Monday, February 28, 2005

Now I Know

I need a server, or something. And now I know I can't fix the thing back like it was. Yikes! I'll keep playing with it, I should have left well enough alone, don't you think?

I Feel Naked...

as the emporer with his new clothes. This picture is supposed to up in my blog header. It is there, on my monitor. But this afternoon at another computer, I opened my blog and there was no picture, only an empty box with the red x that indicates a link is missing.

Tell me, dear readers, am I naked, up there...in the title box? Anybody know what I did wrong? I thought I was so smart.


Sunday, February 27, 2005

Warning: It's a Personal and Pitiful Post



I’ve been looking for a part-time job. Unfortunately, my school schedule is such that my hours available to work are not very attractive to potential employees. That, and maybe the fact that I have only worked one place my entire adult life (which is now closed, or I’d be working there still) do not seem to be helping my search for gainful employment. It seems I can’t even hire on with the local dog-catcher.

But last Monday, I went on an interview for a full time position and the interview seemed to have gone really well. The job was with our local council on aging and involved going around to five different parishes (counties to everyone but the state of Louisiana) and working with senior citizens to help them obtain free or reduced cost prescription drugs.

The two women who interviewed me said I’d be good working with senior citizens and the woman who actually does the hiring told me the other woman would be calling me on Friday. All week, I could see myself doing this job, and doing it well. The parishes involved were less populated parishes and most of the senior citizens would have been rural people, my favorite kind of senior citizen. It would have been a job where I would have been doing something that made a difference in the world. I would have been so patient and kind and respectful with those people. I would have listened to their stories while getting the job done at the same time. I would have loved the job.

By 1:30 on Friday, no phone call had come, and I could not stand it any longer. I called them, telling the woman I was following up, and after a little pause, she says, “Oh, we hired someone else for that position”. That took the wind right out of my sails. I thanked her and hung up. I cried a minute. I called my husband. I took a deep breath and I stepped outside my comfort zone to call the woman back and ask if there had been a problem with me in the way I handled the interview because everything had sounded so positive when I left. I told her I was excited about the job and thought I would have done it well. She said there was no problem with me, I was a delight to meet, that I would have been good at the job, and that I would have fit in well at the office. She added that they were keeping my application on file in case something else came up, or if this person they hired did not work out.

All I want to know is, if I was such a damned delight to meet, and would have been so good at the job, and would have been a good fit in the office, why didn’t I get the job?

And here is the kicker: I have missed a lot of school due to dealing with my son’s issues, my mother was in the hospital, and I was sick with a coughing, hacking cold. I had gotten behind and did not think I’d be able to catch up. I had considered taking a break this semester because of all the extra problems and stresses, but I only had two semesters left and figured I could force my way through. And somewhere in there, my focus and my motivation and my confidence just disappeared on me. It was like I woke up, and saw that I was a big fat loser surrounded by young and talented kids, and I needed to get outta there fast. I also did not think I could handle school, a job, and the stresses of dealing with my son (and taking care of the rest of my family). There were too many things. Something had to give. I panicked. I choked. So, on Friday, I went and withdrew from all my classes. It was a small consolation that the teacher helping me with the paperwork commented on the heavy class load I was carrying. The teachers certainly would have been understanding and have been for the last year as the problems with my son have become more stressful. In retrospect, maybe I should have cut myself some slack.

As usual, when I make a bone-headed decision like this, I did not confer with anyone. I did not ask for help or advice, I just went out and took care of things myself. In my defense, I thought I had that job aced and in the hole. The pay would have been a little more than I could have expected to get around here in the commercial art field, had I graduated. The job would have been more in line with what I would want to do with my life. Now I have neither school, nor a job.

But tomorrow is another day, and I have a few leads on full time jobs. Just the same, I may be brassy and call those people at the council on aging in a few weeks and ask them how that new person is working out, just in case she is not being nice to those senior citizens. I can’t believe I did not get that job.


I can be kind of harsh with myself. I am trying to avoid that right now, trying to trust that there is a reason for all of this, trying not to bash myself on the head too much for being tired and stressed. It is hard. I would treat the man who called me an asshole for not letting him into the line of traffic (when I had already let two other cars do so, and there were several cars behind me, waiting their turn to go), I would treat that man better than I treat myself. That’s not right. I am going to be kind to my (stupid) self about this whole turn of events.

Anyway, it is no big deal, everyone has their problems. It's just life. See la vie. But I really wanted that job.

I was going through some of my poems and I found this one. The form is called Tanka, the syllable count is 5-7-5-7-7-5. The form encourages more emotion that the more common form of Haiku. Things do look a little dark at the moment, but I think I will hang on and still pray.

