I’ve updated my portfolio at sarahmcmenomy.com to show off some of my recent work and give you an idea of the kind of stuff I do for short-term, contract, or commission work. If you have something longer-term in mind, feel free to download my resumé and give it a look. I currently have no full-time or part-time work, which is a win for you — it means that whatever your project is, I am available to devote 100% of my time and energy to it.

You can view my Design work here and my Illustration work here.

As a general rule, my rates for everything from web design to custom illustration hover around $30/hr, but email me at sarahmcmenomy at gmail dot com with a project description if you’d like an estimate.

“Why post this?” is a repeated question. People seem to think that MPT is just using Driscoll to drum up publicity or hits for himself, or to stir the pot. But I’d have to say that as Christians, we should keep an eye on each other. Driscoll, like Fred Phelps, is just one face of modern Christianity, and represents us to those who may not realize that there’s a spectrum, and that we’re not all the same. A wayward sheep is a problem, but a wayward shepherd is a disaster.

As an Episcopalian, I take exception to Driscoll’s comments about our presiding bishop. As a woman, I take exception to what he teaches about the place of women in the church, and in society. And as a Seattlite, I’m worried about the impact of Mars Hill Church on my immediate social, political, and spiritual environment.

Driscoll seems to me to be engaging in WWF-style repackaging of religion for increased manliness, obfuscation (and lack of intellectual exploration) of the Christian message, stadium-filling zealotry, and flat-out sexism. In Seattle, where most churches are withering and dying, Driscoll’s is growing like crazy, and it worries me that he seems to be selling an Easy Christianity.

Christianity isn’t easy. It tells you to love people you want to hate, and forgive people who have harmed you deeply. Signing up for Jesus’ team does not mean you’ll always be right. It’s a lifestyle, not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It requires devotion, persistence, and education. The Bible is not intended to be prescriptive; it cannot tell you the answer to every question you have, only give you a history and some guidelines for how to achieve those answers.

But easy Fundamentalism is what Driscoll is selling to a subset of youth who have been raised in unchurched environments, and who don’t know that Christianity is much, much more than what Driscoll preaches.

Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?

Driscoll is feeding his flock junk food. Personally, I believe they deserve better.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Bento:

Bento (弁当, bentō) is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables, usually in a box-shaped container. Containers range from disposable mass produced to hand crafted lacquerware. Although bento are readily available in many places throughout Japan, including convenience stores, bento shops (弁当屋, bentō-ya), train stations, and department stores, it is still common for Japanese homemakers to spend time and energy for their spouse, child, or themselves producing a carefully prepared lunch box.

I get fresh vegetables and various other foods delivered to my home by Spud, but I rarely wind up using everything, because I don’t eat breakfast and I’m never home for lunch. My mornings are far too rushed (get up earlier? Are you effin’ keeding me?) to make lunches, and that means I wind up spending unnecessary dollars on a downtown Seattle lunch when I could be bringing something delicious from home instead. (And eating out on a regular basis completely ruins the whole notion of portion control.) But I’m an adult, and my hope is that the fun element of bento will help motivate me to assemble lunches the night before and just stick them in the fridge so I can just grab them in the morning. Healthier, cheaper, cuter, and yummier. That’s my goal.

I’m also not really an adult, and squee slightly at the lovely pictures of Kyaraben that float all over the internets, but I am not sure I can bring myself to make cute-ass bento only just for myself. That is why it is good to have a sister who lives with you!

I wanted a box that would be simple, cute (but not too cute), with 2 or more compartments, and at least one that could seal up and hold slightly-wet foods. And I sort of hoped it would fit in my messenger bag. So I went over to Bento&Co and got the blue and green Iro Iro Argyle Set.

These are lovely solid-color boxes with a 600ml total capacity. For $60, I got two boxes…

Lovely Argyle carrying bags…

And chopsticks with their own carrying case!

I also got us each a set of My Cutlery, which come in their own small box…

And can be assembled to make a spoon, a fork…

Or chopsticks!

