Maybe the phrase “self care” has a bit of an odious pop psych stink about it; but it’s really just a form of humility, which means treating yourself like you’re no more and no less precious to God than anyone else. That’s not only good and just for you, it’s good and just for everyone you love.
Read the rest at the Register.
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Behold: phonetic descriptions of annoying sounds teenagers make. Deadpan, dead on, drop dead hilarious.
Here’s the accompanying written analysis by James Harbeck, the fellow in this video from 2013.
To my parents and high school teachers: I’m very, very sorry.
To my kids: I love you, and YES, I’m laughing at you. Go ahead and give me that glottal stop with reduced mid central unrounded vowel followed by long glottal fricative. I can take it. I have four teenagers. I am made of steel.
Here’s how you do it. First, you decide to live in a place where the soil is 78% soccer ball-sized rocks with paltry little swaths of dirt in between. Then you crank the climate way down to supidsville, so it may be Memorial Day, but you’re still squinting wrathfully at the sky and thinking, “Yep, that’s definitely a snow cloud.” You consider burning the dog for fuel. Nothing personal; it just really, really hurts to pay for heating oil in May.
This in itself should make gardening miserable enough. But if you really want to reap sorrow and lamentations as you bring forth flowers into the world, then I cannot recommend highly enough the following technique.
Take it personally. All of it!
Above is a little diagram of one of my little flower beds, which also doubles neatly as a functional map of my psyche. Every single thing that grows tells you something about me, and all of it is stupid.
That lilac tree is a sehnsucht-laden bearer of my youthful memories of this other lilac tree we used to have, alas. I wait in agony for the blossoms to open so I can smell them, thinking all the time about how quickly they will fade, alas alas.
The day lilies come up on their own, and spread like crazy, and I have to rip them out to make way for other flowers, because life is like that. Not even flowers will be allowed to flourish where they will. Death will always have his portion, and I will be his agent. Sheesh, Death.
The purple bushy stuff and the white bushy stuff, I bought on clearance, where the heartless Home Depot generation stopped bothering to water it just because it had already bloomed for the season. Can you believe that? A nice, decent flower, with so much growth left in it, just shoved aside before it’s even fully passed. Just because a flower is forty-one years old and maybe has a double chin and big arms and can’t stay awake through movies, they stop watering it, and nobody even cards it at the liquor store anymore, but this is not right! It’s not right! It’s . . . it’s just not right.
[img attachment=”104044″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”purple thing” /]
The poppies, I bought out of rage. The only thing that would have made me happier is if they had cost five times as much, because that would be just like them. Freaking poppies. I have been trying to grow poppies all my life, because they are so lovely, and I’ve never gotten so much as a single glossy petal or even an inch or two of hairy, snakelike stem. So here I go, freaking buying freaking poppies, and I HOPE THEY ALL DIE. Freaking poppies. *sob*
The daisies, I dug up from another part of the yard and chunked into my garden because the cruel mower was headed for their sweet heads. If that isn’t just like a man, humph. You stick with me, daisies. We’ll start a book club together, you and me, and you can chip in for the rent once your candle business gets off the ground. I understand.
The roses, I picked up last year at Aldi because they were on sale. I don’t even like roses, but what could I do? They were on sale. And wouldn’t you know it, they survived the winter and they’re doing fine. Thanks a lot, Aldi. By the way, your three bean salad stinks. I rate it two beans at best.
The various plants marked “??” are things that I don’t dare to weed because I can never remember if they are anything or not, because I’m an idiot.
And then there’s this beauty:
[img attachment=”104043″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”orange thing” /]
Oh, yeah, this is going to be great, I can tell already. Huge masses of fragrant, glowing blossoms will definitely ignite the senses in the fall, kindling hope anew in hearts that were beginning to falter. Totally. Yeah, I have super high hopes that we’ll see a real turnaround with this particular item.
And one more thing: did you notice that none of this was grown from seed? That’s because I stink! I stink! I didn’t even smell the lilacs today, because I stink!
In conclusion: at least Google knows what I’m talking about.
[img attachment=”104046″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-05-24 at 11.29.56 AM” /]
Catholics are the original lovers of color — from stained glass windows to illuminated manuscripts, we’re way ahead of the curve. Now that coloring books for adults have become all the rage, let’s take a look at the products aimed specifically at Catholics of all ages. Here are a few that caught my eye:
BOOKS TO BUY
The artist Matthew Alderman has two new coloring books out: Feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady and A Feast of Saints.
