What the matter with kids?

The same thing is wrong with kids that's wrong with the adults around them. In the past 5 days, I've had two teens of my close acquaintance struggle with some pretty serious issues.

One of them is my godson's brother. It's a complicated situation, so suffice it to say that he wants to change his name back to the name he was given at birth, prior to his adoption. For the record, neither name is particularly "weird" and he is 18 and in the Army. Because he's 18 and all that goes with that, he immediately told his family about his decision and gotten some major blowback from his mom--not the easiest person in the world on a good day--saying she will disown him if he goes through with that. He's surprised, which he shouldn't be, and hurt, which makes sense. I have no idea if he'll do it because he is, after all, 18; so far it's just a Facebook name change. From my standpoint, he should do what he wants but he needs to understand consequences of those actions. And I'm super-happy he's 1000 miles from his mom for the foreseeable future. Best choice he has made is to join up, get some seriously solid discipline in his life, and get out of his toxic household.

The other problem is more serious. I teach Sunday School to middle school kids along with a parent of two of the kids in the class. Obviously, over the past two years I've gotten to know these kids--the whole class--pretty well and love them to death even when I'm ready to throttle them for being goofy. Yesterday, the mom of one of the kids pulled me aside to tell me that her 13-year-old son is going into the 'hospital' tomorrow for addiction treatment. Last year, they discovered he was cutting himself. Then he joined the football team in the fall which brought some social standing in school and seemed to inspire a more confident bearing. Apparently in November he discovered a pot supplier and started using that, and at some point added some painkillers he found in his parents' medicine cabinet. His mom told me that he had specifically told her that it was OK if she told me what was going on. So I found him in the Sunday School room--alone--after church and gave him a big hug. Meanwhile, his 14-year-old sister is overcompensating as usual and being a completely hyper-spaz "perfect child." Thank God she's actually smart and funny, but she's really needy right now too.

Kids have hard lives. They don't always know the best way to get through the hard parts and make things harder in the long run. It's painful to watch.

And don't get me start on my own son. Sparky's awesome, but there are times when I just want to shake some sense into him, even as I realize that he's got to figure out this whole thing about life/job/school for himself and live with his decisions. Fortunately, he seems to be muddling along in mostly the right direction. Finally.

Blog Challenge

Yesterday, I was supposed to write about A Moment [I] Felt the Most Satisfied in [My] Life. I'm wary of feeling this because it seems to happen about ten minutes before something a bit ... unsatisfying happens. However, in the overall scheme of things, I'm pretty content with the way things are in my life. Of course there's areas I'd like to improve, but that's a good sign: I have the luxury of being able to think about what directions to go.

And today is How [I] Hope [My] Future Will Be Like which kind of makes me want to slam my head against bricks. If the future brings more stupid grammar, I'm not excited. In all seriousness, I'm actually enjoying getting older. I have had a lot of role models in my life for what 60, 70, 80, and up looks like, and--trust me--I've picked their brains on why they remain(ed) vital and fun as they aged. Common denominator is choosing positivity over negativity, accepting what they can't change, and just a general graciousness. I'm shooting for two out of three of those.

Stunning!

All's Well That Bookends Well:

(Bookstore | Fort Worth, TX, USA)

(A sharply-dressed man comes to the counter with a woman of his age and a 5-year-old kid walking near them.)

Me: “Can I help you, sir?”

Man: “Yes, can you tell the price of those books, please?”

(He hands me a list, and I use it to calculate the total price of the books in question.)

Me: “Okay, the total comes to $242.14.”

Man: “Alright. Do you take debit cards?”

Me: “Excuse me?”

Man: “Ten years ago, when I was a teen, we stole those books in your shop with my wife here as a student prank. Now that we both have a good job, we want to show my kid that you must fix your errors in life.”

(I stayed speechless for a good minute before taking his payment. If there’s a “Customer of the Month” award, this family takes the cake!)

I want to clone this family. It's the best story I've heard about dealing with the public in EONS.

