Early Morning Alarms

So, at three o'clock this morning, my mother's phone rang. It was the hospital. A doctor needed to speak with her, she was told.

My mother fumbled for paper and pen, and sat silently in bed, waiting to hear that something had happened to my brother. After a few minutes, the woman came back on the line. The doctor was checking the charts, she said, and would be on the line shortly. More silence. My mother tried to remember which hospital the woman had said she was calling from. She couldn't remember.

The third time the woman came back, she said,

"Is this Maria Kirkwood?"

No, my mother said, this is Pamela.

"Oh. This is the wrong person." Click.

So then my mother called my brother. It was only one o'clock in the morning where he is, stationed on the border in Arizona. He assured her that he was fine, and then the two of them wondered-- could it be Ouisi? She might have been so badly injured that her brain was damaged and when she tried to say "Mela Kirkwood" it came out something like Maria. Ouisi could be lying alone in an ICU somewhere with a lethal brain injury. So my brothercalled my phone, and when I picked up he said, in his steady, it's-all-under-control-but-still-darned-serious voice,

"Ouisi, nothing is wrong here, but we got a call from a hospital that didn't make sense and wanted to check and see if you were okay."

Well, actually, what he said was, "Ouisi, nothing is--" and I said,

"ARRRGHWHATAREYOUDOINGIT'STHREEO'CLOCKINTHEMORNING! WHATISWRONGWITHYOUARRRRGH."

So we all went back to sleep. And nobody was dead, and I did a web search today, and there are no Maria Kirkwoods within five hundred miles of my mother. And the next time that somebody calls me at three o'clock in the morning, I'll try to remember that there are good reasons to call people at that hour, and to not open the conversation with a gutteral cry of rage.

Sunday Frump

Source

I work in an office, a tall, shiny glass building filled with desks and ergonomic chairs. In the morning, I assemble my slacks, blazer, knee-highs and camisole. I pack my work shoes in a bag and walk to the Metro in my sneakers. On the train, I stand amid people who are also wearing this morning uniform, sort of a clothing mullet: business on the top, party on the feet.

The Desert: Looking for a Map

I'm not in a good place. I feel frustrated. Let down. Lied to and strung along and abandoned in the middle of a wasteland.

It doesn't feel like depression. Being depressed walls you off from the bright, busy world and shuts you up in a dark and empty place. You want to get out there, where life is good, but you can't. This is different. Here, I'm not separated from the world. I'm just sick of it. I don't want to write, because there's nothing worth saying. I'm usually a chatterbox, but now I don't want to speak a single word. I don't want to read, or spend time with people, or listen to music, or knit, or do anything, because everything seems pointless-- a way of crowding out the silence and the anger inside.

That crazy dash to cover up the God-shaped hole? I see Christians doing it more than anyone else. I sit through a worship service and yawn at the syrupy music. I wince when a pastor brags about the souls that God gave to him to save. I read a religious text, and wonder how anyone could believe the smug, hateful garbage that we as Christians keep putting out. Here's a concept I thought I understood: the Church gets it wrong sometimes, but God is faithful. Turns out that when the Church is really getting on my nerves, I have trouble believing in God's faithfulness.

Into the Desert

I was taught that Christians are the only people who understand what the point of reality is. I was taught that everyone has a God-shaped hole inside, and that people who don't know Jesus spend their lives in a mad chase after temporary, fleshly passions, trying to ignore the God they think they don't need and trying to fill the void with things that don't fit. But Christians, we lived life with full satisfaction in each day, because God was with us. I was pretty content that I knew everything that really mattered, and so this made sense.

Then I left Rhea County and found that I was taking a different shape. For one thing, I learned some new synonyms. What we called bleeding-heart liberalism was called compassion by my new church. What we called the reign of secularism was called social justice by the Roman Catholics. What we called being ashamed of the Gospel was called humility by the saints. My brain stretched out to accommodate these new ideas, and I found that the God I'd brought with me from Rhea County was starting to rattle around loose. As I learned more about Jesus, that void got bigger, not smaller. And God didn't fill it any more.

Watering the Seeds of Doubt

I found the following on my old blog. It's an excerpt from a paper I wrote for a theodicy class four years ago.

These are the premises set out for us by both orthodox and popular Christianity:

-Our god is omnipotent, a god of infinite and perfect power, reigning over the natural world and the spiritual realm

-Our god is benevolent, a god of infinite and perfect goodness, caring for us as a parent cares for a child

-Humanity experiences suffering, existing in a fallen state of pain, disease, and violence

This is where the questions begin. If our god is so good, why are we allowed to suffer? Does God not have the power to stop our suffering? Or, if God can prevent human suffering, then is God cruel and uncaring, choosing not to rescue us from pain? 

My First Job, or, Integrity Isn't Worth My Thumb

I was eighteen and ready to spend the summer sleeping in and watching TV. Just a few weeks after I finished 12th grade, though, my mother screwed up the agenda by insisting that I get a job. Way to cramp my style, Mom.

On Being Single in Wintertime

I was deleting old files from this computer and found a comic that I drew a few years ago.

Trashy Music and Walls

This year's brainless pop music uses the following lyrical pattern:

1. May I have your attention, stranger
2. I am currently sex-crazed and want to mate furiously with you
3. "They" (an amorphous collective of social peers) disapprove of me as I flagrantly violate their standards of behavior
4. Just to be clear, I will be mating with you tonight only, and have no intention of forming a relationship with you

Britney Spears songs epitomize this pattern-- most recently, "Hold it Against Me," in which the listener has the impression of being propositioned by one of the Chipmunks. Lady Gaga makes it through steps 1 and 2 before getting distracted by la petite mort and spending three minutes expressionlessly dry-humping the air in her "Edge of Glory" video. Pitbull nails all four steps in "Give Me Everything" while rasping and chuckling in a voice that makes me feel like I'm being lightly raped in the ear.

Songs like this make me uncomfortable. Yes, partly because I'm worried about catching chlamydia through the radio waves, but also because I'm worried about living reactively to this model. I'm worried about trying so hard to be not Britney that I live entirely inside my own walls. The personas that these pop artists put on are, sexually, ready at any moment to drop all of their boundaries and rush into total interconnection with a stranger, with no game plan for what happens the next morning. Most psychologists and gynecologists rightly discourage this behavior. The walls that keep us from doing this every Friday night are there for a reason. But I think and live as if all of my walls are as important as the walls that keep me from turning into Nicki Minaj.

In Which I Show Off

I am terrible at most domestic skills. My grandmother baked and sewed and gardened and made lovely shadow boxes and wreathes from vintage notions and quilts. I always wanted to have a house like hers-- smelling of dinner and dried flowers, with treasures tucked into every available space.

You're Scaring Jesus

Or, John 1:10 at the antique store

We just returned from an amazing vacation in the highlands of western North Carolina.

My family has vacationed in Linville nearly every year since before I was born. One of our traditional activities is a day spent in Boone, the city named for Daniel Boone and now known for being the home of Appalachian State University. On this trip, the first that Patrick has attended, we had lunch at the soda fountain in Boone Drug. The waitress, an older woman with fluffy hair and penciled-on eyebrows, took my order by saying "What can I get you, baby?" She shuffled back with a delicious, overflowing mint chocolate milkshake. "Drink on this, honey," she said, "I gave you a little too much." (You know you've left Northern Virginia when the waitress doesn't appear to want you to die.)