Saturday, November 28, 2015

Distractions



from here
I have half a textbook chapter, a 20-question quiz, and a giant assignment standing between me and my summer holiday, and I’m finding it difficult to just do it, despite being yelled at by Shia LaBeouf numerous times now.

Partly I’m distracted by the fact that we’ve decided to move again (AGAIN). We looked at houses this morning, so “studying” this afternoon has actually involved mindlessly copying words from my textbook into a Word document while mentally arranging our furniture in the L-shaped lounge room of one of the places we saw, and trying to work out exactly how many noise-diminishing rugs we’d need if we were to move into the house with the wooden floorboards throughout. And then there’s the “Are we completely bonkers, thinking of moving again?” thoughts, for which I’ve been making up two answer lists. So far I have:

No!

  • Moving will remove an hour of driving time each weekday which could be spent doing more important things, like ACTUALLY READING YOUR TEXTBOOK.
  • Moving will mean we can live in a house again, and therefore ditch our tiresome “BE QUIET!!!! People may still be SLEEPING!!!” morning ritual.
  • A house will mean fewer stairs. Mo’s convinced this will make his life far more bearable, which would in turn make my life far more bearable. 
Yes!

  • Moving will mean packing up all of our stuff and then unpacking all of our stuff.
  • Moving will mean saying goodbye to our beloved neighbours, who have become close precisely because we hear their children running through their apartment at 6am and we run into each other on the stairs and share the bin duties and bring in each others’ washing when it’s about to rain and look after each others’ kids when one of us desperately needs to run to the bottle-o and buy some wine and pitch in to get the garden looking neater before David comes home from hospital -- all of the mini-community aspects of apartment living that I love so dearly. I won’t necessarily miss having to respond to text messages asking if Hazel’s okay because she’s been heard crying noisily for most of the morning, but I will miss the walk home from a friend’s house after dinner together literally taking 15 seconds from their front door to ours (even less if you jump the stairs, like Mo does).
So. We’re leaning towards the “No!“ and hoping we’ll find somewhere perfect and have the move over and done with before my next class starts (midway through January). 

And while a large part of my mind is preoccupied with decorating the interiors of houses we may never live in, a smaller part is trying to distract me from anxious moving thoughts by thinking, “I wonder what will happen next in season two of Friday Night Lights?” and, “I wonder if this season will get any better, because I’m not particularly enjoying any of the storylines at the moment.” And then a different part of my mind chimes in with, “I know! Instead of watching TV you could keep reading that book you picked up last night! That was fun!” It’s talking about The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, which Alan found at a garage sale and I decided to check out at bedtime last night thanks to the lack of books on my physical to-read pile (I have approximately 7 reserved at the library, and any bet they’ll all suddenly come in at once, after months of waiting for them). I ended up reading two chapters instead of the one I’d allowed myself, both of which had me silent-laughing into my pillow so as not to wake Alan. I’m still not entirely sure what the premise of the book is, but Jon Ronson is a journalist whose investigation of a mystery has now led him to researching psychopaths (it’s nonfiction). Ronson is relate-ably neurotic and incredibly funny, and I’m finding the book fascinating, hilarious, and therefore difficult to put down. Here’s a sample:
In another office a neurologist was studying the July 1996 case of a doctor, a former RAF pilot, who flew over a field in broad daylight, turned around, flew back over it fifteen minutes later, and there, suddenly, was a vast crop circle. It was as if it had just materialised. It covered ten acres and consisted of a hundred and fifty-one separate circles. The circle, dubbed the Julia Set, became the most celebrated in crop-circle history. T-shirts and posters were printed. Conventions were organised. The movement had been dying off – it had become increasingly obvious that crop circles were built not by extra-terrestrials but by conceptual artists in the dead of night using planks of wood and string – but this one had appeared from nowhere in the fifteen-minute gap between the pilot’s two journeys over the field.

The neurologist in this room was trying to work out why the pilot’s brain had failed to spot the circle the first time around. It had been there all along, having been built the previous night by a group of conceptual artists known as Team Satan using planks of wood and string.
And then a much smaller part of my mind’s telling me, “Dude, reading that book is not counted as study just because it happens to explicitly mention psychological concepts. You only have one week left of study! READ YOUR TEXTBOOK!”

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Faith (again)



from here

In the last days of pregnancy with Moses, my blood pressure started rising, which meant I was no longer allowed to have my baby in the birth centre. Arriving at the hospital in the final stages of labour, I was therefore ushered into a small examination room to wait for a birthing room (we later found out that one was being used by a doctor trying to get some sleep). In between intense contractions a cannula was inserted into and taped onto my hand, in case everything suddenly went pear-shaped. My body was telling me to push my baby out; my midwife was telling me to wait. She wanted to check that I actually was ready (and she was the expert on birth, after all; I’d never done it before), and she couldn’t do that until we were set up in the right room. Finally on the proper bed in the proper room, my midwife gave me the go-ahead; I knelt on the floor, and Moses was born soon afterwards.

