Five

Five is sitting next to me on the computer counter. She swings one leg over the edge and sinks her teeth (and her noes) into an apple that is almost as big as her head. In a few minutes she will hand the apple over to me so I can eat another section of the skin off for her. I could congratulate myself on being so generous as to eat the skin of Five's apple for her but I think it benefits me as much as her. It's been a long time since I have eaten an apple and I need some fruit in my lunch. I would not have bothered if she had not wanted one. That's what being a sister is all about. Even if I do get the less desirable part of the apple, and she doesn't learn to eat through the bitter stuff to get to the sweet, I get some nourishment that I would otherwise not bother about. Little sisters are for learning the things you missed the first time you grew up. Five keeps me looking at the world as if it were something new and exciting. I learn things over again that I may have forgotten. Yeah, I have to listen to the same story for the hundredth time as I read it out loud but it's the first time for her and her excitement spills over and I see it as she does. It never hurts one to go back to kindergarden once in a while. Winnie-the-Pooh is even better when you are reading it to Christopher Robin. I guess God makes them that way on purpose. But you have to open yourself up. Sometimes I'm so caught up in being Nineteen that when Five invites me to do something with her she just comes off as annoying. I have to make a little sacrifice to open myself up. I have to eat the peal off her apple. I have to say yes and give of my time before I can get any nourishment out of it. The apple's flesh that comes off with the peal is sweet. It's not a full meal but it's a little extra I would not get otherwise.
Would you believe that? Five eat that whole apple and now she's getting some one to make her a burrito!

What happens when there is no spell check.

Arranged marriages

If you watch enough chick flicks (especially movies aimed at younger girls) it will not take long before you run into a story with an arranged marriage in it somewhere. The parents who want their daughter to marry for money versus the girl who wants to marry for love. I always sympathize with the parents. They always portray the parents as being clueless about the man they have chosen or evilly plotting their child's destruction for their own gain. Based on this I hear girls comment on how horrid that situation would be and how glad they are that society doesn't work like that anymore.
I don't know. I think I would trust my parents to pick a man who was far above tolerable.
That was something that bugged me to no end about Mulan 2; (Yes I am publicly admitting to having watched that movie. Little sisters are my excuse.) The Emperor, whom we all admired in the first movie, was stupid enough to set up his own daughters in a marriage with a kid he had never met. I expected better of him. He would have been wise enough to base his daughters match on more than just politics. He would have made sure that the boy was suitable, not just that the marriage was good for the country. Portraying arranged marriages as evil is a categorical imperative in our culture even at the expense of otherwise admirable characters.
I don't think it's any more inherently evil than our current system. You can't argue that there was little love in marriages that were arranged based on the love that exists in the average American relationship today. There are as many unfaithful spouses now as then, if not more. There were certainly fewer divorces. Divorce seems have become commonly acceptable and necessary when the young people started choosing partners for themselves rather than there parents. It seems like it ought to be the other way around. If your parents choose your husband no one will blame you if it doesn't work out and a divorce might be a very reasonable option. Yet it didn't happen nearly as often, as far as I know. Now that young people choose for themselves they often find that they chose wrong and have to try again. As CS Lewis observed, it must have worked since we are all here and many of our ancestors had arranged marriages for hundreds of years.
I told my dad that if he wants to arrange my marriage he is welcomed. Saves me the trouble of having to get rid of guys I don't find suitable. Just send anyone interested to Dad and let him weed out the losers. He didn't seem to enthusiastic about the idea. He thinks I've a pretty good chance of ending up in a convent so finding me a man would be rather useless anyway.

Play time.

This is what I was doing this morning.

I side swiped a parked car.

Don't laugh, it's not funny. I only got my license a week ago and my parents don't want me to drive cause I'm not on the car insurance yet. I was lucky they let me go. Typical.

