This is what I call MicroBlogging

I have a bad habit of getting excessively pensive at the darkest, most trying moments of my life.  It often leads to what I have termed "Xanga-Style" blogging.  Nothing against Xanga in general, but my personal Xanga is a surplus of [preteen and teenaged] angst that the world doesn't really need to see.

I think it's important to express myself on these emotional topics, but I'm worried that an overabundance of my own sadness will bring you all down with me into a pit.

In order to avoid that, I've spent the past few months curating my emotional trials into this list of microblogs.  May it be for you much like a sad love song--in your moments of pain, a commiserate friend; in your moments of triumph, a memento mori that keeps you humble.

Topics too depressing to get their own post

1. When you consistently use more conditioner or shampoo than you use shampoo or conditioner, so that you never finish both bottles at the same time.
2. Spending the whole game of Settlers of Catan winning, only to have the other players revolt against you, and cause you to lose so bad you want to cry.
3. When you're talking with a friend about a TV show or book series that you only casually enjoy, and they ask you, "Do you mind if I give away some parts?" and you say no because you're enjoying the conversation and want it to continue, but then you go back to watching or reading and you realize that the entire experience of the series is changed now that you know that one spoiler.
4. The fact that last seasons of really good, long-running TV shows always come across more as cast and crew nostalgia than as a good ending to the show.
5. Keeping so many emails in your inbox so that you remember to respond to them that you eventually cannot see all of them and so forget to respond to them.
6. Sticky notes that only stick long enough for you to stop looking at them, and then fall off the wall and you can never find them again and they remind you of nothing.
7. How much more fun it is to put up Christmas decorations than to take them down.
8. Dirty laundry.
9. Enjoying the creative stimulation that a caffeine rush gives you, but suffering from so much presticogitation that you can't actually use it to stimulate your creativity.
10. When you like the Glee version better than the original, but can tell no one.
11. Causing a traffic jam by trying to avoid a car accident.
12. Having a terrible day at work, but then having your boss tell you that you're a "great asset to the team" and then wondering whether that is a compliment or a cry for help.
13. Coming to the end of a bagel after mistakenly thinking that you had a whole half left.
14. Loving a song so much that you cannot physically restrain yourself from listening to it over and over and then slowly beginning to hate it.
15. Having really stupid pet peeves, but not knowing how to develop the patience to keep them from peeving you anymore.
16. Taxes
17. Struggling to read analog clocks when you're 24 years old.
18. Wanting to go back to college because it was the last time you knew what you were doing.
19. Wanting to share a funny Michigan-Winter joke on Facebook and then remembering that, because you don't live in Michigan anymore, your friends will be more confused than commiserate.
20. Fun and awesome dreams that are also so easy to psychoanalyze that you're too embarrassed to share them with anyone because they'll immediately know all your deepest insecurities.
21. Seeing deer in your backyard and wondering for the rest of the day if they got hit by a car because what the heck were deer doing in your "yard" in the city?
22. Things that should go viral but never will because famous internet people never see them.
23. Catching up with a book or TV series without realizing that it wasn't over yet, and then suddenly having to wait for the next installment to come out.
24. Dirty dishes.
25. Music that is at just the wrong volume so that you either have to set it to 23 and be barely able to hear it, or set it to 29 and wince at every downbeat.

Thank you for your patience in reading my woes.  I hope I did not bring you down too much.  I may be forced to continue this list in the future because, you know, we live in a fallen world and all that.

--Mary Margaret

The Cycle of Grocery Stores

Yet again, I come here merely to point you elsewhere.  Specifically, I direct you to my post on The Post Calvin where I will attempt to woo you with elegantly crafted prose about the Dominick's down the street from my high school.

A Legacy of Song

Last month, some of you may have noticed my post at The Post Calvin that spoke about my experiences with hymns in church.  This present post relates to that, if only obliquely.

Music is uniquely powerful.  I think many, if not most people feel that power and celebrate it in little moments in their lives.  I'm not a rockstar singer--I dropped out of choir after eighth grade--and my Saxophone is gathering dust in my closet (and is probably also infested with mice, but that's a different story).  Nevertheless, I think I am one of those people for whom music means more than for most.

I'm told that this is because of my grandmother.

