Listening In

People truly say some interesting things if you take the time to listen.  Here are a few of my favorites.  

“Oh, you knit, too?”   “Unit two?  I don’t ever remember unit one!” 

“I love green food… kiwis, peas, avocados, cheese.”  

“I think I just felt a gerbil land on my nose.”  

“I’m not saying your face is ugly, it’s just doing ugly things.”  

“If you, Einstein and I all shared a brain we’d be a complete individual.”  

“I didn’t give your life a moral… I gave it a punch line!”  

“No, you’re trying to pollute her mind just like I’m polluting yours!”  

“All lion names start with ‘k’, even Mufasa and Simba.  Sometimes the ‘k’ is silent.” 

“Now we know why you have asthma, because you think everyone’s ugly.”    

“Are you even listening to yourself talk?  Do you know what you’ve been saying?”   “You’re humoring me; I don’t appreciate humor.”  

“He’s so stupid!  I think he should go to college.”

All that Love Stuff

“Valentine’s Day falls on tomorrow this year.” ~Winnie the Pooh

Eavesdropping

People say some pretty weird things, which can make listening an entertaining hobby.  Here are a few things I overheard being uttered by various friends, family and complete strangers. 

“I was playing ‘Twenty Questions’ with someone today, and the answer was ‘Mickey Mouse,’ but they guessed ‘Jesus.’”  

“I think you should use fake names, it always sounds more realistic that way.” 

“My aliens are so cool they’re abducting a cow!”  “Come help me, I dropped St. Frances behind the refrigerator!”  

“Avocadoes grow on flowers, which grow on avocado trees, and then the avocado fairy comes and blesses them.”   

“You shouldn’t be allowed to work with cadavers, because you just want to do it for the fun of it!”   

“There’s an extra ten percent ‘stupidity charge’ when you use the wrong grocery store’s savings card.”    

“If you were in a ‘Morbid Contest,’ you’d win first prize.” “I wonder what my brain sounds like.”

A Few of My Favorite Thinigs From 2006

Albums that Dominated my CD Player:  

1- How We Operate — Gomez  

2- Back in Bedlam — James Blunt 

3- Plans – Death Cab for Cutie

4- On and On – Jack Johnson  

5- Chaos and Creation in the Backyard – Paul McCartney  

Movies I Enjoyed the Most:  

1- The Goodbye Girl  
2- The Dead Poets’ Society
3- The Lion in Winter 
4- Walk the Line 
5- The Doctor   

Favorite Reads:   

1- A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis  

As the title alone suggests, this is far form a lighthearted, upbeat book, but it’s been the most helpful things I’ve come across in the last year regarding grief and loss.  Unlike other books on grief, it doesn’t provide answers, or formulas to try out; it’s a real look inside the heart of one man as he struggles, questions, and grieves for the loss of wife.   

C.S. Lewis is honest in his writings about how he’s feeling, and even how others relate with him because of his loss.  This book won’t tell you what to do, or where to go from here, but it does provide comfort in knowing you’re not alone as you walk down the long and painful road of grief.  It you’re lost someone, are in the process of losing someone, or know someone who’s grieving and would like to better understand what they’re going through, I highly recommended it.  

2- Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott  

Unlike most writing books, this one is more inspirational, but it still does provide some helpful advice.  It was recommended to me by a writer friend of mine while I was working on a research project that seemed, at the time, to be going nowhere fast.  I found in very inspiring, which is what I needed more than anything right then at that point in time.             

A quick word of caution: Because Anne Lamott is often very candid, crude, and very inappropriate in her writings, this book is not recommend for anyone who might be easily offended.      

3- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton  

It’s a Victorian novel set in New York among the upper-class.  It shows the darker, less “innocent” side of the Victorian era, that we normally aren’t shown.  It deals with some of the interesting social dynamics of the time, double standards, hypocrisy, and what’s considered “proper” or “fashionable” of decent, wealthy men and women.  Some of the issues, you can still see being played out today, to a degree.    It isn’t a light read by any stretch, but because it’s a Victorian novel, it never goes into too much detail, and it doesn’t get nearly as dark as a modern novel probably would.  I loved this book; the story, the character, and the fact that it didn’t paint things in a rosy, romantic lighting.               

4- Loving God by Charles Colson  

Charles Colson takes on the challenge of practically answering the question, “How do we love God?”

 5- The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis  

This isn’t a “relational book,” but rather, its observations on the four different kinds of loves.  It’s not a devotional book, self-help, or deep theology, but I found it very interesting and insightful, and C.S. Lewis makes it an enjoyable read by just being himself.  

6- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card  Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Sci-Fi, so the fact that this book actually made it on my list of favorites says something.   

