The many things I say when I don't know what to say.

A brief note that I tell myself is for others out there in cyber world, but is in reality probably just for myself as there aren't nearly as many people out there in cyber world who care about this as I tend to think:

More frequently than I would have liked had I a choice, there have been many occasions in recent years where I have been unplugged for a prolonged period of time. Unplugged from the Internet, that is.

Even though I wouldn't have chosen it, however, as it's happening, it hasn't been so bad. In case you didn't know that life can still continue without the Internet, I am here to testify that it can. I do miss things, but as the Beatles say, life does indeed go on. I move on. And it really is okay.

The biggest trouble I have with unplugging is plugging back in. It's like I have to start over every time I go through this cycle. My email gets piled to the sky. All the blogs I follow collect stacks of unread posts - posts I want to read, but which take up a big chunk of time as most everyone I subscribe to seems to be as verbose as I am. And then I want to jump back in and blog again, but I don't know where to start. When I know I'm unplugged, I lose the blogging frame of mind, and the regaining of it does not happen in the snap of a finger.

Those are just a few examples. I could give more, but I won't, lest my many words lose their value. My point has been made, and I am currently facing that point and trying to get plugged back in now that my grandma is well enough to not need a live-in caretaker.

So my stack of email is dwindling. I'm starting to check up on some of my Facebook friends again. But I feel half-hearted in all of it. I want to do it. But it's so much trouble. And if the pattern continues, it won't be long before I'm unplugged again and all of my efforts will seem just about pointless.

Why is that relevant enough for me to be talking about in this context? I want to get back to posting substance on this site more regularly, but then again I don't. Or, more accurately, I haven't convinced myself yet that it's worth the trouble in light of everything else that I'm trying to catch up on. I think I'll get there, but it's going to take a while. But then when I consider that it'll take a while, then I also consider that by the time the while passes, I may be knocked back down to the starting point again, facing another while before I get on my feet.

That, my friends, is what is on my mind. I intended about two paragraphs when I started. I guess that's what happens when I forget my propensity for verbosity.

Meeting myself.

I was just perusing my Pinterest boards outside myself. My thoughts:

- This chick's kinda all over the place. She seems like a mom one second and then the next I'd swear she's not old enough to even understand HOW to have kids. Babies having babies so to speak.

- There are also hints that she's formally educated, and then I see Atari coasters....

- And does she really want to live in a house that looks like one Mr. Magorium built?

- She must live in her head most of the time, this one.

- I'd hate to see her dropped in the middle of a fashion show.

- She seems to have lead a really interesting life thus far. I mean, how else could she be this weird? It's kind of impressive.

- We should be friends.

Lacking substance.

I've had many blog ideas hopping around in my head.

I really want to blog.

But I can't.

Well, obviously I can. I'm doing this now.

What I mean is that I can't blog anything that takes longer than a few minutes to write.

You see, here at my grandma's house, I'm having to use my little brother's quite old laptop. The battery on it lasts about an hour. When it's plugged in, it has to be sitting on a flat, stable surface.

While running on battery power, I can get in a cozy spot, curl my legs underneath me, and get in my favorite blogging posture. While it's plugged in, I have to sit at the kitchen table, in a straight chair, feeling completely uninspired.

Also, I can't sit at the kitchen table in the middle of the night, which happens to be my blogging hour of choice.

So until I can learn to write something of substance in under an hour, as long as I'm here hanging out with my recuperating grandmother, I don't see myself blogging anything but this.

Sad days are upon us. Us meaning me.

The fervent prayer of a righteous woman.

Once upon a Sunday morning, one not so long ago, I was sitting in a church service, soaking in truth with a smile on my face, feeling uplifted to such a height I could have sworn there were clouds within my reach.

Then a memory like a pin came in and jabbed a small hole in my balloon. I slowly lost altitude.

For much of the past eight months, I have felt like I've been living in a moment that is perpetually seriously wrong.

"God, why? This is driving me crazy. This is ridiculous. Do you not see how ridiculous this is? I am an untapped well whose resources are not being taken advantage of. What is there to be gained from me being completely helpless? Did I just take five years to get through college and gain a degree so that I could move on to keeping my house clean, hanging drywall with my dad, and serving as a non-paid taxi driver? What's going on? I don't get it."

