Tangle o' Cats

Today's Rickety Contrivance

Today I stumbled across this New York Times article about a woman with MS who felt significantly better after twenty-nine days of giving someone else a small gift every day. The article talks about the health benefits of altruism and volunteerism. Yay!

Today I also got e-mail from a church friend, relocated to the Midwest, alerting friends about Xerox's Let's Say Thanks website, which allows you to send a free postcard to someone in the military stationed overseas. There's a wide range of artwork by kids, ranging from cute to hilarious (my favorite is the Statue of Liberty looking like the Bride of Frankenstein); you can choose your favorite image and then pick a prewritten message, or write one of your own.

Fast. Easy. Fun. Free. Makes you feel good. With luck, makes the recipient feel good too. And regardless of our individual politics, heaven knows our troops need all the cheering up they can get.

Oh, also, the vet called tonight. Harley doesn't have an infection, which means he probably has cystitis, which means we're supposed to make sure he gets a lot of water. She recommended flavoring the water with chicken broth or tuna juice to make it more appealing. Harley turned his nose up at the chicken broth, although Bali was very interested. We'll try another tactic tomorrow.

And now to bed. Yeah, I'm up too late. But tomorrow's not a teaching day, so I can afford to sleep in.

Meet Sydney the Cockatiel!

Charlene, my fiddle teacher, has a new pet: a cockatiel named Sydney. Sydney's a little shy and actually doesn't like Charlene that much (she's devoted to Charlene's husband Josh), but after I fed her a treat, she decided I was okay and fluttered onto my shoulder. I grew up with parakeets, so I'm comfortable around birds. I cooed at her and kissed her feathers while she played with my earrings and ran back and forth across my back, a game that became even more fun when Charlene tried to get her to come down so I could go home. Charlene would reach for her on one of my shoulders and Sydney would run merrily to the other. Back and forth, back and forth! Birdie exercise!

She was very good during the lesson itself; just sat on her cage and chirped occasionally. Charlene's teaching me tonalization exercises and jig bowing, though I've yet to learn any jigs to which to apply it. I'm having fun, though!

If you're wondering why I've been so bad about blogging, it's not because I've been having so much fun fiddling (although I did have a lot of fun shopping, for myself, on Black Friday: very decadent). It's because that sleep thing, whatever it is, has my schedule in a shambles. I slept through my hospital shift on Saturday, which is mortifying. I managed to get to church on time on Sunday, but today I slept until 12:30. Gahhhhh!

I stopped by the lab today for the bloodwork my primary-care doc ordered -- I couldn't do it last week because of the holiday -- so with any luck, we'll get some answers soon. In the meantime, I'm scrambling to stay on top of what I need to do.

That said, back to work!

Sam's Christmas Stocking

I knit a Christmas stocking for a friend's five-year-old son, so I thought I'd post a photo of it here. The dimensions are a little bizarre -- Gary says it looks like a Seuss stocking -- but I had fun making it, and the kid won't care if it looks a little funky.

A friend at work has asked me to make stockings for her twin boys (both much older than five), but they're traveling this year during the holidays, so I'll start that project in January.

The Triune Goddess in the ER

Browsing the web the other day, I discovered that my poem The Triune Goddess in the ER, accepted last spring by Hospital Drive, the literary journal of the University of Virginia Medical School, has already been published there.

I don't think this is my best work, but I'm happy to have it published anyway.

In other writing news, I've finished revising the first hundred pages of the new novel, although I'm sure they'll have to be revised again before publication (and I have no idea when that will be, for those of you who've asked).

I fiddled and wrote every day in November. I hope I can manage close to that in December, although travel will make it difficult.

Happy Birthday, Gary!

Today is Gary's birthday. The cats pooled their allowances to get him a set of cat yoga postcards, and I gave him chocolate, two calendars and a guide book about Oahu. Tonight we're going out for a nice dinner at a Chinese restaurant Gary likes.

Happy birthday, dearest hubby! I love you. And so do the beasts.

