Not Yet. . .

I'm not ready for full-fledged blogging yet, not here or on aol or anywhere. I'm just wading through the flotsam and jetsam of what remains of my creation of the past 1.5 years, kind of deciding: what next?

But since one of the nice and wholly unexpected benefits of journaling was that I now have a way of looking back over what I've been doing for 18 months ("Unexpected?" you ask ~ but I certainly never expected that I'd be able to keep it up!), I know that I don't want to lose track again of the particles of my life. Herewith, therefore, the last few days, of little interest to anyone but myself:

I wasted a good deal of Friday on the aol Journaland crisis.

I spent some of Saturday morning with my friends, all of whom I managed to offend by commenting that young ladies who wear spaghetti-strap tops with their bra straps showing look like sluts. Since this includes all of our daughters on occasion, people took offense. (On the other hand, most of them are far more offended than I am by the show-your-belly look. To each her own, as always. At least we were all able to agree that very few women, regardless of age, have bellies that bear baring.) I am perhaps less inured than my friends to the slut look because of my employment in an Orthodox Jewish school, where the young women dress with extreme modesty. I have reached the point where I find all that skin and underwear on display somewhat offensive. And no -- not because I think it is the responsibility of women to keep men in check. I just think people look better with more clothes on than less, Tyra Banks being the possible exception that proves the rule.

Saturday night we went to see Jarhead. Now THAT was a depressing evening. I had read the book when it first came out and, as I told my husband, the movie is no more uplifting. I'm not exactly sure how it is that we can looked at charred bodies of young men and continue the human enterprise of warfare, but it seems that we do.

Sunday morning I made a presentation to our church adult ed class on St. Benedict and Benedictine spirituality. It was extremely well received, which was pretty nice for me. I did a Powerpoint, which I have never done outside a high school classroom before -- my path to technological competence continues apace, thanks in part, I suppose, to aol.

Sunday evening our church hosted a series of dinner discussion groups of Jim Wallis's God's Politics: Why the Right is Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. A friend and I were discussion facilitators in another home -- a home so huge and lush that you would have been hard pressed to guess there was a discussion of poverty going on over dinner. Or was there? We had a tough, tough time with our group. Two of the gentlemen defined politics as "the art of manipulating social and governmental relationships" and consequently argued that there is no such thing as God's politics. Hence, I'm not sure we ever got past the cover.

So. A week-end. The week will bring vacation and a trip to Chicago, and maybe some time to mellow out.