Two Weeks

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, the title of this post is an allusion to "The Money Pit." Watch the movie. In all honesty, the title has little or nothing to do with the content, except that now we're in Week 2 of Vision. Ah, Vision.

I'm writing after our most marathonesque of days: up at 7:30 for 8:30 call, morning prayer, presentations, Mass, lunch, rehearsal, blah blah blah twohourReconciliationservice. Yes: after being awakened at the ass-crack of dawn, and pretty much singing/talking all day, we close the evening with two hours of singing. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't love pretty much every minute of it.

That's right: liturgical music freak that I am, I adore two hours of things like "From the Depths," "Down to the River to Pray" and "Jesus the Lord." I even loved "Senor Hazme," despite the fact that I can't keep a straight face since Blair told me about the complexities of the base part. You'll have to ask him to explain it.

The only problem is that now my voice is crapping out. Again. It's just a fact of life that, in a retreat requiring this much singing and then personal reflection/sharing (since the musicians are part of small groups now) and general chatting because we like the people with whom we work, the voice becomes a nonrenewable resource. Thank God for Tweak Week!

That said, I've been up way too long, and need to get to bed so I can sleep a li'l bit. I've got some peeps with whome Ii've made breakfast plans, and I'd just as soon not sleep through them. I leave you with some revelations and realizations thusfar from Week 2.

Reconciliation and the clip of "The Mission":
Relieve a man of his burdens before he is ready to release it and he will fall on his face, then adding shame to his guilt. This is why, despite the fact that he forgives us always and invites us, through confession, to give over our burdens of guilt, he will not take it from us before we are ready to let it go. Always, always, the choice is ours.
A perfect image to capture that idea is shown in the film: Father Gabriel helps Mendoza himself climb the enormous falls, then sits beside him with a look of pain and love as Mendoza drags his net full of armor up after himself. I think this must be how God looks when he sees how we refuse to let others--or him--forgive us, and wallow in our sadness and guilt.

Poem for today: still in the roughest of stages. Inspired slightly by SCDubs.

he sits on a table beside a table
cradles his guitar like a child
fingers tease the song
teach it to walk
let it rise and fall
tumble and soar

this is holy ground
we are standing on holy ground
for the lord is present
and where he is is holy

I am afraid of dying young
and he holds me like a guitar
tricking notes from my spine
rise tremble sing fall



Song of the evening: "Grand Theft Autumn" by Fall Out Boy

It's Been Awhile...

And really I don't have time to write much tonight, since I have to get to
bed so that I can wake up for NDVision morning prayer. Today, and the last
couple, have been really good. No lie, there have been some rough
patches--finding out that I can't go into the men's dorms/leave campus/ drink/
leave campus while the kids are here, putting up with people's kaleidescopic
emotions, rehearsing all the time and still not being able to get
everything in, the need that everyone feels to clap or snap to every song
they hear--but overall, the experience has been amazing, and we're only on
day three of our first week with campers.

Had a Reconciliation service tonight, and I got to sing "Shelter Your Name," which is the real Cadillac of solos. It was awesome. Today, we saw a couple of speakers and some stiudent presentations, and presented "The Prodigal Son." Tomorrow is more speakers and "The Good Samaritan," and then my musical ("The Parable of the Talents") is on Thursday.

Since I really do need to get some rest, I'll leave you some reflections that hit me during Days 1-3 of God Camp, aka NDVision2006:

"As when bread becomes his body

we become the living sign--

With God's love change the world

with your life."

~Danielle Rose, "Be God's"

This image is awesome: the bread becomes Body, and after consuming it our bodies because His bread for the world, to nourish the Body of Christ.

• Faith is as much a craft as carpentry or foundry: the inspiration is ever present, and can be found in any number of people, but one must seek and find the tools to make the vision of faith a practicable reality, and to draw others to its beauty.
• A good disciple has passion: Christ had both a passion and a Passion--the two are inextricably connected: joy and pain are inseperable because to experience intense love and joy with one's entire being is to experience the pain of needing to release it into the world. Happiness is fleeting, but joy--and the pain that comes with it--is the bedrock on which to build a life of faith.