Facebook updates

I find it fascinating the serendipity that happens in my friends' Facebook posts. I have them forwarded to Google Reader so they all show up at once, minus all the group, game, and page updates that clutter up the actual Facebook page. I keep saying to myself, "I should post these--it's so WEIRD how they make sense, and they are not at all related to one another!" (most of the time)

So I'm finally doing it.

KaDi  I PASSED!!!!:)

BriJoPe is the happiest guy alive. :)

CheDi We now have 3 licensed drivers in our house....Congratulations Ka[...]!!! [to be clear, this is from the mom of the person listed first]

RoTe Andy Burnham: "Let's not get obsessed by this issue, because it really is irrelevant. It's a kind of fringe pursuit for Guardian-reading classes." Yeah, forget the 56,000 people who are definitely for parliamentary and electoral reform, Andy. It's the most fundamental thing that needs to happen in our politics, because it allows us to vote for who we actually WANT to vote for, not just who we think MIGHT win.

AWe Single from Manchester - London = £65. Cab far[e] London - home = £65 :(

MeThe i really need some wine right now.

LaClo The NPC should be proud of me-just trolled the beach for a couple hours perfecting my Bikini judging skills.

BaHo Just under two hours and counting, finished with work. Saturday pack, Sunday Miami. Next Friday Key West.....you all know what that means to a Parrothead!

ERi "I quit those days and my redneck ways" ... or at least I don't have a car that doesn't run sitting in front of my house anymore.

With the one exception noted above, none of these statuses are related to each other, but in that list we have two English people one after another, two of my high school friends one after another, three mission trip friends (from two different years) in a clump together, and a very "Friday" theme going on.

Déjà vu

Five years ago, I wrote:

It's official: Sparky is in England. I'm not particularly freaked out, although I slept really badly last night. We got the call around 4:30 this morning that they had arrived safely, but I spent most of the night with one ear cocked for the phone (while wearing earplugs: what a dope).

Today, Sparky has been in Germany for about an hour, where the weather seems to be pretty much exactly the same as it is here today, minus our rain. We aren't expecting a call from anyone until they arrive at the school in the town where they will be based, which won't be for another couple of hours. I slept like the proverbial log last night. And I barely cried at the airport, only after Sparky couldn't see me anymore.

Viel Glück, mein Sohn, und Spaß haben!

Exceptionally vague

So, there are two people I know, one a former friend and the other is someone I met because of the first person. Let's call them R and D. It's been at least 18 months since I started pulling away from R. In virtually every interaction, I noticed a distinct inability to step away from R's worldview and countenance other people's feelings. At first I thought it was me--because, well, isn't that how we're trained?

The first crack, admittedly, began as hearsay from another friend (J) who told me some stories about working with (for) R that...relit the painting. It was like suddenly seeing the young woman in this picture when before all you've seen is the old woman. Or, perhaps more symbolically, the other way around. But I'm always leery of hearsay, and cracks can be mended.

About this time, R asked me for a job recommendation, which I was happy to provide. I never received a thank you, even though I spent a great deal of time figuring out how to finesse some details about how to write a recommendation for someone with whom I'd worked only about 6 hours total over the time we'd known each other. The lack of an expression of gratitude sort of annoyed me, but then friends do annoy each other sometimes, right?

Meanwhile, the relationship between R and D was growing and seemed to be thriving. I didn't know D well, having had a total of one conversation in strained circumstances. But I got the sense of a deep, kind, smart and intelligent person, someone it would be fun and interesting to get to know better. Because they both seemed happy, I was happy for them.

The crack widened almost imperceptibly when R--who is proud to be at least agnostic--made a very snide, very rude generalized remark about my religion in a discussion about the Religious Right. Yes, I'm a Christian, and the nutcases drive me crazy, but this comment was a bit like having a stranger slug your little sister. When I gently suggested that perhaps R might be over-reacting, I was ignored. Even when I addressed it online rather pointedly, my point of view was not addressed. No apology, no reaction, no private conversation, just...nothing.

