A Weekend of Ordinary and Unusual Things

Email. There is always email. This weekend much of it was about tweaking Planet Mercenary art and fine tuning some of the design elements for Planet Mercenary layout.

Reading twitter and the news while being simultaneously pleased that people are stepping up to protest because of their convictions, and being appalled at how my country currently appears to the world at large. I have a Facebook friend in Australia and watching her react to the news from America has been painful. There was an entire thread of Australians saying “well, guess I’m not going to visit the US ever again.” The things happening in my country are too scary for them to want to risk coming here.

Buying groceries at the store where prices are unchanged, people are calmly picking up food they need and luxury items they want. No sense of panic or urgency, just people doing their regular shopping.

Waking up Saturday morning with a crippling sense of self-doubt. It suddenly seemed obvious that I had failed at everything I’ve been trying to accomplish and that anything which seemed near completion would actually prove to need total, massive revision. Howard talked me through enough so I could function. The feeling faded by late evening.

Church was utterly normal. People gave talks on kindness and service without any reference to politics or world events. This was both a relief and a frustration. Events in my country are big enough that they should be changing everyone. We could use reminders about Christ saying “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” Yet I know for a fact that my church congregation has people on both sides of the ideological debates and I really did not want heated discussion to chase away the solace of church worship. I dearly love some people on the opposite side of ideological divide from me. I do not want to fight with them. Bridges not walls.

Laying on the floor next to my teenage child’s bed because she is currently curled up in a ball underneath that bed. She can’t come out because her left eye feels all hollow and everything in the world is poking at her brain. So I keep her company until the noise in her head calms down enough for her to emerge. Down there on the carpet I pondered what to do to help her, whether her medicines need to be changed, and the fact that the carpet really needed a good vacuuming.

It is all such a mix of things heartbreaking and things boring, things complicated and things simple, things routine and things unprecedented. I’m worn out with it all. So I drag myself out of bed each day like tiny Steve Rogers standing back up in the alley saying, “I can do this all day.” Sometimes winning comes from just refusing to stay down.