Distracted Mind

I have a fairly foul mouth sometimes. I’ve had to tailor my colorful language since the kids were born, but I can still let a few choice words fly every now and then. This is something that I get called on every once in a while, and usually the message goes a little like this: “You’d sound so much more professional if you didn’t curse so much!” and usually my response is a shrug. If the message is on Facebook, or something like that, it’s generally a shrug accompanied by a delete or some change in my privacy settings.

Why? Because sometimes people need to let loose. I tell my daughter that cursing is what people do when they can’t think of anything more intelligent to say, and I believe that. So why curse? Because sometimes I don’t have anything more intelligent to say. Sometimes I am so overwhelmed by stupidity that I let a few bombs go. While I take pride in having a sizable vocabulary, there are a few occasions where fuck, ass or shit are the best words for the job. Does it make me less intelligent? Dear sweet buttery Jesus I hope not, but it does make me feel a little better if I let fly every so often.

I discourage my kids from cursing because I know that, at their ages, they aren’t able to restrict that sort of language to semi-appropriate places. The last thing anyone in my family needs is for my toddler to let a few f-bombs fly in front of grandma. This means that I restrict my own foul mouth as well, which is only to be expected. However, cursing is still a part of self expression. If I go a little blue-light special every now and then, well, it means I’m still thinking, alive and kicking. If you’re someone who doesn’t like to see that side of me, by all means, I’ll make sure my blue tone is kept out of your rose-colored world as much as I possibly can.

The original bad boy of the Reformation, Martin Luther, had a saying: “Sin Boldly.” Strange saying for one of the founders of the Protestant movement, but it’s a good one. Sin like you mean it and repent because your soul depends on it. Don’t do anything half-assed and don’t be safe.

This doesn’t just apply to sin–it applies to everything in life. Live large, take chances and don’t be afraid to stand up for what’s right. Being wrong is ok too, just be ready to change when you realize you’ve erred. Don’t confuse this with the John Wayne type of “Make my Day” macho christianity James Dobson and his ilk are trying to sell though–this is eyes open, fully conscious spirituality that’s not afraid to admit mistakes.

The Evangelical Lutheran church is doing this today, addressing the roles of homosexual christians in the church. They’re not traveling unexplored territory–the United Church of Christ has accepted homosexual christians for a long time and the Episcopalians have done so for years as well. What they are doing is bucking the increasing trend of hatred and bigotry within christianity. They’re finally welcoming people who were born different, want the same things out of life and want to worship God. That seems like a natural step, but sadly it isn’t one that the church has been brave enough to take until now.

I can’t tell you how many times the church has voted against accepting homosexual members as they are, in committed relationships. They were afraid of the outrage (cue pearl clutching) of their more “conservative” membership. They hurt a lot of people and alienated a lot of christians in their continuing decision to reject gays and lesbians from the clergy and from being “real” Lutherans. I can tell you that the ELCA’s continuing decision wounded my own family considerably and turned my own sister away from the church and from christianity. It also had a very large part in my boycott of organized religion.

I’ve thought for a long time that the ELCA has drifted far away from Luther’s original proclamation to sin boldly.
Luther was not one to shrink from adversity — he stood up to the Catholic Church, left a monastic life for brave new territory as a heretic, and married Katherine. Katherine was no wallflower either: she repeatedly ran away from convent life, once running away in a herring barrel with several other sister nuns, getting the hell out of a life she didn’t want. These were the founders of the church that would eventually play it safe? I wish I could have been there for the vote (which took place on my sister’s birthday, coincidentally), just to stand up and holler “What took you so long?” The ELCA played it safe for too long–at least they finally woke up.

Neither Martin nor Katherine lived safe lives. They took risks, and the risks weren’t always calculated. I look at both of them as true heroes, albeit deeply flawed ones, like every other human being. They believed that living, really living, is not always safe. Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t glamorous and the consequences ain’t always pretty, but at least you can take solace in knowing that what your beliefs aren’t being compromised.

The thing that I admire about Luther, in spite of his many flaws, is that he played David to the Catholic church’s Goliath. He nailed those proclamations to the cathedral door, knowing that he would be branded a heretic. That wasn’t a light weight charge in those days–it could have meant his death. Luther did it anyway, taking organized christianity and setting it on its side. The ELCA is doing that again, even in the face of a schism within the denomination. Just as Christ accepted people from all walks of life, so will the ELCA. If they keep going in this direction, the ELCA might persuade me to go back to a Lutheran church on Sundays. For now, I’ll just say it again: it’s about damn time.

