To war!

Thursday morning, I will have a post up at the Register about a new NFP charting app for iPhone/iPad.  (UPDATE:  the post is here.)  It’s a fairly straightforward and innocuous piece — just a review with a few lines of comment from the developer.  Doesn’t get into theology at all, or discuss sex or anything.

BUT, it’s about NFP.  I’ve been around that mulberry bush a couple of times, and I know that no good can come of this.  Or, rather, some good can come of it, only to be derailed by a handful of lunatics who see the letters N, F, and P, and instantly ride forth into war

with one of the following cries:

(a) NFP is from the debbil!  It’s nothing but Catholic birth control, a demonic liberal tool to chase married couples straight into the mouth of Hell!

(b) Welll, maybe it’s not of the devil per se, but I know for a fact that 90% of my friends who use NFP are abusing it, and have a contraceptive mentality.

(c) If the devil weren’t an artificial construct of the patriarchy, NFP would be from the devil!  It’s nothing but church-sanctioned slavery, an abusive conservative tool to turn women into baby factories!

(d) Ew, you said “cervix.”

(e) What a shame it is that these young whippersnappers take the mystery out of everything.  The whole world is becoming nothing more than a collection of bits and bytes on a screen.  There’s nothing Catholic about technology, and it needs to stay that way.

(f)  Shut up, Jew.

(g)  We tried NFP for two weeks and had a baby anyway, so I’m suing Dr. Billings and my husband is getting castrated.  Catholics are so lame!

Am I missing anything?  Which class of comment do you think is going to get the most traction?  Am I a big jerk, or what?  Maybe no one will care, and I’ll get three comments, and then I’ll have to pretend I’m glad.

 

Double double this this

Double double that that

Double this

Double that

Double double this that.

Phew, now I feel better.  I’ve been listening to that chant for many a day now, and I’d just like to make it perfectly clear to the director of the school that, for every time I hear my kids start up again with the “double double this this, ” I deduct ten dollars from the hefty endowment I was thinking of maybe some day leaving to the school, where they learned the silly thing.  Think about it!  Get control of your school, lady.  This is madness.

Okay, second:  we saw a super duper movie on Sunday:  Insomnia from 2002, with Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank, and directed by Christopher Nolan, who did the wonderful Batman movies.  So today at the Register, I’m talking about what a good movie it is for Lent. Old sins!  Compromise!  Doubt, confession, and redemption!  And Robin Williams finally playing a creepy murderer, like he should’ve all along; and Al Pacino actually acts, instead of just acting like Al Pacino.

image source

Come tell me what you think. I don’t believe any harumphing will be necessary, but you never know — better bring a couple along just in case.

Third:  come see my charming and talented nephew, the ebullient Baron Torres as he launches himself into the horrible world of blogging for west and wewaxation!  “The Noble Bard: Music, sports, Catholicism and a whole lot more!”

 

What, you’re too busy?  Come on, it’s Tuesday.

You know, I think I finally have that stupid chant out of my head.  Now the only thing I’m thinking of is . . .

Gimme an X, gimme an O

Gimme a three in a row.

RO-SHAM-BO!

Echh, well, there are worse ways for kids to spend their time.  They could be doing drugs.  Or blogging.

7 things I could resist

It’s a two-fer!  One:   Seven Quick Takes, hosted by the hostest with the mostest Post-its (get it?  In the picture.  What?), Jen Fulwiler of Conversion Diary (and, among other things, the Register blog).

Oh, so that’s one.  Two is that I am crapping things up at the Register today with a little Lenten Quiz:  JUST HOW HOLY ARE YOU?  Come find out! And see how long it takes before someone notices, and becomes offended that, there is no such person as the Venerable Scrupe!

So go see that, and I want to make sure I get a harumph out of all of you.  Then come back here and join me for:

SEVEN QUICK TAKES:  Seven things I could resist, actually

1.  Making wontons from scratch.  This is only a victory in that it shows that I have infinite capacity for feeling guilty (every time I open the freezer and the package of wonton wrappers falls out, and I have to tell them gently, “Not yet, not yet.”) over something that is entirely morally neutral.  Oh, does not making wontons make me feel guilty!  But that thing I said about that lady at Mass — well, I got over that pretty quick.

