not a priority anymore. And . . . I got the message.

In some ways, it feels like it’s easier to realize that you’ve given up and accepted how things are, or how they are never going to be. The first friend I mentioned - I am sure I will get an email from her now and then, and I’ll respond, and then I won’t hear from her for months. Lather, rinse, repeat. The second one - I doubt we’ll be in touch much after this. Facing up to those facts is easier than deluding myself.

It’s not that it doesn’t hurt, because . . . it definitely does. But it’s better than lying to myself, and investing myself in people who don’t really care if I’m around. In a strange way, it kind of feels like a victory - I am not going to do that to myself anymore.

I think it must be difficult to be friends with me, because I never quite believe that I am good enough. I am afraid to call even my closest friends because I think that I will be bothering them, which probably makes me appear distant and uninterested. I assume they are all busy, and therefore don’t pursue them like I should. I am afraid of angering people or being a burden.

I do this to Mike, too. I got really sick to my stomach on Tuesday night after he went to sleep, and I didn’t want to bother him, so I was very careful not to wake him up. And when I went downstairs to get some ginger ale, I replaced the can in the refrigerator with a can from the pantry so that Mike wouldn’t be irritated that I had forgotten to do that. Never mind that I would have been furious with him for not waking me up if he was the one who was sick. Never mind that he would in no way have been upset with me if I forgot to replace the can. I act all the time as if he is going to yell at me for making a mistake. If you’ve met Mike, you know he’s not a yelling kind of guy. I’m the one who would be upset with myself for forgetting to replace the can, not Mike.

There are probably a lot of reasons I act this way. As I have explained over and over, I feel pretty lonely these days. But it’s not just that . . . I remember acting this way as far back as high school. My closest friend in high school wasn’t someone I did stuff with outside of school very often, or who liked to talk on the phone. I wanted to do those things, to be a typical high schooler, but she seemed too busy with other friends and family. Maybe she wasn’t, and I just was afraid. Whatever it was, now I have a hard time believing people want to spend time with me. When it gets scary, I pull back and reject them so that they can’t reject me first, even when I don’t know I’m doing it.

As one of my friends pointed out, a million best friends wouldn’t solve this problem. I have to believe that God values me whether others do or not. But that seems like a tall order, and I don’t know where to start. How do you change a pattern that has been around for at least a decade?

[Okay, here's my standard disclaimer that I did not make this post so that people would stroke my ego. I hope it doesn't seem that way. I wouldn't want any of you all to be irritated with me.]

[That last sentence was my lame attempt at humor.]

Sunday afternoon I was sweeping the floor of my kitchen and I realized how much I love being home in the fall and the spring when I can have the windows open and the afternoon sun comes in and everything is just perfect. That’s the kind of weather that inspires a clean house and a warm beverage.

This morning I had a dentist appointment, and I didn’t have to be at work until noon, so when I got home after having my gums attacked, the cool weather pushed me and Mike to craw back into bed, jeans and all (he had already made the bed, which was very sweet, but, oh well), and talk for a little while. That’s one of the things I miss about being in school - my schedule is so much more rigid now, and I can’t really cancel everything and get back into bed like I used to. It reminds me of one of my favorite things to do - when I was in high school, I’d get up and take my shower and put on my terrycloth robe and climb back into bed and read for about 30 minutes. And when I was done, my mom would bring me up a cup of coffee. I love getting all warm in bed after my shower.

I treasure time like we spent this morning - I was ready for work, so I wasn’t in a rush to get things done, and I decided the housework could wait. We had time to talk about some things that have happened the past few days, to process how we are doing. I am thankful that he’s around so much more now, because of not working, and I love being able to take advantage of that.

Yesterday I was thinking about how these fall days turn me into a different person . . . I want to talk about days like pearls on a string (which is way more poetic than usual for me) and we’re getting the fireplace hooked up and I get excited about flannel sheets and corduroys and my favorite flannel pajamas. I plan long drives with Mike to the mountains to see the leaves. I listen to August and Everything After. I love summer, but I am ready for a change.

