Tow Truck

I was going to tell you about the phenomenal mess my life is but then I thought better of it.

I want to tell you about my best friend.

So, you know that time in second or third or fourth grade when everyone had friends but every girl needed a best friend? Maybe you don’t because maybe your childhood wasn’t filled with Buzzfeed-flavored nostalgia, complete with trapper keepers and Lisa Frank stickers and Nickelodeon, but for some of us, we understood that having a best friend was a necessity. It was a line on an elementary school resume, a way of proving to future friends that you had it together because you had a best friend. Allow me into your social circle because I have the ultimate reference. That’s how best friends worked when we were kids- you had sleepovers, you giggled, you watched movies together and passed notes and were, officially, best friends.

My best friend from back home moved into town in the third grade from Minnesota. I’m not a mega-social person and I wasn’t a socially-savvy kid, so bringing up memories that specifically involve people is like dredging the lake for sunken buoys, but it’s OK because as soon as I’m home, she remembers something and tells the story like there should have been movie cameras following us around. We sound epic or at the very least more interesting than I’m sure we actually were. There was always orange juice for me in the fridge at her house and I feel like I knew the inside of her pantry just as well as she did. There was a fort to explore (there's a new road there now) and when we grew up, music to play and hours of things to talk about. And whenever I’m back visiting her, it’s like no time has passed. I can sit and listen and laugh more than I have in years, I feel like, and it’s the most perfect thing.

I live a life of cliches and tired old acts, so of course the two of us went to different colleges in different states and developed our own lives, with our own new best friends. Of course we would- we’re independent women who spend plenty of time dreaming, and honestly, even high school took a toll on us, between separated by band and theater and going to different churches with different youth groups. When you’ve done the Millennial Shuffle*, you know that everything in life is malleable, including friendships. It’s not all Dawson’s Creek or Boy Meets World. Mr. Feeny isn’t going to move to college with you and your friends aren’t going to drop out and/or transfer to be near you. That’s a pipe dream.

So when I come back home from my job in a different part of the state and we talk about bands we like or shows we watch or things we’ve done and find that we’re still so much in sync, it makes me miss what we could have been. I have other friends, great friends, friends that I could start whole new blogs about, but sometimes I think that I could have lived in a house in Charleston, roadtripped with the windows down listening to Zeppelin and Cake, waited tables at the country club, and laid out every night for a semester watching the stars down in Chile. I mean, I’m happy with who I am and I can’t discredit the wonderful and lovely things that I’ve done, but I know that there’s a corner of my soul that could have been happy doing something else.

And then there’s nights like tonight where we went to a bar and had a couple of beers, listening to my best friend and her mom tell stories, while a second best friend listened and laughed and swapped anecdotes about teaching languages. We played songs on the jukebox and smiled at the people who walked in and mentioned things that her fiance would notice in a loud voice so he’d come over from behind the bar and spend a few minutes with us. Then, on my way out of her apartment complex, in true classy fashion, I misjudged the turn on the hill and ended up needing a tow truck. But my best friend, she’s been trained to never let them see you sweat, and so we assessed the damage, found a guy to come out and help us, and spent the intermediate half hour watching a British sitcom and laughing at the narratives behind the decorations in her temporary home. When the tow would only take cash and I had none, she never even batted an eye. My car got unstuck, I now have a list of new pop culture to bring into my life, and despite having a substantial problem, I feel so much better than I did before. All in all, it wasn’t a bad night.

So I’m going to hold on to that as I go on about my days. There’s a glorious freedom in knowing that life could have gone completely different and it wouldn’t have turned out that bad at all.




*The Millennial Shuffle is a complex dance staged for the children of families privileged enough to be thinking of higher education for their children, a dance full of angst and an over-abundance of encouragement and unfulfilled promises. The steps are as follows:
Step 1: Get good grades. 
Step 2: Do a sport. 
Step 3: Pick four extra curriculars. 
Step 5: Become a leader in at least one of the organizations you’re involved in. 
Step 5.5: Exhaust any and all energy overachieving at the high school level. 
Step 6: Apply to college. 
Step 7: Graduate by some miracle. 
Step 8: Find a job. Or, more reasonably, don’t. 
Repeat Steps 6-8 until the music runs out.

Dispossess

So what drives me crazy- well, really, what bothers me in life- is that when you stereotype someone, that stereotype becomes their identity to you. And a stereotype, you know, is something very shallow. I mean, think of the stereotypes that you know of, not necessarily ones that you hold, but ones that you know about. Are they in-depth analyses of the historical culture and general life experience of any given type of being? Does it allow for details specific to anyone’s life story? No, of course not. It's a stereotype. Stereotypes are a societal shorthand, and a sloppy one at that. So when you stereotype someone, when you make that often-insulting assumption that you can blame this characteristic or that on a person’s gender, race, religion, or country of origin, you’re limiting your knowledge of this person to a small number of choice adjectives or nouns that the stereotype allows.

