rivka

Some of you will have already seen this on my Facebook, but I had to share it here as well.

One of Alex's nursery school teachers occasionally has the kids tell her stories for her blog. She posted (with our permission) Alex's account of the universe yesterday. I really like it.

"The universe is made of tiny round cells and the magic is how our cells join together. There is nothing in the space between the cells. Then they bump together and get stuck together and it continues until they are tiny animals like jellyfish and plants.

The first people on Earth were made from apes. I came from my mom. My mom came from my grandmother. My grandmother came from my great grandmother. My great grandmother came from my great great grandmother and so it is for all of them. But my great great great great great great grandmother was an ape. But actually it’s really disgusting. We come from sperm.

I was born from my mom’s tummy in 2005. It felt… strange. I used to be in the darkness there and then I came out and it was so bright I screamed. I wanted to come back into the dark because I thought it was the light. I don’t want to go back now because I don’t need to be in the dark anymore.

When you die you just stay dead, you return to the dark. My babysitter thinks that when you die you become the trees or something. I think when you’re dead, you’re dead.

In the darkness of death, there are lots of stuff. My opinion is, that in the darkness of death everything is possible. It means you can do every single thing. But in the light of being alive you can only do a few things.

We are made of the stuff of the universe because we’re made of cells and cells are part of the universe. All cells are the same. One last thing I’m telling of, is that there is lots and lots of stuff.

My foot is starting to hurt.”

(She walks away)

I quoted the whole thing, which is not good blog etiquette, but I wanted to have a record of it in case she ever takes her blog down. Click through anyway to read other fascinating stories, like "The Love of Hearts When the Dinosaurs Were Made."

I really wonder how she elicits material like this from the kids. I recognize some of the source material from Alex's story - we've been reading a fantastic picture book about human evolution called Our Family Tree - but the metaphysical cast she put on it really startles me.

Just because I need some joy in my life today:

We got home from Memphis last night. I'm in the office - the only day I'm coming in this week - and I must admit I'm kind of enjoying the peace and quiet.

I finally snapped at Michael's stepmother. As we were packing up to go she kept very persistently trying to get me to take Michael's bronzed baby shoes. I smiled and said nice things the first several times. "Oh, we'll definitely want them eventually, but I don't want to take them away from Bill." "Yes, but I really think Bill likes to have a reminder of Michael's babyhood around." She kept insisting: "Oh, don't worry about that. We've got plenty of reminders of Michael around." (Like the picture she hung back behind a cabinet, I guess.)

So finally I just looked at her without smiling and said flatly: "Betty, if you want them out of the house, then yes, we will take them."

So of course she backpedalled. And had the nerve to try this one out: "You just insulted me, saying that I want them out of the house." Uh huh.

Michael's father came in to talk with us about it. He said that he wouldn't take any amount of money for those baby shoes, but that we could have them if we wanted them. Although he would worry about them getting broken in transit. Anyway, he just wanted to make sure that we understood that they weren't trying to get rid of them. I felt bad because I really try not to put him in the middle, but.

Our flights home were beautifully uneventful. There didn't seem to be any increase in security at the main screening lines, and when I got pulled for secondary screening (I always do, because my artificial hip sets of the metal detector) the TSA who screened me seemed perfectly relaxed and easygoing. They had a TSA at the gate pulling some people aside for random pat-downs, but it was the most ludicrous security theater imaginable: he only stopped men, didn't stop anyone who had a ton of stuff to carry (presumably so he wouldn't inconvenience them too much), and only patted them down above the waist. He would've found someone carrying a gun in a shoulder holster, but that's about it.

Our kids are beautiful travelers. When I see other people dealing with screaming tantrums on a plane, I feel very lucky.

I did learn an important lesson about Colin and traveling, though. (Did I know this when Alex was his age and then I forgot it? Maybe so.) Yesterday I gave him solid food for breakfast at my in-laws' house, and then I nursed him throughout the day as we traveled home. He got frantically unhappy in the car on the way home from the airport; I nursed him again and he cheered up, so I decided to give him some solids even though it was already 8pm. And that boy ate: a full slice of deli cheese, three handfuls of Cheerios, a jar of baby food (chicken-apple compote, one of the higher-calorie options), and at least a quarter-cup of mango bits. He was starving. I think of solids as being kind of optional to his diet, replaceable by nursing, but it's now obvious to me that at this point they really aren't.

