Merry Christmas! Remakes are travesties!

Well, at least the remake of A Miracle on 34th Street is a travesty. It takes all the charm out of the old film and leaves only a mealy-mouthed echo. Blech. It won't really commit to being in its own era, either; it's all soft-camera angles and bland yet retro-ey styling. And then they take the climax and totally rewrite it. So, way to be inspired by a classic film an dthen take all of the good stuff away.

Merry Christmas, anyhow.

A True Parable

I was on the bus yesterday morning, running late as usual. It was crowded, but I did manage to get a seat.

Right across the aisle from me sat a woman with a large handbag. From out of the handbag on her lap she fished a wrapped lifesaver-shaped mint and a pen. I wondered why she needed both, until she used the pen to poke a hole in the wrapper, which was smart. I turned away as she popped the mint in her mouth.

When I turned back, the wrapper from the mint was on the ground right next to her foot. How could she be so callous as to litter? Littering is wrong. Well, maybe she inadvertently dropped it. I knew a way to get her to pick it up.

"Ma'am, you dropped your wrapper."

She chuckled, a bit embarassed, said, "Thank you," and then proceeded to use her foot to sweep the wrapper under her seat, murmuring, "I'll leave that for them."

For a moment, I was awed by her shamelessness. I had pointed out her littering to her (politely), and she proceeded to make it worse! There was no way she had just accidentally dropped that mint wrapper!

I was not until later that I realized I should have simply bent over and picked up the wrapper myself, without a word.

Random Tag!

Yay! A writing prompt! Thanks to the staff at Let's Shall, here are seven random things about me:

1. I am left-handed.
2. I work for the Children's Law Center in Washington, DC.
3. I can parallel park!
4. In my spare time, I like to identify the period and architectural style of DC buildings.
5. My ultimate fantasy would be to purchase a large historic building and restore it in an ecologically sensitive way either into affordable apartments or an Episcopal retreat center (in the latter scenario, I'd be able to preside at services).
6. I know a lot about estate planning.
7. I have a natural talent for lucid dreaming.

I hope I did that right.

Coming out of radio silence

to share the best advice column about therapy, ever.

Favorite excerpted description of therapy:

And I'm not saying to see a therapist in the sense of, Oh, I think you need help, like you're neurotic. That's not it at all. It's more like, you need help the way a person needs firemen! You've got a situation that's out of control and you need backup!

I know you're so shocked your RSS feed popped this up. You can go about your day.

Red, red, where are you?

Thus we go through life finding mysterious and sometimes fleeting satisfaction in encounters with others, much of it occurring beneath the surface. As we go buzzing about our big and important lives, a part of us is always seeking stillness, or strangeness, or the color red.--Cary Tennis, www.salon.com

Is there something wrong with acknowledging this, in saying--Yes, I am seeking that satisfaction. Will you join me here in the search for red?" And yet I find myself frowning, fretting for responses that are not on their way. I feel like I have forgotten the steps to the dance while watching others twirl around me. I reach out my hand and snatch at recently empty air, and sigh that there is no hand grasping for me.

I went skydiving on Saturday.

That's right.

Again Anew

People long so for beginnings. Fortunately, we have endeavored to create many opportunities for them. Easter just happened, and for those who go to church regularly, it signifies a bright new beginning of the church year. It comes at just the right time; I've had more than enough time to screw up my New Year's resolutions, and now need to start anew. For those who are students or have students in their lives, the fall, although gently preparing nature for ending, feels like a starting point because classes begin. I'm sure I'll need that, too.

I have erased several posts from this blog which had become too personal for me. I think I stayed away partially because of what I would find here. I needed to erase them to give myself a chance for another beginning.

I am so grateful that we cycle through so many starting points, because at least for me I need the reminder of the chance for renewal.

Thank You, Jesus

It feels like a miracle, but you are finally reading the blog of a person who has applied to law school. Don't forget to congratulate me excessively just for applying.