2.  Eating grapes impregnated with Nerds.  Although my five-year-old daughter is pushing me really, really hard.  It’s kind of like voting for Mitt Romney:  you don’t really have to try it, to imagine how awful it would be.

 

3.  Yelling, “YOU FORGOT YOUR PANTS!” at passing college girls.  You know the ones — sashaying along the sidewalk with their jaunty side ponytails (so boot-cut jeans, which flatter my hips, are out of style, but side ponytails had to make a comeback, eh? Eh???), their North Face jackets, their Uggs, and their . . . not-pants.  What are they called, riggings?  Bleggings?  Oh yeah, they’re called TIGHTS.  Not pants, girls.  Go back to your dorm and finish getting dressed.

4.  Getting [#4 has been edited, in keeping with the spirit of Lent] knocked up, for almost two years straight!

5.  Sending a follow-up email to the director of my children’s school, when it turned out she needed to use our bathroom.  I had rashly decided, you see, that no one would need to use the bathroom before we all went sledding together, and so I did not clean it, even though its degree of filth had long ago reached and overtaken the squalid stage.  This wasn’t a messy bathroom, or even a dirty bathroom.  I wouldn’t even call it filthy.  This was . . . a third world bathroom.  This was a Drudge headline bathroom.  This was a Lollapalooza level of revolting muck and outrageous stench, a putrid, feculent, blight on the face of all that is good and decent.  But I didn’t say a word!  Because what can you say?  “Well, now you know?”

Oh, so the email I resisted sending was going to start, “Thanks for coming sledding with us!  I wanted to reassure you about all the discarded medical gloves on the floor. . . ”

6.  Putting windshield washer fluid in the car all winter.   Is it safe to drive around with brown, opaque windshield?  No.  Is it the action of an adult to seek out the deepest puddles and barrel through them at top speed, in the hopes that the splash will clear my view a bit?  No.  Is it so hard to open up a bottle of windshield washer fluid and dump it in?  No.  Is it likely I will just keep putting it off anyway?  Extremely.

7.  Sitting down to find appropriate pictures for these quick takes, even though the right picture makes all the difference.  Well, here’s something I couldn’t resist:

My Love Is Like a Big Red Dog

My kids are pretty, pretty smart.  But not quite as smart as I think they are.

One time, for instance, we were listening to a Danny Kaye song about “they’ll never outfox the fox!”  It goes on to marvel over the exploits of a dashing young scoundrel:

Whenever they try to find me

They find me where I am not

I’m hither and yon, I’m there and gone, I’m Johnny-not-on-the spot!

(He whistles as he jump to a low tree branch)

I’m out on a limb they think!

(He whistles again, jumping down)

I’m down on the ground in a wink

My enemies say “Gadzooks! It’s spooks!”

Shivering in their socks

They know that they’ll never, I’m far to clever

They’ll never outfox the Fox!

The toddler at the time said something like, “He singin’ ’bout Wobbin Hood.”  OH MY STARS! I thought.  What an intelligent child!  She extrapolated from the mention of all this clever, limb-jumping derring-do, and made the assumption that this song was about Robin Hood — when it’s actually about a very Robin Hood-like character, The Fox.

Then I suddenly recalled that we had just watched Disney’s Robin Hood, in which the main character is . . . a fox.  All that was going on was that when the kid heard Danny Kaye sing, “The Fox!  The Fox!” she figured he was talking about “the fox, the fox.”  Not a bad assumption, but not especially brilliant, either.

I never learn.  Today, my dear baby, who is the smartiest-whartiest baby in the whole wide world,  oh yes she is, came up to me and said, “Doggie have nursies!”

What an intelligent child!  I marvelled all over again.  We don’t even have a dog, but somehow she divined that they are mammals!  I wonder what slight clue was enough for her agile little mind, so that she understood that female dogs nourish their young with, as she so preciously calls them, “nursies.”

Then I saw the picture of the doggie she had in mind:

Yep.  To those with nursies on the brain, it sure do have nursies.

Bet you never look at Clifford the same way again.

My book review on Patheos!

The brilliant and apparently indefatigable Elizabeth Scalia, known to many as The Anchoress, is hard at work again, expanding the Book Club on Patheos.  Patheos is a newish site, sort of an online clearinghouse for religious ideas and information — a fascinating place!

