Holy Week: An Outsiders Guide

Holy Week is like the state fair of Catholicism.  Strange things happen late at night.  People dress to be seen.  The atmosphere is festive, yet sorrowful.  Somewhere, a room full of people is lining up to give sloppy kisses to a crucifix.  An elderly white man is giving a half assed washing to the calloused feet of the celebrity parishioners.  A wooden mallet is clonking through the consecration.  PTONK! PTONK! PTONK! PTONK!  Catholics gather to stand, genuflect, stand again and reflect on the 16 ways Jesus got punked before his poor body finally gave out.  And then millions of Catholics walk into Easter Mass in their Laura Ashley florals and pastel button downs, and eventually leave smelling of frankincense.

Holy Week is the loneliest time for a former Catholic.  I have the distinct sense a party is going on and I wasn't invited.  I find myself trying to remember the symbology and liturgy responses.  I still feel the thrill of skipping mass without my parents knowing.  I try to remember the whole crrrazy cast of characters from the Stations of the Cross -- like a children's book I read long ago.  And that is when it strikes me: leaving Catholicism behind was a part of growing up.  What I feel during Holy Week is the loneliness of nostalgia and the achy feeling of facing the world as an adult.  

If only Holy Week were choreographed...  

Ole Ronnie & the Rat

My gait had a certain triumph to it as I crested North Avenue and began my initial descent into Penn Station.  At the Walbert Building, a tired looking, grim-faced man in blue dickeys was shaking his head as he walked out of the parking lot.

"Hey, what are you doing?" I asked, with a cheeriness you might use on a small child you have to befriend before an abduction.  The man twisted his mouth into a lasso of regret, and said:

Old Ronnie.
He got a rat on his engine.
It was dead --
      of course --
By the time we found it.
Old Ronnie.  Poor Ronnie.

Note:  I resolved to do something new for every month of my 34th year.  For April, my options were to get a tattoo or blog every day.   And my friend Seamus said blogging is better.  Here goes.

Back in Black

Great women have something in common, but it is something that others might mistake for a personality flaw.  I offer the following evidence:  Shirley Manson is only happy when it rains; Queen Elizabeth's favorite state events are the ones where something goes noticeably wrong; and I really like it when things in life don't go as planned.  I'm not a self sabotager, I'm just a sucker for a good story.  And in this over-scripted world, it is sometimes a relief to wrap your tired arms around that old Walt Whitman adage:  "Resist much, obey little."

In 7th grade, I thought Shirley Manson was just depressed.

I understand there is a modern phenomenon by which women put themselves under incredible pressure to be savvy homemakers, perfect mothers, nurturing daughters, to be beautiful and thin and smart and efficient and enlightened and fashionable.  Ladies, please!  That's not living.  So I will look back on my sad attempted Year of Blogging in 2014 with compassion and humor.  It was a abject failure and I think that is great.  Because 2014 was still a good year, those two meager blog posts made me proud, and now I have the chance to try again.   

I wonder if she knows how much we have in common?

Here's the proposition:  for the coming month, I will be blogging every day.  Or trying to blog every day.  Or -- at some point -- probably trying to undermine my own attempts to blog every day just so I can say: "OH WELL!  F*** EVERYTHING!"  Here are blog topics that are currently incubating:   

1.  Riding Bitch:  Memoir of my life on the MARC

2.  My Unlikely Hero, Kim Kardashian

3.  Excommunicated:  Holy Week as a Former Catholic

4.  What if Hurricane Katrina had hit Baltimore?

5.  Sand Trap Social Engagements

When you learn to love your mistakes you will be as happy and unaccomplished as I am!

Note:  I resolved to do something new for every month of my 34th year.  For April, my options were to get a tattoo or blog every day.   And my friend Seamus said blogging is better.  Here goes.

Esse. Facere. Habere. / To Be. To Do. To Have.

"The unexamined life is not worth living," said Socrates.  "Yeah, well, the over-examined life is not actually living," says me. 

Where's the compromise? 

Maybe this.  At the beginning of each new year, I make a list. Three lists of five things, actually.  Things to be.  Things to do.  Things to have.  This habit is the relic of a financial education workshop from my freshman year of college.  It is the only relic from that workshop.  Other things we learned that night were not to let your friends borrow your clothes, not to use credit cards, and not to spend a lot of money on booze.  Woulda, shoulda, and coulda.

