Due

My friend Elizabeth is due today. I wasn't able to call her over the weekend, and I feel kind of bad because I'm hoping she'll not go into labor until I get a chance to talk to her and wish her a proper "good luck". It's not fair for me to feel this way. I should be hoping she gets it out as soon as possible, especially since I know she is firmly convinced she's going to be late. I was firmly convinced I would be a week early, and I was. The end of pregnancy is just not fun. Still, I want to talk to her, like the selfish well-wisher I am.

So, I'm gonna go home early today so I can call her. Jeez, I wish I could visit her. It's one of the hard things about being here-- stuff happens back home and I don't get to be there. My friends Cindy and Heather got married-- I missed that. And I feel in my gut like people understand, but at the same time, I feel like, I don't know, like I should be faulted for choosing a lifestyle that takes me so far (literally and figuratively) from my peeps.

So I can't go visit. Yet. Instead, I'm going to ditch work a bit early, and call. I can do that.

I went to the conference yesterday by the group Women in Church and Society that I joined at 8th Day a while back. Michael and I both went. I was expecting it to be a pretty neat day, but didn't actually expect any actions to come out of it, although I knew that was the ultimate goal. The small group I was in, which focused on economics, wound up committing ourselves to working toward the decriminalization of prostitution-- at least on the part of the exploited women. Instead of prison, we think the women should be directed into education and training programs to help them overcome the social and economic issues that led them into the sex industry to begin with. I was amazed when people, almost immediately, began stepping forward with organizations, groups, individuals, and legislation that I should meet with, learn about, and support. Did a bit more research into it today. I'll keep you posted.

This morning, I met with Julian from the Resurrection Project. He works on immigration issues, and is specifically focussing right now on the legislation that's up. He's going to be coming to Youth Group on Wednesday to talk to the teens.

Also, this lady from Pilsen Neighbors has informed me that the Fiesta del Sol meetings have started up again. So we'll see about getting the youth group involved there as well.

And off of all of the above subjects, here's a quote I just found. It's from an 8th Day pamphlet published around Christmas this past year called "New Year Resolutions". This quote is from John Dear from an article called "Peace on Earth" Means "No More War"

"The story goes that when the noviolent Jesus was born into abject poverty to homeless refugees on the outskirts of a brutal empire, angels appeared in the sky to impoverished shepherds singing, "Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth!" That child grew up to become, in Ghandhi's words, "the greatest nonviolent resister in the history of the world," and was subsequently executed by the empire for his insistence on justice."

Su Casa, mi casa

I started at Su Casa this week. I'm going to be there one day a week until Easter, then two days a week. But this week was special, so even though it's still before Easter, I was there two days.

Oh-ho, you're thinking. There she goes compromising her principles.

Well, sue me.

There were two groups in Chicago with the Claretians this week, doing Spring Break Urban Plunge sort of things. John D was leading one of them, and they happened to be at Su Casa the day I'm typically downtown with him, so I just skipped on over to Su Casa. With the spring break group, we spent most of the day cleaning and gardening. Gardening in the snow. flurries.

Then, after the group left, Dan and I worked with the kids, tutoring and playing and what-not. One of the boys went into fits trying to avoid doing homework. It was something else. I went back there yesterday. When he first saw me, his face lit up, but then he remembered he was supposed to glare, and he did. He said, "i'm not going to do my homework, and you can't make me." I said, "I'm not going to make you do something you don't want to do." And then he grinned and said, "Actually, I'm going to do my homework today. And I'm not going to be angry about it." And he was perfectly pleasant the rest of the afternoon.

You shouldn't have favorites, but you know I always dig the troubled kids, and I have a feeling he's gonna be a favorite of mine.

I'm very excited about working at this place.

In other news, my stone has arrived. It's one half my body weight in alabaster. I was home when it arrived. The delivery guy had it balanced precariously on the railing outside. I squealed with delight when I saw it, and said, "Thank you so much. I know you hate this package." He laughed and said, "It's not that I hate it. I'm just glad to be rid of it."

