i
am confronted with a dilemma.  GTS (General Theological Seminary) is
facing severe financial issues - i think i've mentioned that before on
here.  we also have a very serious architectural maintenance problem with
the building that houses our administration and library facilities.  built
in 1960, the building is not only undistinguished, but it is of that sad
architectural trend towards flat roofs (which leak badly) and the awful
acoustical tile dropped ceilings that sag and fall as a result of those leaks. 
even where there are 'real' ceilings in that building, due to the moisture and
settling, the paint is falling off the ceilings.  in the library where i
did all that research, the 4th floor where i was 'living' is a disaster zone,
with buckets and pails out to catch water from the ceilings which are also
dripping on these old volumes.  obviously, we need a new building.

so,
there apparently have been several conversations over 8 years with the local
community board and with architects to come up with a design that fits in with the neighborhood, since Chelsea is an historic district and GTS has been designated an historical landmark. the zoning regs for our historic district require that new construction be no more than 75feet high, and be in character (materials as well as design) with the surrounding buildings. 

so tonight i went to a community board meeting at the request of the seminary to show support for their building proposal.  my dilemma is > i agree with the community.  the design plan is fugly, an all glass and brick tower that is two times the legal height limit.  not only does it violate the legal designation for the historical district but there is a moral issue with it as well...

the new building that would replace our current library/administration building would still house the library, but the administration would be moved onto a new building built on the side street.  the frontage on ninth avenue would be for (get this) retail space!  and in the tower? high income condominiums!!!
this is in a neighborhood that has been fighting gentrification since families that have been there for generations are seeing their children forced to leave because the rents are getting sky high... 

the seminary says that this type of building is needed to generate the monies for preserving the historic buildings on our campus, but honestly!  what about the impact on the larger community?  why not include some low-income (or at least moderate-income) housing in the plans?  why not have a design that falls within the legal restrictions?  and when a high-income property like this goes up, the pressure on the neighboring rental properties is to raise rents.  this would not be helping people to stay here, but would be forcing more of them out.

if i lived in this neighborhood i would be so in support of GTS itself, but so against this proposal.  plus, i thought it incredibly rude of most of the GTS community that attended the meeting to leave before all of the speakers for the opposition had their say.  they made some good points that we really need to address, but i am afraid the majority of people didn't get to hear it all.  or even enough of it.

Rf is supposed to come tomorrow.  i am very (insert superlative here) excited to see him since communications have been iffy between us over the past six weeks.  it doesn't help that there is a six hour time difference, or that i had my nose buried in 90yr old books 15 hours a day for half of that time.... Jb and i haven't seen each other in a very long time, and just when it looked like we were going to get together, it turned bitter cold in new york, and so he refuses to come.  i got so depressed by that, since i miss him terribly > i can say anything to him without him judging me, and it is very comforting to be in his presence.  we can talk about music and life, and argue about God, pretty much talk about anything.  he is always challenging me politically and intellectually, since he is a staunch republican and despises 'bleeding heart liberal pinko commies' > don't ask me how/why he stands me.  anyway, he misses me as much as i miss him, so i convinced him that there could be worse things than simply spending the day in my rooms, with a fire in the fireplace, drinking wine, talking, and listening to music (our overriding passion).  so we will see if we can work out a connection there.  (God knows i hope so - he's probably my closest guy friend excepting Ces)

my marks for the term are in, finally.  i managed a 3.912 GPA which was a major relief for me.  my hardest and most demanding class, liturgics, ended up yielding an A > my prof even gave me an A on my major paper on the theology of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and his criteria are very very stringent for papers.  the new term begins on the 29th, and this time i am taking 7 classes, instead of 6, 17 credits.  we'll see how that goes... *crosses fingers/toes/eyes*  please keep on sending your thoughts/prayers/support...

____________________________________________________________________________

her profile had her real age; this he knew because it was so much older than the ususal contacts he saw online.  she even was honest about her marital status, again because she admitted to being married, instead of the ambiguous or lying ways most assumed in order to troll.  the intrigue was in her profile picture > not the usual avatar, model-thin and skimpily clad, or even a photo of a flesh-and-blood person with potentially little relationship to the contact herself. the picture was of a building, soaring skyward, taken from the street.  it had to be ironwork, but looked like terra cotta.  the industrial designer in him twitched.

"hello"
"hello.... should i know you?"
"no, but i saw your profile pic and i wanted to say hi"
"oh, the building... it's from a large city in the United States."
"well, i'm from stockholm, so i am afraid i do not know it"
"stockholm as in sweden?"
"yes <laughs gently>"

the beginning had been innocent enough, but after talking to her
for over an hour, he discovered he was more than just intrigued.