“I met a girl with autumn in her eyes and summer in the way she makes me feel . . . “ -Counting Crows

There was a period one summer where my brother and I played Monopoly every day. My family was doing this thing where we had a chart that had a list of chores on it, and however many check marks we got meant that we got poker chips. Poker chips could be redeemed for things like television time or computer time or candy. My brother and I, both fearing that the other would have more chips, hoarded chips like mad. So we watched practically no television whatsoever and played Monopoly instead. I am sure we thought we were being very clever. We showed them! We had all these special rules, like we never used the $1 bills. We just rounded everything to the nearest $5. I have no idea why we did this. I think it might have had something to do with always running out of $100 bills, so we always just used the $1 as $100 when we ran out. Sometimes we’d line up our bills to show off how much money we had, and sometimes we’d put it all in a big stack. I remember Joseph would get everything in $5 and $10 bills so his stack would be taller.

Joseph and I liked to play games together. He would even play Sweet Valley High with me if I asked, although I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. It wouldn’t have been cool for people to know that he played a game where the point was to steal each other’s boyfriend. We had this really neat game that had to do with finding hidden treasure, and the regular stuff, too - Sorry, Trouble, Clue. I didn’t wish for another sibling except when we wanted to play Clue. You have to have three people, and sometimes Mom was too busy.

Last week I read Sars’ description of her family’s competitiveness, which includes things like marking each other out of the will for accusations of cheating. It reminded me of a long-forgotten story. For some reason, probably involving a game, Joseph wrote out a will that said, “When I die, Kari cannot have or read my Calvin and Hobbes books.” This was the ultimate punishment, because we read those books all the time, but it was only when we put the books together that we had a complete set. I wish I could remember what I did that pissed him off so much. I probably put hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. hehehe.

My family played a lot of games in general. I remember playing Uno on the floor of our house in Charlotte. My dad would always keep an extra card under his leg, in case he forgot to say “uno.” He’d pull it out and say, “But I have dos cards, so I don’t need to say uno!” On Sunday afternoons, we often played Trouble in all its pop-o-matic glory. There’s a family story that involves Joseph and a Trouble delay-of-game that I shouldn’t share here. But his game delays were legendary. We played Skip-Bo and Milles Bornes and Battleship and Hungry Hungry Hippos (which I gave my mom one year for Mother’s Day. Loud games are what every mom dreams of for Mother’s Day).

After I got the Sweet Valley High board game, I tried and tried to get my dad to play it with me. He refused. At some point, we bet on a basketball game - he’s a Duke fan, so if Duke won, I was going to have to wear a Duke sweatshirt, but if Carolina won, he had to play Sweet Valley High with me. And, to my great delight, my team won. Somewhere I still have a polaroid of him sitting at the kitchen table playing the game. He definitely stole my boyfriend.

Mike and I love to play games, too. Trivia games are my favorite - we have Trivial Pursuit versions 5 & 6, Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit, and, as aforementioned, Book Lover’s Trivial Pursuit. Mike won’t play Scrabble with me, though, because I suck and he is tired of beating me. I just can’t seem to visualize the words. And I won’t play Yahtzee anymore, because I am tired of losing. At least in Scrabble there’s a chance I will eventually get better.

When people tell me it’s not about winning or losing, I always quote Worf: “If winning is not important, Commander, why keep score?” But I don’t remember whether I won or lost most of those games (except an occasional crushing defeat or victory in Monopoly). I just remember it being fun to sit next to my dad and think we finally got him in Uno, only to have him pull out another card. I remember laughing at Joseph’s Trouble delays. I remember playing Trivial Pursuit with Mike one New Year’s Eve, the “Is a pickle really a vegetable” question, and making up words in the worst Scrabble game of all time.

I love playing games with my friends and family, because they create the kind of memories you can still tease one another about years later. Maybe that really is better than winning.

(I’ll have to think about that one.)

A few years ago, my brother gave me a griddle for my birthday. It’s a very nice griddle, and it has come in very handy for scrambling eggs and making fajitas. The only problem is that I wasn’t the one who asked for the griddle. Mike requested a griddle for Christmas or his birthday or something. He was overjoyed to see it when I opened the box. I don’t like scrambled eggs or pancakes, so griddles aren’t tops on my list.

I never told my brother that, because he was only trying to do something nice. And, like I said, it is a very nice griddle. (I don’t know if you read this, Joseph, but we do appreciate the griddle. We use it every week.) “The griddle” is a running joke in our house - Mike will be cooking something, and he’ll say, “I need to use your griddle, is that okay?” And I will give him the evil death glare.

