Toiling and Spinning

Last night I offered to make dinner for my long-suffering husband. He sat at the table nursing a beer while I chattered like a chickadee and started a grease fire. Well, a Canola Oil fire. And there weren't really any flames, just smoke. Alot of smoke. Not as much as a ChimneyFire!, but enough. We decided to leave the windows closed on account of it was ten-below-zero, and the veggie burgers were burnt to hockey pucks, so we popped another smoky brewski and called Domino's.

Then this morning I turn on one of those GOOD MORNING! shows while I'm waiting for the coffee to brew, and some natty psychologist with a hard-on is telling some skinny bitch with a microphone and $300 hair that it's normal to experience stress during the holidays, but the most important thing is to remember to spend time with the ones we love. They could be doing live coverage of another in-country terrorist attack, such is the level of earnest concern.

I start talking to the TV. Not a good sign. I assure it that I could not imagine how I might have been able to stagger through another day without such invaluable information. I thank it for allowing me to be the recipient of this sanity-saving message-in-a-bottle. I share with it my humble awe at the willingness of experts to step down from the ivory heights and communciate with less comprehending souls. I inform the hard-on and the hairdo that while they conversate quite convincingly on national television, I'm fully aware that behind the facade they're actually envisioning oral sex with one another in a freight elevator, and I click them into oblivion and pour myself a cup of faintly-smoky French roast.

And then there's this: The director of the preschool where I teach is starting to put the pressure on. This is a person who's seen difficult times. Well, so have we all, by this stage of the game, some more difficult than others. But life is not a contest. It may be a test, but let's leave the con out of it. To continue, this person has found her answer in Jesus. Well, fine. Whatever. Any port in a storm. Though I'd prefer a glass of the Fonseca 1955 vintage to any other port, but that's beside the point. The point being, this aforementioned Jesus freak is starting to freak me out. She's starting to put the pressure on me. The resident zen pantheist. Can you imagine?

Now, in any other situation this putting-on-of-religious-pressure would be moot. Let me amend that. In any other rational situation. After all, there's laws in This-Land-Is-Your-Land that allow us to believe whatever we want to believe. In theory at least. The problem being, this is not a rational situation. This is a church, birthplace of the irrational. Let me explain.

The happy little preschool where I've been happily teaching lo these past months is annexed to a church. It gets worse. A Lutheran church. Only nobody seems to know what it means to be "annexed" to anything, let alone some church packed to the folding tables with Lutherans. A slight oversight which has enabled yours truly, a.k.a. your friendly neighborhood godless pagan, to sneak in the back door, as they say in hockey parlance. Somehow, after I'd been subbing at this school for awhile, the Christ-crazed director decided she liked me. (Hey, Mikey! She likes me!) She liked my MO. She liked my rap sheet. She liked my auto harp. She offered me a job. I accepted. Then she saw my tattoo. But it was too late. The back door grazed my ass as it clicked shut, and I was in.

Except I didn't know what I was in for. Like a sentence. And not of the grammatical variety. Apparently I'd somehow gotten on the wrong side of the Universe, and as a consequence, the Universe had seen fit to throw me into the lion's den. Just call me Danielle. Only this den is filled to capacity, not with the King of Beasts and all his cousins from Jersey, but with...Lutherans. Let me repeat: I Have Been Thrown Into A Den Of Lutherans! I cannot conceive of a more macabre and ironic punishment for such as myself. Apparently the Universe has a sense of humor.

So while I go about trying to housebreak a squirmy litter of three-year-olds, who don't know a herald angel from a hole in the ground, in fact, they prefer a hole in the ground, into which they can put their faith, their hope and their stinky little tootsies...anyway, while I go about my teacher's business, the director goes about leaving stacks of biblical flotsam on my desk, including Bible storybooks featuring Bible stories, Bible movies featuring Bible movie stars, Bible posters featuring Bible posturing, you get the picture. Jesus H. Christ, it's driving me to drink.

I don't know how any of this fits together. But that's life. And this is my life. It's not an essay. It's not a contest. Although, come to think of it, I did win an essay contest back when I was a teenager. Sponsored by US Steel Corporation, can you imagine? My winnings were two shares of US Steel stock, which I eventually traded for a portable Olivetti Underwood that saw me through four years of college and a starter marriage. The subject of that original steel-belted essay was "Charge It!" I rambled on about procrastinating things like kindness and duty and truth, and at one point, good little Lutheran that I was, I quoted the Bible, something about the "Lilies of the field."

And it's true. I was raised Lutheran. Confirmation, Luther League, lutefisk, the whole ball of lefse. A ball I was destined to lose during four years of higher (and higher) education, along with my virginity, my bra, and my belief in a giant all-knowing head in the sky who ran the Universe and considered incidentals like napalm and Agent Orange a part of the divine plan. These days a perfect underwire is my idea of a divine plan. And as far as the Universe is concerned, it seems to be running itself. And doing a yeoman's job of it. Expanding and contracting and evolving and reforming and occasionally doing stand-up on the weekend.