It’s easy for me to think I’m backwards sometimes.

I woke up at 6:12 this morning.  Without an alarm.  6:12 AM is my GET-OUT-OF-BED-NOW-OR-YOU-WILL-BE-LATE-TO-WORK-AND-NOT-SHOWERED moment; the point from which there is no return to hygiene or punctuality.  But I have no work this morning.  Christmas break started at 3:15 PM yesterday.  My Darth Vadar alarm was completely silent, the back-up alarm on my phone resting peacefully on the windowsill where I left it charging overnight.

I had decided the night before that I was going to sleep in, to enjoy the benefit of a few days of hard won freedom.  But it was not to be so (even thought out of spite I chose to stay in bed until almost 8).  This seems to be something that keeps coming up in my life lately: the more I try to do something, the less it happens.

The more I tell myself “today I will not get frustrated with my students” the easier I lose my temper over what turns out to be rather insignificant transgressions.  The more I tell myself “I will STOP complaining about everyone around me and how they are so wrong for not doing things the way I would do them” the more examples of not-me incompetence present themselves to my judgement.  The more determined I am to skip dessert the quicker the box of cookies disappears.  The laundry pile only grows as underwear becomes less plentiful.  It is as if I say “I will do this” then the opposite happens.

This used to be the prominent feature of my life.  I would sort-of wake up, either hung-over or in some cases still drunk, and say with all the conviction one can have when unable to life one’s own head the I would never ever drink that much again.  I would berate myself for the “last beer:” the drink I happened to be consuming when my body finally gave up and I either puked or passed out.  It’s such an easy thing to tell yourself: “If I had just stopped before that last beer I wouldn’t feel so awful today.” As if the dozen beers beforehand had NOTHING to do with the situation.  And as night approached all my resolution of the mid-morning would fade, because of course this time I would refuse the “last beer.”  I wasn’t going to drink as much as I had the night before, I was just having one or two while hanging out with friends.  Unsurprisingly, it was never just one or two, and the whole thing repeated the next day.

Happily, thanks to God’s intervention, AA, friends, and hard work, I haven’t gone through this depressing little ritual with alcohol in over a year.

But, if I am saying to myself that a certain thing will happen and the opposite occurs, this should tell me that something isn’t in right order in my life.  I’m thinking that this has something to do with my receptivity.

A week and a half ago I went to a reflection night at my church.  Fr. Jedi (that is what I call him because he ALWAYS knows what you’re thinking) gave a talk about the ability to receive.  He was, as is his way, very straightforward, simply stating that “as women you have lost the capacity to receive.”  I sat bolt upright.  “What, how dare you say that!  You be the one fielding complaints all day from unendingly dependent 8-year-olds and then come back to an apartment strewn with paper and shoes and then try and prepare for it all over again the next day and see just how much more in this world you think you can RECEIVE!”  Or so I said in my head.  Luckily I (mentally) piped down long enough to hear the follow up:

“How can you give Christ’s love if you do not first receive it?”

I had no comeback for that.  Okay, in all honesty, my early comeback was pretty weak since I was (mentally) directing it at a priest.  And so I sat, and listened, and thought.  And I kept thinking.  And the more I thought the more the concept of reception reared it’s ugly head.  On Sunday my yoga teacher started off by saying “we are going to work today on our openness, our capacity to receive the world.”  I wanted to scream, because I swear Little Miss Yogi and Fr. Jedi are totally in cohoots, they always end up reinforcing each other.  But I couldn’t very well jump up and say “no, I will not, I refuse to work on receiving.”  So I spent the hour laying on the ground, forcing myself not to cover my torso with my arms.  And I really did have to force myself.  By that evening when I attended Mass I almost burst into tears that I have become incapable of taking communion on my tongue.  I received on the tongue every week from the age of 8 until 18 (my home parish doesn’t allow anything else) and now I CAN’T stop myself from lifting up my hands and putting myself between the priest and Christ.

As happens when a certain concept gets pointed out to you, not only are you more preceptive to it’s existence, you are more attuned to your own reactions.  And over the last week and half every time I see where receiving is part of my life I immediately reject it.  My answer is to cross my arms over my body, to close my mouth, to pretend I don’t hear, to remove myself from the situation.

So I guess I have to open myself to being open.  Fuckballs.