Two weeks later, R asked me to pray for a friend who had just had a pretty horrible tragedy befall her and was grieving a desperate loss. Go back and read that: R asked me to pray. Here's (part of) the email:

You know I don't do God. ...If you would add [friend] to your thoughts and prayers, I would appreciate it, and so would she. ...

It feels pretty odd to ask someone else to pray for a friend, when I'm not sure I think it means anything, but I know it would mean something to [the friend], and all that goodwill can't be bad, no matter what you believe, right?

Thanks.

The time stamps says it all: it took me 90 minutes to reply in toto:

I forwarded the basics to our prayer chain and will add the whole family to my list as well. Keep me posted, eh?

So much of my original email was deleted in that final response. I nearly didn't reply at all. I was...stunned. But I did pray, not just for R's friend, but for understanding and clarity for myself. There was, by the way, no follow up regarding R's friend, the prayer, the situation I had been told about...nothing. [which actually was fine, since I gave up tying my prayers to concrete long ago]

A few more conversations, a few more cracks. Then a huge blowup that I know was more about other stuff than the subject over which I blew. Ostensibly, it was judging people by how they speak, but it was (again) very generalized, very mean-spirited, and when I called R on it--because yes, I'll admit I can be thin-skinned over living my whole life in Flyover Country--I got a lot of justification and blah-blah, along with insistence on me being overly sensitive. Not even a hint of "I didn't say what I meant to say very well" from R.

Soon thereafter, I stopped reading online messages from R. And then months later, R friended me on Facebook. And I got the sense that there was some friction between R and D, whom I checked in with periodically but definitely more as a "Friend of R" than as "friend of D." D and I were NOT friends on Facebook. Boundaries.

Two months later, the pattern continuing to escalate, I did the Unfriend thing. Within a week, I got a message asking to "Add R to Your Friends", which I left sit for awhile and eventually confirmed. Within a week those status updates were upsetting me so much that I went back to Unfriend. Which is where we stand now.

Five or six months ago, I started reading R's "private" blog again because it is absolutely hysterically funny. Not intentionally; in fact, from the outside it's pretty pathetic. Which is why it's funny. {meow} I also started reading D's blog to get another point of view, change the lighting of the picture again.

And what a picture it has become. -->

I do not like it when people are malicious to one another. I also do not like prevarication and splitting hairs. I am the first to say that Bill Clinton, in his definitive statement, "I did NOT have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky!" was lying. Much like Justice Potter Stewart, I may not be able to define certain things, but I know what they are when I see them. And one other cliché: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is, most likely, a duck.

For my part--and a very small part of the drama I am!--I know that allowing R to continue to upset me was/is not healthy. I am slowly learning to remove unhealthy things from my life, so R is gone except in terms of sideshow. The good things R has brought me are many, and I appreciate all of them--R does manage to be surrounded by good things and some exceptional people, which is a little confusing--but possibly the greatest joy is having met D, who was kind and generous with my son at a time when it would have been easier and perfectly acceptable to blow Sparky off completely. For that alone, and for doing it without awareness or expectation of anything from me, D has earned a large portion of friendship.

I like people who don't do things because they "should" but because those things are the right things to do. D is someone like that. R, as I have found out, does things strategically. While I am not willing to say that's always wrong, it's not the way I operate and I don't easily trust people who live their lives always thinking how best to maneuver and control the people and situations around them, both ahead of time and after events have occurred.

Now that I've written all this down, I hope it means I can sleep tonight. Today has been filled with disturbing events and lots of hurtful words and thoughts about R and D and all those in similar situations.

Requiescat Mr. Jimmy

This post was originally published 6/15/06 elsewhere. We received news this week that Mr. Jimmy Lepre passed away last Saturday after a decline over the last few months, but not without inspiring many of us who met him with his strength of character and loving spirit. Jimmy, I know you are with your beloved again. Bless you both.

On Thursday morning, after our orientation (interrupted by 5 or 6 cell phone calls), Ed began dividing us into work teams and assigning us jobs. Our group of about 10 was--I think--supposed to head to someone's house to do drywall. Ed received yet another call, this one from an elderly man who has needed help assessing what was next in recovering his house.