Sarah, Sonia and I have been talking about faith recently on Ms Sundays, and this interval in my labour came to mind as I pondered the distinction between what’s happened with faith and what’s happened with church for me over the last couple of years. I’ve been treating them as though they’re all wrapped up together, but actually they’re two separate things. For many years I’ve had questions and doubts about the theology I’ve grown up with, as evidenced by various blog posts processing things I felt I needed to either let go of, or make more sense of, such as my church’s teaching on women and the doctrine of God’s providence. Throughout this journey, my shifting views have worried me only as much as they’ve worried the church I was in at each stage. Reading back over my blog now I can see how desperately I wanted to be able to embrace my increasingly-greying views while still remaining part of very black-and-white churches; I loved those people, and I wanted so much to belong among them. When we left our church at the end of 2013, I assumed my faith had undergone a massive shift, but I see now that my discoveries that year were no bigger than the ones that had reshaped my faith in the years leading up to that point.

And since that time I’ve assumed that I’ve been grieving some kind of fundamental change in how I understand God, but I think now that I’ve actually been grieving my break up with a much-loved church/denomination. And though I know that it was the right decision to call it off, it hurt – still hurts! – and there have been many moments I’ve wished I could go back to pretending we were a good match just for one more snuggle and the possibility of hearing it say, “We respect you!” and “Maybe we could make it work!” (this would never happen, but a girl can daydream). It makes sense now that starting to date a different denomination soon after we moved was too painful and didn’t work out; I wasn’t yet ready to move on. 

So. A church shift, rather than a faith shift, caused the disruption. I see now that it was only my social identity feeling loss and confusion; my spirit remains hale and hearty. And my faith’s evolution has only been uncomfortable and scary because I was always in churches where I was told that my questions and doubts were to be feared, where the leaders prepared for the worst and told me, “Hold it back! Stop pushing! This isn’t the right place for that!” and I trusted them rather than my gut. I lived in the interval for too long, naively believing that my church would change, and that I had the patience to wait until she was ready to join me on my journey. Turns out I couldn't wait, and she was never really interested in coming along anyway. And now I’m free. My faith can continue to morph, just as it’s always been doing, and from these pangs something beautiful and new can be born.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Things that make me VERY CRANKY #433: My Body's Views on the Importance of Sympathy


As you may already know, I have superlative reflexes, and I’ve therefore prevented many a breakage in my lifetime by swiftly grabbing whatever’s falling (crockery, spectacles, children) microseconds after realising it’s slipped. There are a few things I find irritating about this gift; one of them: why can’t I be really good at something even remotely cool instead, like painting or guitar-playing? Another one: I instinctively stick out a foot to catch whatever my hands can’t make it to in time, and if the falling thing is a) very sharp, or b) very heavy, this is a terrible instinct to have.

Yesterday I tried to rescue a falling toy oven by sticking my foot out to lessen its impact as it crashed to the floor. It was our neighbour’s toy, and I’d turned just in time to see it clattering from the shelf (Hazel was pulling it), which meant, respectively, a) I was keen for it not to break, and b) I had no idea how heavy the thing would probably be. It was very heavy; it flipping hurt. I had a couple of waves of pain that made me seriously wonder whether curling up and crying would be a wise thing to do, but I decided against it (my neighbour’s lovely, but this would surely add a layer of awkward to our relationship from which it may never recover). Instead, I stoically sat down for a cup of tea and tried to concentrate on the conversation rather than the hysterical screams of my foot.

So. Finally home, I sat down to inspect my wound. After all that, you’d expect serious swelling, right? A giant blue-black-purple bruise? Something that would attract instant sympathy? Right?! Nope, no, and no. There was mild swelling and faint bruising, but nothing attention-grabbing or bad-enough-looking for others to fully appreciate the extent of my shocking injury. Its been aching since it happened, and wearing thongs is unbearable. Hazel stepped on it tonight and I had to run through the should-I-cry? dilemma all over again. All this, and yet my bodys still stubbornly refusing to back me up at all by making my damn foot more colourful and puffy.

You know those times when you have a horrible cold and you feel like death and no one seems to care much, but then a bit later, when you’re feeling comparatively awesome but your voice has dwindled to croaks and whispers, people start patting you sympathetically and offering to fetch you medicine and/or watch your kids and/or cook your dinner, and you have to keep assuring them you feel perfectly fine, it’s just your voice that’s recovering now, and actually, if you’re completely honest, the patting/medicine-fetching/child-minding/meal-cooking would have come in handy FOUR DAYS AGO? You know that?

Why does that happen?! Why won’t my body win me sympathy at the appropriate moments?!?!

It makes me VERY CRANKY. 

Also: Ow.