I’m not entirely sure out it works out that because I am walling myself up that the opposite of what I say I’m going to do is what ends up happening.  (Funny enough, I don’t have it all figured out yet.)  But I would be seriously stupid to say that the disordered portion of my life has nothing to do with the disordered outcomes I’m experiencing.  But I’m going to try something.  I’m going home to Portland tomorrow to spend the week with my family.  While I am physically distant from the perpetual stresses of my life (which is mostly my work) I am also going to try taking some time apart from demanding “this is how I shall be today damn it!”  Not to say abandoning personal improvement, but rather admitting that how I’m doing things isn’t working.  I’m going to try to be quiet, to be open, to receive Christ’s love.

It’ll be Good Friday soon enough, I think I’m going to try and let it be Christmas when it actually is Christmas.

(1 Year, 3 Months, and 1 Days Sober)

Today I got in an argument with an 18-year-old over the merits of Harry Potter.  Two days ago I saw The Hobbit.

What do these two facts have to do with each other, besides the fact that I am a nerd?

Today at recess I was talking with two of the other lower school teachers and a substitute teacher about young adult literature.  The substitute is a young woman (18) who graduated from our school last year.  She’s a writer and was talking about how she reads a lot of young adult fiction because that is what she wants to write.  The conversation turned to the arguable merits of various popular franchises (Twilight, Hunger Games) and eventually this young lady brought up Harry Potter, of which she is NOT a fan.

Both of the other teachers laughed, both knowing my deep deep love for Harry and his many stories.  After saying that I could no longer be a part of the conversation I proceeded to argue with this young woman that the messages in HP are not mixed (“it’s all about sacrificing for what is greater than yourself!”) and that Harry’s rash decisions always have consequences (“when Harry doesn’t listen and acts out on his own people die!”) and then pretty much laughed at her when she said that Harry is whiney (“um, have you met teenagers?”).  Not my finest moments.

This conversation really upset me.  More than just my general if-you-disagree-with-me-you-must-be-an-idiot type of upset-ness.  Why?  Why did it matter to me that someone I barely know doesn’t have the same taste as me?  She was making fair points, like that portraying continual flouting of authority isn’t good behavior modeling for young people. I can grant that, even if I think that it misses a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority.  But I was vexed that it didn’t occur to her that she might be wrong.

And that was what I realized later really upset me.  In a small way I was envious of her confidence.  Don’t get me wrong, I am free with my opinions.  It wasn’t that I wished I could speak my mind like she did.  It was more that I got the impression of a simplicity in her outlook that seemed a reflection of her youth.  It wasn’t that she lacked insight, or intelligence, or perception.  It was more that I sensed that intractable attitude of correctness untempered by experience.  I remember 10 years ago when it had never occurred to me just how wrong I could be, and I stated my case with no room for revision.  Before prolonged unemployment, before a morning in tenants court, before friends’ weddings, before friends’ babies, before tax forms, before a funeral for a friend younger than me, before alcoholism, before recovery, before 10 years of a life both painful and joyous I scoffed at the idea that adulthood was harder than I thought it would be.  I dismissed easily the fact that the world is complicated, fallen and demanding of both judgment and compassion.  I too would have demanded that the hero of a novel be virtuous, that art should be a representation of the world as it SHOULD be rather than a truthful reflection of the entanglements of a fallen world.  Art should be true and beautiful and lead the soul to God, but how can it be truthful if it is without flaw?

At 18 I could not have watched  a production of Richard II and hated Richard the whole time for being a total ass-hat but still weep at his death.  I can now.

Which leads me to The Hobbit.

Thorin Oakenshield was my first love.

He was brave and loyal and determined.  And he died.  He had my whole heart.

I was five.  Maybe six.

My father read The Hobbit to me when I was a child.  It is the first book I remember hearing.  I would lie in my parents bed and he would read to me before I went to sleep.  My whole way of looking at the world was shaped by that book.  I knew from The Hobbit that no matter how ordinary I thought I was that there was an adventure for me.  I knew that I couldn’t predict from the way they entered it, or the way they seemed at first, how someone would change me life.  I knew that being smart was more important than being strong.  I knew that you should stay on the path.  I knew that spiders were the most evil things ever.

And I learned that the hero does not (necessarily) live.

I cried so much when Thorin died that I think it’s is why my mother insisted that no one read me the end of books.

And when my father died these were the memories that I held onto.  Not just memories of plot points, character development, and thematic juxtaposition between the longing for home and the call of adventure.  So much more than that.  The memory of being safe and loved.  The memory of being special.  I’m the fifth of six children and my father worked full time as well as took night classes, so time just for me was rare and precious.  The memory of being given a gift that death could not tarnish.

So on Monday when Emily and I went to see The Hobbit I cried through most of it with all the love that never leaves my heart, even though it’s not a very good movie and doesn’t do any kind of justice to the book.  I cried because in a small way it was like being able to hug my father, even if just in my imagination.

