Morning Malaise

As opposed to "Morning Mayonnaise," which is something else entirely.

For some reason, I have spent the last couple of days in a funk. No real reason why, other than the current lack of job opportunities in the area and various theological conundrums that roll through my mind on a regular basis. But if I am dealing with those issues constantly, why was this weekend particularly rough?

Not a clue. I tried to pay attention to my dreams, which often lend some clues, but they seemed to just reflect the usual - I'm trapped somewhere and trying to escape, or I've somehow returned back to high school or college and am taking an exam for a class that I've never attended. No surprises from that corner; they're all anxiety or stress dreams. So I'll have to keep meditating on this and see if I can go deeper to figure out what's going on. Usually, the answer is right in front of me; just takes me a while to figure it out.

In accordance with my lousy mood, I didn't go to kung fu on either Friday or Sunday, finding appropriate excuses for each day. Friday was a celebration with One Ring over the rescue of "Bun-Bun" (as One Ring calls the baby bunny), while Sunday was due to an excessively long nap brought about by difficulty sleeping on Saturday. So this Morning when I rolled in to work, there was an email from the instructor waiting for me. Insert sheepish look and self-loathing brought on by laziness here.

On the plus side, I did get to see Ira Glass, host of This American Life on Saturday when he gave a lecture in Nashville. Basically he played some clips from the show, talked about the nature of working in radio, and compared his radio show to his Showtime series. Very informative, and also very funny. If you go to the website, you can listen to the radio show. It comes on here at 6 pm on Sundays, so I'm thinking about downloading episodes and burning them to CD so I can either listen to them at work or during my commute.

One Ring and I also led the first summer class of vacation Bible school. For those of you who normally don't encounter such things, VBS is usually a time when children show up every day for a week and learn a series of Bible stories set around a central theme. Usually these themes are spin-offs of pop culture. Well my church, being weird, decided that it's easier to have a summer long VBS with a selected, homemade topic. This year the topic is social justice, with a different cause and organization discussed every week. We talked about the local SPCA, how we rescued Barney the Dog of Destruction, and made dog treats and scarves for the puppies to wear during adoption fairs. It was fun, but very tiring, and led into the super long nap that I mentioned above.

Well, the only other thing going on right now (aside from yet another patient skipping his appointment with me. Grrr!) is that I'm planning on attending a Tibetan Buddhist temple on Sunday in lieu of my normal worship. According to everything I've read and heard thus far in my spiritual journey, there is no conflict between Christianity, which is a theistic (obviously) faith, and Buddhism, which is non-theistic (but not atheistic, which is a different thing entirely). Should be interesting. Hopefully the activities there will help me with everything that's been going on in my head and life. We'll see.

Okay, time to head off to the floors and visit some patients.

Peace.