The Most Pelagian Day of the Year II

This is my second post of the day, so for an explanation of the poll, scroll down to the post below.

Poppets, it has come to my attention that some of you are making resolutions to find boyfriends or even husbands in the New Year. >:-(

I was going to write a huge old rant on that, but then I remembered that I wrote a perfectly fine one 365 days ago, so here it is again. Read and learn.

Meanwhile, happy Hogmanay and all the best in 2012!

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Courtship and Cowardice Online

It has come to my attention that there are Catholic men out there courting Catholic women very attentively by email and instant message and then suddenly disappearing into the ether when the going gets tough (e.g. plans to meet in person have fallen through). I do not know the scope of this problem, so I will set up a poll.

I cannot throw stones because when I was a young woman I used to talk about marriage with my poor downtrodden boyfriends, which led them to think I would marry them, and then I would break up with them because I was bored. This was terrible behaviour, for which I am now very sorry.

Meanwhile, I don't remember anyone telling me this was terrible behaviour--ooh, except one guy one frozen night one New Year's Eve, green eyes aflame with righteous indignation. I seem to remember we were inside the doors of a bank, by the cash machines, and he was actually yelling. Meanwhile, he had never even been my boyfriend, although he wanted to be. Oh dear, what drama.

Bad, bad Seraphic.

Anyway, enough about me. I am reading too many stories about this happening now, to girls, to very nice girls, to very nice Catholic girls, who are contacted by likely lads on Catholic dating sites and chat rooms. The boys write to the girls about their hopes and dreams, while thinking out loud that these might be the nice Catholic girls they'd like to share their lives with. But instead of ever meeting the nice Catholic girls, the Catholic boys eventually simply disappear without a trace, as if they had never said or thought any of this stuff.

First question: has this happened to you?

Second question: have you pulled a similar online disappearing act?

Please answer the poll and confess all below. For once I will allow Anonymous comments.

Pirate and the Old Joke

Scene: Thursday, car park in North Berwick, Scotland. The McAmbrose and Single families are in a rental car. Auntie Seraphic and Pirate are in the back seat, and Uncle Ben and Pirate's Mum are in the front.

Pirate: Guess what?

Uncle: What?

Pirate: Chicken butt.

Auntie (genuinely): Ha ha ha ha ha!

Pirate: Ha ha ha ha ha! Guess who?

Uncle: Who?

Pirate: Chicken butt. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Auntie: Okay, cut that out. I only laughed because I hadn't heard it in twenty years.

Scene: Friday, highway in Perthshire, Scotland. Pirate's Mum is again in the driver's seat, and Uncle Ben is beside her. Auntie S and Pirate are once again in the back.

Pirate: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Auntie: Chicken butt. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Pirate: Ha ha ha ha ha!

Pirate's Mother (to Uncle B.A.) I'm really sorry. Now Seraphic has been influenced by Pirate and you have to live with the results.

Auntie: Chicken butt! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Crossing the Border in Orange County

Tonight after Pirate was in bed, his mother, auntie and uncle watched "Orange County." And Auntie had a somewhat unpleasant shock during a scene in which Colin Hanks, playing an unlucky high school senior named Shaun, consults his hero, a writer/Stanford professor named Marcus Skinner, played by Kevin Kline.

At first I was amused at the way Marcus Skinner is portrayed: shrouded in J.D. Salinger type mystery. First he is just a pair of hands opening Shaun's fan letter. Then he is a well-dressed man with a briefcase seen from behind in the dark night of the Stanford campus. Then he turns around and looks like Kevin Kline. He doesn't speak much, but he remembers the novella Shaun sent him. Shaun throws his arms around him. (The audience giggles.)

The next thing we know, Shaun is in Skinner's office or sitting room or wherever, and Skinner is giving Shaun a very helpful review of his novella. His advice is so good that Shaun leaves absolutely euphoric. His smooth teenage face is a complete contrast to Skinner's grizzled charms, and he positively glows with youth and optimism and dreams and

And I was right back there in the sitting room with Marcus Skinner, thinking about how very young the young look, and I thought, Oh dear. I no longer identify with the young in young people movies. I identify solely with the grizzled adults they consult. I AM the grizzled adult they consult--or would be if they could see the grey in my hair, which they can't really, thank goodness, on account of the volume.

Sigh.

Have Cold But Also Presents!

Hello, my little poppets. I have a terrible cold and only emerged from the House to see our old pal Aelianus. Aelianus, whom you may remember from my unofficial first novel, The Tragical Tale of Aelianus of England, was wondering if there is any magic realism in my official first novel (Ignatius, soon to be announced on a Catholic website near you), and I had to think for an hour, sipping Lemsip, before I remembered one eensy bit.// Anyway, being so sick, I cannot think of anything very brainy to say about either the Single or the Married Life today. Instead I will gloat over all my Christmas presents, which include a bottle of Chanel No. 5 from Mum and Dad and a book on British baking from Our Nearest Neighbour Angela. I am very excited to have a British baking book to go with British flour, which is so much different from Canadian.// Feel free to gloat over your presents, too, in the combox. We all know Christmas is not about presents, but now that it is the 27th, I think it is safe to revel in them. I personally love Christmas presents, and always recorded them in my diaries so as to remember who gave me what when.// What is with Blogger? I take special pride in my paragraphs, and their glitches are driving me nuts.

