My friend LT’s daughter, M, is about 2 years older than Eliza.

Two years ago, she was at our house and trying to do something (I can’t remember what, but it’s not really important) and I asked if she needed help.

She looked at me seriously and said, “You must not know that I’m four and a half now.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but that, right there, is what 4.5 is all about.

Dialogue:

T-Rex: Back off, bitch, that brontosaurus is mine! Mine!

Parasaurophelus: Woah, dude. You’re a little tightly wound today, huh?

Stegosaurus: Hey! Why the yelling?

Brontosaurus: My brain is the size of a walnut!

This is my sleeping bag. It makes me feel pretty. Like a princess.

This is some frostbite I got when I went running in 20-degree weather with -^%$degrees windchill. Gloves and long sleeves will do nothing for you when you have a habit of pushing your sleeves up to your elbows because you cannot stand the feeling of sleeves on your forearms.

Jim made me a stinger for Christmas Eve cocktails. Stinger = some amount of tequila + some amount of creme de menthe (he is the man, and as such is in charge of bartending while I cook). Please note trainwrecky hair, and in answer to your question in the comments, Marie, I think I lasted 2 days with the curling irpon before I said, nuts to this, I’ll just suck it up until it grows out. My Vanity<My Laziness

Child with one of the umpteen pieces of zebra schwag she scored for Christmas. My favorite Christmas memory (besides the insane grin Jim got on his face when he unwrapped the Wii I got him) is that late at night after she went to sleep, I went in her room and swapped her old comforter and pillow-case for the new zebra-striped one my mom got her. I woke up at 6:45 on Christmas morning to “mumblemumble ZEBRA STRIPES! mumble mumble NEW PILLOW! STRIPES! mumblemumble ZEBRAS!” coming from the next room over.

Her great-aunt couldn’t find a zebra so she got her this white tiger that purrs when you push a button in his ear. Eliza’s reaction? “Hey! A zebra-striped tiger!”

Over the holiday, Dina wrote a post outlining her faith in god, in light of the discovery of her neighbor’s atheism. And Bon wondered if the concept of the sacred still has currency today.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these two entries in connection to each other because I think the subjects are intertwined. (and can I pause for a moment and offer a dismissive “Hah!” in the direction of those who denigrate “mommy-blogging” and the connections we make online as irrelevant, because I LOVE that these two thoughtful, interesting, lovely women whom I have never met in real life are gifting us with such compelling food for thought?)

I considered myself an atheist for many years. My father’s death was for me the negative-exposure version of what Dina cites as one of her reasons for belief.

She writes: “I looked over at her little girl — so perfect and healthy — and remembered the infertility struggles my neighbor had suffered.  I don’t know about you but I believe that the intrinsic mystery of the creation of life screams, ‘Yes, neighbor-friend, there is a God.’”

Meanwhile, my line of thinking, for many years, was along the lines of: “If there is a god, why’d he kill my dad, who was a good guy? Obviously, god doesn’t exist or he would’ve saved my dad. And if he does, and he allowed it to happen, then I absolutely don’t want anything to do with him.”

Years removed from my anger and grief I still don’t believe in the wish-granter-in-the-sky conception of god — you know, that bearded dude on the throne in the sky who wears the pink robes, listens to prayers and picks who he’s going to kill off or let live. (I know there’s more to it, but I’m being deliberately reductive to make my point, so don’t get mad at me just yet.)

So that could make me atheist — except that who am I to say? I’m not omniscient, after all. Which makes me agnostic, except that agnosticism, when I hear and see it discussed, seems to operate pretty much as a shoulder shrug in relation to WGITS god, which still feels reactionary to me.

Add to this mixture one of the things I do believe because I have found it to be true in matters of fact and faith, which is that nothing is permanent. This is a piece of Buddhist belief, and it warns against clinging to the idea that because something is this way now, it always was and always will be. Relatedly, there’s the idea that our karma (which you can translate to “life experience” if the idea of reincarnation makes you uncomfortable) influences how we perceive things, and that we may not have the power to change the bare facts of the current situation but we do have the power and freedom to change our reaction to it.

I have been a Catholic, a Buddhist, and an atheist. I have seriously investigated Mormonism and Bahai’ism.

After all of those, I have discovered (besides the fact that I am clearly not a joiner where god is concerned), that I am something like an ignostic, in that I feel that god is something so beyond our powers of conception, let alone description, that it’s impossible for me to even know what you are asking if you ask me, “Do you believe?” I think I differ from ignosticism in that I start not from a “no one knows” but from a “something IS out there” position. Maybe the wish-granter is part of it, and so is the ineffable spiritual whatever that lives in trees, and the thing that rolled the dice and set the game in motion and the thing that makes us reincarnate and the thing that … oh I don’t know. Maybe all, maybe none. Maybe even acknowledging that god is contained in every concept of god that anyone ever had falls short.

