Since I was a kid, I have been in love with Dr. Seuss. His writings are so prophetic and contain such simple but powerful social commentary. He’s a man after my own heart. Although, The Cat and the Hat still kind of weirds me out, so many of his other books are just so good. I don’t know much about Dr. Seuss’ life or how he came to possess his set of values and morals but I can’t help but note how Catholic his writing is. A lot of his books line up with the seven principles of Catholic Social Teaching. Horton Hears a Who — Dignity of the Person. Yertle the Turtle — Rights and Responsibilities. How the Grinch Stole Christmas — Call to Family, Community, and Participation.
But The Lorax, this has always been my favorite Seusian story. When I saw that The Lorax was coming to theaters, I couldn’t wait to see it. As much as I love the book The Lorax, I thought they did a good job with the movie, as well. What stood out to me most was how Jesus-like they made the Lorax. Danny DeVito voice and all, there were a few instances when I immediately thought of things Jesus says in Scripture.
The gist of the book is that there is a guy — the Onceler — who finds a Truffula forest. He chops down one Truffula tree and makes a Thneed. The Lorax pops out of the tree he has chopped down and scolds him for destroying the tree to make something so useless. Their relationship continues as the Onceler chops more and more trees down and grows his business.
In the movie, when the Lorax pops out of the tree, it is a huge event. There are amazing lightning effects with dramatic music, he floats down from the clouds, the whole bit. But the Onceler sleeps through the whole thing. When the Lorax is trying to explain who he is and how he came, the Onceler dismisses him as a crazy old …
Spoiler Alert: This post assumes you have read The Hunger Games series and gives away parts of the story.
I totally jumped on The Hunger Games bandwagon. I was completely engrossed in this series. I’m pretty sure I read all three books in about four days. As I read the story, I felt excited that teenage girls would feel empowered by a strong woman character. In my head I made up lesson plans as to how I would teach this book. Katniss is a girl who keeps her family going despite the most terrible of odds. She is not held back by society’s view of her nor does she lend much attention to what others expect of her. She is fiercely loyal to those she loves and would do anything for them. But what I liked most of all about Katniss is that, in her head, she usually decides to do the wrong thing — run away, be cruel, kill someone. But when it actually comes time for her to act, she usually does the right thing — holds her tongue, faces the challenge, decides to show mercy, etc.
Despite all of these positive characteristics, at the end of the series, I was still left with an uneasiness about her. Something just didn’t sit right. I read these books more than a month ago and since then I’ve been trying to peg my issue with Katniss. It did not become clear to me until I started reading Tattoos on the Heart, a book written by a Jesuit who has worked with gang members for more than 25 years. He writes about how these gang members all came from the most atrocious of childhoods and because of that all have a “palpable sense of shame on their backs.” He goes on to explain that guilt is when you feel bad about your actions, shame is when you feel bad about yourself. Enough shame and you stop caring about yourself as a person. This is when bad decisions don’t matter because you …
One day Brandon and I made up our minds to run a marathon. If you knew us, this decision would have sent you into laughing hysterics because we are both the most un-athletic people we know. But we were both desperately out of shape and were firmly resolved to do this. We found a running group. They placed us with a coach. Slowly over the weeks, we ran more and more miles. It was horrible. Excruciating. I had never worked so hard physically.
I come from a family that shows its love through gift giving. I think this stems from La Lupe. She raised eight kids on the most meager of salaries, so now that everyone is grown and she has more discretionary money, she loves to buy gifts for people. It’s her love language. Some people are very affectionate, some write notes, some vocally proclaim their love. La Lupe does it by loading you up with tortillas, dried chiles, and cookies every time you leave her house. And occasionally you’ll get all this in the mail.
This character quirk of La Lupe has rubbed off on most other people in our family. They love to give us (especially our girls) gifts.
I understand this is not a bad problem to have. Oh, I never have to buy my children toys or clothes because someone in my family is always giving us something, woe to me. No, I know this is a blessing especially since we don’t have much discretionary income. But it does leave us with the problem of having a lot of stuff. There is no way to have a simple home if you have lots of stuff.
