"I heard the rocks crying out..."

This afternoon (c. 12:30?), I was feeling unfocused, so I decided to go for a walk -- since on weekdays I usually get at least a half hour of walking in each morning and thus far today I hadn't even put shoes on.

I was wearing my Juno t-shirt, blue jeans, and black sneakers and felt sort of weird.  Jessie talks about "responsible adult" drag, whereas I feel the reverse; I've gotten fairly comfortable in my business casual, and that feels more "true" than t-shirt and jeans.

I walked down my street, not really sure where I wanted to go, head swirling.  I passed Tufts Tot Lot and there was almost no one there and I haven't been on swings since -- okay, in Wales with Gillian, which was only about nine months ago, but still.  It felt kinda grounding.

There was this wee blonde girl (Katja) there with her dad, and we ended up sort of hanging out.

I realized later that I didn't think about any of my interpersonal drama or work anxiety or anything.  Even when I wasn't really doing anything, just watching her climb on the playset.  I sometimes thought about whether I should be heading home to work on stuff, or wondered if I looked weird being a young adult at this Tot Lot, but I didn't fret about the e-mails I might have when I go in to work tomorrow or about drama I can't do anything about.  I'm able to think about my drama while listening to Neil Gaiman, so this is kind of impressive.

As expected, I got a mite sunburned.  Only kissed-by-the-sun, though -- as opposed to bitchslapped-by-the-sun, which is how I once described a sunburnt look.

I also finally decided to put earrings in again (this was after I'd gotten home) -- which I haven't done in ages.  Was pleased to find that as usual my ears haven't closed up enough to preclude me from pushing earrings through.

Accomplishment: I took notes on the <200-page Loving Jesus for CHPC book study on Wednesday.  (I finished reading it a month ago, but no one else had read it, so we postponed a month, which gave me a chance to actually go back and take notes -- something I'd gotten slack on fairly early on in the book -- and I didn't get to that until today.)

Sidenote: I appreciate the GoodReads tweaking which makes it easier to add a book to a reading-status shelf other than defaulting to your Read shelf.

***

Listening to mjules' Rich Mullins mp3s makes me wanna listen to more Christian rock.  Ironic, no?  (The irony being that mjules is a "crazy tree-hugging hippie pagan" -- though hey, Mark M. was saying yesterday he may switch from his UCC church to a UMC church because of CWM, which just cracks me up ... he's the only out gay person at his ONA church, so he's thinking of switching to a nearby Reconciling UMC/UCC church he's heard good things about.)

I'm sad that MLN's copy of I can only imagine [sound recording] : [ultimate power anthems of the Christian faith] appears to be non-requestable.  (I'm not sure how Bob Carlisle's "Butterfly kisses" is a "power anthem," though Amy Grant's "Thy word" and "El Shaddai" are great.)

mjules said:

Oh, Rich Mullins. <3
Ummm, see if you can find Canticles of the Plains anywhere. Rich wrote the songs for it, though he doesn't sing any of them. They were for a musical he wrote about the life of St. Francis of Assisi, but modernized to a cowboy named Frank.
Lovely, though.
And his best album is probably A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band if I had to pick one.

I was having no luck tracking down a copy of Canticles, and she said:

I think it's been out of print for a while. I bought it from him directly at a concert.
I was trying to shorten my name to Meg at the time, thinking it was cute, and he asked me if it was short for Megan or Margaret. I told him Megan, and he said, "Do you mind if I call you Megan? I like full names."
Which rather reminds me of you, Elizabeth-who-will-not-be-nicknamed. *Grin*