I don’t say all that because it’s new information or because I want to point fingers or anything like that. We all stereotype. It must be useful because we use it all the time, and you know, people associate different stereotypes with different types of people for a reason. I say this because I am more often than not frozen into inaction because I’m afraid of being stereotyped. I’m afraid of being judged without any chance to defend myself.

We process a good plenty of information in any given day, more now than ever before. We’re bombarded by story after story, image after image, video after video, and with all that information to process, we need a shorthand, and the shorthand we pick tends to define us to other people. Oh, this story is from Fox News. This one is from CNN. This is from a left-leaning blogger. This is from a young mother. This picture was posted by a teenager. This one’s from someone I know from back home. This movie was made by a producer that I respect. This one was made by some Hollywood exec I don't recognize. This came off of Pintrest. This was posted by somebody I follow on Twitter. I can almost color the things I read and see and absorb based on their sources and my opinions of them. Nothing good can come from Nazareth.

I know that I do this. I see it the things I choose to read, the links I choose to ignore, the information that I accept with a smile, the claims I secretly roll my eyes at, the news story I post to facebook, the one I don't. And if I know that I do it, I have to assume that other people do it. But not just to some faceless person on the other side of the internet. I have to assume that people do that to me, out in the physical world.

How do I escape that? How do I run away from the people who want to rob me of my depth? How do I dispossess them of their impression that I’m another millennial who can’t put down her phone, or just another one of those awkward sci-fi fans, or the Christian girl from a small town, or the hometown girl who went away to one of those liberal schools and changed? Because, you know, I am those things and some of those stereotypes hold true.

But, no. You’re not allowed to limit me to your idea of what I should be. You don’t live in my body or think with my mind. You can’t tell me that I can’t be just as good as, if not better than, my male counterparts because I’m a woman and you can’t dismiss me as a feminist because I don’t sit quietly in a corner when women’s issues come to the forefront. You can’t just label me based on my politics, because you don’t know what I feel or why I feel it or the push I experience every day to make a positive difference in the face of such negativity. You don’t know You don’t know why Buffy resonates with me or why The Empire Strikes back will always be my favorite movie or why I will never say no to watching Moulin Rouge- despite your best guesses, you will fall short of analyzing the complexity that is me. And so will I in analyzing the complexity that is you.

The thing is, though, the infuriating thing, is that you’ll try anyway. I’ll try anyway. And then we’ll miss each other’s points and pigeonhole each other and in general misunderstand our needs and wants and desires and hopes so profoundly that it’ll be a wonder, an absolute wonder, that we’re able to accomplish anything together, unless it’s the fulfillment of a need or a want that we share.

So that’s why I haven’t gone to Moral Monday. That’s why I haven’t written anything substantial (that, and the fact that I’m uncomfortable writing about work). That’s why I stop conversations mid-stride or I leave arguments unfinished and stories unshared. I don’t want to do anything outside the norm because you will judge me and label me and do such a complete job of removing the depth of my personality and existence that I’ll wonder why I ever thought there was anything more to me in the first place.

I have the luxury of that kind of angst and I exalt in it. I let it paralyze me and hold me down with its insinuations, because as long as I have it to blame, I don’t really have to try. I don’t really have to attempt to move forward. It’s even better than not having to justify my actions to others- I don’t have to justify my actions to myself. I can stand at the bottom of the brick wall of Fear of Judgment and shrug my shoulders and say, “This far was I meant to go and no farther.” I can walk away, safe in the conviction that I tried and I was stopped.

That conviction is wrong. It’s time to dispossess myself of impressions of me.

So here’s to tearing down the wall. Here’s to understanding that fixing problems with my body and my mind doesn't make me a health nut or a nut job. Here’s to embracing the tightrope walk of holding onto my opinions and conclusions while lending an honest ear to yours. Here’s to holding a sign because I believe in certain unacceptabilities. Here’s to learning and thinking and above all doing with reasonable abandon. I've always been one to stop at walls, but I think it’s time for a change. 

Youthful Manifesto

When I grow up, I want a two-story house with a porch and porch swing. I want hanging flower pots and a garden. I want to grow tomatoes and peppers and lemon balm and squash and okra and Indian corn and I want to plan hours out of my days and weeks to work in the garden. I want my kids to pick tomatoes off the plants, to learn what to look for when looking at growing things, to know how to use what the seeds and the sun and the rain and the earth give us. I want them to have to move the potted plants inside when it threatens to frost and to understand that to grow something, you have to take care of it. I want them to know how to cultivate good things.

When I grow up, I want to have a piano in my house. I want to play it and I want my kids, if they want to, to have the opportunity to play it too. I want there to be music playing while we live in the house and I want to sing along. I want to hum while I clean the kitchen or do laundry and I want to take my Saturday mornings to listen to the radio and reset the house after the week that’s gone by. I want my kids to have chores, because I think responsibility is taught by taking care of the things you own.  I want to have four Sunday dresses and one dress for parties, three pairs of good jeans and one pair of work jeans, ten sets of work clothes and ten sets of leisure clothes, and five pairs of shoes, because I want to enjoy my abundance but not over-use it.

