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This is just too frakking cool.

Apologies for my lack of formatting-fu: you may want to click through to YouTube for best effect. And giant props to Jessica Stover (of the very cool Artemis Eternal for totally making my day!

John

http://www.piratewench.org/archives/2009/12/phd_boss_entert.html

As funny as PhD boss is in person, somehow, he's even more entertaining when he's not around. I present Exhibit A: The White House Spoon Incident, where he provided for my benefit a fun, little mystery to theorize about while he was out of town.

Yesterday, I took a two-hour lunch because it’s three days ‘til Christmas and who the hell is around to keep track anyway? If you are at work and expecting you or anyone else to get anything done this week, then you are retarded. Go home.

Upon my return, I had TWO calls from PhD on my voicemail. Isn’t that typical? He probably called a minute after I left and a minute before I got back and spent the time in between prepping a good lecture on accountability.

But I needn’t have feared because this was the first message, barely discernable over the background noise:

"Hey, it's me. Um,... I'm in Vegas. Gimme a call back."

And this was the second message:

"Hey. Me again. Uh, I figured it out on this end, so don't call me back."

-- the hell??? He’s supposed to be in Palm Springs with his father!

So I didn't call; I texted him: "omg, you're in vegas?! did you get a quickie marriage?"

As of this hour, I have still not heard back from him. And I am prayed to the Sweet Baby Jeebus that he married some topless dancer. PLEEZ, God, grant me this Christmas miracle, and I promise I will honor hit with the Best Blog Posting Ever! In Jeebus’ name we pray. Amen.

I'm out to San Francisco in less than eight hours. (Urgh.) Have a happy and safe holiday season and I'll see you all in the new year!

This morning's readings were Genesis 25:19-28 and Colossians 1:15-20.

I commented that it was strange, after Sunday's readings of women whose miraculous pregnancies bear redemption, to shift to this tale of strife.  Though it also bookends nicely with the Epistle -- about how all things are unified in Christ.

I was totally going to go to breakfast with prayer folks -- wore my work clothes rather than my gym clothes to prayer service and everything -- but I found that what I really wanted to do was to go to the gym -- probably in part because my morning routine had been thrown off by having to take time out to prompt the boiler (my warm shower turned cold as I was washing my hair).

This afternoon, Scott showed up as promised (he's leaving tomorrow, returning Jan. 18).  He handed me The Wisdom of Maimonides.  I asked, "Is this your 'congratulations on making it through finals' gift?"  He looked confused for a beat and then said, "No, it's your Christmas gift."  ♥

Happy Birthday to my excellent friends, feiran and kent_allard_jr! My, my, this is a popular day to be born, isn't it? I know of two other people with this birthday and I met another person having a birthday only just today. I hope you both are having a good one!

Happy Yule! Happy Solstice! Happy Shortest Day of the Year!

We received roughly eight inches of snow. Here during the snowfall is Virginia, thinking deep, wintery thoughts.

As always, there are more pictures of Virginia here.

* Just a reminder: the Final Round of voting is still underway for the annual Sofanaut Awards. Thanks to your very kind support, I'm now a finalist in two categories for my work on StarShipSofa: The Audio Science Fiction Magazine: "Best Narrator" and "Best Fact Article Contributor." Voting is open to everyone here! (No registration is needed.) I'm grateful for your ongoing encouragement, my friends. Thank you so much!

* Once again, I have updated my working list of dystopian fiction written and marketed specifically for a young adult audience. I'm particularly interested in Earth-bound stories, and I'm defining "dystopian" rather broadly to include relevant post-apocalyptic works, as well. As always, suggestions are greatly appreciated!

( --Fifty Years of English-Language Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, With Links )

"One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
- Wallace Stevens, Snow Man

Lindsay's facebook status Wednesday night:

So Ian, Keith, and Laura Ruth are most likely right. This morning when I checked the weather, it said Sunday would be sunny. Tonight, they said the past few years on the Sunday of Cantata, it snows. The weather forecast tonight? All sun except Sunday when we should expect "several inches"

Saturday night:
me: "I'm going to buy milk before the blizzard."
housemate: "It's not a blizzard!  It's gonna be 4 inches!"
me: "Really I'm just going because I'm low on milk."

Sunday morning I forgot that my porch doesn't magically clear itself, so I just sloshed through the snow (it wasn't wet heavy snow at all).  I mostly walked along the side of the road (there was almost no traffic).

