Mood: Chagrined – with a soupçon of resignation. I had a series of embarrassing moments in the last two weeks – all involving someone quite nice. They’re not a big deal – mostly just me looking ridiculous. And in the grand weather pattern of embarrassing moments in my life, they are but a gentle breeze in comparison to the typhoons of mortification I have experienced and no doubt will experience in the future.

First words today: No idea. It’s almost midnight, and the only reason I’m awake is because I’m waiting for my laundry to dry and my bread rolls to rise. It was a long and busy and incredibly productive day, and I really love that feeling of going to bed knowing that you eked out all you could from the hours allotted to you.

(Note: At this point, I fell asleep kneeling by my bed, forehead on spacebar and drool accumulating on trackpad. All that eke-ing wore me out. I woke up in time to go check on the bread rolls, but the rest of this post was finished the next day, which is now the true today. Or whatever.)

Considering: this Ambrose Redmoon quote: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.”

Self Improvement: I’m getting things together, keeping up with laundry, working on keeping the house nicer, and trying to get more sleep. Tomorrow I start getting up early to go walk. If it lasts longer than a day, I’ll let you know. I’ve only ever been able to sustain a night time workout regime – but I hear good things about the morning workout. Dang, that was boring. Moving on.

Want: I still need new clothes – I don’t know that I’m loving my style right now. But I just did a quick search of retailers, and either I was looking in the wrong places, or I just don’t like any clothes right now. (Nudism, you might ask? So drafty.) All I want to wear is jeans, hoodies and chucks – not exactly the look of a professional. Not to mention the fact that it does nothing to help my figure – it has the rough effect of turning me into a gender free zone. I did find this ensemble on the J.Crew website though. You think a slouchy shirt and sequined pants would look good on me? HEY, ME TOO.

I dreamed: So I have this thing with dreams – I have to find what I’m dreaming plausible, or my brain just won’t go along with it. So it says something about my optimism about relationships that my psyche will allow dreams about competing in the Winter Olympics but refuses to let me dream about anything romantic. (FYI, it was ice skating, and all the professionals died in a freak accident and they had to air something, and I was the next best thing.) Freud would gnaw his own beard off out of sheer boredom if forced to analyse me. I may have slept through all the chastity talks in church, but my subconscious was wide awake and taking copious notes – which it then typed out and forwarded to all departments and taped up in the break room (of my brain).

Cooking: I stayed up late last night and made barbecue pulled pork and big, fat, buttery dinner rolls. Both were fine, nothing to write home about. But I loved, loved, loved being up late in the kitchen, the night air whispering through the window, and the rest of the neighborhood quiet. I loved methodically wiping down the counters, checking on the rolls in the oven, and finally, a few minutes after midnight, having the fruits of my labor right in front of me. Glorious.

Listening: This will surprise you, but I’ve been listening to a fair amount of country lately – the Dixie Chicks phase I was in kind of led into this – that, and oddly, Fleetwood Mac. Well, actually that totally makes sense, because I love the song “Landslide” and while Stevie Nicks is brilliant, I like the Dixie Chick’s version better. Is that heresy? Anyway, so I’ve been letting the country ooze in, mostly in the form of Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts. Here’s the thing about country music – (incidentally, should I be capitalizing Country Music?) – it is so unabashedly romantic and gushy and heartbroken and bighearted and just… American. It makes me think of all the big, tough men I know that listen to it, and that makes me want to poke them a little, and see if the marshmallow fluff pops out. Because that’s totally adorable.

Reading: Race Matters, by Cornel West.

Blogs: I’ve been reading a lot of food blogs lately, with Tartelette being my favorite, but there are so many amazing ones, inlcuding Eggbeater, Sunday Suppers, and the very lovely Canelle et Vanille.

