a place for me to write what I’m thinking
My office lost all their IP addresses today. It was supposed to happen over the weekend, but instead happened four days early. I was unable to get to the vpn, the citrix server, or to my e-mail. I had internet access just fine, but all my tools were there.
I wish I could say I was really productive.
I am going to drag many of my data files over to my local machine, so at least I can still write reports when I’m down.
I attended church today, after taking the sacrament with the Saints, with the Northshore Unitarian Universalists. It was a very interesting service. It lasted almost exactly one hour. The minister was out; he spends one weekend per month helping out in Gulfport.
The form was not at all unusual: Greeting song, lighting things, hymn, readings, reflective song, responsorial, hymn, and a talk. I like what they called passing the basket - “An opportunity for generosity.” The congregation asked questions and gave feedback to the speaker, there was a brief responsorial, and another hymn/song.
I enjoyed it, but being accustomed for the last 20 years to the LDS way of doing things, and before that as a Roman Catholic, it was hard for me to take the UU service very seriously. It was interesting, but not as worshipful as even the decidedly “Low Church” Mormons. It was certainly more modern in tone, and the presentations were very interesting. But overall, it was kind of…I don’t know, “squishy.”
The people I met were very nice. A woman I sat next to, the congregation’s vice-president, didn’t know there were any Mormons in Louisiana.
I’m going to go for a month. I certainly won’t be able to just blend into the background; their numbers have been decimated by the storm. Googling their web site, I found that a congregation in Massachusetts is paying their mortgage for a year, and a congregation in New York is matching that. The UU headquarters is paying salaries for the ministerial staff through the end of February.
They were having their annual meeting today after the service, where they were going to decide on a budget and elect officers. Those concepts alone are a striking difference from LDS practices.
Yesterday was my birthday. I am 46. But briefly, while running an errand yesterday, I was 21 again.
A song came on the radio. I swear, I danced to that song in a campus bar on my 21st Birthday…
Well I was scared and feared and for my life
I was shakin’ life on a tree
‘Cause he was lean and mean and big and bad
And pointing that gun at me!Ah, wait a minute mister
I didn’t even kiss her
Don’t want no trouble with you
And I know you don’t owe me
But I wish you would let me
Ask one favor from you…Won’t you gimme three steps,
gimme three steps mister,
gimme three steps towards the door.
Gimme three steps,
gimme three steps mister,
And you’ll never see me no more.
The memory wasn’t so vivid, a “take me back Calgon” moment, because it was in a bar and I was pretty buzzed. It was because I was dancing. For just a few minutes yesterday, I remembered what it was like to have so much energy that I could boogie for an hour solid, with a brief stop for a drink, then back to dancing.
There are lots of people my age now who have that kind of energy (my buddy Jo, for one). I think I understand, now, what they get out of it. They get to be 21 forever.
The world has changed, but the church has tried its best not to. The best we’ve been able to do with “continuing revelation” was giving the priesthood to black members back in 1978. And that was a Good Thing. But it might have been the last time the church moved forward, rather than digging in its heels to stay in the same place. Well, there’s a place for people like that — we still have the Amish with us, after all. But sometimes it seems as if the church clings to so many of the unfortunate or trivial things about the past — inequality for women, suits and ties, keeping one’s knees and shoulders covered — and embracing the new things that are harmful — consumerism, television, soda pop. It seems sad to me that a church with an open canon, which often has changed to accomodate a changing world, now seems to be increasingly frozen in time, in many of the worst ways.
Some people like their routines. When I am in a Good Place, I also like my routines. But right now…well, I want Something Else.
It’s kind of a vague dissatisfaction. I can’t pinpoint one thing I would like to be different. Most things are very, very good. So why am I dissatisfied?
Of the Four Noble Truths, #1 is “Life is suffering.” Suffering comes from attachment. I am probably attached to ideas of success and the direction life “ought” to go that are unrealistic.
But is it unrealistic to want more from life than work, cook, dishes, sleep, lather, rinse, repeat?
Mormons aren’t “supposed” to look for higher callings. Every calling is important, we are told, from the nursery leader to the Young Women’s music specialist to the home teacher to the stake president - all callings matter, and if you’re faithful and diligent and serve to the best of your ability, you’ll be rewarded for it no matter what the job.
I have been essentially callingless for almost three years. I had a brief, happy burst of engagement as activities committee chair, which was an excellent fit for a non-believer. I didn’t have to bear witness of things I didn’t believe, or share the gospel with my friends, or try to figure out a way to teach a good lesson when all the references were quotes that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I planned parties. I attended the first 15 minutes of ward council, where we talked about the calendar, and then I left. It was a lot of fun, and there were some events coming up that I was rather looking forward to (along with things I wasn’t, like a “Finish the Book of Mormon” bash.) But there was a hurricane, and I left, and while I was gone, I got released.
