Weighty issues

It's not that I'm officially overweight. It's just that I want to nip the middle age spread in the bud. When I was younger, whenever I heard someone say how hard it is to keep off weight after 40, I always thought "that won't be me!" But here I am, counting points, jogging again, yearning to fit into my size 8 jeans. (I once wore size 6, but that was a long time ago after some guy broke up with me.) At 5' 10", I'll never be "petite." But "lanky" would be nice. Or "Svelte". My husband once called me "svelte" (God bless him), and then we started wondering what "svelte" actually means. So we looked it up and it means "slender and graceful, suave and polished." I really love my husband.

I'm trying to watch what I eat, exercise more, and not think about it too much. Because if you think about it too much, you get obsessed and crazy and you waste your life contemplating food and thighs and the size of your jeans.

And every once in awhile something happens to give you perspective. Like when I went out for sushi with my friend, Sara, a few months before she died of breast cancer. I had just started one of my many diets. I picked her up at Starbucks, where she had been reading. I hadn't seen her in a few months, and was surprised at her frailty. She was in lots of pain, and shuffled to the car. We drove to the sushi restaurant and sat down and ordered. She could barely eat, but she did manage to get down a few pieces of sushi. "look, i did pretty well!" She told me. I just stared at her too-full plate. All of the sudden I felt shame -- that I had been spending my time wishing I was thinner. Sara had lost at least 30 pounds. I felt like the picture of health, and all of the sudden I was thankful for my few extra pounds.

Anne Lammot says, "When you're 80, you're not going to wish you had spent more time keeping your thighs in shape." Amen and amen. Now if I could just remember that everytime I put on my size 10 jeans.

Barak Obama for President

Okay, I admit, Oprah Winfrey isn't perfect...but I have to agree with her on this one. The Chicago Sun Times reported today that she wants Barak Obama to be president.

Let me start out by saying that I don't think politics will save the world. The Religious Right and even the Religious Left like Jim Wallis' "Call to Renewal" movement believe we can usher in the Kingdom of God through Politics and legislation. I believe it can only be done through God transforming our hearts and lives. So should we be putting so much of our energy into an imperfect political system, or rather loving our neighbors as ourselves?

Still, I applaud the Call to Renewal movement for stirring up the discussion regarding religion and politics. Not all Christians are Republican...and I think Barak Obama is a good example of a Christian who's a liberal. While I may be biased, since I'm a Chicagoan, I do think Obama has some interesting things to say on the topic -- he's thoughtful, deep, and a man of faith. He addressed The Call to Renewal Conference recently. You can read his speech here:

http://www.barackobama.com/2006/06/28/call_to_renewal.php

the heart of the matter

I went to see my therapist a few weeks ago. My therapist married David and me, so I'm having a hard time talking about the "bumps in the road" because I'm afraid he'll be kicking himself -- "Why did you agree to marry them? Big mistake!"

Not that David and I are having trouble. We flew through the first year of marriage. In fact, we were concerned that we weren't fighting more. Are we doing something wrong? We asked ourselves. I think it's really because we're well suited for each other, we're older so we've already worked through a lot of things, we're older so we know how to communicate and resolve conflict, and we're just old...so we don't have the energy to fight. But seriously, I do say a prayer of thanks whever I hear about my friends' knock-down-drag-out fights with their spouses. Maybe we're just quietly sweeping things under the rug. But I don't think so. I think we just have a way of making each other laugh when we fight. I often find our fights so ridiculous that I start snickering, and then he breaks down laughing, and that's pretty much the end of it.

But I was concerned about how it's hard to talk about our faith. I hear my friends say how they talk to their husbands for hours about a sermon, or about a God-book they're reading. David and I aren't like that. For me, I've been on the journey for so long, I think my faith, at this point, is too deep for words. How do you describe a God who is indescribable? How do you explain the miracles you've experience in your life without sounding ridiculous and trite? And for David, I think his faith, born out of deep pain and hitting rock bottom, is too fresh and raw and new that he also doesn't have words for it, either. I deliberately chose someone who wasn't steeped in the Evangelical tradition -- because I'm a recovering Evangelical myself and I can't bear to hear the cliches, the pat answers, the certain language the skews faith in one way that seems stale and staid to me. Believe me, I dated enough men who had all of the right things to say, but didn't have much else to show for for their faith.

