A warm bed on a cold morning.
Graham crackers, peanut butter, and milk.
Nothing to do and nowhere to be.
A book, a beer, and quiet.

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I'm not saying I doubt you, man;
But when something goes wrong, you'd better have a plan.

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If God were a turtle,
Churches would be domes
we built on our backs,
and they'd be our homes.

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The Agony of Defeat

So last night I was watching the Olympics before I went to bed (as all good patriotic Americans should do), and saw Katie Hoff edged out for gold in the 400m freestyle by SEVEN HUNDREDTHS OF A SECOND. Yee-owch. I mean, silver is great too, but that margin of victory is just STUPID. Basically the winner had slightly longer fingernails than the loser, when it comes down to that. Harsh.

Then in the very next race, the men's 4x100 freestyle relay, the US team won the gold by EIGHT hundredths of a second. Talk about parity in the field.

You know, I often think that getting rejected by a magazine I thought I should be able to break into was soul-crushing, but put in this perspective...not as much.

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Support Scott in the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes!

As everyone who knows me knows, I've been a type 1 diabetic since I was 17 years old. Once again, this year I'll be taking part in JDRF's Walk to Cure Diabetes along with one-half million other walkers across the country, as we try to reach our goal of raising $100 million.

Last year I did great work fundraising for the JDRF, and I hope to do at least as well this year...with a little help from my friends. :) If you can and would like to, please follow the link below to donate a little money toward the effort. Any donation is greatly appreciated--$5, $10, whatever you can spare. You can even put it on your credit card! What could be simpler!

Thanks a lot to everyone who can and feels like supporting me in this effort.

Go to Scott's Fundraising Page at the JDRF Website

The official spiel:

Type 1, or juvenile, diabetes, is a devastating disease that affects millions of people--a large and growing percentage of them children. Many people think type 1 diabetes can be controlled by insulin. While insulin does keep people with type 1 diabetes alive, it is NOT a cure. Aside from the daily challenges of living with type 1 diabetes, there are many severe, often fatal, complications caused by the disease. Possible complications of this disease include blindness, neuropathy, kidney failure, heart disease, circulation problems, amputations, and death. While advances in the last century have made living with diabetes easier, it's still a leading cause of long term health problems and death in this country. Constant need for blood glucose monitoring and medications take a considerable financial as well as emotional toll on diabetics and their families, to say nothing of the health care system.

I have now lived longer with diabetes than I lived without out. It's my hope that, with the help of research the JDRF is funding and through donations from people across the country, one day I can say that statement is no longer true. I haven't always been hopeful about this, but now, for the first time, scientists are predicting that we CAN expect to see a cure well within our lifetime. It's enough to make me dare to hope.

If you're able to, please sponsor me on this year's Walk to Cure Diabetes. You can go to the link below to donate online--$5, $10, whatever you can spare--or, if you're nearby, see me to give a check. Every donation means a lot.

Thank you,
Scott Standridge

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Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

I hold grudges. It's one of the several unattractive things about my psychological makeup. I know all the Buddhist/Karmic sayings about how you're lighter if you don't carry that stuff with you, how you should put the ungrateful passenger down on the other side of the river instead of carrying her all the way to town--I can see the wisdom in such statements and analogies, and am even prepared to say that yes, that is indeed the best way to live.

The problem is, I've never been very good at that. It's very, very hard for me to let go of past pain, from inadvertent meannesses to full-on intentional tortures. They stick with me. Maybe it's my well-exercised memory for emotional events. I can't forget, and therefore can't often forgive.

The girls in junior high school who passed me forged notes from their friends, giggling at the victim girl's cries of denial and mortification at the very thought that I might believe it was from HER. The upperclassmen shouting "Fatso!" out the window of their car passing me at the bus stop. Having a heart so easily and carelessly broken--in high school, at church camp, at prom, in college, more than once. Cast off by friends, rejected by lovers, shamed by those I'd admired--I keep a list of hurts and betrayals written in my skin, line after line tattooed and inexpungable.

Even knowing that I'm better off for the pain--those girls who broke my heart were not the right ones for me, and had I succeeded with them things would doubtless have been worse than they are; the friend who betrayed me set me on a road for better things in the end--even that knowledge does not erase my bad feelings--my frank, painful hate. It's a failing, I know--I'd be a more cheerful sort if I could shrug it off, let it roll down my back, soak into the dust at my heels and disappear. But I'm not made that way, I guess. I never have been.

Because that pain IS me, in a real and I think important way. Without the pain, without the heartbreak, without the anger it occasioned, I'd be someone else. Someone better? Worse? Maybe. Who knows. But definitely someone ELSE. And maybe that's why I don't let go. Maybe that pain has become my identity, and I'd be lost without it.

I don' t mean to imply I'm made entirely of pain--I am made of joy too, of happiness, of pleasure, of pride and guilt and shame and exuberance and exaltation. It just seems that we're often called upon to deny our pain, to ignore it, to pretend it's something other than what it is. That to admit it, accept it, embrace it is somehow a sin. Which maybe it is. I don't know. I just don't know how else to be.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

--Stephen Crane

What pains make you who you are?

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Happy Birthdays and Scary Snowglobes

Today is Thea Rose Standridge's 4th birthday. Yay!

Here's a sonnet I wrote for her on the occasion of her 2nd.


Also, and unrelated:

Scary Snow Globes

[via Monkeyfilter]

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