Reading is a relationship.  It cannot be that as a reader you are strictly receiving.  You have to give as well.  Real literature will form you, it will change your thinking, deepen your empathy, enrich your imagination.  But your experience of reading should change the literature as well.

It can’t just be your head, it has to be your heart too.

At least, I think so.

(1 Year, 2 Months, and 29 Days Sober)

Welcome to the awkward world of Andrea.

When I was 15 I couldn’t get a boy to look at me.  Now, a great deal of this was because I dressed terribly and screamed at anyone who tried to talk to me.  (I was rather unpleasant.)  But even so, girls with “problems” never seemed to have trouble getting boyfriends, so I appeared (in my own mind) to be a special case of nothing-special.  Even as I soften up in college guys always found one of my friends more attractive and interesting.  I was apparently born with a sign saying “Nothing to See Here, Move Along.”

Now at 29 I am looking seriously at my future, at getting married, having children.  Friends are suggesting setting me up with men who are in their mid-late 30s, which I have no problem with.  I consider myself a woman, with a serious life and a semi-mature attitude towards the world.

AND STUPID 15 YEAR OLD BOYS KEEP TRYING TO FLIRT WITH ME!

Over the last couple months every week or so some high-schooler who thinks far too highly of his powers of seduction tires to chat me up.  This has been happening on the bus, on the street, in stores.

The latest incident was on Thursday night and there was witness, much to my humiliation.  My friend and I went to see Lincoln.  She went up to the window and bought her ticket with no problem.  I went to the neighboring window and it took me three times as long to get my ticket.  When I approached the young man leaned forward, put on his best smile, and proceeded to ask me not only why I was seeing Lincoln, but why I wasn’t seeing The Hobbit (“You look like a fantasy girl to me”), as well as what kind of movies I prefer (“so what is your genre?) and finally telling me “I’m not gonna let you leave until you fess up and tell me what you’re into.”  So intent was he on divining my entertainment proclivities that I had to remind him to actually give me my ticket to the movie I was trying to see.  When I was finally free from the pint-sized Casanova I turned to see my friend giving me a questioning look and when she asked me why it took so long I exclaimed in frustrated voice “because stupid boys think it’s ok to flirt with me even though I’m clearly twice their age!”

She burst out laughing.  She told me that it kind of looked like something strange was going on.  I proceeded to tell her about intrusion of pipsqueak admirers into my life lately and she continued to laugh.  It is funny after all.

We both got quite a good chuckle (ok, she did) when it happened AGAIN at the concession stand.  All I wanted was Diet Coke.  What I got was Coke, a come-on, and an opportunity to provide the comic relief for my friend.  Apparently I was so striking that my change fell off the counter.  Ok, no big deal, at least not to me.  But apparently my disregard for the importance of this moment was seen as an opening for under-age amorous intentions.  In possibly the cheesiest voice I’ve ever heard he asked me if I’d like to file a complaint with the management (“if service isn’t up to standard I can have you speak to my boss”) and when I declined he reached to cover my hand while thanking me for my understanding.  I am not kidding.  This exchange happened, straight-from-reality-tv-pick-up-line included.

“Wow Andrea, you must really be looking good tonight.” My friend managed to control her laughter until we had at least turned away from this poor misguided boy.  Let’s be clear: I wasn’t looking anything but haggard.  I had been up since 4:45 AM to go to a doctor’s appointment.  I had taught all day with no break.  I was wearing no make-up, my hair was pulled back under a beanie, and black hoodie doesn’t show a hint of skin.  Now, even not put together for a board meeting, I think it’s fairly clear that I am not a teenager, and have no been for a while.  I don’t think I should have to say “if you can’t vote don’t apply” but apparently I do.

I am not interested in what is so wrong with the universe that this keeps happening.  Nor do I have any interest in correcting these young men by pointing out the hilarious awfulness of their approach.  That is for their peers to do.  Therefore what I want to know is: aren’t there any teenage girls for the employes to flirt with going to the movies anymore?

(1 Year, 2 Months, 25 Days Sober)

My Mom and I were discussing a movie she had seen recently:

“It wasn’t bad.  The acting was very good.  But you know how movies are, there just isn’t enough suffering.  You have to earn a happy ending.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering lately.  In fact, I’m always thinking about suffering.  Recently though I keep asking myself why everyone is so afraid of feeling bad.  Why can’t we face ANYTHING anymore without someone trying to “protect” us?

I was perplexed by my co-worker yesterday when we were discussing a job one of the parents is interviewing for.  The job seems well suited to the woman in particular, and I wish her all the best.  It is a position in the crisis pregnancy field, which I know from friends can be very stressful and emotionally demanding.  My co-worker said to me “oh I just don’t want her to take a job where she’ll be stressed out.  She’s my friend.”