[img attachment=”103895″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-05-12 at 6.33.58 PM” /]
These are printed only on one side. Alderman’s style is graceful and ornate, in the heraldic style. There are 23 pages of original art in each book.
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The amazing Daniel Mitsui has an adult coloring book of The Mysteries of the Rosary available for pre-order. It will be released in July.
[img attachment=”103900″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-05-23 at 10.55.29 AM” /]
Mitsui’s original art is intricate and meticulous, with influences of medieval illuminated art and Japanese art.
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Sense of the Sacred: A Coloring Book for Young Illuminators by Dominic de Souza also comes with an illuminated companion prayer book.
[img attachment=”103897″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-05-23 at 10.56.15 AM” /]
A second coloring book from Gracewatch Media, Living Sparks of God: Stories of Saints for Young Catholics to Color, will be out in less than two weeks.
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Holy Heroes offers offers four coloring books in cartoon style about the life of Jesus,
[img attachment=”103902″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-05-23 at 11.14.29 AM” /]
as well as downloads for coloring pages of John Paul II, St. Therese, and more.
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Good old Dover publishes an endless variety of coloring books, including Women of the Bible, Bible Stories, The Sistine Chapel, Noah’s Ark, and Popes.
[img attachment=”103898″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-05-23 at 11.09.24 AM” /]
They also make lovely stained glass mini and full-sized coloring books, which are printed on translucent paper. You can color on both sides, and then tear out the pages and display in them in the window, and they will shine like real stained glass. There are hundreds of secular titles, and also Psalms, Old Testament Scenes, Noah’s Ark, Angels, Nativity, Saints, The Life of Jesus, The Miracles of Jesus, and probably tons more that I haven’t found yet.
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There are also a good many Catholic coloring pages that you can print out, either for free or for a small fee.
FREE PRINTABLES
Catholic Viral shares 12 free printable coloring pages based on fine art — good stuff by Dominic de Souza, who does the pages for GraceWatch Media (see above).
Waltzing Matilda offers an astonishing array of free printable Catholic coloring pages of all kinds.
CatholicMom.com offers free printables (coloring pages and other activities). The quality of the art is not stupendous, but they are helpfully pegged to the weekly Mass readings.
Nancy of Do Small Things With Love offers 26 free Catholic coloring pages, one for each letter of the alphabet.
Paper Dali has a wide assortment of free printables with text, including some of my man Miguel Pro.
From St. John the Baptist in Front Royal, VA, a large assortment of printable coloring pages. Some of these are pretty basic, some are quite nice:
Pope Francis
Rosary
Stations of the Cross
Apostles’ Creed (English/Spanish)
Our Blessed Mother(English/Spanish)
Saints, Blesseds, and Clergy
Life of St. Patrick
Brown Scapular
All Other Free Catholic Coloring Pages
Stations of the Cross Coloring Booklet and Devotional for Children
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PRINTABLES FOR A FEE
The artist (and father) Daniel Mitsui asks a donation in return for printing his extraordinary hand-drawn images. (See also his upcoming book for sale, above.)
DoveTail Ink has an assortment of religious printables, reminiscent of zentangles, for a few dollars each at her Etsy shop.
For the Orthodox: a series of beautiful printables based on icons via Scribd. Scribd may charge a monthly fee for accessing downloads.
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What am I missing? If you know of a coloring book or coloring pages for sale or for download, please leave a link in the comments!
Another week survived! Here’s what we had:
SATURDAY
Grilled ham and pepper jack cheese, pickles, chips
[img attachment=”103716″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”ham and cheese” /]
Nothing to report. Ham and cheese never gets old. I mean, as a concept. Please do not eat old ham.
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SUNDAY
Chicken shawarma with white sauce, pita, and assorted vegetables
I live in fear that, because of my shortcomings as a descriptive writer, you’re not going to realize how important it is that you make shawarma.
[img attachment=”103717″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”shawarma” /]
And it is easy, especially if you make the sauce and marinate it the night before. Here’s the recipe from the NYT. I served it with pita bread, feta, three kinds of olives, tomatoes and cucumbers, and a white sauce: plain yogurt, lemon juice, tons of fresh garlic, fresh parsley, and a little mayo.
