Your name is on my lips a thousand times a day. I try to think of other things but it’s you, always you dear sleep, that I want with all my heart. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Is that why I’m so fond of you?
!Sleep!
You’ve woven your spell around me. I know I shouldn’t crave you so, but every fiber of my being cries out for you. Try as I may to make do without you, in the end my will is weak. Just like every other sorry addict out there, I always give in. And no matter how much of you I get, it’s never enough. I always want more.
!Sleep!
Last night I gave in completely. I let you take me and you had me all night long. I believe I even dreamt of you. I didn’t know it was possible to have you and dream of you at the same time, but that is exactly how wonderful these past nine and a half hours were. It was glorious.
And then, fickle girl that I am, I woke up with only one name on my lips:
This might come as a shock to some people, but I am a beer. You know how there are always two kinds of people in this life? Givers and takers, lovers and fighters, finders and losers, keepers and weepers…? Well, of the doer and beer genre, I’m definitely a beer.
I’m not what you would call a mover or a shaker. I’m more of a sitter and a liver. I just be here in the life that I’m in and I live along with it. I notice it especially every year this time of year. The lush greenness on the trees comes back and provides glorious shade from the harshness of the violent overhead light. The wildflowers on the sides of the Texas highways come back and provide ointment that soothes as it seeps into wounds I didn’t even know I had as I drive along. And I realize that I don’t really remember getting here. I don’t remember leaving it behind last year and I don’t remember the earth turning and completing yet another rotation around the sun and I don’t remember how it was exactly that we completed yet another school year in the Linebarger household. I’ve just been here, being.
But here we are again. Suddenly I notice that the little girl that started eighth grade (yesterday?) is now a lovely young woman about to enter high school. She’s got big hair and she likes to wear her dad’s shirts and she talks to boys. And the little girl that started sixth grade is about to enter middle school. She likes her room really clean and she writes books and every time I open my cell phone, there’s a new funny picture of her on there to greet me that I never even saw her take. And the littlest girl that was so scared to start third grade because of the TAKS test that she’s been scared of since kindergarten, not only survived both the TAKS test and third grade, but she now blow dries her own hair in the mornings and she plays the piano and she runs across the street to play with her friends after breathlessly asking if she can go since her chores and homework are done.
I got a date with my husband today, which was really, really nice. He finished his first seminary class at Cranmer and we decided to celebrate by going out to an early dinner. This celebration accomplished three things:
1) I got to spend some much-needed alone time with my beloved. It’s been crazy around here this month, and I’ve really missed him.
2) We’ve put ourselves on a strict budget and have been doing great with it and actually still had money left in our dining allotment for the month so we decided to do it nice and go to our favorite steak place.
3) He finished his class! Did I mention that already?
So anyway, yesterday I made this killer chocolate cake because my brother was in town and there was still some left today. Last night I had a couple pieces and I wanted more, but I practiced restraint by telling myself that I could look forward to having more the next day. I fell asleep with visions of killer chocolate cake dancing in my head, knowing that it would be my motivation for waking up in the morning. I got up, had coffee, daydreaming more about how I couldn’t wait to have dessert after dinner tonight.
Well, then Chris called on his way home from class, with his plan of sweeping me away for a celebration date to the place that has one of my favorite desserts ever: Jack Daniels Chocolate Chip Pie. Suddenly I was torn. Was a dinner date with my husband worth the sacrifice of everything I had been dreaming of all day long? And then he tells me he’s hungry now, and could we just go out for a mid-afternoon meal? I have to admit, these were my exact words:
“Yes! That’s perfect because if we eat dinner early and have the Jack Daniels Pie for dessert, I’ll still be able to have a piece of chocolate cake later before bed!”
Now I’m off to get that long-awaited piece of cake. I’m going to heat it up slightly so that the dark chocolate frosting (with strong coffee in it) starts to glisten and slide off to one side. And I’m going to have a big ole scoop of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream on the side.
If my stomach gets too empty, it starts eating at itself.
I feel it, rumbling and roiling like the black smoke snake on Lost, searching in vain for something to eat and ultimately deciding to turn on itself. It’s not really fun when it gets to that stage. And the thing is, I feel like I am a pretty self-aware person. It’s not like I’m off in la-dee-da land, forgetting to feed myself because I’m so busy working on my mad scientist projects. No, I notice things like hunger. And numb gums when I run. And my heart, when it beats two beats right on top of each other, forcing air out of my lungs involuntarily, regardless of whether I’m standing in line at the DMV or not.
It’s just that my hunger mechanism never gives me enough warning. I feel the hunger, I instantly head toward the kitchen and by the time I have the fridge open, it’s too late. The feeding-on-itself frenzy has begun. And what’s so frustrating about it is that by the time it gets to that point there is no going back. I can throw some food down the hatch, but it doesn’t appease the monster. Food that would have been perfectly acceptable ten minutes earlier has now just been added to the volcano that is my stomach spewing out hot lava and taking everything down with it; even perfectly good food.