So my last post was a few months ago–my father was starting to turn around, things were looking lighter. Too bad the light went out.

My dad died two days later, on March 20th. I got a call from my brother on the 19th saying that my father’s health off the ventilator was going south. Because he had a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, we didn’t take any heroic actions to keep him alive. Instead, the doctors taped a magnet over his defibrillator, took him off all medication except a few painkillers that eased his suffering. They kept him off the ventilator, made him comfortable, and we waited for the inevitable.

It was strange, watching my dad slip away. He had gone from the stern, quiet Scots-Irishman that I knew to a frail, shaking impersonation of my father. Still, when they took him off of the vent and all the other drugs, we saw glimmers of the old Dad. At one point, he shakily pulled my sister and me down to his level and whispered as loud as he could “Where did you guys find this joint?” It was as if he thought we had hoodwinked him into going to some seedy bar! Later on, when my mom, my aunt and uncle and my brother and his wife were sitting around talking in the hospice room about how my parents met and became engaged, my father woke up just in time to remind everyone exactly how much my mother’s engagement ring cost. It may have been the last time he was conscious.

I wasn’t there when he passed–it was at night, after I had taken the kids back to my parents’ house to sleep. My mother, my father’s brother and his wife, and my brother and his wife were all there. They said it was peaceful. I was there, however, for the following days of preparation, planning and grieving. It’s weird–I think the biggest emotion I felt the entire time was anger. Anger that my daughter would have to have her fifth birthday the day before her grandpa’s funeral, anger that I was so sick that I couldn’t sleep for all the coughing, angry at certain family members for letting my dad go on in his condition without considering his wishes. I was just a big seething bucket of pissiness. Tears didn’t really come until a lot later.

Really, the whole thing was surreal. Planning the funeral at the funeral home, finding out the different options for burial/cremation, having to go through all his old photos to find just the right ones to display at the wake (and it was a dry wake… damn Lutherans!). There are so many ways to spend money on a dead person and not many of them make much sense!

The viewing was, in a word, interesting. I’m not a fan of open caskets. With as frail as my father had been, combined with the wait for the viewing, it was something that will stay with me much longer than I’ll ever want. All I can say is that when I die I want music, booze and a box of my ashes spread over the Wicklow mountains, far from some sorry, lily scented funeral home. I want memories to be happy.

So why am I writing this over two months later? Many reasons, most of them don’t make sense. The biggest one is because I couldn’t put anything into words until now. There are so many things that have happened in the past few months, and so many more that are rendered sad now. The first Father’s Day without my dad, my daughter’s fifth birthday–the first one my father wasn’t there for. I called his cell phone to hear his voice one last time, only to be disappointed because the service had already been turned off. Good news is a little less so because there’s one less person to share it with. I measure things in how my dad would look at them. I see him in my son’s face every morning when he wakes up. I hear him laughing at my little family’s antics and I cry a little, then laugh a lot.

The past week and a half have been interesting, to say the least. My father, who had been admitted to the hospital at the beginning of March, went back into the hospital one day after his discharge with more heart problems. His defibrillator wouldn’t stop firing, leaving him exhausted and his body unable to cope with the stress.

He agreed to sedation and a ventilator in order to rest. He then developed pneumonia, which was leading to kidney failure. By last Thursday, things were looking bleak. My family drove to Columbus to see my dad, perhaps for the last time. We sat down (at least the part of my family that was stateside) and discussed options, what Dad would want, and how we needed to proceed. I watched my mother grieve for her husband while he lay in that hospital bed, getting weaker and weaker. I watched small glimmers of hope that seemed like poison, from doctors that gave seemingly conflicting information. I prayed, or at least tried to.

Then, on Saturday, things appeared to turn around. My father’s kidneys started acting like kidneys again. His blood pressure, which had been dangerously low while on two different types of medication to keep it raised, was starting to stabilize. His heart was pumping with a somewhat regular rhythm. Grief turned back into hope for my mother, who took each one of these events as a sign for the better. I, however, just didn’t know.

We’d prepared our minds for what we thought was the inevitable. My family was saying goodbye to our miracle man–the man that had died and come back to life a decade earlier. When he started responding to treatment, I didn’t know what to think. I had prepared myself so thoroughly for the possibility of his death that I refused to believe there was any alternative.