[img attachment=”103718″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”shawarma meal” /]
Eh? Eh? You’ll thank me, I promise!
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MONDAY
Hot dogs, beans, hot pretzels
Sadly, I did not take a photo of this meal, so you’ll just have to picture hot dogs in your mind. Which you already are, anyway. You and your filthy eastern ways.
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TUESDAY
Penne with sausage
[img attachment=”103719″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”penne” /]
I did take a picture. Betcha didn’t expect there to be so much penne and sausage in this dish of penne and sausage, did you? But there was!
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WEDNESDAY
Korean beef bowl, rice, pineapple
[img attachment=”103720″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”korean beef bowl” /]
Every time I make this recipe, I think, “Gee, this would be so much better if I were using an expensive cut of beef.” And then I notice that I’ve almost sprained my throat from eating this inferior version so quickly. It’s so good, so easy, so yummy. I had one of the kids grate fresh ginger and mince garlic while I was out, and I threw the rest together in a really short time. Adding fresh scallions really puts it over the top.
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THURSDAY
Chicken burgers, corn on the cob
The Aldi chicken burgers are really quite good — they are juicy and taste like actual meat. Chicken burgers with mayo make me think of Saturday evenings in college. The cook was gone, so the students would make chicken burgers, seafood salad, egg salad, and green salad. Right, Tiffany? Am I forgetting something? It was the perfect meal for people who were just staggering out of their dorms looking to recover from Friday’s hangover so they could get a new one in the works. It’s a good thing I went to a small Catholic liberal arts college, so I was insulated from worldly influences of young people from bad families, ha.
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FRIDAY
Today, we intend to have fancy ramen. I have fresh ginger and garlic, mushrooms, snow peas, and maybe some soft boiled eggs. That seems like a thing, right? It sounds good to me. I’m sure there will be a run on Corn Flakes.
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So, did anyone notice I kind of forgot about the sandwich of the week thing? I saved all the suggestions from last time, but I’m still looking for something that knocks my socks off. Bonus points if it’s cheap!
And yes, I did suddenly wake up before dawn, take some screen shots, and go back to sleep. It seemed important at the time.
[img attachment=”103626″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”vianney dobby” /]
All right, you impious pun monkeys. Whatcha got?
We hear that one cannot call oneself a true Catholic if one does not pray the rosary, if one does not have a particular devotion to Divine Mercy, if one doesn’t go to daily Mass, if one doesn’t have a certain number of children, if one chooses not to vote, if one does not tithe, if one does not attend rallies in support of the unborn, if one does not directly, personally interact with the poor. I even heard, recently, that if one didn’t know that Fulton Sheen used to have a TV show called “Life Is Worth Living,” then one might want to reassess which church one actually belongs to.
Well . . .
Read the rest at the Register.
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Image by Forsaken Fotos via Flickr (license)
This ^^ was yesterday.
Sweet Corrie was screaming because, monsters that we are, we tried to get her to eat her yogurt in her high chair, rather than on the couch. I’d include an audio clip, but I’m pretty sure you could hear her from where you are, wherever you are. The kid is loud. And angry. About everything! All the time! She goes completely berserk for no reason, and no one and nothing can get through to her when she’s having one of her fits. One minute, she’s chirpy and charming and full of fun, and the next minute, she’s flailing on the floor, writhing and drooling and thrashing around.
I’ll stand over to the side and let the geyser of unsolicited advice rush past.
Red Dye! GMOs! ADHD! Oppositional Defiance Disorder! Heavy metal poisoning! Failure to pray enough rosaries in utero! Kids these days! Parents these days! What are they putting in our water! What do you expect when you listen to David Bowie! My child loves her Tula wrap, and she never even wakes up, much less cries. But it has to be an original Tula, not one of those awful Target ones . . .
Feel better now? Thanks for the advice, but I already know what’s wrong with her.
She’s about to learn something. She’s almost 15 months old, and is a smart little thing, so I suspect she’s about to start putting two or three words together. Her tantrums may be incredibly painful, but they sure look familiar.
