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Well, no more writing on the job for me. Bah. And of course it was Cranky Manager who told me, although she did it fairly diplomatically. The thing that upsets me, however, is that she, by her own admission, does not mind me writing, the store manager is very unlikely to mind me writing, but Company Policy minds me writing, and if The Man happened to walk by and saw me writing on the job they would probably fire me on the spot. I kind of hate corporations right now. 

Let me rant for a minute.
  1. Writing helps me do better on the job. It keeps my mind active and my temperament cheerier.
  2. Thus far, writing has never, ever gotten in the way of me doing my job in any way.
  3. My job involves, at the moment, me making about one sale per hour. In between I have virtually nothing to do, except occasionally straighten calendars. Writing for five minutes at a time and then going round to make sure things are all right and making certain I am alert to any and all potential customer needs cannot possibly hinder this. I understand that I will get much, much busier -- someday? really? PLEASE? -- and of course I would not spend all sorts of time scribbling when I have lines of customers and people knocking things down and making messes.
  4. THIS IS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST NANOERS. CAN I SUE? [/flippant]
  5. Writing + books + bookstore employee. Do the math. It is of the good.
  6. I really, really hate wasted hours. Quite a lot of people will laugh at this because when I have a bad emo fit I spend quite a lot of time sulking about and doing nothing -- but really, few things make me feel worse than doing nothing for hours on end. When I go to work I feel very insignificant. I spend four hours standing around doing very little. I sell people calendars occasionally, and yes, I am earning money and gaining experience, but it feels so very -- pointless? -- in the end. That's coming off a bit strongly, I think -- what am I trying to say? Superfluous is the word I keep knocking up against. I sell people somewhat expensive things that they do not very much need. Certainly I may make some people happier by -- being pleasant towards them? Making things go more simply? 
So, yes, I felt really horrible and emo after work today. Silly and selfish of me I suppose. I won't write on the job anymore, and if I get into the store eventually I won't have time anyway -- and that's all right with me. I just hate that I have hours and hours in which I can't do anything useful at all. (Of course claiming that my writing is very useful is somewhat presumptuous of me.)

In better news, I was slated to lead worship all by me lonesome this morning and had scrapped together some songs -- all gospelly things that I enjoy playing and singing, because I am very tired of limp worship songs, but I was not exactly looking forward to it because I am Not Very Good at leading worship. So I was practising a bit, and then Jonathan got on the piano and we ended up jamming for a bit, which turned into impromptu-ly adding him to the roster. It was the best worship ever. My voice only did something funny once, the congregation was actually singing a lot, I managed to be slightly charismatic ("okay everybody, we're going to sing this song now!" and "all together now!" and "one more time!"), Jonathan sounded fantastic, I felt really involved in the music, and I wish I could clearly say that it was because I was worshipping, but I can't tell, really, between music-propelled emotion and actual worship, but at least it was good, and whole-hearted, and joyful, and well-meant, so I think that counts for something. Also, everybody sang. It was kind of mind-blowing. I have so much trouble getting anybody besides my parents to sing with me. (And, um, Dad tends to throw me off sometimes because he is sitting in the second or third row singing a really different melody and harmonising and throwing odd little bits in and, argh. I mean, it's kind of adorable, but it really throws me off. And sometimes people start singing a different melody or tempo than I am singing and that messes me up terrifically. But anyway.) 

(Also I had this really vintagetastic new Goodwill dress, which made me a little happier than clothing probably ought to, although practically every single person in the car made fun of my green stockings at least once.)

I wrote two thousand three hundred or so words today, I think. I meant to go for another two hundred at least, but it was eleven o'clock, and I already wrote more than the Daily Quota, so if I keep that up I'll catch up by the end of the month, at least. I can't expect to write three thousand words every day from now on. (Also when I checked my word count I was at 22,222 words, which was so awesome that I had to stop there.) And, oh dear, how I hated most of what I wrote. There is a certain underlying problem, though, that caused most of the hating, which I may expound upon later. But there were about two hundred words, near the end, that I really liked, and after so many exhausted, trite metaphors and repetitive dialogue and my characterisations going bland and stereotyped and melodramatic, that felt good.

escapadery!