More Matters Medical

We took Harley to the vet yesterday for bloodwork and urinalysis. He's been acting just fine, although he's lost a bit of weight (possibly because he's not entirely convinced about the new food, although he is eating it), but midway through his testing, the vet came back into the exam room and said gently, "I need to show you something." She held up a syringe full of his urine, which was dark red from blood. She said it had been a clean stick and his bladder looked normal on ultrasound, and that he didn't seem to be in any pain when she palpated him. The blood will interfere with the protein measurements they wanted to do, though, so he'll need another urinalysis when we've gotten this problem cleared up.

It's most likely a bladder or kidney infection, so I'm hoping it will resolve with antibiotics. We're waiting to hear back from her about test results and next steps.

Last night over dinner, Gary said, "No animals or humans are allowed to die around Christmas this year." Amen. I called his mom yesterday to acknowledge that it would have been my father-in-law's 83rd birthday, and she was grateful.

I'm having bloodwork today, too. I've been unaccountably exhausted in uncharacteristic ways (i.e. exercise makes me sleep more, not less), so my doctor wants to check hormone levels, among other things. The last time this happened, it was because of my sleep disorder, but that's being treated, so it's most likely something else. I've been doing things like sleeping through church, and even for someone who's admittedly not a morning person, that's a bit much!

Oh, I have a new favorite thing to do while I'm knitting (if we're not watching a DVD, that is): listen to audio books on my BlackBerry! I downloaded the BB software from Audible, and I've been having a great time. Their books are expensive, but they're having a Thanksgiving promotion where selected titles are free. Check it out! This will be a wonderful thing for plane trips, too.

So what am I listening to? First I checked out a History Channel program on combat medicine, and now I'm a few chapters into Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, about a deadly cholera epidemic in Victorian England. Fascinating stuff, but not for the squeamish!

Truth and Dare

Here's this morning's homily, and here's one of the photos Gary took at the Yale demonstration. During the peace at church today, one of our older parishioners walked up to me, shaking her head, and said, "New Haven! I lived for a few years on Orange Street."

"Really? I lived on Orange Street, too!"

She shuddered and said, "It was an . . . interesting place." And I suspect that she lived on a much better stretch of that road than I did. A friend who lived in a rather dodgy neighborhood in Manhattan, and who drove me back to New Haven one weekend, looked around my block and said, "Why aren't they giving you hazard pay for living here?"

When we first moved to Reno, I met someone who'd been at nursing school at Yale the precise three years I was in residence there. At the time, New Haven had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country, and the nursing students helped turn this around by organizing post-partum home visits. The woman who told me this said, "I stopped doing it when we were caught in the middle of a drive-by shooting. My colleagues looked down on me for no longer supporting the cause, but I was too scared."

I should add that Yale grad students are, as far as I know, still trying to unionize, all these years later. I should also add, in the spirit of honesty, that several of my fellow GESO members accused me of rank cowardice and moral failure because, about a week before I turned in my dissertation, I wouldn't sign a letter censuring my dissertation advisor for blackballing activist students on the job market: my own sense of self-preservation took over (and as it turned out, the letter was never sent anyway).

Yale. The place was ugly all around, and brought out the worst in almost everybody. (For a wonderful anti-Yale rant that very much mirrors my own experience, check out pages 76 and 77 of Jane Tompkins' A Life in School.) The undergrads I knew were very happy there, but they lived in gated residential communities.

The Gospel is John 18:33-37.

*

On this, the last Sunday of the church year -- the last Sunday before Advent, when we prepare both for Jesus’s first coming and for his second -- we honor Christ the King. In this morning’s reading, though, we see Jesus side-stepping the question of whether he’s a king at all.

As a threat to the religious establishment of his day, and to the Roman occupation, Jesus knows that if he claims kingship, he will be condemned as a heretic and a traitor. His followers have betrayed and abandoned him. While he has foreseen that he must die, he is no more eager for that outcome than any of us would be. He has prayed in the garden of for that cup to pass from him. And so, when Pilate asks him bluntly, “So you are a king?” Jesus says, “You say that I am a king.” King is other people’s word for him, not his own.

