Spring Break: Day 1

Cinnamon toasts.
Allergy.
Spring break.
Rain.
Silence.

Low clouds.
Sounds of jet engine.
Cancelled luncheon.
Silence.
Rain.

Tax Day

This is my designated "tax day." You know how it is. I'm swimming in papers, shuttling between computer, file cabinet, and 2011 calendar. It is about 80 degrees outside. I look out the window and see green pasture and trees swelling with early spring pink. But I can't budge. I'm stuck.

Later.

Do-nothing Saturday

Has been busy around these quarters. As a deserved (so I feel) respite, I did nothing today.

Our fruit trees are blooming: peach, pear, with the apple on the verge. KDM discovered five spears (trunks to be more precise) of asparagus in the overgrown patch. I chopped off the tops and threw them in the noodle soup.

It's crazy. And scary: What's in waiting for us this summer? After the three-months drought of last summer, we are leery, suspicious of another ambush.

Lent is not over. A time not just to discipline the stomach, but also the tongue, the mind, and the often "insubordinate" fingers on the keyboard. Can't say I have done well on any, especially the last part. So if you come back to this blog and find the previous post missing (remember, I held it back for a day), it would be that I'm carrying out a wrist slap on my own.

Not that anything I write here may be consequential, but that discipline is discipline regardless whether others are watching or caring. I owe it to myself to chop what needs chopping, prune where needs pruning.

You've heard the old adage of the "Catholic guilt." Depending on which side of the door you are on, it's either a curse or a boon. There's no science in it. The paradox of living life to the fullest joy by one who knows guilt is too much for the uninitiated. The word "guilt" is a cheat: an examined life is the only one worth living.

A Few Things

• This Lent, I'm focusing on the d-word, archaically known as detachment. The saints know all about it. My more clinical, modern version of it would be disinterested. But I really like my vernacular version: don't care. To explain it simply, in all things non-essential, I will not fret, I will not calculate, and I will not care. 

• In his book Catholicism, Fr. Barron translates one of the beatitudes "Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted," into "how lucky you are if you are not addicted to good feelings." This has stuck with me. It applies, almost daily, to the circumstances I find myself in, as those around me. I see this "addiction" especially in some of my young students, who are dependent on constant affirmation. I try to be thoughtful in meting out compliments, mainly to wean a person from this "addiction." At the same time I also take care not to be a scrooge in encouragement. The problem isn't that we savor the sweetness of compliment, but rather that when compliments are not forthcoming, we still have the will to go on. This freedom from the chains of good feelings truly sets us free. 

• I am sick and tired of cooking.

• KDM is reading Mark Levin's Ameritopia, which is having a strange effect on our dinner table conversations: we find ourselves discussing Plato's Republic and Sir Thomas More's Utopia. He is now on the chapter on Thomas Hobbs, which means he's very close to coming to Karl Marx. By virtue of all this, I feel the pressure of getting educated on the linage of Utopianism. 

• My poor niece Mimi just took the dreaded TOEFL (Test of English as Foreign Language) Test yesterday. She signed up taking the test without telling anybody because if the result is disastrous, nobody would find out. She told me only because she needed my prayers, and swore me to secrecy. I asked the Dear Lord to please humor this poor girl. She wants to study in the U.S.. TOEFL is a big hoop to jump through.

A Little Nut

Okay, I had a minute, and I looked at some pictures on my desktop, and saw this. This has nothing to do with the previous post, nor with anything of immediate relevance. I just thought I'd show you something which no one else will ever show you. It is a wall poster of a bygone era in my native land, China. The genre was known as the New Year Pictures. They typically hang on household walls till they yellowed and curled around the corners at the end of the year, just in time to be replaced by newer ones for the incoming year. Now I'm showing you this one because one exactly like it used to hang on the wall in our commune house built of wood and mud, when I was about 8 or 9. According to my Mom she bought it because she thought the girl looked just like me. And so said everyone else who ever saw it and compared it with me.

In hind sight, as a little girl I was never that chubby. But by gosh, a poster girl looked just like me! My vanity was greatly satisfied and enlarged.

Unless I explain, you would never be able to decipher on your own the meaning of the metal nut the little girl holds in her hand: you see, in our great Communist, Serve-the-People Republic, everyone was equal. Everyone was a small part of the great machine that was the State. As the title of the pictures declares: I Am a Little Nut. The tiny part of the great machine. That was her, and by extension, my, purpose of existence. Get it?

The word on that box behind the little girl? It says: "Conservation."