So it's like this, my older sister Dana was on a school trip to the neighboring state. She took a train. Her train got in at midnight. My dad was supposed to park the car in the parking lot of the train station and and ride his bike home so she would be able to just drive home when her train got in. That was the plan. Then there was my little sisters chamber music concert that got out a bit late. My dad is like "well, if I go park the car and ride back it will be ten thirty and I have to get up tomorrow morning. Karen! I bet you would like to get up at midnight and go get your sister." Yeah. Sure. So my dad bailed and the only other option was my mother who is seven months pregnant and NOT feeling very well. So I agreed. Dad gave me directions to the train station and they were pretty simple. I actually had no idea there was a train station down town. But it didn't sound hard to find. Mom suggested that my younger sister Clara come with me so that I would not be driving around down town alone on a friday night. That was fine. But Then... mom started giving Clara some well meaning advice and just making sure she knew what she was getting into. There are going to be lots of intoxicated people roaming the streets and you are Not to make eye contact with Any one. As she continued I could see Clara getting more and more nervous. By bed time she was like "Maybe this is not such a good idea." Too late now! So we put a DVD on the computer and watched until it was time for us to go. So we get into the car in our pajamas and start heading for down town.

The streets were pretty empty until we got right to the heart of town down. Then we ran into the one thing that could throw off dad directions: Hoopfest. Well, if you know what Hoopfest is than I guess you know where I live but if not, Hoopfest is when about two thirds of the population of my city get together and play basketball. All the roads are blocked off and filled with basketball hoops. It's a huge deal. My city is a little obsessed with basketball. So we get to the street that we are supposed to turn on and, naturally, it's blocked off. Or at least it looked like it was blocked off. I might mention that my vision is kind of bad right now cause I have a clogged tear duct in my right eye that waters and oozes puss every once in a while and generally makes it hard to see. I have glasses as it is so at every stop light I had to take my glasses off and wipe my eye. As for the time between stop lights; I just prayed and squinted and blinked. So, seeing that the street is blocked, we pull into a parking lot and use the alley to get onto another street. This begins a long adventure of trying to navigate the one way streets and detours. Oh and did I mention that there were indeed crowds of intoxicated people stumbling around, j-walking, running (not just blindly stepping but running like they wanted to get hit) out in front of traffic, and generally making things interesting for the two lost little girls in the giant station wagon. Clara was freaking out. "I am really interested in the glove compartment right now. I am NOT making eye contact." She so comforting. This is doing nothing for my nerves. "LOOK! Hallelujah! there is the street we are supposed to be on! But dad said to just keep going cause there was a dead end and that is the train station. But this is a two way street (amazingly) and I have no idea if I would go right or left. Wait, do I even have a choice? Is that way blocked off? No. I guess we're going to go right cause it's easier right now and I am not sure if it's legal to go left just now." There are all these do cones and those sandwich board type 'do not enter' signs all over the street so I am trying to get into the right lane without hitting any of them when Clara yells "Karen your too close!!!" *CrashScrape* "You just hit that car." No! Really? "I think that's called side swiping." "you're just going to keep going!" "Yep hit and run. No I'm going to find a place to park and survey the damage." "You're going to get OUT of the car!!!??" I did a really bad parking job in the first parking lot that presented itself; just on the other side of the block. We sat there in the parked car for a few just catching our breath. Then I we got out (against Clara's better judgment) and looked at the side of out car. In the dark with water in my eye it did not look all that bad. Nothing was missing. We still had our windows and our rear view mirror. There was no obvious paint scratch. There are lots of people laughing and some yelling in this parking lot so at this point we just wanted to be back in the car with the doors locked again so we did not do a real meticulous check. Jolly good enough! Karen has trouble backing out of her lousy parking job but she gets back on the road without hitting anything else to we can call that a victory. Three cheers for two way streets! We when back around the block to see if we had hurt the other car. It was this big ugly black ( or so dirty and old that it was very dark anyway) truck. Or something. I am not good at identifying different kinds of cars. In any case it was bigger then ours in every dimension. It's not hard to have a taller cars then ours (though this one was fairly tall) but it was pretty impressive for its girth and length. We could see a little piece of the wood paneling off the side of our ugly old station wagon on the ground next to it but it did not look at all damaged (in the dark, through the window, with water in my eye. So we were a little distracted looking at the car we hit and forgot for a moment that we were looking for the train station. Then we got back on task. "Dad said it was a big brick building and you can't miss it." Right. All the buildings in this part of down town are big and brick. There is no dead end. But there is that building sitting a ways back from the street. Could that be it? Yeah. That's it. We side swiped a truck parked across the street from the train station. But, of course, by the time we figured this out, the only entrances to the parking lot had big 'do not enter signs on them. We have to go around again.

