7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 169)
I’m flying out for that filming of LOTR next week, and I’m worried that I haven’t been getting enough mileage out of the fact that Life on the Rock uses the same acronym as the Lord of the Rings. I’ve tried my best to work it into conversation, but I’ve found that the acronym thing just doesn’t work that well when it’s spoken. When I say, “Hey, I’m going to be part of L-O-T-R!” people don’t make the connection between the Lord of the Rings acronym, they wonder why I didn’t just say the name of the show, and it’s weird. Then I tried doing it in writing. I told a friend “I’ll be at the LOTR studio on Thursday — hope I don’t run into any hobbits!” and she was like, “Why would there be hobbits? I thought it was run by the friars of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word.”
This has become a high priority for me, as I will feel like this whole trip to Birmingham will have been an incomplete experience if I don’t get at least one good LOTR joke out of it.
AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!
We’re moving. I don’t know where to, we’re just…moving. Don’t be shocked if I and my five kids show up at your house tomorrow and ask if we can crash at your place for a while.
GRRRNNNNAAAAAGHHHHHHHPT!!!!!!!
[That last take was my attempt to convey the sound of a shriek of mortal terror-anger-despair. Not sure if I quite captured it.]
Right after I finished typing take #1, my son was stung in the face by a scorpion while he was sitting on the couch. I will not be able to write anything else today, because I need to go stare at my couch and scream. If you would like more details, you can see the blow-by-blow tweets from this afternoon, or just wait for the epic post that is sure to follow.
For your viewing pleasure, I took a video of what happened after I hosed this thing down with Raid. AFTER. See? It’s like it liked it! I daresay this thing was frolicking on my chair, just waiting for a tophat and cane to do a little rendition of Singing in the Raid. (By the way, you should probably watch it on mute. I didn’t entirely intend to put it on my blog when I decided to hit that Record button on my phone, and thus I cannot be held responsible for anything I said during the filming.)
UPDATE: No, I have no idea what that green goo is that you can see on the back of the chair at :20.
UPDATE #2: Dorian Speed‘s review of my directorial debut is in:
I watched your short film. I am still processing my trauma. Gritty realism; horror; impotence as Raid proves worse than useless. I felt I was THERE.
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 168)
I have a Malcolm update for you, and it’s awesome: This family has committed to adopt him! The money you have donated will help them in this process, so THANK YOU for your generosity. You can see a breakdown here of the overwhelming financial burden they still face, so please keep them in your prayers, and, if you feel moved, drop them a few buck through their PayPal button on their sidebar. Again: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
When I wrote about fasting from artificial light in the Register a while back, I got a ton of interesting responses. One of my favorites was from a dad who told me about this family tradition that they’ve been doing for 30 years:
We turn off the light when we leave for Holy Thursday Mass and don’t turn them on again until we return from the Saturday Easter Vigil at around midnight on Saturday.
We got the idea when our parish turned off the lights and had us exit in silence on Holy Thursday. And we entered at the Easter Vigil in darkness which continued until the Gloria. And, of course, Good Friday services were held during the daytime so lighting was not a main focus. So we got the idea to practically “live” this period when Jesus the “light of the world” was taken away from us.
I think we might try this this year. Anyone else going to give it a shot?
So, uhh, yeah. Holy Week next week. Wow. As I’ve mentioned, this hasn’t been the most powerful Lent I’ve ever experienced. I set the bar embarrassingly low in terms of the sacrifices I would make and the practices I would undertake…and still managed not to hit it. But! The good news is that it’s never too late to let God transform you. Besides, there’s still Holy Week! I’m hoping to set everything else aside and just focus on the Lord next Thursday and Friday. If you could say a prayer for that intention (i.e. that “focusing on the Lord” doesn’t turn into “focusing on the Lord…after I check email, and, hey, look at all this funny stuff on Twitter!”) I’d appreciate it.