Whenever my kids — say, age 4 and under — are about to hit some new, exciting milestone, they turn into horrible little rage demons for a week or longer beforehand. It’s like their brains are on fire, and they don’t know what to do, so they try to kill everybody. It happens before they walk, before they talk, before they figure out anything big and new. As soon as they learn the new thing, they’re happy and calm and reachable again (more or less).
I have no idea if this is normal behavior for all children (I gave up reading baby books after the first baby, because they were making me crazy) but it sure is normal for my kids, and for some of my nieces and nephews, too. It’s still not pleasant, but at least we know that it’s a passing phase, and we’ll get something out of it at the end.
Another benefit: it gives me a little insight into what other moms are dealing with, when they have kids with special needs. I have several friends whose kids behave like this routinely — the irrational tantrums, the unpredictable rage. But it’s not a passing phase, and they won’t get any kind of reward, and it’s not due to any kind of bad parenting or poor diet choices. It’s something that the kid and the parents endure despite the best research and medical support and the most devoted parenting; and it’s a cross that’s heavy enough without strangers passing by and shaking their heads in disgust.
So the next time you see someone’s kid acting like a complete monster, may I suggest that you either just pass by quietly and say a prayer for everyone’s mental health — or, if it seems appropriate, murmur, “Hang in there, Mama!” Recall that Miss Manners, arbiter of etiquette, considers it “excruciatingly incorrect” to correct a stranger.
And if it’s your own kid who’s gone bonkers, don’t despair. Look, maybe there really is something wrong with your child. I’m not a diagnostician, and I have no way of knowing how you can tell the difference between normal and worrisome tantrums. The only thing I’m an expert in is my own kids; and so the only thing I can tell you, with complete confidence, is that it certainly can be normal for bright, healthy, well-loved, reasonably-disciplined children to turn into the Tasmanian Devil from time to time.
Now, if you have any other questions, please direct them to your pediatrician. I’ll be hiding in the bathroom, at least until the baby figures out how to pick the lock.
Looking for something new to accompany me on my treadmill, I looked up one of my old favorite albums from college: Post by Björk. It held up pretty well! Here’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”:
John Herreid liked the video and said,
My kids loved watching this music video when they were little. At some point one of them (Bertie, I think) asked if we could watch the “song video with Mommy in it” again and it took quite a while to unravel that he meant this one, with him assuming that it was Aletheia in the video.
It really does look a bit like his lovely wife, although I don’t know how prone she is to prancing around in tire stores.
The story made me remember how, when I was little, I assumed that the smiling woman in the red bonnet on the Sun-Maid Raisin box was my mother. Why not? It did look a bit like her. To a kid, who knows so very, very little about the world, it actually makes more sense to eat raisins that come from Mommy than raisins that come from some stranger. Why do we eat Strange Woman Raisins, anyway? Kids’ versions of reality aren’t necessarily stranger or sillier than reality; it’s just that adults are used to the way things are.
When I was in kindergarten, Olivia Newton-John’s “Hopelessly Devoted To You” was on the radio. My father worked at the Vocational Techincal College, known as the “Vo-Tech.” So naturally, I assumed it was a song about one’s dedication to one’s job, where one would “Hold the seedy Vo-Tech to you.”
Now you tell one. What secret celebrities are lurking in your family tree? Is Mr. Clean your Uncle Rick? Maybe one of the Knights of Columbus in your parish moonlights on the Quaker Oats box? I love these stories. Kids need the world to make sense, so they make it make sense.
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Photo by David Prasad via Flickr (license)
Sara Mujica of Danbury, CT is seventeen and pregnant. A pretty common story. What is unusual about her, at least in the U.S., is that she has Zika virus. She caught it in Honduras, where she travelled to visit her boyfriend. She started showing symptoms of the disease just after she found out she was pregnant.
Mujica, who is in her first trimester, has started a GoFundMe account to cover any medical costs if her baby is born with the profound birth defects that may come with Zika. She says:
I have Decided to keep my Baby , Because it’s what God has given to me & I am taking Full Responsibility Of MY Actions & I do NOT believe in Abortion so I would never do that . Thank you so much . The Funds That I Receive, Will be used on All Medical Needs For My Baby & Things My Baby May Need.. Thank You So Much Once Again, God Bless You All !
A lot Of People Are Wondering What I Would Do If My Baby Came Out Normal , Well I Would Donate The Money To People In Need !
