et cetera...

Part-time Role Model... Keep Your Normal Job

2009-12-10T23:58:00.005-05:00

We have a standing tutoring appointment. He is 151 months old and not quite half as many inches tall. Hands that correspond to a pair of bare but promisingly sturdy puppy-feet knock on my door at least once a week, usually with homework in tow. This week it is a literature project – read the story, symbolize each character with a shape and color, and create a corresponding poster. Piece of cake. I kick into cool-grown-up mode and reach for the “role-model” hat.

The first snag comes with his need for color printing and my inability to provide. There would be more of these. There is nothing quite like the presence of a minor to pull ambient questionable morality out of the air itself and highlight it in fluorescent pink. Suddenly, at the pause of a 12-year-old, the word “crap” becomes edgy, Stevie Wonder is risqué, and I am painfully aware that the only piece of brown paper in my house is being cut by a young Muslim boy from the whiskey ad in a wine periodical. Meanwhile, where did I put that hat…?

The book is The Outsiders, of which I know nothing except that overall, the story is purple. This is less than useful, so during all the color-snipping and “Part-Time Lover” listening, I hunt for a synopsis to maximize my contribution for my young friend who is beginning to waver and cutting his poster in half to start over. I now know it as a coming-of-age novel written by an insightful young woman whose reflection on preteen boys in her town dispenses wisdom beyond her years. This does not change the fact, however, that I cannot hear the teacher’s instructions, see the classmates’ posters, or crawl into this 12-year-old brain to cure his swelling indecision or undo my corruption. I am a helpless outsider with no construction paper, and my scraps will have to do.

In hour two, we begin to turn a corner. Decisions are made and rubber cement comes on the scene, followed shortly by little brother from downstairs. His mission is the usual, I assume – convey his mother’s undue concern that my friend has outstayed his welcome and recruit him home – but I will never know. He swings the door open just long enough to catch two words in English on our TV, parrot them and exit, stage right.

“Jackass! Jackass!” Oh boy.

The project continues for quite some time, and though the work station moves downstairs, I remain on call for the remainder of the evening throughout several complete overhauls. While I assume the project is long over and graded, I have yet to hear a verdict, to spite my hankerings for closure. It is nice to believe you are a role-model – good, useful, and given an hour or two on Saturdays, able to turn out a fine product every couple years. Grade or no grade, though I am starting to wonder about my role-model cap. I don’t know if this is standard issue, but I think mine might be tall, thin and pointy with a big letter D on it.

Oh well, at least I now know where my good scissors have been.

Technology fail

2009-08-22T16:34:00.007-04:00

So, here’s one. Apparently the predict-a-word function for text messaging on my ancient Motorola Razor, iTAP, was not familiar with the word “texting.”

Just thought I would share.

Body hair and slow grief...

2009-06-14T15:35:00.016-04:00

I miss her, but at the strangest times.

I miss her when I am putting on my makeup and notice that I have a chin hair. I think of Mom, taking a pink Bic razor to the hospital to shave her chin, because how else can you give your mother a shred of dignity when she's had a stroke the morning her husband was coming home from the hospital?

Then, I look at the way the one remaining light bulb above our pink, fifties-era bathroom treats my two gray hairs like tinsel, and I think of her purple, fifties-era bathroom. I think of all the home-perm kits and shed tears in that bathroom and wonder, will I get the old-woman perm when my hair goes all gray or will it stay dark and thick like hers?

I look at my brown eyes and, at the thought that seventy five years might gain them the easy wisdom indigenous to hers, I finally like them.

Every time I go home lately, someone tells me, "your hair is getting darker." I pretend it's true, and that I am looking more like her, even though I know it's just greasy. (I use her baby powder trick so I don't have to wash it.)

I miss her when I'm cooking and singe my arm hairs. I may not have gotten the genes to burn my chest on the stove through two layers of polyester blend, but as for klutz and arm hair, I got 'em honest.

And I miss her at the end of this post, when by now all these stories of family and hair would have evoked the recounting of some Pennsylvania Dutch prank on the Evendale homestead involving the attachment of some part of a newly-slaughtered animal to some part of an unsuspecting uncle or sibling. I wonder what our kids will think of stories about her.

At the end of the day, what can you do but smile at the stories that somehow close the circuit of where you came from and where you're headed? Funny, how these things work.