After a while, we had so much stuff for the girls, it became an ordeal to pick out clothes in the morning. There were just so many options that Olivia and I inevitably had a big fight over what she was going to wear because she would take so darn long to pick it. And then I started getting furious over how many toys we had strewn across our living room floor. The girls didn’t even play with the toys anymore. They would just go bin to bin pulling everything out and then move on to the next.
There was too much stuff. We couldn’t appreciate or focus on any one thing because there were too many things. We needed to pare down.
The other day I was buying some food from a food truck and I noticed a homeless man sitting by the truck playing his guitar. I bought some extra food to give him as I walked back to my car. As I stopped to give him the food and tell him to have a good night, he grabbed my hand and asked me to listen to his song. So I did. I sat next to him and listened to the love song he had written. And then he talked to me for some time about the lady the song is about. He didn’t look twice at the food and seemed to have forgotten about it by the time I headed home.
I am a workaholic. When I have a job to do I am almost obsessive about it. Especially working in education, there is just so much to be done. There are always so many things to figure out: how to better serve the students, how to better teach the students, how to better meet the students’ needs, how to better meet the families’ needs. In this line of work there is an endless amount of time and effort that could be put in. Each day it is hard for me to detach myself from my work and attach myself to the other important parts of my life.
When I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is check my work e-mail and then I’ll check it again right before I leave for work. Sometimes I find myself praying at night — Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with, shoot, I forgot to submit that announcement I need read in the morning. Should I get up and send an e-mail right now? No, it can wait. The Lord is with Thee, oh, I need to stop at the grocery store on my way into work to buy supplies for our cooking club. Ugh, focus, Vanessa. Pray.
The other day I was talking to a co-worker. I told her I felt like I just couldn’t keep my head above water. There was so much work and I couldn’t get out from underneath it. And the harder I worked more work seemed to appear. I felt like every person I ran into reminded me of yet another thing I had forgotten to do. I had done a lot of work over the Christmas break to get caught up so that this semester I would be more organized and have a better handle on everything. But all that seemed to go down the drain because I was still drowning in stuff to do. This is when my co-worker said something really wise: “It doesn’t really matter how well you organize or work, …
I ate fast food for the majority of my life. Jack in the Box one day, Taco Bell the next, McDonald’s for breakfast, Sonic for dinner. We ate out almost every meal growing up. I didn’t know anything about what I was eating or how it was grown or how it was cooked.
It wasn’t until I moved to Austin about five years ago that I quickly fell in love with food. Not chicken nuggets kind of food, but real food. For the first time I saw the value in eating food grown locally and cooked even more locally — in my kitchen.
Austin is such a hippie place that it didn’t take long to finally learn more about the world hiding behind food I had eaten my whole life. Food was being genetically modified, vegetables were being doused with poisons, artificial ingredients were being added to food production, and animals were being treated inhumanely. Yuck. But still after learning about all that, it is really expensive to buy humanely treated, not-pumped-full-of-antibiotics meat. It can be hard to find organic veggies, and it is definitely extremely time consuming to cook absolutely everything that we eat.
While I am not a huge fan of his aggressive manner, Jamie Oliver has this great clip where he is talking to students about simplifying what you eat. He rolls out this cart full of ice cream sundae stuff and tells them to make one for themselves. There is chocolate sauce and sprinkles and candy bits and cookie dough, etc. Then he tells them that there are 271 ingredients in what they are eating. They have no idea what they just put into their bodies and they probably couldn’t pronounce half of the ingredients they had just consumed. Then he pulled out his homemade ice cream, homemade strawberry sauce, and a crunchy topping. Nine ingredients total and all of them recognizable.