I like being plugged in, and I like feeling like the things I do make a difference. Activities are a good and important way to build a community. It really, really helped that I wasn’t just contributing manual labor, but that I was presenting ideas and fleshing them out with a group. I wasn’t just a passenger. I was a driver.
I think it’s important that I examine my motives for the decisions I make about “Mormon Stuff.” I don’t want to delude myself. The more I think about it, the more I realize that what bothers me most about being seen as “defective” is that it immediately pushes me to the margins.
I don’t want to be on the margins, looking on as other people make a difference, and make things happen. I want to make things happen.
I think I am not alone in this. Most people like having their abilities recognized. I think more of us aspire to leadership than will admit it. One potential positive I see in going somewhere else is that I can probably get involved to whatever extent I like, in whatever area I like.
One of the speakers today had her printer healed thanks to divine inspiration. She had to print something, and her printer hadn’t worked for several days, so she prayed about it, and God inspired her to whack her printer cartridge on the floor several times, and then the printer printed.
Over 1000 people died during Katrina in the state of Louisiana alone. Many were praying for God to send them help.
I want nothing to do with the speaker’s God.
Dave’s account of the story of the Brahmin gave me a different way of looking at the story. It is not that today’s speaker’s faith is not real, or not grounded in her own reality. It is that her faith is not my faith, and I don’t want her faith. I am not capable of that kind of faith.
God is what God is, and what I think of God affects the reality not one bit. However, I do not believe God fixes printer cartridges and ignores the pleas of the dying. And if he is that sort of God…I don’t want anything to do with him. Capricious, cruel and a respecter of persons? No thanks.
My DH and I have been slowly in the process of converting our spare bedroom (which had housed most of our “stuff” when we were living away) into a new office. I don’t like to call it my office, because it’s going to be our office. I am going to work there during the day. DH will work there in the evenings. It will be set up so he can have meetings there, if he likes, and do lecture prep, etc. It’s out of the main part of the house, so he will be able to focus when he’s working there, unlike the current setup where somebody can interrupt him whenever, or where the TV blaring away is a distraction.
The main advantage for me is that it will be a place I go to work. One of the main challenges of working at home is separating the two. It’s not so much that I work when I’m not supposed to, but that I don’t work when I am. If I have an office, that is my workplace, then that is what I’ll do during working hours when I’m in the office. Then, when working hours are over, I’ll leave and shut the door.
When DH is home in the evening, and needs to work, it will be his office.
DH made the desk. It’s really more of a work table, but it’s humongous. He made it out of a door, and table legs we bought from Table Legs Online (no kidding). He trimmed it with red oak, and stained it cherry, and varnished it with four coats of a waterproof varnish made from tung oil. I just like typing that; I really have no idea what tung oil is.
Here is the finished product:
I’m going to take down the Sam’s Club 4×2 white work table tomorrow, and we’re going to set up the desk so I will be working at it on Monday. I will need to do some serious decorating to make our office worthy of my beautiful desk.
Since August 28th, 2005, I have lived on the verge of tears. The most trivial things could make me cry. The most devastating things could make me cry. Photos of the Superdome. Pictures of Mardi Gras. Music, especially, could make me cry. Being depressed when the nightmare started, I think I wasn’t able to cope as well as some, even though we came through the storm almost completely unscathed.
Proximity has also been an aggravating issue. I’m not from here, but I live here. Even when I was not here, I had mental images from when I was. Trees with three foot diameter trunks, scattered like toothpicks on top of the houses on Christian Lane. Power lines down everywhere. Signs spray painted with “Boil water” at the entrances to some neighborhoods, other signs with “Water OK.”
And the stories. The stories inspired a lot of fear in and of themselves. The man with the destroyed house, who refused to leave, and was guarding his business inventory from his ruined house with a shotgun. People with no flood insurance, who weren’t required to have flood insurance, but who flooded. People with no homes, the NIMBY attitude about FEMA trailers, the nauseating political posturing in The City. How can we get better when this is how we live and think? Racism, long the City’s ugly secret, hidden by professions of its non-existence, rose up and reminded us that it was still among us and, sadly, growing.
There were stories of bonding, and sharing, and community. But I wasn’t around so much in the aftermath, so I missed a lot of those. My therapist shared one of them with me: a minister at her church called and said, “a bunch of Mormons are coming from Houston to help. Can you house some of them for the weekend?” She said, thinking “I have a Mormon patient,” “Sure, I can give them a cool place to sleep and shower while they’re here.” She lost 40 trees, half in her front yard. Before they left, her houseguests, six of them, twelve Mormon Helping Hands and their chainsaws, cut up all the trees that were down in her front yard and hauled them out to her curb.
I blogged about the Free Winton Marsalis Concert And Keynote Speech. What happened to me there was a transition. I think I am no longer on the verge of tears. I experienced, for the first time in months, real joy. I remembered what it’s like to be lifted up by my experiences. I feel hopeful.
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