I got to SCBC at about five minutes of nine.  As I passed FCS, I mentally thanked the Snow Angels [the First Churchers who arrive early to clear the sidewalks and walkways].  As I walked to SCBC's front door, I noticed I was walking through snow drifts -- and then saw the handwritten sign saying service was canceled.  *eyeroll*  So I walked back to FCS, chatted with Gary as he finished shoveling, and hung out in the chapel (why yes I had brought my laptop in case of just such an eventuality -- though I probably should have also brought a comb to fix my hair ... or put my hood up as I walked ... I hadn't expected to have so much snow on my hair).

FCS-Ian said it was nice to see me -- that he'd missed me yesterday [he sees me every weekday morning at morning prayer].

I went to CHPC -- again noticed a lack of shoveling (though clearly some had been done).  Karl was walking around the sanctuary (sans vestments) and said hi to me.  Katherine was playing the piano.  Yeah, church was canceled. 

Karl said I could have called the church.  I said that assumes I have the phone number.  (Though honestly I had considered calling -- I don't have the church number in my cell phone, but I do have Karl's cell.  But in years past there has been an email notice.)  Later, Richard showed up.  He said the voicemail says church isn't canceled (though the next line says not to come).

When I was little, Ron and Patty canceled church one Sunday due to snow, but people showed up anyway.  So they decided that so long as they could get to the church, there would be church.  So that is my (eminently reasonable, I feel) standard for church.  One couple showed up later (in large part because they were sponsoring a child and so had to bring their gift in).  The husband chatted with Karl while the wife and I hung out with Katherine at the piano, picking out hymns for Christmas Eve service.

TBQ posted with Subject line "Oh the weather outside is... not as bad as advertised, actually"

While it was definitely snowing (and rather horizontally at that) in the morning, when I came home around noon it had seriously lightened.  I know in further suburbs there was much more accumulation (which is why Karl said he had canceled church -- because most everyone who lives close except me had already left for the holidays, and it wouldn't be safe driving for people who live further out plus the Somerville snow emergency would make parking a challenge).

Tiffany's weekly email last night included:

This week at CWM we will hold a quiet meditative service focusing on the Magnificat, Mary's song of joy.

Please stay safe during the impending storm. While we will have services at CWM, we encourage you to stay warm and safe.

When I showed up at CWM, it was Tiffany and Marla and Sean.  Tiffany said, "We've been waiting for you."  I flipped them off in my head :)  I said it was five minutes of, which is on time for me.  Tiffany said, "I know," and, "I knew that you [implied: of all people] would show up on snowstorm Sunday."  Later on, Sharon and Carolyn and Merle trickled in.

We did a group conversation Reflection like we've been doing in Advent Bible Study.  The Scripture was Luke 1:26-56.

We talked about the issue of whether Mary consents.  We talked about how even if it was a rape (either the Divine acting without Mary's consent or Mary being raped and inventing this story as a cover), something so redemptive comes out of that (which doesn't deny the horror of that, but also speaks to the transformative power of love).  I said that I am so invested in my idea of a benevolent God that I have to see her as having consented -- that if she had said no, Gabriel would have chosen someone else, and that I see in Mary a modeling of radical openness to God, an affirmation that even when things seem so strange and frightening we can trust God.

We talked about how Mary is really prophetic in the Magnificat and how that subverts the traditional ideas of her as meek and submissive.  We talked about how in opposition to the Fall narrative which blames Eve, all of this redemption starts with women (Elizabeth, Mary).  Carolyn cited the "he abhors not the Virgin's womb" line (from "O Come, All Ye Faithful") and talked about how that really resonated for her about pushing back against the idea that women's bodies are bad and cause people to sin and etc.; Marla countered that it feels to her like setting apart virgin!Mary as special and different from all other women (thus reifying the trope that female bodies are bad/sinful).  We talked about the question of whether people believed Mary's story (Carolyn said, "I bet her best friend believed her," and Marla said, "I'm not sure I would believe my best friend if she told me that story" -- bff, I would totes believe you if you told me that story).  We talked about how Mary stays three months at Elizabeth's and so she comes home great with child and doesn't that make her story look even more discreditable and why does Joseph believe her -- I said, "Matthew sends him an angel," but of course we were in the Luke story.