Scalia is the managing editor of Patheos’ Catholic Portal, and she recently asked me to review Brant Pitre’s new book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper.

I will admit, I hardly ever read non-fiction books, whether religious or otherwise — but I enjoyed the heck out of this one.  It was easy to read, with a pleasant, conversational style; but the ideas in it were . . . astonishing.  That’s the only word for it.

I heartily recommend this book as Lenten reading — not because it would be a penance, ho ho, but because it does a great job of taking what you know, half-know, forgot, or never would have guessed about the Eucharist and making it into a cohesive story that illuminates  – well, the history of salvation.  I know that sounds like a lot, but it’s quite a book.

Read my review here! And here you will find Scalia’s interview with the author, an excerpt from the book, and a review by Julie Davis, the Happy Catholic.

Buy the book here!

Communication keeps a marriage strong.

Him:  I love you.

Me:  I love you, too.  But if you get me pregnant, I’ll stab you in the eye.

Him:  I have two.

Valentine’s Day Massacre

(photo source)

This year, I revealed to my husband that I actually kind of like Valentine’s Day.  This is despite all the times I told him that I hated it, it’s lame and stupid, and a made-up, over-commercialized saccharine-fest invented by Hallmark and Big Floral.   For fourteen years, the poor man has been wondering why, every February 14, I would say I wasn’t mad at him, while I was clearly mad at him.

I was mad, you see, because everyone else was getting flowers and riding in heart-shaped hot air balloons and– I don’t know, eating hot fudge sundaes that turned out to have a tiny violin player at the bottom.  And here I was getting nothing, which is what I repeatedly told him I wanted.  Pray for me:  I’m married to a monster.

Anyway, I finally realized that it doesn’t make me defective to enjoy flowers — and that if it’s artificial to suddenly act romantic on a nationally-specified day — well, we need all the help we can get.  Alarm clocks are artificial, too, but if they didn’t automatically remind us of what we ought to do, we’d be in big trouble.   So, yeah, I asked him to get me flowers, and take the plastic wrap off, and he will, and I’m going to like them.  Whew, that wasn’t so hard!

Having taken this huge leap forward in our communication skills, I decided to hunt around to see what normal human beings do on Valentine’s Day.

If you want to feel like you’ve got your act together, just ask the internet a question.  Okay, maybe not in all circumstances.  If you’re rewiring your living room, for instance, or trying to remove the Spaghetti-o decoupage from an angry cat, you may very well have lots to learn.

But if you need help with your relationships?  A quick trip down Google lane will have you feeling like an expert, a champion, a genius, a hero of common sense and decency.  For instance, if you Google “What do guys want for Valentine’s Day?” you will come across this depressing paen to modern love, written by a man:

One of my favorite presents was a trip to the grocery store.

I remember the clear, cloudless day, sun shining down on me proudly pushing my cart into Central Market. Rachel was with me, and some friends who came along.

I picked up a steak and set it in the cart. Rachel said, “That’s great, Doug!”

I grabbed some chips. Rachel said, “That’s really great, Doug!”

I picked up some really expensive jam. Rachel said, “Yum, that will be really great, Doug!”

In fact everything I picked up got the same response from her (or very close to it), and that was my present: I could choose anything I wanted, and she could only say how great everything was. What an awesome gift that was, a trip to the grocery store.

So what did I get, besides some red AND yellow peppers?

I got what most men want. I was accepted.

I weep for America.  I weep for mankind.  I weep for myself, because this is the saddest, stupidest thing I’ve ever read, and I read it three times to make sure I wasn’t missing something.  What is Doug going to get for Christmas from the gracious lady Rachel?  A coupon for Not Getting Kicked In the Nuts?

You know, I probably treat my husband this way sometimes.  But the difference is, neither one of us is okay with it.  We don’t assume that relentless criticism and belittling is part of a normal relationship — we try to get past it.  And please note,Doug and Rachel’s travesty of a relationship is just as much Doug’s fault as it is Rachel’s:   women can’t demean their husbands and boyfriends without the man allowing, even wanting it to happen.  It takes two to be this dysfunctional.

