A Short Rant, a Hard Truth, and Something Funny to Make Up for it.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be English lit. majors. I am truly, truly grateful for kind interest and helpful suggestions about work from people. And yes, there is a BUT. I am just tired of the "Have you considered ...?" and the "Have you thought about ..?" and the "Have you tried ...?" The answer is YES, okay? Yes, I have considered, I have thought about, and I have tried. And now I am receiving "thanks for applying, this position has been filled, we will keep your resume on file" notices for part-time grocery checker positions.

God has really shown me a lot of pride and insecurity throughout this process. Not easy to learn, but I am grateful that He is doing that for me. I am praying for a heart that is humble, hopeful, and focused on service. This is still in progress, as evinced by my fed-up-ness with the conversation above. Really? What kind of a response to loving interest and desire to help is that?

I promised something funny. And here it is, continuing last week's Star Wars theme no less. What do you know? A B.A. in English Literature is good for something, after all!

A Visit To The Des Moines Botanical Center

Outside looks like everywhere: great slabs of white snow marbled with dirt and gravel. Gray pavement glazed over with pitted, grimy ice. Colourless, cold sky. Everything is flat, blank, bleak. The geodesic panes of the greenhouse rise from the parking lot with science-fiction strangeness.

Inside the dome: whorls and curlicues and tendrils. The air is exuberant, heavy with pollen and the lemony smell of growth. Green unfolds and uncurls itself, presses into every centimeter of space. Fullness of stems and fronds and buds and lacebitten leaves. Cursive scribbles of moss fill the spaces on the treestems; aggressive ferns push up beneath broad, spiral palms. The flowers are profuse and jubilant. They lack the decorous beauty of garden flowers, exploding in unnatural, chemical-bright splashes of scarlet, orange, fuchsia, magenta. Their shapes are exotic: frilled, curled, spider-legged, flat alien disks. Not ornamental, but aggressively, unmistakably sexual: anatomy-book closeups, unshy, flamebeautiful.

We few refugees from winter wander two-by-two, wide eyed. Unconsciously our fingers hover near jewelbright leaves and petals (don’t touch!). Human sparrow-pairs, drab in this peacock garden.

An elderly, besuited gentleman, very round of shoulder, very pink of skin, very white of hair. His fluting tulip-wife beside him, immaculately groomed, tastefully brooched and suited. 

The longhaired child, elflike even in her denim jumper, darting and peering: purple orchids (look mom! my favorite color), scary cactus, goldflashing carp. Mom, dumpy and solicitous, smiles.

A peroxide mane, 1980s smear of eyeshadow, cell phone glued to her ear. This woman is ludicrously obese, triple-chinned. Her stretch leggings (look twice, three times: still true!) painted over her lumpy, enormous behind. Thirty years ago she was smacking her gum, gossiping with the same girlfriends about the same (white—harmless?) trash. Ah—behind her, the longtime biker boyfriend, his badboy looks settled now into grizzled, shaggy self-confidence, stuffed into the same Harley tshirt and acidwashed jeans. These two belong together: middle-aged, unglamorous now, unbeautiful. They hardly look at one another; she smacks into her cell phone (she what? Gawd!), he strides behind his proud beerbelly, jingling in his boots. Leaving the greenhouse their arms drift around one another in an unplanned, habitual tenderness.

A thin girl, roundfaced and spectacled, in a little boy's black tshirt. She links hands with her boyfriend, listens as he crouches down to peer at the variegated undersides of leaves, points out the bunch of infant bananas (we had a banana tree once, the fruits fingerlength, thickskinned and bitter). Near the artificial stream there is a creaking, unsteady bench, baking in the sunwarmth trapped by the glass ceiling. Turtle-like, she sits and closes her eyes. Green presses through the thin skin of her eyelids: in great lime-coloured whorls, in sharpedged blades, in saucers and curls and chartreuse tendrils. 