Thrift and closure...

2009-06-13T19:00:00.034-04:00

Fresh Tilapia: post-swimming-in-asian-market, pre-tasty-stock

Tasty Stock: post-crockpot, pre-delicious-curry

Delicious Curry: post-tasty-stock, pre-belly

Well, there you have it. I bought the freshest thing around at the cheapest price around, and produced one of the healthiest, tastiest meals around. It had a start. It had a finish. Then, I ate it.

Can anyone explain why this makes me so disproportionately happy?

Twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go...

2009-05-29T19:17:00.018-04:00

I have nothing against the Ramones. Listening to them on a sunny-day road trip is the perfect way to feel happily innocent and kinda cool at the same time, like you're hanging out with the missing link between the Beach Boys and Green Day.

Of course their lyrical depth is not the main draw, but hey, sometimes the phrase "rock 'n roll high school" repeated nine consecutive times just hits the spot.

And then, last week at my in-laws', I came across this video which managed to unleash something of noteworthy depth.

"Oh how adorable!"

We laughed our guts out.

But wait a minute. These are not first-graders putting on a nativity pageant, tripping around in pastel robes and twine, making a weighty message cute and inane by their lack of understanding.

Somehow, this is the opposite -- here are some of the most seasoned humans around, infusing something as trite as a Ramones song with loads of substance, just by virtue of their life stage.

Hmmm...

When the Goose Bites, When the Bee Stings...

2009-01-18T15:05:00.009-05:00

The little one is afraid of geese, he confides, finally settling to a simmer after I lead my company in push-ups and jacks.

"What do you do when you are afraid?" I press, now that I am conversing with a boy instead of a forty-five pound sugar high.

For me, it was jack-in-the-boxes. Jack-in-the-boxes and eighteen wheelers. And kickball.

The older brother -- Impatience Incarnate -- interjects. "Run away," he squawks, and coaches some martial arts moves which may or may not intimidate the Canadian geese in question. Which of those helpful tactics did he enlist today, I wonder, when David Perez the sixth grade bully put fingers across his face?

"I'm scared of geese," the "baby" reminds me with an outside voice an inch from my face.

"Can you tell God you are scared, and ask him to help you?" Tiny brown fingers cup briefly in front of folded knees in the shape of a five-year-old-Muslim prayer before the conversation escalates in a brother-on-brother stage competition. Geese fly in and out of the dueling monologues, as do Sponge Bob and future career options.

The future is a string of presents, and I wonder how many I will share with these two man-sprouts, and what kind of fruit I am stringing into these characters.

"Be nice to your Mom tomorrow, okay?" Maybe if I put these words out into the air around his effervescent little being, he will bounce into them and consent without voicing the ever-present "Why." Or maybe he will ask, and I will have to fight the urge to say, "because geese bite boys that are mean to mamas," and produce a worthy reason.

Now, acute and accidental prayers for these hearers of our footsteps swoop in to invade my Beloved Solitude, and I cannot help but fear that the One I petition is occupied now, working on our parents' own request that their selfish daughter would be soon ready to be a mom...

joy comes

2008-10-07T23:40:00.001-04:00

I am a mourning person.

Isn’t there something about the day as it
Shatters again, slowly
Like the crazing of an ancient teacup

Fragile and stately,
Sturdy as the Word,
Tinkling
Like shards of expectation?

Jingling, through the chimney
To rewrap the dead strewn under the tree?

Fast broken, first breaking --
Still, promise churns in the wake of morning.

For Roxy...

2007-09-12T21:29:00.000-04:00

The aloe on the sill is always drooping
always thirsty, and restless as a sand dune
simply asking for a word of sympathy
and a little squirt of certainty.

But friend, there is certainly always never enough.
And where is your spirit, your life-breath?
Ever-hopeful twinkle
lathering assurance, soothing
even when the oven door
burns a wrist again?

It seems you're forever in the business of asking
asking, asking
so, I'm asking you --
Where is your joy?

Aren’t you the salve-of-the-earth mender?
Sometimes it’s wearisome to think
but I do,
and with good reason.

For Lee...

2007-03-05T11:37:00.001-05:00

Ode to the Postmodern...