I've longed for a new language. For a new way of talking about God. My counselor explained that he thinks we're both aiming for an authentic faith, and that our hearts are experiencing that connection, even if our words aren't yet. I like that. It's like when we sit in Mass and both of us start crying because of the words of Christ in a song we're singing: "I am for you. I am for you. I am for you, You are mine." YOU ARE MINE. For two people who were single for so long and didn't feel loved...hearing that God is for us, no matter what, is a healing balm. We don't have to discuss it. Our tears say it all.

Or, when we went to the funeral of my 41-year-old friend, Sara, who died of breast cancer in July. We celebrated the life of someone who was seeking God until the end, when her body finally gave out from the tumors eating away at her liver. We were so moved by the memorial service, the hope, the sadness, the inspiration to live like Sara did....that we couldn't say anything. I started talking about it, but the tears came and I couldn't talk and David leaned over the restaurant table, took my hand, and said "I know." And I knew he did know. He so often knows what I'm thinking, feeling, because he's thinking and feeling the same things. It's spooky, but cool. To be known. To have a spiritual communion that is often too deep for words. To have someone say "I know" without you even having to articulate what you're feeling. To seek an authentic relationship with God that is so beyond all of the cliches, and the rationalization. That's what it means to me to have a soulmate.

In search of the perfect cafe

Since David and I both work at home, I've been on the hunt for a perfect coffee shop to be used as a "second office". Starbucks is out. They charge for internet access and it's a revolving door -- too distracting. Although "MY" Starbucks on Main street in Evanston has the coolest baristas -- John and Jake, who are 20-something cuties. They have my drink -- an iced grande no water Americano -- ready before I'm even to the cash register. I have crushes on both of them. When someone knows your "drink" before you even have to order it, you know you've made too many visits to Starbucks. Occassionally I'll order a Pumpkin Spiced Latte in the fall, or some other hot drink. Whenever I do, I think John and Jake get a little nervous. They think they have me all figured out and then ,boom, i order a hot drink and they get rattled. So I love the place. It's not filled with smug yuppie types, like some Starbucks. The people in my Starbucks are cool. But still, I can't get any work done there.

I often go to what David and I call "The Bad Coffee Cafe" in Evanston. He kept telling me that it had bad coffee, and I didn't believe him. But then one day I went there to work. The atmosphere is great for working. A tall bar with comfy stools lines the windows. It's great for laptop use. They have free internet. And there's a little self-employed community there. I see the same people all the time -- one woman is working on her dissertation, I think. Another guy is a computer software salesman. There's a homeless guy who sits drinking coffee in the back and everyone is nice to him. He's just one of the community. I like that. But, the coffee is BAD! The first time I ordered an iced Americano, and added my milk and half and half, and took a sip, it tasted like mud. That's the only way I can describe it. How can you mess up coffee? Is something wrong with their esspresso machine? Is it the brand of coffee? How they grind the beans? David and I speculate...but we haven't yet figured it out. So each time I go there I have to grin and bear the coffee, because I get a lot done.

Today I'm sitting in a cafe in Roger's Park called "Charmers". It is....charming. Cool tables, art deco wall sculpures, and really good coffee. I'm sitting at a corner table in a comfy chair. The only problem is the stereo speaker is right above my head, so I'm having a hard time concentrating. But, hey, good coffee, cool decor, comfy chair. Close. Maybe I'll give it a few more chances and see if this is the real deal. The perfect home for my second office. Heck...anything's better than sitting in a gray cubicle in corporate America. So i'll deal with bad coffee or too-loud music anytime.