"My birthright and my inheritance [as a baptized Catholic] is to be successful in one way, shape or form...in knowing who I am...and what I stand for... The Gospel is my prop to stand for what I believe... Stand up, with God as your anchor and Christ as your guide."

~Chandra Johnson. Pretty self explanatory.

• In a strange but compelling combination, Foreigner's "I Wanna Know What Love Is" was paired with the Passion scene from "Jesus of Nazareth." It was amazing. It highlighted the fact that true, unconditional and indiscriminate Love does not avoid or wait for its cross, but stumbles toward it with open arms, rests against it as Love bleeds. What other gift is like that of Christ's life and love for us? Given freely, gladly, joyously yet at such incredible cost to the giver. Christ died in agony, not that we might love Him, but that we might let Him love us as we were made to be loved.

Song of the moment: What Wondrous Love is This. Like it would be anything else.

P.S. Sorry about the strange formatting. I'll figure that out later.

Do You Remember Vision?

So, I'm in tech week for NDVision, a summer camp of sorts for high school students who want to see how the convept of vocation works in their lives, outside the standard vocation to consecrated life. What is my part in this camp? Oh, I play the devil. No, seriously. I play Lucy Furr/Lou Seifer in one of three musicals that we present during the week to highlight three different parables that show the need to share our gifts and recognize their source. Mine is "The Parable of the Talents," and it looks like it's going to be awesome. Most everyone' s still a little rough on lines, but we seem to be enjoying ourselves, and I think that's translating to the audience of two that we had yesterday at our first rehearsal.

FYI, the musical is only about 40 minutes long, which is why we can have our first rehearsal during tech week. We are a little rushed, but it will all work out. Ally's a great director.

Anyway, in this play, as the devil, I get to wear a diguise. Should you wish to know what my disguise is, you should try taking a Thursday afternoon off, coming to ND and watching it. If this is completely impossible, you should let me know, and maybe I'll clue you in on the disguise.

I also get to have a really emotional monologue and a song about Dark and Stormy Days, in which I abuse lots of people. Maybe it's a little typecast, but I think that the character's doing it sincerely, which is contrary to my doing-it-to-endear-myself-and-get-a-laugh approach to abuse.

Today is our 6th day of rehearsal, and it should be great. I'll keep everyone posted. But now I have to shower and actually dry my hair, because yesterday it just looked bad.

Soundtrack to this morning's toilette: "Ps. 22: My God, My God," performed by Nicholas Tonozzi.

The Planet's Little Ice Age?

One of the roughest and potentially dangerous aspects of having cable in the dorms at Notre Dame isn't the new and unfettered access that the masses will have to pay-per-view, nor the temptation that Celebrity Poker provides. No, it will be the lure of the History Channel when someone should be writing a paper, or of Animal Planet when really Roman law should be the priority. It is the possibility that one could sit in one's room for hours on end playing Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, or judging the decorating skills of Doug on Discovery Channel reruns of Trading Spaces, or watching Hunky Paul and Chico work their magic on Candace Olsen's Divine Design. The educational possibilites are endless, but they will all result in a surfeit of knowledge that will be in no way useful to anyone outside the realm of Trivial Pursuit and Balderdash.

How, you may ask, do I know this? On what research am I basing this supposition? On the bedrock of personal experience, my friend, that's what! When I did not have a television, I limited myself to watching cartoons online at AOL, or checking out Get Fuzzy and then getting on with life. Stupid stuff that I would be ashamed to share with anyone but you, gentle reader. Well, you or anyone else I may know... or meet... or accidentally spill coffee on at Reckers. Regardless, the point is that, deprived of cable, I occupied my time with pointless activities that would not infringe upon the brain space required for the academic portion of my life.

Given access to cable, however, cartoons go flying out the window. Comics and Snood (see previous post) lose their appeal. The Crocodile Hunter starts calling my name, and suddenly I am spending hours watching educational TV that sometimes inspires--gasp!--additional research.