2006-11-28T22:02:00.000-05:00

Creed

We believe in Marxfreudanddarwin.
We believe everything is OK
as long as you don't hurt anyone,
to the best of your definition of hurt,
and to the best of your knowledge.

We believe in sex before during
and after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe that adultery is fun.
We believe that sodomy's OK
We believe that taboos are taboo.

We believe that everything's getting better
despite evidence to the contrary.
The evidence must be investigated.
You can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there's something in horoscopes,
UFO's and bent spoons;
Jesus was a good man just like Buddha
Mohammed and ourselves.
He was a good moral teacher although we think
his good morals were bad.

We believe that all religions are basically the same,
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of
creation sin heaven hell God and salvation.

We believe that after death comes The Nothing
because when you ask the dead what happens
they say Nothing.
If death is not the end, if the dead have lied,
then it's compulsory heaven for all
excepting perhaps Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan.

We believe in Masters and Johnson.
What's selected is average.
What's average is normal.
What's normal is good.

We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between
warfare and bloodshed.
Americans should beat their guns into tractors
and the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe that man is essentially good.
It's only his behaviour that lets him down.
This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions.
Conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth
that is right for him.
Reality will adapt accordingly.
The universe will readjust. History will alter.
We believe that there is no absolute truth
excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth.

We believe in the rejection of creeds.

- Steve Turner

The Silent D - Beguilement, Fraud & Betrayal...

2006-10-13T17:45:00.000-04:00

AHH! Has everyone else always been privy to the reality that "fridge" is spelled differently than "refrigerator?!" Why on earth IS this? And why have I never noticed it before?

This is almost as bad as finding out that my entire family was purposely mispronouncing "skibbies" in full cognizance of the rest of the skivvie-wearing world. I feel strangely betrayed.

I promise I will write about something serious soon...

Solidly out of the 18-24 bracket...

2006-09-11T23:58:00.000-04:00

You know you have entered a new stage of life when you find out people are coming over and you find yourself wiping down the toilet and sink rather than putting on make-up.

Don't feed the animals...

2006-05-09T23:27:00.000-04:00

So today at the park, we were all but charged by a psycho hormonal mother squirrel who apparently wanted nothing but chocolate chips. Not kidding. She came straight past the apple, carrots, and cool ranch dorritos without flinching, crawled up on the table and bit the bag, sporting the biggest nipples I've ever seen on a rodent. Had I not been so rabie-cautious, I think she would've climbed me. It was unsettling.

And evidently, peanut butter gives chipmunks the dry heaves. Is it a full moon or something?

Manliness (or how to castrate your guest author on public radio)...

2006-04-25T23:41:00.000-04:00

I feel about public radio the way many people describe feeling about a rival sibling. On a semi-regular basis, things are said that boil my blood and roll my eyes. But even so, the time we've spent together would likely result in a punch in the neck to anyone who tries to bash NPR.

Recently, Jayson and I were listening to a download of the the show "On Point," the topic - "Manliness."

No, really, the show was titled that, after a book of the same name. The author (a male who's last name, ironically enough, had the word "Man" in it) explained that even amid our society's gender-neutral ideals, there are traits (healthy & unhealthy) to which men are prone, and men and women being equal does not make us interchangable. Meanwhile, an arrogant, postmodern "liberated" female scholar discredited him (and his gender) relentlessly.

While I have never (with the possible exception of my first 2 months of marriage) identified much with the third-wave feminist ideals, there is much to be said for the battles of my 19th-century sisters and even those in the 1960s, especially in education.

In 1869, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women to demonstrate that "the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong...and...one of the chief hindrances to human improvement." And we ladies have come along way. But isn't there a point (especially if our definition of "subordinating" something is to "treat it as of less value or importance") where we're unmarginalizing one group to the demeaning of the other? Of course, Webster was just another dead white male...

I'm not trying to get political or advocate Mr. Manliman; by intent or slow wit, he said some pretty idiotic stuff too. It's just that in all the effort to move past "socially constructed" gender boundaries and convict this guy of chauvanism, no one seemed to notice the woman's condescending off-handed generalizations about men.

I don't know about Manliness - I find it quite elusive to define. All I know is when I let out a long weepy sigh, and Jayson looks gruff and asks "What can I beat up that's making you do that?" I like the feeling it gives me.

"Your hair looks fine..."

