Lysistrata's Daughter

I have always struggled with doubt. I wish that belief and trust came easily to me, but they do not. I think the first time I was aware of my doubts about Christianity, I was nine years old, weeping to my parents that I didn't have a 'personal relationship with Jesus', that hallmark of Protestant salvation and goodness. As a young adult, I discovered Catholicism, then Orthodoxy, and learned to pray the prayers of the church, relieved that I didn't have to make it all up myself anymore. As a Seventh-day Adventist, I hated to pray. I didn't know how to go about addressing the Almighty. I was told to just talk to God as if He was a friend. Of course, God is a friend, but I didn't feel right chatting away about my crushes or worries about what classes to take. It felt stilted and forced. In college, a Catholic friend taught me how to pray the Rosary, and I loved it. I could simply relax into the prayers honed and polished by generations before me. Nev...

My son-- you have marched to the beat of your own heart since you first woke up to the world Too often you will be told Too often you have been told To get in line march with the others-- head bowed, mind asleep But you haven't And I pray you won't ever lose the insistent pound of your own rhythm I say, my son march on dance on run on with your head up your heart open your mind alive My lion heart-- make your path fierce, fearless, untamed.

God is risen from the dead He died so we wouldn’t have to die nobody wanted Him to die but He had to so His people could live He loved us so very much! The day He was nailed to the Cross was a very sad day, but the next day was a surprise! God wasn’t in His tomb. I feel just amazed at Lev's meditation on the Paschal troparion, which he sang to The Padre tonight at bedtime. It seems that Orthodoxy is deeply and naturally part of him.

When I was 20, I spent the summer in Berkeley, learning Greek. My cousin and I sublet an apartment on the border of Berkeley and Oakland. He was learning Chinese. We both studied like demented ants, snarfing our Ramen noodle or cold cereal dinners, while learning flash cards or completing grammar exercises. The neighborhood we lived in, as I said, was on the border of Berkeley and Oakland. It was part students like us, part long-time Bay Area denizens, and part crazy homeless people. By the end of the summer, we were a little freaked out. Our sublet was a tiny one-bedroom built in the 40's and remodeled in the 60's. Yum. It also smelled mildew-y in the kitchen. We took everything out of the cupboard under the sink, trying to eliminate whatever it was that was stinking. We looked with a flashlight to see if the pipes were loose and to try to locate a drip. After a particularly long sojourn struggling with our stinky sink, my cousin marched into the living room, where I ...

I was watching YouTube tonight and playing a free online version of Bejeweled. (Don't laugh. I used to stay up til all hours reading really smart articles, whose arguments I have mostly forgotten.) Because it was a free game, I had to put up with advertisements. What was being advertised, you ask? Fish sticks, oddly enough. A blonde girl, maybe four years old, accosts her mother with a generic box of minced, minced fish sticks and demands, in sarcastic disbelief, "Have you ever seen a minced fish?" Does the mother inform her that she can keep a civil tongue in her head? Does the mother suggest that the child make a polite request regarding the fish sticks rather than this snotty rhetorical questioning? Or inform the child that her options are to eat what's been made or help herself to bread and butter? Apparently not. In the next scene, we see Mommy dearest placing before the tow-headed angel a plate of Van deKamp's fish sticks. Does the little girl ...

Awhile back, I read Sandra Tsing Loh's article about her divorce. It is certainly not the best thing Loh has ever done. The article is a litany of all the hardships of modern, two-income motherhood, which, evidently, led to an affair and ultimately a divorce. It's a bit whiny for my taste, as well as poorly argued (three examples in her own life, plus a sprinkling of statistics does not an argument make). One of my main problems with the article is with the contention that the ultimate failure of her marriage is down to the fact that she didn't want to 'work' on her marriage, which prescription is found on the pages of women's magazines. Call it what you will--date night, rekindling the spark, pretending for a few hours that we don't have children. Nothing wrong with any of that, but I don't think the presence or absence of date night is what sinks a marriage. More fundamentally, I take issue with the idea of 'work'. As Loh conceives it, i...

So, I'm doing this home school thing. It's hard. Really, really hard. I do remember how to do basic addition and how to sound out words. That's not the hard part. What's hard is that I get to deal with Mr. A all day long, every day. He is an exhausting child. The level of concentration it takes for me to stay a few steps ahead of him, teach him, get him dressed and try to keep his temper directed in a positive way AND to make sure everyone gets fed and dishes and clothes are occasionally washed AND take care of Vuk (as the new baby is being Web-christened; pronounced to rhyme with 'kook' and Serbian for wolf, because this kid can howl ) rivals the concentration it took for me to pass my master's exams. I'm really tired, all the time. I also try to exercise a bit, so as not to lose myself in a fat duvet, and read a bit, because Thomas the Tank Engine, while lovely if you're five, is not so great if you're 28. And in the midst of this strug...