I now know two women in their 30s who are single and buying houses. As of noon today my sister’s offer was accepted on her place. Another friend of mine is looking seriously and will most likely have a house by Independence Day or soon thereabouts.

In thinking about it, I realise that I have at least as many single female friends as I do married ones. Maybe more.

I don’t know the intimate details of every one of my single female friends’ lives, but I do know my sister very well. If any of those other women are anything like my sister they’ve arrived at their middle thirties having gone to at least half a dozen weddings, a dozen bridal showers and as many baby showers as that–if not more. They’ve invested a lot in celebrating the culturally-approved significant milestones of other people’s lives.

I think there needs to be some type of equal celebration for single women who buy houses. The whole point of gift-giving showers for weddings and babies is to help out those we care about as they approach milestones in the road we all travel. Beyond the material significance there’s something important about the community lifting up its members as they do something magnificent and difficult. It’s a way to encourage the growth of community, to show love for others and to just plain celebrate the life of a person you love.

Twenty percent of first-time home buyers are single women. One in FIVE. I think its time we started celebrating that on the same level we do baby showers and bridal showers. Yes, these women could use the leg up (as could anyone) but they could also do with a bit of “conventional” society recognising them as the human beings they are. They could stand to have society say “yes, you may be doing it differently but you still count.”

These women–if they are anything like my sister–have spent years celebrating with their friends. It’ll be nice to see their friends celebrate them in return. (Look for announcements of parties coming soon.)

(And yes, I wish I’d been this bold when PK purchased her first house.)

Pink Kitty has a new blog, and she’s talking about things I love to think on–things like prayer, intercessory prayer and the interaction of the body of fellowship.

The church community has become something of an anthropological hobby of mine, moreso lately. I’m endlessly fascinated at how the pursuit of Christlikeness impacts an ordinary gathering of human beings. Obviously no one in a church is entirely like Christ, because they are not yet dead. (It is only in death that we see face to face and are the wholly new creature we’ve spent our time on earth journeying toward.) Nevertheless, a large percentage–we hope for 100, but we’re never sure–are actively TRYING. The disconnect is when some folks focus only on the attempts, while others focus only on the failure of many of those attempts. This accounts for the big gap between the Yay Church! and the Ugh, Church! folks. It also accounts for why so many people of my generation aren’t going to church, dear Barna.

One of the saddest and most obvious gaps between the Trying and Failing is in the area of prayer requests and the response to problems. There are certain problems we’re used to hearing in prayer requests that don’t meet with much undue attention. Everyone’s uncle has had cancer, everyone’s rotator cuff has needed surgery, everyone’s kids have all gotten the flu at once. Health prayer requests are totally safe. As are (sorry, Christy) ‘travelling mercies’. Who hasn’t had a road trip to grandma’s for which they’d like a guardian angel on shotgun?

But there are prayer requests which never get asked, because as much as we like the idea of growing closer to Christ, no one likes their human counterparts to know what’s underneath the clean sheets on their bed. Who raises their hand at the beginning of Sunday School and says “I need prayer for my porn addiction” or “I’m in a dark place with my spiritual walk and would like to be lifted up”? The “juicier” the problem on a human level, the less intercessory prayer is requested. [This is also a problem I have with the Name It And Claim It teachers. As cool an idea as that may be, it also gives unscrupulous pastors--and we know those do exist--fodder for blackmail. ]

I’ve been asking for prayer for health concerns for years. Exactly ONE person from my church checks in on a regular basis to see how I’m faring, and that person is a close friend. Health concerns are mundane.

A while back I had a close friend ask for prayer regarding their marriage. People who had tenuous connections with the couple on a social basis suddenly felt it their calling to be involved in all aspects of the lives of both husband and wife. I was approached by several people at several levels in the church for progress reports. People were interested and people were taking notice. Many people confessed their own difficulties within their marriages over the years–things which were NEVER talked about at prayer request time.

It seemed to me that the more “interesting” a problem, the greater the response is on the part of the church. Some of that may be superficial curiousity, but I think on another level some of the interest in those problems we all share but never talk about is the desire to finally be able to talk about the marital problems, the porn addiction, the job struggles with other Christians without fear of gossip.

The vines had grown to the top of the fence. They’d grown over the fence and into the deck. They’d killed the grill, made the chairs impossible to sit in. They’d clogged the downspouts and were slowly but surely taking over the fabric of the house itself, prying wood from wood with their deceptive greenness.

They looked like freshness and spring and life, but like most of the rest of life they were good mixed with bad. Out of control they were as destructive as they were beautiful and it was time for them to go. When they were at last tamed, the old fences came down as well.

For the first time in a long time the western sun hit the quiet patch of ground where she liked to hide. For the first time in a long time she could sit on the swing and see the sunset paint the sky.

It was mothers day, the first since she’d lost her child, and she’d been hiding in her sadness. Long parts of days were spent remembering the times with him, when he used to play around the roots of those vines.

When the vines came down and she could again see the sky from her safe place she realised that was his gift to her. The knowledge that it was okay to look out and to let the world in.

It was the early morning hours of mothers day when the lattice blew in. It had been tacked to the deck for more than seven years, and the vines had spent that time resolutely climbing and entwining it. The glass bulbs from the old christmas lights were fogged by weather and dead from seasons of time but had become so laced in the thicket of viney wood that they were part of it all.

On the sunny saturday before we had decided to trim back the tallest of the plants–the ones that crept into the old grill and the deck chairs and snuck into the vinyl siding up to the rafters. It was meant to be cosmetic, just a shaping and a pruning.

It was that wildness, though, that extra thick blanket of green, that stored the determination for the whole thing. And when the wildness was gone it all collapsed on itself like the death of seven years’ time, unable to withstand the ill wind of a cold dawn.

