Nancy's Musings

So, December's dying again, folks. This month. I tell you. It's the drama queen of the Gregorian calendar. Speaking of drama queens: I'm over here, making work-life compromises that nobody is happy with, looking at my lonely old age, and shopping for a laptop that has to last me another ten years. I'm thinking Lenovo thinkpad refurbished. I've always wanted one, and there's no way I can afford one new. They cost like four times what my car is worth. More, probably. I pay the worth of the car every time I get an oil change. I don't do New Years' Resolutions. I don't believe that change should wait, and I don't like the idea that something essentially arbitrary (like the Gregorian calendar) should have any material influence on my soul's progress. But I do take every opportunity to get all depressingly introspective. Just ask my dad. I'm a fat old feminist. I'm an emotional minefield. I'm volatile and demanding and outrageously inde...

It's been a horrible week for me. My wins include not crying in front of anyone, no overtly self-destructive behaviors, remaining professional under superhuman pressures, and eating at least two meals a day. Yes!  I've been thinking about my men-friends, and the near-stalker who called me a misandrist this week ( before I could successfully download software to block his texts permanently ). I really feel bad for him. What would it be like inside a head so insecure that you have to believe that anyone who doesn't like you feels that way because of your gender? Sometimes people just don't like you. Most of the time, people just don't like me. This has been my week. Like Aeryn says,* "It's not you: it's me. I don't like you." I don't hate men. I don't even hate that one. I just refuse to remain where I am abused or manipulated. What about the other men I see more frequently? They know I'm a feminist. I want to follow up my Open Letter...

There's a metaphor in Malachi 3:2 that compares the Savior to a refiner of silver, as the fire. It can be read quite literally that Jehovah's presence does not tolerate sin, but modern-day prophets have also spoken of our experiences as a kind of refiner's fire. In 1979, James E. Faust wrote, "In our extremities, it is possible to become born again, born anew, renewed in heart and spirit. We no longer ride with the flow of the crowd. . .". I am not a refined silver. My greatest impurity is a dependence on the approval of others, and right now I live inside a great furnace [insert joke about either global warming or central heating]. But I have faith that God can turn weaknesses into strengths, and I think that is one reason I live here in this refiner's fire. I think that I have been given a perfectly fitted life: not one so pliable and well-tailored that I can take it for granted, but one that will make of me what I have the potential to become. I need to be ...

I am getting old. Every day I am closer and closer to forty, and further and further from thirty. Every day I strain for adulthood, completely uncertain what that even means. I fight through my hazy, heavy infantilizing need for approval. You'd think, in a silly, self-obsessed blog that pulls in the kinds of numbers that comprise a binary code, I would have learned emotional independence. Or that in all the years of PhD program rejections I would have figured something out. Well, I didn't. But here I am, mid-thirty-ish, calling myself nobody because I live single in a marriage-based culture, because I lack confidence in a career like a violent ocean and all the lifeboats are made of hubris, and because I have failed to make an object of myself. My Christmas wish will not come true this year either. *shrugs* I'm just me. I'd love to make somebody else's Christmas wish come true instead, but nobody I know seems capable of articulating what they really want. I went on ...