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Showing posts from July, 2015

floorboards

A farmer is sitting on his porch in a chair, hanging out with his dog.  A friend walks up to the porch to say hello, and hears an awful yelping, squealing sound coming from the dog.“What’s the matter with Ol’ Blue?” asks the friend.“He’s layin’ on a nail that’s pokin’ up from the floorboards,” says the farmer. “Why doesn’t he just sit up and get off it?” asks the friend.  The farmer deliberates on this and replies: “Don’t hurt enough yet.” (from Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking) July 1 Yesterday, I answered the PA’s questions. Models of the brain lined the counter and she took my blood pressure which was too high. I swear I saw sympathy on her face and excused myself to the bathroom to pee and cry before the surgeon came back in. I have never met with a surgeon before. I had an appointment with one once to have my gall bladder out, but I never made it that far. I ended up in the back in the ER with pancreatitis instead and whatever surgeon on duty

take a breath that's true

I love weddings. What is not to love when there are some of my favorite things: free wine, dancing and cake.  People promising forever for better but also for worse, for sickness, for poorer. I love that wedding vows have all that awful stuff in them. And that people say them anyways.  Me and my husband actually did 8 sessions of pre-marriage counseling before we got married. It was ridiculously cheap and what all the “serious” couples in our campus ministry were doing. It was so awkward sitting in a church office with a minister and his wife while they talked to us about family histories, sex or worse. Budgets. We were 22.  Just babies. And in the kind of young love that could kiss for hours until our lips literally hurt and our faces broke out.  We fought over the most serious of matters, like which cds to sell so we could go out to eat or which station to listen to on the radio, probably just so we could make up and make out again. Counseling seemed unnece

i believe

So I wrote this almost exactly 4 years ago. The day before the finals in the World Cup.  This year...I am hoping for a different outcome, but these words....just like the two teams in the finals...are exactly the same. I was not made to play sports. No one in my family played sports in school. My knees are bad. I’m slightly asthmatic. I got genes for long division and reading music and telling jokes, not ones for basketball or volleyball or even playing ping pong without hitting myself in the head (it has happened). I have the coordination and natural athletic ability of Paul on the wonder years. When they did the flexibility test on me at the gym I think I scored about average for an 80 year old. My parents never signed me up for softball, even when I begged. I took PE instead of athletics in junior high. I quit dance when I was 6 because it was “too hard”. I quit gymnastics because it was too much like dance (read – again, too hard) and played the piano and violin and read books in