TO DO.
The To Do list is easy to make.  Exhilarating, even.  I race ahead in my day planner to write down ideas for the coming year.  South Dakota is making a repeat appearance for 2014.  Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, here I come!  The Year of Blogging is also on the To Do list, the first for a regular-weekly-obligation-type thing.  Birdwatching also made the list, though I forget how.  I must have giggled at the idea of sloshing around the shores of the Chesapeake Bay with a bunch of indulgent retirees.  Or maybe I hoped to finally fall in love with nature, in the way that is so popular these days.  The To Do list has a psychic hold over me.  I often find it tucked away by my debit card while I wait in line at Starbucks.  As my eyes skim the list, my brain fires off all the things I will do today to make these things happen.  Register for the Audubon Society.  Read a biography of Crazy Horse.  Buy some galoshes.  In 2013, Move to Homeownership made the To Do list, and then -- miraculously! as if by manifest destiny! -- I gave up my gypsy ways and bought a house.  Who knows, in 2015 I might Win a Nobel Prize or Replace Barbara Walters on The View.  It's all in the list, man.

TO BE.
The To Be list is hard to fill, and getting harder with each passing year.  It is not pleasant to admit all the ways you wish you were.   (Patient?!  Kind?!!  I am pleased to announce that both were evicted from the list for 2014.)  Also, by your 30s, it's harder to change.  May as well just like yourself the way you turned out, eh?  The whole patient/kind thing has taught me that it is a major drag to be constantly reminded that you fail at the fundamentals of being a good person.  So, for 2014, the list dictates I am To Be Positive.   I am not exactly sure what this means.  Less gossip, I imagine.  Fewer "Yeah, rights" said to Nina Totenburg when she recaps the Supreme Court dockets each morning on NPR.  I might even start saying "Thank you for the lovely ride" to my MTA bus driver.  Related to riding MTA is that Less Profane also made the To Be list for 2014.  So far it has only meant that I clap my hand over my mouth in faux shock when the F word leaves my mouth.  This resolution has mostly made me aware of how completely and joyfully I love profanity.  Today, I heard a crossing guard yell "F*** that, she knows that s*** needs be done before the f***ing kids let out the g**d*** school!"  I just gave her a big smile and a wave.  Made my day.   

TO HAVE.
Now, the worst list to make by far is the To Have list.  And I'm proud of it.  I have everything I need.  I don't want any more stuff in my life.  TV?  Nope.  Car that was made after the year I graduated from high school?  Nada.  A new EELS hoodie?  Mmmmmno. (I mean Yes. I just ordered one.)    Sometimes I will even get to the middle of the year and successfully talk myself out of a To Have item.  Last year, I put Little Dessert Bowls on the To Have list, smugly thinking I could knock that one out in a single trip to Target.  But it was no good.  I spent too much time thinking about how seldom I would use little dessert bowls.  I convinced myself that having little dessert bowls would make me hate Martha Stewart even more.  I never got them.  Luckily, my failure in the To Have category did not extend to my selfish 2013 resolution To Have One New Pair of Shoes per Month.  But this year, I think I have decided on things I will be excited to buy and to have:  All New Panties and Adirondack Chairs for the Front Porch.  Only time will tell.  Come on over this summer.  You can see for yourself. 

The Adirondack Chairs, I mean. 

POW! BAM! BANG! Take that, 2013!

It's happened regularly enough for me to wonder.

"You know, I love hearing your thoughts on things,"  said the lady next to me in Monday night spin.  "Do you blog or anything?"

"And I know you do stand-up.  Because you seem just crazy enough.  Tell me, I want to come see you!" said the sales clerk at Nine West last month.  

"My, my, my.  But she shore is opinionated," says my boss.  

"I wonder if you realize how talented you are," wrote Mrs. Barbosa on the front of my poetry assignment in 11th grade English.  

"Well, she was really meant to be a writer but she just can't stand to share anything of herself with others," says my mother.  To total strangers.  While I am standing right there.  

So there you have it.  New Years Day 2014, and I am embarking with friends on a Year of Blogging.  And it will be a year of wonders, indeed.  My purpose?  To write regularly, with accountability.  My fear?  That I have nothing to say.  That every idea in my head actually originated on NPR.  Also, that my mother is right.  My self?  Someone who eschews social media out of cold shrieking obstinacy and romantic notions of how one should relate to the world and to others.  Someone who is not inclined to stay interested in a hobby for an entire year.  But -- above all else -- someone who likes to prove her mother wrong.  

And that may be my saving grace.