Handi-Capable

Well, I bit the big one last week on vacation.  Before I launch into the story, let me just put a honkin' caveat right up front.  I believe that everyone is made by and for God's glory.  In knowing Him and being known by Him, we are currently on the path to full redemption and renewal, but in the meantime we are broken people in a broken world.  For some of us, the brokenness is visible, some more than others.  But for all of us, it's internal.  I believe that grace is the world's leveler, the weight of its goodness crushing us completely and restoring a correct perspective.

You may want to return to that paragraph after reading the rest of this.

To put it nicely, I'm not the most articulate person in the world.  I've been known to blurt out all kinds of stuff that sounds wholly inappropriate given the context or the environment, even though I didn't mean it to come out that way.  The Lord has been kind to me, teaching me to keep my mouth shut a lot of the time, but I still slip up.

One such example was in college.  I took an advanced education course on student development that included physical and mental disabilities as well as how public and educational policies have been created to address them.  My main mistake was (1) taking this class with a good friend who was, how shall we say?  One of the least socially sensitive people on earth.  Also (2), choosing to sit next to said man in class all semester.  (For those of you who think this is G, it's not.  Ha.)  After one particularly grueling 3-hour course on mental disabilities and the prejudices of mainstream society and narrow definitions of "normal," as we were leaving class, my friend said something hilarious to me and I blurted out - in front of the instructor, God, and everybody - "YOU'RE SO RETARDED!" 

Yeah.

Miraculously, I passed the class.

Consider that the back story.  Let me also say though that last week one of the places we visited had an adorable petting zoo area.  There was one section holding a mama wild boar and her babies:

 
They were contained by a fence that wasn't very tall, maybe a little lower than waste level.  I easily bent down and loved on them, only to see a boy next to me, maybe 10 years old, in a wheelchair.  He resolutely wheeled it as close as he could to the fence, then leaned mightily against his restraints, fingers flexed as far as they would go, and he could barely rub the tip of their fur.  This slayed me.

But the point of the blog is this, unfortunately:

A new activity that G and I tried was Stand Up Paddling (SUP).  Let me just say that it rocks.  We took a private lesson with an instructor who taught us the basics, then led us up and down a lazy inlet before taking us out to sea.  If you get the chance, definitely try it.

As we were navigating our way (precariously) down the inlet, we saw several kayakers headed our way.  They were all over the river, laughing and going every which way.  As we got closer, their instructor yelled to them to get to one side, that there were paddlers coming.  They were a rowdy bunch, splashing and spraying everything in sight.  As they passed us, I noticed that all of them were wearing serious shades, I mean, like horse blinders.

They all wore black masks that I thought were blindfolds of some kind.  I've learned over the years to never underestimate Hawaii's ability to complicate or heighten the "crazy" level of any activity, so I naturally assumed these kayakers were taking part in some kind of blindfolded race.

As our instructor passed theirs, I overheard just a tad of their conversation, mainly consisting of both of them talking about how awesome and cool the kayaking was.  Once they were behind us and we were scooting along, this was our conversation:

Instructor:  (shaking her head)  Wow, that's just really awesome.  Unbelievable.

Me:  What?  The kayakers?

Instructor:  Yeah, I mean, can you imagine?  How great is that?

Me:  You mean, how great is the...what?  The kayaking?  Did you see them with the masks?  What a colossal waste of an experience, you know?

Instructor:  (Looking at me in disdain.)

Me:  I mean, what can they possibly see with those masks on?  Doesn't that defeat the whole point of going kayaking in Hawaii?

Instructor:  (Still looking at me in disdain.)  They're wearing masks because they're blind, dumba$$.

Me:  Oh!!  Right!!  I just thought they were wearing blindfolds!!

Instructor:  (Disdain has evolved into more of a loathing.)  Well, yeah they're blind.  What kind of an idiot would kayak with a blindfold on?

Me:  (Gulp.  Sweating excessively and trying not to fall off the board.)  Right!  Totally.  I have NO PROBLEM WITH BLIND PEOPLE!

Instructor:  (Icy silence.)