I don’t plan on making anything that will need a knife, nor is that really (as far as I can tell) the Bento Way.

I also got some cutie-pants bento things.

The flat round things are for thick sauces (hummus, dips); the little bottles are for thin sauces (soy sauce, vinegar dressing). These, of course, are totally practical. Slightly less defensible are the cute as crap panda bear picks.

Last week, I went on down to Uwajimaya, Seattle’s reigning Asian food palace (calling it a “market” seems diminutive), to get some authentic bento foods of various sorts. While I’m not against the idea of sticking in westernized substances such as cheese and crudités and so on, I nonetheless love any opportunity to play around with food, and Japanese food is a sort I’m less acquainted with than many another. (I say “less” because I’m pretty good with sushi, but there’s a lot of Japanese food that’s not sushi. And to anyone out there who tries to argue the “You wanted something cheaper, but you have to go out and buy extra food” line on me: dude, have you ever been to an Asian food market? It’s like the cheapest food there is…)

Here’s the haul:
In the back row, from left to right: furikake (a seasoning made of seaweed, sesame seeds, and yum), pickled ginger, seasoned rice vinegar, black sesame seeds, and kim chee.
On the left: umeboshi (pickled plums), green tea, fruit snacks. (I didn’t get the fruit snacks at the Asian food market, but eventually they’re going to wind up in the bentos…)
Center: sushi nori (for playing with, basically), bonito flakes (fish seasoning that flavors all sorts of Japanese food).
Right: pickled radish. (This looks weird as hell, I know, but it makes a great palate-cleanser. I spent a week once at a Zen Buddhist monastery, and we ate pickled daikon with every meal. Om nom nom!)

A few notes on these. This is one of the most delicious things you can ever put in your mouth:

and since apparently onigiri with umeboshi inside is a traditional type of onigiri, well, that’ll be happening.

Fear not: this will never be going in the bento boxes. It is strictly for at-home consumption, because I do not hate my coworkers, and I’m pretty sure that kim chee is considered only slightly more acceptable in civilized places than durians are.

More things that will be going in the boxes:

Snacky crackers! And…

Sweets! I think most folks around here are familiar with Pocky (chocolate or strawberry-flavoring-dipped little stick-cookies); the other items here are, from the top: ginger candy, plum candy, toasted sesame-filled mochi, and bean paste-filled wheat cakes.

So, I’m excited; I’ve been busy enough with the upkeep of other parts of my life lately (friends, career, blahdeeblah) that I haven’t had as much time and energy as I once did to have foodventures. But this is a good start, and I’m already a little bit in love with it all. For tonight, though…

Some images are property of the BBC; no copyright infringement intended.

As far as I can remember, we did none of it. I was never taught that Santa existed, and never really felt like I was missing out on much. When I asked my father why my folks had never convinced us that Santa was real, he simply said, “I think if you start lying to your kids, they’re going to start not believing you. Duh.” That’s a great answer, but it’s completely unrelated to why I’m glad we never did the Santa thing.

In the modern interpretation, Santa Claus gives gifts only to good children, and these are given as prizes for being good all year. He sneaks into your home while you are asleep, but you never see him. You can send him letters, but he won’t write back. This is because he doesn’t know you. But my family, with whom I’ve exchanged presents every year, does know me. And it seems to me that gifts given out of love are better than prizes won by the deserving. After all, we won’t always be deserving, but we can (and will, whether we know it or not) always be loved. And gifts given to you by people that you know love you and have put thought, effort, time, and sacrifice into getting you exactly what you want? That’s the best. And I think it’s the same as the difference between mercy and justice: mercy is given because it is required by love, and as an act of grace; justice is given because it is deserved. When praying to God, we rarely say, “Please, Lord, when I come before you, be just!” We should know better than to wish for that.

