I'm thinking about doing this monologue.

Valentines Day has been and gone. I have to repeat my Christmas observations. Why is it that people are more stressed out, irritable, and generally impossible to please on the days that are supposed to be the most fun and relaxing. I know why I'M stressed out and irritable, but who wants to spend that much money to be miserable.

Example

We had a lady and her husband staying two nights. On the night of Valentines she came downstairs and chewed out everyone she could get her hands on about the fact that there was no tv or cd player in the rooms. At the Alisal, we barely have electricity and everyone loves how rustic it is. Here, however, she was "very unhappy." She and her husband like to watch the news in the morning. We sent up a tv. She was also "very unhappy" with the breakfast, the room, the environment, and I don't know, the view most likely. She wanted a lower room rate. She wanted special amenities. She wanted the chef to come in the next morning and personally cook them an in-room breakfast. We finally got rid of her, and she called down from her room to say that she was "very unhappy" that there was no chart by the phone telling her how to retrieve her messages (there was one on the bedside table....). In otherwords, she was just "very unhappy."

My thought is...we had people begging for rooms that night, or just a rollaway in a conference room. If she was that unhappy she could just try her luck getting a room. There wasn't a single room in the county to be had for love nor money that night. Secondly. Its freaking VALENTINES DAY. TALK TO YOUR SPOUSE! Do something romantic! Enjoy that fact that you are out of the house, away from the noise and the distractions.

And besides. Nothing is more sexy than shreaking like a shrew at the top of your lungs for a half hour, then retiring with your spouse for a good woe-is-me session. Really put her husband in the mood for romance, I'm sure.

Another idea for humanitarian aid...the country of Haiti is in more political upheaval. Their president has lost the confidence of some of the militant groups of the country. They are uniting to try to make him step down from office. The president has declared his intention of staying in office until the end of his term in 2006. The politics are neither here nor there really. The problem is that because of the turmoil, food and medical supplies are scarce. For more information on the medical conditions in Haiti on a good day, visit the Compassion International Site and look up the country. Now, the conditions are much worse. The average person in Haiti lives in a year on as much money as I make working one job in two weeks. If you would like to donate to disaster relief, click here. The child I support lives just south of the fourth largest city. I have had no word on if she is safe, how near she is to the conflict, if she's still able to go about her life. Anyway...if you'd like to help out some people in a country in trouble, there you are. Compassion International's financial information and mission statement are online. At least 80% of the money that comes to them goes directly to the intended recipient.

Alright guys....If you've ever parused the "My favorite blogs" link, you'll notice Wil Wheaton's is on there. Right now he's trying to raise $25,000 for the Leukemia walk-a-thon in San Diego. Here's the link to his donation page if you have a dollar or two to spare. Here's the link, and I'll put one in the "Beyond ourselves" area too.....

There is the knee-melting-est guy in with his girlfriend?wife?fiance this evening. He's not absolutely beautiful, but he's british and has an Ewan McGreggor thing going on. Wow. he walked up to the desk and we all just stood with our mouths open. And I'm not a drooler by nature. Holy cow is it hot in here.

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day

Ah, the inimitable day has arrived. I'm working a triple shift today, so I don't have time to whine and bemoan the fact that I don't have anything special to do....! I guess I figure, one day of gross spending wouldn't make up for a year of neglect, and if a guy is just getting you something out of social pressure...well, I'd rather get the gift on April 2nd or something. Or maybe I should just stop having opinions of something I know nothing about. Anyway.

I'm working the early shift at my morning job, the lunch shift at my night job, and the night shift at my morning job...tomorrow I work the early morning shift, then the lunch shift and I'm done. Thank goodness. I need the money -- payday is coming, as are the bills!

My car drives so nicely! And it's really really really nice to be sitting in the apartment realizing that, if I wanted to, I could go somewhere because I don't have to wait for Andrea to get off work with the car.

Speaking of Andrea, she spent all evening yesterday balancing her checkbook and updating her spending program in her palm pilate. We are being so good! Starting on payday we are switching to the ultimate cheap cost of living diet. Oh yes. We're making and taking every lunch, and keeping our spending to the barest of all possible minimums. She so she can fund her wedding budget and make car repairs, I so that I can pay off more loans as quickly as possible. We'll see how creative we can be on the littlest possible income. I'm ready to be done with this now!

I have an audition coming up in two weeks. I hadn't decided for sure if I wanted to do the program. It does cost a little because its "educational." I don't know if it pays anything or not. If I could get a part, it would be a great program to be in since it's local. If not, it will be good to get up and actually do an audition since I've been out of practice for a while...I need a good Shakesperean monologue though. Can I learn on in two weeks? And a good modern one. I wonder, can I even do a passable job at Shakespeare? I've never really tried before. The last older play I read was Tartuffe. Great maid role in that one...