He carried it in. I opened it up, but left it on the living room floor for my roommates to marvel at. Britton said, "What's up with the rock on the floor?" He hadn't connected its appearance to my recent preparations for stone carving.

I carried the stone downstairs to my banker later that night, and was pleased (and surprised) that I was able to do so. Now I stare at it, and try to make out what I'm going to carve it into. I have this great love for the stone already-- like I've already spent a year carving it into something, like it's already my first masterpiece (because I plan on having dozens of masterpieces, not the standard one).

Anyway, things is good.

My very eventful weekend.

This lady, Claire, is staying at our house. A few months ago, one of the Claretians, Fr. Wayne, asked us if she could for a couple of nights while she looked for a place to stay. We said sure. But then, upon returning from some overseas mission trip, she kind of got whooping cough. So her move was delayed. But she's here now, whooping cough free (or at least mostly so-- she still has some lingering effects) and looking for a place to stay.

She came in Thursday night. Thursday morning, while I was getting ready for work, Fr. Wayne called and while we were talking it occurred to me that this lady was coming to stay with us and the house was a mess. A mess enough even to bother me, which takes a lot. And we'd not prepared sheets or anything... it was just no good.

Luckily, last week at work, I'd been bored to all hell anyway, with very little to do. And extreme boredom freed me up to spend the day getting the house ready, and doing what work I did have to do on my home computer. At home. I told the receptionists that if anyone needed me, they could just call my house. No problem.

And that's how I spent my Thursday.

That afternoon, just as people started arriving home from work, I got a phonecall from this lady, who introduced herself, although I didn't catch her name. She said that her mother had just died, and asked me to play my guitar at her funeral on Saturday morning. I told her I really wasn't a proper musician, and only knew how to play the one church song on guitar. She said she wanted Ave Maria. I said I was sure that JP could do that. He's the music director, a proper musician, and probably the person she wanted to talk to. She asked if I would still play. I said the song I know how to play is 'How Can I Keep From Singing?' She said I could play that.

When I told my community that night, they laughed. Not in an 'oh, that's so funny' sort of way, but more in a 'why didn't you just say no?' sort of way. But the lady's mother died. She asked me to sing and I didn't have any real reason not to, so of course I said yes. But it was the song that was the issue. It's kind of... cheerful. Not exactly a funeral dirge. I was getting nervous. Maybe she didn't know what the song was and I was going to ruin her mother's funeral.

On Friday, I called JP. I asked him if he though the song would be appropriate, and mentioned that when I played it slowly, it did sound kind of somber. He said it would be fine. It's a lovely song. And as I've mentioned, JP is a proper musician, and I trust his judgement. I felt better about it.

Changing the subject of life, fifteen minutes later, Michael and I left the 8th Day office to go to the big immigration rally four blocks away. It was 2:00 when we left. The rally was scheduled to start at 2:00. We went last year. About a thousand people were there-- filled Federal Plaza. The anarchist group, Anti-Racist Action was there. So were the neonazis. Say what you will about the anarchists, but they kept the Neonazis from storming the rally when they first showed up. The police were a little slower realizing they'd appeared, and it was the ARA that actually kept them and their swastica flags away from the immigrants.

At any rate, despite hearing reports that there would be 40 to 100,000 people present, Michael and I kept invisioning last year's rally. So we were stunned and elated when 100,000 people actually did show up. There'd been a march at 12:00, and Britton later told us that he saw a helicopter shot of the crowd on the news. There was a point at which the entire two miles of the march was full of people, wall to wall blocking the streets. It took Michael and I an hour and a half to walk four blocks to the rally. It was over by the time most people got there, because so very many people turned out to support immigrant rights. I'll dedicate some future post to immigrant issues, but suffice it to say right now-- these are human beings we're talking about, and they do an awful lot of very good things for our country even without some of the very basic rights that us citizens really take for granted. And it's not right that we turn our backs on them or treat them like criminals. They're good people.