When I grow up, I want a good car that’ll last me twelve years. I want to buy it nearly new and I want to take care of it. I want a notebook where I'll keep the inspection notices, the repair receipts, and a chart of the oil changes and the miles on the tires. I want to keep paper towels in the car, because spills shouldn’t be left to sit on the metal and plastic and upholstery. I want to clean out my car every sleepy Sunday afternoon, my one act of personal reorganization on the Sabbath. I want to teach my sons how to change the tires and I want to let my husband teach my daughters about the engine and all the parts of the car hidden away under the hood, because I think it’s important that my children know that intelligence about any subject is not limited by gender.

When I grow up, I want to be part of a church. I want to cook casseroles for church lunches and caringly serve on committees. I want to be in a Bible study that teaches me new things and I want to have a close group of people to hold me accountable, who I can pray for and who pray for me and my family. I want to sing and move and clap and smile during worship because I’ve never sung nor said a truer word than “O may Thy house be my abode, And all my work be praise.  There would I find a settled rest, While others go and come; No more a stranger, nor a guest, But like a child at home,” and I want my kids to see that. I want them to be rooted in hymns and scripture and tradition but I want them to find their own idea of God in the corners of sanctuaries and the ceilings of bedrooms and the halls of the places they go to learn. I want them to listen to sermons from the pulpit and from the forests and from friends. I want them to hear about the grandeur of God and I want them to be amazed by the size of the mountains, the unseeable breadth of the ocean, the unfathomable distance to the Moon and to the stars so that they have a context in which to place that grandeur. I want them to know about Jesus and to be moved by the Spirit and to join the church in their own right because I want them to see the Church the way I want them see themselves- loved, saved, protected, redeemed imperfection striving to share that same love with the world around them. I want them to understand the meaning of the word blessed and I want them to know that simply by the nature of the land on which we stand, we embody that word.

When I grow up, I want to serve my community. I want to go to PTA meetings and town council meetings and football games and baseball games and festivals and performances. I want to encourage businesses to endeavor to make better people out of the people who work for them now and the people who may work for them in the future. I want to speak out for teachers and schools and education. I want to hold elected officials accountable. I want to learn about the problems facing my neighborhood, my community, my state, and my nation, and I want to take proactive steps to bring those problems to a halt. I want to use the abundance that has been give to me to help others who have fallen or who were born into less to stand up and pull themselves out of those places, because I have seen the problems that we the people wash over and I know that there is something better out there for all of us if we begin to solve those problems. I want to watch in awe as we begin to think of ourselves as citizens not of a nation but of a planet together, because I think that we can and I think that we must, in order to preserve this wonder of a place that has been given to us.

When I grow up, I want to plan my time. I want to wake up with a purpose, eat three meals in a day, and read myself to sleep. I want half an hour in the mornings to be with myself and my God because I know the ways I need to be fed. I want to see my husband in the mornings and in the evenings and at night and I want us to have a night alone each week or as often as we can afford it, because I never want to sleep beside a stranger. He may not forever be the man I married, but he will always be the man I know and love. I want our family to do things together as much as we can and to talk to each other even more. I want to sit through recitals and plays and games and meets and performances and competitions and presentations because I’ve seen the way mothers beam when they watch their kids and I am jealous of the kind of quiet pride that admirable mothers have. But through all of this, I want to take time for myself, to be centered, to write or to read or to practice or to exercise or to learn, because I know that I should only do as much today as will allow me to do the same tomorrow and because I want to teach my kids self-care along with self-sacrifice.

And while I’m growing up, I want to travel. I want to live somewhere new to me, with new words for familiar objects, new ways of thinking about familiar ideas, and new accents to learn and decipher. I want to see the other coast of this grand nation, and visit the places around us. I want to take someone back with me to Vienna and Venice and Barcelona and Paris and Rome. I want to go to the cathedral in Dunblane again and see if it kept its sway over me and I want to stand in St. Peter’s Basilica again, long enough to decide how I feel about it. I want to visit a peaceful Jerusalem and Cairo and Baghdad and Tehran. I want to be convinced to take a trip to Tokyo or Seoul or Beijing. I want to stand in places where history has been made and places where history is in the making. I want to think on trains and planes and come back with stories to tell and moments to store up in my heart.

Because I know that I’ll come back. I know that my state has a hold on me and that I can’t be long away from the cardinals and the dogwoods and the pine trees. I know that I will continue to bleed that lighter shade of blue and God help my husband if he can’t understand that. I know that every summer night that I miss watching the fireflies rival the stars is a night for which I’ll mourn. I know I’ll regret being away from the mountains in the fall and the spring, when the leaves turn the world into new colors. I know I’ll long for crisp nights and clear skies, for the miracle of occasional snow powdering cold sidewalks and needed rain bouncing on green leaves, and for the summertime wall of heat and abundant sunshine. This is home. It will always be home. No matter how amazing the other places are or seem, this is where I want to build my life. Here are the people and here is the place I want to love. This is the state that I want to see follow our motto. These are the people that I want to see cared for, brought out of our difficulties, educated, understood, and loved. This is the land I want to see preserved and molded and pushed forward and never lost. Here, in this place, are the problems I want to solve and the goodness I want to celebrate.