"i'd like to kiss you"   he held his breath, debating, and hit send... she was married, she could be offended, sign off...
"okay..."
"<i hold your face between my hands and tip it up to mine... taking your lower lip between my lips, i suck gently on it>.... how was that?"
"perfect....."

and so it began. and continued. and after talking with her for hours, he realized...

"i love you"

i fried my laptop.  spilled a full glass of wine into it... so i have to go get it fixed/replaced... but there will be a new entry plus i'll catch up with everyone ASAP... and for those who asked, yes, there is more of the story to be told, a lot more... just pray to our Lord and the gods of the realm of the electrons that it's just a power supply...

oh, and as a precautionary tale > don't trust a plastic stemmed wineglass near your computer! way way way too unstable...

she did not like the weather.  the air, too warm, hinted at spring, making her blood itch, though winter had scarce arrived.  the breeze coming in her window smelled like rut... the moon rose full silver above the skyscrapers, far beyond the skeletal reach of the tallest trees. she turned towards the moon, its beams limning her face with argent pure, and she sent her longing and love winging skyward.

finally i have a break... i worked up until the last second on that silly research paper.  i was supposed to have gone home on 12/21, so that i would be home for my birthday, but noooooo.  i was still stuck in 1916/1919 and didn't finish until 1:00PM on my birthday... then i had to take out the garbage, do the recycling, pack my clothes, etc... so i didn't get home until late afternoon.  but at least i got home.  i wonder if anyone else notices that when you get home after being away for a while, everyone seems to want to suck up all of your free time?  between the family dramas and limited visiting of friends and working at church for Christmas, and then getting sick (quelle surprise, not), i actually needed to come back into the city for my break.

this is the first year that i didn't put up the Christmas tree > dj did that.  when i got home, he had it all assembled and with lights on it.  it looked very pretty, but i felt very odd about it.  that's always been my thing, to decorate it from the very bare bones, and there is a certain rhyme and reason to the way i do things.  this year it wasn't that way.  yes, i know that it was only the lights that i didn't get to do, but even the ornaments were different, although i put them on the tree.  i couldn't put on the most traditional of them because those have their own boxes to protect them, since they are over 50 years old, and some of them are getting close to 100 years old... so what went on the tree were ornaments that don't need special boxes, although they are still special.  some of them are from when my dad was a boy, but they are plain bulbs... there are 2 or 3 that are 90 years old, however, and are interesting to look at as well...  but i won't be home to take the tree down, so that falls to dj as well.

it's hard to let go.  it's hard to let others do what i have always done, and have always done a certain way.  and yet, what choice do i, or any of us, have?  if we insist on it being done the way it's 'always' been done, then we run the risk of it never being done again at all...  it's a lesson we need to learn for all parts of our lives > the workplace, group projects, even raising our children.  even if we feel we can do a better job, we need to learn to empower other people to do things... i think that sharing that personal power we've accumulated might be one of the hardest things to learn to do.  i watch both my mother and my mother-in-law struggle with that, with learning to let go of things they can no longer do and entrust them to us, even if we won't do them precisely the way that they would like them done.  i need to practice doing that now, since not only will i eventually become old and perhaps infirm, but more immediately, as my role changes and i become a priest, there will be many things in my family life that will have to be done by others or else not be done at all...

we are winding down the semester, and everyone is on edge. 

Peter Boyle died today... he had multiple myeloma.  although most folk probably know him better as the dad, Frank, on "Everybody Loves Raymond", i knew him best as the monster in "Young Frankenstein".  i love that movie, and i loved him in that movie....

i finished my major paper for my Liturgics class.  i ended up working until 2:30AM wednesday morning, slept for 3 1/2 hours, got up at 6AM and worked until 11AM when i was finally done.  it ended up being eleven pages when the minimum was 10, and i hope i did an adequate job.  i hate that feeling when you have given everything you have but you still feel like there should have been something more you could have/should have said about the whole topic.... well, i put it in campus mail wed morning, and there's nothing more i can do about it.  it's in God's hands now. 

tonight in group therapy we started to talk about sexual attraction within a group, its appropriateness, and its effects on a group.  i brought it up, because it's something that i've wanted to talk about before, plus it's an issue, or at least a potential one, at seminary and possibly in the future in a parish setting.  bk was really pleased that i brought it up because he says that's a passionate interest of his (imagine my eyebrow shooting up into my hair, ha ha ha) and he's even written a paper or two on it.  i know ces has wanted to talk about it before, but sz went off on a tangent that was equally good, and we never got to talk about it.  maybe next week... *sigh*

we ended up talking about why talking about sex seems to be such a taboo for most people, and why i (and now bk) can talk about it without others reacting in horror.  apparently, according to ces, i "ask" for it > i think he meant that i am open about it, but it really didn't sound good the way he put it....   sz says it's because i never seem to be judgemental but always ready and willing to listen to what others have to  say.  bk didn't say how he views me,  which of course makes me want to know, intensely > the worst part is that i am sure he realizes how much i want to know now, and i am equally sure he wants it that way.  i don't know if he actually knows how much i do think about him and wonder what he thinks about me.  ces knows how i feel, but he'll never tell...