Aug. 6th, 2008 11:18 pm
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I should be writing about the general hobnobbing and adventures that have been going on lately, but I tried and they're so muddled together in my head (quite comfortably, sort of like my bookshelves) that I can't quite figure out which pieces go where and it's too late at night to bother, so I shall just set down some pertinent facts.

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So, I've been having some really rather fantastic Goodwill luck lately (and maybe someday there will be pictures; I do, after all, finally have a tripod, only there's a bit missing so I sort of have to balance the camera on it, meaning that weird angles are out, except the...constant, unintentional ones, argh). I found a splendid floor-length formal dress to wear to Alessandra's wedding for five dollars, and it fits me like a dream. (It requires fire-engine red pumps, however, which I have yet to find. Also a lace shawl of similar shade would be nice, as I have an annoying and strangely shaped tanned patch near my left shoulder-blade on account of not getting my sunblock on properly the last day of Grey Fox when I was wearing a blouse with a keyhole cutaway in the back. WOE.)

Anyway, on Thursday there was a fifty percent off sale, and among the various & sundry items I collected was a truly superlative turquoise brocade blazer, which I took at first glance to be about five to ten years vintage, due to its pleasantly softened appearance -- you know how clothing gets sort of especially cosy after a few years, but not necessarily shabby. After I had brought it home and was hanging it up in the closet I caught sight of the tag. The brand? Mary-Kate and Ashley. Verily, I am ashamed. ASHAMED, I TELL YOU. But it is a truly fantastic blazer nonetheless (TURQUOISE. BROCADE. -- Since when do they make things this niftily quirky, anyway? The stuff at Wal-Mart is never of this calibre!) so I shall simply keep mum about it, and perhaps surreptitiously remove the tag? (Of course now I've told the entire internet about it...)

There was also a book-sale at the location of the old Goodwill (they got a new, significantly larger building in which they've combined the downtown Goodwill and the one that was at the mall until it was shut down), wherein I spent about half an hour trying to find some worthy literature amongst the seemingly endless dross of romance novels (and the occasional potboiler or self-help book). Eventually I came away with new-old copies of some of our staple cookbooks to take with me when I no longer live here, Chamber of Secrets, an E.L. Konigsberg, another book on psychology by Oliver Sacks, who wrote the fabulous Musicophilia, and -- Strunk & White's Elements of Style! I was delighted at that find, which...no-one else understood. Alack.

Tomorrow, our little church is having a sort of fair, with live music and free pony rides and food and craft vendors, which ought to be great fun. I am singing, which ought to be Very Scary. (There will probably be a fair amount of people, oh dear. I mean, hurrah. So far our previous community outreach attempts have fallen somewhat flatly.) Something will be a capella and other somethings will be Songs I Can Already Play With My Eyes Shut, to lower the terror factor and give me less a chance of fumbling haplessly as I often sometimes do on Sunday mornings when leading worship or playing after the sermon. Any of you local lot who take a notion to come are certainly welcome (Jonathan's already signed on). Remember, food! And -- pony rides! (And -- me! Ulp.)
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I keep meaning to post, but d'you know, the more I procrastinate, the more daunting the post becomes. Things keep on happening -- little things, mostly, but things I feel obligated to write about for my own posterity if not your entertainment. (And I feel both as though I am harried and have too much pressing on me, and that there isn't anything to occupy me at all. I'm restless. And confused, but confusion is pretty much like breathing oxygen anymore.)