Jane Eileen on the Left, Jane Eileen on the Right, Jane Eileens all around, late into the night, ba da ba da

My maternal grandparents were both, I'm told, excellent singers: my grandmother, Jane, a soprano, my grandfather, Joe, a baritone.  When they stood next to each other in church, any number of their six children next to them, they filled those babies' heads with melodies and harmonies and a subconscious joy in the sound of a well crafted, well executed song.

Grandma spent much of her time cleaning, crafting, fiddling about around the house, and unless she was speaking, she was singing.  Sometimes, she would sing songs, but most times, she just sang notes.  I have a vivid memory of watching her in the kitchen in Barrington, Illinois, her soft, wordless singing floating to me over the sound of the rushing tap, the sun catcher on the window in front of her holding colorful images of the birds she loved so much, in part because their songs matched her own.

My mother, also Jane, continued the tradition of constant melodizing, and in fact got a bachelor's degree in vocal performance.  I remember nights as a child when I would wake from a nightmare and my mother would come in to comfort me back to sleep, and I would ask her to sing the Star Spangled Banner, which I called the star song.  I thought it was a beautiful song, and I loved my mother's voice, and the combination of the two soothed many of my frightened fits.  When I would listen to the radio or watch movies, I would sometimes hear a song so lovely, I felt the need to memorize it so that I could sing it to my own someday-children in their troubled moments.

When my mother and I would go to churches other than our home church--if we were out of town visiting family, or if we were attending a first communion, christening, or wedding--I would secretly hope that others around us would hear my mother's singing and be jealous of me because I got to hear it every day.  I got to wake up to my mother singing along to her hymns as she read her Bible in the morning before work.  I got to listen to her sing the harmonies to all the television theme songs.  I got to be serenaded on my birthday.  Everyone should have been jealous of me.

The moment I learned that not everyone sang as much as my matriarchs was, in fact, in a church.  I don't remember what church, or when, but I remember looking around during the congregational singing and seeing dozens of people merely staring up at the stage, some bobbing their heads, some standing with an emotional hand in the air, but none of them singing.  I remember that I tried it, right there.  I tried to just look at the words on the screen as they passed, tried to not sing and just to listen.  I enjoyed the experience of hearing all the voices around me raising up those words, but I did not enjoy not singing.  The words were there, the music was playing, I needed to sing.

The moment I learned that not everyone sang like my matriarchs was, also, in a church.  When I was in England, I weekly attended St. Thomas with St. Maurice with a large contingent of other Calvin students.  One of those students, a great friend of mine, Hope, often stood near me during worship, belting out the words to songs familiar and not.  Her voice, nothing like my mother's or grandmother's sweet sopranos, was, at first, jarring to my ears.  I wanted her to be more on-pitch.  I wanted her to be softer.  I wanted her to sing as beautifully as the women I'd grown used to.

The moment I learned that the beauty in singing comes not just in the sound, but in the act, was not in a church, but in my mother's living room.  At the time, this living room was furnished in thick, sound- and light-blocking curtains hanging in the doorways, several large plastic containers of towels and other hygiene products, and a heated hospice bed where Grandma lay for weeks, her Alzheimer's preventing her from sitting up or standing.  It was a hot July in Chicagoland, but the air conditioning kept my mother, my aunt, and I all comfortably cool as we stood around Grandma's bed, in which, after a few more long hours, she would die.  We held her hands, we ran our fingers through her still-thick, white hair.  We sang to her.

White coral bells, upon a slender stalk
Lily of the valley deck my garden walk
Oh, don't you wish that you could hear then ring
That will happen only when the fairies sing

My aunt began the round.  Like me, aunt Judith was raised with music in the air around her, and like me, she could not make it as beautifully as she wanted to.  Then my mother, with her practiced and wonderful voice, joined.  Their voices came together in a way families should, like at Christmas when Grandpa reads the nativity story to us, first from a rocking chair in the big Tree Room in Barrington, Illinois, and now from a television in my uncle's sitting room.  Their voices made magic, and it didn't matter that one was clearly stronger than the other, or that one had a quaver to it that kept it from hitting every little note in the arpeggio.

As the song is a round, I joined in third, coming in just in time to be in unison with Judith, though I didn't know the song as well as she did.  And now I was in the family too.  And it felt like Christmas feels, like church when everyone sings, even off pitch, like the dishes in the kitchen with the birds watching.  It really was a magic beyond explanation or description.  She gave us our voices, and as we sat there around her, we felt compelled to give them back.  We just couldn't not sing.