This gentleman is an active, fit former-fireman. Coming just six months after the death of his wife, Katrina wiped him out emotionally. He has a tidy little nest inside his FEMA trailer, and his house has been mucked out (twice: he paid for the job once, and then called Ed for help when the $3,000 he spent got him a half-assed, unfinished job which Ed's volunteers full-ass finished). The roof was replaced (I think he paid for that and again had to have volunteers finish the job properly). Then he apparently just ... shut down.

One of the things the D'Iberville Volunteer Foundation and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance have done is continue to assess each and every resident. They stay in touch and check in with them by phone and by visits regularly, though they do not force residents to begin or do any work until the individual is ready, assuming their health is not in danger. So they knew that James needed more work done, and they had talked to him about it, but he just wasn't ready. At 84, he wasn't sure it was worth it to him.

He called Ed Thursday morning as we were getting our assignments. In spite of being assigned to drywall someone else's house, Ed switched half our group over to go assess the electrical needs and get started on drywalling James's house. We pulled up across the street from a nice 60's-era brick ranch house which looked--from the outside--clean if a bit careworn. As we exited the van, looking a bit like a circus clown act, we realized we were parked in what used to be someone's living room; all that is left is chunks of concrete slab and a gravel driveway.

On that cheery note...we proceeded across the street into the garage. The inside of the house had been taken down the the stud walls. There were pipes and wires protruding from the ceiling and walls, and there was wrecked linoleum on the floor of what used to be the kitchen and dining room. The rest of the house had bare concrete floors. No insulation anywhere. Windows and screens in need of replacing, standing open like the front door: a lovely old solid wood door too water swollen to close completely. The front yard had a few dead tree limbs and a lot of weeds, the wrought-iron on the porch rusty under the white paint. Not horrible, but definitely not livable. The bathrooms had all their fixtures intact, including the tile on the floor (which, now that I think of it, will probably have to be removed).

Our team that first day consisted of the following people:

Beast, Sparky, me
two youth members: TS and JY
AD, a church member who used to be a youth group leader
another couple from church: MS and LS
a woman who teaches with one of our members: SB, and her two teenaged sons, AB and JB
another teacher, KM, and her family: RM Sr., RM Jr., and SM

Beast, MS, AD and me got started assessing the electrical layout. It was a mess--they ended up replacing everything except the circuit box, and rewiring the whole house. I was assigned a notebook and pencil and followed MS around making a shopping list.

RM and several others began measuring for drywall and insulation. The other women started talking to the homeowner, who insisted that everyone calls him "Mr. Jimmy." Oy. He was very clearly depressed, bent over under the stress of decision-making and despair. Still, he was lucid and able to answer all the questions about wiring and so forth that were put to him, and gradually began to join in the free-for-all. He mentioned that the linoleum in the kitchen would have to come up eventually so that some other floor could be laid. People started scraping it up in the loose spots with spade and some other tools.

Shopping list completed, we headed back to Volunteer Village to get better floor-scraping tools, and then to Lowe's for our first shopping expedition. Mr. Jimmy came to VV and insisted on taking the scrapers back for us, tossing them into his jeep. That was my first hint that as depressed as he was, he is still physically strong.

Long story short: by Saturday, we had his linoleum floor up, including the sticky backing which had to be removed with solvent, there was insulation in most of the walls, and the guys had sweat about 5 gallons each while climbing in the attic.

In the process, several of us had a chance to spend time chatting with Mr. Jimmy. He is a born storyteller, he loves girls, and he is an absolutely charming man. He told us about his wife, and her love of gardening; their house was a showcase, he said, and people used to drive past and take pictures of all the blooms.

So, the women decided to take the money raised by the children in the elementary school where they teach and fix up his front garden: new (easy-care) plants, pulling weeds, paint on the wrought iron on the porch, a soaker hose so he doesn't have to drag the hose around the house.... The dead branches and tree debris was stacked by the street for removal, weeds were shot with Roundup, and the gardens were mulched.