sometimes i feel as if i am still in high school, crushing on guys... the worst part is that i can no longer do anything about it.  ces and i have talked about that, too.  i also brought up in group how hard it is to be married and have no idea if you are attractive any more, and no really acceptable way to find out...

so last night, i took a break from all this research for my Liturgics paper, and bc and i went shopping.   nothing too exciting, since all i bought was bread and... Chistmas Lights!!!!  so now in the front windows (the ones that face the campus quad) of my dorm living room i have multi-colored lights, and in each of the other two rooms which front on 21st street i put electric candles... "it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas".... and sound like it too, especially now that one of the radio stations has switched to an all Christmas/holiday music programme until the end of the year.

it has become very cold here, and the wind that whistles in off the water just funnels down these manmade canyons and freezes everything.  the clothing ministry here, St. Martin's Closet, at least is now fairly full of clothes, particularly women's > we have coats finally, and many sweaters... we never have enough large men's pants (38-44 waists), but we are even getting some of them; the problem is they don't last long.  yesterday we had several people, about evenly split between men and women, and of course they were all looking for long pants, sweaters, coats.  two of the women only spoke spanish, but fortunately one of the volunteers also spoke spanish.  one of the clients, Gabe, is an aleut from alaska, and has been traveling about as an itinerant musician > when he was ready to leave, he asked us if we would like to hear him play.  of course we said yes, and so he brought out a 1979 yamaha 12-string guitar and proceeded to play and sing some bob dylan.  immediately it was as if i had not left salem, mass, but was back then hanging out in the Campus Christian Fellowship listening to steve or betty or elaine playing... oh, and then a young woman who was trying on clothes said that she played guitar, and the next thing you know, he'd offered to let her play, and she did... they walked off together...

i am reminded of the importance of aiding the homeless and the poor, especially in this time of Advent, of preparation for the coming of God, incarnate in the human baby Jesus.  "prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made sraight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God." (luke 3:4b-6)  how can we make straight the paths that are crooked? or raise the valleys? or lower the mountains?  only by working for the equality of all, the dignity of all, the reconciliation of all.  we must raise up those who have fallen or who are down-trodden, help them out of their valleys.  we must reach out to those isolated and alone, whether by nature or circumstance, and bring them down from their mountains of isolation.  we must be a light for the pathways of our fellow humans so that they don't stumble, or follow the crooked path. 

we are all in this lifejourney together.  what allows us to sit in and with the suffering of others, homeless or depressed or victimized or disenfranchised or imprisoned, is the knowledge that it is within suffering that redemption happens.  even the birth of the little baby, Jesus, took place in the shadow of the cross > what baby gets funeral ointment for a birth gift??  Jesus died for us on the cross, suffered all of the horrors of that death and rejection, in order to show us that the way to salvation and redemption is not to rise above suffering, but to dwell within it, to sit with it, for it is in suffering that God is with us.  God holds us in suffering, reminding us always that there is resurrection in that suffering.  suffering is not something to be sought, but it is something that is redeemed.

and so, as we go out into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit, ready to give our suffering Lord to a world that so desperately needs to hear this release from death, look up!  lift up your heads!  the Lord is near.  Rejoice.

so...i am supposed to be reading to write a reflection paper that is due tomorrow.  and what have i done for the past 3 hours? for the past 3 hours i have helped my niece study for a math final... over IM...

i don't know whether i want to cry or bang my head on the desk...

part of my frustration, granted, is in the lack of technology for IM to convey certain math statements.  however a much larger part is frustration with a public school system that would let her pass her high school proficiency tests without a basic knowledge of long division, of fractions, of percents...  she's not the only one, either.  i've tutored 4 or more persons, one of whom was in honors, in the last few years, and the deficiencies were the same.  i'm sorry, but there's no excuse for this.  they all went on to college, got IN to college, and even in the remedial maths are having issues.  i was certainly no math whiz, but they would not have let me OUT of school, let alone IN to college, with these sorts of issues...

i am not sanguine, not even a little bit, about these examples of grade inflation.  my other niece and nephew were able to get higher than 4.0 GPAs when they graduated high school, and yet they cannot even carry on a conversation in spanish with me (they took 4 years in high school, are within 2 years of the last time they took it, and i took 1 semester years ago in college as an undergrad)...

since i am in no way a cosmic genius, this says something quite unsatisfactory about the school system in the US