The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking sprang into action and declared that Mujica is an opportunist, a liar, a cheat, a fraudster, a hypocrite, and of course a slut and a whore. They note that she shouldn’t have been having sex, she should have been using contraception, she should have been in school, she shouldn’t have a boyfriend in another country, she shouldn’t have come home again, she shouldn’t have believed her doctors who told her at age 15 that she was infertile, and she shouldn’t assume that her baby will be born with birth defects.
Most of all, she should get an abortion. She must get an abortion. They could easily forgive her for all her missteps, as long as she makes the only responsible choice now. It’s wrong not to, for her sake (she’s only 17!), for the baby’s sake (he might have microcephaly!) and most of all, for the sake of society (THERE’S MONEY INVOLVED).
There is another choice besides giving birth. If she’s so worried that there will be something wrong with the baby she shouldn’t have made in the first place, she should just unmake it. On the GoFundMe page comments:
Lilith Jade (with 76 favorites): “You’re being selfish and opportunistic. You should abort the fetus before it becomes another burden on society. Also if you’re fine with premarital sex then you can’t use religion as an excuse not to abort.”
Diane Pressly (60 favorites): “You are a selfish attention whore. Shame on you. If you were a real mom and loved your child at all, you wouldn’t put an innocent life through what’s ahead. Begging people for money to pay for your poor choices just makes a bad situation worse. So sad.”
Is Mujica some kind of fraudster? I have no idea. Maybe she’s lying about all kinds of things. Maybe she already knew she was pregnant and went to Honduras anyway. Maybe the baby will turn out healthy and she’ll spend the money on sassy fairy tattoos and ill-conceived business ventures. People are stupid and irresponsible and impulsive even after strangers have been kind to them. This is nothing new.
But here’s something else that’s as old as humanity: as soon as death is an option, it becomes the only responsible option. Once death is one possible choice, it looks like the only choice. That’s what kind of thing death is. It is a devourer. It is never satisfied. As long as there’s another victim to offer, the living will be eager to make that sacrifice, hoping to appease death to save their own lives.
What are these commenters really saying, with their anger toward this girl they’ve never met? They’re saying, “I’m not a burden. I’m not irresponsible. I and my family, we’re not going to suffer, because we’re not hypocrites. We’re legal. We’re healthy. We’re responsible. We’re pure. We’re not like her and her unauthorized baby. We deserve to live.”
No one wants to be pro-death, exactly. When there’s a baby involved, we sweeten the deal and say, “Just start over. Maybe you’ll get a better baby next time.” When there’s an old person involved, we say, “He had his chance. Now he needs to move over and let other people enjoy their lives.” We insist on death for some in favor of the living, as if death in all its current popular forms — abortion or euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide — will improve life for the multitudes. We argue that one person’s death makes life better for other people. Choosing death, we argue, is a choice for freedom, for health, for happiness, for life itself — if not for the victim, then for someone else, someone who deserves it more.
Ask the 80-year-old who knows very well that he is tedious, he is smelly, and he is expensive, and his children wish the old fool would croak already and stop gobbling up their inheritance. Ask the married, stable, loving parents of a baby boy whose brain is growing out the roof of his mouth. Ask the woman in the wheelchair, the sexual abuse victim, the burdensome ones. Ask them if a stranger has ever suggested it might be better if they just, you know, die.
As if we weren’t all burdensome. As if we weren’t all disabled. As if we weren’t all needy, all victims, all expensive beyond all reason. As if we don’t all come at a price.
But we don’t want to face what we are. We want to see ourselves as worthy, as indisputably worthwhile. We’re different! We deserve to be here, unlike those others, those living errors, those heavy lives who are dragging us down. And so, as soon as death is a possibility for a stranger, we spring up and tell him that he has no right to continue living. We line our avenues with trees, so that our conquerors may march in the shade. Let death take what it has coming to it, we say, and maybe it will leave the rest of us alone.
But death will not be appeased. It will not rest. It is hungry. It does not stand back and say, “I’ve taken my share; now the rest of you living can abide in peace.” Death is an indiscriminate invader, always looking to expand its territory.
Nothing can appease death, but it can be disarmed. One thing only can accomplish this, and that is self-sacrifice. Not the sacrifice of other lives. Never the sacrifice of other lives.
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image: screenshot of gif by Nina Paley
