Planning- The Last

In a statement of 500 words or less, describe and reflect on your life journey and the vocational directions toward which you are pointed.

Oh, this is where I’m supposed to have an answer, isn’t it? Where I know where I came from and what I want to do in life?

Ugh. This is it.

I could lie, say that I have it figured out, that there is a call on my life, always has been, and that I’ll be a revolutionary pastor. Changes will come rolling down because of the Spirit sent to be a part of my existence.

I could be more honest, say that I’m not sure what the future holds for me, but getting a masters of divinity is the current best possible option for me. I’d write something dry, a considered opinion on why admissions officials should put my application in the acceptance pile, convincing you that I will succeed at your university. I’m good at that. 

I could write something from the heart. I could tell you that I have a burning passion for the Church hiding under layers of sarcasm and self-doubt. I want to believe that the world could be much worse and that we need to work to maintain and grow the good in the world. I could lead off with a story about a hero and close with a lesson from a villain because I believe that mistakes are not equivalent to complete breakdowns in your moral fiber. That essay would roll off your tongue and reach down into your soul and I could write that thing. But it wouldn’t say a thing about being accepted to your school, so we try again. 

Personal statements are odd, telling strangers your deepest hopes. Because that’s what I’m doing here- chasing my deepest hopes. It is odd to me that something I hold so dear, that lights up my life like a fairy glow in the distance, that I can trap in my hand but never hold, could be achievable and that your piles of paper and books could help me do that. I cannot imagine that there’s a place for my dreams in your system. 

But that’s what I’m betting on here. I think that your school will be the place where the deep hope I have grows into something real and tactile, something functional that spreads its light into the useful places of the world. I’m banking on the idea that you’ll help my hope-dreams live. That’s why I want to pay you all of this money, learn these things, make these connections, and jump through these hoops; I want my hope to grow. 

You understand that, right? 

You see that often? 

Listen, you trust me with your school’s name and I’ll trust you with my hope. It’s an agreement that you must make thousands of times each year. I can’t guarantee that this time it’ll be anything other than average, but I will work to make extraordinary things happen in this world, and I will work to make them start here, if you let me.

Thank you for your consideration. 

Planning 20

Song of the Day: Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons

Have you ever seen Much Ado About Nothing? Well, it’s phenomenal and there’s a version by Joss Whedon on Netflix, so you should go watch that. It’s got Nathan Fillion. I don’t know if there is anything else I need to recommend it. 

Much Ado holds a special place in my heart among Shakespeare’s plays. I mean, you got your Romeo and Juliets, your Julius Caesars, your Macbeths, your Hamlets, and those are all good and often read. Then you have all your comedies, like She’s the Man and Ten Things I Hate About You. But (and I know all about this because I wrote a paper about it one time) Much Ado isn’t as lighthearted as the rest of the comedies. I mean, (spoilers) Hero fake dies and there are some serious defamations of character over the course of the play. Plus, Beatrice has this awesome speech where she knows that the lies about Hero need to be avenged and she’s raging to Benedick about how she would do it; if she were a man, she would eat the liar’s heart in the marketplace. Roll laugh-track, am I right?

And Shakespeare, tool-status notwithstanding, definitely goes for a “men kinda suck” theme in Much Ado. Have you heard the song from it? “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more. Men were deceivers ever. One foot in sea and one on shore, to one thing constant never.” Shakespeare would like for you to know that men are inconstant jerks, ladies. Keep that in mind. And not that Shakespeare defines my worldview, but I’d have to say that reading this over and over again in high school may not have been the best in terms of building my trust of the male species. 

Trust is hard. It’s hard to trust other people to get stuff done. It’s hard to trust that people will be there for you when you need them. It’s impossible to trust that you’re getting the whole story about anything and it’s difficult to trust other people with your story. If I have difficulty trusting my friends to be the awesome people I know that they are, how in the world am I supposed to trust a guy for anything when I know that there are just utter scumbags out there, hiding under a layer of relative niceness? And I know that you date people to figure all that sort of stuff out and that you don’t fall in love with someone before you date them, but eventually that end date is there, you know? Eventually, I’m either going to trust this man with everything that I have and hold or we’re going to go our separate ways and knowing that a wall like that exists scares me away from even smiling at someone too much.

(And then watching all these other parents scares me away from ever wanting kids. What if I let my kids become brats and I don’t know how to fix that? What if I drive my kids away and all they can see in me are hateful things? What if I can’t provide for them and they end up in some terrible situation because of my economic circumstance? What if I can’t keep my kids safe? I know I’m being ridiculous, but, you know, we can head off all these worries at the pass if I just keep my head down and rock the forever-alone lifestyle until my ovaries pass their prime.)