Well, last night I finally got my revenge. Mike’s birthday is Monday, and one of my aunts took us out to eat and then gave him his present. She gave him gift cards to a few restaurants, since she knows going out to eat isn’t really in the budget. And she gave him something I had been gazing at longingly ever since Sarah alerted me to its existence - Trivial Pursuit Book Lover’s Edition. Guess whose face lit up this time. I am so going to kick his butt. At “his” Trivial Pursuit.

I have talked on here about trying to stand up for myself and being honest about my preferences, but it’s really hard. Last night there was a discussion (it’s not really important what it was about) and I made a conscious decision not to agree with everyone else just to make them happy. Good thing, right? “Be what you’re like! Be like yourself!” I wasn’t being antagonistic, but I wanted to state my preference (“How can it be b***s*** to state a preference?”) like everyone else had. And I left that room feeling that disparaging remarks were being made about me as soon as the door was closed behind me.

I can’t really put into words how hard that was for me. It weighed on me all evening. We got into bed and Mike turned to me and said, “Are you going to tell me about it?” And I turned off the light and just cried and cried as he held me. I didn’t know how to say it. Is it such a weird thing to want to have friends with similar interests who come from the same basic beliefs? Are my opinions such that no one but Mike can put up with me? I get tired of feeling that I have to be funny or clever all the time so people will like me. I get tired of all that performance. I desire to have friends on a deeper level than that. I do have good friends, I know. But I also feel like something is missing. I have been wondering lately if “grown-up friends” just don’t have the kind of connection that comes so easily in college. And even my college friends live elsewhere or are having babies or are just busy with their own lives.

Or maybe the problem is me. Maybe all my walls and defenses have pushed people away. Maybe I have done this to myself.

I have been so incredibly lonely lately. I am good at pushing those feelings down and settling for less. But sometimes a stupid conversation will bring those desires for acceptance to the forefront, and even my normal coping mechanisms don’t work. Today, though, I’ll stuff those feelings and hope that everyone ignores my puffy eyes. I’ll try to focus on the good and ignore the sadness in my chest. I will be glad I stayed true to myself, even though it was hard. And I’ll pretend my heart doesn’t feel like it wants to split apart.

This month’s Booklist had an essay talking about reader’s advisory, and at the end of it, it posed an interesting question. Someone is looking at the library’s copy right now, so I will just paraphrase. What would your response be if an older patron came in and said, “I am in the declining years of my life, and I am tired of reading dreck. I want to read beautifully written books that will help me reflect on the years of my life. What are some books that you recommend?”

I can’t think of anything. Well, that’s not true. I can’t think of anything that doesn’t kind of sound pretentious. I have read a lot about the morality in The Brothers Karamazov, so I might recommend that. And War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But those answers sound awfully pretentious. And why do I automatically revert to old Russian novels when I think of deep, important, and beautifully written? The only one of those three that I have actually read is Anna Karenina. I do hope to re-read it one day (who was the genius who let me read Anna Karenina at the age of 13?) and I own a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. I suppose I am waiting for inspiration to suddenly hit or the book to read itself. (Or maybe I am just afraid to start it.)

Some of my favorite books - the Pride and Prejudices and the Gaudy Nights - they have a lot to say about truth and relationships and human motivation, but they still seem to be on the lighter side of things. I don’t read so that I can impress people with my monumental reading list. I read more for escapism, to immerse myself in a story, but “story as truth” has also been a huge influence in the way I learn and see the world. I read to learn and for enjoyment. I carry bits and pieces of the books I’ve read around with me - I call people kindred spirits because of Anne, and I think of Mary Russell when I see a challenge involving bees on The Amazing Race. Trees hit by lightning make me think of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. I see girls interact here at the library, and I wonder which one is the Queen Bee. I think of my favorite rabbit when I see butterflies, and he’s in there with Encyclopedia Brown and Hester Prynne and that last silk dress. Even “story as truth” was stolen from Madeleine L’Engle.

And yet, I seem to believe that none of that is “important” enough to recommend. It’s changed me, it’s changed the way I look at life, but it doesn’t seem good enough for other people.

If I found out right now that I didn’t have much longer left to live, I might reread Anna Karenina. But I would also see if I could get J.K. Rowling to tell me how the Harry Potter series is going to end, and I’d try to read so many of the books that are on my list - recommendations from friends and things I’m curious about. And I’d reread The Velveteen Rabbit and The Lord of the Rings one last time. I might not revisit Bridget Jones, but that doesn’t mean I wasted time reading her, because, thanks to her, I know how many calories are in a banana. And she made me laugh. Not all books are created equal, that’s certainly true. But it’s hard to say which ones are the most important.