He goes on, though, to say something just as threatening, if not more so. “For this I was born . . . to testify to the truth.” People who tell the truth are dangerous, because others might listen to them and decide to act on those truths. This is why those who speak truth to power are so often silenced by any means necessary. It’s why writers and intellectuals are so often imprisoned by dictators. It’s why prophets in every generation -- people as diverse as first-century apostle Saint Stephen, civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and openly gay politician Harvey Milk -- have so often been assassinated. Telling the truth about oppression, any oppression, is inherently activist, inherently radical.

In one of her books, writer Anne Lamott quotes a set of rules for life: 1. Show up. 2. Pay attention. 3. Tell the truth, and 4. Don’t be attached to the consequences. Not being attached to the consequences sometimes means being willing to pay a high price.

What does all of this have to do with kingship? After all, we don’t automatically, or even easily, associate monarchy with truth-telling. My husband and I have been watching the Showtime series The Tudors, and while historical accuracy isn’t the show’s strong suit, I suspect that Henry VIII was nearly as willing to deceive both others and himself in real life as he is in the show. This may give us pause, since our Episcopal Church is one of the indirect outcomes of his machinations. Nonetheless, while we don’t necessarily expect truth from kings and other earthly officials, we want it. We yearn for leaders who will both tell us bracing truths and take the risk of acting on them. And as a result, we recognize truth-tellers, and truth-doers, as kingly, even if the prevailing powers don’t recognize their royalty or, worse, punish them for it.

One of the messages of this morning’s Gospel is that Jesus is only our king, only our Lord, if we recognize and claim him as such. This goes along with the maxim that we can’t truly call ourselves Christians unless other people have called us Christian first, unless we have made our Christian beliefs so visible that other people naturally recognize whose truth we follow.

Of course, there are all kinds of definitions of Christianity, some of them directly at odds. Some versions of Christianity delight in welcome, while others insist on exclusion. This leaves non-Christian onlookers very understandably confused. All any of us can do is to show up, pay attention, act on the truth as we understand it, and not be attached to the consequences. Discipleship calls us to be both truth-tellers and truth-doers. Sometimes it demands a high price of us. And it calls us to honor those who have paid such prices themselves.

My first brush with genuine activism came when I was in graduate school at Yale. Yale is a rich, powerful, mostly white institution in the middle of New Haven, Connecticut: a poor, troubled, largely non-white city. The University has a long history of terrible labor relations. When I was there in the early nineties, the administration’s attitude to both students and workers seemed to be, “You should feel honored just to set foot here. You have no right to complain about anything.”

Yale teaching assistants –- the graduate students who did the bulk of undergraduate teaching -– were paid less than Yale’s own estimate of the cost of living for nine months for one person in New Haven. Yale’s housing was more expensive than city housing, although living in town literally involved taking your life in your hands whenever you went outside after dark. An undergraduate who’d ventured off-campus was fatally shot while I was there; a six-year-old girl was killed by a bullet going through the back of a schoolbus, and there were gang shootouts on the courthouse steps a block from my apartment. Meanwhile, Yale charged its grad students hefty fees for health insurance –- although university employees who worked the same number of hours got free insurance –- didn’t offer us a grievance procedure, and required us to complete our degrees on schedules often impossible for those who had to work extra jobs to make ends meet.

So we tried to form a union. Two existing unions, the ones for clerical workers and maintenance workers, teamed up with us to lend financial and practical support. Both unions had extensive experience with the Yale administration and had gone on strike many times. The clerical workers were mostly white. The maintenance workers mostly weren’t. Most of the clerical workers commuted in from the suburbs. Most of the maintenance workers were local.

One of our early attempts at activism involved a lunchtime walk-out. Grad students -– again, mostly white, and mostly middle class or better -- gathered on a sidewalk, chanting slogans and waving signs that said, “Prestige won’t pay my rent.” While our professors considered us ungrateful and rolled their eyes at our theatrics, none of us, at that point, were in danger of any reprisal. That changed several years later, when professors deliberately sabotaged the hiring prospects of activist students on the job market. Meanwhile, the Yale administration had warned the other two unions that if they joined the walk-out, if they showed solidarity with us, they would lose their jobs.