They told her to pray,
faith would release God’s blessings.
She could not conceive
her belief would move God’s hand
and so in her darkest night,
she stopped her praying.


And this one, which is rather harsh, but it is what I felt at the time. I no longer feel so melodramatically rotten. That too, is a blessing.

For My Tombstone
The better part of me
must have trickled like tears
down my father’s legs
onto white cotton sheets
to be washed away.

Only dross remains, rolling
into the refiner’s fire, railing
against the flame, wasted
and never purified while the I
I am burns away the I
I might have been.

Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.
I never was.

Friday, February 25, 2005

Good News, Uncle Robert, I Got The Plane

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
if I should die before I wake,
throw my journals in the lake."
(courtesy of
bobbie)

I don't know if my grandfather's bachelor brother kept journals. I do know he kept stuff, and as a young girl, I was fascinated with his stuff. I wondered what kind of things an old man might keep. The plane in the photos was one of the items he kept. It was always poked into the "plate" of the house, in plain view, but inaccessible to me. (The roof of the porch had open rafters and so there was space on the cross beam, a ledge, of sorts, to stick things. That is the best I can do to explain the "plate" of the house.)

Anyway, I would often ask my uncle if I could see the plane and he would take it down from its perch and hold it for me to look at it. I never got to hold it. My uncle was a school bus driver and one of the kids had made the plane and given it to him.

My uncle was a private person, and about the only one who knew any of his business was his old maid sister, who lived with him in the home they grew up in. There was a family story that he had visited the local fortune teller because he had lost something. The other grown-ups surmised that he had buried some money and had forgotten where he had buried it.

He had an old trunk in his bedroom that captured my eye. His bedroom was off limits and so I always stretched my eyeballs to see what I could see through the open door. I saw the trunk in his bedroom and I knew there had to be all sorts of treasures be hidden away in there.

But you see, Bobbie's little prayer brings up that third group of people I mentioned when I wrote about what people do with their journals. People like me want to donate ours to science, others want their family members to have them. People like my uncle want their journals, their stuff, to be "thrown in the lake", or planted with them when they go, or burned.

My rascally uncle fell into that category, and his sister burned the contents of his trunk when he was gone. She enlisted the help of my grandmother and they unceremoniously burned a lifetime of memories. I know they did not dig too deeply but my grandmother said there were letters (from women who were in love with him!) and receipts and post cards in the trunk. Believe me, my grandmother, the sister-in-law, would have thoroughly studied every scrap of paper, but the sister was fiercely protective of her brother's privacy. I probably would have too. It is not that I would have been digging for dirt. It is that I would have longed to see the things that were important enough to him to hang onto for so many years, and maybe to have had something to hold up to future generations and say "this was your Uncle Robert", here are the things he treasured. It would have been a way of keeping his memory alive.

I fussed at my grandmother about burning the trunk, about not putting my aunt off till my mother could have gotten there and maybe reasoned with her about the whole thing. Thinking back, I don't think he ever actually asked her to burn the trunk, I think she just got the idea that that would be what he wanted done. I think she acted hastily in her grief and may have regretted burning everything after all was said and done.

And yes, I know, if that was his wish, it was right that it be honored. After all, I know I'd probably come back and haunt somebody if they kept my journals and did not do with them what I asked!

But I got the plane, and I have pleasant memories of him. I think my uncle would be pleased that I have the airplane. Thanks, Uncle Robert, but pleased or displeased, if I would have been there, I would have at least taken a peek into your papers. And I bet I could have charmed my aunt and my grandmother into letting me take care of your stuff. And who knows, I might have taken the liberty of plastering some of it all over the internet.

By the way, Uncle Robert has been gone for 30 years. And the nearest we can figure is the plane must be at least 70 years old. Don't tell Uncle Robert, but I see one of the propellers is missing. Dang, I hope he does not decide I am too irresponsible to take care of his treasure.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Weirdly-crafted Pieces



I don't know why I get such a thrill out of cutting things to pieces and then putting them back together in a different way. Part of it must be genetic, my grandmother was a quilter. I learned that art from her, back in the seventies, while I was still in high school. Like me, Granny sometimes had an oddly skewed perspective, particularly when it came to her propensity to pair purple plaids with brown and white striped fabrics.

The first quilt I made was to be a Christmas gift for a boyfriend I'd picked up over the sumer while working away at a camp. There were squares of fabric from clothes my mother had made for me. I remember there was one fabric with Winnie the Pooh on it and trees all around. True to my nature, I carefully cut a square out of that fabric where I had a nice tree trunk and I embroidered our initials on the tree trunk. As fate would have it, the BF broke up with me shortly after we exchanged Christmas gifts, and he returned the quilt to a broken-hearted me.

