No News

I'm really thankful that last nights sudden illness didn't carry over into today. In a few minutes I'll go home and make another attempt to kill my room mate, the cockroach.

Once again

Here's the beautiful place where I live. After a long time without, I will very happily be able to update Blogger for about 25 days.

glad to be back.

The roll out.

More fun! So long as the snow doesn't stop my flights, I'll be on the move in a couple of hours, continuing for the next four or five days. Yay.

Hey, It's like my life! Ha.

Today's bread story was about the numerical book, chapter 9 and line 19-23 about the traveling nation and how they followed a pillar.
I relate most to the part about waiting and setting out as soon as the pillar moves. Sometime it's overnight and you just take off. To me, that's exciting. Being all packed for the road is easiest when you're going to roll out. But sometimes the people had to park for a year. I can imagine someone thinking. "I could have built a little house and planted stuff, but I didn't know. I hate waiting."
It reminds me of what my friend Jonathan said. I don't like staying in one place, not doing anything and just waiting, knowing that no matter how long I have to stay in a place, I still have to be ready to go any second. What a need for trust and what a need for peace and understanding that the time isn't being wasted.

Open-fire-Dryer, Squatting and the Spiderpede

who knew that it's just a cylinder of clothes next to a cylinder full of flames. What advanced technology.

I moved into a recently vacated room in the building my friends own so they could rearrange the place I was staying.
except today the power was turned off, which includes heat. That's what I get for being a squatter. My friends couldn't get the power company to turn it back on before Monday. I was more amused than sad. It seems reasonable for the former tenant to stop paying utilities.

So I went in the basement for the light, the laundry and the wireless access, where I discovered the exposed dryer fire.

After collecting my laundry, I punched happily away at my email until I looked down and saw the worst thing ever: a spiderpede. I don't know what they're really called but I hate them as much as I hate ticks. They're centipede length with dozens of spider legs. It looks like pure evil, like a twisted wicked spider or centipede mutated horribly and ate centipedes until it became the Uruk-kai abomination of the scary insect world.

I would have taken a picture of it, but I felt it urgent to blast it out of existence with the first box I could reach. Then I took all my stuff up out of the basement. When I go bed I will wear earplugs and cover my eyes the way I do when I live with cats.

My Unrequitted Love of Libraries

I still love the libraries of this city. I brought 23-month-old friend to the children's section. There were several people talking about writing and the writing process. That was exciting, but I didn't get involved.
Unfortunately, the conversation turned to hating on schoolteachers, e.g. "They only work six hours a day, nine months out of the year...so overpaid." which made me glad I wasn't in the conversation.

It was a little shocking because somehow I didn't expect teacher-bashing from a librarian, thinking that there was some camaraderie to the knowledge world that both occupations are part of.

I wonder if maybe she felt that librarians are equal to or higher up than teachers in that world and that she as a librarian should be paid more.

Either way, I won't be quick to tell her I'm a teacher.

Rolling along

Someone asked me if I feel like my life has been harder than the lives of others. I admitted that I have often felt that way, but have also recently realized that everyone else in the worlds probably feels that way, or should. The real issue is that life is lousy because this is not the only world, and we shouldn't keep ourselves attached to this world.

Awww, look at the cute duckling. Look at its cute little foot pressed up by its cute little face.

I had another conversation--this happens a lot--about the ravages of bipolar disorder. Where I live, my closest friends were all born the same year and have all experienced it. I have long complained that the problem with bipolar in the community is that it affects your interface with other people. If you have any disease, especially a not-terminal disease, you can still be a sweet or consistent person or whatever. Your personality stays the same. But if you have a psychological disease, like bipolar, that makes you think differently or act differently, there's a meshing of who you are and the problem you have.

It's easy to think of my friends with the disorder as good people burdened with an illness. It's hard to think of my mom that way. I could get away with calling her a burden. She send another email this morning and I got mad. Most people who know her can't even think of her as a person with a problem. They think of her as a living problem. I think of her that way, too. After everything so many have tried, reaching a person like that is way beyond any of our means.

Score

although Murphy was right. As everyone predicted, as soon as I troubled my boss to resend the documents that had been lost and she had to interrupt the country-wide two-week shutdown for me, something in the mail got un-lost. I go my work-permit yesterday. Yay. No idea what happened to my invitation letter, but that has somehow been provided for, as well.
the intercession has come through.

assured!

I can be comfortably certain of one thing, this is never going to be comfortably certain. I think I've known this for years and years, but the longing is so strong for security, that we want it more than we believe in it. There will always be something horribly wrong, or much more complicated than necessary, or in some way stressful.
Being calm and trusting the only trustworthy person is actually not that hard, when you ask for better trust, what's actually hard is doing it without looking glaringly irresponsible and in-denial of all reality.

scramble ramble damble

What's the worst that could happen? My documents that I need could arrive on Saturday morning, too late for me to send them to Chicago, and I have to go to Chicago by myself. Erg.
Actually it could be much worse. My visa could be rejected entirely.
but if I'm meant to be there, he'll get me there. I can only be faithful in continuing to do the work I need to do. The great thing about running errands is that you see people you know and that's always fun. It's actually exciting to have so much to run around and get done in the next four days.

Peace, world.

Tortillavision

When children are sick, they get to watch more T.V. Or they can make a T.V. out of a tortilla box and the non-ill ones can have a show.

The little explorer discovered a DVD of 180 very old cartoons. Some were actual classics and one was my all-time favorite, one of the pillars of my childhood. Can you identify it without looking at my facebook status?

More cuteness.

dedicated to Jodi....
*everything is lo-o-ost...oh o-o-oh*
but you know that you can take it to the L...
I promise if people keep reading my blog, I'll keep taking cute pictures to post. So there, read my blog.

Focus on the Good

Urbana had some painful good things and some not so painful good things. I got engaged. I was encouraged by seeing people I missed and connected with.
Reentry is not fun. The experience we go through often feels like responsibly putting a book in the bottom level of a very tall bookshelf when suddenly, the whole thing breaks, showering you with monster leather volumes and the whole oak case, itself. Sometime it feels like carrying a mass of bags that after much careful organization, each rip open just as you finish cleaning up the last spill.

Sometimes it feels like being one of the sheets of metal in the how-a-tuba-is-made video and you're getting pounded and pounded.

I'm returning to the stressful world that comes after Urbana. It's cold, it's tempting and I feel really bad today. I feel once again as thought my walk toward the Boss consists of one painful process after another.