little miss sunshine

If you're planning on seeing Little Miss Sunshine, it's worth the 9 bucks. I went by myself the other night while David was volunteering at a youth center. Yes, it was one of the few nights alone since I've been married. I didn't know what to do with myself. It was sad. So I went to the mall, hoping not to run into anyone I knew because I wasn't wearing any makeup and hadn't washed my hair (ahh, the life of a freelancer). I bought my small popcorn and diet coke, snuck into the dark theater, and sat in a middle seat. I was wanting an escape, some inspiration, something. Maybe I was feeling sad because I was alone. Or maybe it was just my darned depression that seems to pop up from time to time. whatever it was, I was hoping little miss sunshine would at least let me escape my troubled mind for a few hours. It takes a lot for me to laugh. Little Miss Sunshine made me laugh, and is an interesting commentary on our success-driven culture. It made me laugh. It made me think. And I managed to escape the mall without seeing anyone I knew. It turned out to be a pretty darned good evening, even though i was solo.

leaving corporate america

This is my second month away from corporate america, where I lost my soul for five years somewhere in the land of beige cubicles. So I made some money, piled up a lump of cash in my 401K, wrote some cool brochures for my portfolio, and made what I think are life-long friends (photo of our writing team above) but was it worth it? In the meantime I lost a sense of who I am. I stopped writing about things that were really important to me. Instead it was all about products and branding and coverages. Sure, it was moving words around on paper, so my writing didn't suffer too much. It was my soul that suffered. And, yes, in the end my writing suffers. Because what am I to write about if I have lost my soul? So the past two months have been about getting in touch with who I am again. In some ways it's excruciating, because I have to deal with the fact of 5 years of lost time.

So I am back to writing about things I care about. But what do I even care about anymore? I'm starting at square one. It's a new day. I can't look back. I'm forging ahead.

It's always been a struggle, as a writer, to figure out how to make money....to provide for myself, and to write about things I care about. It's always the corporate jobs that suck the life out of you that pay the most. The life-giving assignments typically pay crap. So if anyone out there has figured it out, let me know.

on death and dying

After a long blogging break, I'm finally feeling the urge to write again. We'll see how long it lasts.

Pain tends to prompt me to put pen to paper. Or, more accurately, fingers to the keyboard. This time it's about losing friends to breast cancer -- two within two months. As I've observed these friends battle this disease, I've been struck by how difficult it has been. For my friend Leslie, it was a 4-year search to find God in the struggle. So many times she doubted God or couldn't make sense of it all. But in the end she grew more and more peaceful. I saw her a few days before her death and as the cancer made her mind grow foggy, she became childlike and she would point to things in the room the rest of us couldn't see. It was as if she was in the passageway between two worlds...moving toward something so much better. I found a strange comfort in that. It made me less afraid to die, because she was so peaceful after 4 years of fear, doubt, and pain.


My other friend, Sara, died this past Friday. She was married 10 months ago, and she borrowed my wedding shoes. When I dropped off the shoes we sat in her living room and talked . She had no hair -- whole brain radiation for the treatment of her brain tumors had killed off her remaining hair follicles. She would never grow hair on her head again. But she didn't care. She looked beautiful that day. For Sara, the cancer had helped her see God more clearly...about how joy and suffering go hand-in-hand, and her wedding was a huge celebration for the joy one can experience in the midst of pain. The last few months of her life there was a large tumor that moved from her liver toward her lungs. Her liver started failing and fluids made her legs and torso swell. Still, she told her husband that even now, she wanted to become more Christlike. Surely she was identifying with Christ in her suffering. Let this cup pass from me, I'm sure she thought in those last excruciating months. But I'm also confident she was saying "not my will, but yours."

Ever since my mother's death almost 6 years ago, I have been struck by the resurrection that happens after death. Death is conquered...not only for Leslie and Sara, but for us as well. "In the midst of ruin, there treasures will be found", says the poet Rumi. And author Nicholas Woltersdorff says ""I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see." Our grief changes us. Gives us an urgency for life that we wouldn't have otherwise. Teaches us compassion. Give us life. I'm not sure I like the price, but I am looking for resurrection stories now, in the lives of my friends who were close to Sara and Leslie.