this station will not resume its regularly scheduled programming until ...

two feet of grading is completed. (literally, two stacked high feet of paper).

broadcast signal cuts to...

~snow~

Addison's Birthday

this morning jaelyn, lynn & i surrounded addison's bed and woke him up singing happy birthday.

we got through the whole song twice -- inches from his face -- and he was still laying there, hands folded neatly behind his head theoretically sound asleep.

at the end of chorus two, lynn said, "who's going to open one of his presents first thing this morning?"

no twitching or changing in the sleeping face, but his hand quickly thumped his own chest. Birthday song? ho-hum. Birthday presents? Well that's a whole different proposition.

the picture above is from LAST year's celebration -- the waalkes kids, jae, & leah surround the birthday hero.

below is a more recent photo (in action this summer).

though most birthday celebrations will be postponed til next week (because of jaelyn's severe strep -- and probable infectiousness of all of us), we're still celebrating Add's entry into our world!

He's a crazy, funny, smart guy, and we're the lucky ones...



peace~

limin

my friend / student ryan writes about liminality and limin (one of my favorite topics) and asks in today's blog, whether:


Does everyone always feel they are at an in-between stage?

Neither here nor there? I guess people my age do at least.

Isn’t life just one big state of limin anyways?

I have this idea that people RESIST the feeling of betweenness because its unsettling. That most of people's fealty to doctrine, institutions, bueracracy, parties, stereotypes & locales is rooted in a growing or lurking sense of fear that...

THINGS ARE CHANGING.

and they may or may not be able to keep up or MATTER in the world-that's-coming.

I think there's a certain truth in being able to embrace the danger and chaos of betweeness that's rare to find in people. Particularly in people who have the opportunity to opt out of that danger -- that betweeness -- that neither/nor -- both/and....

how dare i go up for tenure in the face of these comments?

how dare i own a mortgage?

and why buy life insurance at all?

good questions. i keep asking them too. i'll tell you this, it's a heck of alot easier to be a prophet when your retirement account is steadily growing than it was to be naked and wandering through the streets of jerusalem with an oxen yoke on your back.

unsettled in my peace ~

part of my ongoing delight / bewilderment with the kitschy pop culture....

the 12 days of kitschmas

...

i've been trying to be attuned to waiting -- in order to be fully present in the advent season.

as soon as i started to try to attend to the times that i had to wait, i realized something about my life: its very religious.

somehow or another, the guy (me) who labelled watches "institutional handcuffs" and stubbornly refused to believe in time -- lives in a world where his life is so carefully organized that not only does he always know what to expect next. But he also always seems to be able to orchestrate that next whatever right now.

i'm not sure what's wrong with that yet, but I'm sure that something is.

so we were putting up the christmas tree last night and we have this family tradition that on the night we put up our christmas tree -- we order pizza. so we did.

i happened to glance out the window and noticed that the pizza delivery minivan (go figure!) was parked on everhard road -- the road in front of our house. Those of you who have visited know that NO ONE parks on the side of everhard. There's no place to park, but there he was, turning on his hazards, traffic backing up behind him before he could even open the door.

Apparently he had second thoughts, because his hazards went off, the car edged forward. And he disappeared.

But I had been waiting for him at the door. I was eager to receive the pizza, hand him the check and let him run back out to his car before he caused a major pileup in front of our house. But what happened now? Had he pulled just a little bit forward? Should I stay? Wait?

I paced from window to window for more than ten minutes. Ten minutes, when you're convinced that something is IMMINENT, is a long time. I walked into the living room and watched Lynn pulling out boxes of ornaments, listened to J & A make up elaborate stories between nativity characters involved in some custody battle (seriously. that was the jist of their playful invention). I should help Lynn. I should set the table with paperware. I should wait by the door, just in case he comes zipping up. I should...

Where is he!?

And I realize that I'm waiting. So I look around inside my interior world to see what waiting is like. It's like: annoyance. It's like: eagerness. It's like: imbalance, the moment just before a forward fall, but after you've committed too far to the lean...only oddly enough, it feels like you're stuck in that precarious, uncontrollable not this/not that. Almost/Not Quite.

Waiting doesn't feel mostly hopeful (even though I am -- Pizza as Messiah seems a potent metaphor at the moment). Waiting doesn't feel spiritual or good. It feels like C'Mon Already.

Addison these days asks about what's going to happen next all the time. He wants to know "How we get home?" "How we get there?"' "How you coming back?" "How I get that thing?" etc....

So I try to be honest and forthright as I leave and I give him an answer in terms of hours or occasionally days. His answer is so standard, that I can say it along with him.

"No. No. TWO minutes. You be back in TWO minutes."

And now Lynn and I are resigned -- we say, you're right -- in Addison time, we will be back in two minutes. But two mintes. You can't get anything done that fast (I feel like telling him). But on the other hand -- he can't imagine a world that's much bigger than the emotional terrain of exactly two minutes.

where did he learn that anyway?

peace~