I have a big important meeting in an hour and a half, and I am nervous. To give you an idea of how important a meeting it is, I am wearing a blazer to work - something I do about twice a year. Some of you will be coming along in the form of a silver otter pin which you chipped in to give me at alt.polycon 12, so, thanks. It's nice to feel like my friends will be with me.

Now that I have a webcam on my work computer, I can show you what I look like when I'm trying to appear professional! Here I am:

So the church Christmas pageant has three Sunday morning rehearsals followed by an evening dress rehearsal the night before Christmas Eve. Only this year we got about 20 inches of snow the day before the last Sunday morning rehearsal, which meant that it didn't happen. Instead, on Wednesday night a bunch of excited hyper pre-Christmas kids showed up for the first rehearsal with costumes (which weren't done, incidentally), the first rehearsal in the sanctuary (which always leads to insane aisle-running), and the first rehearsal without scripts (which was supposed to have happened that missed Sunday).

They had done a surprisingly good job of learning their lines, but everything else about the rehearsal was pretty awful. It's hard to nail down a lot of the blocking before you have the sanctuary to work with. The kids were pretty crazy. I honestly left the rehearsal expecting the performance to be a disaster.

Christmas Eve I was so flustered that we were parking outside the church when I realized that I was still wearing a pair of jeans and a grungy brown wool hoodie over a faded red T-shirt. "I forgot to get dressed!" I wailed to Michael. He looked down at his own jeans and sweater. "...So did I." It was 5pm. I had told the kids to arrive no later than 5:10. I was planning to be onstage for much of the pageant.

We dashed in carrying the last few props and an eleven pound ham. Threw the ham in the oven in the church kitchen and asked someone who happened to be in the kitchen to put the brown sugar glaze on it at 6:30. I took both kids with me to the sanctuary while Michael ran home to change and bring my clothes. The majority of the kids didn't show up until sometime after 5:30. We had no chance to rehearse, but we did go over my list of Important Last-Minute Reminders: Everyone speak LOUDLY and SLOWLY. Face the audience when you speak. When the Herdmans are being bad kids, they shouldn't actually make any physical contact. When the Herdmans are in the pageant-within-a-pageant, they stop goofing off and take it seriously. Angels and shepherds need to be quiet when they're onstage.

Also in this time period, one of the mothers went to town on the Herdmans' faces with a mascara wand to make them appropriately grimy and smudgy. They were all thrilled to be at church in their oldest and most awful clothes. I did not tell them how adorable they were, because they would've taken it the wrong way.

Ten minutes before the service was supposed to start I herded all the kids out of the chancel to the robing room. No, they were too loud to be there. To the little entryway behind the robing room. Still too loud. To the upstairs hall. I tried to engage them in conversation about Christmas to stop them from shouting and chasing each other. Michael brought me Colin to nurse at the last minute before church. I kept on chatting with the kids on my end of the hall until I looked over and saw a few of them at the other end of the hall looking at me like this: O.O O.O O.O "It's just how babies eat, guys," I said and hoped that I wouldn't be hearing from their mothers later on.

6:05. I marched the kids down the stairs, through the entry, through the robing room, into the chancel, and down the steps to the front pew. There was a welcome and a chalice lighting and then we were on.

And the pageant went beautifully.

We had some luck with the play-within-a-play format, because I could stay on stage the whole time (as a parent helping out the pageant director, very realistic) and move people into place if necessary. But the kids needed very little help. They said their lines beautifully and with feeling. They were mostly in the right place at the right time. They did not burn down the church when I let some of them hold candles. They looked fantastic, even the ones who were in totally makeshift last-minute costumes. And they had the pageant spirit, just beautifully.

Afterward during their shaky and confused bows acceberskoorb swooped down on me with a bouquet of white roses and, um, something else pretty. I don't know flowers.

And then we went to the Christmas Eve potluck. Last year there wasn't enough food and Michael didn't get any dinner. (That's partly why we brought a ham this year.) This year there was plenty, and we feasted on turkey and ham and smoked gouda mac and cheese and horseradish scalloped potatoes and tzimmes and all kinds of miscellaneous side dishes and desserts. And Alex actually ate food instead of just running around being hysterically excited. (Colin had a jar of pureed turkey-apple-cranberry holiday dinner, because I fall for marketing tricks like that.)