G:  (Swooping in like a knight on a beefed up surf board)  Really, B is very nice!

Silence.

G:  As long as you're not disabled.



Now would be the time to return to that first paragraph.

Da Kine

In an effort to s-t-r-e-t-c-h our anniversary out as long as possible (at this rate, it may end shortly before Christmas), I'd like to show you some vacation pics in batches.  Hawaii is very hard to confine in just one or two posts.

I do have some very interesting posts to come, which involve:

• Sharks
• Wild Boar
• Honu (Turtles)
• Beach Resorts
• FOOD, people

But in the meantime, let's take a look at some beaches.

Stay tuned!

TGIF, people!

Bye Bye Single Digits

Today we usher in a new decade of marriage.  As I've been touting like the town crier lately, we are officially done with marriage in the single digits.  Which only makes us sound old, but whatever.  As G pointed out, 10 years ago two kids said "I do" and the rest is history.  I remember joking that we should keep our backpacks in the church so we could hit the trail once the vows were complete.  Little did we know what awaited us down the path.  Little do we know what still awaits us.

Here's to the next 10.

Marriage is...

Marriage is like an ocean.  It looks like one thing from the shore, but like something else entirely when you jump in.  At times the water gently laps your feet, and stepping in, you realize the undertow is strong.  The force will pull you out to sea.  Some waves slap your face and leave you wiping the salt out of your eyes, out of your ears, feeling the burn in your throat. 

And some waves lift you up and carry you to shore.

On Marriage

From the book of Proverbs:

"A house is built by wisdom and becomes strong through good sense.  Through knowledge its rooms are filled with all sorts of precious riches and valuables."
(24:3-4 NLT)

TGIF, people!

Who says you can't learn from video games?

I would like to share with you something I have learned recently from, of all things, a video game.

Full disclosure:  I am what people would call a "gamer".  I have an Xbox 360 and spend probably more time playing it than I should, both on my own and with/against other players over Xbox Live.  I have always loved playing games of all types--when I was a kid, my brother and I would play marathon Axis and Allies games--and I grew up playing the Atari, the Nintendo, and various computer games (X-Wing, Sim City, etc).  Nowadays I am more of a console gamer--hence the 360 and the first-gen Xbox and Playstation 2 sitting in the basement--but I also do some miniature tabletop wargaming (I've recently started playing Dystopian Wars) and I do play EVE Online every once in awhile.  All this being said, I do still find time to cut the grass and do other chores around the house, and I do practice regular personal hygiene.

So, back to what I learned.  I've been playing a game recently on the Xbox 360 called "Assassin's Creed".  The game is somewhat of a departure from games I usually play.  For one thing, it's set in the 1100's, and for another, the object is not to dispatch as many of the foe as quickly as possible and as creatively as possible.  This is a thinking kind of game.  The basic premise is that your character is an Assassin named Altair, and you run around the Middle East (Damascus, Jerusalem, Acre, and a little bit of the countryside in between) assassinating targets given to you by the master of the Assassin's cult.  I have not yet finished the game, but I am getting close, and with each target I take down I get the feeling that there is more going on than it appears, and that my character is merely doing someone else's dirty work.  I am interested to see how it turns out.  It is a thinking game in that you cannot go in to each city "guns blazing", so to speak...you have to conduct investigations to find out information about your target in order to get close to him, in order to assassinate him.  It is very interesting.

The game is set during the Crusades--not any one in particular, just the Crusades.  In addition to taking down your assigned targets, the game is peppered with Templar Knights who will attack you on site.  Being the amateur historian that I am, I've always wanted to learn about the Crusades, but have just never taken the time to do so.  Finally, after playing this game for so long, and hearing about the Crusades, and the Templars, and the Knights Hospitallers, I made a command decision:  I went down to my local bookstore and picked up The Crusades, by Thomas Asbridge.  I plan on starting it as soon as I've finished the WW1 book I'm working on (mentioned in the last post).

Playing the game has caused me to do a little cursory investigation into the Crusades and the Templars and Hospitallers.  But playing it also piqued my curiosity enough to go buy books to learn more.  See?  Video games aren't ALL bad.