I literally couldn’t follow the logic.  What on earth does being someone’s friend have to do with how stressful their job is?  Is the measure of being a friend how much you wish for your friend’s life to be easy?  Do you not want them to take a stressful job because you don’t think they can live up to the responsibility and therefore you’re weighing the prudence of telling them you think they should look in a field more compatible with their skills?  Are you afraid of, as her friend, having to listen to endless complaining about how stressed out she is?

The simplest, and most generous, answer is that the possibility of her friend experiencing difficulty makes my co-worker sad.  But that only leads me to my first question: why?  I’m not saying that REAL suffering is inconsequential, that when faced with serious trials, be they individual, familial, societal or human, that we should not be moved, should not desire to help, to give of ourselves for another person.  But I can’t help but see that we have lost that distinction between difficulty and suffering, and that we have become so averse to anything even remotely unpleasant we have completely abandoned the idea that through suffering we are redeemed.

I take no joy when my loved ones are going through rough times, or are upset.  But I have absolutely no patience for people who seem to think they were born with a “get out of pain free” card.  I have no patience with myself when I start adopting this attitude, as I do every so often, whining about how things are so hard for me and why did I have to get the fuzzy end of the lollypop?  (Please see my crocodile tears and self-pity cake.)

My priest keeps saying over and over again that God can make something good out of any circumstances if we just let him.  And maybe that is what bothers me so much about a general attitude of suffering-escapism; it’s not letting God do his job.  By trying so hard to never let anything bad happen we are trying to prevent the situations where God can show us how to grow in love and virtue.  As if we deep down don’t trust that he can make a silk purse out of sow’s ear, so we keep trying to dress the pig up as a different animal.  (Okay, I think that metaphor got away from me.)  It’s kind of “well, I’m not going to let God test me, because what if HE fails?”

My senior year of college my heart was terribly broken.  (I do not at all like using the passive voice for that sentence, but my emotional situation was mostly my fault, so I also don’t like to say “a man broke my heart.”)  Right before graduation it became clear that my romantic hopes were not to be fulfilled by the man I loved.  I called my mom crying, pouring out the whole story, sure that she would tell me I was being silly and that it wasn’t worth crying over.  She told me to cry.  She sat on the phone with me for over an hour while I just cried.  For my mother tears are reserved for death of a loved one, mass with the Pope, Shakespeare, and Beethoven; tears are only appropriate for expressing the highest things in life.  So I was a bit surprised that she was willing to indulge my sobbing over a man who I loved but loved a different woman.  It wasn’t because she saw my little drama as some singular tragedy evocative of a deep human truth.  Nope, not at all.  It was that she recognized that I was suffering, and that my suffering must be faced, endured, and eventually rejoiced in.  To do that I needed to cry, to not try to push my heartbreak into the background by “being strong” and pretending “it’s no big deal.”  My mother knew I would be a better person if I accepted that I was hurt and learned out to deal with that hurt.

I did both.  It took a long time, and it wasn’t at all in the way I expected.  Or for that matter, in the way my mother expected.  But it worked out in the way God saw as for the best, and the more time has passed, the more for the best it becomes.  If my mother had tried to “protect” me, to distract me and coddle me and behave as if there was nothing for me to learn from my pain, then there wouldn’t have been that open space for God to shape my life.  I would be an entirely different person, and I can’t say that I think I would be happier.  To be spared momentary (or a few-months-long) discomfort at the expense of the wisdom, maturity, humility, empathy, and love that I gained by allowing God’s will just doesn’t seem worth it at all to me.

Suffering isn’t just how we become better people.  It is how we become fuller people, it’s how we live a more real and whole life.  So why are we spending out entire lives trying to avoid it?

(1 Year, 2 Months, 21 Days Sober)

Today I came to a conclusion of epic importance.

And it is:

Giving up sugar is not my path to heaven.

By the last period today I was a total crazy bitch.  I was trying to give up on candy and desserts and overly sugary crap for Advent.  To try and work more on myself and to sooth myself less with cupcakes.  It’s this thing where I am trying to identify the patterns of avoidance that I fall into and addressing them.  I totally gorge on sweets to make myself feel better when I think I’m sad or stressed or put upon.  And it really wasn’t going too badly.  I was thinking I was pretty virtuous and while I thought I was a little cranky, it didn’t seem too bad.