If I can stay a step ahead of it and eat BEFORE I get hungry, all is well. But that just doesn’t seem like the right order in which to operate.
If my life gets too full, it starts eating at itself.
I feel it, thrashing and freewheeling like the rickety old Texas Giant, searching in vain for peace and deep breaths and ultimately deciding to turn on itself. It’s not really fun when it gets to that stage. But we plow ahead valiantly, knowing that next month will bring at least a small measure of quiet. And we take what we can get around here. Small measures accepted. I only hope I don’t self-destruct completely before being able to enjoy it.
I want to enjoy camping with the family, eating meals outside, not driving on the freeway four or five times a day, letting kids stay up late and sleep in later, reading good books, seeing my husband more than twice a week and going out for ice cream daily. Yes, I said daily.
Mine own sweet mama, with her sweet youngest grandson, Baby Mack
My brother and my dad
Our pastor from Oregon was in town, with his lovely wife and daughter
My sissie-in-law, with her own sweet mama
A sweet little Chapincito, with his own sweet, pregnant mama
Another sissie-in-law, with the youngest to which she is mother
The middle to which I am mother, looking a little like a sasquatch
The youngest to which I am mother, along with her cousin and the man I am in love with
A newly walking nephew to which I am aunt
Our friend, Kathleen, with Baby Mack
Good conversation plus good food that I didn’t have to cook equals a really, really great day…
I’ve added a new link to the sidebar. You can see it right over there. See? I got to thinking that I’ve got three years of blog posts built up here and there’s surely got to be a “best of” list that I could get out of them. But then I got to thinking that maybe my favorite posts would be different from some of my readers. So I was wondering if those of you who have been reading for a while have any posts in mind that I should consider adding to the list.
And while you’re mulling that over, I’ll just tell you that I’ve completed my first week of running with my coach, Robert Ullrey. You can download his podcast for free on iTunes. I love him! Tomorrow starts week two. I finally feel like I’m getting the pace down and I know when to breathe. Techno music helps. Also, for the first time yesterday, my gums weren’t completely numb by the end of my run. That seems like progress. I think I might become a runner after all.
Last night I saw live and in person the people who I believe live inside my heart. They write their music from in there, based on all the things I do and touch and feel. They sing from there too; or she does anyway. It’s the way I sing in my heart, even if it doesn’t sound like it by the time it makes it out my mouth. They are the band that is so personal to me that I almost don’t even like to talk about them because I think they belong to me. I think they ARE me. They are Over the Rhine. I saw them last night at the Granada in Dallas. It was really quite an experience to watch the people who’ve been living inside me all this time. It was quite an experience to hear them live too. I would say that it was an absolutely delicious experience. I sat and I drank it all in, many times needing to close my eyes so that the sound could envelop me completely. At times I couldn’t even tell if I was drinking them in or if they were drinking me in because I really felt as though I’d been swallowed whole. At times I had to reach over and hold the hand of the beautiful man beside me who got me the tickets because they were singing the songs my heart had written about us. At times I laughed unrestrainedly and delightedly like when the drummer turned into a baton twirling, hair flinging, beat discovering maniac. At times I entered into the painful places that I’m sometimes afraid to go to and I remembered that pain can often bring joy. At times I remembered to breathe.
I know I’ve put a lot of their songs up here before, but here’s the one that got me hooked on them to begin with. They sang it for me last night.
I’m back on Facebook. As hard as I try not to care if people are mad at me, I care.
I just care.
Oh, I care.
My brother-in-law wrote a great post about why he wished I (and others) wouldn’t quit Facebook, which sorta made me wish I hadn’t quit. And then SOMEBODY got mad at me. Which made me think probably other people are mad at me too. Which made me sad. Especially when I really love and miss those mad people. And the new dilemma I now find myself in is that all the people who were so proud of me for quitting are now going to mad at me for unquitting. I don’t like when people are mad at me. But the bottom line is, I really do want to keep in touch with people and that seems to be the best way to do it. I just want to be better this time around at not letting it depress me. Maybe my technical genius of a brother-in-law could show me how to institute all those settings that he says are so easy to institute to make what shows up on my home page less depressing. Because as good of a webpagemaker as I truly am, I get on Facebook and all webpagemaking abilities fly out the window and I can’t even think where to start because I’m so depressed. Information overload tends to depress me. Can I just only see flowers and hearts and sunsets on my home page, Matt?