After the rally, Michael and I putzed around for awhile, got some coffee, and then headed back to 8th Day. During that walk back, we ran into a few people we know from Holy Cross, including Yesica from HOPE Program, and two of my teens, Tony and Cristina. Tony was all beaten up. He'd gotten jumped by one of the gangs, right in front of Cristina, a few days previous. It's going on three years that he's been out of gang life, but some things are just very difficult to escape. He's had a rough time regardless recently. His sister died from an aneurism a couple months back, and in the last month, two of his friends were killed. Tony is such a very good person that it kills me when bad things happen to him, and bad things always seem to happen to him. But he always says, "It's okay." And he doesn't complain, and he doesn't open up except to those people he really trusts. It took me a year to get him to say hello to me. He'd always hang in the background when adults were around because he didn't want his bad reputation rubbing off on Cristina. He didn't want her to be associated with him at all, even though they were dating. After he started saying hi to me, it was another half year before he told me anything about himself. In all honesty, I still feel honored when he speaks to me.

They had to go after awhile-- Cristina's nephew was hopping around doing a pee-pee dance and Walgreens wouldn't let her mom take him into the bathroom.

Anyway, after that, Michael and I headed over to this place called Howl at the Moon, where Ellen had won a Happy Hour for 100 of her closest friends. The deal was, you get in free before 7, you get two drinks for 50 cents, and then discounted drinks after that. They have dueling pianos, who play audience requests-- typically perky pop songs, although they also had a college fight song war for some thirty minutes. They serve the up-and-coming twentysomethings who work in the Loop. There were three people of color patronizing the place, including John's friend Joel, who obviously was with us. Michael and I felt really out of place there. John had shown up before us, and two of his friends were there. Britton and Dan arrived after 7 and didn't want to pay the cover, so they left. I only got drunk after three long island iced teas, which is a testament to the very low alcohol content of their 50 cent drinks since typically half of one would have me reeling. We finally decided to go closing in on 8:00, and I'm proud of Michael having been able to stay so long, because even John and I were starting to hate everyone in the place by the time we left, and we like going out. As we left, Ellen and her sister finally arrived, but she didn't blame us for going-- we'd been there for hours already at this point.

Back at home, we watched this movie Light It Up about a group of students who take an inner-city school hostage and demand school books and repairs and the rehiring of a good teacher who'd just been fired. Not a bad movie.

In the morning, I was up early to go to the funeral. Fr. Marino mentioned to JP that the lady wanted the Ave Maria sung, and then JP told me he hadn't known that, and didn't have the music. "I hope I can remember it," he told me. In the end, I wound up singing it a cappella, because I do happen to know the first verse at least. The accoustics in St. Paul are awesome. JP turned up my mike and my voice echoed off the brick-- it was actually rather nice. I sang How Can I Keep From Singing, a little slow, and that turned out nice too. I prayed for Aunt Rose, and again for my grandparents, and was glad that I had agreed to sing.

When I got home, Dan was waiting for me, but Britton had already left. The dyeing of the river was about to happen. We high-tailed it to the CTA and then made our way to the Chicago River, which was already green when we got there. A caustic, unnatural, neon emerald green. It was disgusting and beautiful all at once. Through the clever use of cellphones, we met up with Britton, and then went to the parade. The bagpipes were good, and some of the dancers, and there were some tumblers too that were neat, but mostly the parade was boring. We decided after an hour or so to pretend it was already over and we left. Britton wanted an Irish beer so we went to a pub, and briefly debated if it would be a good idea to start a bar brawl in honor of St. Patrick's Day.

That afternoon, I finished the fourth cut for the legs of my banker, and then went to bolt the legs to the tabletop. But we uh, we didn't have a wrench. At all. Dan suggested I bike over to St. Paul, because even as lacking as the place is in tools, they would surely have a wrench. They didn't. So I went over to Casa Claret, and found a pair of pliers that would work. And they did-- more or less. Until I got tired and refused to take a break because I was so close to having finished the next step, and kind of stripped the last two bolts pretty badly.

At that point, Michael and Britton and Dan and I made a decision that the house needed a wrench, or wrench set even. So Sunday, Michael and I went and got some. And I have officially fallen in love with socket wrenches.

I've also officially finished my banker. At 10:30 last night. I'll put up a picture later, or something. I'm so proud. It's heavy and I can't lift it on my own. It'll never fall apart. I did that.

