Jeannette's last blog reminded me of a dream I had a couple of days ago - obviously the result of twoo (wow, what a misspelling, I think I'll keep it) much stress over my job search.
I dreamed that I was a candidate at a school, eating breakfast with the Res Life gang there. They were putting me through all these weird personality tests, like asking me to pray for breakfast and then one of them went into the kitchen and started banging pots around so loudly I couldn't concentrate enough to pray. What made it most disturbing was that just as I was getting ahold of myself he started banging a V-I cadence over and over with two different pans, obviously insinuating that I'd droned on long enough. I was so frazzled when I woke up!
So what I was going to tell, you, Linnea, is that I had a stroke of brilliance before I drove the four hours to King and I checked out the unabridged audio tape set for Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, which I had been planning on reading this week. A British guy, Jim Dale, reads them, and reads them well. I got so into it coming back today that I was fussing at the characters and gasping when I realized a connection before they did. Realized how bad off I was when I yelped aloud at a tense part. I think Rowling has done a good job when I can be so seriously concerned about the characters, even when I know they're eventually going to be alright. I have the last chapter or two left to go - happy tonight to me!
I spent the night last night with Janna and Rebekah Larson's family. They are really cool people - which I've known ever since the lot of them helped me feverishly sewing buttons onto costumes during the last hours before the opening of "Our Town" during my freshman year as costume mistress. All subsequent interactions with them have been extremely pleasant.
So I did just get back from a whirlwind trip to King College in Bristol, TN. I want the job there. It doesn't pay well...but I really want to work there. For one, it's four hours closer to my parents while still being close enough to Hannah and Harold at Covenant that I could see them a few times a semester. It also lines up really well with my idea of what I want to do in the department, and I "clicked" well with practically everyone I spoke with, including the gal who's head of the staff, just a couple of years older than me, who will be a great friend.
And the apartment provided is huge and clean (much different from the others I've seen recently), and the surrounding community is such that I would be welcome to throw my musical self into some fun service as well as supplement my job with some piano students. I'm going home to crunch numbers right now and I think it'll come out as a manageable situation. I think they really liked me too - so I'm expecting an offer next week - and while in theory I'm prepared to accept a "no" from God about it, I am rather thinking this door won't shut unless I'm on the other side of it.
May have to eat those words later, so you guys pray for me, okay?
I just must say, I love my church. I was over at my pastor Travis' and his wife Kimberly's house, for a small group meeting. We had finished the main part of the discussion and were about to head into prayer time, when someone left to take a bathroom break and the talk turned to the jellybeans that were floating around the room in a bowl. (Well, you know.) Anyway, they were those Every Flavor jellybeans, like the ones in the Harry Potter books - every flavor meaning that in with the cherry and lime and licorice and grape you'd also have Grass Clippings and Black Pepper and Ear Wax and Booger and Vomit, et cetera. People were taking gambles with it - I saw one person courageously down a vomit followed by a black pepper. Apparently the flavor is exactly like what they're named for, except sometimes on the sweet side.
(Which brought up the question, do everybody's boogers taste the same? How did they research this? Or is it just the power of suggestion? No one was willing to test it in our group.)
Travis said that the elders use the jellybeans in their meetings with prospective members. Then he got a glint in his eye and went racing out of the room and came back with what they used to use - a funny little base with four metallic crescents sticking out of it, with some tubing or wiring dangling around it, looking vaguely like something a farmer might attach to the underside of a cow. He got four of us to take ahold of a metallic handle, which detached from the apparatus, and told us to press the buttons on the top of them when "the light turns green." He then turned on the thing. A large button in the middle of the base flashed red, faster and faster, while very ominous electronic music of doom came out of it. When it turned green, I pressed my button and threw the crescent-handle down, because I guessed what it would do - and sure enough, the person who had been the last to press his got a nasty electronic shock. This is what my elders sit around doing. Heheheeeheehe..... as I said, I love my church.
I finished reading Lewis' Space Trilogy again, and was richly rewarded. I never found the third book quite so fascinating before. Lewis' take on the sovereignty/free will tension is absolutely lovely, and one of the reasons I remain sane.
Speaking of sanity, my wonderful old friend and roommatten Gretchen Lee flew down to Chattanooga last Saturday, and I spent the next three days with her at her grandparents' home in Greenwood, SC. We were stupid the first day and spent way too long in the sun, and I'm still suffering for it. Besides turning very red in spots, in the past two days I've had to twice knock myself out with Benadryl for the heinous itching that periodically overwhelms all my other senses. Man. I'm never going out in the sun again.
(That's where Rachel says, "Tuggy, I wish you weren't a liar.")
So, yeah - That Hideous Strength. So cool, but so bloody. I never noticed that before, either. I thank God, somewhat reluctantly, for giving me some of the dreams that he has - I've dreamt that I was a murderer, or a child molester, or an abuser of some other power - so that I can better understand that my own heart is desperately wicked and that the only different between me and the scum of the world is that God has changed my heart and prevented me from doing such atrocities in actuality. So, for many horrible sins, I have experienced the temptation and the giving in, if only in my sleep.
