Just Some Rambles

Well, it's Friday morning and I face the same Friday morning dilemma. What to do with 1/2 a sandwich. It would be so much easier if both kids liked the same things to eat. If I try to make each one a sandwich from one slice of bread, then the sandwich is too thick. If I save the other half, by Monday it will be stale. Sigh. These are the kinds of things I think about at 5:56 in the morning. Usually I stay in bed listening to NPR for a while, but the Spring semester has started and I'm too nervous to sleep, or stay in bed today. I keep thinking, "Do I have the ability to do this, again?" But the answer keeps coming back, "What choice do you have?"

I think about my blog posts and laugh a little. I sometimes wish I were the type of person who didn't care about the things going on "out there". It would be so much easier just to go around life oblivious, or not caring about it all. Sometimes I cruise around to other people's blogs and am a little envious. "Why can't I just write about things like that?" I think. But then I hear a news story, or read something...and it starts all over. "All animals are created equal, Some are just more equal than others." And I just can't stomach the pablum they try to feed me. Just too much, inequity, disregard, too much abuse of power. I can't pretend. Can't pretend I don't care about the downward direction my country is going. So, I write. Do I really think I'm going to change anything??

Ron has called and cancelled our gym session, he's sick. I think, "I wonder if I passed it on to him?" even though I stayed home Monday, so he wouldn't catch anything. So Now what do I do? I should work off this nervous energy and go to the gym. But the gym is across the street from Barnes & Noble...how do I know the car will actually make it to the gym. Without Ron waiting, I'm just so lazy. I think about Runningman and say to myself, "Just get in touch with your Inner Marine." And laugh a little. Discipline is not my strong point. If I stay here I'll just work myself up over what has to be done this coming semester. I keep telling myself, "Just take it one day at a time." But somehow all the tests and papers and those Goddamn group projects all roll into one big ball and I think, "I can't do this, I just can't do this." But I know I will, somehow. And I just want to cry from the sheer magnitude of it all.

Sometimes I think, "How did this all happen? Where did this life come from?" I know I didn't plan things this way. Before panic turns to despair I stop thinking, and picture myself sitting in the old church I used to go to when I was a child. I used to pass it on the way home from school; back then churches were always open during the day, so I'd stop in. It was so nice and quiet that I could hear the candles burning. Once the heavy wooden door closed, all the street noises and children's voices would disappear. I would slip my hand in the cool marble Holy Water font and bless myself as I walked in. I always walked up the middle aisle. Some people would say to me that it was disrespectful - especially when you went to leave. "You shouldn't turn your back on Jesus!" A few times I tried walking out backwards, so I could leave still facing him. But finally I decided those people were just full of shit. I would start by sitting in one of the back pews. But not the very last one. I would just sit and look around at the architecture. I loved the high vaulted ceilings and the stained glass windows (the real ones, not those crappy modern abstract ones). I looked up at the lights hanging from their long slim black cords. I would drink it all in and smell the smells of years of wax and incense mingled together in the air. Usually I had the place to myself. Every once in a while there would be some little old lady, dressed in black, saying the rosary on a pair of black beads. Sometimes there'd be someone from the Parish Office walking through, and they'd stop and look at me suspiciously, wondering if I was up to no good. But most of the time it was just me. Eventually I would work my way up toward the front pews. But not the very first one. I would sit and look at Him and He would look at me. Sometimes I would be there twenty minutes or longer. We would just look at each other. Nothing needs to be said, I reasoned. He already knows. Somehow talking just seemed redundant. Before I left I would go up to the marble railing around the altar (those hadn't yet been ripped out, in the misguided post Vatican II travesty). I would lay the side of my face on the cool marble for a few minutes and then I would leave. Sometimes I left out the side door, so that no one from school would see me. I would walk down the street to the drugstore with my 15 cents and buy a Butterfinger, and then I'd slip a nickel in the weight scale out in front of the store, the one that also told your fortune. Then I'd go home.