This reminds me of the story of the man who had invented a brilliant method for saving money on the farm.  “On the first week,” he says, “I fed my  horse a bale of hay.  On the second week, I fed him half a bale of hay.  On the third week, I fed him a quarter of a bale.  I was damn near to teaching the horse to live on nothing at all, but on the fourth week, the ungrateful s.o.b. died on me!”

Happy stupid Valentine’s Day, folks.  I hope you get something nice.  Or if you get nothing, I hope at least it doesn’t feel like a gift!

Go, and never darken my towels again.

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl.  I didn’t even watch the Puppy Bowl, which is what the kids were watching.  I sat in the kitchen and ate so much hot spinach artichoke dip that I didn’t even have room for the main dish, which was bacon.  Bacon, do you hear me?

Okay, I had a few pieces.  But I didn’t have room!

Anyway, I guess I missed the main point of the Super Bowl, which was the commercials.  Sounds like I didn’t miss much.  I know that they’re often trashy and offensive, and everyone says they were also stupid and annoying this year.  And . . . violent?  Here’s what DoubleX Factor’s Marjorie Valbrun had to say:

Aside from being sexist, several ads . . . seemed surprisingly violent, including those focused on men. I had not watched a Super Bowl game in several years, so perhaps the level of violence is not that unusual to regular watchers. But they still seemed aggressively physical. . . Do the commercials really have to be just as physical as the game to hold our attention?

I have a really hard time seeing the problem with aggressively physical commercials aired during a game which is about trying to kill each other.  I guess the bloggers just bored with being outraged about sexism, which I can understand — it must be exhausting, especially for poor, frail females!  Tee hee.

In case you are not familiar with the Double X Blog, it’s from the liberal but contrarianSlate magazine, and has the montrsously inaccurate tagline, “What women really think.”  This is kind of like a bag of salt having the tagline, “What slugs really want.”  Nevertheless, I read the dreadful thing to keep in touch with the kind of women who (and this really happened once) see me coming down with the sidewalk with my kids and say, “Eek!” and run away.

Most of the writers are run-of-the-mill, perpetually outraged feminists.  Amanda Marcotte stands out for her near-epileptic, flecks-of-spittle style of journalism, which recently and notably led her to blame pro-lifers for the grisly horrors committed by Kermit Gosnell.  Even her fellow bloggers took her to task for that bizarre accusation.  I can’t even worry too much about the damage she can do with that point of view, because you’d have to be so far down nutso creek to take her seriously, there’s no turning back.

Okay, fine, so back to the Super Bowl:  the women didn’t like the violence, they didn’t like the sexism, they didn’t like the stupidity.  But then the blogger had this to say:

It felt as if advertisers went for cheap laughs this year at the expense of imagination or wit.  I almost expected the Marx Brothers to show up.

Ohhh, no.

No, no, no.

Humorless feminist, you have gone too far.  The Marx Brothers signify a dearth of imagination and wit?  What is this, backwards day?

I desperately hope she simply has never seen a Marx Brothers movie, and only knows that they’re those black-and-white guys in the window of Poster Barn at the mall.  And this is a crying shame.  If you look up “imagination and wit” in the dictionary, you will see a picture of Harpo Marx giving his leg to a blonde debutante.  If you Google “imagination and wit, ” you will hear Groucho telling Margaret Dumont, “Those are my principles!  And if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others.”  And if it’s sexism you like, here’s Groucho as Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer:  “We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren’t developed yet.  But we’re going back again in a couple of weeks!”

We’re doing our part to innoculate our kids against creeping radical feminism:  we’re having a Marx Brothers festival.  So far we’ve seen A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup,Horse Feathers, and even A Night in Casablanca, which was much funnier than I remembered.

Well, Marjorie Valbrun, why don’t you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out.  Normal humans:  what’s your favorite Marx Brothers line?

 

I’m going!

to the first ever Faith and Family Mom’s Day Away in Stoneham, MA!

It will be April 2, which is the baby’s birthday.  Too bad, baby!  Mama’s going to hang out with Danielle Bean, Jen Fulwiler, and Rachel Balducci, who will all be speaking at the event:

In addition to the talks, our schedule for the day will include Mass, opportunity for personal prayer, adoration, and confession, catered lunch, select vendors, and book signings.

