october!

Just yesterday I think I spoke of the approach of summer and how all the vegetables were raring to go, and all I could think about was shorts and sunshine. Funny that as I write this it is hot probably like the day I awaited summer, and a fan is blowing in face, and every few minutes I sneeze as it picks up the dust in the room. Now I anticipate fall. Not that I look forward to greeting the outdoors with misery - walking everywhere has it glory until it's cold - but I am looking forward to the first few days of cold cheeks and wind tears.

I can vouch for DC from last November that fall here is gorgeous. I'm really excited to experience it. Last night we went to our first small group meeting, and we had chili and seasonal sierra nevadas and pumpkin cream cheese bread. And it was everything that it is every year; except that there is really nothing like the first pumpkin ale, the first changed japanese maple, the first frost of the season...

I start a new job in two Mondays. There is a lot of excitement and anxiety I'm experiencing, because it's the first big jump I've ever taken into adultness. Honestly, my hope is that I can still be young. At the end of the day I am 23. Except at the end of November 10th. But in reality, as much as I try to be grown up and responsible and essential in the work place...I still want to be my age. Something I've felt since moving up here is that I can't be silly anymore. Silly is one of the greatest expressions of candor out there, and, when expressed in small doses, it brings the sweetest fragrance of youth to even the oldest someones.

In other news I'm knitting a sweater. This is important to know, because you are now my accountability partners as I struggle to finish it. It is necessary to finish before it gets cold or else I don't know what I'm doing. Also...to friends two sizes smaller than me and a few sizes larger, you may be getting a surprise Christmas gift if this sweater does not go as planned...

a couple weeks ago

collar!

the goal

most recently...

you know it's cool if it's worth blogging about

Yard Sales. They are so intriguing. There is a whirlwind of emotions I feel when I have them. On the one hand I so hope to sell everything no matter how cheap I have to make everything and no matter how much money I don't make. On the other hand, I feel so indescribably sorry for the people buying my knick knacks because I KNOW how worthless they are. Someone bought my vanilla-smelling, half empty package of tea candles, and I felt bad that they were spending a whole 50 cents on something that had sat in my drawer for the last 5 years. And yet really that's a positive thing--that my trash is someone else's treasure. It's just that when I see the old men buying 10 cent coozies that aren't cool and the unopened package of unsharpened #2 pencils and the tiny UT foam football that I proudly boasted on my bookshelf as a student, I immediately imagine how these items will all end up in this old man's stack of hoarded crap. I don't guess feeling sorry for him will change any of the circumstances, except that I will continue to get richer off of the persons like him who love worthless preowneds.

I was in DC the other day and as I pranced around pretending to be a Washingtonian, I felt one with those other working women because I had on a dress and cardigan for an interview. Suddenly, as I was comforted about my non touristic appearance, I realized there were slowly forming blisters on my heels and pinky toes, and I was struck knowing that I would never be one with the women because my feet hurt so badly. And I was wearing flats. But then I stood on the escalator, and in front of me was a woman climbing up quickly (on the left side...that's important apparently), and just as I was about to look away--ah ha! her heels slid off her feet just enough on each step for me to see the two band-aids on each heel...Soon thereafter I went to CVS and bought CVS brand bandages, and I felt like I could pretend to be a city gal again.

A humbling experience indeed is an overnight bus trip. If you were super human before, you are completely and unfortunately just a tired tired person after a trip like that. I have now taken several of these--one to Boston, two to Knoxville, and two to DC. The next morning all I can think about is espresso and fluffy pillows and the sighs you heave just before falling asleep in your own bed. On this last trip, I got the coveted spot on the Megabus to sleep--the back row on the upper level with 5 seats that if you stretch out on early enough and the bus is empty enough, you can sleep there the whole time. When a big boy, without asking, sits in the very middle seat of this row, it makes the sleeping process a bit more difficult, the arthritis in the knees more inevitable, and the respect for humanity just...not...there. I struggled all night long to find a place where I could fall asleep for more than 20 minutes and not be bitter toward this person taking one of MY five seats. It really never occurred to me until afterward that his sleep was just as important as my sleep. I think I am much more comfortable thinking of other humans as THERE instead of as CREATED. It doesn't change the fact that I was exhausted the next day because of his space in that seat, but it does make me consider that the space in that seat was taken by someone as important as me.

reality

when I was little, I used to think that someday we'd use up all the variations you can possibly make out of music notes, and there would be no more new songs. It depressed me to think about because I loved music so much. In a quirky way, I think this fear helped me enjoy all my favorite songs from the point of first-listen fascination and subsequent goose bumps to the complete memorization of every lyric, background harmony, instrumental solo, and key change...


