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thebratqueenThanks once again to all those who sent bday wishes. 'twas most appreciated. =)
Service leader duty went well today, in spite of all efforts to the contrary. Originally when I agreed to do this it was under the impression that I'd just have to say a few words of welcome and then do whatever reading was required of me when the person actually doing the service nudged me. Then I found out earlier this week that because we were having an outside speaker it would fall to me to actually, if you can imagine this, lead the service in my job as service leader.
Which really wouldn't be so bad all things considered except that having missed more services than I've attended in the past year I am completely out of practice on what we do and when so this was effectively asking me for the same level of instinctive understanding of a UU service that I have for, say, a Jewish one which is to say my knowledge of both can be summed up with "There's standing and sitting and possibly singing, depending upon what it says in the little handout they give you when you show up at the door, assuming Temples do handouts." So I told C, the head of the religious services committee, that I was fine and up for the challenge provided that she stayed within eyeshot of me somewhere in the audience in order to flash me signals to let me know if I'd forgotten to tell people to sit, or when to start singing, or,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
not_god forbid, inadvertently started attempting to sell Amway products.
Then I found out last night that not only am I doing the welcome words and the whole standing/sitting/singing conducting but also, apparently, the actual service since the speaker who was supposed to come in was stuck out in Ohio or some such similar place with a broken car and a very small chance of being able to walk from there to here in time. On the plus side he'd managed to email his speech to us, so all we had to do was get someone to read it, but on the minus side the speech wasn't too long as he was also going to do a question and answer session that he, I think rightly, assumed would take up most of the service. Which now meant we had a service that was, on paper, about 10 minutes long and needed to take up something closer to an hour.
Alrighty then!
I roped C into co-leading the service with me, so she got all the parts where she had to tell people to sit and stand and sing, and I got all the parts that I'd thoughtfully pre-written in preparation for the original service leader duty I'd signed up for, plus I had to read the guy's speech, improv a little something at the end of it, and then open the floor up for anybody who wanted to talk about their thoughts and impressions of the topic (on growing up fundamentalist, trying to be ex-gay, and then accepting yourself, which while a fascinating topic is not one that many members of our congregation have personally gone through, esp the part about founding http://www.heartstrong.org since I'm fairly certain only one guy has done that).
We also added in Milestones, which for those of you who are not in the know, is a portion of the service where people get up to share joys ("I became a grandmother yesterday"), concerns ("I'm lighting this candle for John, who has a biopsy this week") and, just to round it out, occasionally long and rambling stories about nothing in particular which eventually lead to a candle-lighting for some sort of thing but damned if you know what it was. Normally we don't do Milestones if we're already opening the floor up for conversation, as was intended with the question and answer session, but with the need to pad out time we felt this was absolutely necessary.
So of course this is the one week in all of UU history ever where nobody, except one person celebrating her daughter's birthday, had a Milestone, so the whole thing took up maybe three minutes, two of which were C going "Does anybody have anything else they'd like to share?"
Which lead to me doing the speech from our guy, and it was a good speech for all that I hadn't seen it until 20 minutes before the service, it was written in a single-spaced 11 point font, and the printer that had been used was in such a strange condition that parts of the speech looked like this andother parts looked like this which vaguely made me wonder if I was looking at edits of things that had been meant to be cut out but it didn't make sense without that stuff so I forged ahead anyway and did my best in spite of the fact that I had to practically glue my eyeballs to the podium in order to not lose my place.
I then blathered a bit at the end about my own experiences with knowing I was gay when I was younger, and tossed in a bit about the concept of people "turning gay" or "turning straight" in light of marriageprotectionweek.com's assertion that allowing gays to marry will cause everyone to mysteriously turn queer, and then threw it open to the crowd. A few people came up to talk, which was nice, and all in all we were able to get a service which was a smidge closer to 45-50 min long, which was better than the 10 we started out with.
C then ended the service and it was off to coffee hour, during which it was made readily apparent that: 1) I'd done good 2) People were very grateful that I'd stepped up to the plate with both the speech reading and the improv at the end 3) Whatever guilt I'd been carrying about the committees I'd dropped out of last year due to personal problems was more than taken care of by the good karma I'd earned with this and 4) I don't like chamomile tea.