See, in situations like this, hope is a bitch. She reels you in with whispers that everything will be different this one time, that things are going to turn around. That everything will be even better than “Okay”. She hooks you and then she poisons you. Reality falls short of expectations. Hell, sometimes reality just takes one look at hope and laughs. These are the times I worry about–the times when hope lies. This is what I was afraid of with my father, so I refused to give in to the hope that he would recover.

Seeing my father in that bed, unconscious and frail, that man wasn’t the man that taught me how to fish, how to use a hammer, how to ride a bike. That man was a shell. I was furious with anyone who tried to say anything to the contrary. I told myself that my father wasn’t in that shell anymore, but now it seems he was. My father is being weaned off the ventilator today. Time will tell whether or not his body will tolerate being off the machine, but he is better enough to try it. The miracle man may just ride again.

This isn’t an argument about semantics, or something I’m asking just to be tedius. I really want to know. What the fuck is an “Average” American? Is there a standard that we either adhere to or deviate from, some baseline that we’re all measured against? I’m asking because Senator John McCain seems to think that there is and I’d like to know where this definition is so that I can check to see how I measure up. I know about his idea of average from his campaign (and look how good that “Average Joe” is doing right now–he’s turned mediocrity into a marketable skill!).

For those of you that don’t know, the Senator has taken his Mavericky Maverickness to the land of twitter (gosh, he’s so cutting edge, we’re all bleeding), where he’s keeping us all up-to-date on the “Top 10 porkiest projects” each day. He assures all of us in twitterland that Thursday’s will be posted soon. I love how the things he thinks of as pork all have potential to create new jobs, and how many of these jobs don’t apply to the “average” American. If you’d like an example, check out this one, from February 27th. Just throw out the window that if we’re talking about “American”, we’re talking about the entire continent, not just U.S. citizens. Wait, scratch that: include the entire continent. I’d like to see what Sen. McCain uses as a definition for the whole damned continent.

As much as all politicians like to think they’re fighting for the “average” guy or gal (or at least like having that appearance), Washington D.C. is like a interrogation room with dirty windows. We can see in (mostly), and politicians can sort of hear what we’re saying but, as long as they’re in the room (D.C.), they can’t see us all standing outside. McCain’s petty jabs at projects are the result of his obscured vision of the U.S. He sees everything through his partisan lens, which obscures the potential help any of these projects offer. Take the example I linked to above: McCain comments that investing in astronomy isn’t going to help “average” Americans. How’s that? Americans need jobs. Some Americans (and by American, I mean those of us living in the United States) happen to work in the field of astronomy, or are studying in that field. How is investing in astronomy a bad thing? Or is it because this investment is going to Hawaii, which probably has the least obscured night sky in the country other than, perhaps, Alaska?

Where McCain finds pork, I find jobs to be an avenue toward progress. Guess I’m just not average according to John and I think that’s a good thing.

So my new years resolution was to take my lunch to work more often than I buy lunch. So far, I’ve been pretty good about it, some weeks I bring lunch every day, some weeks it’s once or twice, but let’s just say that the average is on my side. Since making this resolution, I’ve had to add more recipes to my arsenal–cheap, flavorful and healthy recipes that allow me to make a few meals over the weekend, package them up and put them in the fridge to pull out on my way out the door in the morning.

Imjaddarah is a Lebanese recipe, often made for Friday Lenten dinners. The recipe I’m writing won’t be used for any Friday night though, since it calls for a cup and a half of chicken broth. Sure, you can use veggie broth for a Friday night or a vegetarian meal, but all I had in my pantry was chicken, so there you are. This has a few extra ingredients from your basic Imjaddarah, which you can find here: Imaddarah Lentils and Rice.
Recipe after the fold.
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This week has been tough. My job is still great, I’m still alive, and I’m not rocking in a corner muttering to myself, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been hard. The biggest thing has been dealing with my daughter’s daycare and the reality that my daughter is basically me, cloned.

I wasn’t what you would call an easy child. I was high strung, energetic, stubborn… what some people would call a free spirit. This caused me problems in school. My progress reports and notes from teachers always mentioned my attention span, my lack of organizational skills (worlds messiest locker, anyone?), and my temper. Back in the eighties, ADHD was still relatively new, not much was known about how ADHD manifested in girls, and I went undiagnosed. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I was diagnosed, and by then I had learned a whole slew of coping mechanisms.