The quilt was a sore reminder of my loss in love, and I ended up giving it away to a friend who, I noticed on a visit to her home a few years later, used it as extra padding in her child's playpen. It was also sometime around the time that I found out it was my father who had sat and picked out all the offending embroidery threads that contained the intials on the tree and my declaration of life-long affections. There is something touching about knowing my father carefully removed the threads that gave evidence of a daughter's unrequited love. I am sure he did not know what else to do to make it better. He was also the one who burned the letters I had received after coming home from that ill-fated summer romance after it was clear I could not bear having them around, either.

I made a few more quilts after that, and still have quilt tops that need to be quilted. Come to think of it, I have one in my closet that sits, half-quilted, that I started for my husband back in 1983, when I was pregnant with our first child and preparing to quit work and thought I'd have all the time in the world to quilt. I guess I thought the baby would sit in a corner and be still and quiet while I worked and smiled at the little stinker, but alas, that was not the way it was! I doubt I will ever finish that quilt, for varied reasons, and I know the little stinker who was not still or quiet will never finish it after my demise. There may be hope that my youngest would discover it and take on the work of completing the thing. I certainly won't care, I'll be dead and gone.



Now, my journals, they are a different story. I will care about what happens with them. My journals are my room without mirrors where I escape the daily grind and yes, in them, it is possible to see myself. There has been some discussion on various blogs and groups I frequent as to what we as journal-keepers want done with our journals when we die.

Regarding this question, I believe there are two distinct camps (maybe three, but I am going to save discussion on the third group till a later time), and there are fundamental personality differences between the two camps. This realization dawned on me last week at school, during a general discussion about classes we are required to take that we would rather not take. Speech was the disdainful class they were bemoaning. One young man said he would rather be in the class with all Commercial Art people, because he already knew most of them. Another girl said she would rather "make a fool of herself in front of a room full of strangers" than people she knew and had most of her other classes with. I agree with her.


That is why I would rather donate my journals to a university (the equivalent of a room full of strangers) with a strong women's studies program or to a school with someone interested in doing pyschological research on personal writing, or to an English department rather than leaving them to the whims of my family (the equivalent of my fellow students). Don't misunderstand, it is not ego that leads me to that decision. I see donating my journals as no different than someone leaving their body to science. I am leaving my thoughts, my mind, my essence, my spirit--something-- for someone to study. Besides, my loved ones will probably not appreciate the journals anymore than they will appreciate the quilts. They will just see it as another of my quirky traits, not worth a second glance. And there may be one other small reason I'd leave my journals to someone who might actually look at them and glean them for some small value. It has to do with the saying that if you can't be a good example, then you will just have to be content to serve as a terrible warning. And yes, I know, that last remark actually was a little disrespectful, but I did say it, sort of, tongue in cheek. You know, self-depracating humor, my favorite kind.



But still, the researchers will probably find, once they wade through all my verbosity, that is, they will find the issue of self-respect to be one of the major themes of my life.

Friday, February 18, 2005

Let Go? Did You Say "Let Go"? To Me?

Yesterday, in my real journal, the paper one, the more personal one, I came to see that I have been spending a lot of time lately trying to figure out what to do about several issues in my life, that I am trying to grab at too many things, trying to factor in too many variables. Somehow, I need to relax, to let go (and let God).

And when I hear “let go and let God”, the sassie one in me says “yeah sure, screw it all up, tear it all to pieces and then let go and say to God, here God, You fix it” which does not seem right to me at all.

That is where my confusion comes in. I think I have to at least “sort of” put things back together in order before I let go and let God have it, kind of like picking up a house before the cleaning lady comes, to keep from looking like such slobs. It seems I do not have a grasp of living by grace at all. I think God already knows what a slob I am.

Someone at school was quoting an old Saturday Night routine where the guy says “I’d rather look right than be right”. You know, the old Southern churchy tradition where the family gets all mad and screams and hollers on Sunday morning getting ready to get to church, and when they get there, everybody slaps smiles on their faces and they practically stick to the pews, they are so full of sweetness. She was not referring to me, of course, but if the shoe fits…

There is the fear that I will never actually “be” right, that I will always be a cardboard cutout girl, desperately longing, like the Velveteen rabbit and Pinocchio, to be real, to be right, rather than to just look right.