I’m eating an English muffin with apple butter oozing into its deep nooks and crannies and it’s storming outside. I’ve got a green tarp as big as our first apartment spread out over my living room/dining room area, trying to dry after the kids used it as a slip-n-slide on Saturday. It’s supposed to storm all week. In my attempt to become a runner, I went out at six this morning as I’ve been doing for the last week or so and did my first “running” in the rain. The thunder was rumbling, the sky was lighting up at irregular and eerie intervals and my lungs were about to explode. I can’t ever figure out whether to breathe in and out every three steps or every two steps on my block on/block off run/walk thing that I do. My lungs don’t like either of those options. And neither does my head, come to think of it. It throbs with every pound of the feet on the street. There is something really cool about running bleary-eyed though, first thing after getting out of bed. My eyes aren’t fully focused yet and all the street lamps are soft and starry. I like the word bleary.
It’s storming outside.
Our church just started this thing where we’re all reading through the Bible in 90 days together. I did my first reading last night. Genesis is interesting. There is so much that I’d kind of like to have some more info on. You know, the usual questions like how did Eve know how to cut the umbilical cord on her first baby and how did she know how to feed him and where did Cain get his wife and was it excruciatingly depressing to live so long or were the years really as long back then as they are today and how exactly did Noah get a hold of all those animals and did any of them try to attack him? But I don’t know. I know there must be an answer to all of those things and although I’m curious, it really doesn’t affect my faith one way or the other not knowing. I kind of even don’t really want to know. Just like I don’t really want to know how a nuclear reactor works. I know somebody knows and I’m glad it’s not me because I don’t think I can handle it. I can’t even handle knowing that there’s a swine flu going around and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. I don’t like knowing too much.
But I do have one thing I want to know. I even wrote it down to ask in Sunday School next week if I can work up the nerve. I can’t ever seem to keep my face from turning purple when I speak out loud, which inspires me to internalize most things. Also, I think I have a hard time asking questions that I don’t think there’s an answer to. And I think most of the questions I have don’t have answers. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t trust the answers. Is it possible to have faith, but not trust? I really want to know why Cain’s sacrifice wasn’t pleasing to God. It doesn’t say why, it just says it wasn’t. And beyond why, because I think I know the answer to that… did Cain KNOW as he was going into it that it wasn’t going to be good enough? That question terrifies me.
That’s where I am on this stormy Monday. I want my kids to be happy, I want this tarp to be dry, I want my hips and my debt and my pile of laundry to be smaller, I want to love God more and I want to know if my sacrifice is good enough.
I just finished my root canal. I’ve had an unfinished root canal for two months now. Suffice it to say that my mouth is dumb. Particularly one tooth in my mouth. Particularly the roots of the one tooth in my mouth. But it’s done now, which makes me feel like I can finally get on with my life. Of course, my mouth is still totally numb as I type this. Who knows what I’ll feel like when the numbness wears off? It’s been hurting for months now. Why stop now just because there’s burnt rubber packed in the holes where the roots used to be?
I’ve been doing a couple things to get my life in order as I’ve been in a holding pattern with this tooth and I’m just going to go ahead and share them with you now…
First and foremost, I permanently deleted my Facebook account. I hated the pressure. I hated the unwanted information that assaulted my senses every time I logged in. I hated the exposure and the feeling of being on display in a worldwide human zoo. I didn’t at all hate the games I played with friends, however, and if anyone knows of a way to continue Word Twist without having to go through Facebook, I’m all ears. I may end up creating a new account under a fake name just so I can play. That’s dumb, I know. As dumb as my mouth.
Another thing I’ve done to move myself onward and upward is to subscribe to this service:
I haven’t been so excited about something in a long time. For just five dollars a month, you get weekly menus, complete with the grocery shopping list and recipes. And the best part is, you choose the plan according to how big your family is and what store you shop at. Then you get a menu that corresponds with the weekly specials at your grocery store! And it even tells you what brands to buy, with the items totaled up at the bottom of the shopping list so that you know how much you’re spending before you even go into the store. I have been so bad at planning lately (see my last post) that I feel like this just might save my life. Or at least my bank account. Saving money without having to think about it AND eating good meals with the family while doing it. Nice. Not dumb at all.
And now I’m going to get off my computer and move on to the next thing: filling out the application to move one child to the same private school that we just moved her sister to. In fact, I just can’t shake the feeling that we should just maybe go ahead and put all three of them there next year. I don’t know. But I’ve got to keep moving, that’s for sure. And so I pray. And I wait. And I think and I wonder. And then I talk with my husband some more. Sometimes I wonder why we work so hard to do what we think is the best thing for these children of ours that we love more than life itself. I was informed this week by my eldest that she has only one goal in life to accomplish before she dies: to have a staring contest with Johnny Depp. I really don’t think this school is going to help her accomplish that goal. But it has other good qualities. And I think I feel content with that.
So anyway, yesterday I made this killer chocolate cake because my brother was in town and there was still some left today. Last night I had a couple pieces and I wanted more, but I practiced restraint by telling myself that I could look forward to having more the next day. I fell asleep with visions of killer chocolate cake dancing in my head, knowing that it would be my motivation for waking up in the morning. I got up, had coffee, daydreaming more about how I couldn’t wait to have dessert after dinner tonight.
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