And we went home and put the kids to bed and hauled presents out of hiding places and wrapped a few things and hung candy canes on the tree from Santa and I lost one of Colin's stocking presents. And poured ourselves glasses of red wine and curled up on the couch to watch the first-season West Wing Christmas episode, "In Excelsis Deo," except that Colin kept waking up and finally we went to bed without finishing it.

Christmas Eve was good. The pageant was wonderful. We have amazing, amazing kids at our church. Is it too early to start worrying about what story we'll do next year?

Many years ago, when I first graduated from college, I worked as a research assistant at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. I was paid the princely sum of $15,000 a year, which I'll admit seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. For the year that I held that job prior to going away to grad school, I was officially an Oregon state employee. Then I moved away.

Today I received in the mail a packet from the Oregon Public Employee Retirement System. They were writing to let me know that my membership in PERS is being terminated because it's been ten years since five years after I stopped being an employee of the state of Oregon. If I send in a form, they'll send me my accumulated PERS retirement benefits: $1511.61.

They have to take out 20% in federal taxes, so the actual check I get will be more like $1200. But that's $1200 of money I had absolutely no idea was coming to me. Merry Christmas a day early!

(I should totally have a chalice-in-a-Santa-hat icon for this post, but I don't. Alas.)

So Garrison Keillor wrote a cranky and mean-spirited column for Salon in which, I guess, he tried to horn in on Bill O'Reilly's lucrative and attention-grabbing "War on Christmas" routine. Except that because Keillor operates in a different cultural millieu than O'Reilly does, he decides to call out Unitarian-Universalists and Jews:

You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit (where I discovered that "Silent Night" has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God) [...]

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't.

Christmas is a Christian holiday -- if you're not in the club, then buzz off.

As they say elsewhere on the web, in a turn of phrase so useful that it quickly became part of my regular vocabulary: "I wish I had a thousand eyes - I'd roll them all." Because let's take a look at the shocking way that UUs have butchered the carol "Silent Night." You might want to send small children out of the room for this one, and pregnant women and people with heart conditions should exercise caution before clicking this link to #251 in the UU hymnal.

The UU blogosphere has been all over this one, of course. I particularly like the thoughtful and comprehensive response by Rev. Cynthia Landrum, which sums it up thusly:

On the other hand, Keillor is falling prey to a major fallacy that says, "the way I remember things from my own childhood is the way things always have been and always should be." His personal history has become the authoritative version of what Christmas should be, and what hymns should be.

But, of course, neither Christmas nor hymnody is like that.

The funny thing is that the version of "Silent Night" Keillor is so vigorously defended is a not-very-faithful English translation of a German carol, "Stille Nacht." A UU musician posted a literal translation of the German carol. The scansion wouldn't work to actually sing it, but it has some beautifully intimate mother-infant imagery:

Silent night, holy night
All is sleeping, alone watches
Only the close, most holy couple.
Blessed boy in curly hair,
Sleep in heavenly peace!
Sleep in heavenly peace!

The literal translation from the German also has a fantastic line in the third verse: Son of God, oh how laughs Love out of your divine mouth.

Is Garrison Keillor singing about Love being laughed from the infant Jesus' mouth? No? Then he can shut the hell up about how awful it is when UUs change the words to hymns.

As far as Keillor's anti-Semitism: I don't even know where to start when it comes to those horrible Jews, ruining Christmas for the poor misunderstood outnumbered Christians by, I guess, holding a gun to their heads and forcing them to like "The Christmas Song." No, wait! No Christian likes that song, right? The reason it gets played ad nauseam during the Christmas season is because Jews control the media. Now it becomes clear to me. As I said: I wish I had a thousand eyes - I'd roll them all.

I do not need this T-shirt.

Just reminding myself.

In about five minutes I have a meeting that I am extremely nervous about.

So I'm posting this fabulous video, via acceberskoorb's facebook, of a talented ASL signer performing Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains."



You don't need to know sign to think this is cool - I only know a tiny bit. He does a fantastic job of using facial expressions and body language to convey the nuances of the song. And if you're a language geek, you'll want to click on the "more info" section on the side to see a literal translation of the signs matched up against the English lyrics.

We were seven hours on the road coming home from Williamsburg.

Seven hours. Much of it in stop-and-go traffic jams. With a four-and-a-half year old (who was actually incredibly good) and a nine-month-old.

Kill. Me. Now.