The day when some men give diamonds and cards and restaurant dinners he spent clearing away the deadloss, chopping bits of wood and plastic and disentangling the vines while the wind beat against the house. It was as good a way as any to spend the first mothers day after the death of one of their children. As good a way as any to pretend that the way things were different didn’t matter and that what was torn down by wind and weakness would grow back if you had enough nails and patience.

I mostly liked this episode. Minimal Jack and Kate, a good amount of mysticism and Nestor Carbonell. And of course it was very satisfying to watch someone–anyone–beat the crap out of Michael.

The only thing is that the writing is starting to remind me of dreams I frequently have. Some nights my subconscious will take me back to high school, but I’ll be there with my husband and a couple of people who worked with me at the travel agency and the music minister from a church I went to 8 years ago.

It’s totally random and makes me feel slightly unglued.

That’s kind of how I felt watching last night’s episode and I think it’s why I’m holding back on loving it. At the beginning it was pretty cool to see someone from another “time” pop up in a seemingly impossible situation. Now it’s starting to make me feel unmoored and anxious. I’m ready for some level of resolution to the story, because I’m starting to feel like there is no “story” per se, but rather a series of literary legerdemain. I’ve seen as many of the quilt squares as my mind can handle and I’m about ready for someone to stitch them together.

I know that it’s probably very uncool and extremely un-American for me to admit this. At the very least I expect more than a few cold shoulders at the next few social occasions on my calendar. But I have to say this. I have to be brutally honest.

The Speed Racer movie looks like a pile of celluloid throw-up.

I have read so many articles, both online and in print, which rave on and on about how Speed Racer is the best thing to happen to movies since Jason Segal’s penis. The press for the brave new technology is endless. Yet every time I see stills or commercials for the film itself it looks like a huge mess.

I am fully open to the possibility that the fault lies with me. I wonder if this isn’t the visual equivalent of those Youth Ringtones that are so high-pitched you can’t hear them if you’re over twenty-two. Maybe Speed Racer only looks cool if you are a fifteen year old boy. Or tripping.

Since I’m neither, I’m going on record as saying “Yikes” and skipping this one.

I’m doing my best, as I explained in an email to someone yesterday, to live at peace with all mankind. That’s sort of my promise to Casey–to follow his example of kindheartedness as his legacy.

That means that I’ve refrained from calling the various medical people I saw Saturday and Today a bunch of long words with many syllables that frequently feature the letter K.

I’ve got a fibroid in my uterus. Medically it’s sort of the equivalent of having a wart, a hangnail or another nuisance bump. Yet the first thing out of everyone’s mouth has been the notion that I should think about whether or not I want to keep my uterus.

My flavour of feminism has always been a bit off. I read serious feminists and their opinions and often find myself confused. I don’t know which “wave” I am, and in the last few years I’ve actually sort of stopped calling myself a feminist and started just being stubborn about individual rights in general. Nevertheless I get very annoyed at the number of unnecessary hysterectomies and caesarian section births that are sold to women because they’re easier. It offends me that we’re actually telling a woman to cut out a necessary part of their bodies for convenience’s sake.

The doctor today made it sound as though my only option was to have the womb and all associated parts 86′d. Then I come home, run straight to the internet and see that there are indeed many options which are more preferable, easier on the patient and allow the women to keep their body parts intact.

All told, I think that’s what I’m gonna go with.

Isn’t this cool? I was writing about the shelves we got over the Tax Holiday over at Tiny Cat Pants. (We didn’t realise it was Tax Holiday when we went out shopping, but hey. Cool for us.) I remembered that my sister brought my camera back from Ft. Wayne, so I decided to add a couple snaps of my new Happy Place.

Bookshelves always make me feel so happy inside.

>> Iron Man is an awesome movie. (Said awesomeness may be due to painkillers, but I’m betting not.)

>> It’s grilling season. I love the taste of meat cooked over fire.

>> The Lost Season Finale is the day before my birthday. My birthday falls on Memorial Day Weekend this year, which rocks. It feels like the whole world has a three day weekend for ME. ;-p

>> I actually wrote a post with fewer than 100 words.

So I FINALLY watched State Of Play (The BBC Series version) this weekend. It was good, but I think I had my hopes set too high.

People often say this show is “The British Wire“. I’m sorry to report that, as good as it is, it is most definitely NOT anywhere close to being The Wire. No Tom Waits opening song, no kaleidoscopic viewing of the events of the story through all layers of characterisation. No fully-realised secondary and tertiary characters. No Baltimore. No Omar. No Bubbles.

Just a two-and-a-half hour story squeezed into six hours of BBC-style story-telling. I maintain that the big twist ending, halfway through hour six, is a twist ONLY because the story’s been going on so long that you’ve gotten comfortably numb and have almost forgotten the main catalyst.

I am interested in seeing the US movie they’ve turned this story into. After the six hour miniseries that was too long I’m betting that the US movie will either tighten the story into a great film or chop it unrecognisably. Either way, I do think that Mack will take a liking to it, given the subject matter. (Oil industry shenanigans.)

I will say, though, that the miniseries is worth watching if for no other reason than Bill Nighy. He has said for several years that being a journalist was his dream job. That shows through in his performance as he lights up the screen everytime he’s on. The scene where he greenlights the hiring of the freelancer played by James McAvoy is priceless–I rewound it three or four times.

Another sighting that left me kind of shocked was actor Rory McCann who plays D.I. Brown. The man is the spitting image of a young Sean Connery. In fact I even stopped the movie to google him, thinking he may have been Connery’s son. He isn’t. But he did star in the funniest oatmeal commercial I’ve ever seen.
(Who spells “porridge” like that, though?)

Anyway, if you’ve got Netflix you should add State of Play, because it’s good. It’s just no substitute for The Wire.