So it took a while for all this new-found knowledge to turn into action. After five years of cooking and comparing prices and buying from farmer’s …
I was at Target the other day looking at coloring books for Olivia who is an avid colorer. There were about 100 options. I wasn’t overwhelmed by the choices but I still stood there staring at those books for about 10 minutes. Why? Because I couldn’t find one, single coloring book. Every book was a coloring book and something else. They included a pack of triangular crayons, or stickers, or paints and paintbrushes, or glow in the dark pens, or secret messages that could only be revealed if smeared with Cheeto-covered fingers. I couldn’t find a simple coloring book. All I wanted was a book full of pictures that lacked color. There was none.
I often get annoyed when things are more complicated then they need to be. I already feel like I’m constantly running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I don’t need things that add to the crazy. I need more simple in my life.
As Lent begins, my theme for these 40 days in going to be simplicity. What is going on in my life that I think I “need” but don’t really. What seems as essential as water but maybe isn’t? What extraneous stuff is crowding out the thing I should be doing most? I want to turn down the noise in my life and listen more closely to what I should be listening for: God. I want to detach the sparkly pens, the pop-up pictures, and the decoder ring. I just want to be a coloring book. Plain, simple, blank and let God color in what God thinks I need.
The White House issued an accommodation Friday exempting religious employers from having to pay for contraceptive services in their insurance policies. When I heard this first line, I immediately rejoiced that the Administration had heard the cry of its people and changed its policy. Then came the next line, “Contraception coverage will be offered to women by their employers’ insurance companies directly, with no role for religious employers who oppose contraception.”
The USCCB has understandably responded to this accommodation with caution as outlined here. This is drastically more articulate than my response to the accommodation which was, “Wait, what? How does that make sense?” Or posed as Olivia’s favorite question, “How they do that?”
So according to the government, religious employers (which was not defined) will not have to pay for contraceptive services, but instead insurance companies will pay for the contraceptive services themselves. Last time I checked, insurance companies were not in the business of doing stuff for free. Now that insurance companies will have to cover the contraceptive services that religious employers won’t, wouldn’t that make insurance companies raise the rates on religious employers’ plans because they will have to pay for those claims? I just don’t see how this will stop church money from being used for contraceptive services.
The government did throw in this line about insurance companies, “Covering contraception is cost neutral since it saves money by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services.” Obviously insurance companies will cover contraceptive services for free because in the end it will save them more money than having to pay for pregnancy and kids. Uh, what? No, it won’t. Insurance companies will be paying for something that they weren’t before. Pregnancy and kids are covered by insurance plans and the employer is paying for those incurred costs. So the insurance companies save no money by giving birth control to women for free.
I appreciate that the White House is trying hard to appease all sides here, but this still falls short. Mostly because it’s so vague.
I voted for President Obama in the 2008 election. Leading up to that election and after it, I’ve fought an uphill battle trying to explain how I could be Catholic and vote for a president that so obviously has pro-choice goals. In my argument, I kept coming back to the USCCB’s statement, “As Catholics we are not single-issue voters. A candidate’s position on a single issue is not sufficient to guarantee a voter’s support.” There are 7 principles of Catholic Social Teaching. When I weighed how many of the principles McCain stood for and how many Obama stood for, my tally was overwhelmingly in favor of Obama. Just to name a few, Obama is in favor of the DREAM Act and more comprehensive immigration reform. Obama wanted to reform healthcare (an issue I have written about at length). Obama’s economic policies were intended to directly help those at the bottom as opposed to using the trickle-down effect. And on and on. Even though Obama is pro-choice, I couldn’t ignore all those other extremely important issues that I agreed with. And even when it came to FOCAor other pro-choice issues, I guess I just didn’t believe that he would rock the boat too much.
Then a couple weeks ago, I read an article in The Wall Street Journal:“Obama Offends the Catholic Left.” I’ll ignore for a second how I hate the terms liberal Catholic and conservative Catholic. The amount of discord and division between Republican Catholics and Democrat Catholics is disgusting, and the disdain that both groups have for one other is just plain depressing since we’re all on the same team. As Catholics we do not fall perfectly in line with either party. But that’s for another post.