I see people starting their joint lives with other people and I don’t feel behind. I’m not really at a loss. I think I say it because it’s expected, but I’m fine by myself. It’d be nice to have someone else in my life, but I don’t know if it’s worth it, what with the busyness and the aforementioned fears. Plus, I’d want everything to be perfect, or at least perfectly imperfect, and then I’d just be disappointed, so until I adjust my expectations, I might as well just wait it out. I’m moving on in a year anyway. It’s not a great time to start a relationship. And I know, a date doesn’t imply a relationship. But why would I go through that horror of a social cluster if I wasn’t going to get something long-term out of it?

Listen, I want a family. If I’m planning my future, I want to plan a future with the possibility of a man in mind. Just… don’t think that I’m wasting my time if the fulfillment of that possibility isn’t on the horizon yet.

Planning 19

Today’s Song: Happy by John Fulbright

You know what would be the most awesome job? A plane mechanic. You get to learn all about how planes work, you provide a great service, and I’d assume you’d have pretty good job security until the zombie apocalypse inevitably descends upon us. You spend all day dealing with the literal nuts and bolts of something that is magical to most people. And you only have to deal with planes. Very little of this silly people interaction.

I could be a mechanic in the Air Force or the Navy. Get to serve my country but never have to shoot at anyone. They’re reducing the size of the military but I’d be a great mechanic. My dad might laugh at that, but if you’d just give me a couple of hours alone with tools, an engine, and a schematic for reference, I could have that thing figured out. I’d want to be a car mechanic too, but then you have to do that whole price-setting thing and there’s a lot of customer service and cars are more dangerous than airplanes anyway.

I’d love to have a job where I get to work with my hands every day. One of my favorite things about my current job is that I get to do some mechanical troubleshooting from time to time, dealing with the projector or the dome. I’ve learned a little bit about computers too, but fixing computers doesn’t have the same appeal to me. It’s like Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman. Partway through the movie, he has the realization that he doesn’t make anything. He tears apart companies and sells off their pieces and gets money, but he doesn't physically create anything. I’d like to make something. I don’t need to build great big ships, but I’d like to make something. 

There are opportunities presented before us in all parts of our lives. I assume there’s a reason why a mechanical career was never presented as an opportunity in my life, but I think I could be content there. No grandiose vision. I would really enjoy being blue collar. I don’t need much to get by. Now, I’d have to be guaranteed a living wage, but other than that, it’d be nice to have this defined place in society, this useful job. “Oh, what do you do?” “I’m a mechanic.” Nailed it. No complex explanations. And you work 9-5 and then you literally have to leave your work at the office. It sounds really nice.

I was talking with a coworker who had done the same job for 25 years before moving to the job he has now. It blows my mind that he could have done anything for that long. 25 years doing the same thing every day? No forward momentum, nothing to aspire to, no new place to be. It’s amazing to me. But people have careers, you know? People get a job and stick with it and used to be, if you were a company man, you were guaranteed a pretty good retirement at the end of the line, and enough free time in the in-between to have a family and pursue a hobby and fill out the edges of your life. I can see how you’d pass all those years, I guess. It’s just an un-understandable expanse of time to me.

I am ready to be doing something, though. I am ready to know what I’m going to be for the next little while. And I’m ready to start a family. I’m mentally ready for that complication. Now, fiscally, I’m not, so it’s a good thing I’m in a state of perpetual singlehood. But I could knock out a few years in a given profession and I could learn a reasonable work-life balance and I could make a new little person to bring into the world and I wouldn’t complain about any of that. Wanderlust is still here, yes, but the desire to be warm, safe, and stationary is a real one, and not a bad one. And it’s not like you can’t mesh the two, the adventure with the quiet family love.

Can’t you just picture it though? The idyllic scene of coming home a little achy with grease on my shirt to help my kid out with his math homework? I’m pretty sure I could spend good long years thinking all is right with the world, with a life like that. I wouldn’t mind it one bit.

Planning 18.5

Today’s song: Royals by Lorde

So yesterday, laying flat on my back in my hotel room after three long days at Universal in Florida (which has the nicest staff, I have to say; good on you, Universal!), I called up to make a reservation for a shuttle to the airport because I’m an adult and adults do things like this. They think about transportation before they fly to Florida on an impulse. Yup, I’m an adult. And when I called and made a reservation, they told me that my shuttle would be getting to the hotel at 4:35am. “Four to five AM?” I asked, disbelieving. “Four thirty-five AM,” the apathetic phone voice replied. And so I found myself standing on the curb outside the hotel in what I’m pretty sure was eighty-degree heat at 4:31am this morning. My flight, for reference, departs Orlando at 7:30am. I was not amused.