This is just the rantingest rant I've published in a while. I got a call last night from Adrian that it is really and truly snowing in Waco. Not just spitting that you can see sort of if you squint just right, but atual inches. At least I think. I was asleep when he called, and not terribly coherent when I woke up enough to say hi.

Ok, I've run out of things to say...and my brain is still asleep.

Car

My new baby is a 2000 Chrysler Cirrus. It (I haven't decided on name or gender, or if I'm even going to give it one....My favorite toy throughout childhood was just "lambie") Has Alloy wheels, automatic everything, a V6 engine, a spoiler, moonroof, and a 6 CD changer. It is dark blue-ish purple-ish. Oh, black leather interior....And I got a really really really really good deal on it. The finance department almost cried. Thanks so Sharane my fabulous dealer!

I bought a car today. It's beautiful. I'm picking it up tomorrow...

CS Lewis on Spiritual Reading

Wherever you find a litle study circle of Christian laity, you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke, or St. Paul, or St. Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev, or M. Maritain, or Mr. Niebuhr, or Miss Sayers, or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvey. Naturally, since I myslf am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. And new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in the position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o'clock a coversation which began at eight, you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why - the reason of course, being that the earlier stages of the coversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed "at" some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real sifnificance. The only safety is to have a stndard of plain, central Christianity ("Mere Christianity" as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one til you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

(Transcribers Interjection. I think the same rule should hold true for all reading. While some modern books are very good, and entertaining, a steady diet of them can make you either one-dimensional, or undernourished intellectually. For example. Le Divorce. Pretty intertaining socially, but not really that deep. Certainly not edifying. Substitute a classic.)

For a good ("popular") defense of our position against modern woffle, to fall back on, I know nothing better than G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. Harder reading, but very protective, is Edwyn Bevan's Symbolism and Belief. Charles Williams's He Came Down from Heaven doesn't suit everyone, but try it.

For meditative and devotional reading (a little bit at a time, more like sucking on a lozenge than eating a slice of bread), I suggest the Imitation of Christ (astringent) and Traherne's Centuries of Meditiation (joyous). Also my selection from Macdonald, George Macdonald; An Anthology. I can't read Kierkegaard myself, but some people find him helpful.

For Christian morals I suggest my wife's (Joy Davidman) Smoke on the Mountain; Gore's The Sermon on the Mount and (perhaps) his Philosophy of the Good Life. And possibly (but with a grain of salt, for he is too puritanical) William Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life...

You'll want mouthwash for the imagination. I'm told that Mauriac's novels (all excellently translated if your French is rusty) are good, though very severe. Dorothy Sayers' Man Born to be King (those broadcast plays) certainly is. So, to me, but not to everyone, are charles Williams's fantastic novels. (Another Interjection by Rachel: An allusion to Tolkien, who had a very big aversion to William's style of writing, declaring that his books were vulgar and farcical. The eventual erosion of their friendship started when Lewis befriended Williams and allowed him into their writers circle) Pilgrim's Progress, if you ignore some straw splitting dialogues on Calvinist theology and concentrate on the story is first class.

St. Augustine's Confessions will give you the record of an earlier adult covert, with many very great devotional passages intermixed.

Do you read poetry? Geore Herbert at his best is extremely nutritious.

I don't mention the Bible because I take that for granted. A modern translation is for most purposes far more useful than the Authorized Version (Aka, King James).

As regards my own books, you might (or might not) car for Transposition, The Great Divorce, or The Four Loves...

Have you read anything by an American Treppist called Thomas Merton? I'm at present on his No Man Is an Island. It is the best new spiritual reading I've met for a long time.

About prides, superiorities, and affronts, there's no book better than Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life where you'll find all of us pinned like butterflies on cards-the cards being little stories of typical characters in the most sober, astringent, eighteenth century prose.

Sunday Reading

Today I am reading today "The Joyful Christian" by CS Lewis. Someone asked me about it. And the first thought that came to my head is, I am reading it because it is Sunday. Which raises a quandry in my mind. One hundred years ago, people read only their Bibles on Sunday, or maybe various church published tracts. There was a sense of keeping separate the sacred and secular on that particular day of the week. Some Sundays, I feel the need, since I am always working (lets ignore the serious issues on that subject for a moment) to read something devotional.

But.

Shouldn't we read such books that we shouldn't be ashamed to read on Sunday? Or, since to most of us that thought rarely occurs, should we ever read anything we would be embarrassed for someone to "catch" us reading? So, in a sense, shouldn't all our reading be "sunday reading?" Not, necessarily sacred in nature, but things that are edifying. Books that are uplifting, and of good content. "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely ...think on these things."

It's worth at least a passing thought.