Now Playing: The Boston Celtics vs. the Orlando Magic on Philip's laptop.

Philip and I are sitting companionably in his room right now. Sitting, I say, though it's more like perching, above a sea of open suitcase, shoes, clothes, photo frames, iPod, books, backpack, and other random wanted/unwanted pieces of junk. He's busy making a Calvin and Hobbes stencil with an exacto knife, the same knife that gave him the gash on his finger last week--which will hopefully become a scar with a good story, according to him.

Christmas day so far has been fairly pleasant. Laura and I both got up "early" this morning to make breakfast for everyone. She made crepes (vanilla-flavored with orange sauce), while I fried bacon and scrambled eggs. The eggs were actually all yolk, the remnants from yesterday's angel food cake baking experiment. The recipe Laura wanted to use for said cake required sixteen egg whites; hence the very heavy eggs that accompanied our Christmas breakfast.

After breakfast, after my dad had scrubbed the disgusting bacon-and-egg frying pan (courageous man!), we opened presents, just the six of us. My dad's exclamations at our generosity are always gratifying. Somehow opening Christmas presents is so much more fun than opening birthday presents: you don't feel as though you're on the spot, and everyone is enjoying the process together.

As usual, my dad received loads of chocolate. We always have to get creative with my mother's presents since she can't eat chocolate, but Philip solved the problem this year with tea and biscuits. There was the usual round of books (cookbooks), checks for buying new clothes, socks, CDs (for Stephen, the soundtrack guru), etc. Laura wound up with an adorable pair of rain boots, printed with raindrops--"pre-wetted," as my dad and Philip pointed out, like the jeans that are already ripped.

When the detritus of wrapping paper and ribbon had been cleared away, Philip, my mother, and I made sack lunches and drove down to OKC to visit my grandmother in the hospital. The day was overcast, another one of these winter days that looks as though it's come out of the dark end of my mother's box of old pastels--grainy, crumbling at the edges, smudged with snow flurries.

The three of us spent the day in the City until midafternoon. My grandmother was asleep at first, so Philip and I found a quiet corner, where we sat and talked about books and phoned Alyson to say hello. But at about lunchtime, she wanted us to come in, so we did. She's better today, talking more. We ate our lunches in her room while my mother fed her slices of grapefruit. We talked to her when she felt up to it or held her hand while she dozed. 

At about half two we drove home. I'm very sleepy, or was while I was trying to do my quiet time. Laura has probably already started to work on Christmas dinner downstairs.

After the whirlwind of the past few days, today and yesterday have been wonderfully quiet, giving us the chance to do the usual Christmas activities. Yesterday morning, Laura, Stephen, and I decorated the house for Christmas: not very much, but something, at least, to make it more festive. Stephen helped me hang the evergreens over the doorway into the dining room and then handed up ornaments for me to hang on the bristling plastic branches. Ornaments made faithfully for us every year by Grandma, cross-stitched or needlepointed, including the silver angel with her long, slender trumpet that always goes in the middle of the doorway.

This morning Laura and I baked gingerbread, a process that involved a lot more faffing about than was strictly necessary. We always use the Joy of Cooking recipe, but for some reason Laura has never realized that the recipe calls for (what according to her is) a gross amount of flour. That led to a lot of silliness. In the end we got the batter made and the cookies cut out, baked, cooled, and iced, all while listening to The Nutcracker. Now the house smells like cloves, cinnamon, and ginger.

And tonight: Christmas ball in Ponca City! 

Now Playing: Still Foyle's War.

I apologize for leaving this thing to suffer along by itself for so long. Since Thanksgiving, I've been writing furiously: a chapbook for the creative writing (poetry) class, a couple of short introductions and a syllabus for digital humanities, a fifteen page research paper for medieval literature, and a portfolio of poetry and a personal statement for the MFA application.

Once it was all safely turned in on Tuesday, though, I finally surfaced for air. It snowed in Bloomington last weekend, a nice four inches or so. I went downtown on Tuesday to do some Christmas shopping and then walked back to our house in the snow, enjoying the luxury of that rich crunch and slip of crisp new snow underfoot.

