Pyrex mystery!

Meanwhile, whilst thrifting...I have a bad habit of finding things mysterious to me and trying to identify them. Yesterday I found this small round clear glass piece of Pyrex, marked "France D". It has a sloped base, but sits flat on the taller rims. It has a semi-circle notch on both sides, opposite to one another, that almost look like ashtray ridges. I've looked everywhere. My best guess is that it's some sort of obscure laboratory part. I'm interested in selling it when I find out what it is. It's my current mystère-du-jour.

I'm sitting in bed eating cinnamon toast and listening to talk radio. It's election day and boy do I not give a flying fuck. I am sick of the constant phone calls, the mail full of glossy attack ads, and the general vomit of political signs all over town. I am done done done. No matter how much I care about the issues, come election day, I usually feel this way. The whole process makes me hate to participate, hate to vote. I'd rather pretend to not care than participate in the orgy of power. That being said, I will step away from the computer and go vote, because I need to shut up about everything if I'm not willing to do the easiest thing available to me.

Cheers to all! Happy thrifting :)

Linking up with Sir Thrift-A-Lot's Thirftasaurus :)

Update: A friendly comment from a reader revealed that this is a milk saver! Thanks readers!

Boosting your own ego

Not completely empty, but mostly :)

This week's episode of The Bachelorette made me think about a phenomenon I've seen in heterosexual romantic relationships: Women pressing the man to admit that he is indeed hopelessly in love with her, causing total exposure and emotional nakedness (but only for him). She manipulates the situation because she wants to know that it's a sure thing. She isn't going to go all-in unless she first knows that he's all-in first. It's like, "You show me yours first, then I'll think about whether I'll show you mine."

I call it a phenomenon because I've seen it happen over and over again with my single friends. They agonize over whether or not some guy likes them because they depend upon that knowledge to judge themselves. If he loves them, then they're worthy of being loved. Their worthiness is completely dependent upon that knowledge (Oh man, this drives me crazy).

We use people's vulnerabilities against them in order to make ourselves more powerful! When I make the guy admit his feelings first, then I have the upper hand. I have the power to crush him if I want, and now there's zero chance that I'll get crushed. Self-protection at its worst, my friends. Using other people's vulnerabilities to boost your own ego? Not cool.

But resistance is not an easy task. It means making up your own mind. It means a whole hell of a lot of risk on your part, with the possibility that there is only pain on the other side. But the cool part is, you get to become a whole person in the process, and that's worth every painful moment, and every tear.

Some ideas on landlording, Part 3

Political stalemate?! Ah, the good old days ;)

I probably should have done a good introduction about why this issue relates to my blog, but it's a blog, and we just aren't that organized around here :)

The church is important to me. I wish it weren't, because it makes me even weirder than I already was, but it's just how it is, so I guess I have to deal with it. Honestly, it just makes me less attractive to the single (i.e. unattached) members of the opposite sex. That's really the only reason I feel weird about it lately. I don't want to be marginal.

I think that the church is to be God in the world, that the church is the way that God is humanly present in the world. The church has no walls, or even labels. The church is not Christian, or Muslim. The church is within each of us that affirm the humanity of God, that choose to allow God to work through us to love others, something we are not always humanly able to do (I'm choosing my words carefully here, seminary peeps).

So on that note, the church needs to be active in the world! We need to be solving problems, helping people lead happier, healthier lives, and generally extending grace and peace all over the place.

So currently, I think that involves being a better landlord. I'm a practical girl.

Some ideas on landlording, Part 2

It's so funny to see old headlines; they could be today's :)

So since I live in the Disneyland of foreclosures, buying a house is super difficult. Houses go up for sale, and typically come down just as quickly. In my neighborhood, with huge gorgeous homes, when they don't sell, the price just drops...and drops...and drops. Seriously. It's really sad. On one corner, a "For Sale" sign keeps getting tagged. I flip off the invisible taggers in my head every time I see it. I hate tagging. It makes me so angry. I also hate trash on the road. Dude, this is your neighborhood too! But I digress.

I've begun to wonder what motivation a person could possibly have to rent property to other persons, other than to make money. And if houses are hard to buy, even though mortgages are cheaper than rent (!), renters can then get stuck in bad situations with no way out. Landlords have no motivation to make different choices, to adequately care for the property, regardless of whether these are individuals or larger corporations, unless some outside entity decides to give them some. I think that there should be some sort of license that people are required to achieve and maintain in order to rent out property. The license would demonstrate that the individual(s) is able, willing, and knowledgeable enough to care for the property at a basic level, and has shown him or herself capable of maintaining the property over time.