We worked at Mr. Jimmy's Thursday, Friday and Saturday straight through. The rest of the group was doing other jobs: painting one house and drywalling another one, and I did some of the drywalling on Monday, too, in a house just down the block from Mr. Jimmy's. On Saturday after we'd cleaned up the work area for the day, and after to some urging from his new girlfriends, Mr. Jimmy sat down in the garage with all of us gathered around and performed five songs on his guitar. There was not a dry eye in the house. He eventually agreed to come to our camp and do a concert for all of the volunteers on Monday night. It was the loveliest concert I will probably ever attend. There was not a dry eye in the vicinity, and a few audience members were singing along quietly with him.

On Saturday, his daughter and son-in-law, and grandson and great-grandkids arrived for what seems to be their weekly visit. [They live near Mobile.] They had some work to do for him on the house (long story), and they mowed his yard. The little kids (ages 5 and 9) were agog with all the work being done in the attic, and my job that day was to keep them out from underfoot so they didn't get boxes, wires, plugs, tools, etc. dropped on their heads. They are pistols, those two. Mr. Jimmy was grateful for our presence again, for giving them something to do: "They get bored here. There's nothing for them to do," he said.

Both after the concert and before we left his house Tuesday for the last time (electrical completely redone, inspection passed!), Mr. Jimmy told us that we obviously love to work, that he couldn't believe how hard we ALL worked, and that he felt that he might be able to move into the house before the end of the summer. I don't know: he's got HVAC, drywall, flooring, fixtures and plumbing to deal with next. BUT!!!! He was standing upright, smiling, gesturing--a totally new man ready to face life again. I will undoubtedly never seen James Lepre again, but the light of his lifetime of stories and the sound of his voice singing "Bill Bailey" will stay with me forever.

Yes, we helped this man, and some others. But what we got in return is just as valuable, if somewhat amorphous. I feel like I've regained my sense of purpose, reminded myself of strength I didn't know I had, seen the horror of what nature can do to us and been properly reminded of humankind's place in the world, killed some of the stereotypes I've had about Southerners, crossed off a few more states in the list of those I've traveled in/through, and survived another 'camping' trip. I wish I'd been able to eat a beignet (my stomach was not willing to face one), and I wish I could have stayed in D'Iberville longer. I wish these people didn't have to go through this horrible time, and I wish I could understand why someone would want to rebuild a beach house on the site of the one that washed out to sea last year.

Mostly, I can't wait to do this again sometime, somewhere. But only if Irene McIntosh is in charge of the meals!

My son ROX!

"Whiplash" (Metallica)
He TOTALLY has the heavy-metal slouch thing going for him... Guitar Hero is his addiction of choice. Meanwhile, I'm ROFLing (in my head), but also appreciating how much time he's put in to be able to do this without any "clonks" in the middle of the 'tune'.

He asked his English teacher to read over the first page of one of his completed short stories--which he writes on his own time, and has done so for over 5 years. The page with comments is on the kitchen counter, and it is GOOD! Perhaps he'll let me publish it here. I'll ask.

Definitely telling him about NaNoWriMo. Can't believe I never thought of that!! Duh.

"A patron in my library"

Originally posted 10/20/05

Wednesday afternoon, I sat in the library at a table with my son's backpack as he did his math homework on the Internet 20 yards away. I was doing my Bible Study prep.

It was busy, but not noisy, and I was enjoying being "just a patron" in the library. It doesn't happen very often. One of the times I looked up to check on Sparky I noticed someone I thought I knew. Then she turned and I knew she wasn't who I thought she was.

The person I mistook this woman for comes to my church now, but my first interaction with her was probably 5 years ago at the library. She was one of our more desperate patrons,. She mumbled, she stared, she made little sense, she asked nonsense questions, she never smiled. She wanted videos, but couldn't produce a coherent thought about what videos she wanted. Not just any tape would do. She was hunched over, holding herself together physically, if not mentally. She was difficult. Crazy. Weird. All those oh-so-attractive words. On one of her visits, she told me that she wasn't allowed to see her grand-daughter, and it was killing her. Then she told me that same fragment-story every time she saw me for the next several weeks.

