Archive for October 6th, 2008

6 Oct

Still, small voice

Posted by Noelle in That Darn Cat, Uncategorized, White Box Living. Tagged: , .

There are very few things about my religious upbringing that I think about very often.  But it can’t be denied that 20 years of Sunday School is going to have some kind of affect.  Of the handful of things from church that I liked, one was the concept of the “still, small voice.”  In short, if you’re grappling with something or unsure of what to do, stop and listen, and the voice will guide you.

In my time of belief, I would have said it was God speaking to me.  Now I like to think of it more as “my conscience” or better yet, “the voice of reason.”  Sometimes, in moments of whimsy, that voice takes the shape of Jiminy Cricket.

The challenge for the believer is to listen for that voice, and follow the instructions it gives.  It usually knows the right thing to do, and it will try and keep you from doing the wrong thing.  It’s a good system for decision making until you decide that you know better.

For instance, I should have listened to the still, small voice when it told me that I shouldn’t put my brand new mint vanilla reed diffuser on top of the toilet, balancing precariously on a barely level surface two meters off the ground in a home with two of the fightin’-est cats this side of the Mississip.  But no, I said.  It will be fine.  If I put a glass filled with perfume and some sticks on top of the toilet, The cats wouldn’t dare take the fight there, especially if it’s right below this tempting open window and above their litter box!

You can probably guess what I knew happened the moment I walked in the door and smelled my apartment.

You win this round still, small voice.  Perhaps, before I venture back out to replace the reed diffuser, I’ll listen to you telling me, “your allergies and subsequent asthma are often triggered by the smell of perfume, and maybe after Saturday night, you might not want to reintroduce that form of odor into your home.”  Actually, you don’t need to tell me twice.  Everything in my home, including my hyper-allergenic cats is mint vanilla scented at the moment and it’s causing me to aaaa…. aaaaachoooooo!

6 Oct

Wheezy

Posted by Noelle in Birmingham, It's a medical condition. Tagged: .

I had a little housewarming party on Saturday, and right after the last guest left, I had some kind of crazy ass allergy or asthma attack.  I tried to sleep, but the sound of my own wheezing kept waking me up.  I’m assuming the attack was not caused my my dear guests, but by the cleaning I had done earlier in the day, or some other cause that I don’t even want to consider.

Before the 3AM catfight could break out that night, I got myself out of bed and Googled “asthma home remedies.”  Most of them involved drinking hot coffee or black tea, or making some kind of crazy concoction of spicy vegetables.  The closest thing I had was Chai tea, a cup of which equaled about an hour of sleep.

On the rare occasions when my sleep schedule gets messed up like that, I always have crazy vivid dreams the next night, usually based on a mish-mosh of the things that have happened to me most recently, usually if I’ve been watching TV or movies.  Because over the weekend I 1) watched three episodes of Season 4 of “The Wire,” 2) Watched “Nova: To the Moon” (Netflix suggested I would like it) 3) got in a small tiff with Birmingham after spending a lovely afternoon with him and 4) saw “Religulous” at the movies, my dream went like this:

Birmingham and I got into a fight, so I went back to school, only the school was an inner-city Baltimore elementary school.  It turned out that I was a brilliant mathematician, the smartest one in the class, and during the math lesson I figured out how to make space ships rendezvous inside the moon’s orbit.  That meant that I got to skip to the head of the class, and I got to be a part of the moon expidition.  When we arrived at the moon’s surface, we found a lovely grove of trees, and we also found out that we were all able to breathe properly, even without an atmosphere.  While we were all collecting rocks and stuff, the lunar lander took off without us.  And then a voice came down from the heavens and said we were being punished by God for not believing in him.  And then he read to us from the book of Genesis.  And damn if his voice didn’t sound a lot like Birmingham.

And then I woke up wondering how that trip to Mars was coming along.  I plan to sleep like a log tonight, after this cup of strong black coffee wears off.

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