Carol of the Day

Is there a sexier caroler than Marvin Gaye? I think not.

Ditto

William Blake's Angels Hovering Over the Body of Jesus Christ

My good friend Claire, the mother of Canadian Sophie has a post up today that I'm just saying:

Ditto

Fellowship Update

Sigh. I landed up withdrawing from my fellowship. I feel right and good about this, but I'm definitely disappointed, too. I sent an email out to my fellow trainees last night, explaining why, and began receiving replies that were very supportive this morning. But when I logged on to the account later to see if there were any more, I realized that I had been cut off.

Sigh.

The whole thing is weird. How it was handled. I've literally heard nothing except for a few words from my supervisor.

Sigh.

I'm moving on quickly from this one, though. No drama (and the powers that be can rest easy knowing there won't be any contagion loosed upon the mighty halls of academe)

Carol of the Day

Anything the PS22 Chorus does is incredible, but check this out -- all of it!



My favorite PS22 chorus song is "Landslide."  You can read about the chorus and their director here.

Hmmmmmmm

We are so overstimulated that the ordinary and the commonplace no longer delight us, and ever-higher dramas are created to make us feel alive and important.  How foolish that we do this to ourselves and to our children.

-- Father Richard Rohr

You didn't think I was going to do it, did you?

In between soccer playoffs, the flag football banquet, the Cub Scout December meeting, the Geometry of Architecture fourth grade math project which involved re-creating and then writing about the geometric principles of one of the world's great architectural masterpieces, ours being the Seattle Space Needle (due, of course, on the second to last day of school before vacation, what the hell is the teacher insane?), the snowglobe project where the Boy had to bring in a damn jelly jar, the back and forth and then withdrawal from my fellowship, the lacrosse practice, the poetry reading and the seizures, well,

HERE YOU GO and Fa La La La La La La La La La!!

don't gag on the sweetness, but the Chef is paper-mache

simplified mantel, looks better in the dark when lit with little tiny lights 

the owl ornament is mine from 1971 -- made in West Germany when that was still a country

each year I give an ornament to The Husband and my three children, a tradition that I'm carrying on from my own childhood

trains and boys and men -- no more need be said

this might be the first year that the Swiss Husband relinquished the decorating

Sort of Creepy Santa, but I love him

Carol of the Day for Ms. Moon

No offense

to the ones I have, but I need a new group of friends with whom to converse daily. Ones who don't have Christmas vacation plans to visit far destinations -- Costa Rica, Santa Fe, Fiji, Bora Bora, Sedona --  I hate to admit it, but my brown eyes are turning green. Call me if you're staying home, in your too small house with way too much crap, whiling away the days while The Husband administers to The Mistress (and if you're a troll of the political persuasion, yeah, yeah, I know I'm blessed in so many ways so don't get your panties in a wad at how petulant I sound).

I guess it's time to haul out the Billy Collins:

Consolation


How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hill towns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.


There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.


How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?


Instead of slouching in a cafe, ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.


And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car
as it it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

A good day

so far. (and this is written super, super tiny so that I don't jinx it. Remember, I'm a southern Italian peasant woman, deeply steeped in superstition)

feeling groovy

Flying your freak flag - Christmas carol of the day

Scroll through the photos I've posted of one of MY NEIGHBOR'S Christmas displays while listening to Sir Elton John. Sometimes we all need a break from the hallelujahs and angel choruses. Because sometimes it's all too much --

(and thanks to my neighbor Mike for the photos!)

and a partridge in a pear tree

So last night, like every night recently, Sophie had a huge seizure at the dinner table. Right before, the boys and I had off-handedly said that we would pray that she wouldn't. But she did, and while I held her and comforted her and then hauled her off to her bedroom to rest, the boys silently finished their dinner. When I came back to the kitchen to finish my own, we were all silent and that's when I started to cry, just a little bit, but enough so that both boys jumped out of their chairs and we all stood together in a hug. The silence, though, prompted me to start talking and the conversation that ensued was a beautiful and near-hysterical one. Hysterically funny, that is -- hysterically absurd -- hysterically profound.

Me: So, what do you think about the fact that we prayed Sophie wouldn't have a seizure and she did?


Henry: I don't know.


Oliver: God doesn't care.


Me: I can see why you'd feel that way. Why do you think God doesn't care?


Oliver: Well, it's like this. God is up there, looking down, and his angels keep coming around to tell him about people's problems. God's not always listening because it's impossible to listen to everyone.


Me: I think God is more like a spirit in everyone and everything. So that means he can't really listen or do anything but he can be with us, with Sophie when we're sad and suffering. I think that spirit is always there and it's love.


Henry (rolling his eyes): Can I go now?


Oliver (to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas"): ... and my buuuuuutttttt looks like a ham.

Carol of the day

not music, but essentially music.

What is the purpose of life? he asks.

Faintly falling, falling faintly

It's hard not to believe one is living on an entirely different planet when I open my door to a blue sky, blazing sun and eighty degrees this December afternoon. My son called me into the living room before he left for school to show me footage of the sports dome in Minnesota caving in from the recent obliterating snowstorm. Many of the blogs I visit and read have photos of trees encased in ice, children bundled up in boots with rosy cheeks and pots of chunky soups simmering on stoves. My son Oliver's cheeks are rosy, too, but mainly because he played a quarter-final soccer game this weekend in downtown Los Angeles where the temperature probably spiked at 85 degrees. Yesterday, we finished decorating our Christmas tree, not beside a crackling fire but with the door wide open because The Husband and I are not going to turn on the air-conditioner in mid-December, damnnit! I am not too bothered by the lack of holiday appropriate weather because I actually despise snow and cold weather. And while it's a bit irritating to still be wearing a tee-shirt with no sweater when you're out and about, getting ready for the two-week Christmas vacation, I comfort myself with one of my favorite passages in Irish literature.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.


--  from James Joyce's The Dead


You can watch a clip from John Huston's equally mesmerizing movie by clicking HERE (embedding the video is blocked). I highly recommend watching the whole four minutes or so, particularly the end.

The Mask

World War I soldier and wife during 1918 flu pandemic**

I've thought a lot about the mask in terms of disability, the irony of my objecting to wearing something that is perhaps a "way of life" for a non-verbal person. My friend Andrea sent me an email with this comment which I found brilliant -- the exact words that just didn't come to me:


It has occurred to me that the wearing of the the mask, removed from the context of vaccine/no vaccine, is such a signifier of what many severely handicapped people experience. They wish to be seen for who they are behind the obvious barrier of their disability, they wish to be able to communicate unimpeded, they wish to live without the constant humiliation of whatever masks their essence. I'm sure this wish often fades with time, or is conveniently slaughtered by conditioning, or, for those capable enough, becomes a rallying point for demanding change, but for the most part it never becomes less visible, defining or in the way. They can't take it off.


**On the plus side, I've found it strangely exhilarating to troll around the internet looking for cool photos of surgical masks.