You mean nothing to no one but thats nobody's fault.

Trying to muster up the courage to face church today. Boo. It makes me so tired. I really wanted to be at Cornerstone today. Im really very sad about that.

Got back from Atlanta at 3am yesterday morning. We took a mini vacation last week and drove all around Florida and then up to Atlanta to do some shopping. Driving into the city was like going home to an empty house. Everything is familiar but there is no one there to welcome you home.

One thing that I did notice during the couple thousand miles we drove is the excruciating amount of "adult" stores everywhere. I dont know if I was just looking for them after finishing one of Craig Gross' books, or if I'd always known they were there and never really registered any of it. There must have been billboards advertising porn or strip clubs every 5 miles in bright yellow and red letters, screaming as you drive by. It was literally littering the highways. Its been said that as adults you have the option to choose to look at porn or not, but there is no not anymore. Its everywhere, and even if you dont look at it, you can read about it on signs, hear about it on radio advertisements. Something is wrong.

The sad thing is that its just people. People who are hurting and people who are lonely. I've never heard of anyone in real life being proud of porn addiction. I've never heard too many people talk about it at all, its still too shameful, embarassing.

I guess as a girl, it bothers me because so often in popular culture women are not valued by their hearts, or who they are. The same is true of men. The objectification (or neglection) of people bothers me. I wish it wasnt that way.

Well. Time to get ready for church.

I can feel it in my fingers

Bloodorange and fire lights in the sky never tire of being so high...

I got Jaymins letter Saturday and in it she listed Fictional Characters She Would Marry--here is mine. Abbreviated.

• Mr. Darcy. From Pride and Prejudice.
• Mr. Bingly. Also From Pride and Prejudice.
• Dorian Gray. To appease my subconcious masochism.
• Graham Simpkins. Because he is a weeper. More than any woman I've ever met. (Mormons Jaymin, Mormons.)
• Nino Quincampoix. He's quirky.
• Christian from Moulin Rouge. Yes.
• Fred or George Weasely. The have red hair and are completely ridiculous.

Very abbreviated...lol.

Today was one of those cold early winter days where is feels like you breathe the frost that covers everything, like it seeps into your lungs and blood and you might always feel cold no matter how warm it gets, because its become a part of you. I can feel it in my fingers (*sings* I can feel it in my toes...lov--christmas is all arou--sorry.) as I am typing this now.

Last night my sister and I went over to our grandparents house to help set up their tree. After taping some of the limbs, re-wiring what seemed to be an entire strand of lights, sweeping up glass fragements from one of the ornaments we broke, fighting with the angel to stand up straight and stop leaning on the top and nearly toppleing the whole thing over quite a few times we got it up and it looked very nice--classy. I love christmas. I really do, I would set up christmas decorations as soon as it got cold and not take them down until summer if I was allowed. Hahaha. We set up our stuff at home today. Its very much in the vein of ultra tacky christmas vomit and leaves you with a queasy feeling in your stomach after looking at it, but in that context its rather lovely and was very fun putting up.

I started reading Dante's Divine Comedy yesterday, and finished the first several Cantos. Just as a diversion. I need to find another good book to read, because I think I've read every one of mine twice already. Im thinking about picking up Pride and Prejudice because I've watched the movie no less than 20 times in the last couple of weeks, and think it would be good to brush up on the book. I like the movie because it portrays love like life is. Messy and tedious and biased and frustrating, but in the end worthwhile, unexpected and better than imagined. It makes my heart happy.

This saturday is the christmas party at my Uncle's house in Columbus. I really am actually excited about this one. I think it will be fun--a younger and more diverse group of people than our traditional family christmas parties. I think the only person in my family that is near to my age is my cousin Alex--he's about 3 months or so younger than I am I think, and he lives in California. Come to think of it, I havent seen him in a while, since we were 16 or so, but he was really fun. He has red hair and eats burritos with sporks and is funny and kind of ridiculous. Most of my family is boring and only talks about varying degrees of disgusting health ailments, the gaining or losing of wieght about everyone in the room, and hunting. Yes, family get togethers unfortunately are usually rather dull and its all I can do to drag myself there.

Which I always thought was sad because I really wanted to have a close family, that sounds odd, but I really was a lonely sort of kid (not much has changed, eh? lol) but I always wanted to have cousins that I could visit and aunts that were fun and made cookies and things like that, but it didnt work out that way. Oh well. I guess thats why I have such bizarre and wonderful friends! Now if only they lived closer....boo.

I think I'll make peppermint bark for the party. Yes. That sounds wonderful.

Ah well, I've blathered on enough here for one night.

A Brief Dialogue Between Lovers

He: Sometimes I feel as if I cannot contain all this dire and deceiving passion that ravages my soul. What is lacks in direction or facet is made worse a thousand times by the inconsistency of its presence and the sheer tremulous wantonness of its nature. I feel as a person divided, dualistic and desperately wanting for something more, something grander than the heartache and loneliness of a life so tormented. Yet, am I to live the art I so want to create? Is there a cause for this reckless passion, this untamed spirit that is trapped in my heart? Oh, God, there must be. I am the pen and you are my poetry. The light of your eyes far outshines the pallor of this meaningless and fleeting life. In you I see a million burning stars, I see the fair Venus herself, staring back at this worthless wretch before you—

She: Call not yourself worthless! I will not hear it! You might be a man divided but only so that there is more of you to receive my love. I would not have you change, I will not have you leave yourself, your torment is romance, your suffering—what binds my heart to yours. Poets cry themselves to sleep for want of the love they can only write of. Your tear-drenched pillow is for want of words that you may only live. Say not that you are worthless, for in your spirit I find my worth, and if you art worthless than how low have you made me? Do you so slander my good heart?

He: Never! Your heart is my life, its beating is my breath!
She: Then love me with all of yourself, and it shall never cease or run cold.

"You could be happy, I hope you are..."

"...You made me happier than I'd been by far
Somehow everything I own smells of you
And for the tiniest moment it's all not true..."
--Snow Patrol

Thats a great song.

Favorite things this instant:

• The amazing time with the people from SC and LA this weekend!
• Still the sign that says "You are loved there is hope" in the spare office of the church.
• Hugging people who hurt you at one time and realizing that despite that they are only people and they feel as well.
• Starbucks Grande 1 Shot Soy Raspberry Mocha No Whip.
• Having had talked to Jaymin last night.
• Being melodramatic and very pansy-ish in all of these entries and being completely ok with it, because, well, Im a girl. Hahaha.

If God is not a respector of persons, and if He is love, then it also means that love is not a respector of persons--thus the saying love is blind--and that, dear friends, is what I am counting on.

Blue eyed Circumstance shines bright as heaven tonight, thou art mine by fate or chance--I satiated oh drunk in love's soft light, I would not that light turn harsh and gray--else love freeze as ice on winter's day, oh passion leave not my bedside, let love be poetry forever and flow steadily seductive as the oceans ebbing tide--each new day a well kindled flame discover--fire of love, oh passionate passion!

Odd coincidence it is that passion has a double meaning of suffering--it is clever and cruel. Thus love both inspires and injures the very core of our souls. There is nothing so agonizing as loving without return--reciprocation. But it is in the fires of this hell that we are made perfect and pure and able to understand the full weight and consequence of all that it is to die to love, to be completely consumed with it for one other than ourselves, and for that I am grateful for heartache.

Sorry. I am enamoured with love and all its meaning. I fear my only true passion is the want of passion, therefore I am not very good at anything but talking nonsense.

Thus with a kiss, I die.

"I felt I was on fire, with the things I could have told you
I just assumed that you eventually would ask
And I wouldn’t have to bring up my so badly broken heart
And all those months I just wanted to sleep
And though spring, it did come slowly, I guess it did its part
My heart has thawed and continues to beat"
--Conor Oberst from June On the West Coast.

My head hurts. I'm tired. I spent most of the day with my grandmother whom I love dearly, but she was in terrible sorts today and it was a miserable awful time. Ugh.