Case in point? This evening, I was supposed to be memorizing lines for The Parable of the Talents for NDVision. Noticing, however, that Jen C. has my script binder, I resolved to make some jewelry, and headed to the 24hr space and the cable television. And lo and behold, I found the History Channel. I watched 2 hours about the Amazon Basin (did you know that Henry Ford tried factory-style plantation management to produce his own rubber for tires? hyooooge failure) and another 2 hours about the fact that, from the 1300s to the 1800s, the planet experienced an ice age that caused, among other things, the Plague, the Potato Blight, witch hunts, the French Revolution and the winter at Valley Forge. PS, we may be headed for another one, because if the global heating trend continues, the density of sea water will change, causing a change in the way ocean currents flow, creating a ripple effect that will produce erratic weather patterns, including unseasonal and large amounts of precipitation in areas unaccustomed to it, droughts and unusual numbers of tropical storms. That doesn't sound at all like recent years.

Oh, yeah. The Pentagon already had a think tank run scenarios on the global reactions to this kind of climatic change, and among them are worldwide starvation, the United States policing resource use on a global scale, and the possibility of nuclear holocaust.

I don't quite remember where I was going with this. Just know that now, instead of being able to sleep soundly, as I would if I had been frying my brain with good, wholesome American slopTV, my synapses are firing like woah (clearly this intellectual energy has no effect on my vocabulary) and I will likely be up for several more hours, causing me to sleep in and miss lunch and the opportunity to memorize lines, subsequently losing me my director's favor and my good mood.

Boiling it down: cable, and its accompanying treasure trove of information, will ruin my day, and I'm sure that I am only the first of many victims on this campus.

In the Wee Small Hours

Used to be the thing that kept me up at night was money. Or rather, that I had none and that people still wanted it from me. There's a special kind of panic attack/heartburn that only those in serious debt can truly understand, and so I think the fact that I will be free of personal (not educational) debt in less than four months is an understandably joyous one, because it means that my esophagus will be leading a kinder, gentler life.

Now, however, I am discovering a new brand of insomnia, one associated with the fear of writer's block. This is not to say that I have writer's block, because I don't. Can't say that all of the things I've been writing have been great, but they may have a seed or sheen of greatness waiting to be revised into fruition.

No, I'm worried about getting writer's block. As in, my thesis is due in less than 8 months. A rough draft is due in about 4. The fear is: what if all revisions lead to crap? What if, in the midst of crap, I can't come up with nuggets of purest gold to bring me out of the crap? What if, in my moment of greatest need, when what I need is the golden nugget of POETRY, what I get is the moose nugget of poetry, so devoid of poetical promise that the only thing to do with it is turn it into tie tacks and swizel sticks?

It's a terror of dross, is what it is, and it is why I've been reading my book (The Last Templar by Raymund Khoury, who I might add writes women very well, to the point that I though it was a female author) and have been stuck on the same page going, this is so much better than what I could write, what am I even doing here? And it's prose, for crying out loud. Not even the same genre and I'm still having comparative performance anxiety.

The other part of it is, what if the only good poems that I can spin are sonnet length? What if I can never break the page in a successful poem? I mean, I think I can, and Wilkinson liked El Resumen del Romanticismo, despite its work-in-progress-ness. But still, that's eating at my upper stomach. Yeah, gross, I know--try living it. I assure you, that's worse.

I think the real niggling doubt is that the thesis won't be ready, not because I can't write it, but because it's not what I'm supposed to be doing and so I'll set up roadblocks for myself. What if, after two years, I'm no closer to having refined my work than I was when I started? What if I keep taking courses, keep taking classes, only to find that none of the fruits of those labors satisfy me? What if I'm only hiding from something that I'm really supposed to be doing because I'm scared of what it might be? At this point, I guess the good thing is that I'm acknowledging the possibility of this, and so will be able to combat the symptoms of restlessness and procrastination, so I'll still get the degree, if not the satisfaction. Still...

Augustine may have said that the heart is restless, but if he were any kind of writer, he would have known that the restless of the heart can be controlled by moderate reductions in caffeine consumption. What he would have written is "Heartburn: Restless is the Stomach."

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

Based on the reactions that I got from some of my friends when I said this, I gather that no one else's parents sang it to them every time they pulled into their own driveway. Talk about cultural illiteracy!

I know that there's a lot of blogging to be done in regards to the choir trip, but that's just going to have to wait, because I have other things to think about.