2006-04-09T23:36:00.000-04:00

I am convinced that one of the most elusive yet valuable useful skills you can have as a person is the ability to tell someone what you really think in a way that does not make them want to stop being your friend. That is one of the reasons I think Jesus was so cool.

This afternoon, I was thinking about all the games we play trying to figure out how to be honest enough with people to be able to live with ourselves without constantly sending death blows to each other's precious egos. I usually end up choosing the passive aggressive route.

You would think this would only be an issue with people we don't know very well and want to think we are polite or cool, like new acquaintances or people who might read our blogs. But I think sometimes it's stinking hard to be honest with close friends. I mean, I don't want to come off as a know-it-all jerk, but sometimes people have ideas about things that don't make much sense or are doing stuff that's obviously harmful, and sometimes they get bad haircuts.

I was reading a verse today that says something about being the kind of person who sees constructive criticism from friends as a "kindness" instead of refusing it. I'm starting to have a great deal of respect for my friends who use the phrase "What do you think?" in a way that you can tell they really want to know...

As soon as the storm windows are gone...

2006-04-08T19:34:00.000-04:00

defenestration : dE-"fe-n&-'strA-sh&n
(noun, etymology: de- + Latin fenestra window)
a throwing of a person or thing out of a window

I am as yet unpersuaded as to who/what will be the lucky defenestree, but I am open to suggestion. Regardless, learning new big words would have much more appeal if they all sounded like this much fun...

The downside of royalty...

2006-04-02T18:56:00.000-04:00

People who don't exercise get sad and chubby; now that it is not snowing, I must start being more active again.

Today, I went for a walk with David Crowder shoved down the backside of my pants. This approach to making exercise bearable and more spiritual proved only marginally successful, as he and the CD player kept sliding down into uncharted places and slowing me down.

I'm not sure when my transition into princess-dom occurred, but my new-found lust for an iPod brings to my attention that it undoubtably has. My perfectly functional & portable, skip-protected compact disk player may as well have been a turntable strapped to my back, with my large, visible headphones flagging my obsolescence and poverty for the neighborhood's amusement, in case anyone on The Boulevard failed to notice. Surely, this is unacceptable.

While being a princess has it's advantages (like not being expected to eat fast food), I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this royalty thing. If I ever obtain an iPod, what will I be able to feel pious about not owning?

To hell and back...

2006-03-22T18:44:00.000-05:00

So New Orleans is intense - The News wasn't kidding. The difference is that seeing an image or two of total devastation doesn't wreck a person's heart like driving past 17 miles of the image.

Once again, my journal cried itself to a lonely sleep the majority of the week, mostly because my tarp-pulling muscles and pen-pushing muscles evidently live in close proximity. And even with coffee, alertness is fickle after a long week of demo work and communal cot dwelling in a vermin-infested, Ninth Ward warehouse.

On the bus, a friend told me her heart feels like the houses we passed, imploded and floated off their foundations. We talked about the recurring cycles of our hearts and how hard it can be to see restoration on the horizon after so many storms.

It's funny how living in such close proximity with 2,000 other grimy, tired people will scrape away at one's social exterior like a coin on a lottery ticket. You all start out feeling like hopeful and adventurous girl scouts on a bus trip to save the world, and then the friction makes whatever's under the thin silver coating start to peek through. As it turns out, none of your numbers match, and except for your dollar donation to benefit older Pennsylvanians, you're left with little but the gentle reassurance that you're all still losers.

Don't get me wrong, the trip was amazing - in 5 days, our camp accomplished 7 times what the other aid groups had done in half a year. I took part in helping to save 7 apartments, a church, a house, a grocery store, 5 kittens, and a family of mice. And I saw a creepy parade and made some great friends.

Maybe I'm just afraid that with CNN, our egos and all the world smiling and patting our backs, we'll just go back home and keep right on living in our self-seeking, manipulative, water-logged hearts like nothing ever happened.

Man, do I need gutted...

Batter my heart three-personed God, for you
as yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.
That I may rise and stand o'erthrow me and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

-John Donne

White hair (this might be a long one)...

2006-02-17T19:08:00.000-05:00

So yesterday someone said I was a "hero" and it got me thinking. Just about everything has gotten me thinking lately, which you'd think would make for good journaling fodder. You would think. I must need more mental RAM; my head gets too full to synthesize anything into words or onto pages, and sadly, the most meaningful and thought-provoking times in my life usually correspond with the longest gaps in my journals.

