I'll keep holy on the Sabbath next weekend

Too much activity on the moving front kept Sister Nancy Beth from slaying the blogosphere & spreading the gospel of glamour. Thank God I'm back here at the Beauty Palace and can recoup. I've got less than a week until the moving truck comes and takes the heavy furniture from my old pad to either Jesus' apartment or our storage place. In the meantime, the Praisemobile made countless trips between the new place, my old place, the storage facility, and Goodwill, plus I've been making an ever growing list of chores (get spackle, fill nail holes with spackle, remove overly decorative window treatments installed during my days of selfish hedonism, box up non-perishable foodstuffs, etc) with seemingly nothing being scratched off of this. I've done nothing but live & breath moving for the past two months, with the hopes that that would make this process easier and less stressful. As far as I can tell, it hasn't.

The pressure finally got to Jesus on Saturday. We agreed that we would pare down our houseplants, and a few of mine ended up in the green waste mulching bin Thursday night. Jesus had been dragging his sandals on this one, first looking into this informal houseplant adoption program he had heard about that happens on the sidewalk outside a not-so-local nursery, then asking co-workers if they'd be interested in taking them in, and then an eleventh-hour effort of having me check on the internet to see if there was some sort of plant rescue here in LA: no dice. So Saturday, we're back at his place after having bought some plastic bags to bundle them up at the roots; we finally decided we were going to drop them off at this nursery. I can't recall what I was doing in the living room, but Jesus walks out of his kitchen with his face all red and tears in his eyes, saying "I don't want to kill them."

Is he joking? He's walked out of his kitchen with watery eyes before, but he had been cutting onions, and he said something comical like, "He beats me." Nope, he's not joking. Think, Nancy Beth - you're obviously in a situation here, and your reaction to this one will go a long way in determining how you handle each other's difficult emotions. The thing to do was to hold him and console him, obviously, and of course the plants could stay (Sister Nancy Beth's sap-thirsty impulses had been sated by offing her own ficus & asparagus fern two days earlier). As I held him, I knew someday these roles will be reversed: when my aged cat finally has to be put to sleep, when my sister's cancer finally takes her away, or when one of my parents goes (mine have got a decade on Jesus'). Rough going, but definitely an emotional milestone of sorts for our relationship. Anyway, I bet most people never knew Jesus was such a sensitive guy.

We talked about this later, and it was only superficially about the plants. It was really about the speedball of nostalgia that my moving in had delivered to him intravenuously, with those plants being a bridge that spanned Jesus' 15 years in LA, seeing him through deaths of friends and changes and the comings and goings people have in their lives, and now my moving in was going to be another one, a major one. I see that in their own quiet way, they're going to be a witness to our time together, so I can make room for them. But I really need to dust their leaves.

Sunday was just as busy. I had to rush off to church, and was disappointed to see Jesus lying on the couch at 9:50 in his robe. "What do I have to go to church for?" he asked.

"Because I said so," I replied, but it was all for naught. Given how rough the previous day had been, I wasn't even going to push him, so he spent the day enjoying his ceremonial frankincense and Sex in the City dvds.

I got to Our Lady of the Denunciation 15 minutes late, but since I have to stay after mass for my missionary work, I figured it all evens out. I'm spearheading an effort to collect skin care products for the women of Iraq, which we're then going to airdrop - hopefully this will be put to better use than the results of Operation Enduring Eyeshadow, which ended up on their thumbs. The parish ladies are going a bang-up job with their donations, but you can be rest assured that every time the Sunday LA Times includes a sample of Eucerin, there are 15 packets of the shit in my collection box. I'm going to ask Father Joe to see if he can't somehow get the ladies thinking about toners & astringents, like maybe by giving a sermon about a mustard seed falling into somebody's enlarged pores. The rest, as they say, is up to God.