We talked about how the Magnificat comes after Mary has gone to see Elizabeth and after Elizabeth has rejoiced and affirmed her.  (At the end, Tiffany asked us what we would take with us from this for the coming week, and I said for me I would take that with me, that reminder that within the beloved community we can find love and joy even in the midst of events that are so scary and confusing.)  We talked about the possibility that Mary hadn't really accepted it until she talked to Elizabeth, and my tellings-and-retellings self suggested that maybe she went to this hill country town to abort the baby (maybe she had just been placating the angel ... how does one know if an angel is truly from God anyway?) and changed her mind after seeing Elizabeth.

***

Friday's lectionary readings were Isaiah 42:10-18 and Hebrews 10:32-39.  I was struck by verse 16 from Isaiah:

I will lead the blind
     by a road they do not know,
by paths they have not known
     I will guide them.
I will turn the darkness before them into light,
     the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I will do,
     and I will not forsake them.

Behold, our God is doing a new thing (Isaiah 43:19).

***

Friday night, I went to Revels with my mom.  I had basically zero expectation, but I actually enjoyed it a lot.

It opens with an excerpt from "Black Elk Speaks" -- "Black Elk's Vision," about Black Elk's vision of the Tree of Life (I thought of Revelation, of course).  At one point he's tending the [invisible] tree and a little white boy asks him what he's doing and he tells him and asks the boy, "Do you see the tree?" and the little white boy says no, and Black Elk says something like, "Well I guess I'll have to try harder," which I found so powerful (hi, I am a child of CWM, where we are so about embodying God's Kindom here on Earth).

At one point, a little girls asks him what his people do in the winter, and he tells her that they gather together inside and tell stories.  She says something like, "We do that, too.  I like stories," and I almost cried.  Though I almost-cry like all the freaking time these days.

I was a little disturbed by the representation of Native people/culture.  In part because when they were in groups they were usually (a) in full-body costumes that hide their faces, which felt a little dehumanizing/Othering to me (though it also meant I didn't have the visual squick of White people playing Native Americans) and (b) felt like an interlude passing through, without real connection either to the other characters on the stage or to the narrative as a whole.

And after a point at which Black Elk is lamenting that the Tree is withering, he sees white kids finishing a Tree of Life quilt and asks them the story of it, and they tell a weird folk tale about pregnant!Mary and a cherry tree, and most of the rest of the Second Act is Christmas music. I mean, I know it's called "The Christmas Revels" (the "In Celebration of the Winter Solstice" subtitle notwithstanding) but I felt a little bit like the subtext was, "The Tree of Life is Jesus Christ -- Native Americans couldn't keep that Tree alive; it takes Christ[ianity] to make that happen."  I mean, I do think in some ways that the story of Jesus Christ *is* The Greatest Story Ever Told -- that God incarnated, enfleshed God's self, dwelt among us amidst the marginalized people, proclaimed an open and abundant table to all, endured death and triumphed over IT, resurrecting in body and spirit, promising the same (present and future) hope for us -- Christ stands between us and the powers of darkness, assures us that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  But at the same time, it feels problematic to me to imply "*our* story is the culmination of *your* story."

There were a bunch of parts where we sang along (the last song before Intermission was "Lord of the Dance," and we sang the chorus, and as they exited into the atrium, they brought the people sitting in the front rows with them, dancing).  The guy leading us in that, as he had us practice, said: "I love harmony.  There are no wrong notes, just poor choices in the moment.  And then we move on to the next moment, with new choices."

***

I helped my grandma wrap Christmas presents on Saturday, and she talked about how she had grown up Congregational.  This got me thinking about how my life would be different if when she moved to Norwood with my teenage mother and uncle she had gone to the Congregational Church instead of United.  My first thought was that probably when I moved to Somerville I would have just gone to First Church Somerville and so wouldn't have known CWM.  My next thought was that "my church" wouldn't have stopped being "my" church and so I probably wouldn't have done rounds of ecumenical church-hopping.

Updates as follows:

- We have laughter. He's only engaged us a few times, but it's pretty much the best thing ever.

- Liam is 16 weeks as of tomorrow

- He is also TEETHING OMFGWTFBBQFJHGJHDJHVKUI;P;OGDSY! *dead*(halp)

and

- Baby is tipping the scales at almost 18lbs. Yes, I am aware that he weighs almost as much as a baby twice his age. He's perfectly proportioned though, not too much chub. It's mostly just sheer size. Upper 95th percentile FTMommy's Backhurty.

dood. i did 9 loads of laundry today. i am efffing pooped, man. pooped. that's $15 of laundry. dear god.

however...i just CANNOT bring myself to do the few days worth of dishes that have been sitting in the sink. ugh. they are driving me crazy but i'm so tired and so NOT into dishes...