And then I got to thinking.

And Bright Eyes played through the speakers in my car as I drove around the dark cold city. And it is perfect.

I am choking with things I never say to people. I am suffocating on sorry's for what I never said. For what I should have said.

In that spirit, I will write more later, its freezing here, and I can barely feel my fingers or think straight. The cold has always incapacitated me in one way or another.

Goodnight.

Later...

I've just finished watching Shakespeare in Love, and I might state that it is always bad for me in the most wonderful way to watch or read anything even involving Shakespeare. It seems to me that he embodies the passion and the feeling of all that it is to be human--to laugh and cry and love. A passion that is no longer present in our modern lives of productivity--it seems to me that the Industrial Revolution did more than mechanize the world--it mechanized our lives and the way we think and how we act. We are machines, with no time or care to see the beauty and tragedy of life in all its aspects.

I feel that if I were born a little under a hundred and fifty years earlier I would have fit well with that age. The sheer decadence and celebration of life and love, the decay of the past rotting beautifully, poetically with the tragic modernization of the present. No wonder so many great thinkers and writers came out of the late 1800's and le fin de siècle. It must have been magical.

I think that is the real difference between art and fingerpaintings, between scribbles and sonnets--its the total embrace of every aspect of life--the good the bad, the celebration of being human and unashamed to feel and to think and to be. We are not machines. We are not engineered to perfection or vastly productive robots--we cannot find our true worth in how much we make or live up to the high standards we have created for ourselves--and for this we are guilty and shamed for simply being human. We have suppressed the very spirit that makes us. God did not make us mechanical, he made us flesh and bone and heart. Above all heart, and love. A machine cannot love. It cannot think, or feel. I am glad that I am not one. I am glad that I dont ever want to be one.

I can take people thinking Im unproductive, or a failure by their standards if it means that I know the true nature of life, the magnificence buried by debris and love it passionately for all that so many never see.

I am free, I am tragic, I am alive and terribly morbid.

Thou art tedious, Hypocrites
O god of all modern men!
From thou winged wisdom flees--
And fair Patience is streched thin!

I've been feeling rather poetic lately, maybe its just because I've immersed myself in it. I guess I have just been needing a feeling, not words of comfort or words of wisdom, just the feeling that I am understood. Enter poetry. The perfect albeit lonely companion.

I think those opening lines will be the begining of my first ever epic poem. I've never tried to write anything like that before, but I do rather like what I came up with there.

Today has been a crap day really. Really crap. I wont go into detail, I am much to kindhearted for that, but suffice it to say that I spent a great deal of today staring blankly out of the big picture window watching the fiery leaves fall while secretely fantacising about throwing myself off of very high bridges (ah--rush of air--so alive--tearing through my lungs--ripping through my hair--ice on my skin--the sky above so blue--mirrored by the shallow water below--I am free--I am tragic--I am amazing--splash! crunch!--I am alive and terribly morbid!) and popping the remnant of the bubble wrap that was from the first box Jaymin sent me. Yes. One of those days.

We did get the curtains up. Yes. It gives the livingroom the feel of a hotel really. Im not quite sure I like them, but at least they keep whatever strange people that might be meandering by in the middle of nowhere from peering into our windows and watching us do such fascinating things as watch movies, practice the Soulja Boy dance or pick our noses. So, one thing accomplished.

Oh well. Tomorrow is a new day. Lets hope for a good one, shall we?

"Rien n'est vrai que ce qu'on ne dit pas."

After writing several letters in the last week or so, Im begining to believe that is true. Nothing is true except what isnt said. Thank you Jean Anouilh.

Why is it so easy to talk to people without saying anything? Why is it so hard to be real? I dont get it. I dont.
Pourquoi c'est toujours comme ça?

Because we are all by nature terribly terribly afraid, or else we have learned it. Humanity was deeply hurt by the fall. Much more deeply than we sometimes think.

Peut-être nous ne voudrions pas le penser, parceque la vérité (comme l'espérance...merci enfin M. Guillaume Apollinaire!) est toujours violente, et puis il pleure dans notre coeurs.

Well. In this short entry Im quite sure I have broken every french grammar rule in existance, so I must be off. Im making myself a cup of tea and the kettle is shreiking from the kitchen.

First of all: I am tired. I am true of heart. And also: You are tired. You are true of heart.

So, I began looking through A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genuis--with all its arrogant insecurites, its pretentious self-conciousness, and most of all its disgusting brilliance--I realized again that it is exactly what I want. I love that book because it is the embodiment of what I want to be. I mean, I dont want to do the same things as Dave Eggers, I dont want to fall alseep while drunk, or have sex without condoms, and sometimes fall asleep having sex without condoms while drunk...but I do want to be simply, obviously, effortlessly, arrogantly, timidly, profound. In the deepest and fullest sense of paradox. A wonderful mix of definite purpose and lack of pragmatism. To be, unashamed, unabashed, certain and full of doubt, wonderfully afraid and exuberant, heartwrenching and hopeful--but beyond all--real. Honest to God and self real.
I think if I were compeletly honest with myself my real fear like I have told myself over and over with many tears and soggy pillows, is not being alone. I am not so much afraid of living alone as I am of not living at all. Not seeing everything I can, and doing everything in my power, and being someone genuine. I am afraid of death before life.
I have two years. Two years before these god-awful braces come off and I can smile pretty and speak without slurring once again. Two years to save money, and learn all I can, and then I am going away for awhile. I dont know where. Maybe California. Maybe France. Probably both. And I am living. Whether or not I have someone else to go with me. Whether or not my family disapproves. I am tired of being afraid of not living up to other people's expectations of me, I am tired of being incapacitated by lonliness.

So there you have it.

"He that hath the steerage of my course, direct my sail. Onward lusty gentlemen!"

Dont read this, its depressing as hell.

Number of times I checked the mailbox today: 5
Number of times I cursed the mailbox for being empty: 6
Number of minutes stood outside in the rain: 13
Number of hysterical fits of craptasticness: 3
Number of emails, phone calls, or comments today: 0
Number of times I silently hated myself: innumerable.

Today sucks. I feel awful. Im beyond tired. Beyond sick. Beyond frustrated and depressed and angry. I just feel exhausted and awful. I dont even care anymore.

What good is it living in the most blessed country in the world if you feel so awful so much? I would rather live in shit than feel like it.

Im done with feeling like this. I just want to feel ok, but it seems like I cant. As soon as I manage to level off and be ok with things it seems like I fall further back.

All my rantings and previous complaints about the sucktasticness that is my life right now are only amplified by the fact that due to the freaking huge metal bars in my mouth I cant talk at all really, at least without it hurting or sounding half retarded and unintelligable. This means that not only can I not teach at church the 3 times a week that I am scheduled for, but I am not going to impress any employers sounding like I should be that one kid's sister from the Goonies. So my stress meter bars that indicate fear of disappointing others and frustration from not haveing any money have gone way past red into another dimension's color scheme.

I know things will get better. I do. They have to. But Im just so tired of things getting better only to soon thereafter feel worse than ever. I havent lost hope, Im just tired of it. Im tired of everything.

Whats worse is that this is compounding. I feel so crappy I cant make myself get anything done, and then I feel bad about not being productive, and it goes on and on and gets worse and worse.

I never wanted this to be a whiney sad blog like my others. I wanted it to be from my heart, (hence My Heart Exploding Words) I wanted it to be full of love and hope--but its become painfully obvious that my heart is not full of that. Not at this point in my life at least. Im trying to fill it with that, I want to.

Well. Time to check the mailbox again.

Ye Olde Nouvelle Blogge Entry Pour Au'jourd Hui.

...that title takes talent...or something abnormal.

Favorite Things of the Moment:

• Juicebags
• The French Pod Class avec M. Sebastien Babolat
• The Cornfields that surround my house that are perfect for 4wheeling in.
• Picking out where we are going for our mini-vacation this winter. (England is temporarily post-poned due to scheduling conflicts...probably this summer instead)
• Knowing how to say: Volgio averlo adesso, wench!
  