I also had a great conversation with one of the men in our congregation, who pulled me aside to talk about the concept of being distanced from your loved ones because of what you believe or feel. He said that while he personally was not gay he knew what it was like because he'd had a schism with his own parents back when their political beliefs diverged. To which I said, "Really?" and he said, "Yep! I told them I was going to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and if they couldn't cope with it then that was too bad!" I don't know why but that made me want to hug him.
After coffee hour I decided it was time to head to the Body Shop to treat myself to a few day after my birthday gifts.
Post Body Shop I called my folks while walking back to my car, just because the whole "being distanced from your family because of who you are" thing got me in a schmoopy mood about my folks, so I called them to say hi and I loved them and invited them to meal with me. Mom bowed out but Dad agreed, so we went to my fav. Italian place for all brunch-related things and enjoyed a nice long conversation about religion and such. Did you know Catholics are apparently changing when they sit or stand during services? Which, as my folks and I agreed, will certainly go far to end all that pesky corruption inside of the Church. (And boy do I need a macro to link up to an icon of a smiley face rolling its eyes)
lucifrix will also be happy to know that at the end of the meal, and in spite of my protests that I had not invited Dad along in order to, as Dad and I call it, "Pull an Elder Brother" (which refers to the fact that Elder Brother, even though he currently has enough money to talk about buying his wife, as for example, a horse, has this habit of inviting Dad to join him for a cup of coffee and then, once the order is in, mentioning that he forgot to bring his wallet so could Dad get the check?) Dad paid for the whole meal calling it an extended birthday treat, which made me especially happy that I'd ordered some chocolate cake for dessert.
Once back home I then took a happy Sunday nap, which was still wonderful even though now that we're approaching winter Sunday naps have that frustrating habit of starting out in bright sunlight and ending up in darkness, thus potentially throwing off my entire body clock for the rest of the day. But no, it was a Sunday nap of perfection, suitable for botling.
Awake from my nap I then took advantage of the multiple Body Shop products that I had purchased in order to take a nice long bath with a book, which I enjoyed with the company of Luna, who poked her head over the side of the tub every fifteen minutes to see what on earth I was doing and then, once she correctly realized that my invitations for her to perch on the edge of the tub itself was as much about petting her as it was trying to see if I could coax her into some inadvertent yet undoubtedly humorous accident involving bath water and the Body Shop's Oceanic bubble bath, at which point she promptly stopped poking her head over the side and instead curled up on my towel, making sure to shed all over it just in time for my cleansing shower.
And now I'm awake, relaxed, cleansed and somewhat hungry again. How's your day going?
Service leader duty went well today, in spite of all efforts to the contrary. Originally when I agreed to do this it was under the impression that I'd just have to say a few words of welcome and then do whatever reading was required of me when the person actually doing the service nudged me. Then I found out earlier this week that because we were having an outside speaker it would fall to me to actually, if you can imagine this, lead the service in my job as service leader.
Which really wouldn't be so bad all things considered except that having missed more services than I've attended in the past year I am completely out of practice on what we do and when so this was effectively asking me for the same level of instinctive understanding of a UU service that I have for, say, a Jewish one which is to say my knowledge of both can be summed up with "There's standing and sitting and possibly singing, depending upon what it says in the little handout they give you when you show up at the door, assuming Temples do handouts." So I told C, the head of the religious services committee, that I was fine and up for the challenge provided that she stayed within eyeshot of me somewhere in the audience in order to flash me signals to let me know if I'd forgotten to tell people to sit, or when to start singing, or,
not_god forbid, inadvertently started attempting to sell Amway products.Then I found out last night that not only am I doing the welcome words and the whole standing/sitting/singing conducting but also, apparently, the actual service since the speaker who was supposed to come in was stuck out in Ohio or some such similar place with a broken car and a very small chance of being able to walk from there to here in time. On the plus side he'd managed to email his speech to us, so all we had to do was get someone to read it, but on the minus side the speech wasn't too long as he was also going to do a question and answer session that he, I think rightly, assumed would take up most of the service. Which now meant we had a service that was, on paper, about 10 minutes long and needed to take up something closer to an hour.
Alrighty then!
I roped C into co-leading the service with me, so she got all the parts where she had to tell people to sit and stand and sing, and I got all the parts that I'd thoughtfully pre-written in preparation for the original service leader duty I'd signed up for, plus I had to read the guy's speech, improv a little something at the end of it, and then open the floor up for anybody who wanted to talk about their thoughts and impressions of the topic (on growing up fundamentalist, trying to be ex-gay, and then accepting yourself, which while a fascinating topic is not one that many members of our congregation have personally gone through, esp the part about founding http://www.heartstrong.org since I'm fairly certain only one guy has done that).