Once again, between detours and one way streets and people we were not supposed to make eye contact with it took us about another ten minutes to get back to the parking lot across the street that we had parked in before. Dana was just going to have to walk a little way cause I was not about to chance missing the entrance again trying to get closer. My parking job was a little better. Once I decided on a space that I thought might fit the ark. There was also this little black pickup (or it looked black. Everything looks black at night) sitting in the middle of the lot, not in a parking slot but just sitting there with it's lights on blocking my way. I had wanted to find a place closer to the cross walk where there were not so many cars and I could make a really wide turn into the slot. But no. There was this pickup. I thought at first that it was waiting for us and as I was not eager to park with this guy staring at me, I stopped for a moment hoping it would pass me or go park or something. But it didn't, it just sat there. I wasn't about to try and make eye contact with the driver and signal for him to go so I pulled into a slot and parked.

I gathered up my purse and looked around for anything else in our car that any one might want to take. I can't imagine anyone suspecting there was anything of value in that hunk of junk but you never know. That pickup is still sitting there. We're in our pajamas. We were counting on getting a place in the train station parking lot and just waiting for Dana to come find us. Now we have to walk across the parking lot, across the street, through another parking lot, and into the train station to wait for Dana who might be searching the lot already. Smooth. We got out and Clara was paranoid about the doors getting locked. I just want to get inside where there are security guards. But she insists that I have to lock her door with the key. Stupid old car doesn't have power lock on the key chain. We stood there with a pickup behind us for three minutes or so trying to get the door locked but it's not happening so we close it, stick the key in and pretend to lock it. No one would want to rob out car anyway right? We walk away, past the pickup. We didn't make eye contact of corse but I could have sworn the two guys in the pick up were watching us. I looked back as we waited for the light to turn and so one of the guys get out of the pickup. He was walking towards our car but he looked over his shoulder at us the next second so I starred at the light again rather hastily. "You know, Clara, now would be a very appropriate time to say a prayer to St Michael the archangel." I don't know why we did not think of this before. St. Mike and I should have become very good friends by now. "God save the car." I mutter and we cross the street.

It's 12:10. Dana said her train got in at midnight so by that information she should already be here. There is no sign of her in the parking lot. Or in the lobby. Clara remarks, at this point, on the large number of people we ought not to make eye contact with in this building. Thank you Clara. She is staring at the various vending machines and trying to look inconspicuous. Without making eye contact we, deduced that the guy sitting behind the counter over there must be a security guard. Karen is very glad and resolves not to go out of sight of said personage. We approach and ask him if a train had come in with in the last quarter hour. After assuring us that he didn't know anything and we ought to ask the train people, he said that he hadn't seen any large group of people disembark so it must not have come yet. Good. We sat down and waited. Clara stared very hard at a bus schedule in order to avoid making you-know-what-with anyone. I considered what would happen if someone decided they wanted a big ugly station wagon to drive home in. It was 12:30 when Dana's train came in. She was one of the first people off and she got in line for the ticket counter cause she had left something at the station on her way out and needed to retrieve it. When we first saw her we waved but I guess she was not making eye contact with anyone either so she did not see us. We would have yelled (cause it would have embarrassed her and that is our solemn duty as little sisters) but we were a little hesitant to draw that much attention to ourselves. We sat and watched her for a little while before we got up and and tapped her on the shoulder.

