So it's about to be Thanksgiving, and I still don't know where we are celebrating tomorrow. Graham's family is really sort of struggling now that Margaret has died, and I don't know if they'll pull it together or if we'll eat at Jim and Betty's - which is really what I'd rather do anyway.

Today I wore a green sweatshirt imprinted with a big ferocious cat leaping through the letter 'R'. Since this shirt cost me $2 at K-Mart, I do not think it is official merchandise of any real team, so I am going to make up a team to root for throughout this football-heavy season. Lets hear it for the Rockfort Sabers! A banner on the bottom of the logo assures us of "Victory".

Sabers got the rhythm
Sabers got the claws
Sabers got the victory banner
So Up Yours!

They're a profane lot in Rockfort.

I just wanted to briefly clarify exactly what I had gotten myself in a lather about in the previously described "public castigation" incident.

You don't hear a lot about foster care or foster parenting outside of the bad news. That is the way things generally are - you hear about the fire department when they accidentally burn down the orphanage during an oily rag fight, but not when they save a couple dozen homes of ordinary joes. But I feel like foster parenting has gotten a really bad and undeserved reputation. I hear people insinuating or even directly saying that people do it for the money. Let's just do the math...most foster parents are paid around $180 a month for keeping a child 24 hours a day for an indeterminate time period. This amount is meant to cover their food, clothes (beyond a small initial allotment), entertainment, school supplies...basically everything that a kid needs is on your hands and if $180 doesn't cover it, you do. $180 a month works out to about 25 cents an hour. It is a job that you never get to leave. Even at the toughest jobs I have had I could console myself that at the end of the day I could go home and recharge and be ready to face it again tomorrow. You home becomes a sanctuary, but not for you. You can count on cleaning up a wet bed every single morning and meeting with teachers when the child acts out in school. You can count on the fact that you are not, will not, and should not be the person the child loves and bonds with. That role is reserved for the parent and you are working at every angle to get the child and parent into a state where they can live together. Your ultimate hope is to make yourself unnecessary. For the money? Patently ridiculous.

My family has been a foster family from the time I was 10 years old, and for the last ten years they have taken on severly emotionally and behaviorally disordered teenageers as a primary ministry. I have seen the incredible sacrifices made by not only my own parents, but all of the large network of other foster families we know intimately.

Yes, it is rewarding, as it always is, to be doing what God had told you to do, but it is also so hard. My mother has had her ribs broken, her life threatened, her furniture destroyed, her walls kicked in. She has become physically and emotionally exhausted dealing so intensively with the bottomless needs of these kids, most of whom have nothing to give back. She has literally poured out her life in love. And not a mushy, emotional love that talks well and does little - a servant, sacrificial love that is in the hardest part of caring for broken and angry people every single day. A kind of love so unbeliveable and self-forgetful that most people cannot understand it and have to assign some sinister motive. To hear people deride foster care or foster parents as money-grubbing, child-abusing, slave-aquiring creeps - well it offends me in the deepest way possible. Arg.

I'm sorry that it gets me so defensive and emotional. I don't think I would be so passionate about defending myself as I am about my mom.

At least I hope not.

Okay, so there are people who's blogs I've found just by looking around on the internet or through friends of a friend, and I feel a little voyeuristic for looking at them when they know me but they don't know I know about their blog...all this to say, that if anyone ever happens upon this and you feel that way. don't. :) All that also to say that I followed a link on my friend Josh's (who I haven't talked to in years) xanga site (which he doesn't know I read) and learned I have, apparently, a rather exhaustive knowledge of 80's lyrics.


Anyone surprised? I would have scored even better if I knew how to spell. Kind of frightening thinking about all the space in my brain devoted to arcana and blather.

out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.
-Sylvia Plath

So I kind of yelled at a man in a fairly public setting on Wednesday. I felt terrible, partly because I didn't feel terrible at all.

It would be true to say that I didn't know quite what came over me, but also to say that I recognize in it a familiar pattern - that is to say, it was both quite like and quite unlike me.

The short version (from my distinctly biased point of view) is that this fellow was giving a talk on a matter dear to his heart and seems to have decided that being aggressive and belittling were the best means to his ends. He was a longtime military man, and while that may have had no bearing on his manner, it reminded me of other servicemen I have known in it's violence and lack of humility. As I felt myself becoming more and more irritated, I was writing down my problems and questions with what he was saying. The final straw came when he derided a group of people that are very near to my heart and are (I think) unjustly demonized. When he insisted I answer one of his questions, I responded with the questions I had been building up in my mind, matching him for tone and aggression level. It was far from the attitude and response set he had been expecting, as it seemed like one of his (successful so far) strategies was to cow and intimidate the audience. Anyways, I was very forceful and we kind of came to an understanding, but it really shocked my friends.

I feel really ambivalent about the whole thing. On one hand, I really try to be a calm and humble partner in discussions, and I rarely have opinions I feel so strongly about that I need to express them despite the response others will have; but very, very occasionally I feel like I must, on principle, stand up to someone - particularly someone who I think few people stand up to - particularly the pompous, the authoritarian, the hypocritical. Can that in any way be used by God? Could he use it to shine a light? Or is it always destructive not to turn the other cheek - is acting within the bounds of anger, righteous or not, always sin? Me thinks it's probably the latter, but I don't want it to be. Because no matter how I seek to be gentle and a servant in everyday life, there is the delicious matter of putting someone in his place, the joy of the devastating comeback, the victory of the surprise attack. Rising like Ariel and eating men like air, you know? And I think that if my friends had not been there, I would have felt less embarassed than empowered, and sin hates to be in the light. I don't know. I guess I just hope that there is the seed of something good in my willingness to challenge people (authority?) if it is submitted to God and not just an end in itself.

Well, I have wholesale ripped off the design of another, far superior site without even changing the content or the links for now, but I hope that matt considers it a compliment, because I love how it looks, and it wont stay like this for long. Hurray!

...so as I was saying...he stored the leftover parakeets in the garage and started up the symphomatic machine. Talk about a mess.