Lately I’ve been oddly intrigued by a medieval devotion called The Fifteen Oes, a.k.a. the Fifteen Prayers of St. Bridget. The story I heard (which I am not sure is correct) is that St. Bridget was praying about our Lord’s passion, and she was told in a vision that he received 5,475 injuries to his body. The idea behind the 15 Oes is that if you pray them daily for a year, you’ll have honored every one of the wounds of Christ (15 x 365 = 5,475).
Again, I don’t know if that story is accurate. However, I love the prayers, in that each time you go through them you meditate on 15 different aspects of Christ’s sufferings. I’ve read comments from around the internet from folks who said that they found it to be powerful to commit to praying the 15 Oes every day for a certain length of time, even if it wasn’t for a whole year. I think I may include this in my Holy Week devotions.
A while back I went through a long phase of reading nonfiction adventure stories (a la Over the Edge of the World and Skeletons in the Zahara), and that got me interesting in the subject of castaways. You would not believe all the crazy castaway stories that are out there! Here’s a fascinating article about wayward ships drifting from Japan to the U.S. back in the 19th Century, and here is a Wikipedia roundup of famous castaway stories. This one is one of my favorites:
In June 1722, [Philip] Ashton was captured by pirates while fishing near the coast of Nova Scotia…He managed to escape in March 1723 when the pirates landed at Roatán Island in the Bay Islands of Honduras, hiding in the jungle until the pirates decided to depart without him. He survived for 16 months, in spite of many insects, tropical heat and alligators. In the beginning he seems to have eaten only fruit, because he only had his hands to collect food; he could not kill any animal. He had no equipment at all until he met another castaway, an Englishman. A few days later the Englishman “went out but he never returned.” The Englishman left behind a knife, gunpowder, tobacco and more. Ashton could now kill tortoises and crayfish and make fires to have hot meals. Ashton was finally rescued by the Diamond, a ship from Salem, Massachusetts.
Whoa, whoa, WHOA. Wait. While he was a castaway in what was then remote jungles at the edge of the civilized world…he happened to run into another Englishman?! How crazy is that? How did the other Englishman get there? How did they begin that conversation when they first ran into each other? I’m going to need someone to please write a compelling historical nonfiction epic about this. Thanks.
Tomorrow (Saturday, March 31) I’m speaking in Houston at a women’s retreat for St. Cecilia parish. I’m going to be talking about how how fear prevents us from living our lives to the fullest — a subject with which I have plenty of personal experience. Can’t wait!
Simcha recently posted her favorite songs for Lent. I’m not educated enough to have multiple suggestions; after about two I’d start digging into power ballads from the 1980s. But I will say that no Lent is complete without listening to Dum Transisset Sabbatum, sung by the Tallis Scholars, at least once.
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Apologies to Beth Anne, Jen, Priest’s Wife, Genny, Ann-Marie, Barbara, Katie, Kaylene, Ana, and Blair, who were the first 10 to link up but whose links got deleted due to a technical glitch. Sorry about that!
7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 167)
The process of my husband and me editing the book is finally drawing to a close. I was going to employ the term word “laborious” to describe what it’s been like, but the word didn’t seem to capture the fullness of the experience. I went to thesaurus.com and found a bunch of synonyms:
arduous, backbreaking, burdensome, effortful, fatiguing, forced, heavy, herculean, labored, onerous, operose, ponderous, rough go, stiff, strained, strenuous, tiresome, toilsome, tough, tough job, wearing, wearisome, wicked
Yes. All that. Especially operose. I’ve never heard that word before, but if it means something tedious and hard, then yes, it was indeed an EXTREMELY OPEROSE process. Anyway, I’m probably going to send the draft to my agent by the end of next week, at which point I’ll shut up about the book for a while.
