Monday, October 27, 2008

from the congregation

Whenever I attend church, I can always find her sitting in the third pew. Once spotted, my mind tends to sway toward very un-Christian like thoughts. She’s gorgeous and, sitting so near the pulpit, it becomes very hard to focus on what sermon is being preached on any particular Sunday. Good Samaritans. The parting of the Red Sea. Love thy neighbor. It’s impossible to pay attention…though she is clearly a neighbor that I could easily love.

The problem, however, is that her husband always occupies the spot next to her. Which, from what I gather during the fragmented sermons that have seeped into my consciousness, is in some type of violation of one of the commandments. So I am relegated to observational admiration only.

Week after week, they’re there in the third row, dressed in their Sunday finest, this woman and her husband. And I began to view her much like I would a television show, once a week in one hour installments, filling in the blanks as to how I imagined her ‘outside of church’ life to be. What type of shampoo did she use? What was her favorite flavor of ice cream? Did she wear toe socks on cold weekend mornings?

These were questions I pondered during each Sunday service…though I knew that I should have been doing more church-like things, such as listening to the sermon.

Then one week, she arrived alone to church. ‘Perhaps her husband is on a business trip,’ I thought to myself. The following week he was absent again, and the week after that as well. I began looking for clues. And while some people, I’m sure, attended church for things like praying and for seeking eternal salvation, my mission was to figure out what was going on with my crush-from-afar woman.

Having only one hour a week to observe, my detective options were limited and, thus, consisted of trying to sit close enough to her in order to see if a ring was still on her finger. This, I felt, was a plan that even Sherlock Holmes would be proud of.

Eventually, I was able to find a seat that provided an optimal view of her hand. By this time, her husband had been missing for several months. And after some creative neck craning, I confirmed that all fingers were ringless. Clearly, the marriage was over and she was unencumbered by things such as husbands and joint checking accounts. I now had a chance at becoming the future second husband of someone whose name I didn’t even know.

The problem, as I saw it, was how to actually meet her. Sure, I had seen her in church…but how was I going to somehow turn this into anything more substantial?

Should I try to coordinate my exit with hers, exclaiming, ‘Wow! I see that we both believe in the same God. What a coincidence! Would you like to get dinner one evening?’

Or perhaps I could plan on reaching for the holy water at the exact same moment as she did so that our hands touched with, hopefully, ensuing sparks.

But as I went through various other options as to how I could create some type of holy-hookup, I realized that nothing I had conjured was likely to bring about the desired results. I was going to need some type of divine intervention. Divine intervention that I knew would probably go to someone else…someone who actually paid attention during services.

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Monday, October 06, 2008

body by dq

Until I became an addict, I never realized just how available and easy it was to get a fix. Not an addiction in the cocaine or marijuana sense but, rather, to soft-serve ice cream.

A few months ago, while driving along, I passed by a Dairy Queen. It had been years since I last ate at a Dairy Queen, so I stopped with the intention of getting a small ice cream cone and soft drink. I had never been a large fan of soft serve ice cream, but felt that, with the economy in such bad shape, this was the least I could do to help stimulate it.

The colorful and tasty looking pictures on the menu board above the registers made me realize that a single, small cone simply wouldn’t suffice. So I ended up ordering a Blizzard…the Pecan Cluster one to be exact. And whether due to the pecans or the butterscotch syrup, I became a soft-serve ice cream convert. Ice cream that had previously been overlooked in favor of other, tastier, dessert choices now became an absolute necessity.

And it wasn’t until I became hooked on these Blizzards that I realized just how many Dairy Queens we have around the city. Previously, I would drive right by them, never even realizing that they were taking up retail space at the mall, and in the shopping plaza situated in between the Eckerd Drug and the Chinese dry cleaning place, and a mere half mile away from the public library.

Now I saw them everywhere I went. And every day as I passed one, I would suddenly find myself turning into the parking lot…justifying that a Blizzard was in order as a ‘reward’ for something that I had accomplished that day. For that sale I had made at the office. For letting that blue Chevy merge onto the highway in front of me. For only hitting the snooze button twice instead of my customary three times.

But as the rewards I tried concocting became more and more inane, I simply began telling myself that I ‘deserved' one and that ‘life was too short’. Because what could be more worthless than a life filled without M&M Blizzards? Or Butterfinger Blizzards? Or even the Oreo Blizzards, which aren't my first choice in achieving Blizzard bliss, but are still entirely acceptable as a last resort.

Near the end of summer, at perhaps the darkest hour of my ice cream addiction, my friend Jim returned from vacationing in Florida.

“You know,” he told me, “Florida is like a completely different world. The people down there are all so thin and good looking…at least compared to up here. Maybe it’s because the winters are so cold here in the North, and people spend half the year bundled up in bulky clothes...so they don’t worry too much about trying to stay thin. But down in Florida? You wouldn’t believe all the tanned, beautiful girls! And in bikinis year round! I definitely need to consider moving.”

That evening, as I stared into the mirror, I glanced upon the new waistline that Dairy Queen had given me and realized just how far away Florida really was.

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