Back Off My Sparkly Pink Flower!

One day in November, I was alone in the chapel for evening prayer (I don’t know if I mentioned this before or not, but it isn’t like I’m a stranger to obsessive repetitiveness), which actually doesn’t happen that often. Anyway, so I’m there by myself in this chapel. It’s a very pretty chapel. What do I decide to do?

I decide to sing evening prayer. Not all of it, just the hymns, canticles and psalmody. Got to do the psalmody differently, too: with antiphon, psalm and psalm prayer – bonus! Since no one else has to try and copy me with my no-actual-music, I can do what I want.

After I finished evening prayer, I got one of the hymn books and sang all the songs in it that I knew (except the ones about Jesus dying, which would be liturgically inappropriate, I think), which were depressingly few. Still, having memorized a few of my favorite songs anyways, I ended up staying there quite a bit longer than the usual half hour. It was great!

I realized when I was leaving that I was super happy, which was an interesting and welcome departure from my usual moping and despondency (cue the violins). I think it just felt like…I was doing what I was meant to do, that for a moment things slid into place, that this was what I wanted.

Do you think Medicare would subsidize building a chapel as a medical expense? Hey Medicare: build me a chapel! In the long run, it’ll be cheaper!

Absurd notions aside, it isn’t the building that gave me that feeling, though I must admit the sound was great. The praying, that’s the key…But of course praying can’t be the entirety of my life: I’m not trying to be a twelfth-century German anchorite mystic.

More’s the pity.

There are other things that make me happy in my life. I mean the kind of happy that is just pure and unreasonable – that is, there’s no reason at all for such a thing to make me happy like that.

I really like snow globes. I gravitate toward them in stores. I keep forgetting about how much I like snow globes until I’m actually standing in front of them. *happy sigh* I like the sometimes-sparkly little snow and the way it drifts down after I turn the snow globe over. I like watching it settle. I like looking at the little scenes inside of it. Simple snow globes are the best: easy to turn over, simple enough little worlds within them, a perfect little image. Thus, I am somewhat annoyed by complicated snow globes that try to integrate multiple scenes and globes in the same structure. You know, like the dragon and wizard war ones where the dragon and the wizard are in separate bubbles that are stuck on the same unwieldy base, which is also thematic. You can’t watch both at once. One bubble per globe is enough for me. Though a snow globe may come with the ability to play pretty little music, I almost never wind it up.

So far, I have prayer and snow globes.

I also really like balloons. If snow globes make me a kind of relaxed happy, balloons are their excited brethren. People don’t randomly give each other balloons nearly often enough (I don’t randomly give people balloons, either, mostly because I’m afraid they won’t want them). I love getting balloons. *happy dance* I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because they’re so innocent and joyful all by themselves. Helium balloons are so cool! I admit that the tin-foil looking balloons shaped like other things (a heart, for example) kind of annoy me. This doesn’t make any sense because I think balloon animals would make me happy – I haven’t actually had any, but they seem like so much fun in the movies.

One of the saddest things I ever saw was…you know those garbage cans with the round hole in the top that you put things through, that’s a bit smaller than the circumference of the actual can? The reason for these holes and discrepancies is mysterious to me. Anyway, one day I was walking to the tunnel that connects Place Ville Marie with the Eaton Center, and I saw an upside-down red balloon stuffed into one, part in and part out because it didn’t fit through the hole. I don’t know why it made me sad…there’s just something wrong with throwing out a perfectly good balloon. Letting them up in the air is fine – freedom! FREEDOM!! – but stuffing them into a garbage can just isn’t.

So I’ve got prayer, snow globes and balloons. I think that’s enough.

Which is kind of funny, because I don’t actually have balloons or snow globes, and sometimes even prayer, but somehow just knowing they exist is enough.