Today was yet another beautiful day. Ended up going to the Ohio Renaissance Festival, which was interesting enough by itself, but also my Grandpa brought over his new 4wheeler he bought today and we had fun testing it out. I have scratchmarks across my face and arms from trees and briars, and I picked out pine needles from hair for a good twenty minutes. Plus I got to talk to two of my most beloved people via cell phone today, which always makes everything a little better. Overall, it was glorious.

Tomorrow morning looms dark on the horizon, however. I am still at a loss for what to teach for sunday school. Im thinking maybe I will start the "Why, Us?" series that I have been working on, or thinking about recently (thank you Shane Claiborne, Donald Miller, and Rob Bell!). When something horrible happens, when we are faced with injustice, poverty, hatred, racism, violence--so often we look around and ask "Why, God? Why would God allow this to happen?" As Christians, we are called to follow Jesus' example, and to be like John the Baptist-- pointing to Jesus and God with everything we are. We are to die to ourselves and become new in the body of Christ, being his hands and feet in this world. So "Why, Us?" Why do we allow suffering and needs to be unmet, why do we allow violence and hatred to consume our world, the creation that God has given to us to take care of? Not Why, God, but Why, Us. (as an interesting aside, at the festival they had a museum of medevial torture devices, some of the worst stuff you've ever heard of...and who put it to use the most...yeah...thats right. The Church.) We are the ones who are failing with our negligence, not God. What does it mean to be born again into a family where every five seconds a child dies of hunger? How do we follow Jesus in humble servitude in a world ravaged by selfishness and greed? Why, Us? What are we going to do about it?

We also have COGTIME, as I like to call it, where we go through the Bible and figure out what we believe as a denomination, what we believe is biblical and true. Last week we covered John 1:1-2. We might continue with the "difficult texts" theme tomorrow. Hopefully it will be nice outside and we can have hippie time under the tree again. I like that. Class rooms are so confining and overly airconditioned.

Tomorrow is going to be sort of a work day for me, catching up on things that I've been putting off or forgotten. I've been working on a few paintings that I would like to finish before my fortieth birthday, and if I dont start now it might not happen. I also need to sit down and figure out what my schedule looks like for the next month or so. Everytime my phone rings Im terrified that its someone about to yell at me because I've missed a meeting, or forgotten an event that I was in charge of, or slept through an appointment or something. It will be good to not have to worry about that so much.

Sometimes the best place to be is lost.

Im lost. I think thats ok. It means Im going somewhere.

So often I think only of arriving at a destination, of getting there. I long for a teleporter to illiminate the hassle and time of getting to where Im going. Dont get me wrong, I love driving, I love traveling, I love looking and seeing things, and taking back roads and getting lost and learning something new, going somewhere different. But I forget about that sometimes.

Lately I notice that I've been applying my "just get there already" urgency to life. I just want to figure things out, I want to get to wherever Im going already--Im tired of waiting, of being lost and not having a map to figure things out.

But all life is, is getting there, isnt it? All it is, is a journey. (whoa...and I didnt even smoke any pot to come to that conlusion...deep...) I dont think I will ever get there--unless there is dead, and Im not going to rush that. Im going somewhere I know, because Im lost. And I like that. I dont know how to get to where Im going, but at least Im moving. I realise that right now I'm frustrated, and tired and just want to metaphorically find the damn hotel already--but its preparing me for the next step of my journey.

So I guess Im feeling pretty good about today. I went to Sonic and got a Berry Limeade. Small things like that make me immensely happy. My husband is going to have it easy, hahaha...well, in one way at least.

So yes. Tomorrow is Saturday and it is bright and alive and full of potential. I wonder what we shall do with it?

There is a piece of you in every single second of every single day.

I have been feeling creative tonight. I guess I had to turn all my frustrations (which I am pretty sure were spawned from several recent events, most notably going to my highschool's homecoming and seeing loads of people I graduated with, none of which would so much as smile back, or say hello...slightly disheartening.) into something else. I drew several silly pictures, and have been playing several silly songs on the guitar, most notably my favorite Wrecker's songs...who ever would have thought that I would like girl country? Wierd.

My last entry was optimism drained. Today has been more on the side of optimism regained--or perspective put in place. Suffice it to say, that I feel better. No closer to any sort of understanding, but better. I guess at the end of the day, no matter how frustrated I am with everything, just the thought of life working out makes me smile. Love stays with me.

I am trying to decide what I am going to teach on tomorrow morning for Sunday School to my highschoolers. Im thinking John 2. Water into Wine. Water symbolising life, of course, and wine symbolising joy. Turning life into joy. That sounds like a good topic to me. Heavily expounded upon with several other points, and tangents so as to fit the alloted half hour time frame, of course. I actually like that Im the only teacher in there now. Not because of ego issues or anything, the opposite in fact. I dont feel like Im going to say something stupid, I mean, I will say something stupid, but there isnt a basis of comparison, you know? Smart teacher, stupid teacher sort of thing. I dont know what I'm talking about.

There is a definite lack of profoundness here, or anything really. I didnt want to write in this blog just to write, I have enough fillers in my other blogs. I just dont feel like I have the energy to convey any real thoughts tonight. It does take something out of me.

Oh. One more thing.

I drove around Springfield the other night. I had a mix that I made in Atlanta for driving around there at night, like I used to do when I was upset or just needed some space, or to feel like I was a part of something bigger--a group of thousands of people driving around in their cars listening to The Verve and Bright Eyes and Brand New and feeling sort of desperately melancholy and disenchanted perhaps--but I digress. I was driving around Springfield, listening to the music that reminded me of Atlanta, and this whole flood, this wall of memories just flashed past, everything that happened there, everything about my life and my thoughts and everything--technicolor spinning in my mind.

I am really lonely here. I dont have any friends around. None. Zero. I miss my life and my independance at ABC terribly. I miss Northside Drive and Peachtree NE, and Fellini's and Centennial Olympic Park, I miss Josh getting hit with Jaymin's car, and watching people beat up helpless appliances, I miss my apartment, and watching movies with everyone, I miss Tommy Lee even though he wasnt our pet, I miss the Wall of Dale, and Michael--who is still trapped behind the stove, and I miss Jasmine and Macy visiting our rooms and eating the little yellow pellets from the pellet gun, I miss dancing like Janet Jackson and the Freak Hawk, I miss going to get milkshakes and grocery shopping with Kyle, I miss Dustin in those hideous pink slippers, and JJ playing guitar and cookouts at The Cheat's or just hanging out in his office, I miss and the Surly Man, I miss Ugly Frank and walks over at Clayton, I miss the Masquerade and the Tribesman. I miss Atlanta at night, with the lights and the cars--that--indescribable feeling you get when you're there.

I guess, maybe, what I miss the most, besides all my friends, is that in Atlanta, I didnt feel like a loser--I had my own apartment just outside of a place I love, and I had my own job that I really enjoyed working at--I had people that believed the same things as me, and were a constant source of love and support around me all the time (especially my first year there). I didnt feel stupid, or not good enough. I feel like that here. I feel like I'm failing, like Im not going anywhere--and that everyone here cares about that--but not about me.

I love my family. I do. But it is so hard for me to be here without anyone else.

Way to end on a happy note, eh?
Kyle will be here in January, around the same time I start at Cedarville. That will make things better. I'll be fine until then.

Optimism Drained.

It so hard when you have so many words to say, they bubble and turn in your stomach and almost make you sick, but you can't--you wont say them, because it costs too much. It is easier to stay sick and sad and lonely and never risk anything because you are afraid that the risk will turn out worse.
John Greenleaf Whittier wrote something to the effect: "Of all the words of tongue and of pen, the saddest are these: it might have been"
But if you dont say those words, they will poison you.
And because of that, I think I might be metaphorically dying.
Why, why is it so hard! Why cant I just be good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, confident enough---why can't I ever just say what I mean---what I feel, and be happy? Ugh! I get so damn frustrated with it, with my self doubt, with my fear, with everything.
So, what do you do?
Nothing. You play Room Service or say something completely bizzarre, and secretely hate yourself for it.
Or maybe thats just what I do.
Sometimes, maybe, things just arent meant to work out. Sometimes, the good guy dies. Maybe these thoughts I've been having should too. Im just tired.