The new Department of Health and Human Services ruling has people reeling over how the President could make a move that …
I’m going to be honest. At the end of December I was not in a good place. I was unhappy with everything — my home, my relationship with everyone in my life, my spiritual life, my performance at work. Everything. I felt really bad about how I was doing all around. I just kept playing these scenes over and over in my head about times I had screwed up or done something to offend someone or said the wrong thing. I couldn’t get these conversations out of my head.
On my first day of vacation I just couldn’t shake this cloud that was hanging over me. So as I usually do when I’m feeling crummy, I decided to poke around the Internet for something interesting to read to get my mind off of myself. Whoa, did that make everything worse. I read about a mom who homeschools her kids and built a kiln in their backyard to teach them about chemistry and how it applies to pottery and glazing. Then I read about a Notre Dame grad with a beautiful family who is home with them full time, has a really successful sewing business, has great style, and has one of the prettiest blogs I’ve seen. Not to mention she makes her kids really cute clothes. Then there was the mom that was showing her luscious garden and all the beautiful food her family ate from it. I read about a mom who cooks every single meal her family eats and only eats out once a year. Then, to top it off, I read a blog about a mom who had just finished reorganizing and redoing the last room in her house and was showing the befores and afters of her whole home. I remember sitting in our living room with our laptop and Brandon sitting across the room reading. I’m pretty sure that I audibly screamed, slammed the laptop shut, and ran to the closest sugary snack I could find.
I couldn’t admire these women’s accomplishments. I couldn’t appreciate how wonderful …
I always pictured my life differently. I’ve always been a simple girl with simple wants. I pictured that we would have a home without a TV, definitely no video games, a big garden out back where we’d grow a lot of our food, chickens for eggs. We’d make everything, our own clothes, our own laundry soap, etc. A pretty hippy existence all in all. My husband has a totally different picture in his head. He envisions a life where we would have most of the new gadgets that come out on the market. He is really interested in new technologies and how they can be integrated into everyday life. How the iPad or the Kindle Fire or smart phones can help us and actually be learning tools for the girls. Whenever a new piece of technology is released, we inevitably have to have a conversation about it and how it would fit into our life.
I’d say this is the hardest part of our marriage, having to blend my idea of life with his idea of life. This is something that a lot of marriages struggle with. When you get married, you’re not the only one calling the shots about your future. You have to include another person with different desires and goals.
We talk about this a lot. We look at our life, try to stretch it and pull at it and take parts out and patch parts together. We have calm conversations about it. We have heated discussions about it. We have screaming fits about it. We have fights about it that leave me seething and stomping around for days. It’s a tough issue that probably will never fully get figured out.
The other night we were having a rather light-hearted argument about technology and Brandon asked, “Why did you marry me? You knew what you were getting into. You knew how much I love all this stuff.” I half-jokingly responded, “Because you just didn’t have that many gadgets back then. They didn’t exist yet.” Then I asked, “Why did you …
Every year the rollercoaster speed at which the year passes from Thanksgiving to New Year’s is always baffling. Every year I’m caught so off guard when Christmas Eve rolls around that I’m positive that everyone else has their days mixed up. This year was no different.
This year we had both Thanksgiving and Christmas here at our house. And if that wasn’t enough pressure, La Lupe actually made the trek out to Austin to spend it with us. In case you don’t remember the debacle from last year, which was my hostessing skills, it suffices to say that I ended up sitting in a pew on Christmas Day crying because I felt like I had ruined Christmas. That was my first try at being the matriarch of the family. It was a total fail.
But this year was different. Well, a little different. I entered the holiday season determined to mellow out a bit and take things in stride. With La Lupe in town, I knew that I wouldn’t be in complete control of everything. I knew she would call some of the shots. And that made me feel a lot better.
We had 12 people staying with us, so I very carefully planned everything out: meals, activities, Mass, etc. But as I was planning, I repeated to myself over and over that all these things would probably not work out and that it would be ok. Just roll with it.
The holidays started with me getting off of work late and rushing to meet my mom at the grocery store to buy all the food we needed for the week. Apparently the same thing happened to the rest of Austin because it took us 30 minutes to find a parking space, a cart, and get inside the store. La Lupe called us, “We’re 1 hour away.” Dear God. One hour. Ok, we get home and put away groceries just in time for La Lupe’s characteristic knock on the door.