Part of me wants never to grow up, to forever enjoy the nostalgia of imagining the future. Part of me wants to grow up this minute, to immediately have that love and create that world and curate that reality. But all of me knows that even now, while I’m waiting to start down the road that’ll take me to the person that I’ll be, I can shape who I am. I don’t have to wait to start taking care of myself. I can pick up discipline and know that discipline, like waking up on time or planning the time to read, to learn something new, to walk, or to write, doesn't mean giving up my freedom- it means freeing myself from the burdensome parts of me that stop me from doing everything I want to do. It means working to be healthy while good health is easy to have because I have seen the abundant liberty inherent in good health. It means working to learn and to educate while I still have the time and the mind for it because I have seen the value of understanding the facts of our complex world. It means learning and being sure of myself, of my needs and wants, and being able to articulate those ideas, those needs and wants, because that will help one day when I embark on that frightening endeavor of sharing my heart and mind with someone else. It means having peace in my heart and an unshakable understanding that even though I have all these wants and plans and values, my path will be guided by a different hand with a greater glory in mind and that that greater glory will serve the world better than my tiny dreams and hopes and goals.

Today, I function in a world of groaning maturity. Tomorrow, I’ll live in a world of understanding quasi-adulthood.

To be, rather than to seem.

Could Be Another Change

So I took this one class in college, my first religious studies class (which also counted as my philosophy credit, which meant that I could drop Philosophy of Physics, which was the last honors course I attempted to take and was the beginning of my downward spiral into average academic achievement, thank goodness), called Heaven and Hell. Now, to be fair, there was both heaven and there was both hell, but we really only spent one week on hell and I’m not even sure that we mentioned Paradise Lost, which I thought would have been required for the understanding of hell. But I digress.

In this class, we had to write three papers about the soul/the afterlife in popular culture. I picked 2 C.S. Lewis books and a movie with Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding Jr. in it because that’s the kind of person that I was. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And I was really proud of my papers. They were fine papers. But I think this is the beginning of my condescension of my condescending college self, because I know now that there are so many other possibilities out there that would have leant themselves to those papers, things that were outside of my worldview back then. Things like vampires.

Now, feel free to judge away again, because I’m going to dive into Buffy-land. First off, where was this show when I was a teenager and why did it never come across my path until now? Maybe I just had to wait until I was ready for it. Second off, Joss Whedon has no problem killing characters and bringing them back again (something I should be familiar with as a Stargate: SG-1 fan, since killing Daniel Jackson is a recurring theme in that show) so that just screams for investigation into how life and afterlife work in the Buffy universe. And what do you do with the undead who walk around? Are vampires alive? Where do they go when they’re slayed? When people are sent places and brought back, what were those places? How do those places correlate to western theology and how are they different? Why am I interested in this now when I could have had two or three killer papers, which is what life is really all about?

Also, how did I miss the opportunity to write about zombies? ZOMBIES. Maybe I just wasn’t as into the internet then as I am now. But there are endless possibilities here and I don’t think I had the courage to dream big enough yet at that point in my life. I mean, it’s easy to stand higher up on the hill and say that I had no idea what was going on when I was down there, but there are going to be (hopefully) more years of climbing and looking back down and wondering. I can’t let myself get sucked in too much here either. The internet is a fun place, and watching shows on Netflix is wonderful, but there are loves to be regained. There are books and there is writing and there are minor dreams to be dreamed again.

But it’s good to look back sometimes too, you know? It’s good to look back and know that it wasn’t perfect but it was good enough. Room to grow. Room to grow is good.

Three Pages of a Quick Second and Two Pictures

Let me tell you about my day today for just a quick second.

My alarm went off at 4:45am so I could take a shower before going on a school visit today (I drive a travelling planetarium around the state. Yeah, my job is awesome. Deal with it). I did not get up then. I did the eh-I-can’t-possibly-smell-that-bad-and-I’m-going-to-sweat-anyway roll over to turn off my alarm. Then I woke up in a panic at my next alarm and packed things in my suitcase in record time and nodded in approval at how everything magically fit (I left my shampoo and conditioner in the shower) and rolled my suitcase down to the cul-de-sac and got in the state van and struggled with the GPS (who I like to call Gipus in a loud and often angry/condescending voice) and started my morning drive.

I got to the school and sketchily waited in the darkened office because no one was around but I couldn’t find the light switch and I wasn’t sure where else to look. Then someone came in and found people to help me unload and I set up the planetarium and nodded again in approval because the door was behaving itself (it often doesn’t) and I had been very efficient during setup this morning (this was before I noticed that I forgot to put up the flags). I got the confidence boost that comes with singing along to the musical of the hour and hearing the echo of your voice around a big empty room and being happy with the way it sounds. If you have never had this confidence boost, I recommend burning a CD of songs in your vocal range and singing along in the car where no one can hear you until you’re confident enough to fill up a room where no one can hear you. Then maybe you and I can get together and we can figure out a way for our voices to fill up a room with people in it. It’s a process.