Running is a good time to sythesize life. I went this week for the first time in a long time, as the weather here was begging to be traipsed through. Five minutes of traipsing at a jog is apparently long enough to put a stitch in one's side and get one over the thrill, but one has an obligation to save face with all the other sporty traipsers, especially the elderly ones. (The last time I went jogging, Jayson and I were passed by a spandex-clad gentleman of at least 70 years. It was not good for morale...) So I walked and jogged for another half hour, mostly trying not to puke in front of the schoolbus kids, pretending I was going to be one of those strong, vibrant women you see in the vitamin commercials.

Each of my grandpas has one sister, neither of whom had ever caught my attention as being particularly strong women, probably since my grandmother was such a saintly matriarch. But during my Centrum Silver jog, I was thinking about my dad's aunt Sarah and how she's been divorced for as long as I've known her and how her kids live out of state and don't visit and put her in a nut-house nursing home with smelly, slobbery, mentally-absent old people after her heart attack two years ago. I mean, growing up, she never topped my favorite relatives list because she lived out of town and played favorites. But I watched her get yanked suddenly from her home into this Creep Ward in the middle of nowhere, never to see her house or most of her stuff again, only to take it in stride and grow as a person. I'm sure she figured out that her ex-husband Herb helped us haul most of it to the Goodwill, and that her kids could afford a better place for her if they wanted to, but she's just upbeat, and thankful to be alive. When I was living at home, we would go out for Bible study and coffee afterwards, and she had all kinds of questions about faith since she started reading her Bible again. Now, instead of whining that people there don't converse intelligently (or know it's unacceptable to sit on the lounge furniture without pants on), she's helping the grouchy, incompetent aides do their jobs, and I think she's even some sort of unofficial chaplain at the home's prayer group.

She and my mom's aunt Cora are two of the most elegant women I've seen, probably because their hair is totally white. Cora lost her husband George to a brain tumor when I was eight, and from what I hear, he was a pretty cool guy. In all the old pictures, she always looks like she thinks so too. She has three daughters, two of whom live as far out of state as you can get and not be in an ocean, and one lives about an hour away. Pretty sure if I was a widow and all of my kids moved out of town, I would be lonely and unstable. But she never seems needy or resentful, and frequently hops on planes by herself to fly to Florida or Seattle without missing a beat, although I'm pretty sure she'd rather not. She's one of those women who grew up poor and knows how to cook and can every vegetable but not without her own paring knife, and you never really hear her complain or talk in a sad way about how life changes.

So now that this is a novel, I feel like I should say I was motivated to do something really special, or at least that I found five dollars or something. I could try say something profound about being a hero, but thanks to Enrique Iglesias, I'm not sure I can even take the word seriously anymore. I guess I don't mind being thought of as one though, as long as I get to have white hair.

For the one who has everything...

2005-12-23T13:29:00.000-05:00

So I ventured out into the last-minute insanity this morning to pick up some final gifts, and saw:

I'm all about diy, but does this seem like a bad idea to anyone else?

Quote of the day...

2005-12-23T01:26:00.000-05:00

"Speaking of reefer, I need to call Grandma..." - Jayson's mother

My husband is bred from quality stock.

Gouty feet...

2005-12-12T23:34:00.000-05:00

If only I could drive. vote. have sex. get into the bar. get into a school. graduate. be in a band. get married. get skinny. get paid. have a kid. not have a kid. afford my kid. see my kid. have another house/job/spouse. keep my hair. find another church. find time. pay bills. stay healthy.

Man, sometimes I wonder what my/your/our existence would be like if we could just relax and quit waiting for the next thing...

"If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot." - John Bunyan

Things i like to make...

2005-12-09T23:27:00.000-05:00

If our children don't have webbed feet or a peculiar number of extremeties, I will be impressed. This week hasn't allowed for much time to be creative in the true sense of the word, so I've been getting my fix by priming the spare room upstairs and playing with spray paint and cardstock in the basement. I guess since this is my designated venue for arrogant rants, it would be ok to mention my disdain for store-bought cards. I don't know if greeting card companies just don't care or if they just know that no matter what caliber of crap they throw on the shelf for their made-up obligatory-greeting-card holidays, Wal-Mart shoppers will pay $3.25 for it, but I'd rather not if I can help it. Hence the spray-painted cardstock. They're nothing overly special, but it gives me an excuse to play with aerosol toxins and feel like I can make something. Maybe I'll try to post some of the more successful ones later when I'm not high...
.
Oh, yeah and if you're in the market for a beta-carotene boost (or have a relative who tends to leave you overly endowed with random produce), here's my recommendation of the week.