We need more public shaming. We need more people willing to say, "Dude, check yourself. The way you're treating your renters is dehumanizing." Seriously, renters get screwed. They have no power, and those with power have no motivation to change negative behaviors. So I don't know who I'm talking to, but if you have an idea, let me know. I'm just ranting here for my own benefit. I do love the sound of my own voice.

Some ideas on landlording, Part 1

I found a bunch of old Atlantic Monthlys last week.

My neighborhood is not always a pretty place. There are lovely homes, and well-kept yards on one street, but move over a couple streets, or even a few miles away, and you'll see homes with yards look more like mini-landfills than yards. I don't think that these homes are lived in by the homeowners. I imagine, due to the nature of the neighborhood, that they are rentals.

Are there laws that require landowners, or home-owners, to keep their property clean? Do cities spend more time faulting renters for the state of the property than they do the owners? In my city, a few years ago, the police attempted to create better neighborhoods by fining people who had property with major blight. The campaign ended quickly when the neighborhoods rebelled against the police, and owners were cited as problem-makers who bought property, raised rent, and never cared for the property itself, but law enforcement did nothing. A lot of the homes were Section-8, which was a problem on its own because the owners were abusing the system and neglecting the property. Many owners lived out of state, or were "property managers" with no personal ethic to care for the property.

I once lived in a lovely apartment complex (and it was a decent-sized complex), where there was an on-site manager who lived on-site, and the owner came regularly to deal with maintenance and landscaping issues. I always felt very cared for. It was old, but it was not neglected.

How do the powerless affect change in the powerful? Stay tuned for Part 2.

Thrift Share Monday :)

I just want to give the world more beauty :)

 

Do you know that there are innocent people in prison? I just watched the documentary, The Thin Blue Line, and it reminds me why I wanted to go into law when I was a kid. I wanted to make sure that no one suffered for a crime they did not commit. I was a dreamer - I still am.

Are you a helper? How did that happen? What is the difference between a person who lives life committed to peace and justice, and a person who lives life for money and power? I guess that's one of the reasons I ended up where I am today as an adult, definitely not a lawyer. I wish I could understand why people decide to work for good, then I could pass it on.

I've named these "The Star Trek Shoes"

My newfound acceptance of science fiction and fantasy is evidence of my ability to dream a little more, to incorporate a little bit more un-reality into my life. I think dreaming is a really important thing. Sometimes we scold children for telling stories, and sometimes we need to be encouraging them to dream more instead of less. There has to be a time where imagination is fostered and nurtured. If we do not dream, we can never hope for something different.

Every one needs something big to dream. Dreaming keeps us alive.

Still linking up with Apron Thrift Girl :)

It's too bad I'm not urban.

I am so enjoying my tiny little apartment. It's really too bad that it's not ideal for a long-term solution. The space itself is okay, but not having a kitchen is clearly a problem, as is being connected to someone else's garage. I'm starting to dream about a tiny little place of my own, but I think that a small place in a good location would be difficult to find. I think that there are a lot of mother-in-law places on my street, but I don't know if that would be a good long-term solution either. I want something that I can stay in. I want to have enough space for my stuff, and a little wiggle room, but not too much. I like to feel cozy.

I used to have a one bedroom place. It was a duplex. Later I lived in a studio which was also a duplex. I preferred the one bedroom. It was small, but very well organized. My kitchen was large enough to cook, and I had a washer and dry hooked up in there as well. The trouble with that place was that the landlords were ridiculous about the lawn, but refused to put in sprinklers. So in the end, it was a battle over me not wanting to water crab grass in 110 degree weather, and them wanting the crab grass to be green. I'd come home to a threatening hose on my front porch as a warning. Ridiculous.

I have a lot to say about landlords, and some things I've been thinking about in terms of ethics and city planning. Perhaps tomorrow...

Cheers!

There will always be more garbage.

Remember the last time you got to swim in a clear blue swimming pool, enjoying the cool water, and loving the way the water felt against your body, making your muscles work in a way they can't do on land?

Remember the huge lump of dog hair or garbage or kid urine that suddenly got in your way?

Yeah, that's life. But it doesn't mean you should stop swimming or that you should begin focusing on the garbage. Toss it aside, and move along. There will always be more garbage. You can't control that.

Garbage in, garbage out

 

In yoga tonight, I had thoughts running through my mind throughout the class. That's rare. Usually, I am able to get rid of everything very quickly and focus on how much pain I'm in. Maybe I am feeling stronger, so am therefore able to let my mind wander, but it got me to thinking. How am I getting rid of the negativity in my life? How am I dealing with the garbage that comes in? Am I doing anything?