Woman with a Troubled Past

Plans are afoot for Auntie to return victoriously to Poland as the keynote speaker for a women's retreat. This retreat is very much still in the planning stages, and eventually I will have to remind the enthusiastic organizer that I do not, in fact, speak Polish and I get the parish Polish altar servers to read me his letters./ In one of the letters, the organizer sketched out his suggestions for the programme, and my parish Polish altar server du jour stumbled over one of the phrases. Apparently I was being described as a "brave woman with a troubled past", which the loyal altar server did not think a sterling summation of my auntish character./ "Yarg," shouted Auntie. "It's the divorce, isn't it? Yarg! Continental Europeans! Yarg!"/ The altar server listened patiently as I ranted about European Catholic attitude towards annulments and divorced women and why people look at me as if I have a troubled past. And then I remembered the last bit might be because I actually wrote about it in my book. Meanwhile, if you write about being divorced, people are going to think of you as divorced. And if you are somehow magically married again, people are going to want to see your annulment papers and hopefully some contrition./ My principal source of contrition, which I thought about as I woke up today, is that I thought Dorothy L. Sayer's Gaudy Night was any kind of guide to life. Plot spoiler alert. In Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey novels, Lord Peter eventually falls in love with a dark-haired, husky-voiced, detective novelist named Harriet. We will not say that she was based on Dorothy L. Sayers herself because I will go mental if anyone thinks my own heroines are based on myself (unless they are actually named Seraphic, of course)./ Now, BIG PLOT SPOILER, after a few novels in which Harriet consents to go out to dinner now and again with the dashing and clever Lord Peter, about whom she has a major inferiority complex, Harriet "gives way" at the end of Gaudy Night and, to quote Lord Peter's mother, they end up "kissing madly in a punt."/ This is all very romantic, and I think Gaudy Night was an absolutely splendid book, but Dorothy L. Sayers sacrificed common sense to a handy literary device by making her heroine fall in love with a man she had consistently rejected for three years or so. Harriet is depicted as having won a major victory over herself, and it was of Harriet I thought when I was 24 and much stupider than I am now./ It may have been the last time I mistook fictional decisions for real life lessons. I certainly hope so. And meanwhile I have discovered that I am not the only woman who has done this, for apparently there are women who honestly take as Gospel lessons learned from Sex and the City and other television shows. Never mind that a freelance writer does not make Carrie's salary. I remember Samantha wondering if sleeping with half of New York is what got her breast cancer, and she being very relieved to discover that the nun in her waiting room also has breast cancer. Yes, nuns get breast cancer. But they don't usually get cervical cancer which, unlike breast cancer, is linked to a very common STD. And as my friend Lily pointed out, there is no way a woman who uses men the way Samantha does could possibly have long-term loyal friendships with three women./ Being in general pro-great world literature, I am sure that there are some lessons you can learn from the classics. However, I would steer clear of making major life decisions based on the decisions made by fictional characters. I don't care that PLOT SPOILER Anne and Gilbert got married in the end and had seven children. Lucy Maud Montgomery and her very best bosom friend both married men mostly just not to be spinsters, it seems, and they were miserable./ The Anne books were and are escapist fiction, no matter how many Japanese and Korean tourists insist Anne is real. Plato wouldn't allow any poets into his perfect state, and that is because they told such shocking lies. I am sure he would feel the same way about novelists. However, to be fair to novelists, our first loyalty is not always to the truth of ordinary life but to our beloved characters. We make up our own universes, and the laws that govern this universe do not always govern ours./ If Blogger does not fix the bug in its new model I will be leaving it sooner rather than later for my very own new webpage, so stay tuned.

It's About Baby Jesus

Great column from Single mum Crescat over here.

Being between washing a ton of dishes and mixing up the dough for gingerbread men for the tree which we finally bought this morning (£20 as last minute, woo-hoo!), I have almost nothing more to say.

What I have to say is a suggestion to thank God for who you have and what you have this Christmas, and concentrate on the people who really love and like you, and not on the people you wish loved and liked you. Celebrate with the people who really are in your life, like your nephews and nieces (if you have some), and don't brood over phantasms of your imagination, like your future children.  That is the only and best way to keep sane over the holidays.

And, finally, it's not your birthday (unless it is): it's the day we mark the birthday of our Lord, so good Christian readers rejoice and get ye to the best and most beautiful service you can find to celebrate--unless you are a strict Presbyterian, in which case I wish you a happy and tranquil Sunday!

I'll be praying for you all at Midnight Mass.Merry Christmas (and happy Sunday) to all! Wesołych i błogosławionych świąt Bożego Narodzenia!