How would you answer the question?

Saturday night we had some friends over for a fondue party.

Now, first I should tell you this: One of the differences Mike and I have is that he is quite good at the entertaining thing. He loves finding new recipes and planning the menu and cooking for people. I am one of those people who worries if the house is clean enough to have people over. (It wasn’t as clean as I wanted on Saturday, but my bum foot meant I just couldn’t do everything I wanted.) So I stress when we’re having people over, even when it’s just friends. I get this from my mother. Mike keeps telling me that he would love to have weekly dinners and have people over, just like his family did growing up. To me, that seems unbearably stressful.

However, I am the one who came up with the idea for Saturday’s get-together. So if I was stressed, I brought it upon myself. Honestly, though, Mike shouldered more than his fair share of the preparations, and he did so quite uncomplainingly. I kept offering to help with the food, but he had a plan, and he executed it perfectly.

I loved watching him in action - perfecting the cheese fondue (which we ate entirely too much of), adjusting the flame, explaining the “rules” to those who hadn’t fondued before. He made all these sauces and looked up tons of recipes, and I could see the pleasure on his face as each course got better and better. His face shone when he saw that everyone was enjoying the food he made. I worry too much about perfection - is everybody happy, are they starving and wishing he would shut up so they can just eat already, is the fondue what they expected? I worried that he had done too much and that I wasn’t doing enough. That our friends would think I had made him do everything, even though he kept telling me he didn’t need any help. He, on the other hand, doesn’t worry so much about what people think. I can hear his voice telling me over and over, every time we host a get-together, “They are our friends. They care about us and they aren’t as critical as you think. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect.”

The amazing thing is, in spite of my worries, it kind of was perfect. We ate for hours and had good, real conversation for hours after that. We took a bunch of hysterical pictures and acted silly. And when our friends finally left just after 1:00 am, Mike turned to me on the porch and said, “That was one of the best get-togethers we’ve ever hosted. Thank you for inviting them.” He did all the work, and he’s thanking me.

I am blessed indeed.

On Friday, I was at Barnes and Noble with Alisa and saw this book on sale. Since I watched the events of September 11 unfold on CBS, it was, in fact, what I saw, and I had wanted to purchase that book for a while. The sale price was good (better than the price on the website, if you were wondering), so I decided to go ahead and get it.

An event like September 11, 2001, is both a shared event and an intensely personal one. We can all relate to the feelings that other Americans have, but each individual deals with it in his or her own personal way. For me, anything that reminds me of the fear and confusion I felt that day is likely to bring tears to my eyes. I didn’t lose anyone that day, and I didn’t feel that I was in any personal danger. Nor has my daily life changed much, if any, in the aftermath of the events. And yet, I still feel an incredible heaviness in my chest when I think about how I sat on my couch in my bathrobe and watched the day unfold.

I was at home alone on that day, working on a paper for my class that evening. I checked my friend Richard’s old messageboard, and saw a post by Dawn that said she was at work, she heard that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center buildings, but she couldn’t get any of the news websites up. She asked if any of us who were at home could turn on our televisions and let her know what was going on. And that is how I came to be watching TV in time to see the second plane hit. We must have been watching Everybody Loves Raymond the night before, because the TV was on CBS, where it pretty much remained for the rest of the day.

Last night we watched the DVD that came with the book I bought. The first part of the DVD contains CBS’s footage from that morning. It was stuff Mike had never seen, because he was working that day and he saw everything after the fact instead of as it unfolded. I kept pointing out things that I remembered about the interviews and the witnesses, and he asked me questions. “When did you know it was terrorism?” he asked. “When the second plane hit, I knew they were doing it on purpose, though I doubt I would have thought the word terrorism on my own,” I told him. His experiences that day were quite different than mine. His understanding of the events was filtered through my shaking voice on the phone, trying to make him understand what I was seeing, that planes were hitting buildings and that we didn’t know what was happening. I called him when the first tower fell, and again when the second one also crashed down. I remember his voice after I told him . . . he just said, “Okay,” but I could tell he didn’t believe me, exactly. I couldn’t really blame him.