Shows went fine. Kids were funny and oohed and aahed at the appropriate places and generally got edjumacated. I got to take this picture of balloons on the wall:

It was a pretty solid day. Then, as I was packing up, I got the message that my great-aunt had died, so of course I put music on and finished packing up because dealing was not something I was going to do. I mean, I was planning on going home this weekend anyway, so maybe I’d be able to manage things. This, by the way, is the kind of thing my mind does when it can’t deal. It starts to plot out a schedule and a bullet point list of things we’ll need to do in the next couple of hours to deal. This is helpful- remember, I drive a travelling planetarium around the state for a living, so logistics can be difficult. At the same time, it’s just a schedule and logistics. Dealing starts when I actually put the schedule and logistics into action and that doesn’t happen as soon as it should most of the time.

We finish packing up- the guys who helped me load the planetarium back into the van were pros and Gipus manned up and got some directions. Then, as I’m driving to my hotel and singing along to the musical of the hour, I notice that there’s a car pulled off to the side of the road. Actually, that’s not an accurate statement. There’s a Jeep that’s completely rolled off the road on its side in a ditch. I turn around and ask the guy if he’s OK and if he needs a ride. He’s fine, magically, ironically, and there’s a tow shop right down the road, so I drive him down the road. He gets in and he tells me that he just drifted off. I turned down the musical of the hour- there’s more profanity than I want someone to whom I’m giving a road after he just drove his jeep off the road to hear. You know, he was going to turn on the next road and just drifted off the road. He was very adamant that he just drifted off the road. I nod and remark on how lucky it is that there’s a tow shop right down the road, because it’s not like this a super populated area. I think I actually said that it looked pretty sparse out there. Which may have been an unfortunately complex choice in words because as the guy’s sitting there, I think, “What’s that smel- oh.” I have been in enough high school bathrooms to have a guess about the real reason this guy just drifted off the road. Honestly, this is one situation I didn't expect today.

I drop the guy off and wish him well and roll down the windows. I use the moment in the parking lot to check my phone to see if there’s any news and I see a text from my dad asking me to call him, which I do as I pull out of the tow shop. He asks me where I am (I was on the way to Roanoke Rapids, which is so far north in North Carolina that it's almost Virginia) and if I’m driving and you know that “Are you driving?” is the new “Maybe you should sit down.” My grandmother (my great-aunt is her sister) had had a massive heart attack that afternoon and had been taken to the hospital and they hadn’t started her heart back up.

Which I absolutely can’t handle. Like, should-pull-off-on-the-side-of-the-road-because-I-can’t-see can’t handle. Then again, she hasn’t died yet. And she’s in the hospital. Maybe she’ll get better! But you know that sinking feeling you get when you lie to yourself and it’s a pretty obvious lie? That’s the kind of feeling you get when your grandmother has unexpectedly had a massive heart attack and they haven’t started her heart back even though it’s been half an hour. But you lie anyway, because life would be so much better if the lie were true.

So I ask my dad when my great-aunt’s funeral is going to be, just to have something to say, but he doesn’t understand me even when I ask the question twice more (probably because I’m in an area with little to no service and I’m leaking out my eyes and nose) so I get angry and tell him I’ll call him back later and toss my phone rather violently into the passenger’s seat, because I needed an expression of my anger. I mean, I feel like my grandfather just died (I also found out he was in the hospital while at work at the planetarium, so clearly, my working at the planetarium isn’t good for my elderly relatives) and my great-aunt did just die and I can’t handle the idea that my grandmother is going to go as well. Oh, also, my old ballet teacher died. So that happened.

I go get pizza because I haven’t eaten since breakfast and because comfort food is called comfort food for a reason. And I drive to my hotel and as I’m checking in my dad calls back. Again, I can’t deal, and I don’t want to be rude to the lady behind the counter (she’s my age. Why would I call her the lady behind the counter? Society, man. Society) so I let it go to voicemail. I drop my key card and pick it up and struggle bus it to the elevator and call my dad back and start crying alligator tears in the hallway because my grandmother’s died. And the logistic panicking happens and the helplessness happens and I’m thankful to no end that no one else rode the elevator up with me because they’d probably awkwardly try to comfort me and that’s on the growing list of things I can’t handle right now.

So I sit on the edge of my hotel bed and sob, not even bothering to check for bed bugs (which I still haven’t done- and don’t call me paranoid, because I’m statistically more likely to run into bed bugs since I travel more than you [probably] and I like my clothes and luggage). Because how much must this suck for my mom and my aunts and my uncle and my cousins and my brothers and my dad? And me! How much must this suck for me! Here I am, hours from home with a travelling planetarium and a full week’s worth of shows and a dead grandmother and alone. All I want to do is go home and hug my mom and tell her not to die without letting me say goodbye, please and thanks, and I surprise myself by wanting to do this, really wanting to be home and not just saying that I want to be home because it’s societally expected of me. I want to be home because home is where my grandmother was and I didn’t get to make it back in time to say goodbye, and regret, you can just take your place in line because you’re an emotion I’ll deal with later.