…Until my agent gets back to me with his feedback. At which time I will churn out one neurotic update after another, clogging my Twitter followers’ feeds with cryptic but ominous-sounding messages, writing a series of posts on my blog whose titles will likely look something like:
- 5 Tips for Dealing with Abject Despair
- When You Want to Die
- Even When You Feel Like a Talentless Fool, God Still Loves You
- Remember: God Can Bring Good Out of Even the Most Hopeless Situations
- Sorry I Haven’t Been Updating Lately; I’ve Been Busy Sitting in a Corner, Staring at a Wall While Clutching a Bottle of Wine
My dad told me a crazy story the other day: One time a friend of his named Bob was camping out on a ranch in West Texas. Bob and a buddy had seen a huge rattlesnake while they were out that day, but left it alone. At dusk they found a place to sleep and got in their sleeping bags. The next morning, Bob woke up to realize that there was a very large snake in his sleeping bag, down at his feet. That’s right. I said “WOKE UP TO A SNAKE AT THE BOTTOM OF HIS SLEEPING BAG.”
Let’s pause there for a moment and think about that: You wake up. You feel a huge snake at your feet. You think it could very well be a rattlesnake. You’re not anywhere near a place where you could get medical attention. And you know that if you try to get out of the sleeping bag the snake will likely get spooked and bite you. How do you get out of that situation? Think about what you would do, and I’ll tell you his friend’s clever solution in take #7.
One of the moms in my daughter’s preschool class had a great idea for celebrating the teacher’s birthday: She suggested that each child bring a single flower, which would then be assembled into a bouquet. The result was beautiful:
Each child brought a homemade card as well. It ended up being a lovely, meaningful gift that even those of us on tight budgets could easily swing.
Why didn’t you tell me about Audrey Assad? Well, I guess Marc Barnes did. So maybe the problem is that I’m not a good listener. But I do think that at least one person should have emailed me personally to demand that I stop what I’m doing to go check out Assad’s music. Anyway, I’ve listened to Restless about 20 times since I bought it on iTunes yesterday. It’s got Augustine references, beautiful melody, a voice that makes tone-deaf people like me wonder if this person is the same species that I am. What more could you want in a song?
There was a lot of interest in that Vatican Astronomy Camp I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Some folks asked for the link, and Kayla (who has a great blog) kindly found it for us: Here you go. Thanks, Kayla!
The answer from #3: Bob got his friend’s attention — painstakingly, since he had to avoid, you know, moving or breathing or otherwise doing anything that might upset the snake. He told his friend to build a fire right next to the sleeping bag. Once the fire was going, Bob gently pulled open the top of his sleeping bag and had his friend fan smoke inside (just about suffocating as he tried not to cough). It worked. The snake got irritated by the smoke and came slithering out. And it turned out not to be a rattlesnake after all.
So, the moral of the story is: This is what happens when you leave the house. First you think it’s a good idea to take a walk, then you get adventurous and start riding bikes places, then camping starts to sound fun, and, long story short, you end up trapped in bags with poisonous reptiles. People like me never have to deal with that, because we are smart enough to stay indoors at all times. Next time someone suggests that I get out a little more often, I now have a reply that will render all their arguments invalid: Snake in sleeping bag.
“Jen, do you want to go camping with – ?” SNAKE IN SLEEPING BAG. “But don’t you want to go on the hike to – ?” SNAKE IN SLEEPING BAG. “Shouldn’t you at least go to the grocery store for – ?” SNAKE IN SLEEPING BAG!!!
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 166)
If anyone has seen my brain, would you please send it to me? You can find my mailing address here.
I don’t know what’s been going on this week. It’s probably some combination of DST-itis, travel fatigue, and an adrenaline hangover from the final push on the book. Whatever it is, I just cannot deal with anything. For example, my kids asked me this afternoon if they could have PBJ for lunch. I gazed from the peanut butter jar, to the jelly, to the bag of bread, and just about collapsed in tears and the thought of trying to put all that together into some kind of meal. I think if I could just have one or two days to do nothing but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, I should be fine.