I had gotten my twenty dollars from the lobby for the shuttle fee, which was substantially cheaper than taking a cab. I was taking the Mears Transportation Shuttle to the Orlando International Airport from my hotel outside of Universal. This is important. I was staying at a DoubleTree. This is not important. I mean, I’m a Hilton Honors Gold Member (see: traveling planetarium professional), so clearly I like Hiltons in the first place, and I had a lovely time, but this is about my trip back to the airport.

I got outside early because missing your shuttle to the airport is how you pay $60 for a cab and maybe miss your flight, and after a few minutes, another couple and a girl about my age showed up. The couple got in a different shared ride, but the other girl and I bonded momentarily over this awkward experience of waiting for a magical van to the airport. The shuttle was hella on-time, though (like, 4:34am-on-the-nose on-time), and my driver was the world’s most courteous human being. I think it probably helped that he had a British accent, but whatevs. He was nice. Put my bag into the back, got out a little stool to help us step in the van. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy this whole process was. I mean, the sun wasn’t even awake yet. I’m pretty sure that means life is supposed to be difficult. 

On the way to the airport, he told us stories about his other trips that week and gave us a tour of what you can see of Orlando from the highway. I learned things like:

1. Canadians really are that nice. This couple forgot their passports and (unlike the girl who thought he had given her bag away to another passenger when she had really left it in front of the door to her room) instead of making a fuss and telling him to turn the shuttle back around, they dealt with it on their own. Canadians. Props.
2. There’s a three-story McDonald’s in Orlando. I have since googled and verified that it is in fact the world’s largest. 
3. There’s a convention center (I think) run by this guy who used to work in hospitality at Disney and if there aren’t any conventions in town, he opens up the rooms for the most cheap, like $60 a night, and apparently the guy, who’s around 80, will actually come serve guests in the lobby a couple of times a week, even though he owns the place.
4. Sea World opened up an Antarctica section. Penguins! 
5. The busiest time of year for theme parks is Christmas. They will actually shut the doors to the Magic Kingdom because it’s at capacity. But if you come in the first two weeks of December, everything’s decorated for Christmas but NOBODY’S THERE. 

The driver thought that the girl from the same hotel as me and I were traveling together, so he offered to drop us off at the same terminal if we wanted so we wouldn’t have to split up, which was quite nice. And he also apologized for getting us to the airport so early, as all of us had 7am flights or later and I rolled up here promptly at 5:10am. So, all in all, this experience could have been horrible, but this driver made it not only bearable, but actually quite pleasant. 

I say all of these things because I never got any extra money out for a tip. And I feel horrible about this. I don’t always think about tips because I’m still new to this adult money landscape. My brain is still in the realm of “Can I?” instead of “Should I?” Can I take an impulse vacation to Florida to see my friend? Yes. Should I? Dubious. Can I tip my driver? Yes. Should I? Yes. Did I think about that? Yes. But the ATM in the business center only comes out in denominations of $20, which was what the cost of the shuttle was and I wasn’t going to get out extra cash and make change because what if I was late? I realized that these were flimsy excuses right around the time McDonald’s factoid came my way on the shuttle, so I took to the only recourse I had left: Twitter.

I tweeted about my shuttle ride, tagged the company in a couple of tweets, and sent in a customer feedback email with my driver’s name in it (which I had written down as soon as I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to tip). I have also now blogged about it, which is going to go on facebook. I’d put it on tumblr, but honestly, I’d probably just add a Supernatural gif to the end of it and I’m pretty sure Sam and Dean have never taken a shuttle anywhere and Castiel can fly, so that kinda knocks those out of the running. I have done all the interneting I can at 5:56 in the morning. 

My point with all of this, other than to hope that this guy gets something good for doing something good, is to say that we live in a different world than I ever anticipating living in. It’s a world where people like me can afford to fly and be driven places. It’s a world where some of us are in situations different from what we expected, with protocols that we forget to plan for. Sure, you tip your servers and your bartender, but when else do you tip? What’s expected? How terrible of a person am I for not tipping? Is this guy going to get by without those few extra dollars I would have thrown his way, and the accumulated missing dollars of the other non-tippers in the world?

At the same time, a social media shout-out is money to a company. You might not be on Twitter and you might be new to this whole Book of Faces thing, but then again, you might be another twenty-something who forgets to tip, but is keen to know how to save $40 on your ride back to the airport. This is the landscape I inhabit. Does it feel like a poor substitute for cash? Absolutely, since none of this might get back to the nice driver that set this whole process in motion. But it’s the best I’ve got right now, and it’s not nothing.

So thanks for the free internet, Orlando International Airport, and thanks Mears, for hiring at least one good driver. And friends, if you ever find yourself waiting at MCO for multiple hours, there’s a pretty sweet fountain near terminal A before you go in to security. Enjoy that for a while. I know I did.