Then the call to work to try to get people to cover, which was wonderfully, thankfully painless. Then the texts to roommates and friends, cancelling or changing plans. Then how many times do you have to tell someone news? Can’t they just know? Do I have to say this again and again? Because it brings the tears up every time and my face is already puffy. AND ALSO, they put the tissues IN THE BATHROOM COUNTER which is just an added difficulty when I clearly need the tissues on my bed.

On the upside, I could now change out the stuck-in-the-counter tissues if called upon. Life skills. Check.

I cringe a little when I make a joke. I think humor while grieving is appropriate in public, but it sounds crass in a text. But I don’t have anyone here with me to make the joking less crass and I have to deal somehow, so I joke away. And now I have to get my pizza out of the state van and bring the projector up, because I’m in no state to drive and I don’t want the van to retain any of the smells of the day. But I’m mourning, right? I mean, I’m not watching Castle right now, even though I have cable right in front of me. [Insert joke about missing the d00k game.] [Retract joke.] [Struggle to decide how to feel about all of this and the internet, which is still perfectly happy to say funny things that I feel like I can't like right now.]

I also can’t help but think about how differently I’m reacting to this news than I did two years ago. I processed things more easily back then, I think. I don’t think I joked because I don’t think I had switched from the silence shield to the bitter humor shield. I was also perfectly happy to internalize things, but I don’t do that so much anymore. External expressions of internal pain have gotten more real. More real in that I don’t just post them on facebook. I talk to people. And people have offered to do nice things for me. People can be nice.

It’s just that the adult in me can’t handle the third grader in me right now. “People can be nice”? Nice, kid. The adult in me is standing beside the checklist lady in my head, the one who started making plans earlier. The checklist lady is kinda satisfied. I mean, biologically, everyone has two parents who, biologically, have two parents, so you’re going to have four grandparents die, so this is just another check mark completed. It’s all the same to her, whether you make the check mark when you’re in elementary school and don’t really understand death or whether you’re legally an adult and don’t really understand death. I don’t think I let the checklist lady have any soul, so we can’t blame her too much. But I think the adult needs to man up and stop shaking her head at me. This is hard. And I think it’s important that we know that this is hard. I think it’s important that the checklist lady and the analyst lady go home and just let me be me for these moments. Because these moments are going to come again in the future and they’re going to hit harder and I need to learn to deal. I’m growing up and I can’t ignore that fact anymore.

Being Neat

Whenever I feel out of control, I make up my bed. It's this one little thing that gets totally disregarded when things are fine and fun and hectic and exciting and is just a thorn in my side when things are slow and sluggish and hardly bearable, but it's an easily removable thorn so when things feel out of control, I remove it. I make up my bed and I feel like, out of all the things I've done wrong, at least I have done this one thing right. It might not give me a star in my crown, but at least it's something.

I had to make up my bed when I got back home today because I yelled at a dear friend yesterday. She told me that I had a tone of defeat and I snapped and said that of course I did, because she had been attacking me all night, which was absolutely true to me at the time. I went on a lovely little rant listing off the wrongs she had done me and how hurt I was and how I really just needed to go away and think about things like this and then I left and went to bed hours earlier than I planned. I lay there for probably an hour, seething at the laughter coming up the stairs and listing the reasons why I was right and she was wrong.

I can't get over how childish it was. I can't get over how defensive I was being. But maybe it'll turn out to be a good thing that I was childish and defensive, because looking back at it has turned this into a tipping point. There have been a lot of tipping points in my life lately, or opportunities for tipping points. I feel like the guy on his roof during the flood, you know, the guy who ignores the weather forecast, the storm warning, the emergency warning, the guy in the row boat and the emergency helicopter because he says God will save him and then when he dies, asks God why he never sent anyone to help. I might have missed the warnings, but, after yesterday, I think it's about time I jumped on a rowboat.

I'm in a weird place in life. Friends are getting engaged and married, they're starting careers, they're working and living these lives that I'm consistently amazed at. I wonder who stopped watching us and started letting us play adults. Doesn't the world know that we don't have it figured out, that we've never filed our own taxes before, that we barely know how to live our lives, much less combine our lives with someone else's or even make another life? I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Am I grown up? Because it sure as hell doesn't feel like it.

It feels like I'm going through being a teenager again, you know, rocking out that angsty, independent, finding-yourself phase. Did I never have opinions before? Because I'm defending them now like a mama bear defending her cubs. Have I never looked in a mirror before? I'm noticing all sorts of flaws and features I never considered until now. And someone needs to pull me aside and explain to me that while animal crackers and icing may seem like a great idea for a meal, it's not. Just because you can eat something doesn't mean that you should. I have a lot of thoughts that are all, "I'm an adult! I can make my own choices! Can't nobody tell me what to do!"