We also added in Milestones, which for those of you who are not in the know, is a portion of the service where people get up to share joys ("I became a grandmother yesterday"), concerns ("I'm lighting this candle for John, who has a biopsy this week") and, just to round it out, occasionally long and rambling stories about nothing in particular which eventually lead to a candle-lighting for some sort of thing but damned if you know what it was. Normally we don't do Milestones if we're already opening the floor up for conversation, as was intended with the question and answer session, but with the need to pad out time we felt this was absolutely necessary.
So of course this is the one week in all of UU history ever where nobody, except one person celebrating her daughter's birthday, had a Milestone, so the whole thing took up maybe three minutes, two of which were C going "Does anybody have anything else they'd like to share?"
Which lead to me doing the speech from our guy, and it was a good speech for all that I hadn't seen it until 20 minutes before the service, it was written in a single-spaced 11 point font, and the printer that had been used was in such a strange condition that parts of the speech looked like this and
I then blathered a bit at the end about my own experiences with knowing I was gay when I was younger, and tossed in a bit about the concept of people "turning gay" or "turning straight" in light of marriageprotectionweek.com's assertion that allowing gays to marry will cause everyone to mysteriously turn queer, and then threw it open to the crowd. A few people came up to talk, which was nice, and all in all we were able to get a service which was a smidge closer to 45-50 min long, which was better than the 10 we started out with.
C then ended the service and it was off to coffee hour, during which it was made readily apparent that: 1) I'd done good 2) People were very grateful that I'd stepped up to the plate with both the speech reading and the improv at the end 3) Whatever guilt I'd been carrying about the committees I'd dropped out of last year due to personal problems was more than taken care of by the good karma I'd earned with this and 4) I don't like chamomile tea.
I also had a great conversation with one of the men in our congregation, who pulled me aside to talk about the concept of being distanced from your loved ones because of what you believe or feel. He said that while he personally was not gay he knew what it was like because he'd had a schism with his own parents back when their political beliefs diverged. To which I said, "Really?" and he said, "Yep! I told them I was going to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and if they couldn't cope with it then that was too bad!" I don't know why but that made me want to hug him.
After coffee hour I decided it was time to head to the Body Shop to treat myself to a few day after my birthday gifts.
Post Body Shop I called my folks while walking back to my car, just because the whole "being distanced from your family because of who you are" thing got me in a schmoopy mood about my folks, so I called them to say hi and I loved them and invited them to meal with me. Mom bowed out but Dad agreed, so we went to my fav. Italian place for all brunch-related things and enjoyed a nice long conversation about religion and such. Did you know Catholics are apparently changing when they sit or stand during services? Which, as my folks and I agreed, will certainly go far to end all that pesky corruption inside of the Church. (And boy do I need a macro to link up to an icon of a smiley face rolling its eyes)
lucifrix will also be happy to know that at the end of the meal, and in spite of my protests that I had not invited Dad along in order to, as Dad and I call it, "Pull an Elder Brother" (which refers to the fact that Elder Brother, even though he currently has enough money to talk about buying his wife, as for example, a horse, has this habit of inviting Dad to join him for a cup of coffee and then, once the order is in, mentioning that he forgot to bring his wallet so could Dad get the check?) Dad paid for the whole meal calling it an extended birthday treat, which made me especially happy that I'd ordered some chocolate cake for dessert.Once back home I then took a happy Sunday nap, which was still wonderful even though now that we're approaching winter Sunday naps have that frustrating habit of starting out in bright sunlight and ending up in darkness, thus potentially throwing off my entire body clock for the rest of the day. But no, it was a Sunday nap of perfection, suitable for botling.
Awake from my nap I then took advantage of the multiple Body Shop products that I had purchased in order to take a nice long bath with a book, which I enjoyed with the company of Luna, who poked her head over the side of the tub every fifteen minutes to see what on earth I was doing and then, once she correctly realized that my invitations for her to perch on the edge of the tub itself was as much about petting her as it was trying to see if I could coax her into some inadvertent yet undoubtedly humorous accident involving bath water and the Body Shop's Oceanic bubble bath, at which point she promptly stopped poking her head over the side and instead curled up on my towel, making sure to shed all over it just in time for my cleansing shower.
And now I'm awake, relaxed, cleansed and somewhat hungry again. How's your day going?