The stakes were high. I really want to prove to La Lupe that I’m …
For the past 18 months, I have seen a man pass our house in his wheelchair every week. He has long, dirty hair, lots of bags, and a bandaged foot. The first time we saw him was startling. If you remember, I previously wrote about how we moved into a suburban-ish area. We were unpacking boxes when we saw him move slowly past our window. He stood out. He wasn’t a twenty-something jogger listening to an iPod, he wasn’t two moms pushing their strollers and chatting, he wasn’t our neighbor walking his dog, he was a sick, slow moving man who, very likely, did not have a home. We stopped what we were doing and peered through our window until he was out of sight.
The more years that separate me from my time at Notre Dame, the more I realize how easy college made certain things in life. Making friends was easy as I was surrounded by a great community of people with whom I had a lot in common; I never had to spend a lot of energy finding people with similar interests. We also had Mass in our dorm, which meant we all went to Mass with our closest friends — it didn’t take a lot of extra work to be part of a spiritual community. In fact, being a theology major and, in general, just being a Domer, it was never difficult to find tons of groups, retreats, events, or volunteer opportunities that guaranteed an awesome spiritual community.
Then I graduated and lived in a Catholic Worker house. As a community we said daily prayers together, usually attended daily Mass, and were always having discussions about faith and Church teachings and how to live out the Gospel. It too was a wonderful spiritual community.
Then came Austin — when I finally found out how hard it is to make friends in the “real world”. There was no longer a guaranteed community. I was in the world where most people were very different from me and I had to work to find people that I could relate to and be friends with. As for a spiritual community, this was even harder. I couldn’t just walk down the hallway with my roommate to go to Mass. I couldn’t just get dressed and head downstairs for Morning Prayer. I had to put effort into finding a place to call home.
Ever since getting married and moving to a new part of town, Brandon and I have been bouncing from parish to parish looking for a home. Parish-hopping if you will. Between me, the theology major, and Brandon, a complete and total liturgical nerd, we are extremely picky when it comes to finding the right parish. A good homily is a big deal to me, which immediately narrows down …
While I am partial to things that people may classify as hippie — like peace, love, granola — I don’t very well understand the Occupy movement. I don’t quite understand why people are camping out there. I don’t understand why they can’t just take shifts and then go home. I don’t understand why they are asking for donations of food and clothing. I don’t really want to understand how bathing and bathroom breaks work around there. But what I wholeheartedly agree with is that something needs to be done about corporate greed.
I know there are a lot of reasons for the economic recession but a huge cause of it was some people thinking their pocketbooks were infinitely more important than the people they were swindling. And this has been the model for most corporations. It truly is disgusting. The idea that someone could deceive others, knowing that it would drive others to total ruin, just so they could buy their sixth house off the coast of France is just flat out horrifying. How we have allowed these people to rise to power and stay in power is beyond me.
In Matthew 25:31-46, it is clear how we should treat our neighbors. We have the responsibility to care for them and if we don’t, well, there is no way that we will get to heaven. We cannot love God and ignore the hungry, the homeless, the sick. The idea that business and profit is more important than people is totally contrary to the message of Jesus.
There is a big energy company that I am well acquainted with. They are just as corporate as the next, but they do a lot of good in the community. I know an employee that has worked there a long time. He has been at the forefront of the company’s movement to encourage all of its workers to get active and help in their community. He has encouraged his coworkers to join him in working with the numerous nonprofits he is involved with. Whole departments have gone …
I’ve never celebrated Día de los Muertos. I’ve never heard La Lupe speak of celebrating it, either. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.
A lot of people wrongly think that Día de los Muertos is celebrated on Halloween but it is, in fact, celebrated on November 1 — All Saints Day — for babies and November 2 — All Souls Day — for everyone else that has passed away. People mark the day with huge parties/parades and faces painted to look like skeletons. They make elaborate paper maché skeletons or skeleton puppets and dance all through the night. Families set up ofrendas dedicated to deceased loved ones with pictures, flowers, skulls, and food. What is especially touching about the day is that many families go to gravesites of their loved ones and sometimes eat the person’s favorite meal over their grave as a way of breaking bread with them once again.