End of an Era

Earlier this week, a man named Claude Choles died at the age of 110 in Australia.

He was the last remaining World War 1 combatant in the entire world, the last soldier of the millions who went to war from 1914 to 1918.  America's last WW1 veteran, Frank Buckles, passed away in February of this year.

I was discussing the war with a guy I work with a few weeks ago, and he said something that I had never considered before:  WW1 was a conflict that combined 20th century weaponry (like the machine gun) with 19th century tactics (like horse cavalry).  For example, there were British generals who were career cavalrymen who were insistent, even in the face of unquestionable evidence, that men on horseback could overrun machine gun positions.  Millions of British soldiers paid the price for this kind of stupidity and narrow-mindedness.

World War 1, probably more than any other conflict of the 20th century, shaped the world as we know it today.  It was in no small part responsible for the Russian Revolution of 1917, which ushered in an era of communism, and it caused the creation of the Middle East as we know it.  The Ottoman Empire, which even at the beginning of the 20th century still held a vast amount of territory, cast its lot with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) in the First World War.  After the conflict ended, the Ottoman Empire was no more, and its territories were divided up amongst the victors.  The British and French, rightly or wrongly, became rulers of large parts of the Middle East and North Africa, and administered these territories as they saw fit--which didn't always sit well with the locals.  Indeed, many of the lines we see on maps today for the borders of countries like Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia were drawn by the British for their own purposes.  They created monarchies where none had existed before and put men on the throne who were to rule countries that they weren't even from.  These are just a few examples.

Today, at least in this country, I feel as if WW1 is the forgotten war.  There is no national monument in Washington DC to commemorate the fallen.  On Amazon, there are 5 time as many World War 2 titles as there are World War 1 titles (not to detract from WW2, which in scope was a much wider conflict--truly a World War).  Next time you are in a Borders bookstore, go to the history section and look at the number of shelves occupied by WW1 books, compared to how many are occupied by WW2 books (in our local Borders, the WW1 books thinly cover the upper three shelves of one "book case", whereas the WW2 books are contained in 4 entire book cases).

We didn't get involved until 1917, and the war ended in 1918, but we still sent over a million men to Europe, and over a hundred thousand of them didn't come home.  I feel that we owe it to them to at least have a basic understanding of what they served and died for.  The story of how the war started is tragic, and it seems almost as if the whole affair could have been avoided but for a few key decisions on the parts of a handful of men.  But it is also a fascinating (if morbidly so) look at the world's leaders of the age, and the weaknesses and hubris that led to a conflagration that killed entire generations of the countries involved.

There is a good website, www.firstworldwar.com, which is a pretty user-friendly way to find out the 5 W's (who, what, when, where, and why) of WW1.  Or, I would recommend you read A World Undone:  the Story of the Great War, 1914-1918, by G.J. Meyer.  I am in the last hundred pages of this book myself, and I must say it is one of the most well-written history books I've ever read (and I've read a LOT of history books); he takes what could be a fairly dry topic and makes it very engaging and interesting.

It was called the Great War, the War to End All Wars.  On this side of things we know that it would not be humanity's last great conflict, but would merely set the stage for more to come.  In this light, the battles of WW1 are arguably some of the most important of the 20th century.

Cooking Lesson

Being the modern and sophisticated woman that I am, I occasionally try my hand in the kitchen.  And by occasionally, I mean at least once or twice annually.  A couple of weeks into our marriage, I got all ambitious and set out to make a chicken casserole.  After mixing all the ingredients and getting it into the casserole dish, I noted that the instructions said to cover it and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.  So I put the pyrex plastic cover on top of it and let it bake.

Yeah.

G ran into a friend from high school a while back and we had him over for dinner tonight, which prompted this post.  Thought I would share a couple of things that I like to "cook," if you will.

The first is - get ready for it - a pasta salad that I like to make and take to work for lunch.  It consists of a ton of fresh veggies (use whatever you like), a few whole wheat noodles, and italian dressing.  If I'm feeling motivated, I slap on some rotisserie chicken and colby jack cheese.  Now we're talking.