This is really long and it was all pretty painless from here. Dana had two male classmates with her. It was really nice to have some guys to walk with us (although Clara said they looked just like all the other people we're not supposed to M. I. C. with. Dana drove. I wonder if mom had not worked Clara into a state of paranoia we would have done better. Nothing was as bad as it seemed at the time.

So that was my adventure. I hate Hoopfest and one way streets. Dad asked what happened to the car this morning. I have not seen it but I guess it's worse than Clara and I thought last night.

Good grief. I rambled on forever. I think I am going to walk down town and watch some basketball.

Ahoy, There!

Did I mention that I'm a pirate? Yeah, I've been a pirate for two years or so. I've always been fascinated by them. I became one the other year when CYT did Treasure Island. I tend to take part of the characters I play with me after the show is over. I'm one of the the two girls in there. The rest of them are my henchmen. That was my all time favorite show to be in. It was not one of CYTs better productions but we had so much fun that I think it made up for it. Our director was always telling us little factoids about sailing and pirates. I was lucky enough to have the best of all worlds because I was double cast. I got to be a main comic character and then the next night I would switch parts with another girl and play a pirate for the first few scenes and then a loyal english sailor for the rest of the show. As a pirate I got to murder some one, (my good friend Jared) and wear cool cloths and have henchmen. Being a sailor was awesome cause it's just nice to be a good guy cause you win, even if you die doing it like my character did. The other sailors were really fun to hang out with. On stage there were all sorts of subplots happening behind the main action that the audience probably didn't pick up on. There was a rivalry between the captains sailors in our blue and white stripes and those unruly fellows in all manner of colors who turned out to be pirates. Us sailors started out being very civil but they were always pulling pranks on us like sloshing buckets over us while we were trying to swab the deck. Then it was war. Good times.

But that ended. The pirate-ness came home with me and infected my younger sister. Now I am the boatswain on a small but sturdy craft. The captain is fierce and fearless. We're not a particularly successful but we have so much fun together that none of us would dream of giving it up no matter what bride or black-mail we are offered.

Pirates are source of endless entertainment for a theater kid with a camera and some imagination.

Pirates are infinitely cool for many reasons. (The greatest of these being their incredible fashion independence.) I am as much fascinated by the history as the reputation and images they have accumulated through popular culture. I would love to read trials of some of the famous pirates. I read a children's book about female pirates that had a bunch of legends and tall tales. It was great fun. There was an old viking legend that had me glued to the book just because it was so odd. Normal women simple do not become pirates and then accept their arch enemy's proposal of marriage. I mean, the guy slaughtered her crew, then fell to one knee on the bloody deck of her ship and asked her to marry him. And she accepted!! It made my 'Wow list'. But I liked it. If you try to fill in motives and things to these stories you get some really interesting characters. Then there was a story about woman in colonial america who dressed as a man to rescue her husband from prison. I Really liked that story but when I researched it I could not find out if it was fact or fiction. Not that is matters so much. A good story is a good story but it was frustrating that I could not find any more details than the kids book gave. Jean Laffite and John Paul Jones are my favorite historical pirates. Well, I guess Jones wasn't really a pirate but he had that under dog tenacity.
I've always wanted to write a pirate story. With all the bells and whistles; plank walking, buried treasure. It would be really fun. Now, if only I can think of a plot. I have several character sketches and beginnings but no point, no conflict. I'll get to it some day.
Why am I writing all this? No particular reason. It's in my head right now and I am having fun putting pictures in my blog. I have allot of pirate pictures.

This is just a complaint. Ignore it.