That's just a small snapshot of my end of the dialogue I was having with God. There were moments that were less bewildered and self-imposing and more encouraging, but in general I spent most of my time feeling defensive, believing, subconsciously I think, that to stop fighting would mean admitting defeat, which was unacceptable.

I did eventually begin to get over myself, though. It was a remarkable work of grace. And I began to see how nothing was wrong, how suffering isn't always punishment, but - more often than not, perhaps - an opportunity for better; a grace is its own right. We'll leave that there until another blog on another day, and say nothing more on the subject beyond this frame of mind is the one I had on that high-flying Sunday morning. Another one of the reasons I was feeling so much lighter than air.

We now return to the prickly memory. I don't remember what anyone was saying at the time to trigger my specific remembering. All I recall is that my specific remembering was of a time several years ago. I came to a point in my existence where I was feeling particularly discontented by how content I was to be comfortable. When I get comfortable, I get stagnant. I don't grow. I don't contribute much to the world. I don't do anything to enrich another person's life, because I'm not doing anything to enrich my own. I only drain life, I don't give it.

I was so unsatisfied by settling for comfortable contentment, that I remember writing these words to God: "Lord, don't let me get comfortable." And for a time after that, as I would think-talk to God, I would repeat those words, "Please, don't let me get comfortable." I repeated them often, and fervently.

Vividly flashed the memory. Sharp became the realization: I begged God to disallow my comfort, then what did I do when my comfort was undermined? I felt like a victim. I fought against defeat.

Oh. Yeah. That's right. I did say that, didn't I?

It's a good thing I'm not condemned. My balloon did deflate a little, but I very quickly felt that much more a victim of grace than I had before. God honored my prayer, even when I didn't understand the gravity of what I had prayed or that I had prayed it at all. He's not letting me settle for less than the fullness that is available to me.

Thank you, thank you, Jesus.

On Lent.

I didn't learn much of anything about Lent until I was grown. Before that, I only heard the word a few times and all I knew of it was that it was somehow associated with Easter. I was born into the religious circle of General Baptists. General Baptists don't talk about Lent. General Baptists talk about believing in Jesus and getting your hands dirty; the school of love God and work hard. My heritage is a practical one, and the idea of sacrificing something for 40 days and giving extra care to prayer and penance was too complicated for my doctrinal forefathers. Baptists of all types, whether "General," "Primitive," "Independent," "Southern," "Missionary" or any other name you can imagine, are "the plain people." The only exposure I had as a child to all things liturgical, aside from the days of Christmas and Easter themselves, came through my father's father and the Methodist church. He was a United Methodist minister when I was growing up, and we would occasionally visit whichever United Methodist church he happened to be pastoring at the time. While in that religious sphere, I would sometimes hear words like "Lent" and "Ash Wednesday" and "Advent," but as my stay never lasted long, my understanding of such matters remained shallow.

I still am largely uneducated in Lenten matters (just last year, while I was still a student, I saw a girl walking around campus with a smudge on her forehead. I let my initial confusion pass, but after I saw another girl, I thought, "What is going on?" Only then did I remember it was Ash Wednesday.), but after learning what little I do know, I've found the tradition interesting, and I've thought about participating.

But my want of education, in both senses of the word, is at once my first and second hesitation. My first hesitation is that I feel I lack the knowledge to, in a sense, have the right to participate. I felt the same way about Communion (or the Lord's Supper, Eucharist, whichever is your term of choice) when I was a child. I have known about Jesus my whole life, and I gave that life to him when I was four years old, but I didn't understand the whole thing with the bread and wine (or juice in the cases of every church I've ever attended) at such an early age. I heard "Do this in remembrance of me" over and over again, and watched all kinds of people nibble either bread or crackers and drink tiny shots of grape juice from these nifty fluted cups, and felt like I should do it too, but I didn't get the context surrounding it or understand the depth of its meaning. So one Sunday morning, while walking with my aunt through the procession at the front of my grandpa's church, when my father's sister looked down at my short frame and offered me a piece of bread I shook my head from side to side. I didn't understand it, so I didn't want it. Even though I adore freshly baked bread and grape juice more than most other things on this planet.