I happen to know that the following fascinating women will also be there:  Hallie Lord!  Rebecca Teti!   Melanie Bettenelli with her guaranteed beautiful new baby! Lisa Mladinich! Kate Wicker! Pat Gohn! Dorian Speed!  Lisa Hendey! Siouxsie and the Banshees!  Or maybe I just dreamed that!

It was kind of a long night.  The baby decided she was no longer going to fall for this ridiculous “sleeping” routine, and by the time she succumbed, I was wide awake and ready to fret the night away.  Then she woke up again half an hour before the alarm went off.  So I changed her, started some laundry, some coffee, and some cream of wheat (yes, they each ended up in the proper receptacles somehow).  Got the kids out of bed, and 45 minutes later we were all in the van, just waiting for my son.  I had seen him with his jacket and one boot already on, so I assumed it was safe to get into the car and leave him to figure out the rest on his own.

Mothers, never underestimate an 8-year-old boy’s ability to  . . . just stand there.  For any amount of time, for no particular reason.  He has other talents, but his main one is . . . just standing there.  Eventually I got the little goober out the door and into his seatbelt.  We blasted through the fresh blanket of snow that had fallen (because yes, Lord, yes — we needed more snow.  More snow is exactly what we needed) and onto the highway.

Fifty yards down the road, a truck stopped in front of me to make a left turn.  I stopped.  I really did stop.  I stepped on the brakes, anyway.  But after several seconds of dreadful, silent drift, it became clear to me that I could either smash into the truck, or into the snow bank.  The snow bank looked like it was resigned to more smashing, so that’s the route I took.

And you know what?  No one got hurt, the van was fine, I didn’t hit the truck in front of me.  AND, the driver of the truck pulled over to make sure we were okay; she lent me her phone, and while I was calling my husband, two guys stopped to help.  While one of them was hooking up a chain to the van’s back bumper, a volunteer from the fire department stopped to direct traffic.  Everyone was just lovely, and within five minutes, I was back on the road.  Isn’t that nice?

However, I believe I could use a day away, even if I have to wait for April!  And I know you could, too.  It really does sound like it’s going to be a wonderful time.  If you can make it at all, I would absolutely love to meet you there!  And yes, if I can get my act together, I will be handing out Pants Passes.

A fine day . . .

Guess what I did yesterday?

That’s right, I took the four youngest kids and picked up their older brother from the mountain 40 minutes away because he broke his elbow on the school ski trip; got lost,  got lunch for the other kids, discovered I was short one lunch and went through the drive-through, picked up the math workbook we left at the dentist’s office a month ago, got gas, realized that if I tried to find the hospital which was closer than our normal one, I’d get lost again; went home, changed the baby, threw in some laundry, raked snow off the roof and dug out the mailbox, took the five kids at home and picked up the other three from their ski trip, dragged them all to the hospital, discovered the elbow was actually just bruised, ran to the supermarket for supper, gave the kids a stern lecture about patience, was thoroughly  ignored, went home, and pretended to forget that I had promised severe comeuppance for those among us who bite others among us in parking lots.

In the few minutes we were actually home, the baby managed to climb on the countertop and smash some decorative eggs, pour the last coffee grounds in the house into reservoir of the coffee machine, twist her brother’s new glasses so badly that the lens fell out and the temple piece sticks out of the case like a broken limb, and push a stool up to the stove and turn on the oven.

She also took the clean laundry out of the dryer and threw it in the toilet.  But she always does that.

In the several hours we were in the car, the toddler did two things:  screamed, and peed.

What I’m trying to tell you is that this is a really good day for me to have two articles in different places today.  Not here.   Somewhere else.  Just . . . just leave me alone in my wretchedness.  These are both pieces my regular readers have seen before, but I’m delighted to see that I’ve picked up several new readers in the last few weeks!  So they will be new to you guys, anyway, and thanks for joining us.

At Faith and Family Live, it’s “What I Say to Mary:  A Mother’s Prayer” — a little slice of life, exterior and interior.

And at Inside Catholic, it’s “No Petty Virtues,” which will be up sometime in the middle of the day (but I will be out, so I’m saying this now).  It’s about generosity, prudence, and Superman!  Sort of.

Please come check them out!   And have a lovely weekend.