What I’m wearing: I’m still not sure about this category, and I’m afraid it’s by far the most boring part of these entries. I always wear black pants, and I’m usually wearing black flats. Although – speaking of black flats, if you’ve seen me at all this summer, you’ll know that I’ve become ridiculously attached to these black laser cut flats from Target. These shoes were an early casualty of the days back when I kept having to chase the puppy down and screech “NO, NO, NO, YOU FREAKISH MONGREL!” at her while brandishing a chewed shoe. My big toe actually pokes through on the left one. Has this stopped me from wearing them? I laugh heartily, because no, it hasn’t. (Do you see now how I can lean toward looking homeless?) I have stopped wearing them to church – at least, sacrament meeting, etc. To ward prayer and other activities the shoes do indeed go (if you don’t know what ward prayer is, and think it sounds like a religious insane asylum – you… are not far off).

I got totally side tracked there. I’m wearing a purple top, black pants and holey black flats. Yawn. But I don’t look homeless.

Song of the day: I wanted to post Landslide – but I just watched the music video, and beyond being full of disturbingly bad CGI, there are also black choker necklaces and staggering amounts of eye makeup. So, I’m going to go with this instead – because, guess what, we are going to be friends!

PS. I love Jack White.

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living In better conditions.” – Hafiz

I’ve never been a gambler. I’ve never put a quarter in a slot with dreams of winning big, or even winning little. Poker, blackjack, mahjong, dominoes even – have never appealed to me. I don’t understand the thrill of potential loss.

Decision making is excruciating.

So what’s the difference between taking a chance and having a little faith?

I shouldn’t equate gambling and faith.  I’ll get struck by lightning.

My inclination is to avoid getting too invested. Without investment, there is no chance of loss, no chance of the bottom dropping out on you. But fear stunts me and keeps me from moving forward, from taking chances, and from just possibly experiencing magic.

Or maybe I’m just being realistic? What if I’m just being realistic?

Don’t over think it, you might say. Just take a leap.

I seem bold – and I am bold. But I quake in my black ballet flats at certain things. I turned to the scriptures for a little piece/peace of mind, and found the story of Ruth – it struck me, not for her loyalty, not for the relationship between family, but rather for her courage and faith. She was really brave. She seems braver to me than Esther. It says right there in the Old Testament that Esther was gorgeous – we don’t know anything about Ruth’s looks. It’s easier to be brave when you’re hot.

Faith isn’t something you can pick up at Target. Faith is something you build – a catch 22 of what comes first – the action or the confirmation. You’ve got to act to have a little faith about future actions, but you need faith to do those actions. It’s like weight lifting – you’ve got to lift, so you can lift.

Tell me: how do you turn off your brain?

I just held a newborn. A three week old little baby boy named Mitch.

I would have named him Elliott. He looked like an Elliott, with his blue-striped Crocodile polo-shirt and blue jeans. He had blue eyes, black hair, and eyebrows, and he gazed fuzzily up at me and smacked his gums like an old man. He stretched his little arms and snuggled. Holding him was the easiest thing I’ve done in months.

When I handed him back to his mother, I could still feel him for minutes afterward. Phantom baby syndrome?

I cannot wait to have kids.

On NPR, Reverend Samuel “Billie” Kyles was talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. And he said this:

It is said that Robert Louis Stevenson was a man who never enjoyed good health. He spent a lot of time in his room even as a child. He was always looking out the window. His nurse asked him one day, Robert, what are you doing? He said, I’m watching that old man knock holes in the darkness. She said, what are you talking about?

He would climb up the ladder and light the light, come down, move the ladder to the next pole, climb up, come down, move the ladder. And everywhere he would light a light it appeared to him with his little quick mind that a hole was being knocked in the darkness.

And so I’m suggesting that those of us who have the strength and the ability, we should be knocking holes in the darkness. So, Martin Luther King came to Memphis – it was a dark place to come, but he came and he came knocking holes in the darkness.

Photo taken from the Y Mountain parking lot in Provo on a cold night last November.