Do I HAVE to??

Now that we're in Baton Rouge, with jobs and a car, Sarah and I are apparently going to start living a disciplined life. This involves getting up early every morning (well, like 7:30), working out, running regularly, reading regularly, and --- here it comes, eating healthy. Which, with our summer beach trip only two weeks away, really means eating next to nothing. At least, that's what it seems like to me.

Background: I've never dieted a day in my life -- unless, of course, you count the times I rode the curve of Sarah's sugar-purging frenzies. Those lasted a week at most and were generally just well-intentioned fanaticism. My role in these crazes was typically little more than bemused observation and maybe smaller bowls of ice-cream than usual. I don't even know how to count calories.

But NOW, Collette, Aunt Jill, and Sarah are on a strict regimen of yoghurt and fruit and granola and eggs and I really am pretty sure that's just about it. At my dismayed "But I'll be hungry all the time!!" they stared at me in surprise and said, "Duh." THEN, to top it all off, Collette almost didn't let me eat a bowl of Big O's because "THIS WILL GO STRAIGHT TO WHERE YOU DON'T WANT IT!!!!" I was horrified. My conclusion to all of this is that dieting sucks.

This was all discussed in great detail yesterday, with varying levels of enthusiasm from all parties involved. I'll be honest, despite my misgivings, I can get excited about a new scheme for a new life of health. How bad could it be? Being healthy is fantastic. Resolutions are fun if just to see how long they last. So, the plan was set and had only to be set in motion.

Then, last night, after a day full of healthy and delicious yoghurt and starvingness, Collette, Sarah, and Hannah (third person) drove out to find a movie to watch to celebrate a summer together. When we got to the register to rent the movie, the movie-store guy said, "We have a five for five special and you can get two candies, two drinks, and a popcorn." Five minutes later, we drove off with Cokes, Butterfingers, Nerds, and Extra Butter Popcorn in the back seat.

Oh, summer, I love you with your good intentions and grace to break them from time to time.

[Addendum: I feel I should inform the world, in case it's worried about me -- my ultimate decision about the summer is to eat whatever the heck I want and just exercise regularly, like you should in the summer. :)]

Words for Everything.

You ever sat down to write (specifically, blog) and just not felt the muse? You know, you've done everything else you can humanly think of to do: read for hours, taken the car to get an oil change, made coffee three times, tea twice, watched two episodes of Scrubs, run around screaming in the Texas downpour, shopped for a new phone, made dinner for the family, made a playlist to clean the kitchen, cleaned the kitchen, tried to avoid checking facebook obsessively, sketched a picture, read everyone else's blogs -- I mean, after all that, what else is there to do but blog?

But the muse just isn't there. All you really can do is sit and suck on your spoon of chocolate ice-cream and wish you had something to say. I've been reading a lot this past week -- Kerouac, Neruda, Dillard, Salinger -- and thinking a lot and a lot has happened (even today), but for some reason it's all mulling itself over in my head but not ready to articulate into words. Which is fine, I guess, it just doesn't help me to entertain myself with writing about it.

Part of it could be that I've been realizing how sometimes the most important things don't have words for them (unless, of course, you're Leo Gursky in The History of Love -- that guy had the words for everything).

Like when, after hours of total agony and lawyers and arguments and sobs and yelling and fears, your child is finally returned to you after two months of tremulous despair -- Well, who can really understand the depth of what happens between a mother and child, separated after eleven days of life, reunited, or a father with his three-month-old son back in his arms? I sure don't. When Mom and I were lying, exhausted, on the couches in our living room after Tuesday's court ordeal, all I could say was: "Mom, I don't think I will ever fully understand what the heck just happened. Like there is seriously no way I will ever get how profound that all was." I know only that it was surpassingly meaningful.

Reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard has a lot of words for things, but they are all hints and suggestions that really say, "GET OUT TO YOUR OWN CREEK AND BE SILENT AND WATCH!!!"

I get stir crazy in small towns and long for, say, the Big Apple where ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE right now. But I think we need these small-town moments to force reflection on our overcharged minds. Or I do. Probably not having words all the time is a really good thing. For me. :)

Little Bambino

Today is the scheduled hearing for our foster baby, to decide whether or not he can go home to his real mommy and daddy. (He was taken from them by Child Protection Services after an accident for which his mother was accused.)

Mommy Ashley and Daddy Barney are here at the house right now, cooing and giggling over the new contraption they bought for Junior -- a little baby carrier that hangs on Barney's chest. Cries of "Oh! my boy! my boy!" are coming from the living room. They are here to get him all spiffed up for the hearing and hoping with tearful strenuousness that their baby comes home to them soon. It's so wrong and awful to see families separated.

