For this week’s Sleeping With Bread post (click on the badge at right for more information about the meme), this week’s host Lamont phrased the questions: “What are the things that caused you to feel ‘chapped’ this week? What are the lip balm – Gilead – moments that cooled, refreshed and healed?” She used those instead of the customary ones such as “For what am I most grateful? Least grateful?,” “When did I give and receive the most love? The least love?,” or “When did I feel most alive? Most drained of life?” and so on that we who participate in the meme often use.
Chapped?
For today’s post, I’m going to hearken back to this post where I put things into focus through the prisms of body, mind and soul, the theme of this blogs, so in terms of things that caused me to feel chapped:
1. Physically: Lack of exercise. Much like in that post, I’m still struggling to get myself out the door to exercise, even though I joined the Idita-Walk 2010, which involves walking 30 minutes a day for 35 days from Feb. 1 to March 31 for a total of 1,049 minutes.
2. Mentally: Lack of reading discipline. I’ve been in a reading slump since at least December, having only read one book: Murder at the Super Bowl by Fran Tarkenton with Herb Resnicow, and then I kept on a Super Bowl theme and tried to read Black Sunday by Thomas Harris. It didn’t hold my interest and I’ve decided to follow the example of a few book bloggers that I follow, who are doing something called “deliberate reading,” which is only reading what they want to read.
To that end, earlier this month I started reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses as translated by Mary Innes as part of the Really Old Classics Challenge (click on button to go to challenge’s main page). Along with that, I’m going to continue participating in the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge and want to pick up the Ladies Detective Agency series again by Alexander McCall Smith.
Beyond that, I have no plans, other than to continue to try to read books that already are on our shelves. However, since I started working at a library part-time in December, that is getting to be more and more difficult than it sounds. The only thing I’ve been doing to try to stop the tide from overflowing the house is to keep a list of books I find while shelf-reading instead of just grabbing them from the shelves and taking them out immediately.
3. Spiritually: Lack of spiritual discipline, primarily missing Mass this past weekend because, in a rare moment of honesty here, I was out late Saturday night getting drunk at a firemen’s banquet with my wife. Do I regret getting drunk? As a Catholic, of course, I have to say no (said in half-jest). However, I do regret missing Mass (said in all seriousness).
And those moments that cooled, refreshed and healed me (a lot shorter than the things that caused me to feel chapped):
1. Physically: Walking to work at library. I can say that it definitely has been cooling this winter.
2. Mentally: Hanging out with friends for the Super Bowl. The commercials were horrible; the halftime show, meh; the food, very good, but the fellowship, even better than all the previous.
3. Spiritually: Joining the aforementioned Tara with a group (online) from her church in reading and discussing Holy Conversations: Talking About God In Everyday Life by Richard Peace. I will have a post tomorrow that will go along with this.
I’ll end with this clip from Napoleon Dynamite, since that is where Tara got her inspiration for the wording of this week’s questions (with which I also leave you):
What are the things that caused you to feel “chapped” this week? What are the lip balm – Gilead – moments that cooled, refreshed and healed?