I finished my weekend by going to bed and sleeping like I was comatose for ten hours. That was awesome too.

love ya bye!

Building a Banker

I've ordered the stone. I decided which kind I wanted, and I made the call and placed the order-- and it was out of stock. So I talked with the guy and we decided on another stone that would be really good for my first adventure into stone sculpting. It ought to ship sometime this week-- 60lbs of Oystershell Alabaster. Very exciting.

So on Sunday, I went to Home Depot to get a bunch of wood. There are a few things you ought to have in your possession if you're going to sculpt stone-- steel tools, some sandbags, and a banker. A banker is a tall, sturdy table on which you can bang away to your heart's content without worrying about your back getting sore from leaning at an odd angle, and without worrying about the table collapsing under the pressure of your sculpting. I'm building a banker.

Home Depot's kind of neat because there is always a guy there who thinks it's a good idea to become your personal expert because he thinks you're cute. My personal expert quickly came to decide that he didn't care how cute I was, but to his credit, he stuck through to the end, no matter how many different things I needed to get. I picked out my wood, and I went to find Delino, who would cut it up for me. Home Depot's kind of neat also because they cut up your wood for you.

Except, well, halfway through cutting my wood, Delino went into Diabetic shock, and had to be carried to the breakroom. His manager told me he'd be okay, but there was no one else to cut my wood for me. So I bought a saw, and went home. A very nice old Mexican man tied my uncut boards to the top of my car. I liked him best.

At home, I set about creating the table top. It's very sturdy, and made me happy to have created it. Then I went about sawing up two 4x4 beams into four 41" pieces for the legs (that's elbow height on me). But... the 4x4s are treated, and impossible to saw, in the normal sense. You can pull the saw back, but you can't push it forward. The teeth get caught in the gooey treatment stuff. I swore a lot that night as I made the first cut. But it came down to the principal of the thing. I had to get through that first cut, because I'd started it. My community and I decided it would be a good idea to find someone with a buzzsaw to make the other three cuts. But I was going to do that first one, come hell or high water.

Actually, neither of those came. It took two hours, but I finished the cut, and then fell on the floor laughing like a madwoman and screaming in triumph. That night, I went up to the chapel and curled up with a notebook and thought about how much I had enjoyed the act of creating something, enjoyed the physical labor of sawing through the unsawable. I figured that as tired as I was, I wouldn't be able to move the next day.

But I could. And I felt great-- sore, but the kind of sore that comes after a good workout, or a satisfying day of work. I decided that I enjoyed the process of creating, even with its stumbling blocks, as much if not more than having created something. I decided, I could complain about sawing through the beams, or I could saw through the beams.

I finished the third cut last night. I am loving this. Making something. Putting things together. Starting with 2x4s and 4x4s and 2x8s and screws and bolts, and ending up with a banker. Good times.



In other news, my Great Aunt Rose died yesterday. In 1999, just before I went to Spain, she gave me a ukulele. It had been in her closet for fifty years. She bought it just before her arthritis developed, and couldn't play it afterwards. I'm taking that uke to a coffee shop tomorrow night, and I'm playing a set for her. It's not much, but it's something I can do.

May she rest in peace.

The Saga of Famine and Disease

I'm back at work now. Finally. I was really starting to get bored.

Michael got really, really sick Thursday night. Really, really, really sick. Badly sick. It was not good. In addition to my not being able to help him at all, I was also worried about getting at least some sleep before I went in for the 30 Hour Famine retreat with my youth on Friday. Michael was really sick. I couldn't do anything. I felt guilty, but I left him, and moved to the couch for the night. Then, Michael comes in and tells me to take the bed and that he'll take the couch. He was sick and he felt guilty for keeping me up. He said, "I want you to have the bed." I said, "I want you to have the bed, and plus you need to be near the bathroom." I won, although it didn't feel like much of a victory.

By late Friday afternoon, I was pretty well sure I was getting sick too. But I was also pretty well sure that I'd put in a lot of work to get the 30 Hour Famine together, and I'd be damned if I was going to miss it for a last minute stomach virus. But it was okay, really, because I have this deal with my body that I only throw up when absolutely necessary, so we worked together and managed to hold all that nastiness off for awhile.