In preparation for tonight's dinner, I went all out.  Fulfilling half of my annual quota.

Let's start with dessert - a nice fruit dish.  For those of you shaking your head, allow me to point out that I used all fresh fruits.  This requires extensive cleaning and chopping, people.

As if that wasn't exhausting enough, I made a yummy fruit dip that consists of one jar of marshmallow cream and one block of cream cheese.  I could eat this (and salsa) with everything.

Dinner consisted of pasta that my BFJ likes a lot, along w/a very complicated salad side dish and bread, as follows:

You may be asking yourself, what, pray tell, do I reward myself with after a grueling day in the kitchen?

Perhaps my next lesson will be on what I like to call, "cleaning."

TGIF, people!

One door closed

I used to work at a place that drained my brain of all serotonin.  The upshot, though, was that I worked with some great people.  In the last couple of weeks, we've had some reasons to get together and celebrate some things.  As a result, I've been able to close this door of my life in the best possible way.

Here are some pics of great peeps behind this closed door:

Recent Events & Poem #2

I'm still in shock about the recent events regarding OBL.  I'm going to refrain from commentary as the details and socio-political implications are far above my paygrade.  On September 11th we were woken up in the middle of the night (b/c of where we lived at the time) by a phone call from my mom, asking if we were alright, if everything was alright, and we had no idea what she was talking about until she told us to turn on the news.  This Sunday, I was woken in the middle of the night by a text from my mom that said, "YEAH!  OBL IS DEAD!"  Interesting how things come full circle.

But I've been thinking about the families of those killed on 9/11 and their reactions to this.  It has me thinking about several Tim Keller sermons I've heard over the years.  He often reminds us not to turn penultimate things (good job, good marriage, good reputation) into ultimate things.  They are good, but they're not God. 

People who lost their loved ones, and really all of us in this country, have been waiting to see if we'd ever get him.  If a day would come that would definitively close the door - somewhat - on that tragedy.  And then it came.  And I started listening to interviews with victims of 9/11 and, though they were glad and relieved and vindicated and one step closer to closure, most of them also stressed that this is complicated, and that in the grand scheme of their lives, it doesn't actually change anything.

The Bible, God, and Tim Keller often warn us not to make our lives revolve around anything but Him.  If we revolve around money and get a billion dollars, it will not be enough.  If we revolve around finding a good spouse and we find one, we will crush them with the pressure of our expectations.  Nothing in the universe is big enough to fulfill us except Him.  And this is being proven to me in a small way by these families - it's very very good that he's gone.  But it's not enough to bring back the love they once had and to ease the pain of their loss.  It will never be enough.

And a follow up to "The Art of Losing."  Marilyn Hacker wrote a response poem that I also really enjoy.

From Orient Point

The art of living isn't hard to muster:
Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

unless they're in the here and now, and just her
willing largesse free-handed to a friend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster:

groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;
take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

to know she can afford what they will cost her
to keep until they're kept.  Till then, pretend
the art of living isn't hard to muster.

Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster
of pleasures.  Next time, don't go round the bend
when someone makes you promises.  Don't trust her

past where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust her
words to mean more to you than she'd intend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster.

You never had her, so you haven't lost her
like spare house keys.  Whatever she opens,
when someone makes you promises, don't.  Trust your
art; go on living: that's not hard to muster.

The Art of Losing

For a while I've been experiencing the art of losing and I have to say, I'm getting pretty good at it.  That's an accomplishment for Type A's, let me tell you.  And by losing, I mean voluntarily giving things up.  I don't mean misplacing items and frantically searching for them later - that is not me, for sure. 

I mean, opening my hands and watching things fall; realizing that I can sift through them and pick some up (or not) before walking away. 

Losing is indeed an art and it's not a disaster.  It reminds me of the poem, One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop.  I first read this poem in high school and have always found it amusing.  I get that the author is being cheeky and sardonic, but I love it and it seems to speak to me these days.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.