Flannery O'Connor

I love, love, LOVE Flannery O’Connor. And here are a few of my favorite quotes of hers:

1 - "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."

2 - "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

3 - "The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree."

4 - "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd."

5 - "I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing."

6 - "Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe."

7 - "People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."

8 - "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."

9 - "She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick."

10 - "I write to discover what I know."

11 - "If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you."

12 - "I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted."

13 - "Total nonretention has kept my education from being a burden to me."

14 - "The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience."

15 - "Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

16 - "Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way."

17 - "I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial."

18 - "The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled."

19 - "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

20 - "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax."

Which ones do you like?

School Happenings

Working at a school has brought up a lot of memories of my own schooldays:

Going to first and second grade in a war-torn country was quite an experience. First we had to make it to school. For a while, this meant going through a checkpoint manned by soldiers who wanted to see our passports every morning. Once we got to school, it was often a difficulty staying there. There were a lot of strike days when my parents had to come back just a few hours later and pick us up.

Being at school could also be dangerous. Soldiers tear-gassed our playground several times that I remember, and once the bomb sirens went off and we all had to don gasmasks.

Also, discipline was enforced through slaps across the face and rulers across the hands. (I never got slapped and was only rulered once during an all-class punishment.)

Third and fourth grade were in a different city that was a lot more stable. Still, discipline was the same, and the kids were pretty rough. Every Saturday we walked home from school because it took the bus over an hour to go the one mile.

I homeschooled for a while, and that was great. Mom and Dad rented a little room downstairs from our apartment, and we did school there. I remember spending a lot of time coming up with “extra-curricular” activities, such as watching a swarm of ants attack a centipede-like bug that was very poisonous.

When I was in junior high, I attended a VERY conservative Christian school. We watched movies about the end times and how Halloween is the Satanists’ “high holy day” and how all rock music was based on satanic rhythms and was “Hell’s Bells.” One other movie I watched there was about how the United States government has concentration camps scattered throughout America that are just waiting to be filled with Christians.

I LOVED high school. There were students there who had lived all over the world. One day in Math class we discovered that we could say the “Hail Mary” in eight different languages.

I had one teacher who was terrified of birds, which was unfortunate, because his classroom had a balcony where the pigeons liked to land. It was amusing.

Another teacher, during his second week there, refused to let us leave the class when the fire alarm went off. When he finally let us go about ten minutes later, we discovered there was a real fire in the building.

I remember a friend hiding under her desk when fighter planes flew over. One year we attended a funeral for a schoolmate. We put on a lot of Shakespeare plays. I was in our bell choir.

Schooldays were some of the best days of my life.

Nomads

Josh and I have never had a plotted plan for our lives. We have some goals for the future. We have some dreams. But no solid plan.

Usually we move somewhere and hang out there until we get tired of it or decide that it’s time to take the next step in life. Deciding on a “next step” usually involves five or six different ideas, and narrowing those down to one. Then we pick a date and go.

Since we have been together, we have lived in four different places:

 Minneapolis, MN

 Waxahachie, TX

 Belgrade, MT

and

 Springfield, MO

Here are some of the places we thought of going to, but didn't quite make it:

Boston, MA

Pasadena, CA

Seattle, WA

Alaska

Ellendale, ND

and

Japan

The Alaska and Japan thoughts were a little less defined...

We’ve been in Springfield for just over a year, and it is about time to consider moving. Right now we have a LOT of ideas, and we will probably look into all of them to some extent. Here are some of our possibilities:

Alaska

Seattle

Minneapolis

(which are all returning ideas)

or:

Pennsylvania

 Lebanon

 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

 or:

 Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates)

 Of course, more options may appear. It will take some effort to decide where we want to go. But, a year from now, we should be there.

Proper Camping

When I was eleven, my mom’s whole side of the family went on a camping trip together. Granted, it’s not that big of a family – just the six of us, the five of her brother’s family, my grandparents, and my great-grandma – but we had a grand time. The first day we were there my mom jumped up from the picnic table yelling about bears. My sister, who was around nine at the time, was in the outhouse and thought a bear was trying to get to her.

The bears were not after her, but were down the road a ways, digging through the trash cans. We all walked down to see them – a mother bear and her two babies. That night I kept imagining bear claws ripping through our tent. The next night I slept outside with my cousin, Travis, and saw a bear quite close to me and a whole bunch of shooting stars.

When I was five my family tried to go camping on the beach, but we fled to a hotel when we heard there were ticks in the area. All I remember from that trip is my mother panicking about a mole on my stomach and asking if it had been there before. I couldn’t remember, but years later, it still hasn’t given me Lyme Disease.