Well, the weekend will be busy; Dad's church has got an Easter party tomorrow morning and I am slated to awake at six thirty, which I am not looking forward to (and should probably start working on any minute now; I seem to require an obscene amount of sleep). I'm hoping it goes well, as we're trying to draw some more people, particularly families, to our church, which is currently very small and in need of growth. There will be food (breakfast), and -- I'm singing. Which I am kind of not very prepared for, so. Okay, they're easy songs, and I've mostly got them down, and they're the sort of folk songs that my voice wraps itself around the most easily, but I am nothing if not perpetually nervous and paranoid anyway.

Sunday is Easter. Where did that come from? All of the holidays have been springing up on me unawares this year, and Easter being unusually early does not help. I missed St. Patrick's Day entirely -- it was a Saturday, and I was out and about, as usual, and I didn't even listen to the radio. Or wear green. Or put on Solas, or the Chieftains, or anything. Actually I feel as though I've been missing a lot; days are going by much too quickly and insubstantially, and yet why do I feel that the moments are dragging on? Even spring -- I've been longing for it, and then suddenly -- oh, well, look, birds. Go back to my breakfast.

 Easter is always an awkward holiday for me, as I may or may not have mentioned before, because I never feel like I get it right. I feel like it ought to be sacramental, like it ought to feel important,  like I ought to feel more solemn or at least think about something, but I get up and watch the sunrise, eat a doughnut, put on a pretty dress that's entirely inappropriate for the weather, go to church, have a nice lunch, and then sleep off and on most of the rest of the day, and I think -- where's the reverence? Maybe everyone else is getting it and I'm not. I don't know. So I'm confused all over again every year.

And now I really ought to practice "By the Mark" about forty more times and force myself to sleep. World, why do we run on different clocks?
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So, the one thing I should Never, Ever Do Again is this: Sort the apostles during a lull in the sermon. Because then I start giggling. And that's just wrong. (Giggling in church is one thing. Giggling hysterically in church when the pastor isn't saying anything remotely funny is something altogether different.)



(But Peter was such a Gryffindor!!)


*headwall*
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So. 

In regards to my previous post, which I didn't have enough time to write properly and now have equally little time to explain properly--rather, I have worlds and worlds of time, but little on the computer--I'm not leaving Christianity, or the church. I'm a little sick of the church, though, seeing as I've been hurt by nearly every single one I've been to, including the church that claims to be there for the people who got hurt by the church. I wish I could take a break from it, and then go far enough away that I could find a place that suited me, with pastors I felt I could confide in, but that won't happen until college. I will go to whatever church my parents go to until I move out, because I know fellowship is important, but often I feel as if that's all I'm getting out of my churches. The sermons at our current church are--not often very meaty. Add to that the fact that my thoughts towards the senior pastor are somewhat less than friendly. (Many of the people, however, are wonderful. I don't ever mean to discount them.)

I'm just tired, I think, of all the extra stuff. I wish I could find and practice a sort of pared-down Christianity--one that doesn't have the modern trimmings and trappings that mean nothing--among people who don't see Christianity as a sort of subculture, a sort of conformity; people who don't believe that to be a Christian means to listen to certain kinds of music and read certain kinds of books and watch certain kinds of movies and dress in a certain kind of way. (I'm not talking about modesty, either. I like modesty. But I find it somewhat odd that there seems to be a certain manner of dress among most of the Christians I know--I can't explain it, exactly, but there's a weird sameness to it. The colours always seem to be the same sorts.) 

Sometimes I'm reluctant to tell people that I'm a Christian, not because I'm at all ashamed of what I believe, but because of the connotations the title itself carries. People think of uber-conservatives, religious freaks, the Crusades, Christian media, and they also feel a certain seperation. So, I'm a Christian, you're a Bhuddist, and you're a skate punk. And you're a businessman. Let's all hang out in our corners of the room, eh? I don't believe Christianity is a way of life. Believing in God--the real God, not some composite made of all the bits that interest or please you--is life. It's life, the way it should be. It's a regaining of some of what we were created to be. Matt Slocum said, "We forget how it is supposed to be: we were made for perfection." And then we sinned. Loving and serving God is reaching back towards that perfection; it's the only way to truly be human. And in a way, yes, that would make us different from other people, but it doesn't put us in this other box on the other side of the table. "I've found truth. Maybe someday you will, too."

