Unspokens

I've been telling myself to grow up lately, usually with expletives involved, but I do try my best to keep the expletives inside of my head instead of out in the world where they could do some real damage. And it's not all the time, before you get worried about my mental state, just those times when you turn a corner or walk into an empty room and take a second to collapse under the pressure of thoughts you'd rather not be thinking.

Because adults can do that, right? They can just stop thinking about something they don't want to be thinking about and it doesn't bother them anymore, yeah? Much better than Barney's "just be awesome instead" idea. That's clearly why I need to grow up: so I can get that skill of selectively forgetting. It has to come in handy.

I definitely know kids can't do it. Kids and teenagers and college kids, we all are held sway by the things in our heads, the ideas we like to focus on and the ideas that don't leave us alone. You ever promise a kid ice cream or cotton candy and forget about it? They sure didn't, and they will remind you every second of every day until you drive over to the State Fair and buy them a package of that blue and pink sugary goodness. Speaking as a writer who has a tendency to border on the emo Myspace side of melodramatic, I can tell you for a fact that any of the billion problems accosting the regular teenager can get stuck in their head and run a little racetrack rut in their brains until every creative and bland method of expression has exhausted it. Ideas, thoughts, they're out to get us, really.

Of course, thoughts and ideas lead to actions. I remember listening to the other girls giving prayer requests at my Bible study in high school and they all had these unspoken prayer concerns. It was a codeword that meant that there was something going on about which they either couldn't or didn't want to talk in front of the adults (or the other rather puritan girls in the room who would definitely, for sure, no chance of it happening any other way, judge them for whatever it was that was bothering them). but for which they knew they needed prayer. I head those unspokens and I never thought it could mean anything serious. The unspokens of a high school girl must be something as frivolous as being upset over a guy who didn't like her back, not getting enough attention, being worried that she's too vain, or something.

But now I'm on the other side of that, where I have a rather large unspoken taking up a lot of my thought time and I would dearly love a prayer group to take that need to and have it lifted up. I mean, I don't know what prayer does, but it comforts me to think that something's being done and to see that proof of caring in a group.   Then again, maybe I'm just hanging onto an idea so I can shoulder this burden and get some attention by having an unspoken. God, it's so easy to be cynical about myself. Add that to the list of things at which I excel.

You never know. Maybe this unspoken will teach me a better way to deal with other's unspokens. Maybe that's what adults actually do- they just learn to deal with it and there's no magic trick involved. Ugh, why is it that half the inspirational posters lie to you and the other half try to make up for that first half by presenting what has now become cliche bits of counter-intuitive knowledge?

Sorry for all the posts about growing up and not being an adult and thinking about what adults do. It's just that I thought I'd have it all figured out by now, not being in the oft-mentioned position of finding out that no one's got it figured out just yet. Sometimes I wish someone would sit me down, give me and affirmation that high school me was good and college me was good and post college me has a lot of potential to prove how much good she can bring to the world. And then someone needs to sit down high school me and tell her not to judge post-college me because she's not that bad of a person besides the fact that she washed her sheets yesterday and has been too lazy to make up her bed and has been sleeping under extra blankets on top of her comforter while trying not to kick the pile of clean sheets off her mattress and onto the floor. Because I think high school me would judge me for that, among other things.

That's not my unspoken, by the way.

Our Stars

You know what I'm really good at? Running over acorns with my car. They're tiny and they're everywhere and I can hear them crunch when I back out as I'm leaving my apartment. I basically do half the squirrels' job for them. Really, I should get a medal. Win one for the humpbacked squirrel who has difficulty eating with no one to break his acorns for him!  

I'm also pretty good at pointing out stars, knowing which planets are up, explaining some astronomy topics. It's kinda my job right now. I was working an observing session at a wedding, sometimes manning the scopes but mostly doing star tours and answering questions. After one rather lengthy session with plenty of good questions and conversation, one of the ladies there suggested that I read Steve Job's commencement speech at Stanford because it was all about finding what you love and making that your job, and, clearly, I had found what I loved. I had heard a similar thing from a couple visiting the planetarium earlier that day, who came by after the show to ask a question and tell me how good they thought I was at giving shows. So, with all that, I guess I have found what I'm meant to have been doing all along. 

Then again, someone wrote in to complain that my show didn't fit his expectations and that neither he nor his grandchildren gained anything from the show. So maybe I'm not as good at this as I thought and maybe I'm not in the right place after all. On the other side of the seesaw, though, you can't make everybody happy all of the time. You just gotta think these things through. 