In the meantime, we did the Famine. Oh boy, did we do the Famine. We started by handing out registration forms that one of the girls had made up for us. The youth coming to the Famine were going to be homeless people checking into a shelter. Karina, who made the form, had garbled up the letters, and when the youth asked us about it, we got impatient with them, asked them if they could read, were they on drugs, treated them like non-humans. Afterwards, we went through their bags, looking for "drugs and weapons", but really just looking for Ipods and cellphones, which were not allowed.

We had a discussion, asking the youth how it felt, the way we treated them, asking them to imagine being treated like that every night, asking them what they would do if they knew their choice was to either be treated like scum, or to sleep on the street. We asked them to come up with their own background stories, their own reasons they couldn't read the form properly-- some of them were on drugs, some of them had never much gone to school, some of them were just hungry, some of them didn't speak English very well-- but all of them still felt they deserved to be treated like humans.

Later that night, Dan and I did a skit about a job interview. As the manager, I was hardnosed and condescending to the smelly homeless guy who showed up late to his interview because he didn't own a watch. But he really needed the job, and promised to do well. Afterwards, still in character, we let the kids as questions, and they blasted me-- why didn't you hire him? couldn't you even try to help? can't you see he was trying?-- I laid down some heartless facts-- the guy smells bad, I can't have bad hygiene in a restaurant, he was late, he doesn't have a place to live, I can't even call him if he doesn't show up one day...

The teens turned their questions to Dan-- how did you get to where you are? is it hard? why can't you get past this? do you have no one who can help you overcome these problems?

We then had a discussion about what "binds" the poor-- what are the things they need to overcome in order to do things that you and I don't even think twice about, ie, being able to put a phone number on a job application, being able to shower beforehand. All of these things make life so much harder-- kind of like, hm, say, running a relay race while you're tied up. And so that's what we did. They had a blast. We had another discussion at the end, how the game felt both for those in charge of the tying up (the haves) and for those who were bound (the have nots). It was a vastly different experience, a fact that was lost on none of them. We also talked about what we, ourselves, can do in our own lives when we come face to face with these inequalities. I ended the discussion with the big question-- even if I hadn't hired Dan in the end, would it have made a difference if I had at least treated him like a human being during the interview?

We had a candlelight vigil that night, and then offered the teens the option of "renting" their blankets and pillows back from us. If they didn't have the Famine Dollars, or didn't want to spend them, they could always dig through the garbage and use some of the hundreds of newspapers that just happened to be there.

We hardly slept at all. :)

In the morning, after prayer and check-in, we took the group to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, where we boxed up 5000lbs of food for distribution to food pantries and kitchens around the Chicagoland area. We were all so hungry-- even me, but especially the kids and Dan. I'd been eating little bits because of that whole hypoglycemia thing, but just enough to keep my bloodsugar up. They'd not eaten at all, and found it a cruel sort of torture to be thrown in with all that food and unable to eat any of it. But maybe a fun sort of cruel torture. They kept waving food in my face and demanding, "Look at this! I'm not eating it!" and then throwing it in a box. Everyone kept reminding each other that we really did have the option of throwing in the towel, quitting the Famine, and going home to get food. But the people we were feeding with our work here, they didn't have that option.

In the afternoon, we played soccer. After a few minutes, Dan blew the whistle and I threw myself on the ground yelling, "Get down! Get down! Get down! Duck and cover! Now!" Everyone threw themselves down and I explained to them we'd just had a huge natural disaster, a 9.0 earthquake that flattened the city. Our persons, our families, our communities, our city, the economy, everything was crippled because it had all been destroyed. And unless you have 4 Famine dollars, you don't have enough money to buy your way out of this problem. One girl did, but she chose not to spend it. We finished the game of soccer with everyone blindfolded and on their knees to represent the crippling nature of the disaster. Daena and I ran around the court with the ball yelling, "Follow my voice, it's over here."

Yup, blindfolded soccer. Awesome.