Im going to write a letter. In this letter Im going to put all my feelings, and plans, and all this crap that Im dealing with now. Im going to put this letter in a box and bury it. If one day, things should work out, then it can be dug up--but if not--it stays burried.

Geesh. I need to get a hobby or something.

I Am Hopeful Full Of Doubt

This entry is scattered and makes no sense, but thats only because I am still working through all my thoughts...hopefully some of them will be adequately conveyed.

First, A Poem:

After Parting

Oh, I have sown my love so wide
That he will find it everywhere;
It will awake him in the night,
It will enfold him in the air.

I set my shadow in his sight
And I have winged it with desire,
That it may be a cloud by day,
And in the night a shaft of fire.
--Sarah Teasdale

She is my favorite poet. I highly recommend "I am not Yours" and "It is not a word" and just about anything else she has written...they are all amazing.

Cut to an interior view:

Patience. Wait. Patience. Patience. Wait. Patience. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Its so very difficult.

I was thinking earlier about everything (which means the one thing *cough cough*, that I always think about) and one underlying truth became apparent--you know, things you know but you never really realize that you know them, until something really obvious hits you in the face and it all makes sense? Well, it really hit me: God made love. He is the source of love. Whatever I feel that is loving and caring and selfless comes from Him. It is because of God that I am able to feel that.

God also created him (who shall remain nameless, simply because I have an idea who he is, but I could be wrong...I dont think so, but I might.), every part of him, everything that I adore (good word Jaymin) about him. God loves him more than I ever could.

To me, this has huge implications about how I think about him, about how I think about everyone for that matter.

The girls in our youth group like to do what all girls in the 13-16 age bracket like to do: talk about how hot (or not) the guys at their school, or at FUEL, or anywhere really, are. Its always been something that bothers me. It just seems to really cheapen someone. It feels like its just slapping an "I would do you" lable on them and negating the rest of their humanity, the fact that they feel, and think, and are loved terribly by God.

So we're working on not talking about guys that way. If we had boys (other than Eric) in our youth group it would be the same for them.

Another reason why this is so important to me, is because like Josh Harris says in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, you should treat everyone of the opposite gender as brothers or sisters in Christ, not only because God loves them, but because you most likely arent going to marry them. They belong to someone else. They are someone else's future husband or wife. If you dont treat them with that kind of respect, then you not only hurt them (yourself), you hurt the person they (you) will eventually marry as well.

I just think that one has to be careful. I try to remind myself this constantly. I wouldnt want anyone acting inappropriately towards my future husband, I love him too much already, and I would probably have to draw blood if I found out about it. No, just kidding, thats where forgiveness comes in, but I wouldnt be happy about it.

Patience. Wait. God makes everything beautiful in its time, right? Its just that sometimes I wish His time would be at 7:00pm this evening.

Stolen Thoughts--like all the thoughts.

Favorite Things This Instant:

• Keychain Kyle
• Ridiculous phone conversations about the same three topics
• Velvet Elvis, by Rob Bell
• Toph
• Eco-Christianity being on the Rise (ABC is going Green!)
• Hermiander and Pigwidgeon, my fish, NOT being dead.

I read something recently to the effect of: if people were taught more about who they are, they wouldnt have to be taught how to act.

If a person embraces who they are made to be, their fate, their destiny, whathaveyou, then they wont have to be told how to act appropriately, what to do and what not to do. It will come naturally. Hm.

Who are you made to be? Who am I made to be? Who are we all made to be?

God, made us all in His image. We are like Him. We share basic similarities. We are not God, but we have some sort of resemblance to Him. We all have the life, the spirit that He breathed into us. Rob Bell talks about how there is this person that God has created us to be, this destiny if you will, that he has made us to fulfill. He says that anything we do apart from that is sin. He says that God has an incredibly high view of His people, noting that we are refered to as righteous, and holy--that now that we have wrestled with the idea of believing in God, its time to wrestle with the idea that God believes in us. That He loves us just as we are. Right. Now. Like I am. Like You Are. Nothing I have done will change that. Nothing I will do can change that. The question is not whether or not God loves us, but whether or not we accept His love, and chose to love Him in return.

I dont know who I am supposed to be yet. I think its a process. Here's what I do know about myself:

• I know that most of the decisions I make on my own are awful and ruin everything despite my best intentions. Consequently I know that things will work out in the end, and that God takes care of the things that I waste so much time worrying about.
• I know that I love my friends and would do anything for them if they needed, and just because most of them live more than two states away and none of them live within almost an hour from me doesnt mean that I'm alone.
• I know that when I love someone, I love them with everything, and that that love never really leaves.
• I know that when I am married, I will be the best nymphomaniac wife ever, second only perhaps to Jaymin.
• I know that life is in the little things, and not the big events. Its in spaghetti fights, and movie nights, and phone calls, and running like squirrels and letters and road trips.
• I know that I dont know much, and thats a good place to start.

I also know that I like lists. Yay!

As an aside, no Hermiander and Pigwidgeon are not dead, I know you were just as worried as I was about me forgetting to feed them both for the last several days, but they are fine. Thin...but fine. So, yes. No need to worry. I was in a bit of a panic there for a second.

Non e possibile per me cosi.

"The levity of longing that distills each dream inside my head by morning watered down forget on silver stars I wish and wish and wish."--Conor Oberst

Its night time that gets me. Maybe because its dark and quiet, save for the sound of air running from the AC vents. Its when I feel like everything is so much to handle, and start wondering what the point is, and I just feel so low...

Thats another reason why my best work is created at 3am. The sad (literally) truth is that art generally isnt made when one feels happy. Why? Because you dont feel like making it. You are content with your life, and love the people around you when you are happy. But when you are sad, then the art you make, makes you feel like you are connected with something. That you are not alone in how you feel at that moment, that you are sharing in an experience that so many other great artists have had in their lifetimes. It makes you feel less alone.

Maybe Im just melodramatic and sentimental, but for me, art isnt about colors and canvas, its about feeling empathy. Understanding. That as much as I dont understand most people, and as hard as it is for me to relate to almost everyone I know, and as far as my friends are away from me, that for that hour, that instant, I know that there are other people who have lived and are living that have felt just the same way I did, right then.

But back to night.

The bad thing about 3am's is that for most of them, I havent done anything other than check my myspace and facebook 53 times each, and have watched seasons 1 and 2 of Family Guy. That I have this feeling of unproductiveness, of wasted time. I have a guilt for not being creative, not have actually finished just one of the couple dozen paintings I've started, not managed to finish the inkwash of Josh and Jenny's wedding, not drawn anything in my sketchbook in the last 2 weeks...and then it gets bigger than that. Then it seeps into the rest of my life. All the things I should have done and been by now, that I havent done or become.

Enter SuperNikky. She is too good for CrappyNikky to live up to. The previous entry should make more sense now. Remember I was still under the influence (of nyquil) when I wrote it.

I keep thinking about something that happened earlier today. It made me happier than getting into Cedarville, if thats possible. This really worries me--that it made me so happy that is. Its again with the getting attached to things that dont exist. I keep praying that God will take away these feelings if they're not from Him, but it doesnt seem to be working, and Im not sure if I just dont want it to work, or if Im supposed to feel like I do. I know Im being rather cryptic. I apologize, but its hard for me to write specifics. I work best with generalizations. (Jaymin, I will probably either email you or call and tell you about it.)

Anyways.

All that said, I think its time to start up season 3 of Family Guy and try to get some sleep.

SuperNikky faces certain DOOM!

Yesterday night, I did something I havent done in a very very long time...Im not proud of it either.