Along with just being a fun read, the book illustrates well how the hardest things in our lives — the things we’d like to wish away — are the very things that shape our character, for bad, good, or even both.  Although the main character, Ender Wiggin, is a young boy it isn’t a children’s book.  I found in a very interesting novel with a lot more depth than I would have suspected it to contain.         

Quotes I Like:  

“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”-Coc (Gabrielle Bonheur) Chanel 

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” -Mark Twain 

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” - Mark Twain 

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” - Galileo Galilei 

“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Favorite Moments:  

-Finally getting to see “The Importance of Being Ernest” performed live.  It was wonderfully done.  It’s one of my favorite plays.  

-Riding on a trolley car in Sand Francisco, walking through China Town, Golden Gate Park, and admiring the beautiful, old Victorian homes.  

-Seeing more of California than Disneyland.  

-Balboa Park in San Diego, and the Andy Whorhal exhibit.   

-Seeing my mom, Ian and Shannon all genuinely smiling.  

-Coming to the peaceful realization after moving that I was truly safe, and I could relax and breathe again.

-When friends listened, asked questoins that showed they cared, and then remember what I said later.

The Cow that Ate Baby Jesus

Paper snowflakes and candy canes hung from the ceiling, the windows were now the stage for two dimensional happy and peaceful holiday scenes, and a simple, wooden nativity scene — with oversized hay scattered around it — sat in a corner.  It was just about as festive and tacky as a two-year-old Sunday school classroom can be in the middle of December. 

Several of the kids had taken a shine to the little wooden nativity scene.  Each of them picked a character to claim as their own, and began acting out the Christmas story — with some minor artistic licensing, unless of course, there was a Lego family and a T-rex present at Jesus’ birth.      

Nate — a cute little boy, who also happened to be the biggest worrier I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting — had added a plastic black and white dairy cow to the mix of playthings that were reenacting the familiar scene in Bethlehem.  

“Teacher, do cows eat this stuff?” Nate asked holding up a few pieces of hay in his chubby, little hand.  I said that yes cows do eat hay, so the plastic cow continued munching away on the hay in the feeding trough where the little wooden baby Jesus was sleeping.  

Suddenly, panic shot through Nate’s whole body like a bolt of electricity, as he looked down at the toy cow that towered over the manger.  He dropped the cow as if he was holding a smoking gun, and asked in a small, shaky voice, “Uh, teacher Kelsey?  Was… uh… baby Jesus eaten by a cow?” 

If he hadn’t have looked sincerer, I might have burst out laughing.  But like a mature and competent Sunday school teacher, I fought hard to hide my amusement, and instead of turning into a laughing hyena, I replied in a confident voice that no, baby Jesus wasn’t eaten by a cow; in fact, he wasn’t eaten by anything.   

But my adult manor and reassurance didn’t remove the worry from his mind, and instead, Nate, shot a look of horror at the plastic cow next to his Spiderman shoe.  In his mind the cow had become as fearsome as if it had grown fangs and might, at any moment, leap on him and try to suck his blood just like Count Dracula.  “I think baby Jesus was eaten by a cow!” he wailed, which caught the attention of the rest of the class. 

Slowly, the kids began to scoot away from the nativity, shooting it the same glances you might throw towards the scene of recent crime.  Their lips began to quiver, and I knew tears were on the way if I couldn’t reassure them baby Jesus hadn’t been cruelly digested by a dairy cow.  I’m honestly not sure they would have been more upset if they’d been told their grandmother was an axe murder.    

I tried to explain to my group of little alarmist how we know Jesus wasn’t eaten by a cow when he was a baby, because he grew up into an adult, but after that didn’t work, we had a lengthy discussion about the difference of carnivores and herbivores, and how because cows don’t eat meat, that means they also don’t eat babies.     

Vegetarian cows chewing cud rather than gnawing on sleeping, innocent babies consoled all of the little worriers, well, all but Nate who earnestly asked “But what if the cow didn’t see baby Jesus?”  He was convinced that some absentminded cow, the size of a house, might have accentually eaten Jesus.  After all, Jesus was essentially sleeping in the cows’ food dish.   

It’s been several years, but I still can’t help wondering if Nate has a cow phobia; the poor kid.          

What a horrible Christmas story it would make if Jesus hadn’t survived “barn life”: God loved the world so much that He sent His one and only Son to Earth, but sadly, He forgot to take into account the giant, baby-eating, dairy cows, so the Son of God became lunch for a hungry cow, because someone let the baby sleep in the cow’s food dish.  It sounds more like a Monty Python sketch than the Christmas story when the baby-eater is added.  Thankfully, Jesus didn’t end up suck in some cow’s teeth. 

Emanuel – God with us – came to be the light into the world, to bring redemption, and thankfully, no, he wasn’t eaten by a cow; not even accidentally.