Before we broke fast, we talked about whether or not begging for money really was the "easy way out", if it really was so much more preferrable to getting a job. How would it feel to be that person standing there on the street corner with the sign? So they made their own signs, and then Daena and Dan placed them around the front of the Church while I went in and set up for Mass. During Mass they read petitions they had written, offering the congregation insight into their experience over the weekend. It was incredible how it affected them, the things they had reconsidered, the connections they had made.

At the Break Fast Meal afterwards, we had the teens sit at a table, and I brought out a paper plate of food for them to see-- a sandwich, pear slices, cookies, crackers-- and told them that the cost was 2 Famine dollars. No one really had that much left. I said that if they didn't have enough to buy a plate of food, what they needed to consider was whether or not they were hungry enough to eat from the garbage. I dumped the plate, napkins, and food into a grocery sack and shook it up. Their shoulders slumped when they saw me do that, but they nodded, getting the point. And as it turned out, they were all hungry enough to eat from the garbage.

AFter that, we just kind of broke off. Some ladies from the Church had come to Break Fast with us, and the families of some of the kids. We started cleaning up. Daena had to leave early, which left me and Dan. My energy was sapped. I hadn't eaten THAT much, but I was definitely feeling sick, and had no strength. But luckily, Dan's a better person than me, and didn't complain that he wound up carrying almost everything as we got our stuff together (I did do the dishes, at least, and I carried light stuff).

I was so cold. I didn't feel like I would ever be warm again. When we got in the house, I sat down by the heater in the front room, and promptly fell asleep. I dreamt even, although not more that a couple a minutes passed. I fell asleep again on the kitchen floor a few minutes later, after putting a pot in to soak. Then I made my way downstairs.

Michael was doing better, although was not well, but I was getting dizzy and just went to bed. Within 2 hours of getting home from the Famine, that deal I had with my body came up again, along with my dinner. Michael heard me and came into the bathroom to hold back my hair, which I have decided is an extraordinarily loving and affectionate thing for a person to do. It made it seem not so bad.

Of course, I was up ever 45 minutes the rest of the night, delirious with fever, and having some sort of delusions that my blankets were actually a series of paperwork that dealt with various aspects of the developing Palestinian government. We made really great progress with Hammas at about 6am. Michael asked me how I was and I had only enough presence of mind to realize that if I told him things were going well with the Palestinians, that he wouldn't know what I was talking about. Then I went back to the paperwork. I finally got warm at about 8am.

I lost 8lbs in those few days, which has left me weak to all hell. I'm such a wimp now, and it's really frustrating me. Today, Thursday, is my first full day out of the house and back at work. At first, everything I managed to do was a milestone-- Yay! I made tea! Yay! I drank half the cup! Worn our now, time for a nap!-- My energy has mostly returned now. I'm walking now rather than shuffling, didn't need a nap yesterday, stairs don't intimidate me anymore, etc., but I still can't carry weight for anything. I'm going to start yoga again tomorrow, and work on building my strength back up. Yes, and my weight. Acturally gained 3lb back already (waterweight, I imagine) so I suppose it's more accurate to say I netted a 5lb loss. Still. I weigh less than I have in 7 years, and I'm not too keen on being underweight. I still have this fear that Mom's going to swoop in and force-feed me cans of Ensure. Gross.

I know, poor me, right? About 2/3 of Americans are overweight and I whine about this. I'll get over it.

Back to more important things-- on Monday, when I was technically well, although still lacking energy and strength, Dan and I went to Su Casa Catholic Worker House. We met with Julia, the Volunteer Coordinator, and talked about some options for working there. Then we had dinner (I could really only have water) and played with the kids and talked with the other volunteers and the residents and figured out what we could do if we were to go volunteer there. I think we might have a good fit. At any rate, I think we might see. We've been given applications to fill out, and they said once we get them back, it'll be a few days to a week before we'll be able to start. Dan's going to go ahead and do 2 days a week, and maybe will eventually up that to three or more. I'm going to start with one until after Easter, then will up it to two.

So yeah, things are changing, life is going. All in all, a very good thing.