Painting water lilies is not work.

As a seminarian--as a student in general, really--I'm often asked to write long papers about issues that don't really stir me. For example, this evening and for the next few days I am writing about The Interior Castle, by St. Teresa of Avila and her role as a reformer of monasticism. Enthralling, no?

But get me started on a pet topic in art or theology or psychology or any of a dozen other subjects, and I feel like I could write for days and not say everything I think or feel about it. So when I was reading for a class a few weeks back and stumbled across this quote, my heart screamed Yes! like it does when I come up with or come across some small truth that resonates with me.

"No narration of a nascent image, whether in story, poem, or conceptual form, exhausts the content of that image."- James Fowler, Stages of Faith

Gah! I mean, who hasn't experienced that at some point? Some image, some thought wells up in you and suddenly you're boring your friends by talking about it for hours on end (or blogging about it). You are so excited to share it with the world, trying to bring it to reality or just trying to make someone else understand.


Sometimes you get lucky, and that's what you do for a living. I mean, Monet painted around 250 renditions of his water lilies. And you know what? I bet he could've painted 1,000 more.

Maybe this is just for arts people, but I don't think so. I think it just looks different to different people. Maybe for some people their "image" is an equation or a chemical formula. Maybe for some people it's of a united church or a peaceful Middle East or a thriving Africa. The point is, when you get to spend your whole life trying to flesh out that image, work isn't work anymore.

So what are your images?

Possibly my worst date ever.

There are several things to catch up on before I tell you this story. First, I've been keeping up with (and even stepping up) my New Year's Resolutions. Hooray! Jeff and I have been working out three times a week for over a month now and I'm definitely starting to see results. I also decided that I also felt emotionally unhealthy because of my addiction to Facebook/StumbleUpon and other such websites where I'd lose myself for hours, so today marks week one of my two month internet diet. I'm only allowed to use certain websites that I actually need (and my blog so I'm not completely unconnected from my friends and family back home for 2 months).

As you might remember, one of my other resolutions was to try to enact a date night every other weekend. Yesterday was actually only our second date since we came back to DC, but we're working on it.

Yesterday also crashed and burned.

You see, a few weeks ago on his way to class Jeff saw a flier for a guitar/cello concert on February 15. He loves guitar and I love cello, so this sounded like the perfect Valentine's Day date, especially since I had class on the 14th anyway; so, we went online and found a little Italian place close to the church where the concert was held, and I was pretty pumped about it all.

First, we got to the restaurant and the "restaurant building" it was a part of turned out to be pretty much just a mall. Not the classiest. No big deal, though. Then we ordered, and the food was probably mediocre at best. I'm pretty sure I could've made better Italian food. Then there was a minor debacle over which dessert to get. I wanted to split a chocolate hazelnut tart; Jeff wanted... pudding.

As you can see, Jeff won. It was ok, though, because not only was it better than I expected, but this silly little Italian pudding also ended up being the best part of the whole evening.

After we polished off the pudding we headed over to the church for the concert. The guitarist started and only played for about 15 minutes. It was a very pretty Spanish guitar improvisation on a classical piece I didn't recognize, but that kind of guitar is really more Jeff's thing than mine and in any case I was just waiting for the cellist to start. You have to understand, I love cellos. I think they make what is possibly the most beautiful sound on the planet. So when this world famous, highly acclaimed, played-and-taught-at-conservatories-all-over-Europe cellist came out, I had high hopes.

What I was not expecting was an hour of the most painful cello playing I have ever heard. Seriously. This woman sounded like a little kid who's tired of practicing and just starts hitting his instrument with his bow. I was impressed... by how she was able to make such awful sounds come out of such a beautiful instrument. And she gets paid for this. People like this. Heck, the other people in the audience seemed to like it! I'd kind of like to tell you who she is but I'm afraid of getting a C&D letter in the mail, so if you really want to know so you can look her up and prove me right, send me an email.

So that was our first Valentine's Day as a married couple! Mediocre Italian food and horrific violence against my favorite instrument in the world. But in all honesty, we got each other cute gifts and we had fun together. And now I have an awesome/awful story to tell!

Oh, and one quick, barely related note that occurred to me as I was thinking about the atrocity of that concert. For a concert, a bunch of unrelated individuals come together and bond over their love of a particular artist as he or she performs. For a church, on the other hand, a bunch of people bonded by their love of God come together and listen to a message that speaks to each person's individual life. That's it... not terribly profound, it just occurred to me that a concert is the opposite of a church service and I couldn't sleep till I wrote it down last night, so I figured I should at least share it.

Oh, and at least we looked pretty:

Man. I am so short. Oh well.