Does any of this make sense? At all? My father and I had a long conversation about this on Sunday, and he actually agreed with a lot of what I feel. He says I would like the churches in Africa, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh--people are there to love God, to worship Him, and to fellowship and grow with other believers. There isn't the pomp and circumstance and materialism show that many modern American churches feel is required of them. I'm sick of 'worship' bands that get applauded after every song, and play like it's a concert, instead of encouraging the congregation to actually worship God. (I was pleasantly shocked when I visited [profile] midenianscholar's church--the worship band was stripped down, and the leader wasn't showing off. He was instructing the congregation on what the songs really meant, how they should fix their minds on God isntead of just the music. It was amazingly refreshing!) I've been growing more and more frustrated with how much show is going on at my church. Last week, we had worship, then a special song, then an over-long movie clip, and then the sermon. Once in a while, a short film clip or a song or a skit is great--it gives you a sort of context. But having such things every week makes me feel as if the church is trying too hard to entertain me. Life isn't all about fun. I like having fun (although my sense of fun is--twisted, seeing as I get insane joy out of sitting around with people discussing weighty topics), but not everything needs to be fun. And just because something isn't fun, that doesn't mean that it's going to be dull. As an example, I feel uncomfortable calling the film Hotel Rwanda, about the 1994 genocide, entertaining. It had me riveted. It was possibly the only film to have me sobbing at the end. It was not dull. But it was not fun. It was, however, important.

If I could create my own church--which would be kind of a mess, because I would make an awful pastor and definitely need someone older and wiser than me instructing us all--I'd put it in a beautiful, wide-open building. I'd have art on the walls--not always specifically Christian art, although some of it would be. The rest would have to do with Creation and joy and beauty--people enjoying themselves, alone or together, or images that symbolise things such as love, or hope, or paintings and photographs of flowers, trees, landscapes, mountains, et cetera. I'd have a lot of windows. That way, when people came in, they'd be struck by beauty, and see the beauty of God through the beauty of His Creation. I wouldn't have a worship band. I might have a guitarist, or a pianist, and a string- or wind- instrumentalist, and a singer. The songs wouldn't be so popular that all the meaning's been choked out of them--they'd be written to be easy enough for ordinary people to understand, but not overly simplistic--songs with actual doctrine in them. The senior pastor would be someone with a great deal of integrity, someone who is a man of prayer, of deep faith--someone who knows what he's talking about. And I don't know. Maybe most people wouldn't want a church like that. Maybe a lot of people would. I just want something that's real

Well. I think I've lost track of what I'm saying again. I guess my real thing is this: I wish, in a way, that I had never been a pastor's child. Being involved in the inner workings of the church makes it so that you see all the absolute worst of it. It gets discouraging, especially once you get old enough to understand almost everything that goes on. I think my father makes an incredible minister, but I wish I hadn't had to see all that I have. It's made me a lot more cynical than I would have liked to be, especially at such a young age.
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I find it confusing and somewhat bothersome that I can wax lyrical ad nauseum about so many things, and yet when it comes down to deeply serious things that really matter, I find myself completely at a loss. 

(Such as now, for example. Plague.) 

But here is one conclusion I seem to have consciously reached today: I have little use for the trimmings and trappings of Christianity, and even less use for the Christian subculture. Christianity in and of itself is man's invention, but Christ is not. I need to find a way to cleanse my mind of all of the cliches in order to discover the mind-blowing glory which must be God: the God I see in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in the music of Sixpence None The Richer, the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien--the God of art and words and music and nature and love and being, as well as the God of the Bible. 

One of the problems, I think, with the American church at large, is that they seem to be trying to take all of the wonder out of God, and reduce Him to something commonplace, occasionally even trendy. I've had too much of that put into me, I think, and I need to find a way to erase that.

At the moment, however, I am simply confused and have no idea how to type anymore.

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