...I took Nyquil. I drank about half a cup of nyquil around 9 last night, and consequently woke up just a few minutes ago today. I felt awful though. I still feel the wierd lingering effects of the Nyquil, and my head still hurts, but Im slightly better, aside from getting very dizzy every time I stand up.

I took the Nyquil, not to refuel my past Nyquil addiction, but because I felt genuinely sick last night, fever and all. I havent been that kind of sick in a while, and when I am sick I dont take anything for it, except maybe a glass of water and enough vitamin C to more than fill the reccomended daily percentage for the state of California. That wasnt working though.

Hence the delving into the OTC medicine. Im so ashamed. Ok, not too ashamed, but still. I dont like taking that sort of stuff anymore.

To kind of switch subjects (I'm good at doing that...mahahaher...) I was reading some more of Velvet Elvis yesterday during church (I know Im an awful sinner...this will come out later) and the part I was reading was about guilt and shame--and how we carry around this image of what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to act and who we should be. How we carry around all the expectations from what other people want us to be, that we have tremendous guilt and shame because we arent living up that. We have this person that God has created us to be, but its become distorted and is full of all these other...people. We have this image of superwhatever built up in our heads, and its killing us because we cant live up to it.

So I have to kill SuperNikky. I have to take her outback, and end her pathctic existance.

This could take awhile.

Last night I had the strangest dream.

It really bothered me. It was awful.

But as bizzarre and messed up as it was I think it illustrated something to me. Sometimes you have let go of something that makes you happy because it might be killing you. (with sandwhich bags, no less.)

There are somethings in my life that I really enjoy. A good example of this is planning my future wedding (in detail) and naming my future children, and generally attaching myself to things that dont exist yet. Thats not a good thing to do. For instance--if you didnt have a car, and someone gave you mercedes, you would be ecstatic right? Yeah...unless it was black, and you had planned on silver...or you wanted leather seats instead of cloth...or you had a Ferrari in mind. You see?

I know whatever happens I will love my life, and things will be great, but I dont want to taint that by falling in love with the details that might not work out. I dont know if I'm making any sense anymore. But maybe I should try to appreciate today. Right now. Just as it is.

Black Ink on Yellow Paper

Favorite Things As of This Moment (Idea taken from you, Jaymin because I assume that you are the only person reading this...mahahaher...)

• The printout over the desk in the extra Church office that says: "YOU ARE LOVED! THERE IS HOPE!"
• Honey Wheat Bread...well...what it stands for at least.
• Boy Meets Girl, by Joshua Harris
• Cotton Candy Icecream
• Mystery Science Theater 3000, as pathetic as it is.

Last night FUSION was used as practice for our upcoming Family Nite Live productions. Its a cute idea, and whenever you see the promo videos that KidStuf puts on it looks amazing, but I still have some reservations. Mostly because we are a small church that tries to do big church things and bring people in that way, but all that seems to be happening is that we use our same small group of leaders for almost everything and the only people that come to our programs are the people that already go to North Hills, and not even all of them come. Programs just arent really working, and when they do work, they dont pull people in who have never been to church (which I think is the real point), we get people from other churches that werent happy there (and wont be happy here after a few months). I dont know, maybe Im being too critical, but everytime I think about going to church now I get this sinking feeling in my stomach that something isnt right. That something big is missing.

Oh well. Onto other things.

I read Josh Harris' Boy Meets Girl the other day, and in the very begining of it he tells a story about Adam and Eve. He tells it from several years after their getting kicked out of the garden, and they have kids and grandkids and great grand kids and great great super mega ultra fantastic grandkids and so on. In it Adam is walking with one those grandkids--called Elanna, and she is asking about the first time he met Eve, and how it felt, and so on--lots of questions. Here's what Adam says to her and some of the dialogue from that point:

"You ask these questions because you yourself long to meet your soul's match. Dont pretend I dont know you, child. You have [Eve's] eyes. They looked just like yours do now whend she was longing for the Garden. But you miss someone you've never met [or that you have met and are just waiting...hint hint]. You want to run through time and glimpse that first meeting. You want to know how you'll know him. But you need not fret.

"But it doesnt seem fair to me," Elanna said, the words born of frustration tumbling out. "It was so easy for you. The Maker brought Grandmother to you. She was the only woman for you. She was the only woman!"..."But here, now, its so different--so confusing."

"Its not more confusing," he said gently. "it only seems that way. Our meating was 'easy' as you put it, not because we were the only humankind, but because in those sweet days before we disobeyed, we implicitly trusted the Maker to bring what was good."

Yeah, its kind of cheesey or whatever, but I really liked its point. Its not that things are any harder now, but we make them harder. Its not that God doesnt have something good planned, its that we are too impatient to let him bring what is good. Its like what Julie said at FUEL, sometimes the best answer is "wait." But its also the hardest. You are loved! There is hope! I like it. It frees me up from worrying about it and half wishing that there were still arranged marriages (I guess in a sense, there are). So now I can focus on really big issues, like whether to watch Colossus Versus the Headhunters, or Squirm on MST3k. Yeah.

Dont laugh. Thats a serious dillema.

I would like a tarp coated with crushed wheat, a gallon of honey, and a razor.

:)

Lights Will Guide You Home

I think the biggest way that God speaks to me is through books and reading. Maybe its just the act of reading my feelings written by someone else that makes me feel connected to something bigger. It makes me feel less alone. And I have become very alone here. So I've become an insatiable reader...heck, Im even reading FF Bruce's "Paul, an apostle of the heart set free" which sounds like it would be cool and interesting, but no. Its very boring and filled with things I will never remember, dates of battles, and succesions of kings, but its just to be reading something.
Coming back from Yellow Springs the other day, I took a route that I dont normally take coming home--mostly because it takes about twice as long and goes through the poorest most run down neighborhood in Springfield. Its all cracked pavement and rusted cars and bars on windows. There is always someone dressed in the gray dirt and grease of poverty with shifty imporing eyes. Its not far from where I grew up. And sometimes, I recognize the people from volunteering at Rainbow Table. One of the kids there, I guess he's about 18 or so, asked me where I went to school. He remembered me from Middle School.
It disturbs me. Because I am them. I am no better than them, they no better than me, we have the same God given breath of life in us both--but somehow I got lucky.
It bothers me most because I am too afraid to do anything about their situation--as if anything could be done. Let me rephrase that--I am too afraid to get to know them, to love them because it will bring them too close, and I will see how poor I am in comparison. How my pride is cutting me off from God's charity, while I think I am just supposed to give it out because I wear clothes from Buckle and own designer makeup.
I think too often we look at the poor as a problem, instead of people, reducing thier humanity to charity, and when we do that we fail to see our own desperate need for charity. It is easier on our pride to write a check and walk off with warm fuzzies than to love and care for another one of God's creatures.
I've been reading You Shall Know Our Velocity! again, and the main point of it is that the main character came into alot of money, that he didnt feel he deserved. He wants to cheat time and movement by going around the entire world in a week handing out money to people, a lot of money--a life changing amount in most of the countries he and his friend who goes with him visit. An underlying theme in it though, he that he feels cheap. He feels ashamed of giving out this money when he actually does it. He spends a lot of time trying to justify his actions, but always comes back to the conclusion that he is a coward handing out only false hope because he is not brave enough to share any life with them. He dreams about doing it--about walking into their homes and loving them and milking cows and making dinner and sharing in what is really life--but he cant. He is too afraid. So he keeps handing out money and running away from widows because he doesnt want to look in their faces, or have them tell him thank you.
I am a bigger coward than he is. He is at least wresting with this idea, trying to overcome it--I only wrestle with not thinking about it. Im imposing indifference on myself, and I think that is the worst thing there is. I think maybe thats part of what Paul might have been talking about when he is talking about sin, and says that he is the worst of all the sinners. I thikn it might have been because he didnt care about the evil and injustice of the world around him for so long. He watched it, and approved it. He had his own self covered with the law, being a jew among jews, a pharisee, but that he didnt give a damn about anyone else. Its that he was so selfish for so long, and that is the worst sin we can commit. It is also the most common because every evil thing just about can be traced back to "Me".
We need God's charity most of all.

