Gratuitous Web Presence

Still somehow coexisting.

It’s already mid-January, but I want to think that I can still move forward in fresh start mode as if it’s New Year’s Day.

This list will no doubt morph throughout the year. As it is, I buy and download books and hardly make time to actually read them. I want to change that this year, especially as the sense of my own mortality has grown exponentially in recent months.

I purged my library of most of the hardcore Catholic stuff (mainly Opus Dei-aligned books and other like-minded material) and found myself with lots of Merton, Nouwen, Jesuit-authored works, and St. John XXIII.

The list so far (excluding the abovementioned authors for now), which will forever remain in progress:

• Crying in H Mart, M. Zauner
• Everything is Spiritual, R. Bell
• The four Gospels (NLT and Message versions; I might purchase the First Nations Version of the New Testament this year)
• A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis
• Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others, B.B. Taylor
• How Do You Live?, G. Yoshino
• Introduction to a Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales
• It’s OK That You’re Not OK, M. Devine
• Kierkegaard for Beginners, D. Palmer
• Learning to Walk in the Dark, B.B. Taylor
• Praying Our Goodbyes, J. Rupp
• Religious Rebels: Finding Jesus in the Awkward Middle Way, C. Wood
• Saving Time, J. Odell
• Searching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day, B. Merriman
• Understanding Guilt and Bereavement, B. Baugher
• Why Be Catholic?, R. Rohr

(This, of course, is no guarantee that I’ll actually read them; I also reserve the right to call an audible and read stuff I happen to come across in my stacks or on my Kindle. I also figure on much of my reading including audiobooks.)

I’ll likely add books by Pope Francis, Eugene Peterson, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Brian Zahnd. Thinking a lot about grief, universalist theology, brain health, and aging, so I expect more reading about all that.

Honestly. Death can really do a number on one’s life.

Called in sick to CCD for tomorrow. Should have done it last week.

Some days, I wonder whether I should have just done that from the start and backed away over the summer.

The past several months have done a number on my Catholic faith. Maybe some of it is just physical and emotional exhaustion; I know much of it is realizing that my parish is a MAGA breeding ground that makes me wonder whether being lowercase-o orthodox requires my becoming a heartless, hellfire-preaching, conspiracy-theorizing political nincompoop. I’ve grown deeply uncomfortable with the Baltimore Cathechism brand of Roman fundamentalism there that is growing outright (and outwardly) contemptuous of the present pope.

I’ve spent a few years trying to reconcile my social libertarian tendencies, economic progressive beliefs, and social justice sympathies with my conservative inclinations (e.g., being pro-life [with allowances for circumstances such as rape or incest], attempting to be more observant in uppercase-C Church practices). I’ve been failing miserably, especially in recent months. But I keep thinking there has got to be a place for me in the Big Tent, somewhere between the New Agey Franciscans and the scary Opus Dei types.

Sometimes I wonder whether I should have just remained Anglican.

It’s pretty depressing to know that I was actually cheering for a positive just so I could get out of teaching CCD tomorrow.

But I’m still not feeling well.

I find the most awesome stuff on Threads. This, for example (h/t @thehappygivers).

Somehow, I made it through a trip to Seafood City without weeping because I couldn’t text Eleanor to explain some weird Filipino food I found in the freezer aisle. 😐

Decolonize the soap shelves! 😬

Been spending a ton of time on Threads in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, the Christmas holiday teamed up with the algorithm to bring me enough posts about grief and people losing their parents/siblings/friends/cats/dogs/birds to make me want to go back to bed and hide for a month.

So, I’m back here for now. I’m also thinking it’s time for me to jumpstart some analog journaling, especially with the New Year approaching. Social media posting and texting with friends aside, I really haven’t processed all the sadness churning through my psyche in the past month. I keep waiting to fall off an emotional cliff, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Meanwhile, I’m slowly backing away from our very conservative Catholic parish, which is clearly much more of a MAGA breeding ground than I imagined. Learning this has been disheartening and sad. I’ll finish up the CCD year, but I plan an indefinite break from the place. I have so much more to write about that, but not yet. Not here.

So much lost this year. It’s exhausting to have to let go of so much.

(Repurposing some of what I posted to a grief support group on Facebook—some of which in turn is repurposed from a Threads post—because I have very little of anything left in me.)

It’s been a tough year of losses: one of our cats in April, my college mentor and close friend in June, and my sister last month. I feel like I haven’t fully grieved my mom in 2021, and a work friend and one of our dogs passed not long after.

I haven’t had a breakdown or anything—just a few scattered tears and overwhelming, heavy sadness. I still have to press ahead for work and family. Waiting with dread for some kind of collapse.

Meanwhile, it’s Christmas Eve. Just put together dinner: arroz caldo, a Filipino chicken and rice porridge, which Mom always made late on Christmas Eve so we could eat just before opening our gifts at midnight.