We camped out on New Year’s Eve of the year 1999/2000. We were living in Lebanon, and we watched the fireworks over Beirut before turning in, blissfully unconcerned about Y2K problems.  

It was another time, but at that same campsite, that I saw a UFO while spending the night about nine feet off the ground in a hammock. (I swear I saw three lights in a row close together and a disc-shape curving off behind them. And it never moved for hours.)

Josh and I went camping in Arkansas one spring break. It rained EVERY night. Raindrops on canvas can start to wear away at your sanity after a while. There was water in our tent the whole time and it was always cold and soggy. But we still had a marvelous time, building fires, cooking on the camp stove, and mining for diamonds at the nearby Crater of Diamonds State Park.

The last time Josh and I went camping we stayed at a Forest Service cabin near Butte, Montana. There were beds… with mattresses. It was amazing. We had a wonderful time, mostly solving crossword puzzles, reading the cabin guest journal, and driving around finding open range cows and old abandoned miner cabins and horse corrals.

This past summer I went camping with a bunch of young people. We slept in hooches, and cooked over fires, and swam in the river. We saw spiders and snakes, and hundreds of fireflies that twinkled in the forest at night. A whole family of toads decided to live in our woodpile. We painted our faces with mud.

My parents went camping last weekend. My mom said they had a good time except for the noise from the generator that ran all night in the next camp sight. Who takes a generator camping??? You’re supposed to sit around the fire and get sticky fingers from marshmallows, and freeze in your sleeping bag all night, and wake up smelling like an odd mixture of damp and wood smoke. Otherwise, you’re just not camping properly.

Safety Pin Philosophy

This morning I was frantically searching for safety pins. I knew that they had been on the side table in the living room, but they weren't there anymore. I could not for the life of me remember putting them anywhere else, and I had asked Josh the day before if he knew where they were, and he hadn't responded.

This morning, though, Josh said, "Check in the third-drawer-down in the kitchen."

Now, the third-drawer-down in the kitchen contains little-used kitchen items such as cookie-cutters, a meat mallet, and other random items. Including, this morning, a box of safety pins.

I knew that I had not put them there, and I wondered what on earth would have made Josh think that was a good spot for them.  I fished one out muttering about his crazy tidying-up "skills."

When I got back to the bedroom, I asked Josh, "Why are the safety pins there? I mean what reason is there for them to be there?"

His reply: "Rachel, you aren't going to solve a question that safety pin philosophers have been asking for thousands of years - Why are we here? You aren't going to crack that one this morning."

Subbing

I accepted a substitute job for the next couple of weeks, and I started it this morning. It's as an attendance secretary, not an actual teaching position, but it was SO fun.

It was totally a spur of the moment thing. I saw the job posted and I called to make sure it was done at noon, then I clicked a button, and voila, I have a job in the mornings. Astounding really.

I LOVE being around students again. I also like that I don't have to worry at all about classroom control. And, I'm not very busy. The lady I work with/for suggested I bring a book.

So far it's been a great experience.

FTW

Halloween Costumes

So, I am basing costumes for Josh and me on these characters:

And maybe this for Luna:

Late Night History

Last night as I was brushing my teeth my thoughts turned to Glenn Beck and his recent "Rally to Restore Honor." I told Josh that I wanted to write a book in response called "What Honor?" and talk about all of the ways that the U.S. has been very dishonorable throughout its history.

I got into bed reciting the list of offenses that the United States has committed - the syphilis experiment in Guatemala, several experiments done by the government on Native American peoples, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, treaties broken with Native tribes, slavery... the list goes on.

And then Josh chimed in: We dumped the British tea into the sea because they were charging too much tax.

Me: It wasn't the tax on tea they were mad about. I think it actually helped the British when they dumped the tea.

Josh: (laughing) What are you talking about?

Me: The ship was stuck in the harbor, because they couldn't unload the tea and it couldn't leave with the tea and it was causing problems for everyone.

Josh: So, the British Tea Party was an inside job by the British?

Me: No, maybe it didn't help the British. But I'm pretty sure it helped the ship captain.

Josh: Are you saying the ship captain dumped all of his own tea and started the Revolutionary War?

Me: He didn't dump his own tea, but I think he told everyone when they could come and dump it... or at least he didn't try to stop them. Although if it was his tea, maybe he lost money.

Josh: We should write a history book.

Me: Unless the tea belonged to a trading company...

Josh: It would be all of our late night history discussions and would talk about how the Tea Party actually helped the British. At least one British ship captain.

Me: What was that trading company called?

Josh: We could call it "Late Night History with Josh and Rachel."

Me: That would be fun.