Resolved 2011

Hey there! I have not posted for almost 8 months, but I have not been idle. First of all, I logged plenty of quality time on Facebook and Twitter, where I have 411 and 146 potential readers respectively. Here my potential readers are infinite but my actual readers (let alone commenters) are few, and what can I say? I'm a girl who likes feedback.

I also did some stuff. I have discarded many, many boxes full of stuff we did not need, but you still can't tell by looking at my house. Stuff flows back into it like the sea flows into a hole dug at the water's edge.

I cooked a lot of dinners and played with my baby and fed my baby and rocked my baby and pushed my baby in the stroller, and he is no longer a baby but a two-year-old.

I finished a triathlon! And that's pretty much what I did. I got up one morning and performed two straight hours of pretty intense aerobic activity. I did not train for a triathlon, I did not lose 20 pounds training for a triathlon (although, disgusted with myself, I did manage to lose almost 20 pounds afterward), I did not set and make a particular time goal. I discovered that I like splashing about in the ocean but not swimming, and I like riding my bike very slowly with groceries in the saddlebags. I like running. I don't plan to do any more triathlons.

I was talking to an old friend about my vague disappointment with the experience, and I hit on a précis: "I wanted it to be a project," I mused, "and it turned out to be just an accomplishment." "Story of my life," he observed, and it sort of is mine too. I like to do things I am good at right away. And while I was 66% horrified by this recent Wall Street Journal piece, Amy Chua is right on when she says "...nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work..." I want to learn to work.

So my word of intention for this year is

Project

--the noun, although I am working on a way to make the verb relevant too, because I'm like that about words and unity and so on. I am going to try to frame tasks as project and process. Some of my projects will be easy and fun--like listening to one album a day from our vast and somewhat neglected collection--and some will be more challenging, like writing that second novel. And I am about to announce a project in which I hope some people will join me online, but that is another post.

I can't claim that I had any success with "listen and love without fear" or "embrace," so I will continue to--well, work--on those words of intention too.

Supersecret Small Town P.S.

Re: the wedding. I forgot to mention that the bride is a distant cousin on my mother's side, so distant she probably doesn't realize it. My parents are going because they are friends of the groom's family.

I love my supersecret small town

My parents are going to a wedding this weekend; one of the bridesmaids was Annie to my brother's Daddy Warbucks in 1993.

NSLR is going to a supersecret Catholic boys' high school next year; his prospective track coach was Tom to my Connie (in Good News) in 1984.

My father was explaining these connections to my children, and then he observed, "They're going to start thinking there are only about 11 people total in Supersecret County."

When, in fact, there are 11 million. At least, that's how many are downtown when I want to park my car.

Days of Meat and No Meat

There's been a lot of talk lately, in the media, in the blogosphere, and in my real life, about eating less (or no) meat. I started down the road of thinking harder about the meat we eat when I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, and picked up speed with Real Food. For the past year we have been splitting a meat CSA share with Johnny Falschgedank (we miss your blog, Johnny!) and Umami Girl; starting in June my family is taking on the whole thing (which is good because NSLR, between the diabetes and the rapid growth, is constantly clamoring for more protein).

So one suggestion that's floating around a lot is Meatless Mondays. Now, I like alliteration as much as the next girl--I was named with alliteration in mind. And I get the concept that starting the week with a mindful practice can help us continue to be mindful as the week goes on. But I am also very capable of taking things personally, and this feels like a deliberate flouting to me, to wit: if you are a Catholic, or even a believing and practicing Christian, please consider meatless Fridays.

