Twofer:Rising from the Ashes and Lust (Sin of the Week)

There ARE signs of SPRING! There are!

Well, I'm not sure I'm 100% back but I think I'm ready to give it a shot again. It doesn't hurt that there are several big splotches of green outside my window and that the back roof snow is dripping like it might finally come down. It also doesn't hurt that I had pretty awesomely exciting news yesterday. Last summer (courtesy of the great tree tragedy) I applied for and received a grant from a place called Delaware Opportunities as part of something called their "Access" program. I had wanted help making it easier/possible to come and go through my front door. At the moment it's about a 3 and a half foot drop to a narrow log. I can do it (or I could a couple of years ago which is the last time I tried), but it's not easy and it's even difficult for delivery people and friends. Anyway, the kind gentleman who does site inspections and supervises the process came yesterday and it turns out I'm not just getting a new accessible entry - I'm getting a walk-in shower, a taller ADA (Americans With Disabilities) approved toilet and a sink to go with it. They're also going to move my washing machine from where it is now into my kitchen which means I'll be able to use it. How cool is that! So it's kind of like Christmas on steroids here. With paper work, bids and approvals, it will all happen anywhere between May and September. Yippee! Of course now I can sit around being anxious about who's coming and how I'll manage the cats and will it all be ok, but.... it's pretty exciting.

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On another front, Kay, over at Perhaps We Learn has decided to try her hand at a meme and is offering a Friday sin a week for the Lenten Season. She is starting us out with Lust of all things, which is a tough one for me.... but I'll give it a try.

Lust is not my best sin. When I hear the world lust, I think about sex which immediately throws me into a state of complete panic. I may have mentioned that my mother was a little crazy in some ways. She was raised by crazy people and she passed the crazy along. Not on purpose. She couldn't help it. When her father found her talking and laughing with a friend of one of her brothers, he called her a whore and refused to speak with her for several months until he needed his shop cleaned at which point he deigned to converse with her again. She didn't mean to pass this kind of twistedness on; she simply couldn't help it. The fact that I had a body made me a threat. I was pathologically naive and innocent. Really. I thought kissing was sex. I didn't know that men had penis's or that I had a vagina. In my twenties I thought kissing was sex and when I finally achieved my first kiss was terrified of getting pregnant and mortified at my immorality. I was one screwed up kid. Over the years I've come to know that I'm not stupid, so the fact that I could grow up even in the 50s and be that out of the reality loop says there was something really messed up going on with me. But anyway... back to lust. When your mere existence makes your mother think you are promiscuous, when you live in a world with no touch, when anything that might make you even modestly attractive to the other sex is viewed as whorish, it gets really confusing to know what's what. In my world thinking some guy was cute was the virtual equivalent of having ripped my clothes off and hopped into bed. I was so afraid of being lustful or promiscuous that I don't think I actually got as far as lust very often. Not that it never happened and not that I never acted on it, but I was so messed up (and probably still am) that I never got to enjoy it. And that is truly sad.

All of this tempts me onto my soap box about how Americans as a society are really screwed up about sex. We give kids such a mixed message. In soap operas, sit coms and movies, people hop in and out of bed with reckless abandon, little or no shame and lots of guilt and ill consequences. This at the same time a large segment of our society is proposing abstinence mixed with ignorance, a sure-fire prescription for STDs and unwanted pregnancies. We ask our kids to do as we say, not as we do. In a society supposedly as prudish as ours, one of the most popular TV shows is Desperate Housewives in which (I have not watched the show, though from bits and pieces I've seen/heard, I can tell that the writing is really good) one of the women has sex with a young teen age boy. There's little outrage about that, though in real life, we'd send her to prison. Anyway.... We are a society that glamorizes lust and sex out of one side of our mouths while conveying to our children out of the other side that it's a "bad" thing for them to be interested in. Hmmm... I wonder why kids like Bristol Palin get pregnant.

So this is a lot of verbiage that doesn't say much. Lust isn't a big issue for me these days. I never leave the house and I don't know any straight men. I will say that if I were going to lust after someone, the actor Mark Harmon who plays Jethro Gibbs on NCIS or George Clooney are the kind of men I would lust after. Or does the fact that I can say that mean that I DO maybe have a little lust left in me? On a less sexual front, I lust after a new TV, new flooring for my kitchen and a new sofa.... but maybe that's a sin for another week.

That's it for the moment. I wrote my 10-word and mini wordzzles a couple of days ago and they are incredibly boring. Hoping my new found spirit of life applies to my imagination too and will grant me some inspiration for the mega. I'll try to post them by 6:30 at the latest.

I've missed everyone. Will try to pop around and catch up on what you've been up to, though I may pace myself and do it over the next couple of days.