I Fall to Pieces

Poor Britney. Really, is there anyone out there who can't understand the impulse to do something a little unexpected? Who hasn't, at least a little, fallen to pieces? I imagine it's easier to fall and more difficult to pick up the pieces with so many people watching.

I certainly can understand the feeling, though. Ash Wednesday surprised me this year. As a somewhat recent convert to the Episcopal faith, perhaps I have the convert's zeal for these kinds of rituals, but I really respond to the observance of Lent. Starting off the season with an evening service makes it feel special and important to me. We are marked with pieces of ash and reminded of our own fractured natures. This season confronts me with the seemingly endless quantity of my neediness, how unwhole I feel.

But thankfully, I am not expected to meet my needs alone, or to create wholeness from just personally limited resources.

Time Goes By

so quickly. I am overdue for commentary here. I just keep on keeping on, though. I am quite busy praying for a snow day tomorrow. Oh federal government, please be a weeny about freezing rain.

In other news, I have managed to exercise for two days IN A ROW! And IN THE MORNING? Will wonders never cease? I certainly hope this one keeps up. Of course, a snow day could cause some serious interference with that. Although I'll have to get up really early to check the OPM's operating status.

A Piece of This City

There are always opportunities, even in a real estate market as insane as Washington, DC. We spent today checking out one such opportunity. $160,000 will get you "two rooms and a bath" that needs a lot of work, but it's in a historic building featured in the bible of fine DC apartment houses, Best Addresses. The place is in a co-op building in a great neighborhood that was all the rage in the early 20th century. We decided to extend the fantasy by checking out other open houses in the area. All of them were way out of our league, but we had fun looking. We dressed up to look respectable and everything.

Imagining a possible future beats the hell out of what I've been dwelling on most of the time lately, and I think we'll probably make more of a habit of it.

Sailing, Sailing

...through the day and night. This daily posting thing is harder than I thought it would be. Performing on demand does not always happen as I'd like it. So I refuse to perform. I just show up. My dear friend at let's shall is fond of saying this is the most important element of friendship, and I am rapidly discovering that it is the secret to blogging as well. Perhaps one of these days I'll even write something interesting. I don't think I've shown up enough for that quite yet, sadly. Sorry about that. But you never know what day it will happen, so be sure to tune in. :)

Easing into Life Again

I think this city has just the right pace when the federal government is closed. There were people on their way to work, but it wasn't too crowded. There were no traffic jams reported on the Weather Channel's Local on the 8's. Clearly, the federal government just gets in the way here.

So far, 2007 feels a lot like 2006 as far as work is concerned. I'll let you know if anything changes.

Life Begins at Death

Apparently, former President Gerald Ford's opinion about the Iraq war matters more now that he's dead. Somehow, it amuses me that we suddenly value the relevance of those who've gracefully exited the stage more than when we could more easily refer to them and ask their opinion. No one was exactly beating down Ford's door December 28th. Dying is a great way to give yourself some cred, goose up your career and even impart a gentle sheen of respectability.

I am somewhat loathe to comment on political matters on this blog, but if I'm posting every day, I need more fodder. I'll see what I can do.

Happy New Year!

I have several resolutions. The first, and most relevant to this space, is to post to this blog every damn day, even if it ends up being nonsense and embarassingly personal. Hijinks ahead! No, I will not share my other resolutions with you. This is not a diary, and my other resolutions are boring, like losing thirty percent of my body weight in eight weeks and quitting the crack. We'll see, though. If I get desperate with daily posting I may throw anything up here. Happy New Year!