I, personally, don’t think god lives in heaven, I don’t think he’s a bearded dude, and I don’t think he grants wishes. But I don’t think that any of you need a psychology degree to read my life experience, political leanings and personal hang-ups all over both the spin I put on that particular conception of god, or my reaction to it. I also hope it goes without too much elaboration that my personal hang-ups, etc., should in no way be taken as a judgement on you for your stance vis-a-vis a traditional god-concept, if it happens to be different than mine. If it brings you peace, offers moral guidance and makes you happy — not in a “whatever makes you happy, maaaaan” way, but truly happy — then I would be churlish at best to try and convince you to believe otherwise. All the more because to do so would be in opposition of one of my tenets of belief, which is that one’s understanding of god is personal and cannot be shoe-horned into a particular shape. I certainly can’t expect that everyone would take to easily to the idea I do hold to, that there is a divine presence or energy that, though non-corporeal, is around us and in us, that some people and creatures seem to have a special talent to access it, and that there are places and times and rituals that can bring us closer to tapping into it.

And that brings us to Bon’s question, because that last bit, I think, is where I see my definition of sacred.

I do think there are things that are sacred — places, rituals, things — because they bring us closer to god-whatever-it-is. I don’t know how we determined that god likes incense, but I recognize that the lighting of same in ceremonies in many religions is for believers a ritual that brings them to that place where they can drop all the worldly thoughts that fizzle in their minds and find calm for a short while. Even though I no longer consider myself Christian beyond any but the cultural sense, I do love to go into old churches where centuries of people’s prayers asking for help in being and doing good have worn thing the barrier between us and god.

Just as your god-concept may be different from mine, what’s sacred to me may not be sacred to you. So I hear you on the ironic obsession with sacred-cow-barbecuing. I’m all about well-placed irreverence, but sometimes, in our day and age, we ignore the signals that it’s time to turn off the grill. But I think that the less pessimistic answer to Bon’s question may be that counter to the fear that there is no such thing as sacred anymore, what is sacred is shifting around us as people’s concepts of god and worship shift.

1. Jim and Eliza and I are going to visit her cousints for Christmas. That is not a typo, at least it isn’t if you live in our house.

2. I hope they are prepared to learn about dinosaurs, because that is pretty much all we talk about around here these days. Eliza’s awesome former babysitter sent her a kit of paint-your-own dinosaurs, and as I told said personage in an email, she paints a little every day, and then she finds unsuspecting adults and barrages them with facts about velociraptors and triceratopses. The whole thing is made of win, especially the now-black and -red velociraptor, who is, like, so totally goth.

3. I am going to make Jim open his gift on Christmas Eve. I am SO BAD at buying gifts that I suspect it reveals some sort of fatal character trait on my part. I cannot figure out what other people would like. (Then again, I often cannot figure out what I would like either). But I think maybe this time I have gotten a good one and I am psyched to see if I have nailed it as I think I have. Certainly, it will be completely unexpected because I am previously on record as being strenuously opposed to us owning anything in the general category of said gift. (Not the item, per se, just us owning it.)

4. One of my friends is not responding to my emails/facebook comments. I can’t tell if she is just not getting them, is busy, or has broken up with me as a friend. This is feeding directly into a little mind-game I like to call, “Am I profound, batshit, or sending to the wrong email?” It started last week. We senior instructors had been discussing a couple of items r.e. the karate dojo via email and I group-replied a couple of times and had no one picked up on my responses. I figure I either wrote something so profoundly wise that there is nothing more to say on the subject, or I am so wrong-headed that everyone is struck dumb by my idiocy. Or, you know, I forgot to hit send.

5. Battlestar Galactica Season One finale: OMGOMGOMG! Yes, we are just now getting started on this show. We’ve been busy with all those other shows the hepcats like.

6. My new I-have-to-accommodate-the-fact-that-my-husband-works-regular-hours-now-so-my-schedule-is-crazy schedule is so confusing that I have to look at my time sheet every day to figure out when I am supposed to be here and when I can leave. Being here by myself at 10 p.m.? Crrrrrrreeeeeeeeepy.

7. Husband dressing to impress the people at his new job = totally cute win!

8. I’m thinking about doing a marathon. See, Sarah and I started talking about doing the Ragnar Relay thinger in May, and training for that is kinda nuts, and then I figured, if I am going to go to the trouble of gearing up to run 18 miles of relay over 24 hours, without sleep, I might as well try to run 26 miles in 5 hours, with sleep. Right?

9. See, if I got 45-seconds-per-mile faster after the half, by the same logic, after these two races I should be running 7-minute miles. Hey! I just realized that I am lazy. Getting faster would usually involve speed training. I cannot abide speed training — all that panting and puffing and moving fast. But if I can just run slowish for a really long time and get the same result, I won’t have to DO any speed training. I think this is a special category of lazy. Possibly the category where you replace the “L” with a “CR”.