Evening at the beach.

Rain feel lazily, as if uncertain it wanted to leave the sky. The air was thick and tangible, the wooden stairs warm and worn. Her feet moved with the fluid flawlessness of repetition. In her mind a thousand scenarios played over and again, each one hitting her vividly, forcefully. Three more steps and then it was sand, smooth and sinking and sticking to her wet feet. A hundred feet ahead the waves—gray, white, angry—consumed the shore. The sky was on fire now, blood and flame and smoke.
She’d reached the edge of the water, arctic on her skin. Two steps and she fell to her knees throwing off her jacket and starting out for the halved tangerine sun. Seaweed wrapped around her thighs and throat as she swam farther, against the striking salt tides. Four hundred feet from shore, her heart beat fast and sharp. She heard his voice from the beach behind her; held her breath and disappeared.

The only sanctuary is the bathroom: a brief non-fictitious work of fiction.

Chocolate chip saline fell through her fingers while she covered her face. It was silly, she told herself, he doesn’t love me, he doesn’t care. She was nothing special, she thought. Gray rivers streaked her cheeks as she stared steadily in the mirror. It was always like this, she thought. She could only keep the fleeting feeling of contentment so long. I want to be more, different, to change, to demolish myself if I have to, start again—to be good enough for him, she thought…and I hate this. I am a chameleon, a charade, I do not exist, I am not real, I am always someone else, she whispered to her reflection. He can’t love me, because he doesn’t know me, and he wouldnt if he did, she thought.

She fixed her face and took deep breaths until unhappiness’ red residue left her face and eyes. Everything will be ok, she thought, everything will work out…it has to. She smiled at herself in the mirror, was disgusted by the flawlessness of its fabrication, smoothed her hair and skirt and then walked back upstairs, smiling and saying “hello” to everyone she knew.

She heard him laughing as he walked up behind her and lightly hit her on the shoulder. As she turned around he asked where she had been and where they were going to go for lunch. She smiled and said she didn’t care, that anywhere was fine, fantastic. He picked her least favorite restaurant, but it didn’t matter, she laughed and agreed—sounds good, she said. Nothing will change, she thought. He smiled and grabbed his keys, winding through small crowd near the door, leading their way to the parking lot. It was a beautiful day, she thought, warm and blue and perfect for destroying yourself.

Love Me Like The World Is Ending

This is my reoccurring theme. Mostly because it bothers me and I don’t have any real answers to anything about it.

What do you think of when you think of “love”?

…just a question.

I don’t get people in relationships. I don’t get relationships when I’m in them. So, unfortunately and too bad for me, I don’t often get in them.

It all seems so easy…but its not. It’s hard. It’s frustrating before you’re in a relationship because of the uncertainty and awkwardness, and once you are in them because of the selfishness imposed upon them. And that selfishness isn’t even just dating relationships, friendships as well. It seems like more often than not, with loving someone, it’s really only about what we can get out of that other person. Its always that they will make me feel whole, they will make me happy, they will make me less lonely, they will buy me dinner or take me to a movie, or they will do some never-ending list of tasks for me. They will take care of me. Me. It’s relationship masturbation.

Oscar Wilde: “Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine, non sum dignus, should be on the lips and in the hearts of those receiving it.”

I don’t want to spend my whole life worrying about me. I don’t find myself interesting enough for that. I want to think and care about someone else. I want that someone else to worry about me. It doesn’t work if someone loves you as much as you love you. Self-esteem and worth are important (if you don’t feel worthy of love, how can you give or receive it?), but self-obsession has been robbing so many people of knowing real love.

Conor Oberst: “You think about yourself too much and you ruin who you love.”

It always takes something really awful for someone to appreciate what they have, or worst-case scenario, had. It does for me, at least, but I’m also fairly certain that I have some deep-rooted subconscious masochistic tendencies. But what if we actually appreciated people while they don’t hate us for something stupid and selfish we’ve done? That would be revolutionary. I love idealism. It gives me warm fuzzies. I am going to use it while I still have it.

I guess, you just do what you know how to do, or when the fabled “right” person comes along you don’t care about yourself so much. I don’t know. It’s all a little hard for me to believe. The movies have ruined it, because life is nothing like them. And, in lots of ways, it should be.

It would have been better with you here.

"I know about art and love if only because I long for it with every fiber of my being."

Tonight had one of those sunsets that you just want to disappear into. To melt in. All burning orange and pink—the kind you cant help but stare at even though you are fairly certain that you are burning your retinas out and at the very least will need a different contact prescription afterwards. It was worth it though. I thought about taking a picture, but it wouldn’t have done justice. And a painting would seem cheap.

Every night, there is this amazing work of art, this indescribable Technicolor masterpiece above our heads, and how often do we take the time to look up? I know I don’t often enough. I heard it said (in a Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movie…) that it is better to see one painting and really see it, than to go by a thousand in a blur. This is what my life has become. A blur. The details are gone, the images distorted and warped, I have made myself think that I am too busy to stop. But I am busy with the most pointless of things. I am busy with checking my email and drinking juicebags and watching reruns of The Office. You know, really important things.

I think I am going to try to stop every now and then and just look around some more. I used to read outside a lot, and go for walks around Clayton to feed the ugly ducks Jenny and I named that look like some badly beaten burn patients but acted like dogs—wagging their tail feathers when they saw you and eating from your hand. Ethel was such a ho, leaving Frank like she did. Soon I wont have long to be outside here, it will be winter, and that disheartening fact has gotten me thinking about it I suppose.

I went over to Yellow Springs yesterday and bought myself a juice and an orange and sat in the middle of Kings Yard and just was. I watched the hippies and the would-be hippies, and the old women and kids carrying skateboards walk by. Some of them said hello. That’s my favorite thing about that town. There is always someone willing to talk to you. It was good. It was sort of a recharge. I’ve been feeling kind of down lately.

I finished Blue Like Jazz today, and in it Donald Miller is talking about communities, and people. He tells the story of how he lived in the woods with a bunch of hippie liberals and loved it. He felt more loved and accepted there than anywhere else—than in his church. It was because they just loved him as he was, as a person, regardless of what he believed or thought or did. But more often than not the Church only loves people who agree with them. It’s (our) love is more often conditional than unconditional. It (we) only loves people if they don’t doubt, if they don’t question, if they behave properly and adhere to a set of unwritten standards that it (we) holds them to. Love is like money; it is given to those we deem worthy, but withheld from those who we don’t.

I do that. When I read about that it hit me. It is one of those things that we all live with and subconsciously know exits but never really realize—never think about. Or maybe that was just me. I don’t like that I do that. I don’t like that I also know what he’s talking about when he says he enjoys being around the people that the Church has typically condemned or had some underlying hostility towards better than being around “church people”. Its sad, its unfortunate, we are not doing our job as Christians, we are not living love.

How do we change that?

How do I change that in myself?

I think I am going to start by liking me. I have thought about this before, I even did a little devotion on it I believe, but it was reaffirmed while reading that book. I am going to start with not hating myself. The Bible says to love your neighbor like yourself, but I don’t really love myself, and I hardly like myself most of the time, so how can I love anyone else, I mean, really? I cant. So that’s where I begin. Kind of cheesy sounding I know, but I think it just might work.

Just some thoughts that have been in my head today.

The Quest For Perpetual Joy Continues.

“To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” –Oscar Wilde


Whoever says that being a Christian washes all your problems away, and makes you feel instantly new, and happy and joyful is full of shit.
I once wrote this:
I try really hard. I try really hard to be happy, and to be ok with everything—with how things are and are going. I want to be. I really do. I have been succeeding more and more. I love my friends, and my life, and most things about it. But sometimes, something in me gives, and its like I cant handle any of it anymore. I break and I have to let off the happiness and no matter how good things are going…I fall to pieces. For a time I feel like I cant deal with doing anything anymore.