I am a firm believer that the brain and body carry everything with them. Your brain remembers everything that has happened to you. It is stored in there somewhere, and someday something that you've never remembered before from 3rd grade will pop up suddenly because something in your environment triggered that particular neurotransmitter to fire (or get fired on?).

So that's all well and good when you work at Clouds-R-Us, where everyone is friendly and happy and no one has an unkind word for anyone else, and nothing bad ever happens to anyone. But for the rest of us who have constant good and bad flowing into our lives, I think it's important to stop and think every once in a while, "How much good am I putting into my life? Is there any way that I can replace some of the bad with some good? Is watching Law and Order a good thing or a bad thing for my overall health and well-being?"

Yoga is part of that for me. Yoga gives me a great deal of good and at the same time reminds me to breathe out the bad, and to let go of the things I try so hard to hold on to. Yoga isn't for everyone, but it is a symbol of what each of us needs in our lives-a time and place, set aside, for the purpose of cleansing and renewal.

I hope you find this space for yourself somehow, and if not, I hope you start to look for it.

Loving what you love

 

Do you ever wonder why you want what you want, what makes you interested in your interests, why you love who you love?

Sometimes our desires are born from our upbringing, and sometimes this can be good. You like Christmas music because it reminds you of the holidays with your family. You love strudel because you always ate it at Grandma's house. You like to bowl, because you went bowling every Saturday morning with Dad.

But sometimes our desires are born from suffering. You love running because it makes you feel strong, and you were made to feel weak and insignificant as a child. You love eating, sometimes too much, because it fills a void you can't quite name. You become an accountant because you were homeless as a child and want to avoid any feeling of helplessness.

These are things that trigger our deepest feelings, good and bad. Oftentimes, the things that are the most important to us are the most difficult to explain to other people. If your heart could speak, it would explain, and people would understand.

I'm beginning to think that I love what I love for good reasons, and bad reasons, and I'm wondering where to draw the line. How much bad is too much?

Just pick something.

 Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.

Bertrand Russell

In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I am a stubborn fool, and believe in things that will never be. But I am also a wise fool, because I believe in the impossible, and maybe, just maybe, hope things into being. I've been told that I would die without hope, because I said I didn't have any. But to live without hope is no life at all. To live without believing, even somewhere deep inside your own unconscious mind, that something better is possible, is to be dead.

Every person alive has some form of drive to live, and I call that hope, I guess, whether or not it really fits (If I tweak the definition a bit, I can claim that I have some and no one will worry about me). Depression can be the realization that there is no reason to hope, and no thing to hope for. So every day, I wake up, and I find something that keeps me going. Sometimes, it's completely delusional. Actually, it's usually delusional; that's why it sticks around. It's the rational hopes that don't last long-they are quickly swept into the "not possible" pile and filed away in the garage.

I believe in the impossible. It has gotten me through decades of life-not-always-worth-living. And to give it up, and hope in a God I cannot see or touch or feel, who may or may not ever return-that seems more delusional than thinking you can time travel to win the lottery, don't you think?

I rock.

Gardening has always been a non-pastime of mine. The past weeks have been so kind as to teach me that it may even be dangerous for me to work in the yard without supervision. But today, with the odds against me, I trimmed the crazy shrub outside my front door that was days away from gouging my eye out one sleepy morning.

This afternoon, a friend came over to help me install some shelves. My place is so small, I figured that was a swell time to get some things done outside. I got me some tools (sharp ones!) and I went to town. It was laborious. A very large weed had taken over the small square-foot dirt plot, and I needed to get it out.

There was a moment, after I'd been trying to get at the huge ugly thing with the hooked clippers, that I thought, "I should get a saw." I went into the garage, found a chainsaw, picked it up, pushed some buttons, and realized I needed an extension cord. I stood there another moment and realized, "I am the clumsiest person I know. Plus I really like my body just the way it is. I would not like today to be the day that I lose a hand." I put the chainsaw down and went back to the clippers. Eventually, I was able to dig [insert constipation sounds here], locate the root, and pull the whole thing out with my bare hands. It felt amazing. There should have been fireworks. I am awesome.

Today, I did yardwork, and I was successful. Someday future-Megan will be climbing some mountain thinking, "This is nothing compared to that darn root." And then I'll stand on one foot or something equally amazing (because seriously, my feet are the opposite of flat, and sometimes, in yoga, everyone is cemented in their perfect poses and I pick one foot off the ground, and start falling all over myself).

Did you hear that, World? I rock.

"Don't bogart that can...man."

So since I can't go out and do "people on the street" interviews in my neighborhood, this is essentially the state of things in my part of the city. And it's been this way for so long that it doesn't even faze me. This is life as we now know it.