When I got back onto campus last night (I don't really count Fischer as "campus." Sorry, Car :) ) I noticed something. The air at Notre Dame is unique. I’m not talking about the soursweet wind that comes from the direction of the ethanol plant, or the scent of manure drifting from freshly mulched flower beds. Oh, don’t get me wrong, those are definitely part of it, but it also smells like generations of disintegrated lilacs and fallen leaves turned to humus. Not the kind with chickpeas, but the kind that is the top layer of dirt in a rich ecosystem. It also kind of smells like fire, which may have been why I found myself on the way down to the Grotto at 1:30 this morning.

Living next to the Grotto could do amazing things for my prayer life. I got twitchy and distracted during the last half of the rosary, and was doing it completely wrong, singing psalms in my head at each decade because I don’t have the mysteries memorized, but it felt good. Really good. It’s been too long since my knees ached from praying. Hopefully they’ll learn to embrace it this summer.

I'm sure I have things to be doing right now, but I think I'm going to take a nap instead. I'm still kind of on Alaska time. Sorry about the scattered entry.

Oh.

HHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPY BIRTHDAAAAAAAAAAAAY, CAROLYN!

Spit It Out!

Preface: I love my mother. She is an amazing woman, and probably my best friend in the world. That said, sometime she drives me freakin' nuts.

As you know, we're going to be hosting two of the Folk Choir while they're here, and I've been trying really hard to make it so that they can spend the night here rather than at Lumen Christi in the big FC sleepover. I mean, it could be really cool, but I thought they might want to sleep in a bed, and I have the chance to offer them that.

So, Mom comes home this afternoon. I have spent pretty much the last two days cleaning--all of downstairs, both bathrooms, the kitchen and the upstairs living room, with the exception of vacuuming. I'm a firm believer that if there are no tracks on the carpet when company comes in, they will think that you haven't vacuumed. It's all about appearance. Hell, I even weeded the backyard and trimmed the lilac bush in the front yard.

Mom doesn't, however, say nice job, or glad that's done. I mean, I'm not asking for gratitude at all, since it's only fair that I clean, as these are my friends that she's opening her house to. (Yeah, yeah, dangling prepositions all over creation. Deal--I'm in a mood.) But what she does instead of any of these things, she asks what, exactly, I cleaned downstairs. She whacks a couch cushion to show that there's dust in the cushion from when Dad redid the bathroom. And she drags her finger in the dust on the treadmill's base. I was, needless to say, hurt. Why ask me what's done, so that I can feel proud of what I've accomplished, only to display disbelief that I've actually done anything? I mean, it's been a while since I did large scale cleaning. I would have been fine if she had said, actually, you did a good job but missed a few things. Instead, this apparently became a teaching moment, in which I am allowed to figure out for myself what I've done wrong, as I am clearly not up to receiving honest criticism.

And then there are the plans for the morning. As I said, I was trying to make it so that the boys could stay here tonight, if they so choose. My plan: they come home with me, I get up and shower in the morning before getting them up, I get breakfast and lattes for everyone at Jitters and Dad drops us off at Lumen Christi on his way to work. Mom, however, goes through all the things that are wrong with this situation: by the time you get home and to sleep, it will be 2am and then you're up at 5:30, leave the house no later than 6:20--are you sure this is what you want to do? And what if the boys want to shower? And how is breakfast going to work?

For the love of God, Mom--if you don't think it's a good idea, SAY SO! If you think it would be easier for them to hang in the gym, SAY SO! I can take it. Katie, I just think it's not a good idea. I mean, shit--what am I going to say? Actually, Mom, you're wrong. Or I really don't care about your preferences. Yes, I may be a little disappointed, but I respect her opinion, when she gives it. Instead, she asks questions that she clearly already has the answers to, and makes me feel like an idiot for not having the same answers. And those of you who know me know that there are few things I hate more than being treated like an idiot. I mean, I do stupid things sometimes, but I am an exceptionally intelligent person. I'm not being arrogant--it's a fact, not bragging. As for criticism, I've just spent a year being criticised as my job by people I barely know; I think I can handle it coming from my mother.

Okay, yeah, so that's what I'm throwing on the goat today: some definite irritation with my mother.

Awesome thing about it all, though: she's around to irritate me, so nothing will ever be all that bad.

Song of the moment: Sugar Daddy, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.