I still feel like that from time to time, I still feel lonely, and sad, and disconnected. Does this mean that I don’t love Jesus, or that God doesn’t care about me?

Far from.

I truly believe, as much as it sucks, that the greatest gains come from the worst times and the awful feelings in your life.

I have spent the past two years at a Bible College, and had it mean nothing to me while I was there. To me the worst most awful shameful embarrassing things I’ve done in my life, I did while at Bible College. I am not at all now who I was then, but I remember how it was. How it felt, and those feelings still come rushing back with intense force, vivid, and real. I’ve always had issues with just being happy. With just being ok being me. I’m working through them slowly.

I think God uses those things though, he uses the crap that’s in our lives—our shame, and doubts, and fears, and everything—to make us into better people, to turn us into something better in the end. I’m not proud of all the things Ive done, but I realize that they are important, they taught me something, they are a part of who I was, and who I will become.

Being a Christian isn’t an easy out for super hyper happy mega fun time. But there is hope. There is always hope, and that is the real point.

Excurse at 2am.

Its 1:39 in the morning and I just got back from Josh and Jen's. It's a long drive from there, but well worth it, even though I wish they would go ahead and invent the teleporter already. I'm ready for it. It's a pretty creepy drive, all cornfields and small towns, and granaries and railroad tracks. Everything is black and quiet, and feels like the instant in a movie before a vampire swoops down and blood gushes everywhere. Or just before the psychotic serial killer's knife gleams in the rear view mirror. That's what I get to think about on drives home from Troy.
Maybe that's why I always end up listening to the most bizarre stuff on the radio. This is the only time I listen to the actual radio, at 1am on the way back from Troy. I listen to Jeff Daniels, and Howie Day, and Foreigner, and Prince, and sing—oh the singing! Singing always makes everyone feel better, although it did give me a sore throat to accompany my headache.
Kyle called right while we were talking about him, around midnight. Funny. Speak of the Kyle, and he shall call you from 500 miles away.
Yesterday, or I suppose now it was two days ago, was my birthday type event. It went well, just had my grandparents over. I like it like that though; I get weird when there are lots of people sitting in a semi-circle watching me open gifts, like some sort of birthday spectacle. Its an awkward disliked situation for me. I never know how to react; I would much rather not get any gifts at all, or just open them all in private later, and thank everyone individually or whatnot.
It makes them happy, though, to see the look on your face, I guess. But it just makes me uncomfortable, I don't know why. It's my least favorite part about birthdays, oddly enough. Mine was good though. I'm 20 now; there is no longer a "teen" in my age title. I think I'm ok with that.

Im just uncertain. Habitually uncertain. Chronic self-doubt. I dont know what to do, ever. Life isnt getting any clearer, if anything its getting worse. I was more sure about the future at 15 than I am now. I think Im losing hope. I've worked all summer at the church and it was great, I loved it (even though I have never been so poor in my life, and now I have to cut most of it out so I can get some sort of job so I have gas money to get to the Church), but there is something more, something missing. I want to work for God, I want to live passionately, dangerously, whole heartedly following Jesus, but I dont know how or where to begin. I dont want to do it alone either. I cant. 
I know this is a time when I am supposed to be making myself better, 
becoming who I am supposed to be. 
Its just hard when you feel like you are completely alone in everything 
almost all the time. 
The cornfields are not much for company, or maybe thats just me. 
It all just seems so daunting.  Its all so frustrating. It should be so simple.


I'm going to bed.

January As Usual- A work in progress.

This is yet unfinished. I started it in January, of course, while still miserably alone in my Atlanta apartment. Now Im in a house in Ohio. Not much has changed. Its cheap, and trite, and disgustingly cliche, but heregoes.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”—Oscar Wilde.