And Here's A World Of Beauty

"When Death Comes." By Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems. Beacon Press, 1992. 10-11.


When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder-blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

WHen it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited the world.


"Goldenrod." Oliver, 17-18.


On roadsides,
    in fall fields,
        in rumpy bunches,
            saffron and orange and pale gold,

in little towers,
    soft as mash,
        sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers,
            full of bees and yellow beads and perfect flowerlets

and orange butterflies.
    I don't suppose
        much notice comes of it, except for honey,
            and how it heartens the heart with its

blank blaze.
    I don't suppose anything loves it except, perhaps,
        the rocky voids
            filled by its dumb dazzle.

For myself,
    I was just passing by, when the wind flared
         and the blossoms rustled,
             and the glittering pandemonium

leaned on me.
    I was just minding my own business
        when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
            citron and butter-colored,

and I was happy, and why not?
    Are not the difficult labors of our lives
        full of dark hours?
            And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,

that is better than these light-filled bodies?
    All day
        on their airy backbones
            they toss in the wind,

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
    they rise in a stiff sweetness,
        in the pure peace of giving
            one's gold away.

How Do You Pray?

We were in Matthew 14 Sunday -- the passage where Jesus walks out on the water to a boatful of seriously freaked-out disciples. By the time their master approaches them, the disciples are in a bad state. Stormy weather, scary sea, and on top of everything, it's "the fourth watch of the night" -- between 3 and 6 am. It's the darkest part of the night, and the disciples are exhausted from hours of rowing.

It's also, as Pastor Larson pointed out, the time of night right before dawn.

If I were my mom I'd have a Deep, Encouraging Yet Also Somehow Hilarious Message about what the gospel means to the really, really dark times in life. Instead, I'm going to talk about how much I hate winter. Y'all, it is definitely the Fourth Watch of the Winter here. And it is not pretty. I'm holding out hope for spring, because I know it's coming, but meanwhile I crawl around the apartment like a lethargic snake. I avoid looking out the window. And I snarl at my poor, patient husband.

Because I have the soul of a poet (at least I use that as my excuse for being messy), I get depressed pretty easily. I've always prayed a lot. I'm pretty good about praying for the people I love, because I think about them a lot. But this winter, God has really convicted me that WAY too much of my praying is nothing but self-indulgence.

We probably all have a friend who will call and talk for hours about how she's doing, and somehow never gets around to asking what's going on in our life. Well, a lot of the time, that's me talking to God. My days are filled with "Lord, I feel awful, please help me, please remind me of your goodness, please help me trust you and hang on here," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

That, my friends, is LAME.

So my latest strategy is not just to stand in the living room moaning to Jesus about how unhappy I am, and how awful I feel because I'm such a worthless, ungrateful, whiny human being. Instead, I go into the bedroom, and I take out my current Black Book, and I start by writing a page of things that I am genuinely grateful for. Not things I should be grateful for, things I am grateful for. And then I pray. First I thank God for all his gifts, and then I confess my stinky attitude, and then just talk about whatever I need to.

So I still am mildly depressed a lot of the time, but I find myself with a lot more peace, and so much, much, much gratitude. I know being more deliberate about my prayers is really a no-brainer. This post isn't a How-To -- it's a Thank You.

Because after filling a lot of pages in my Black Book with "grateful lists," I am overwhelmed by the people God has put into my life. Family, friends, church family -- even the people I am only beginning to know. I have been so surrounded by love.

Sure, I'm grateful for all the stuff, but mostly I'm grateful for the people. If you're reading this, that probably means you.

So I just wanted to let you know. Thank you.

God is very good.

Small Blessings

Yesterday Dennis and I woke up and discovered that our water had been turned off.

Oh, the joys of living in older housing. It can be an adventure at times!

We were a little grumpy at missing morning showers, etc, but God was taking care of us. There was EXACTLY enough water left in the kitchen pipes to make four cups of coffee. EXACTLY. No more, no less.