It's just that I've been making choices that haven't always reflected the person I should and want to be. Some of those choices have dug me down deep and deeper into a hole that I've been in long enough to question whether I even want to get out. Being in that hole makes it easier to listen to the lies that echo around in my head, and if you hear a lie enough, it begins to be absolutely true to you. And I don't think that there's an amount of afterschool specials or cheesy morals in movies that can overcome the lies-that-became-truths in your head. I think some people can think their way out of it, maybe. I think that sometimes people whom you respect have to remind you what's right and what's good and what's true, and they may have to remind you of that often, whether they're people who've written a book or people who've written a song or people who've made a movie or a TV show or people who see you on a daily basis and choose to see your potential for good as being greater than your existing bad. I think that sometimes you need to get help greater than what is readily available to you in your day-to-day life.

 I think it's time to turn a corner. It's time to move beyond making up my bed. Let's chose to be better today.

What about you? What are your turning points?

Quitting (Or, the Difficulty of Opposites)

I don't like to be in the way. 

Given the option, I'll sit in the smallest corner and look out the window and hope no one needs to use the outlet beside me. Actually, given the option, I'll take the second smallest corner if it isn't near the door and doesn't have an outlet. I wouldn't want to inconvenience anyone. I just don't want to be a distraction, you know? I'll walk around on tiptoes and set things down as gently as possible so that no one is bothered by my noise. Really, I just don't want to be in the way.

Maybe I just really don't want to draw attention to myself. But then, I know that can't be right, because I say things and do things that are just attention-getting. I mean, I have a job that routinely requires me to stand up in front of a group of people and talk about outer space, and even though I'm not the reason they scheduled the visit, I still make sure to wear socks that don't match, so they notice me. I talk loudly and quickly, so that you hear me and you have to focus. But then, I also got glasses to hide behind, and wear bland clothes, and prefer sitting in a corner by myself to sitting at a table with fifteen other people.

Part of that is being an introvert, and I don't like the idea that there's something wrong with preferring time to yourself or needing to recharge if you've been with other people too long. I think we live in a society of extroverts that favors those who would speak up for themselves and it bothers me that those who would think for themselves are brushed aside for lack of vocality. But I can't soapbox my way out of everything. Part of the difficulties I have in life spring from a lack of confidence in myself, which is too big a problem to deal with when you're perpetually fighting to keep your head above water in the sea of constant human contact.

I've really been convicted of my lack of confidence lately and I think that conviction is important because it reminds me that I'm not who I used to be. The lack of confidence comes from this need to have people like me and knowing that I don't measure up to their standards. I don't always dress in well-fitting clothes. My hair is not always done up. I don't always make it to the earring selection time of the morning and I rarely get beyond that to the makeup time of the morning. I have too much fat in too many places and too ugly of a face to be intrinsically pretty by society's standards. I have one of those faces that is just pretty enough to make me think kindly of myself until I catch a sideways glimpse in the mirror or see a particularly unflattering picture. Say what you want, but I will never walk in a room and be the prettiest girl in the room. Mix in a surprisingly large amount of social awkwardness, and you get the last few years of my life: realizing that I'm not the amazing person I thought I was and standing too long out in a rainstorm of self-doubt and self-depreciation. Add a major that regularly called my intelligence into question and it's no wonder I lack confidence.

But the thing is, I'm supposed to have the confidence regardless of what people think of me. I have infinite worth in the eyes of God just for being a human, a creation of his hands, and that is supposed to be an unshakable confidence. The Maker of the Universe loves me and calls me daughter- how can the state of my clothes or the size of my eyes matter?

That's the crux of the matter for me. Living into my God-given birthright became so much harder when I realized there was value in what other people said too. I had to trade in my old thoughts, what I knew, before I could get new ones. And what new thoughts! There's beauty in many things that were never intended by their authors to reflect the glory of God. There are songs that weren't written for churches that express the desires of my soul. There are good thoughts and deeds happening outside the boundaries of the people of Christ and it's not even hard to find them. And I don't want to have to cherry pick. I want to love humanity in all of its messy wonderfulness, encircle it with my arms and love it for the good. But we're an occasionally messed-up bunch and hugging humanity can mean that you get stabbed by barbs as often as not.

So while I want to hold on to these thoughts of beauty, I can't get away from the barbs that cut in, from the judgmental looks that say that you don't measure up to my standard of beauty or you don't like the things I like or you don't laugh at the things that I laugh at. Those looks knock you down, especially when they come from someone who has brought beauty into your life. When those barbs are cutting into you, it's so hard to keep yourself together. It's hard to look at yourself in a positive light. The idea of being fearfully and wonderfully made is a joke in the red tinged light the barbs bring with them. Between that and questions of purpose and path and justice and fairness, my confidence never had a chance. It's hard enough to wake up in the morning and battle the demons of doubt, apathy, and anthropophobia. I can't fight for my confidence as well. It's just easier to give up and live another day among the incurably meek.