I’ve made it for my family for years. Sometimes I’d text my sister a picture to prove to her that I could make it. She’d text back with heart or thumbs-up emoji, sometimes typing “Wish I was there!”

Now neither she nor Mom are around to tell. Pressing ahead, but my heart feels empty.

My sister and I were close, and she would have been 67 at the end of November. This is tough.

But there will be Christmas. And arroz caldo. A blessed holiday to you.

My latest comfort viewing: Last weekend’s “ABBA Christmas” skit from “SNL.” Played over and over again. Just call me “Frostitita.”

My brother picked up our sister’s death certificate over the weekend. Cause of death: severe sepsis with acute organ dysfunction, with secondary causes being aspiration pneumonia and Covid-19 pneumonia. “Other significant conditions contributing” to death were acute renal failure, dysarthria (slurred speech) and late effect of hemhorragic stroke.

Seeing the certificate photo he sent was a major gut punch this morning.

Watching Shohei Ohtani put on that hideous jersey at this Dodgers news conference is making me physically ill.

(Credit: Self Care Spotlight on Instagram) | More Meme Therapy

I’ve grown weary of being beaten over the head with the insistence that I do this or that to improve my health – the term “epigenetics” is particularly triggering for me – and live to be 100 or more.

If living until forever means nagging the people around me to be healthy, consuming only supplements and things I hate, and ending up alone and friendless, I’d rather die now.

Given the people who are barking at me incessantly about this, the term “narcissism” seems apropos here.

“… living to 100, even 120, may not equal a better life, especially if a fitter body isn’t accompanied by agency, hope or sharp cognition. There are ethical concerns as to whether it’s responsible to desire a century of life in a time of climate crisis, an expanding global population and an epidemic of loneliness, particularly if our partners and peers may not be there to share it. To some critics, the financial and time investments in a longer life — or, more precisely, the hope of a longer life — suggest an extended exercise in narcissism, so many more years of Me Time.”

I honestly had no idea I would be inundated with so many welcoming replies to this post. Swiftie Nation is powerful on Threads, and my fellow Gen Xers are particularly intense among them.

I am now midway through the Netflix “Reputation” concert film and creating a Spotify strategy to plow through the Taylor Swift catalog, thanks to the 150+ responses here.

It has been a pretty rough 2+ weeks for me, so the timing of this cheery new obsession is pretty darn perfect.

This is the ultimate burial of a lede. 😬

Lots of anguish among Padres fans about losing Juan Soto, but (a) it’s not like we’re lacking superstars without him, (b) we needed to lower the payroll and get some decent pitching, and (c) the $31M or so freed up in this trade could buy us a Jung-Hoo Lee or get a decent rental like the Second Coming of Gary Sanchez.

I’m sadder about the likelihood that Blake Snell ends up elsewhere.

Anyway, time to tune out the screeching NY media that won’t shut up about this. Onward.

Finally unwrapped my Spotify stats thingie for the year.

I have got to move forward. I realize that grief has no timeline, and that the whole “stages” thing is crap. But the brain fog has been insane, and I’m tired of being static.

Frequently used tools lately in My Comfort Toolbox

• During this offseason, baseball podcasts and MLB Radio
• “Gravity Falls”
• Threads
• Weird YouTube rabbit holes (i.e., old baseball games, “Friends” clip compilations, Letterman bits, stuff about Taylor Swift’s cats, BBC shipping forecast reruns)

Ready to dig up from the bottom of the toolbox

• Journaling
• Art (especially eager to build pieces with background papers I created with E)
• Prayer
• Spiritual reading
• Weekday Mass
• Transcendental meditation
• Some basic movement (starting with YouTube exercise videos)

Another wee hours post before bedtime. Grateful for texts, cards, social media posts, and email since my sister’s passing. Even more grateful to see friends face to face, as I did yesterday. (👋🏽 to G!) Slowly climbing out of a brain fog that worsened in the past week, thanks in part to all this.

I hate when you ask someone a purely rhetorical question (“Think my sister would forgive me if I don’t write her obit right now, because I just don’t have it in me?”) and they respond with something practical like you actually wanted an answer.

The New Guy got a hold of one of my hats — the one I wore while visiting my sister last month in the hospital — and made a significant dent in it.

Part of me is deeply annoyed. But then it was just a $10 hat I picked up at Walmart. I have more beloved hats. Things could be worse.

I did not need this, stupid fucking iPhone. Not today. 🥺

My sister passed away early this morning after a week of dealing with Covid and kidney failure as well as the after-effects of a stroke last spring. She would have been 67 years old on November 30.

Usually I write through losses as a way to grieve. But I don’t have it in me right now.

In your charity, please hold us in your prayers and thoughts. Can’t talk specifics, but we have been in a holding pattern of anticipatory grief this past week.

Blessings to all, whether you celebrate the holiday or not.