New years' resolutions, like second marriages, are the triumph of hope over experience. Although our lives are chugging along just as they were a few hours ago, and our problems haunt us no matter the hour, we look at our life anew and pretend that there is a possibility for a fresh start. How else would we get anything done? And even just one month of regular exercising is better than none.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

If true love doesn't happen in six months, match.com will let you keep the service for another six months free of charge. The first time I saw the "Make love happen" guarantee, I almost fell over laughing. How do you define a successful love-falling in six months? Also, six months of true love is easier to accomplish than six years or six decades. This is a guarantee that the match.com people know they'll never have to back up. What schlub wants to admit he's failed at love even after paying for it? and who will admit total defeat after such a short amount of time? To really fail at love, you need years. But go ahead, make love happen. Guaranteed.

I'm still here

Well, trying to avoid writing about my messy life and focusing instead on "abstract" topics that were only tangentially related to my messy life led to me not writing at all. That didn't work. Perhaps I'll try the high concept stuff at another point. This poor blog is rather schizophrenic, but I'm not ready to kill it just yet.

Another reason not to write in this blog is that I've made a major commitment to National Novel Writing Month. Actually, I'm way behind in my word count for that, too, thanks for asking, but I'm still really glad I'm doing it because it's incredibly fun and freeing and I am convinced that it will somehow magically enable me to write fabulous law school personal statements.

So, perhaps what I'll do for the next little while in this space is update you on the progress of my novel. Of course, it's a silly romance, but I'm loathe to give away too many plot details for fear that people will think it's autobiographical, which it is NOT. Taking the advice of a legendary professor quoted by a friend, I am writing what I don't know about what I know, which simply means that if you were to read the novel in a certain light, it would probably look familiar, but it would not be as close to the truth as I'm sure you'd imagine it is, you little imaginer, you.

So in short, Mary is not down for the count quite yet. Mary Like the Saint perseveres through hardship and a lack of posts, and will prevail!

Meditations: safety

I used to brush my teeth immediately after disembarking from an airplane. Steering myself towards the bathroom, I'd whip out my toothbrush and remove the grime from my mouth. A clean mouth feels refreshing after the dull ick of travelling too close to other people on a stuffy airplane.

Now I don't even get to carry toothpaste in my bag. In return for foiling a major terrorism plot, we lose the ability to carry the items we need to clean ourselves. Or moisturize ourselves. Or quench our thirst.

Travelling by air has long become a demoralizing, joyless experience. Sitting for hours on a dingy airplane dizzyingly close to inevitably annoying people with disgusting habits like picking at their nails or sucking on their thumbs or smelling bad or snoring or taking the armrest when everyone knows that the poor schlub in the middle seat gets BOTH armrests!

Landing and brushing my teeth was my personal way of putting aside the experience of flying. a small private ritual. Which has been replaced by the empty security line rituals that only strip away our meager travelling dignities. We are left with bare feet and empty laptop cases, scrambling to gather our things (but not toothpaste!).

Really, neither ritual leaves me any safer. Scrubbed teeth don't keep annoying people away, and I don't think removing my shoes will actually prevent a determined someone from blowing up a plane some day. And yet I keep flying.

Know Your Saint Marys: St. Mary the Slave

An early Christian during the Roman era, St. Mary the Slave was tortured for being a Christian. According to catholic.org, she suffered "unspeakable horrors." Although she survived her torture, she is still celebrated as a martyr for her intense suffering. Imagine the perseverence Mary must have had to withstand and even survive torture. Her life was not even her own, and yet she kept living for Christ. An inspiring example.

Meditations: Calamity

It seems to fall from the sky, and you expect it to end as suddenly as it seems to have begun. Oh, but calamity continues, and continues, and continues, until it is a river running through your life through which you must wade. Somehow, I used to imagine tragedy as a flashbulb, a big, bright, sharp moment, but only a moment. And a moment you can live through.

But a river? It is so long, and always rushing, rushing me while at the same time moving interminably slowly. I don't know how to face it down. And perhaps that is the point. To allow calamity to wear us down to something smoother, simpler, with fewer implacable demands. To imagine being smooth sits well with me. After all, our calamities, large and small, continue on in our lives with their rivulets unending. I certainly hope that there is something valuable and meaningful in that.