My habits are so ingrained and I have spent so much time pretending, working on “looking right” and I am so good at it that most people don’t know the difference. I say the right things and I act the right way. My mind knows exactly how to keep the charade going. But my heart knows it is all wrong. It is the recurring theme of my life, my “thorn in the flesh”. I don’t think I will ever get the hang of it, being real, or being right. I’ll just work myself to death on the fake outer layer while ignoring the jewel just below the surface. I’ll have ugly plastic flowers when I could have had fresh ones, pink, sweet-smelling hyacinths.

I am disappointed by a lack of healthy intimacy in marriage, disappointed because my son is struggling and tends to ignore my feelings and my advice. I want those healthy mutually satisfying relationships the therapists imply are available. On the other hand, isn’t that looking outside myself for self-worth? Should my disappointment in my relationships affect the way I feel about myself?

Is it so abnormal to feel, as my sister has said, that really, all we have is ourselves and God and if we stumble into, craft, create or carve any satisfying human relationships at all, they are lagniappe, just a little something extra? In the end, should I let go of my desire for connection, intimacy, for mutual satisfaction in relation with others and be content with just God and I? That is how I made it through many years, by hanging onto the myth that that was really how it was meant to be.

It was not until I started in counseling that I realized there were people who considered my view to be unhealthy, or motivated by fear. And some days, I still don’t quite get what the big deal is about living life as a (guarded) lone wolf. Isn’t that part of being “in the world, but not of the world”? Or is that one of those perversions of truth that I need to work on correcting? I don’t know. All I know is that I have pretty much always been somewhat reserved and guarded. And maybe it is a hilarious paradox for me to say that I do not see that as harmful because, in many ways, I am miserable, feeling disconnected, and caught in some sort of out of body experience where my head spouts all this out like it is perfectly logical to have ten foot walls around one’s heart, while my heart sees the small pockets of sunshine that leak through the cracks and wants so desperately to seek out and savor the warmth. The head cries out “danger, sunburn, skin cancer, heat stroke, you will meeeellllltttttt” and the heart believes the head and withdraws. It is an endless, vicious cycle. Sometimes I wish someone could fix that for me.

I do have responsibilities to do my metaphoric housekeeping, but I do not have the responsibility to hold myself onto the edge of this cliff that I find myself hanging from at this moment. I can allow myself to be held for a moment, and then to be placed back on solid ground. I can trust enough to let go. I do not have the responsibility to sustain myself. I do not have the responsibility to build protective walls around my heart either. When I am trying to hold everything together, to keep my world from falling apart, to protect my heart, I am taking on God’s part of the responsibility.

And the weird thing is, today God reminded me, once again, of my part and His part by way of this
blog that led to another blog, and you can read it for yourself here under the post entitled “Letting Go”, dated January 25. While you are there, read the post called “Pretend”. It is another good one that I needed to hear.

Wonderfully strange, huh? That’s the way God sometimes is. And me too, come to think of it.


Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Ice Carving, Louisiana Style



The chef always gives us a talk on safety and tells us cutting the ice, when it is properly tempered, is like cutting butter. He lies. If that ice were butter, my biscuits would never be buttered. It is just too hard to cut.

We had high school visitors today and he is getting them started by carving out a basic shape. All they will have to do is chisel a little bit and smooth the ice and they will have a nice looking vase.

I don't know where the chef is from. I know he ain't from around here because he is the only person I have ever heard say (in real life) "yous guys", as in "some of yous guys may have brought your own chisel". I am not even sure how to spell "yous".



These guys are working on a Coronna bottle, I believe. It could have been Diet Coke, I suppose.



Even the students from Instrumentation got in on the act. I think their tool was my favorite, although at first, I thought they were going to be carving a crawfish. That would have been nice too.



These girls from Culinary Arts worked hard on a tool of their own. Here they are polishing it with a towel to smooth off the rough edges. They really enjoyed the process. So much so that I worried they would polish it all away.





Chef got in on the act too, helping the girls to get the shape just right. We Commerial Art students were busy getting it all on a tape for our video production class. I don't know if the chef just got carried away or started thinking too much about the ramifications of this particular sculpture, but by the time he finished helping the girls out,



the carving was only another innocuous phallic symbol, now known as the Eiffel Tower or a rocket ship, depending on who you were talking to. We all knew something was up when he carved that square out at the bottom of the base. Guess we will never know whether it was an ill-timed slip of the knife, or a planned cut designed to keep the chef out of hot water.



These poor folks have just learned the hard way that you have to be careful when you try to carve a hole out for a handle. If you hit an unstable spot in the ice, the whole top of your block of ice will crack and fall to the ground.

All in all, it was a great day for ice carving. The temperature was in the upper seventies. Unfortunately, that left some of us exposed to more cracks than we might have liked.



What else can I say? I mean, other than

THE END.