My second hesitation is this: clearly, Lent is currently nothing more than an intellectual curiosity for me. The essence of my interest is contained in my desire to know, not in a desire to be affected by it. If all I want to do is pull it apart and examine it so that I can store knowledge and experience in my brain....is that the right posture to have when approaching Lent? I think I too often engage the world solely with my brain and not with my heart, and that detached intellectualism has a way of stripping beauty, truth, good things, of their meaning. In my zeal to learn about the flower, I pluck it from its roots, and pretty soon the life that attracted me to it is gone and I'm cradling a broken, dead, decaying configuration of atoms; not a flower. I don't want to kill Lent.

But maybe that's just how I roll and I need to embrace it. I think most of the time I need to see the flower die before I can appreciate what it means. Then, through the sacrifice of that one flower, I can go on to find other flowers and be fulfilled by only gazing at them and breathing in their scent, not tearing them apart with my fingers. Maybe I could jump into Lent with no more knowledge of it than I now have, and being around it, looking at it, hearing it, smelling it, would allow me to experience how meaningful it is. But more than likely, it wouldn't. More than likely, I'll have to make it die, to pull it apart into myriad facts, ideas, and theologies before I can find its essence, the essence that I have ripped away.

And for all my debating on both sides of the fence, maybe that's actually not such a bad way to operate. I seem to remember some guy saying that it's only in losing my life that I can find it.

As Lent is already upon us in Christendom this year, maybe this season can begin my education. And maybe before the next one rolls around, I will have thoroughly ravaged it enough to put it back together and finally have it mean something to me.

My misfit children.

In an effort to capture as many thoughts as I can, I write down things on a regular basis. If I have a specific plan for them, they could end up any number of purposeful places. My order-loving left brain won a battle with my erratic right brain a while ago, and it's winner's demands were that I categorize the colorful array that dances through my head and designate separate depositories for every category. With a minimum of eight notebooks/journals, it has worked well, and my right brain has complied. But the ease of submission has been helped by the fact that His Orderly Majesty was merciful, and did allow me to have one place that could be a catch-all for everything that refused to fit in a category.

That notebook has become one of my favorites. Its contents are all of the things that I don't know what to do with, but don't want to lose. As a misfit that has found a place with other misfits and has been cherished enough to not be left for lost, that notebook resides in an empathetic place in my heart.

So, like a proud mother, I present to you now a sample of what's in the quirky pages of my beloved. Why? Because that's what mothers do. Much of it is self-explanatory, but if you're reading these thoughts, and they don't make sense, don't panic. I'm aware that the chatter that happens in my head on a regular basis would likely be unintelligible to most if it was audible, and by writing it, I'm essentially making it audible. If anything you read below peaks your interest, and you want to understand more about it, just let me know and I will be happy to let you in on the joke. Or at least try to let you in. As with all jokes, some people just "get it" and others don't. (If you're reading this, that likely means you're my friend, and as my friend, that means you're probably cool (read "nerdy," "dorky," "geeky," or any other delightfully similar adjective) enough to "get it.")



"I appreciate having online conversations with people who don't take me seriously."

"My great aunt and uncle died last year and left us Febreeze."

"My mom and I are both eating close-to-midnight sandwiches. Mother-daughter bonding. But that looks like a weak bond. Maybe I should write it mother=daughter bonding."

"I've taken to sleeping with an array of books again. I'm taking that as evidence that my heart is alive."

"I appreciate living in a place where I can hear trains on a regular basis. There's a loneliness in the whistle that captures my sympathy whenever I hear it. But the train is also a reminder of other life being lived out in the world. Travel. Interaction. Non-loneliness. There's more and I long for more."

"Feminine clocks...clocks with fur coats..."

"It's weird/interesting knowing that I live in a house where druggies have been in before. Makes my life seem more interesting that it actually is."

"I'm grateful for friends who inspire the use of genuine exclamation points."

"I look like I'm wearing someone else's clothes. Someone else's larger clothes. If this shrinking keeps up, I won't be able to wear half the stuff in my closet."

"Fear me and my words of might!"

"1 Chronicles 1:10 reads, 'Cush became the father of Nimrod; he was the first to be a mighty one on the earth.'"