The only thing that the DVD didn’t capture was the real sense of not knowing what was going on. When flight 93 went down, there were reports that it had hit Camp David. There were reports of car bombs in Washington. No one knew if there were more planes that had been hijacked. The DVD didn’t show all of the coverage from that morning, so it edited out a lot of the uncertainty and the innacuracies.

I think for an event like that, what sticks with me the most are specific images and feelings. I remember Bryant Gumbel saying, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, there is smoke coming from the Pentagon,” and I remember being intensely relieved when Dan Rather took over soon after that. His coverage was a lot more professional. I remember the same images everyone else does, of course, of planes and buildings and people jumping. But I also remember things like walking on campus that afternoon and seeing everyone, literally everyone talking on a cell phone. I remember a jeep driving by with a huge American flag hanging out the side. Later on, I remember Democrats and Republicans singing together on the Capitol steps, and President Bush’s speech on Mike’s birthday. I remember watching the National Prayer Service from the bar at Chili’s with my mom. “A Mighty Fortress” was playing, and my mom said, “I wish we could hear the words at a time like this.”

The only thing that wasn’t on the DVD that I felt should have been was Dan Rather’s appearance on Letterman. That was one of the hardest things for me (and I remember Rhonda and I talked about that last year when we met up in Chattanooga). My family generally watches CBS news, and I remember a lot of major events being explained to me by Dan Rather - things like Tiananmen Square and most national elections and, more recently, the Columbia spaceship disaster. I know a lot of people don’t care for his style, but I am used to him. When he broke down on Letterman, it was like watching your grandfather cry or something. It was so hard, because he’d been calm throughout everything that had happened, but he had finally hit his breaking point, I suppose.

It was sad to watch all of that last night, but it was therapeutic in a way. It allowed me to experience all those feelings with Mike instead of watching in isolation. He saw how the anchors gasped when the second plane hit, backing up the tape to be sure their eyes were telling the truth. He heard the disbelief in Dan Rather’s voice as witnesses told him the first tower had fallen. He sat there with me as I cried, knowing this time exactly what was going to happen. I suppose it could be somewhat morbid to watch all of that again, but it helped me turn an intensely personal experience into a shared one.

So, most of you know, but for those who don’t . . . yesterday I sprained my foot. I am still not exactly sure what happened, but here is what I think happened. One of the other ladies here at the library asked me to give her backup at the desk, so I stood up to head that way. My foot was either asleep or I landed on it wrong, because it turned and made this awful popping noise and I face-planted right here in my cubicle. Being the tough strong girl that I am (in my head), I tried to walk it off, and I kept telling her I was perfectly fine. In fact, I was not perfectly fine, and I almost blacked out at the desk because it hurt so much. I was sure I was going to puke and then pass out in front of the patrons. Which would have been quite a story to tell afterwards.

All the mother-figures here at work got me ice and Advil, and my boss said I had to go to the first care place before I could go to the hospital to get it amputated. This is the kind of joke my dad would always make growing up. hehe. So, anyway, I sprained my foot, but luckily I didn’t break anything. I did get the afternoon off of work, and everyone is being very sweet today. It still hurts, but I am managing.

This is the kind of situation that brings my lack of graciousness clearly into focus. I’m not very good at accepting help in these situations. Mike had to drive me to work (it’s my right foot), and I moaned and complained about inconveniencing him. Yesterday one of my coworkers had to drive me to the doctor’s office, and I felt terrible about that. Right after it happened, the lady who had asked for help kept asking if I was okay, and I kept brushing her off. I was (and am still) embarassed about falling like that, and I also suffer from the I-don’t-want-a-big-deal-made-about-me-unless-it’s-on-my-own-terms syndrome. I’m not the most graceful person, but it’s just plain embarassing to fall like that and have everybody know about it and have to help me to the car and drive me home and so on and so forth.

I am sure there’s a lesson in there for me. Something about pride. It’s always about pride. *sigh*

Do people normally wear sunscreen in their hair? Because my scalp has blistered just above my bangs - I wore my hair in a ponytail when I was outside this weekend, and I was outside a lot. I could have worn a hat, I suppose, but I don’t feel like I had a lot of other options. I put some lotion on it last night before I went to bed, and it’s feeling much better.

It’s funny to me how easily my mood can be affected. Last night I had a bad dream and I woke up in kind of a grumpy mood. Was the dream real? Was I insulted in real life like I was in the dream? No. But it still upset me.