January as usual, he thought. January is never really an extraordinary month. After the optimism of New Years wears off, which is generally a few days, or the next morning depending on what he had been doing or how much he had drank--January left him with the scurf of last years emotions piled on his heavy heart. No, he thought, January was never a good month. He walked slowly, deliberately tracing his steps through the snow in the staggered pattern she left just ahead of him. She was pretty, he thought. She is not much more than that, he thought. He told himself she was all he had, and pushed the uncertainty into its place in the back of his mind. He was always so organized.
Past the snowy windows in the warm lit homes, he was following her back to her apartment on the east side. She was talking now, she was always talking and laughing and smiling and finding the good in things. That’s why she was with him, he thought. She can find the good in anything. He heard the vague semblance of a question through the fog of his mind, and nodded "yes" without knowing what he had agreed to. It didn’t matter. She would remind him of it later, with the smile, and with the laugh. Sometimes he hated that laugh.
They were at the iced concrete steps of her apartment now. It was a brick building, cracking and old with a peeling red painted door. The Christmas wreath was still up and wouldn’t be taken down until after spring. She never thought of these things as he did. That’s why they were perfect for each other, she had said. He kissed her goodnight on her cold flushed cheek and she made plans for their lunch tomorrow. He had not intended eating lunch. He never really ever intended to eat, and took to losing weight whenever she went out of town. He never left town.
After the door shut with a slight frozen groan, he turned and started towards the north end of the city; tightening the scarf she had given him around his throat and passing a wall that had “My hand thinks I’m an artist but my heart knows I’m a poet” spray painted amidst the gang graffiti. He did not yet feel like going home. The building lights flickered on, blotchily illuminating the streets as the sky grayed and darkened. It got dark so early now he often heard people complaining of being tired at seven o’clock. He was always tired, but he never slept. She had made him go to the doctor for it once a few years ago and he got a little bottle full of big pills to take. He told her that they helped, but he still hadn’t broken the seal.
Snowflakes sailed lazily to the ground around him as he opened the door to the small pub that he liked to go to without her. The warm rush of heated air tinged with cigarette smoke and the stench of cheap perfume that greeted him felt like home. He unraveled the scarf that was now damp and sticky from the cold sweat that comes from freezing all winter and hung it up with his jacked on the dirty coat rack near the door. He sank into the padded vinyl barstool and a moment later was delivered a drink without ever having said a word.
The bartender was a wide round woman, though not unpretty. She had very long straight dark hair and a voice as smooth as her skin. He liked just listening to her, and if he smiled enough, and laughed every so often she would talk the whole night. She would talk about her son, and how proud she was of his grades in school, of her freshly painted apartment, and of her mother who meant well but never let her be her own person. People are never just them, they are always tainted, he thought, they always belong to someone, or something. Everyone is a slave to some vice or guilt, or worse to some virtue or well meaning intention.
It was long past midnight and the neon signs had blurred before they went out. He stepped out into the freezing street once again and began home. He lived two blocks away, but in the iced needle air it felt like miles. Someone was behind him but he didn’t know who she was. He never knew who she was, and he liked it that way. Tonight she had red lips and warm hands and laughed far too much—god, was everything that funny?
They made it to his apartment and he opened the door without looking for the keys. He never locked the door; if people wanted to steal things, then by all means, take them, he had said. It was cold and stark in the fluorescent lighting of the hall as they fumbled through the kitchen and into the bedroom. He fell backwards onto the bed and knocked over a cup full of cold week old coffee that was sitting on the nightstand, and heard her laugh. Then the lights went out.
The next morning he woke up to the sound of garbage trucks in the alley beneath him. There was frost on the window, making the pale, sick light that came through it even grayer. Everything was gray. There was a note sitting on his dresser that smelled like the alcohol and cheap perfume of the pub, he threw it out without opening it. The bathroom tiles made a soft sound when the skin of his feet met their surface, stopping at the sink. The mirror was dusty and speckled with flecks of toothpaste, but through it he could still see his reflection. He was thin and pale, almost gaunt and his eyes matched the fog outside in color and haziness. He splashed water on his face from the tap and stepped into a pair of last week’s dirty jeans.
He made his way down to the café that she had arranged to meet him for their lunch. He was early this time, a rare occurrence. He didn’t like being early to anything because that meant sitting alone and awkward listening to the petty selfish gossip of everyone around. No one ever talks about anything important; no one ever talks of anything of substance or meaning. No one ever has any substance or meaning. Nothing does, he thought. There is no truth; there is no reality or meaning or purpose. There is only me, he thought. Hubristic thoughts are always so charming.
She smiled and pulled up her wooden chair across from his. The sound of the wood scraping on the marble floor made his skin crawl. The waiter was a short, pear shaped man, with red cheeks and red hair, and a smile plastered with condescending politeness across his face. The waiter took their drink orders, just a glass of water for me please, she said, no, no lemon, and cup of black coffee and a coke for him. She said he looked like he needed the coffee, she said he looked a mess. She was always trying to take care of him, always trying to make him take care of himself. He managed to choke about half of the inky dark coffee down just to make her stop telling him how much he looked like he needed it. He lost count of how many times she said that phrase.
She was talking happily now, excited about some new trifle that would be the center of everything she did or breathed for the next few days. It was hard to focus on her through the static of sound, the mangled mixture of words and stories from the other tables and the other people in the café. There were always so many people, saying so many things, telling so many stories, prostituting so many words, and cheapening them. Sometimes he felt like he could see them materialize, big balloon letters hovering momentarily over everyone’s head, watch them floating in the air, and then vanish. Popped by a movement of wind.
She was looking at him with great blue imploring eyes, using that strained, false sounding voice when she asked him if he was paying attention. Of course. Of course he was paying attention, he said, and vomited a few of the words he had caught back to her while stabbing the ice in his empty glass. She smiled, and laughed that laugh, and went on talking about her obese cat, or her aunt’s salon, or some other tedious topic of no real importance. He smiled, and laughed, and agreed, and she was happy. She was almost always happy.
Out of the picture window, he could see everyone hunched over, bundled up, running to get inside from the cold that was cutting their noses and fingers. They all had this twisted look on their faces, like looking through a kaleidoscope, like they had all eaten something sour. A little boy in a blue coat and red hat held his mothers hand and caught snowflakes with the other. A man in a long tan trench coat with a briefcase muttered anxiously into a cell phone. A woman with long hair tucked under her pink picoted toboggan walked quickly with a man in a black pea coat next to her. There are so many people, but there is no one. He is always alone, he thought.
He got the check and signed his name in small sloppy scrawl, and held her mittened hand as they stepped to the street. He was not listening. There was no reason to ever listen to her; she always said something more than once. Everything she thought was a rerun. A quotation. He looked into the café through the picture window and saw all the people he had just been surrounded by. The loud woman with basketball breasts and two small children was in the corner, the pale man with the goatee and coffee in the booth. He loved them, because he did not know them—because they were perfect, and pure. They laughed, and made love, and played on swing sets, and read poetry. They had warm homes with warm friends and families, and—she was hitting his arm and yelling his name—Nick! You aren’t even listening, she said. In the strained odd voice that attempts to hide the truth in a joke she said that he never cared about what she was saying. She said that sometimes she wondered why she even bothered with him. Sometimes he wished she wouldn’t, he thought.
It was hours later and he was underwater. Looking up through the inch and a half of pellucid water above his eyes in the bathtub everything was recognizable but distorted. The showerhead, the curtains, the window facing the apartment complex across the street—all changed, misshapen, warped. This is life, he thought, it’s looking through water.
Still dripping, the sick blue glow of the television in the next room hit the side of his face as he sat at the plastic kitchen table. He was writing on a yellow legal pad with a blue pen trying to transfer this feeling from inside of him to the page. To purge himself of it. He felt like he was being turned inside out—his stomach twisting, tying, spinning, nauseous. Beside him the phone was off the hook, screaming with its dull hum. “I don’t love her” was written three times in hard, dark marks on the paper, like the harder he wrote the more real and convincing it would become.
The icicled cars and buses had pushed through the snow behind her. She was still smiling after saying, “I love you” at her doorstep. He was tired, and he hadn’t thought. He had told her she meant nothing to him. She hadn’t heard what he had said. He let go of her hand and turned to face her. The smile on her face had melted, like the snowflakes in her hair.
In his kitchen the refrigerator hummed, only echoing the silence. She hadn’t said anything. Nothing. The cars continued on the street, and people kept walking by, but she was quiet. The look in her watery eyes was haunting. This is why people break up through impersonal means, through phone or email he thought, because it’s easy, because you don’t have to see them hurt and love them again, if just for that moment. Because you are free while they collapse.
The reality of what he had said, what he had done hit him with real intensity and force. He thought the air had left his lungs and couldn’t breathe; he was being torn apart from the inside. But this is what he needed, he told himself. This is what he wanted. She blinked away the tears that ran warm down her cold face. He felt like that instant might have been the definition of him; his whole purpose was to just to have existed in that moment. He wished he could take that instant and freeze it—to stop that second and have it preserved, perfect and pristine for all time. To be able to step away, and look at everything that was happening right then, to absorb it all, to remember every detail, to really live in that one moment and remember exactly how he felt forever.
Every second was so pure, so painful, that they each cut into him—the tragic look on her face, the snow that fell on her hair, and the traffic that slid past on the iced road. I am heartless, he thought. I do not exist, there is no me, he thought, there is only her, and what she makes of me.
But it was gone. She had turned and locked the red painted door to her apartment, leaving him standing, inches away from the Christmas wreath.

We are afraid, and it's easy.

Its 4:30 am and I can’t sleep. I’ve spent the last several hours in that state of hazy exhaustion where everything at least in part, feels surreal and intangible. At night everything glows blue. I have been reading the first 50 pages of Catcher in The Rye and have fallen madly in love with Holden Caulfield, however hubristic and humble, however eloquent and vulgar, and honest and fake and paradoxical—or what have you, as his character is. He is more real that some people I know. Have you ever noticed that? How ashamed people are to be themselves? How embarrassed we’ve all become at feeling, or loving, or being angry? I think about it a lot. We have all stifled ourselves, put ourselves on mute and lost the remote control in the couch—beside a shaker of garlic salt—which I found mysteriously in our couch earlier—it smells something awful. We are uncomfortable just being us, and feeling like we do. Oscar Wilde wrote that “man is least himself when he talks in his own person, give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” That’s not true for us. Even our masks lie.

Why? Why do we waste so much life killing ourselves?
Because we are afraid, and its easy.
I was reading with a Mag-Light over my shoulder. A powdered moth flew right into it, right by my face, not an inch away. I read until my eyes felt like they do now, burning red dry sandpaper blinking. That’s one of the best feelings on Earth. Reading until you feel like you might go blind from all the pages and the ink. Until you want to cry, or your eyes weep for themselves. I had forgotten that feeling until this summer. I quit reading while I was at ABC—except for a few books.
I killed that moth. It’s a sand colored squish on a napkin in my waste paper basket, 3 and one half feet away from me, next to a lopsided pile of magazines that are being used to press a big yellow lily, that died naturally. I always keep flowers. I have several dried roses hanging upside down in my closet, and a few in vase that were from my great-grandmother’s funeral. They’re all quite morbid really. Maybe I will throw them all out. I won’t bet on it though, I’m much too sentimental for that. That’s one of the things wrong with me. That and I’m easily influenced on what I read, and it reflects itself in everything I think. Amongst others.
There is a light shining from the hallway—down the stairs, pale and pointless. It has been bothering me all night, obnoxious from the corner of my eye. I should turn it off. I won’t. I’ve had the same song stuck in my head all day, on repeat, over and over again. It gives me a headache. At least its not the Dancing Kitty Cat song or Phoebe Buffet’s Shower Song this time. That was awful. Entertaining, but horrid.
If I go to sleep now I will get approximately 2 and a half hours of sleep. I have set my alarm for 7:30, a ridiculous time. I am wondering what the point of that would be. I’m so tired though, I just cant sleep. Maybe I should get some pills for this again. No, that would be too…too…something. Something I don’t want to be or do. I will find a word for that later. Its constantly changing.
The really sick thing is, that I feel bad for killing that moth. That sick anxious turning feeling in my stomach when I think about it. I hate that.