I've heard on more than one occasion that this is ripping off the city. By stealing from recycling bins, people are essentially stealing from the city's income revenue. I doubt that this is a real issue, but am more than willing to take feedback on it. If you know anyone who can comment on this issue, I'd love to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about.

Racisme: Parte Deux

Where I live, people sell food on the street. It gets dark outside, and they park their food cart out in the middle of a dirt corner and set up plastic tables and chairs, and suddenly this once-dead corner is a hot spot.

During the day, men (always men, now that I think about it) ride down the street selling bags of fried pork rinds. It's been a while since I've seen a man with popsicles, but in the town where I grew up, we didn't have men with pork rinds; we had men with paletas. My favorite paletas are strawberry and lime (just water; no milk).

Just a few blocks from my house is a Mexican panaderia and cafe, and while I was walking to Starbucks a few weeks ago for the internet, I passed it and thought, "Maybe I should stop." I still had a mile to go to get to Starbucks, and I was a little motivated by the exercise, but honestly, I didn't have the energy to try a new place.

While reviewing burritos last year, I went down to little Mexico (as I like to call a particular part of town down the street from my school) and walked into a place that I'd always driven by, and looked like it sold food. Wow. They did not want me there. One of the other customers asked me if I was a teacher, because I looked like one. There's no way around that one-that is what I look like, for no other reason than that I'm white and wear glasses. I ordered a rice and bean burrito, and that's what I got: rice and beans. It makes me sad to think about it. There wasn't even any salsa. They just wanted me to get out of there. I made them uncomfortable.

So today, even though this is now my actual neighborhood for the second time, I still feel a bit weird going into a new place by myself, like that panaderia, or a food cart on the side of the road (but not the pork rinds man, because I don't eat meat) not because I'm afraid, but because I don't know what the cultural expectations are. It isn't right that the city is racially and economically segregated, but it is, and I don't want to step on anyone's toes. Even if I dressed and acted differently, I don't think I could ever fit in.

Keep her Barefoot and Pregnant

I'm not one for blog hype, but when Christians start talking about sex, I'm all over it. Donald Miller's blog posts about love this week have set the blogosphere on fire, from angry feminists to angry conservatives; every one of them was pissed, and every one in between was in love with Miller's Eldredge-meets-Driscoll brand of romance.

Now I was offended too, not because I didn't agree with Miller, but because I did. I am easily lulled into the new-reform movement's ideas about love: boy is in charge of the love story, boy woos girl, girl stands back and lets it happen, making sure that she doesn't get too power-hungry and spoil the whole thing. And I was that girl that wanted too much, that did too much, that thought too much and talked too much. I was all wrong inside that model, and now I'm bearing the fruits of my sin, of my lack of desire to be submissive, to be invisible.

Now I'm all for submission in marriage, but by teaching that women must submit to their husbands in all things, we perpetuate a culture and gender-promoted view of men-on-top. It's not as easy as "The bible says it...that settles it." Submission is bigger than "Do what you're told." Submission is about trust in a relationship, and trust can never be established when we initiate a relationship in this inegalitarian way. Maybe at some point, the relationship can handle that kind of restructuring, but for a woman to make herself less to be attractive to men is to take away her God-given identity in order to conform to a chapter and verse.

As a good friend reminded me yesterday, we Christian women love to talk about being a Proverbs 31 woman, but we like to forget how strong that woman is: "The heart of her husband trusts in her...(v. 11)."

That's all for now. Don't trash yourself.

Am I Ever in Control?

The past four years of my life have not been easy. Going to a seminary wasn't what I had in mind when I got my BA in Psychology. I was never a very "religious" person. I thought that only super-Jesus-lovers went to seminary, and I never did the whole Jesus thing very well as a young person. I didn't get it. I saw God as harsh and unloving, so Jesus only increased my fears of being inadequate, of being weak, and of being unloveable.

I guess I was always spiritual, deep down, in-tune with my own experience of the world and that of others. I just didn't know that that was what it was when I was fifteen. And when I found God at twenty-one, I wasn't thinking I'd suddenly become a different person. But somehow, in a moment, I began to care very deeply about what God thought. I wanted to do exactly what God wanted me to do, every single minute of the day.

But that was an immature faith. God doesn't work that way at all. Relinquishing control over my life didn't make my life better. I still don't know the difference between being lazy and giving my troubles to God, or if there is ever a time when that exists, when we can have control over our own lives. I don't know when the power of choice ends and the power of God begins. I know very little. But I know that God is good, and that in the midst of great pain, God is with us. That I know for sure.