This same woman--call her "Lisa"--now comes to church regularly--because it's a block from her apartment. She fits in well with the 'normal' segment of society that peoples our library, still has some slightly deviant behaviors (now more in the realm of eccentricity than scary-weird), and lives with her daughter and her grand-daughter. She doesn't drive, and she can't hold a job, but she is a lovely person. I think of Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies whenever I see her.

All this went through my mind yesterday as I looked at the woman walking between Sparky and me. In an instant, two pictures flashed in my head. "Lisa" as she was 5 years ago, and Hedda Nussbaum (whom "Lisa" also vaguely resembles). This woman was doing the Eggshell Walk. The if-I'm-very-careful-where-I-step-I-won't-fall-into-the-chasm huddled clutch of a pacing walk, back and forth about 15 feet either direction. She was walking to Jerusalem between me and my kid in the public library.

Other people noticed her. They left a wide space around her, and they didn't acknowledge her, but they watched her like you'd watch a frothy-mouthed squirrel. "Walk slowly and ignore it, but shoot it if it comes toward you."

Meanwhile, Pacing Woman was oblivious, or at least inured. Her current pain was so much greater than anything outsiders could inflict. Five hundred years ago, she'd have been called a witch. Or a holy woman.

What do I remember mostly, though? The pockets in the seat of her jeans. Her pale blue T-shirt. Her bent shoulders and tense neck. Her electrical-socket hairstyle. Her blank face surrounding those eyes, which were staring past the walls and carpet of the library.

I looked back down at my "homework" where I found myself reading the following from our study guide:

Holy. The word means "separate" or "set apart." ...Holy things and beings were utterly different from, utterly alien to, common things and ordinary creatures.

By the time we left, she was gone. Maybe she was a holy woman after all.

Sore

This week has been filled with G.I. issues: Sunday overnight was awful, and last night I woke up with terrible heartburn. Today, my shoulders have been absolutely killer painful. It wasn't until about 2 hours ago that I realized--after Beast tried to unkink the muscles for me--it's not muscle pain. This is deep down achy pain.

So now, having assured myself that I'm not having a heart attack...really, I'm not...I'm wondering if instead I'm coming down with the flu.

Or it's just stress, since I'm losing my favorite Tech Svc. employee, the one who keeps me sane on difficult days. She's leaving at the end of November. That makes close to (maybe over) 20 hours/week I will have lost this year. Sigh. It also means it's really time to rethink how we "do" Tech Svc. before we just jam someone into MEM's place.

Joy.

Tomorrow, the plan is to work all day and then head to Sparky's second away varsity football game...alone. Beast will be in Ohio setting up for the estate/rummage sale.

And then I work Saturday too. Ugh.

The payoff is that I'm off to see Amy on Sunday. Yay. Yayyayyay. Must gossiping will be had.

...figures...

The calmest, most rational, loveliest person at my workplace

is leaving

due to family issues. She's the primary caretaker for someone who needs nearly round-the-clock care and a daytime aide home alone with him all day isn't cutting it anymore.

I'm so sad.

But I've been whacked so hard by Teh Sad this summer that this is just another stone on the cairn.


It means we'll be totally rebuilding the tech svc department from scratch. So that's either a Very Good Thing, or the straw that will break this camel's back. Stay tuned...

ALA

Weird people go to ALA. I'm sure that's not a shock. It's just a VERY odd mix of people.

I was one of them today.

I met a good friend for the first time and we hit it off immediately. Gawd, I love teh internets!

I ran into two old friends by happenstance. And they wouldn't go away!

I chatted with another good friend who is going through...Major Stuff. She said kind things to me, which may or may not be deserved, and I worried about her. Still am. Still will be for awhile.

And I came home with four new cloth bags--only one of which was, at most, half full. (The six new books don't count--they were in the bag I brought with me.) Now that I've been home for awhile, I'm down to a stack about 6" tall of materials to deal with at work this week.

And I spent about $65, which I won't be submitting for reimbursement. I mean, really, what's the point? It was worth every dime to be on my own dime today.