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Henry's friend Max: I know who Darth Vader is!
Henry and Max in unison: It's Anakin!
Henry: So, I wonder - why did Anakin want to become Darth Vader?
Max: Oh - I know! I know! They kept calling him "Annie" all the time and it made him really mad so he turned into Darth Vader to make them stop it.
I just spent about 12 hours over 2 days learning about Movable Type. I haven't thought this hard about this kind of stuff in a long time. My husband is a computer programmer, so it comes easily to him, but to my brain? not so much... I'm a content person, a words person. The HTML - it seems like math to me, or like balancing chemistry equations. Neither of which I'm terribly good at. I tried to explain to my husband that processing HTML/XHTML tags atually hurts my brain. Yeah, he thought I was weird, too.
But now I have a (semi-workable) banner, I've learned how to customize the side bar, and I am starting to feel my way around the site. I have a new, increased admiration for those folks who HTMLify for a living.
My hope is to make this a place to share some thoughts and to hone my writing skills. Being a stay at home mom has its rewards (at least that's what they tell me), but my brain is starting to wither away. I know the names of all the Rescue Heroes, the major characters of Sesame Street, and the personality quirks of all the Scooby Doo characters. I know which variations of protein, fruts and vegetables my children will actually eat, and I can make dinner with a baby on one hip and a 5-year-old throwing a fit in the middle of the kitchen. Is this the best use of my talents (?) and skills(?). Some days I think so, some days I think I may not have any talents and skills any longer. Anyway, I'm hoping to use this site as motivation to help me in my eventual second career. Eventually I hope to get paid for writing - probably as a technical writer. In my before-kids life, I was an 8th grade Language Arts/American History teacher. I loved it, but don't want to go back to teaching right now.
Of course, after the MT/HTML/RSS crash course of the last couple days, I think a little brain withering might be welcome tomorrow. Hey kids, wanna watch Elmo?
This month, we're reading The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. Once I discovered it wasn't actually a left-wing political diatribe, I was eager to read it. (Not that I don't enjoy my left-wing diatribes, i just was hoping for some good fiction.) It seemed promising enough - New York Times Booklist, etc.
I had heard two of my friends murmuring this weekend about the slowness of the book, but I hadn't started it yet. Now that I have, I must concur. I'm not enjoying it. I feel like I know where the book is going (Nazism! In America! Oh, how awful!) and I'm not really very excited about following the writer to his destination. I consider myself a moral and socially aware person, but this book seems tedious to me.
Please tell me it gets better!?
Coincidentally, I had borrowed the book The Known World from the same friends as I had seen its high recommendations and was interested in it. I had no idea what the plot was before I flipped it over this weekend to read the back and thought - great, another morally pedantic book. This one is about Slavery! It's horrible! Feel compassion for those who went through it! Feel shame at your anscestors' complicity! I agree slavery was horrible and that its effects are still being felt in many ways that we as a society must continually address. I just don't want to read any more fiction about it.
Sigh. How about some modern fiction? Well, maybe not modern fiction if you mean the kind of 'modern fiction' wehre there is no point to the story whatsover (ala Stone Diares). But how about something like Three Junes, Peace Like a River, or the Egqyptologist?
Complicating matters is the fact that it's my turn to bring books for October. If next month's book sucks, it will be entirely my fault!
Any suggestions?
UPDATE: I acutally abandoned reading this book. I know many people think Roth is one of the best authors of our time, but I just couldn't connect. Yeah, and I hated Moby Dick in college, too, so maybe my idea of what makes a "great American novel" is a bit off. Anyway, my book club universally disliked it. So, yay for me!
*I stole this title from a book review on Amazon.com*
My five-year old son and I made cookies today. Henry loves to help me cook and bake. He runs the mixer for me, dumps in ingredients, and cracks eggs. Snickerdoodles are Henry’s very favorite kind of cookie and I needed something to serve my bible study, so that’s what we made. We finished creaming the butter and sugar, added the flour, and moved on to shaping the cookies into balls and rolling them in cinnamon-sugar. Henry proudly created balls with his little hands, rolled them in sugar and placed them on the cookie sheet.
I put a couple bowls in the sink and turned around to look at his work. The pan was crammed full of a motley assortment of cookie shapes in a mishmash of sizes. There were giant snickerdoodles, baby snickerdoodles, microscopic snickerdoodles, and lopsided snickerdoodles. There were snickerdoodles precariously close to the edge of the pan. There were snickerdoodles with pointy tips, flat snickerdoodles, and a couple that actually looked as if they’d missed the cinnamon-sugar dip altogether.
For a moment, I was frustrated. I wanted him to go watch a video so I could “fix” all his snickerdoodles – to make them uniform, spherical, and evenly coated. I was planning to serve these to my bible study, for heaven’s sake – I wanted them to look perfect. I thought about how much easier the whole process would be if I could just do it myself and not be bothered. Thankfully, God brought my focus back to Henry. I paused, took a deep breath, and saw how proud he was of his cookies. I put the pan in the oven and smiled at him. “You’re such a great big help,” I said. He beamed and did his “happy puppy wiggle”. I gave him a hug and set him loose on filling up another pan.
When the timer went off, Henry crowded me at the oven in anticipation. “It’s smelling yummy in here!” he said. We opened the door and pulled out our creations. The tiny snickerdoodles were burnt and the giant ones were still raw in the middle. One had oozed over the edge of the pan and seared onto the oven rack. Some had hardly any cinnamon-sugar on them. There was maybe one that looked the way I thought a snickerdoodle “should” look. But Henry was thrilled. “Can I eat one? Can I eat one? Can I eat one?” he asked while jumping up and down. We gave the cookies a token minute to cool before he plunged in, loving every bite. I was caught up in Henry’s joy and those snickerdoodles started to look just perfect to me.
I got to thinking that Henry’s pan of snickerdoodles must look an awful lot like the work I do for God. By his very nature, God is perfect – he created the world! How much easier it would have been for him to do everything himself – to reconcile his people back to him entirely through his own doing. Instead, his master plan was to include his children in his kingdom work. Each one of us is “God’s workmanship, created to do good works in Christ” (Eph 2:10). God has work for me to do: encouraging others, creating safe community for the women in my bible study, coming alongside friends who are struggling, reaching out to friends who do not yet know Jesus, raising my kids, being a nurturing wife, writing articles about my faith journey… And each thing I do, I do badly. I don’t return phone calls like I should, I sometimes snap at my children, I say things unthinkingly to friends, I procrastinate with my writing, and I let opportunities to discuss Christ slip through my grasp. My “snickerdoodles” are misshaped and lopsided too.
Thankfully, God doesn’t send me off to watch a video while he makes things “perfect”. He lets me get messy, he lets me make mistakes, and he continually refines my skills. I wonder if he chuckles sometimes at how proud I am of the things I do. Thankfully, he loves me like a parent and thinks my “snickerdoodles” are delicious, even when they’re burnt.
For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)
** I occasionally write articles for my church's eNewsletter. The entry above was my latest effort**