On that note (pun intended), random as this tie in may seem, there is a lot I can say similarly about people. There are a world of combinations that happen in chromosomes between two people when they are making a new person...and those two people were separately created by two people with a bunch of combinations of chromosomes, and so it goes back and back and back. Anyway, that makes me consider the fact that with all these mash-ups we call people, they're beautiful and memorizable, and the person who created them thinks they are It. Then I further continue to think about people I meet who, by the world's standards, are completely messed up and will never be "anything". One of them being myself, the other people usually don't have a home, have drug issues, probably have been in prison a few times, mumble so I can barely hear them, don't realize that nobody over age 17 wears Hollister or Abercrombie shirts (especially not from heaven-forbid a thrift store), and may use 12 packets of sugar in their coffee. And to that person, Jesus says the same thing he says to me and to Obama and to my grandmother and to Ryan Adams, "You are not what you did." I was listening to this pastor (Scott Sauls) today, and his big thing was that we as humans look at people for what they have done in their past, completely dismissing the fact that messy people may actually have a story...that there is a narrative behind whatever horrible that-which-we-don't-speak-of's they did. I really don't need Jesus to look at me for the very worst I've done or thought...


Then that pastor talked about how Jesus comes into places in our hearts that we don't want our parents to see and makes redemption happen. He told a story about a man, Bill, who had been sober for about a month and somehow ended up in his church even though Bill didn't smell like Old Spice, had kids who misbehaved, and had a wife who wasn't in a better place than himself. This guy became a big part of the church, despite his issues. His family kept coming. The point of his story wasn't that Bill made it to the finish line as an associate pastor of that church or started a recovery program for addicts (not that this wouldn't be beautiful)...but that he came to a place in his life where he wanted to be permeated by the Gospel. The thing is, people don't always end up in brown paper packages tied up with strings. If we are going to love people, we can't expect our results. You know those great stories? The ones where drug addicts finally give it up and have a family and start to make money and go to church and then they get their big break in Chicken Soup for the Soul? Unfortunately as great as it is, it doesn't happen that way all the time or even most of the time. The homeless people may always be homeless, the dads who left their families may not come back, the stephanie gilman's who try to have all their ducks in a row may constantly fall on their faces. But when our cities can come around those fellow strugglers and point them to Jesus and ACTUALLY love them, the story is beautiful. It just may not look exactly like the suburban culture would have it look.


So...I'm convinced that Jesus made an infinitesimal amount of music notes, words, and chromosomes, and more and more beautiful combinations are constantly being made. Certainly they all need revision, but what imperfect things don't?

The Giver

"I like the feeling of love," [Jonas] confessed. "I wish we still had that," he whispered. "Of course," he added quickly, "I do understand that it wouldn't work very well. And that it's much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live..."

The community of Sameness in The Giver is one that I can identify with, and I'm realizing I've lived most of my life longing for Sameness. This isn't to say I don't enjoy change. If I didn't enjoy change, I wouldn't have gone away to college, studied abroad, or gotten married. But I draw from this inner repertoire of fear...and I think I decide to test out the waters of Change, using my fear as the guinea pig to make sure it's going to be safe. It is an exhausting way to live, I assure you.

One of the ways I see this is through babysitting. When I babysit, I am so concerned with how happy I can make the kids and feel completely inadequate when I can't do it. As a kid, I was afraid of babysitters because sometimes I could tell they didn't like me. I would beg my mom not to call this or that person to babysit, and it occurs to me now that maybe I am that person to other kids. I know they aren't always supposed to be cooing and happy, but when they aren't, I don't know what to do. Something I've realized as I've gone over and over in my mind wondering where in the hell my maternal chromosome went is that a close relative to my general fears is my fear of failure. A baby starts crying, I've failed. Their crying feels like a boss yelling in my ear that I am not good enough and I might as well give up. I look at upset babies like I did pre-algebra. No matter how many times I tried to figure out the problem, it was NEVER EVER the same answer the book wanted. Now perhaps this was due to the fact that I was home schooled and didn't have an actual algebra teacher. The thing is, I DO have good teachers for how to deal with babies. I have two sisters who adore their kids, and their kids adore them. My mom and dad were crazy about me and assured of that on the reg. I'm pretty sure Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so...so now why can't I pour all of that out on little people without fear of rejection...?

I could go on and on about the ways this fear of change manifests itself in my life...ahem, all my friends leaving me, and me about to leave all my friends for D.C....but the big one right now is my job.

Here's the real issue. I am not a Giver by nature. I'm a Receiver. And the big changes in my life all require that I be a Giver. It's super uncomfortable and is breaking me into pieces, and I'm not adjusting well. I don't know how to love people, and I rely too much on my feelings. If I feel frustrated, I assume it's in my nature to be an angry person and that I'm not supposed to feel angry, which makes me more angry. Me, me, me, me, me, me. That Toby Keith song comes to mind, but I dare not sing it.

I'm really just going to have to let somebody else take care of it just like the rest of my issues, because this is too heavy. And I do and will keep failing if it's up to me. Which, most of the time, I make it up to me because I don't exactly know how to give it all up. I mean, with loving being so dangerous, this definitely feels the safest way to live my life in fear fear fear fear.

But I don't think it's healthiest.