10. In spite of the fact that my fellow instructors may or may not think I am loopy (oooh, wait, this post has a THEME!) let the record reflect that I still love karate. Deeply. Abidingly.

11. I also love celery root- and apple-mash. Recipe: Cut up celery root. Cut up 4 apples. Put in casserole dish. Add half stick of butter. Nuke for 15 minutes. Blend. Add some salt. Eat.

12. We offered to bring a side dish to the cousints, but I promised Jim I would not bring anything weird like the aforementioned.

13. We got a new area rug for Eliza’s bedroom and put the old one in the basement. The cats sleep in the basement at night and we figured it would make things cozier down there for them, but they seem to be using the rug as a vomit target instead. I mean, why yack on the tile if these is carpet pile to get those little chunks of catfood stuck in, right?

14. During the latest parental-abuse bout hair-washing session, I, as per usual because of the squirming and flailing, got shampoo in Eliza’s eyes. ” Now look what you did!” she screamed at me angrily, stamping her feet.

15. Today is pajama day at Eliza’s school. Guess what we have been talking about at home when we haven’t been talking about dinosaurs.

16. Yesterday, in the schedule-o-rama-lama-ding-dong, I forgot to leave the sitter a carseat to bring Eliza to school. This will be the OTHER thing that we will be discussing for the next 4 weeks, to my eternal pride and joy. (The school is 3/4 mile from our house so the sitter stuck her in the back with just the lapbelt. The apocalypse did not happen.)

17. Sometimes, I think about getting a different job. But then I realize that in a different job, I would most likely not be able to wear my current uniform of pants and long-sleeve-T-under-short-sleeve-T, and my ambitions go out the window. It is, too, dressy! My T-shirt today has sequins on it!

18. Mah hair. The current cut is a new low. At first glance, it resembles the inverted-bob look of months past. But then you look more closely and realize that the hair-cutter-person actually managed to create an interesting flat-sided thatched-roof effect that is only remedied through the application of a curling iron. A curling iron, people. I haven’t used one of those since before I was pregnant with the not-at-all-Small-anymore Person.

19. Kings of Leon.

20. If you are cooking, and you pour some salt into the pot and then you notice you put in too much and you scoop it out? Don’t just dump the piping hot crystals in your bare, cupped hand, where they will fuse with your skin as you hop around trying not to drop f-bombs in front of your child who is totally blocking your path to the sink.

21. Anyone else’s Christmas tree have about 75 percent of the ornaments on the bottom 25 percent of the tree? What’s amazing is that the cats haven’t had a total field day with this. Perhaps they fear the wrath of our tiny decorator. Wise animals, those two.

22. What should we get the cousint who gave us the fridge-snowman who sings a song every time we open the fridge?

23. I really hope someone gets the kid a board game for Christmas. I suspect the sitters are both going to quit if they have to play too many more games of Chutes and Ladders.

24. Why is Suzanne Collins taking so long to write the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy? Dammit, the last one came out 4 whole months ago and I have to wait ANOTHER 8 months for the next one! JESUS, people, how much can a person take?

25. Cheetos as an underrated food group: Discuss.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the oft-repeated piece of snark that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach. I do believe I take exception.

Teaching, my lovely friends, is hard. If you fall apart, so does everyone whose eyes are trained upon you at that very moment. If you do it wrong, so does everyone else. If you can’t explain how to do it right, they never will. You have to know how to do it right, AND you have to know it so inside-and-outside, forwards-and-backwards, in-your-sleep-and-wide-awake, intuitively-intellectually-spiritually-physically, that no matter what corner they come at you from, you can help them understand.

Teaching is the final piece of learning. Do you really know it well enough to teach it?

And then. Do you have the authority, creativity, and empathy to communicate it effectively to your students? Can you make them understand why it is so important that they learn this while keeping hold, at the same time, of what their confused, eager, maybe-even-scared perspective might be?

I make mistakes, and my students display their tremendous generosity when they let me do that without throwing their hands up in the air and giving up. They see my mistakes as tests of their own willingness to face challenges. They put their trust in me that on balance, what I have to say will help them grasp what it is they want so much to master.

I am not a great teacher, yet. But sometimes, I am a good one. Sometimes, I say exactly the right thing at the right time and the right person hears it, and suddenly it works and I catch that person’s eye and we share the barest grin because jesus christ, that was intense, and it worked.

I am lucky. Teaching karate is unusual in that everyone who’s there wants to be. I have an advantage over those who are faced with classrooms where a quarter of the students care and the balance are indifferent-to-hostile. I have a better-than-average shot that my students will let me become a good teacher.

At the end of class, we bow to each other and say Arigato — thank you, in Japanese. Students bow to teacher and say it, and I bow to them and say it back.

I don’t know if they realize how deeply I mean it.