If you (whoever you are) think of it today, pray for them and for the judge and for little Bambino.

Summer Reading

There's a new "gadget" on the side of my blog, in place of my old To-Do list, titled "Summer Reading." Reading for fun is probably one of my most-anticipated parts of summertime. What with travel and youth ministry, I sometimes don't have as much time to do it as I dreamily imagine during the school year, but I still can get through a lot.

So I've listed some books I'm thinking about reading/rereading this summer, but I am also SUPER open to SUGGESTIONS!!!

WHAT SHOULD I READ??

Everyday Experiences

-I have drool on both shoulders and my clothes smell faintly like baby formula.

-The bartering system in our house had undergone a few subtle changes:

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Junior has a poopy diaper.”

“And?”

“Will you do it?”

“Is that a real question?”

“I’ll straighten the house before Mom gets home.”

“What about the dishes?”

“I’ll do those, too.”

“Deal.”

So I changed his diaper this morning.

-There are about four half-drunk Fresca cans spotted around our kitchen and living room. They are mine. I don’t know why but I can’t drink a whole can of soda. I’ve tried. I’ve tried asking you people to finish them for me. I know you don’t understand, but I JUST CAN’T, OKAY??!?

-Question: Is it "soda," "Coke," "soft drink," or "pop"? Or some other word I have yet to discover. Soda-pop?? That one's pretty fun.

-IT IS SO HOT OUTSIDE.

The things I did and the things I didn't.

Robbie pointed out I should update the To-Do list that has been on the side of my blog for the past five months. So I'm changing it and in this post I shall assess the damage (i.e. go over the list and see what I actually got around to doing).

"Observe everything." Absolutely done.

"See Paris." Well. I saw it sort of from an airplane......? I guess I'll just have to save this one for some romantic day in the future. :)

"Walk across London Bridge." Well, technically London Bridge was moved to Arizona (DUMB), but I walked across the one that would be London Bridge if London Bridge was still in London even though it's technically not called that. I walked on a bridge IN London OVER the Thames. Boom. That was the point.

"Visit the Kilns." Done.

"But a ticket in King's Cross." Done.

"Buy a drink in the Eagle and Child." Done over and over. I am C. S. Lewis.

"Find Hogwarts." Done, done, done. (See pictures below) I actually even went into the real place where they shot a lot of the movies (the library scenes, the dance scenes, the Great Hall scenes, the staircase scenes) but I don't have pictures of a lot of them for various reasons.

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

[Billie Holiday]

A week after arriving back in my homeland, I packed up my duffle again and hit the road for the east. A roadtrip is exactly what my American plains-starved soul had been craving. As Claire Colburn said in Elizabethtown, "Everybody's gotta take a roadtrip once in their lives." Or over and over and over again in their lives. Like Sal in On the Road, which I am currently devouring for the second time.

I wound my way up the mountain, hugging oh-so-familiar curves, and wondered. I wondered lots of things, of course, but especially: What will this be like? Will we all be the same or will we all be different? Will we fall into the same comfortably-worn patterns of talking, relating, enjoying one another? Or will there be a big silence made of the gap between December and May? Processing questions like this is always good. But I shouldn't have worried.

The minute I stepped out of my car and was attacked by Nat Weber I knew that I had been really starved for everyone at Covenant who, I came to realize over five months of missing, really are the butter to my bread. I spent one glorious week squealing, squeezing, swimming, screaming, and - I've run out of s words - generally catching up and basking in the presence of Covenant people. Amazing what five months away will do to renew and refresh your love for a place and the people who are part of it. The lovely spires and cobblestone sophistication of Oxford are perfect in the same way that the trees and ponds and wide-open hills of east Tennessee are perfect. The loveliness of the one in no way diminishes the magic of the other. Maybe it even adds to it.

So. On May 22, Sarah and I will be driving the four hours down to Baton Rouge and moving in for the summer: heat, humidity, family, spicy food, and being a summer youth intern with First Pres again. PARTAY!!!! The rest of the summer is mission trips, summer camp, family vacation, and weddings. Until then, I am at home in Marshall, Texas with Mom, Dad, and Sarah, just like it used to be. Except one difference: we have a baby. :) Three-month-old Junior is our foster child for the next couple weeks and he is both depriving us of sleep and giving us an excess of delight we haven't felt for some time. (Right now, Sarah is sitting on the couch in front of me, burping him, and his little wide eyes are staring at me and his mouth is beginning to turn up in an impish grin.)

I feel like a Walt Whitman poem and just getting into the deep down glory of summertime.

"I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night."

(I really should read On the Road every summer.)