So I’m not sure that Santa is in the spirit of Christmas, mostly because I’m not sure he’s in the spirit of Christian living. These days, I tend to think of Christianity more and more in humanist terms. I don’t mean that we should reject the divine nature of Jesus, or that the theology of the religion is useless; I simply mean that the part of Christ’s story which holds a personal message for me is not the miracles — which were proof of his Godhood, and the effects of his compassion — but the relationships he built, and the way that he taught and treated the people around him.

As an Episcopalian, I’ve grown up with a distinct fondness for liturgy, for church tradition and history, art and architecture, and for our works of theology. These things are important to my personal practice, but I think that they’re also the accoutrement of the faith. Although they can be useful to refine one’s understanding of how to live a Christly life, they can also cause a drift of mental clutter that gets causes me to be distracted from the idea that Christ, far from being a distant Man in the Sky, was a personal God.

In his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” (contained in some editions of “The Weight of Glory”), C. S. Lewis writes:

It is not an accidental resemblance that what, from the point of view of being, is stated in the form “God became Man,” should involve, from the point of view of human knowledge, the statement “Myth became Fact.” The essential meaning of all things came down from the “heaven” of myth to the “earth” of history. In so doing, it partly emptied itself of its glory, as Christ emptied Himself of His glory to be Man. That is the real explanation of the fact that Theology, far from defeating its rivals by a superior poetry, is, in a superficial but quite real sense, less poetical than they.

Lewis is using the idea of the poetry in story to state an idea that diverges pretty drastically from many other religions. Christ’s incarnation is the descent of the divine, rather than a man who ascended to Godhood. The earlier gods of Greek and Roman pantheism were super-human, and this was a reason to praise them — for their glory, and their divinity. Praise was given out of hope and fear. But in Christ, we find a God descended, and one who deserves praise given in the form of love, because of his love. Christ’s death and resurrection are important, and the ascension is vital to the Christian faith — but I think it is the incarnation of God as man that is at the center of Christian living, and it is this aspect of Christ’s story that comes to fore during the seasons of Advent and Christmas. There’s an implied idea that if he can do it, we can do it too: we can be Godly men and women, and we have a clear example — as Jesus tells his disciples, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

Blame “Art and Fear” for putting the thought into my head.

This is just one in an ongoing series of carnival-themed drawings. It is original and unique: this is not a print, but a hand-drawn image.

The image itself is approximately 8 1/2″ x 11″, plus a 1″ border which makes the image suitable for matting and framing.

Media: archival ink on high-quality printmaking paper.

All sold artwork is carefully packed in flat cardboard mailers to ensure that they will reach you unharmed. Please allow 1-2 weeks for delivery.

Click here to view and order this drawing on Etsy.

I haven’t been in in months. Something about my sister moving in with me, a different (much less stressful) job, and life generally having a more reliable routine have obviated the need for the Buckaroo, for me. But when it was there, and when I needed it, I was so glad it was there. And it was necessary to have someplace like that, for a single girl to go and get a cheap, cheap beer at one in the morning, and play a free game of pool with the bartender. For me to walk right in, and stay for three hours, chatting to the bartenders, after a stranger had followed me all the way down the street (and, actually, into the bar) from my bus stop. Everyone I met at the Buck was suddenly my best friend — though none were relationships that existed outside of the walls of the tavern.

It’s closing tomorrow. I stepped in tonight to say good-bye, but really, it’s already gone. It’s bloated with people I don’t recognize in the slightest, taking up every inch of available space. Random people man-handled me getting past the two inches I was occupying, and I felt very much like a stranger in my own home. I had an Odyssean urge to throw the suitors out and reclaim my territory, preferably via bloodshed. A tiny cluster of regulars whom I did recognize hovered outside, smoking, and casting angry, sad, annoyed, and amused looks at the throngs inside. Realizing that, having ordered my last Buckaroo drink, I was free of some sort of (completely imaginary) obligation, I chugged it and left. And like an adult, I resisted the desire to pour it on the ground as a blessing and a plea to the great gods of the dive bar to LET MINE LIVE.

It’s too late anyway.

Download the high-quality printable PDF here! Sign your name, and count the shadows…