My friends and I marched up and down the sidewalk, waving our signs. My husband was there taking pictures. I felt more than a little ridiculous. I was acutely aware of how many onlookers thought we were preposterously privileged spoiled brats. Some undergrads walked past and jeered; professors hurried by, scowling, unwilling to meet our eyes.

And then, down the street, we heard the sound of many people walking in unison. Tramp tramp tramp. The steps sounded in time. Tramp tramp tramp. We gathered along the curb and peered down the road, only to see the maintenance workers -- mostly older black men who would be very hard put to find other legal jobs in New Haven -- marching to join us, proudly wearing their janitors’ uniforms and waving signs supporting our demands for fairer treatment.

They were witnessing to the truth as they understood it, and they were risking a very high price to do so. My eyes filled with tears when I saw them. I wanted to kneel. They were true kings. I saw Christ that day, long before I ever dreamed of attending church.

I believe they wound up keeping their jobs. They had marched out together, and Yale couldn’t afford to fire all of its janitors. The strategy of solidarity worked.

In this morning’s Gospel, though, Jesus is alone, in front of Pilate. His followers have fled, terrified, to save their own lives. Ultimately, Jesus forgives them, and us. But his story forces us to ask difficult questions. Who is our king? What truths do we speak and serve? Can those around us recognize our loyalties in our behavior? And if the prevailing powers try to silence those who speak the truths we cherish, what will we do? Will we run the other way, or will we march, regardless of the consequences, to join them?

Another Week, Another Blog Post

Remember when I used to post once a day, or sometimes even more than that? Yeah, so do I. I remember those days fondly, but don't know if I'll be getting back to them anytime soon. I'm just too busy in through here.

Various updates and bits o' news:

* I'm still fiddling and writing every day. I've now invested in a fancy Kun shoulder rest rather than my previous foam pad; the Kun's improved both my posture and my tone, although the second still has a long way to go. The sound's no longer muffled by the foam against the bottom of the instrument, though, so I'm getting more resonance. I also bought an inexpensive backpack case for the fiddle so traveling will be easier. I'm already wishing I'd spent a bit more, since this case has already developed zipper problems, but they won't endanger the instrument -- they're on the outside pouch -- so I'll use this one as long as I can.

* Harley's still letting me brush his teeth, but a few mornings ago he smelled alarmingly of urine, so on Monday we're taking him to the vet for his followup bloodwork and urinalysis. I haven't noticed the odor since then, so I hope it was just temporary.

* The book contracts came this week, and it turns out that I'll get half the advance on signing. I thought I wouldn't see any money until I delivered the manuscript, so this is good news. With that money, plus what we saved from my summer teaching gig, we're going to attempt to: 1) go to Honolulu for Spring Break, 2) get the ductwork redone in our house so we actually get some benefits from our furnace and AC, and 3) go on an Alaska cruise in May. This is both ambitious and decadent, but we're going to do our best anyway. It's been a tough year, and we're both acutely aware of having to have fun while we can.

* Monday would have been Gary's father's birthday; I'm going to try to call his mom that day. Today I got a sweet, wistful card from Fran, who often dreams about Dad and was writing to thank us for everything we did for her while she was here. I called -- I've been meaning to write her and hadn't, so I felt guilty -- and it turns out she's doing well: she has friends, is spending Thanksgiivng with family, and generally sounds more chipper than I've heard her for ages.

* Speaking of my father, the other day I got a call from the RN at his assisted-living facility. "I remember you told me after your Dad died that you'd found a place that would take partly used medications. Can you remind me where that was? I have a lot of stuff I want to donate." So I told her. I also told her that the phone call made me feel really good; Dad would thoroughly approve of medications going to the homeless-outreach clinic rather than being wasted, and her phone call made me feel as if something positive came from his death.

* Speaking of medicine, I learned this week that the Literature & Medicine program at our local VA is a go. I'm facilitating it, so I'm very happy and excited.

More news in . . . oh, in a week or so, if I run true to form. And there will be a homily tomorrow!