I say all this so that people who never think that they're in the way understand what it's like to be someone who always prefers being out of the way. That's the thing about introverts and extroverts, or any pair of different-thinking types of people: it's beyond difficult to get the opposite team to understand the way you think. And even if they do, it's hard to get them to understand the depths of your feeling. To get up every day and say I'm going to be confident in who I am? That's a tiring thought. To get up every day and express that confidence in ways that everyone will see without being found prideful or objectionable? Impossible. There's always going to be someone who thinks you're wrong, who is opposed to your viewpoint, or doesn't understand why your viewpoint has to be expressed that way. People will think you're too political, or not political enough. People will shake their heads sadly at your ideals or frown at your lack of action. When you get entrenched, people will mistake your olive branch for a barb. And even if none of these things ever happen, there's the possibility of drawing this hatred to yourself just by being you, which is a scary thing for someone who doesn't like to be in the way.

I agree that a change has to come for me, because, like most people, I can't always go on the way I am. I understand that people can be wrong and that there often needs to be a voice of reason brought into their worlds so they can move into a better place. But I don't need another ladder tossed into my hole in the ground- I need someone to remind me that I can climb it and that the climb is worth it. I have promises that it is, but promises aren't guarantees. I can't move for a promise.

Comparisons

People like to label each year and section it off, like if we put it into a box and analyze its problems, we'll be better able to take on the future, like events and changes limit themselves to a three hundred and sixty-six day span. Now, I'm not knocking year-end reflections, because I think it's valuable- it’s like we as a society needed to schedule a planning period and this was the time we picked. I'm always in need of some planning, so I'm happy to go along with it.

For me, I think 2012 is going to be the year of the metaphor. I mean, it's only one of many kinds of year- it's a leap year, an election year, an Olympics year, the apocalypse year- but you have to make it personal, somehow, and this was the year that I discovered just how much I love metaphors. I mean, it also could have been the year of staying in places that weren't mine (between adventuring, house-sitting, and a job that requires you to be on the road half the month, I've been around), the year of fear (afraid of being a thorn in someone's side, afraid of pain, afraid of not having enough), or the year when I read Anna Karenina. But I think that 2012 is best defined as the year when I finished watching Friends ("It's like all of my life, everyone has always told me you're a shoe... And then today I just stopped and I said, What if I don't want to be a shoe? What if want to be a purse, you know, or a hat? No, I don't want you to buy me a hat, I'm saying that I am a hat- it's a metaphor, Daddy!"), the year when I read The Fault in Our Stars ("It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing."), and the year when I discovered the PBS Idea Channel ("Why does this guy insist that everything about internet culture is 100% the best? And come up with bad metaphors around it?" Because he's looking complexly at a huge section of today's society and linking it to big philosophical ideas. Duh. ). And now, since I've named it, I wanted to give you a list of metaphors about my life, but phrasing those proved to be challenging, so here's a list of similes for my life that I've discovered.

-Life is like my old computer. I got it in college and am consistently amazed at how it still works (not because of its quality, but because of sheer determination) , and how I still haven't completely replaced it with new technology.

- Life is like driving on a highway. There's a certain amount of pride that has to be squashed when you get passed while driving at a respectable speed, directions are occasionally difficult to come by or wrong, but the road's predictable enough that you can get by, and you can't always tell someone you've wronged that you're sorry. Also, you could die.

-Life is like snowflakes. Each one is unique because of the specific set of circumstances that it was formed in and traveled through to get to the ground. Plus, most of the snowflakes you see are conglomerations of individual snow crystals. When the crystals form, they start out as hexagonal prisms, and then the branches or arms form on the corners of the hexagonal prism, because that's the easiest place, and the crystal grows the way it does because it's easier to build on the existing arm than to make a new one. You never see a four or eight sided snowflake in nature, even though those are easier to make when you cut out paper snowflakes, unless the snowflake is deformed. Most of them are deformed, because journeying to the ground is difficult.

-Life is like searching for something on google. Sometimes it knows exactly what I want, because it's what everyone else wants too, and sometimes I can type in twenty different combinations of keywords without finding a thing because I can't for the life of me think of a different way to ask for something.

-Life is like getting a new phone. There was absolutely nothing wrong with my old one, but people kept on telling me to get a new one, and now I can't think how I functioned without it. Also, I'm surprised when people from purportedly third world countries have the same kind of phone I do, because you'd think that other things would get in the way.

-Life is like writing. To have any kind of confidence at all, you have to realize that when you speak with your own voice, it has a quality that no one else has, and you should be valued for that. Just because it's something that I would say said the way I would say it does not mean it is intrinsically bad. The contribution you're going to make is going to be unlike anything anyone else has made, even if tumblr has proven that there are hundreds if not thousands of people almost exactly like you, except with a weird affinity for squids.

-Life is like a literary comparison. It's difficult to understand, and it's never perfect.

Happy New Year! My New Years Resolution? Read 12 books. What about you?