Irony & vague pronouns...

2005-11-16T01:34:00.000-05:00

Ok, so tonight I ran across a site to help women who have dealt with sexual abuse... and it was playing the hymn "He Touched Me." I am speechless...

Fall...

2005-11-14T22:06:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is the last leaf pickup day in our neighborhood, and today I got behind the leaf-blower-picker-upper-shooter thing. It's probably good for me to be stuck between vehicles long enough to get over wasting time and start savoring the finer moments in each season of life. Even having to sit behind two ugly slow-moving pieces of road maintenance equipment for ten minutes made me thankful that our fast-paced society still allows the leaves to fall in their own time. I guess if they wanted, they could probably in the name of efficiency just devise some truck to vaccuum all the leaves off the trees before they clutter up our lawns and re-nickname the season "Suck..."

I really need to cut the cheese...

2005-11-14T00:27:00.000-05:00

Upon my arrival home today after far too much coffee and a few hours alone in the car, I have come to grips with my personal kryptonite. I love cheese. After such soul-seeking surfaced this problem to my attention, I turned to the only obvious dependable beacon of wisdom in our ever-shifting society and found the following cheese addiction research via google. Come on, folks, when are we going to quit blaming petty narcotics and start getting serious about the War on Cheese?

TangentJunkie.com & Barbie Therapy...

2005-11-12T10:17:00.000-05:00

After visiting a very random website today, and I'm convinced that randomness is like yawning. Whatever it is that The Yawn knows about being beguilingly contagious, Randomness has apparently learned and mastered. I say this because after having spent a mere half hour perusing amazing articles of global irrelevance (such as the pros & cons of digital post-it notes and the top 10 best things to stare at), I find that my brain is now on shuffle.

It has currently landed on a childhood passtime that had escaped my memory for well over a decade - parachuting Barbies off of my parents' second story porch equipped with the ever-fashionable plastic grocery bag. In hindsight, my amazement lies not in the fact that I did this, but how long/often/much I did this, given that it never really worked. Even with the most elaborately designed baggie-chute, alas the Barbies always seemed plummet to the ground, landing sideways on their disproportionate thighs.

Now that I think about it, it's strange that I ever even played with Barbies. Maybe because I grew up playing Hotwheels & He-Man with two guy cousins, or maybe because I was the sort of precocious little brat who would tell you that I was not cute and did not play with dolls. Subconciously, I think the reason is obvious. I didn't care if Barbie ever floated gracefully to safety. I was just after was the same thing all of us are - seeing her little 39-23-33 "I-would-have-to-walk-on-all-fours-if-I-were-real" butt eat dirt.

To the Would-Be Christian Author

2005-10-30T15:30:00.000-05:00

I like books. I have boxes and shelves of them, some of which I've read, some I would like to read, and some I have no intention to read any time soon but feel guilty getting rid of without having read. I've read my share of Christian nonfiction, and as I finally tossed some of it into a box for the goodwill this weekend, it seems appropriate to challenge all of those aspiring authors out there to keep providing us with mediocre self-help literature we're embarrassed to have taken the time to read.

So, write your self-help book, your marriage book, your here's-how-to-be-better-Christian manual. Give us all your new and improved version on Western Christianity. Take that 3-point outline that you came up with and cram a verse or two into the more obvious points every so often for credibility with theologians and gospel bookstores. Please let us all know why our marriages are bad, our children are average, and our times with God are boring, and give us the missing piece we've been waiting for. Better yet, make a cute little diagram with clip art, give it a ridiculous aliterated title, and continue to refer to it in capital letters at least once or twice on every page and each question in the workbook. Please. We're all waiting with bated breath. And our couples group meets tonight at 6 and the brownies are almost done...

I am a blogger.

2005-08-01T00:40:00.000-04:00

My name is Carrie, and I am a blogger. *phew*