Yesterday I was supposed to give a talk to my girls club about friendship. I have given and listened to similar talks dozens of times. Everything was all wrong. I don't know what's wrong with it. Or if it's me. It was a good talk. I spent all week working on it. Mom read it and did not see any problem with it. Clara (my sisters who is fifteen) read it for me and liked it allot. That was really encouraging cause she can be a pretty tough one to please. She said that if she was a ten year old hearing the talk she would be greatly encouraged. So all was well. This meeting was on friendship because we were expecting some new girls and when ever someone new comes to the club we like to give them a picture of how our club is different from others. e.g. we are not an exclusive clique but a group of girls trying to bring each other closer to Christ. So anyway, after I sent out schedules to all the girls who had ever come to a meeting and a bunch more who said they were interested, a total of four girls showed. Now I wonder if the schedules got sent to the new girls. I had filled out the envelops but mom sent them off. I wonder if she did not send the ones that were not all the way filled out. There were some that were missing a zip code cause I was interrupted or needed to look for the address in a different list. That would certainly explain why no one showed. I don't think it would have made the meeting any more successful though. In any case the four girls who came must have needed to be there. God knows. So we all sat down in my living room and said our prayers and read a passage in the gospel and meditated on that for a while. We were talking about the two greatest commandments and I asked them what they though loving God with all your strength meant. One of the older girls got it right away. In so many words she stole my explanation: Using your physical strength for Gods glory or to serve others in Gods name is loving God with all your strength. So that was cool. We had and nice little discussion on that. Then it went down hill. Clara was part of the problem. First, one of the girls brought her little brother. He had a little toy car that was broken some how and Clara is exactly the sort of girl who can't walk by a broken toy, especially not a car, without trying to fix it. So she was over on the other side of the room giving a detailed commentary of what was wrong with the car while I was trying to talk. The girl next to her would double over laughing every once in a while. It was really distracting. I don't know what happened to the talk or if it was just my lack of skill in giving a talk. It was really good on paper, or at least I thought so. But out loud it was really boring and disorganized. I think it was mostly me. I had to reiterate myself a bunch of times cause Clara was so distracting and my points weren't connected in any logical fashion. The girls kind of drooled through it. Only God can know if they got anything out of it but I felt like I was wasting their time. My resolution was not concrete enough. The activity was to vague also. I think part of the problem is the was my living room is set up. That seems odd but it's true. I was sitting on the hope chest at one end of the room with Clara and her friend on the opposite end. The other girls were siting along either wall. I have a mental block about making eye contact with people for some reason. I tend to stare off into space when I'm talking to some one. I stared at the carpet for most of the talk. Every now and then I looked up at the two girls on the other end of the room. But it was really hard to look over at the girls on the couch. I need to find a way to arrange our little living room so that all the girls are sitting together and I can face them. That might get them more involved. Yes it would. It's really pointless to talk about being open to new friends and not closing people out when I am practically acting like there is only two other people in the room. Stupid. Okay I guess I'm done ranting now. I can't really know how much of a failure I was and I don't need to. I need to just let it go. Even if I'm no good at giving talks, I'm here doing it and no one else is stepping up to take over so I guess God must want me here. He will have to take care of the drooling girls. In my weakness He is strong, right? I hope next week goes a little better. Maybe it will be sunny and we can go out in my back yard or up in the playhouse. That would be easier. I need a new way of writing talks. Mom suggested that I just give them a topic to talk about and kind of guide the conversation to the points I want to make. That might be a good idea, I will have to try it. Next week I have the older girls (assuming they show up). This summer I am trying to get one of them to put me out of my misery and lead the younger girls. I am supposed to talk to them about a leaders relationship with God. That would be allot easier to talk with them about rather than talking to them (or at them) I am not a good person to be lecturing any one on prayer. I'm such a novice in that sort of thing. Zita of the three second attention span and no will power. Alright, I'm really shutting up now. If you wander into my mind you are going to have to deal with pointless rants like this.