It is commonly believed that Vatican II did away with abstention from meat on Fridays, retaining this practice only during Lent. In truth, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence in November of 1966 which read, in part:

1. Friday itself remains a special day of penitential observance throughout the year, a time when those who seek perfection will be mindful of their personal sins and the sins of mankind which they are called upon to help expiate in union with Christ Crucified;

2. Friday should be in each week something of what Lent is in the entire year. For this reason we urge all to prepare for that weekly Easter that comes with each Sunday be freely making of every Friday a day of self-denial and mortification in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ;

3. Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence as binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law. Our expectation is based on the following considerations;

a. We shall thus freely and out of love for Christ Crucified show our solidarity with the generations of believers to whom this practice frequently became, especially in times of persecution and of great poverty, no mean evidence of fidelity in Christ and his Church.

b. We shall thus also remind ourselves that as Christians, although immersed in the world and sharing its life, we must preserve a saving and necessary difference from the spirit of the world. Our deliberate, personal abstinence from meat, more especially because no longer required by law, will be an outward sign of inward spiritual values that we cherish.”

Obviously, if your sabbath begins on Friday night, that would be a terrible time to abstain from meat, and I would never suggest such a thing. But if the story of Christ's passion continues to hold any meaning for you at all, you might consider marrying that meaning to the meaning of your choice to abstain from meat. Amidst the noise and waste of life today, it behooves us to heap up meaning where we can.

Back out of all this now too much for us

I would be remiss if I did not point out that this weekend's Wall Street Journal has a column in their Masterpiece series about "Directive," the poem from which I titled my blog. Not surprisingly, I concur with Randall Jarrell that the poem is "...consoling or heartbreaking? Very much of both"; and "...hard to understand, but easy to love."

Much like life.

Sure, Blame The Public

From a Wall Street Journal article on the sitcom "Modern Family": a look back on creator Steven Levitan's career--

"From there, he jumped from failure to failure, such as 'Greg the Bunny' and 'Stacked,' a sitcom in which the pin-up Pamela Anderson played a bookstore clerk. 'I overestimated the American public's willingness to see Pamela Anderson as anything other than Pamela Anderson,' he says."

Oh, boo-hoo, Steven. Perhaps if you had not called it "Stacked"? I know that kept me away.

Home Again

Inspired by Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project, I have started a Happiness Group with Umami Girl and two other friends who don't have blogs but should--if that's what they're into. We decided to jump in with some resolutions and report back in a couple of weeks; but also to give some serious thought to Rubin's 1st Commandment, "Be Gretchen." What does it mean to "Be MomVee"?

One thing that occurred to me is that I love music, and although it's a big part of my life, I could be happier by making it even bigger. I thought a resolution as simple as "Remember to turn on the stereo" might be warranted.

Last night Not-so-big-R. posted a status update on Facebook with a few selections from the eclectic jukebox in the restaurant where he was dining with the big kids on their ski vacation: All the Girls I've Loved Before, Xanadu, You May be Right, One Fine Day, and Atomic. "I love 'One Fine Day,'" I commented, and he replied, "I know you do." That was nice in itself.

So I started thinking about One Fine Day, and Carole King songs in general, and I thought, "I should rip the CD of 'Tapestry,' and then I can run to it tomorrow." Well, I had forgotten how much I loved that album. When I was 11 or 12 I listened to it over. and over. AND OVER. I know the whole album sequence, which side is which (I prefer side 2), every schmaltzy string section, the moments when James Taylor chimes in, and of course every word of the lyrics.

Today I ran on the indoor track at the Y, and I began to recall auditioning for Pirates of Penzance with King's "Home Again," in my warmest, easiest, biggest voice. But there was no accompanist there that night, and the director suggested that the few people present come back and re-audition on Saturday. He seemed particularly encouraging to me. When I returned I had changed my song to "The Simple Joys of Maidenhood" from Camelot. It seemed more appropriate for a Gilbert and Sullivan audition. Great song, don't get me wrong, and I can pull off the humor--but the image of the director chatting with the music director the entire time I was singing is burned into my brain. Chorus. There aren't a lot of parts in that play anyway, and I was young and inexperienced, but still: why didn't I stick with what worked?

I'm not sure what all of this means, except that MomVee is an Alto (like Jay), and she loves Carole King.