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I mostly just retweet other people's stuff, things that I find interesting or things that I think need attention from the masses. In the alternate universe where I'm well-known and important, what I retweet would make a difference, but right now, it's just a collection of articles I'd like to peruse later. Like this one, about dropouts and failures fueling the US economy. Now, I don't intend to start a new business but I do intend to fail. Well, not really intend, I just know that it's inevitable. I like the idea of being comfortable with failure, mostly because I'm not and I want to be. The idea of doing something badly, or just having the odds against you, and learning to pick yourself back up is really appealing to me, which is impressive considering how overdone it is in inspirational montages and the like. 

Because I tend not to fail. My life basically works out for me. And that bothers me, especially when so many other people's lives don't work out for them. I didn't do anything to deserve the good luck and veritable blessings I've gotten over the course of my life. I tend to pick things I can do and then do them well. Setting out on a journey that might end in failure isn't something I've ever done. I want to change that. I mean, I'm certainly not asking for hard times. There's enough of that going around. If you could grow by vicarious pain, we would have the best generation of people and leaders in the history of humankind. But I think it's time that I stopped waiting for my real life to begin and started making it happen. 

I'm just not quite sure how to do that. 

And as far as having found my passion, I went to hear John Green speak last Thursday and seriously considered writing as a profession. Part of the talk was about his new book, The Fault in Our Stars, for which I am beyond excited and which I shamelessly link to on Amazon here, and part of it was about the ideas that are in the book and the struggle that ensues when you look at the world and see how much pain there is, and how much of it gets doled out to the innocent. And I swear, I was hanging on every word, feeling like I was jerked back to reality when my friend said something to me or the high school girls in front of me shouted out something. I didn't leave the talk with questions answered. In fact, I left feeling unsettled, but that might just be because it was John Green speaking. My best friend, when recommending Paper Towns to me, said that you shouldn't read his books if you're already in a funny mood, because they make you think. But I love the way his books make me think and the way he uses stories to talk about bigger things, bigger themes. And there's always hope, and I like that. I want to do that in my life. I want to make something, give something to the world that makes everyone who sees it or hears it or reads it think and hope. 

Have you ever heard an organist say that they're really meant to be an organist because they need to hear the sermon twice? I've heard at least two church musicians say it, so it must be a thing. Well, I think that, for right now, I'm meant to work in a planetarium because every day, I'm reminded of how tiny and insignificant our planet is and might be in the grand scheme of the universe. I need that dose of thoughtful humility so I remember that the simple shower of leaves outside my window wasn't shaken down for me. It's just the way the universe works and the universe is a big place and I am so small. But I can change my corner of the universe, and make it better and that has to count for something. 

So maybe that's my passion. Eh, maybe not. It's a pretty vague passion. 

Maybe I'll just stick to naming our stars. 

Single

I have in my general acquaintance several men of the thirty to forty age range who are really good guys. They all have a family or are starting one, are great with kids, good at what they do for a living and seem to be very kind and caring human individuals. One of them in particular I love watching interact with his wife because they always seem like they're happy to be together. I look at them and think, "I want that."

I've also been thinking a little bit about the idea of extended adolescence since that's what people seem to be calling the phase of life in which most of my friends and I exist. We're not adults and we're not viewed that way by society. I don't really know how I feel about it, having this opportunity to pursue my dreams without any expectations of a family weighing me down, wondering about how I'm contributing to society while still feeling like I'm living on God's good graces. It's a privileged burden and I feel terrible that I have such choice and freedom in my world. I can do anything but I feel like I pick a job and settle down.

Having had no classes or formal education of any kind in gender studies, it didn't really strike me to think about the different effects extended adolescence has on men versus women, but I found this article about it to be fascinating, true and explanatory. It also gave me a sense of relief. See! There's a complex sociological reason why I'm single!

That was really how I was going to phrase this whole idea that I've been rolling around. It was going to be a vaguely angry fake letter to the guys around me, imploring them to grow up and get some of the characteristics of the good men I see around me so I can find someone and stop spending so much time alone. For a while I felt vindicated by the article. It's not my fault that I'm picky- guys really are different now from my grandparents' generation, from my parents' generation. In the world of college graduates, they're stuck with over-achieving women who don't need them and who are competing for the same jobs for which they're applying. It's different. It means a new understanding of the families we'll have, if we have them at all.

Because I want it all, but not right now. I want a career, though it might take me a while to get to the career stage, and I also want a family. And I want someone beside me the whole time who's figuring out what he's going to do with his life and who's going to be happy bringing other lives into this world with me to ponder their own complex social structures. Really, what I want in my life is one of those men who have their lives figured out, who are starting their families and enjoying the comfortable middle road of their lives after the tumultuous path they took to get there because I want my life to be that settled. Or as settled as life gets, anyway.

Then again, I potentially have several more years to watch Star Wars, make s'mores in my microwave and seriously discuss the merits of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And apparently there are guys out there who are in the exact same boat. Really, there are worse ways to spend the time it's going to take the world to figure us out.

And as long as the world gives me the chance to bring my kids to the quad to play, it can take its sweet time figuring us out.