If that's not a particular Providence, I don't know what is.

And I still need help with yesterday's question. Please leave a comment if you haven't already!

Thankfulness

Today did not start out so great. It was DARK and COLD and WET when I woke up (at 6 am!), and the outfit I had planned to wear seemed like the absolute WRONG thing to wear. Then I spent half an hour throwing on, then off, the OTHER contents of my closet, frantically trying to find something that was clean, fit, and business casual. I didn't have time to eat my oatmeal and had to run out the door with an apple and no lunch.

Really? I mean, NOT ONLY am I eternally loved by God, He gives me so many, small, specific blessings every day. With that in mind, I would like to offer

THINGS THAT I AM THANKFUL FOR TODAY.

I don't like driving in the rain, BUT I did NOT forget to turn off my lights today!

No time to pack lunch = Caramel Frappuccino from the Starbucks down the road from my office. YUM. That, my friends, is a definite WIN.

My husband SUGGESTED that we go shopping for work pants that actually fit. New clothes = yay! And even today -- SO much better than being too fat for my clothes!

Ashes Against the Grain. The perfect album to listen to in today's weather ... ON my iPOd ... AND I'm allowed to listen to said iPod while I'm in the filing rows at work!

FREE COFFEE at work. I availed myself.

Most of all, I am thankful for my Dear Husband, who was patient and kind to me this morning, lent me his umbrella, offered to do laundry AND go shopping, and most importantly, PRAYED with me that I would remember to enjoy God's good grace to me throughout the day.

I am very, very blessed.

THE JOB BLOG

After 2 weeks of employment (by Mon. or Tues. that should be gainful employment!), I figured it was time to tell the folks how said employment happened.

Most of you are aware that I was hoping to have a job before DH and I actually moved to Iowa. My search was made difficult by the fact that I graduated with a degree in English literature (specialising in Medieval literature, at that), am not licensed to teach in Iowa, and have almost NO previous work experience due to frantically acquiring said degree ... Still, my resume looked good, I was hopeful, I did everything right (I thought).

By the end of July, I was despondent. Turned down not only for "dream" positions that I really lacked the expertise for, but for secretarial and administrative jobs that, frankly, any high school graduate with a decent work ethic could do. I couldn't even get a temp job at the Monster Financial Firm that, I was assured, was the one company in town that was always hiring.

I was down to three options. Three bleak, bitter options.

Cafeteria worker in a high school. I could do that ... get up every morning at 4am to spend all day preparing bad, prepackaged food for unappreciative high schoolers. I could really do that. But I really didn't want to.

I could join the Army. At least then I would get great benefits. Health insurance for the first time in years sounds pretty good. Then again, I would have to spend time away from my dear husband. Lots of time away. And I would have to do pushups. Lots of pushups. I HATE pushups.

Or, I could MAKE $1000s A DAY FROM HOME! UNBELIEVABLE EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY!! SIGN UP NOW to MAKE $$$$ IN JUST HOURS A DAY!!!!!

Really. I was desponding all right. I was in full out despond, on the floor by my laptop, staring at the ceiling and wailing in self-pity because I didn't want to work in a school cafeteria. It was bad, people. Bad. I am not the most mature human being, evidently.

Anyway, the story has a happy ending. After forcing me to deal with some major pride and trust issues (thanks so much, Lord), God finally, graciously provided a temp position at said Monster Financial Form--which has a good possibility of turning full time. If you're interested, I alternate between managing files (the system reminds me of working at the library), listening to insurance companies' hold music (I think they've been using the same songs since 1984. There are two of them -- one is peppy, and one is schloopy. Listening to either makes your brain turn to goo and slide out of your nostrils), barcoding, and other random office-y type stuff. Not terribly complicated, but enough variety and volume to keep me busy, and I really like all the people I work with.

Really, anyone could be doing my job. But I'm very, very glad it's me.