On one hand, my experiences can help my daughter, regardless of whether or not she has ADHD. On the other hand, I have no desire for her to go through everything I experienced. I was on hellishly awkward kid. Prone to tears, extremely insecure, pretty much a walking target for bullies… that’s not what I want for my kid. Granted, she’s all of four years old, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not worried for the thirteen year old she’ll grow into.

I’m proud of my daughter for her fierce independence, her intelligence, her willingness to take risks. I don’t want that to be overshadowed. It’s times like this that deep breaths and living in the present are all I can do.

I’ve been doing the link blog thing for quite a while, not updating anything about my actual life. Believe it or not, there are actually reasons for this. One, I was stuck in a job that I genuinely disliked. This depressed me greatly. In fact, it downright pissed me off.

Two, I was pregnant. I was happy about this, still am, and I am now very happy to have two children. Even so, I am not, I repeat not a good pregnant woman. My last pregnancy damned near drove me crazy, and the aftermath completed the trip. Since I was actually happy about the prospect of another child, but very nervous about the possibility of going nuts again, I was naturally a little conflicted.

Stir in just a little bit of late-pregnancy complications, an unexpected c-section, and post-partum recovery, and adding a newborn to our little family, and you have a recipe for no blogging for a while. Just some links every few days.

Of course, now, the baby is out, I’m not crazy, and I’m out of the job I hated. Needless to say, I’m pretty thrilled. In fact, I feel like I got a piece of my soul back. Not only do I now have two kids that I adore, but I also have a job that genuinely challenges me and feels rewarding. The new job smell isn’t quite gone yet, but it’s still a thousand percentage points less stressful than my old one.

So that’s what’s going on, in a nutshell.

Hey kids, want to read something scary? Just head on over to the New York Times for some good old fashioned scary news, coming at you straight from the Lake: Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town?. Why is this so terrifying? Because it’s true, it’s real, and it’s happening right here.

Honestly, it’s a little disappointing to hear that you really can’t afford as much house as you thought you could. It’s tempting to take the offer that will get you more, even if it may come back to bite you in the ass. I’ll be honest–I thought we’d be able to afford a lot more than we were able to when we looked four years ago, but once we realized what our monthly payments would be, we started aiming a little lower. Of course, not everyone had people looking out for them like our realtor–she was the first one who suggested that we were far out of our price range.

Four years later, we’re ready to get the hell out, as are at least four other households on our block. It could be that we’ve outgrown our house, that it’s on an extremely busy street, that my daughter can’t play outside, or that one of the neighboring houses has a residential count that defies noise ordinances, basic manners, and all laws of physics (oh… did I mention the neglected pit bull pup in their back yard?). Honestly, I don’t know how many people stay next door (I don’t say live, because being crammed into a three-bedroom bungalow like that ain’t living), but it’s a hell of a lot more people than that house was built to shelter. Our house has gone from being a little slice of our own heaven to hell in four years, and only part of it has to do with the scary article in the Times. A lot of it has to do with the state of our city as well.

The crime rate is going up. People are trying to move out and getting trapped by the fear of paying two mortgages at once (and that’s a very real possibility that could really crush a person’s/family’s financial well being), and Cleveland is looking less and less desirable. Just ask my other neighbor, who has had his house burglarized over five times (realistically I’d say around eight, but I’m not sure) by the same people, who have never even been brought in for questioning. The last time he was burglarized, the cops wouldn’t come out–serial burglary doesn’t rate as high when you’ve got drug dealing, gang shootings, domestic abuse cases, and everything else to deal with and not nearly enough officers to handle it all.

It’s more than I can cope with–and judging from the realty signs, more than a few of my neighbors agree. Cleveland was a wonderful place to live, but it’s going downhill and fixing it isn’t glamorous enough to get Frank Jackson or any of our city council members airtime. Taking on the banks, fixing the schools and public services is a hell of a lot harder than offering up a few soundbites, so I doubt most of our officials would be interested in the first place.

Quite honestly, after living here, all I want is a farm out in the boonies with a half mile between me and the closest neighbor. Cleveland, I’ll remember to visit you. Right now it’s time to pack.

The insidious danger of danger

Think that being a woman online means that you have to be a shrinking, anonymous, violet? WRONG.

If you’re one of those people who thinks that women need to protect themselves more than men for the sheer reason of their sex, turn off your television, read this opinion piece and do some soul searching.