On the flip side of that, this is the second time in a couple of weeks that I can say that a phone call really cheered me up. I got to talk to Rhonda last night for the first time in a long time (we live on opposite coasts and she is at work when I am off of work) and it put me in such a good mood for the rest of the evening. I know I complain a lot about being lonely, but I have amazing friends.

So, periodically I like to update you guys on what I am reading. For the past week I have been reading The Professor and the Madman: A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s interesting, but I haven’t been in a reading mood, so it’s been slow going. Did you know that one of the men who helped create many of the definitions in the OED was in a lunatic asylum? It’s true. I like how the author plays with words and definitions to progress the story.

I am also giving Vanity Fair another try. Because I really want to see the movie (read: get someone to take me to the movie), but I want to read the book first. I am stubborn like that.

Next after that is Daisy Miller. I have several reasons for being interested in it right now, including it being mentioned in Reading Lolita in Tehran.

And, somewhere in there I have to squeeze in The Secret Life of Bees. Because the book club that I’m starting at work . . . it starts at the end of September, and I need to re-read the book before the discussion.

I have been in a lull, because there were a bunch of books I started but never finished. I am hoping to do better with this crop.

Life is always changing. First I was in school and Mike was working, then I was in grad school and Mike was working. Then I graduated and got a job and we moved and he quit his job and now he’s in school and I’m working. Every time I think, “We’re about to settle into a good routine,” something else changes. It’s not a bad thing - it’s just the way life is.

This morning I sent Mike off for his first test of the school year. He made himself breakfast and we made our lunches at the same time, so he had food to keep him mentally focused. And before I left (I leave earlier than he does), I prayed with him the same things I used to pray before tests: no nerves, good comprehension when studying, and good recall. When we went over the material last night, it was obvious he’d been studying and paying attention. I hope he doesn’t get too nervous to remember the material.

I have been thinking about prayer the past few days, especially when watching the weather reports. Like most of you, I’m concerned for the people in Florida as Hurricane Frances gets closer and closer. It breaks my heart. I just don’t know how to pray for the situation, though . . . there is going to be so much destruction. I always feel silly praying about the weather. I know God hears all our prayers, but weather just seems so random. I feel very small when I pray about something so big.

Last night I dreamed (actually, scratch that. I dreamed it this morning sometime between 7:00 and 8:30) that Mike and I bought a beach house. I was all, “Yay, we own two houses!” (Mike’s comment on that: “That doesn’t sound like you AT ALL.”) And our friends were all excited for us, but I think that was only because they thought we were going to let them stay there. And one of my friends who lives in Wilmington came to visit me. She is an IV staffworker, so she wanted to use my house for retreats. I learned from my dream that my friends are all moochers. And I have no idea where the money is coming from to pay for this house.

I was eating some vegetable soup for lunch today and I remembered this random story. One of my friends in college, her roommate was dating a vegetarian who ate all healthy and disgusting. The roommate would buy a big fat fried chicken sandwich and waffle fries from Chick-Fil-A and put the trash in my friend’s trashcan. The boyfriend would come by and berate my friend for her poor eating habits. And the roommate just sat there and let my friend take the rap for eating so unhealthily. Why would someone do that? It’s just not very nice.

Speaking of eating lunch, what exactly constitutes proper breakroom protocol? I went to lunch a little later than usual today, and there were a couple of people having what looked like a serious conversation when I walked in. Should I have turned around and left? The door was open. It’s not a private place. I didn’t know what to do, so I started loudly digging my stuff out of the refrigerator. They left almost immediately. It was a little awkward.

When I was in college, I knew a girl whose last name was Lovejoy. My friend Kelly and I decided that we also wanted to have fruit of the spirit last names, so I started calling myself “Kari Peacepatience” and she decided to be “Kelly Selfcontrol.” I even got her a little beaded bracelet that said “self-control.” We thought this was the funniest thing ever. (We also thought that quoting Tommy Boy a lot was going to help us get guys. That tells you a bit about our intelligence right there.) I can’t help it - I still giggle when I think about it.

Last night I fell asleep just fine, but I woke up around 2:00 or 2:30 and was awake until 5:00 or 5:30 . . . I avoided looking at the clock, so I don’t know for sure. But I do know that even Pride and Prejudice didn’t help me, and its soothing tones usually lull me to sleep when I am having trouble sleeping. So, if you don’t think my Peacepatience story is funny, blame it on fatigue. (But if you like it, just remember that I am a naturally clever person.)