I wish this would account for my crankiness

Revelation at 4:15 AM: I have a tooth abscess. That's why I've been in pain since Sunday. Hoping the dentist calls soon. With my luck, he's not right here in town. He's probably in Butler instead. As long as I get this thing settled, I don't care if I have to drive across the Mojave and the Gulf. (Why I would have to do that is a mystery.)

Finished The Secret Life of Bees yesterday afternoon. Pretty good stuff. I love her metaphor, especially the teasers at the beginning of every chapter that come from various publications on bees and their lives and their care. In spite of the dangers I'm treading upon (according to the fundamentalists), you can't help but see how we're all intertwined--nature and humans. Good grief, look at what the fall did to them! The lion and the lamb did get along until we blew it. I'm not a tree-hugger, but if we think that nature is just ours for the destroying, we have it all wrong. We use it with respect. We don't worship it, but we treat it as a creation of God. And we look at it to learn about it and about ourselves. Makes a big difference.

I guess that's the reason that I didn't like the book. I liked it for its metaphor and for the story itself, but I had a lot of trouble with the idea that the folks in the book worshiped bees and their version of Mary. I found it disturbing that the center of worship for these people--black people--was the legend of a wooden woman who loosed them from slavery. Maybe I'm looking way too far into it, but it was almost like she preyed upon the stereotype, in some ways--like the only things African-Americans worship is the fact that they were freed from slavery and the only thing they detest is the fact that they were slaves. The women in the book were well off--or at least comfortable. They certainly didn't get where they were by dwelling on their ancestors' pasts.

Maybe I just need to take more drugs and lie down again.