A good friend passed away last Wednesday. He had fought cancer a long, long time.
Ruben was that cool kid that everyone, and I mean everyone, immediately loved. He just had this vibe. Laid back but totally present. Go with the flow but very purposeful. He was so comfortable with being himself that he emboldened everyone around him to be more uniquely themselves. Everyone felt a little more adventurous and free around him.
Due to my admittedly Amish tendencies when it comes to technology, I was surprised at the wave of sadness that washed over me when I heard of Steve Jobs’ death. The kind of sadness I would feel if someone I knew personally died.
I don’t love Apple, I don’t love iPods, I definitely don’t love iPhones. I honestly don’t know, nor really care about what technology he advanced. I can appreciate his brilliance, his charisma, his aesthetic. He really was the best in his field. I can respect that.
But that’s not what made me sad. Maybe it was partly that he had kids and now some kids out there in the world are without a loving father. Maybe it was partly because he has been fighting cancer for a while and, while he fought the good fight, he was finally called home. Maybe it was a bit jarring the message that it truly doesn’t matter how much money you have or how at-the-top-of-your-game you are — when it’s your time, it’s your time.
What made me sad was that Olivia and I, for months now, have been praying for Steve Jobs. Really, we have been. Our nightly ritual is to pray right before she goes to sleep. We go through our litany of people we pray for. We pray for Mommy, Daddy, Baby Lina, Grandma, Grandpa, Grandpa James, Grandma Bobbie, Ruben, Jen, Christine, and Steve Jobs. I’m not kidding. We have prayed for him by name every single night for months and months. Of course we pray for other family and friends, too, but these are the constants.
While I may avoid technology like the plague, Olivia is just like her daddy. She loves it. Whenever my mom and dad come to visit she gets giddy with the anticipation of playing with their iPhone and iPad. She can work those things like a pro. She can do more on them than I can. She loves Apple. So after a while she started listing the usual suspects during prayer but then also started praying …
I am a perfectionist and a micromanager and am easily overwhelmed. There really is no combination that would result in a more tightly wound person. So it’s safe to say that sometimes I can get really hung up on a problem, and I can take life a little too seriously.
This is usually when something happens that is so random that it just has to be a sign for me to lighten up.
A professor once told us about a time that he was in New York City and was running late to catch a flight. A cab finally pulled over and they proceeded to La Guardia. This professor is a friendly guy. It was going to be a long drive so he tried to strike up conversation about the yoga book that was in the passenger seat, but the cab driver barely spoke English. He saw some tattoos on the man’s hands that he knew to be native to a region of Sudan that he was familiar with. Then he told us, “Only in New York can a fat-faced Irish man talk to a man from Sudan in a cab about yoga in Italian.” Seriously, an Irish man and Sudanese man had a conversation in broken Italian about yoga. Talk about random.
I find that I have moments just like this exactly when I need to have them. Really random moments that are akin to someone taking me by the shoulders and shaking me saying, “Snap out of it.”
One time a friend and I were working away with, seemingly, the weight of the world on our shoulders. The two of us were really stressed and teetering on the brink of a meltdown. All of a sudden, we heard a buzzing sound followed by the smell of smoke. We both jumped up and ran outside our house to figure out what was going on. In the furthest reaches of my imagination, I would have never guessed that the buzzing was the sound of a hair clipper, and the smoke was from a joint. …
The other day I was buying some food from a food truck and I noticed a homeless man sitting by the truck playing his guitar. I bought some extra food to give him as I walked back to my car. As I stopped to give him the food and tell him to have a good night, he grabbed my hand and asked me to listen to his song. So I did. I sat next to him and listened to the love song he had written. And then he talked to me for some time about the lady the song is about. He didn’t look twice at the food and seemed to have forgotten about it by the time I headed home. 