Speaking of the book, I haven’t mentioned it much lately because there’s not much to report. I want my husband to edit it before I send it to my agent, but he’s been so busy at work that he’s hardly had a chance to look at it. I assure you that you will know when I send it to my agent, because all my online activity will cease: I will stop blogging and tweeting (as well as eating and sleeping) and do nothing but sit in front of my computer, hitting refresh on my email inbox as I wait for his response. If I need a break, I might fixate on his Twitter feed for a while, reading his updates like tea leaves to see if I can decipher his thoughts on the book. (He says he’s having a bad day. That must mean he hates the book. Or wait. It could mean that he’s so amazed by it that he fears he’ll never represent something so astounding again!!!! — Actual thoughts from the last time I sent him a draft.) Anyway, if I seem to be taking this latest delay in stride, it’s only because I’ve come to believe that God’s main goal with this project is simply to teach me how to wait.
Back in business school, my husband once heard that the way to find your perfect career is to look at what kinds of things people are already asking you to do. (E.g. One of the reasons he decided to back into law after a detour in the business world was when he realized that friends frequently asked him to help them with legal work.)
I think this advice could also be applied to finding your charism. Others are often better at seeing our gifts than we are, and naturally think of us when they need help in the areas in which we’re gifted. I know that one of my friends is the go-to person around here for cooking advice, since we all know that God has really showered her with gifts in that department; there are a couple of ladies in the area who have taken on quasi-official roles as homeschooling mentors, simply because there was so much demand for their advice; another became a part-time doula after so many friends asked her to assist them in childbirth. I’d be interested to know: In what areas do people tend to ask you for help or advice?
We finally got our Lent lights up! For those of you who aren’t Catholic, “Lent lights” are a tradition where you hang Christmas lights around your house but don’t light them, as a symbolic gesture for the penitential season.
(This is not to be confused with people who are too incompetent to take down their Christmas lights before April and try to pass it off as a liturgical tradition.)
I now know two local families who are moving to the neighborhood around our church, for the sole reason of being able to walk to Mass and all the other activities that take place there. I love, love, love this idea. Obviously it’s not something everyone can do, but I would love to see more folks make it a goal. As I’ve said before, I believe that if even 20% of parishioners lived within walking distance of their parish church, we would be surprised by just what a dramatic impact that would have on Christian culture.
My husband often refers to being “behind the curve,” and his desire to stay “ahead of the curve.” Basically, to be “behind the curve” means that you’re just reacting to whatever chaos is thrown at you, barely keeping your head above water. Here’s an example, using lunchtime at our house:
- Behind the curve: The kids tumble into the kitchen. They’re exhibiting symptoms of some kind of discomfort. Now they’re scaling the refrigerator. Someone got out a crowbar to get into the child-proofed snack cabinet. After analyzing these clues, it occurs to me that they might be hungry. I look at the clock to see that — uh-oh — it’s an hour after we normally eat lunch. Then the baby starts fussing, and I look at the clock again to see that it’s time for her to eat too. Now I face the task of fixing food and filling drinks and finding clean plates and napkins with four hungry kids underfoot and a discontent baby on my hip. Long story short, there tends to be a lot of yelling from all parties involved.
- Ahead of the curve: I see that lunchtime is coming up, and I think about what I should serve. I’ve already fed the baby since I knew the mealtime crunch was approaching, so she’s playing happily in her bouncer. I get my two oldest to help me get the table set, which is possible since a) they’re not crazy hungry and b) I’m not trying to talk over whining toddlers and babies. By the time everyone gets hungry, I have all the drinks filled and the sandwiches mostly made. I tell everyone to sit down, and have food for them to start eating within a few minutes. If any chaos breaks out, I can give it my full attention since I’m already done making the meal.
One thing that has been a huge help in this department is doing a big weekly planning session on the weekends. No matter how crazy our weekend is, I do not let the week begin until I’ve planned our dinners, made a grocery store list, written up my calendar for the week, and made my to-do list. When I do that, I can usually stay ahead of the curve.
Whew! I didn’t know if I was going to be able to stay conscious long enough to write all seven takes today; the fact that I made it this far is a great victory. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go stare at a wall.
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