On Thursday Russell drove me to the airport in Indy. It took an hour-and-a-half to get there on slushy roads, and thus began the day's travel adventure. I got to Atlanta with a quarter of an hour to run to my connecting flight to Tulsa, only to discover when I reached the gate that the flight had been delayed for an hour... and then another hour... and then another.... At about a quarter to six they canceled the flight for real and put all of us on a quarter to nine flight that night. But at least I wasn't spending the night in Atlanta!

Laura got in last night, too, and we spent the night with Philip. My dad came to take us back to Stillwater today. My mother is down in the City with Grammy, who's very ill. At lunch Laura, Stephen, and I decided to clean the whole house. Stephen had already done most of the upstairs, which left the downstairs to be dusted and vacuumed, the bathrooms cleaned, the laundry done, the sheets changed on beds, etc.

Finished with our work, we're now having a laptop party in the living room while we watch Foyle. No knowing when either one of the parents will be home. The day outside is bleak, drab, dark, overcast.

Now Playing: Foyle's War.

Yesterday while I was sitting in the airport for seven hours thanks to a canceled flight to Oklahoma, I read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. It's a bleak futuristic novel set in a post-nuclear apocalypse North America. I generally don't read science fiction like this, but Dr. S recommended it when I was working on my senior project, so finally thought I'd give it a go.

The book is quite well-written as far as science fiction goes. It takes place in three sections, separated by time, over the course of which the human race repeats is nuclear mistake and blows itself up again. On the whole the book is quite grim. Humans carry not only their individual sins but the sins of the whole human race; the human race is doomed to repeat its futile search for perfection, becoming more and more jaded with the results of the pursuit of wealth and power until it destroys itself and starts over again.

Despite this pessimism, the book has a strong but very complicated thread of Christian theology. Its main characters are monks, dedicated to the preservation of human culture and learning through fallouts, wars, and plagues. Because of that, there's a lot of Latin in the book, and some of the story's most beautiful moments center on Christian imagery of crucifixion and redemption. At one point, the author makes the statement that humans can never be divine: we may have infinite power and wisdom, but we can never have infinite love, the third quality that makes God who He is (thankfully!).

Yet it's hard to know exactly what the author's position is toward Christianity. Does Christianity offer valid hope for a world full of human monsters? Or is it merely foolish idealism in the face of humanity's proven tendency toward evil? What's the use of hope if we're just going to blow ourselves up again anyway? Is the human race worth saving? The story doesn't provide easy answers to any of these questions, and on the whole I was left thoughtful but depressed.

Now Playing: Not much.

Just back from the Indiana University Ballet's production of The Nutcracker, and I must say that it brought the sort of incandescent happiness that is both sheer delight and almost pain. Very simply, the choreography and music were a reminder that there is peace, order, stability, unity beyond the brokenness I see and experience. Perhaps it's overly pessimistic, but at one point I felt a surge of amazement that the dancers weren't knifing each other on stage--or tripping and falling every other beat. That the audience could sit and watch the production as a unified group without any terrible mishaps or outbursts. That the orchestra could produce those incredible, heart-wrenching crescendos without flaw. I know that there's such a thing as "common grace," but it seems to me tonight that that's the wrong word for it. We take it for granted and assume that God will hold under control all of our evilness, when really it's so amazing that there should be any rhythm to the world after the Fall.

And it gets better! One of the dancers didn't quite pull off a landing; a brass player over-blew a note; and I was sitting up in the balcony, watching, not participating actively--but Heaven is coming to earth. Heaven is coming to earth, and when it does, the peace that is only foreshadowed here on earth will flow effortlessly, effervescently from us as we participate actively, flawlessly, in it. It's truly incredible that God would permit us to participate in His glory, but He will there. I love C.S. Lewis's essay "The Weight of Glory," particularly where he talks about how we will perhaps be enabled to enter into nature in some deeper, fuller way, to join its beauty and power as we long to do but cannot do on earth.

Earlier this week I read the end of Ezekiel, where the description of the new Jerusalem is given. On either side of the river flowing from the temple "will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing." As the fruit in Eden was our poison, so the fruit in Heaven will be our feast; as the leaves in Eden were our pitiful attempts to hide our rebellion, so the leaves in Eden will heal us of our brokenness once for all.

It's snowing!

White rabbit!