"What other people got from the Grammys: 'So-and-so won this many awards, Yay!'; 'What the heck was that?'; 'Is she for real?'; 'Oh, Whitney. We'll miss you, darling.' What I got from the Grammys: 'Milton Babbit died? Really?'"

"Due to a lack of vengeance, apparently I'm a disappointment."

"Often times, the best moments come unexpectedly. I hope I'm always ready to accept them and make the most of them while they're around."

"Editors are nasty? I suppose. Gentle editor, am I."

I also have a number of lists in the notebook, including but not limited to: "Things I Intend to Do When I Live Alone," "Disney Songs," "Emily's Favorite Things," "Songs for My Blog," "Harry Potter Discussion Topics for a Podcast," and "Skills I Have Which I Don't Want to Turn into a Full-Time Job."



Thank you, reader, for allowing me to be so self-indulgent.

On free toothpaste, washing dishes, and overcoming responsibility.

Every time I shrink away from writing a "this is what I did today" post, one of the things I tell myself is that the only people who follow this thing are my friends. If we were looking at each other face-to-face, I would tell any one of my friends everything that I feel compelled to write about what I've done, so in reality, such a post is all good, yes? Yes. So, although I don't want this site to decay into nothing more than a depository of Emily Lynn Harmon's current events (...and now, there she goes to the mailbox...), for this friendly reason and for another I will soon explain, I will now talk about a few things that recently happened in my life.


This week, it has been a challenge to engage my right brain. I've wanted to write more, and not just more but better, but that hasn't happened. So here I am writing something just for the sake of writing something.

Every day this week, I have awakened and soon devoted my thoughts to cookies. "Today, before this day is over, I'm going to make some," I've told myself. Then, I get started on the things I "need" to do and/or following through with plans that I've made. If you're intimately familiar with the state my surroundings, you'll know that "things I need to do" truly means the "things I can't possibly put off or my world will feel like it's tumbling out of control." My life isn't that organized and perfect. It's more like a regular battle against chaos. One of those things that I've "needed" to do, something that directly relates to the cookies, is clean the kitchen. We don't have much room in the kitchen to begin with, but when dirty dishes are added, the surface space fades to nary a square foot. With no dish washer and no hot water in the pipes, washing dishes, for five people no less, is a bit of a challenge. But it's a challenge I didn't want to leave undone before I made cookies. I can function with messes in certain situations, but in a kitchen, especially a cramped one, I find it to be nearly mentally and emotionally impossible to overcome.

Thus, several days this week, I have valiantly begun attacking the kitchen mess, aiming to finish quickly so that the cookie-baking can begin.

I still haven't done it. Those dishes never disappear. It looks like I'll have to get over my kitchen-mess-ophobia if I ever want to make cookies. That, or the Harmon house will likely be homemade cookie-less until we get either hot water or a dishwasher.

I've also been continuing my efforts to shop wisely and thriftily. Every store ad that comes in this house gets scoped out for the best deals, and I diligently search through my coupon depository to find coupons for sale items. When something's on sale and you have a coupon for it, chances are it can be obtained for a pretty low price.

My mom and I went to two drugstores today. While I don't know the exact numbers, I do know that we saved over 50% on everything we bought. The thing I'm most excited about is that we made $2 on some Vitamin D. No joke. We also managed to pick up some free toothpaste. And tomorrow, I believe we are going to acquire a free light bulb. I'm kind of a rookie at this bargain hunting thing, but it seems to be working out pretty well.

As cool as all that is, I'm fighting a battle that all people incur, creative types especially, I think; how should I balance my priorities? The typical responsibilities never leave, and while I am in the middle of a glorious opportunity to learn to not be so duty-bound by them, I have not yet become so untrained that I no longer care about them. I do care about them. Tending to them does good things for my family and me.

But I want to write more. I want to read more. I want to sing more. I want to become a better musician. I want to make things. I want to be a better German speaker. I want to become more learned in Latin. I want to make cookies. And share them with my friends.

Every good writer I've heard address this subject says to forget the laundry overflowing the hamper, look at the dirt laying on the floor, and move on. If what you want to do is write more, then leave it all alone and write. And when you can't leave it alone enough, feel no guilt in trading sleep for playing with words. I know they're right. And I do that sometimes. Regularly, even. But not regularly enough to feel like I ever accomplish much.

What to do, what to do....