Then as the day went on the minor annoyances got more and more major.  I have one student that no matter what spare-time activity (something to do if you finish before the rest of the class) I offer, she wants to do something different.  Usually I try to be flexible with her, but today I just couldn’t.  I couldn’t put up with her need to be different for the sake of being treated differently.  The same went for two girls who made up a story to get girls in the 4th grade in trouble.  I couldn’t for a second see their side of it, ask myself why they would be doing something to blatantly attention seeking.  Slowly but surely I was worn down until I was almost in tears because there was a huge miscommunication as to whether they needed to change for gym or not.  When I went down to the office while my students were in gym the last period I looked at the left over St. Nicholas candy, and said “fuck it, I really need that.”  And two pieces later I felt a lot less like screaming.

So it seems that I need a minimal amount of sugar because without any I start crying and raging at the drop of a hat.

That’s when I realized that while I am called to be holy, giving up entirely any sort of baked good or chocolate goodie is not a part of that call.  It makes me so less than holy. And I honestly feel like it is was the sugar.  Overall I had a pretty good week.  I had two parent meetings that were not horrid.  (I have very low standards for parent meetings.) My kids were really well behaved at the ballet yesterday and seemed to really enjoy it.  I went to a meeting on Tuesday for the first time in months and was just so happy that I did.  Looking at things, nothing really to say “that, there, that was unacceptable.”  And yet, but the end of today I just wanted to tear my hair out.

So I do have to be more moderate in my appetites.  And I do need to stop playing a shell game of distraction when I feel less than awesome.  But I do not need to stop sugaring.

(1 Year, 2 Months and 17 Days Sober)

I just got back from seeing the last Twilight movie with some friends.

I think I enjoyed it way more than I should have.

Let me explain.

I had a really long and frustrating week.  I was impatient with my students.  I came home every night and just crawled into bed, refusing to accept that the rest of the world existed.  When I knew I was being irrational I could step back and remove myself from the situation, but I couldn’t get ahead of the irrational.  I looked at my pile of grading growing bigger and bigger but felt no will to tackle it.

But more than anything I felt very lonely.  Lonely in the sense that I didn’t want to have to reach out and tell someone that I was low, I wanted there to already be someone there who would notice that I needed some cheering up and would make that his job to do.  It’s always a little awkward to call someone and say “hey I just feel off and kind of need someone to talk to.”  I am much better about doing that than I was a year and 3 months ago.  (Then I couldn’t do that at all)  But I would like to have someone in my life who would call me to find out how my day was without my prompting.  My natural reaction is to make fun of myself for thinking something as cliched as “I wish I had a boyfriend,” but I don’t wish I had a boyfriend.  I wish I loved someone enough to do for him what I want him to do for me.

By the time yesterday morning rolled around I wasn’t looking forward to coming home after work to more of the same that had been going on all week.  So when Alissa called and invited me to an art show and to go shopping at Target afterwards I jumped on it, even though I was worried I wouldn’t be very good company.  The show was amazing and I bought a really beautiful piece that will look fantastic above my desk when I finally save up the money to frame it.  I picked up a shit ton of pencils at Target because my students keep wandering off with the class pencils.  And like always I had a blast hanging out with Alissa, talking about politics and listening to adorable stories of her children’s exploits.

I did something out of the ordinary last night.  Something way out of my comfort zone. I asked a friend of mine, who was also at the art show, if she had any single male friends she thought would be a good fit for me.  My friend is always in matchmaking mode (she is hilarious) and immediately she started telling me all about a friend of hers. I have only ever once before asked any of my friends to set me up with someone and I never followed up with her about it.  At any point before yesterday I would have been so embarrassed to even bring it up.  Any romantic hopes I’ve had have either been very very private conversations with people I trust implicitly, or vague third person theory debates.  By simply talking to me friend, asking if she knew anyone, I took a step towards making myself more present in my own life.  To connecting my current actions to my future hopes.

And maybe that is why I didn’t feel particularly distracted today.  I didn’t have random snippets of discontent floating around the back of my mind all day.  When I met some girlfriends for the movie I wasn’t half absorbed with my ongoing work problems or my lack of motivation for exercising.  I was engaged with my friends and willing to admit that I was enjoying an awesomely crappy movie with them.

I came home happy with my life.

It’s easy for me to get caught up in what I don’t have (perfect hair, much money, easy social graces) and to forget that over the last year I have developed a bit of self-reliance in asking for the help that I need.  When I have those opportunities to see just how fun and giving and lovely my friends are I wonder how I am able to forget all the help that is out there for me.  I don’t think that it’s that I forget the help is there.  I forget that I have to ask for it.  And I forget that asking will sometimes be hard.

(1 Year, 2 Months, 11 Days Sober