But one that I have not experienced (at least not in a blatant form) is the temptation central to Mark Studdock's journey through the book - the need to be included in the powerful inner circle, and the lusting after darkness for the sake of darkness itself. At one point in the narrative, Lewis says something like "to anyone who has felt this, the mere mention of the symptoms will suffice to bring up full recognition" but that if you hadn't experienced it, no description would be adequate to explain exactly what he meant. If he is right in saying that (and I have other reasons than trusting goodwill to think that he is), then I surely have cause to rejoice, because even the little I can imagine is pretty hellish.
God doesn't allow all of us to be tempted in the same way, and I don't think any of us are tempted in all ways - except Jesus. Oh, Lord, how horrible it must've been for him.
Closer to my experience is Mark's wife Jane's journey, in which her supposedly noble motives are shown over and over to be petty and self-seeking to her own detriment - even evil, a label she doesn't acknowledge exists as a reality. Lewis has a great knack for chronicling the mind games that we play in second-guessing ourselves, trying to protect our consciousnesses from God's enormously irresistible courtship.
My online book discussion group is having a party merging movie titles and plots. Please feel free to add your own.
Clockwork Oranges are Not the Only Fruit -
Misunderstood young lesbians form gang and wreak a terrible revenge upon a future society - before they settle down and join the police.
Daredevil in a Blue Dress: A rare example of the crossover superhero-cross-dressing genre. Ben Affleck and Denzel Washington star.
Lord of the Ringu: Cult Japanese fantasy horror. Teenagers are dying in a remote peninsula after watching a mysterious video. A reporter investigates and discovers that they are suffering from DVT after sitting through all 12 hours of the extended edition in one sitting.
War and Peace of the Worlds: Tolstoy’s majestic classic set in Czarist Russia has a cast of thousands battling first Napoleon and then an alien tri-pod invasion force from Mars.
Breakfast Fight Club: Troubled teens bond during school detention and form underground group who beat each other to a pulp then blow up big buildings in protest at the consumer culture. Cheer as Molly Ringwald defeats Brad Pitt and Meatloaf in a bare-knuckle fight, just after Eng. Lit.
Spirited Far and Away: Peculiar but enchanting mix of traditional hand drawn animation and the worst Irish accents ever committed to film. A young girl and her family get lost in a disused theme park which turns out to be a health spa for nineteenth century Irish immigrants to the US.
Don't Look Who's Talking Now: Donald Sutherland is stabbed to death in Venice by a talking baby dressed in a red raincoat. Featuring the voice of Bruce Willis.
Boyz 'n' the Parenthood: Steve Martin stars in a bittersweet family comedy which takes a darker turn when the entire family is slaughtered in a series of crack-related killings.
Godfather Brown: Kindly Catholic priest-cum-amateur detective, Kenneth More, is really the brutal head of Sicilian gangland family with cotton wool balls in his mouth.
Steel Magnolia: Watch the plot simultaneously thicken and unravel as you follow seemingly unrelated events in the lives of a screwed-up group of close-knit Southern strangers who are prevented from finding true meaning in life by freak weather conditions.
Chicken Lola Run: Every time Ginger thinks they're in the clear, everything ends horribly, but they keep inexplicably getting second chances for about forty minutes.
The Sixth Sensibility - Impoverished Victorian girls falling in love with restless dead men.
My Best Friend Flicka's Big Fat Greek Wedding Singer - oh dear, I think that's going way, way, way too far.
Along Came a Spider-Man - Morgan Freeman tries to pin down a double-crossing superhero in spandex.
Curse of the Black Pearl Harbor - I'm not going to start on the possibilities of this one, except to say that Johnny Depp really shows up Ben Affleck.
Snow White and the Se7en Dwarves - the wicked stepmother systematically punishes the Snow White by brutally murdering her little friends until the girl turns and poetically kills her own innocence by forcing the witch to eat her own poisoned apple.
The Lion King and I - double the singing, double the culture clash, double the power struggle, double the romance...oh gosh, I am so glad this isn't real...
I have almost completely finished! Had my SIP oral today - thought I was going to die, because when faced with the astute and pointed questions of my readers, suddenly all my research and thoughts and findings seemed like complete bunk and utter speculation. I was sent out of the room in shambles while they talked about me, and came back in to their smiles, explanations of some shortcomings in my work (which I agreed with), and an A- (that's an A-flat, Rachel. =P) Hooray! I love everyone in the world at this moment.
I woke up this morning quite literally unable to move for a few moments. Something had happened to my neck in the middle of the night, very scary - lots of pain shooting everywhere - I finally figured out a way to get out of bed, and once I was upright it was a little better. I drove up to see Nurse Barb and she gave me this cool neck thing that makes me look like a million dollars, and spent most of the day with a hot water bottle on my neck. Figured I was having a delayed reaction to being sideswiped by a pickup on Friday and moving furniture and scrubbing behind stoves all day Saturday, but at least it's now beginning to relax and be a little more moveable. Darn that word. Does it have an e in the middle or not?
Mmm I was going to talk about the cool movie Big Fish for a moment - I just saw it Saturday - but it's dinner time and we're having lovely cream cheese chicken tonight. I will leave you with a bit of a songs, courtesy of a half-hour with Hannah and Rachel while making shadow puppets in bed yesterday -
Any man of mine better walk that line
We meet in the middle 'neath that old Georgia pine
Like two sparrows in a hurricane
Did you ever know that you're my hero?
Let me be your Juliet
And I will always love you
I compare you to a kiss from a rose on a grave
Don't you think it's time? Don't you think it's time?
(Oh, perhaps if I hated country music less it would take less space in my brain.)