A Spoonful Weighs a Ton

"Those who make the worst use of their time are
the first to complain of its brevity"

- Le Bruyere, Characters

So.

Three months haven't passed, and I'm blogging again. God forbid this ever come a regular thing, that would be like...a real blog!

I know!

I KNOW!

Honestly I really do have a purpose.

A couple of oddly interesting things happened this past week. Firstly, I seemed to actually communicate with a certain individual *ahem* mark *ahemcoughhack* whom I just never seem to be able to communicate with these days. Letters would fly between the wires, questions asked, but rarely answered. But without asking, I received a wonderous response, making me look forward to fall a little bit more and really cut back financially wherever I can. All it took was a little give on my part. Well a lot of reflection, and a give in attempting to control the uncontrollable. It seems to go without saying I'm as stubborn as three day old baguettes.

Really though, I think I'm ready to go back to that place there. Unlike the thrusting reentry into the USA, I have ideas. I have hope for something else than what is turning into the mundane and ritual. We'll see. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket or something quirky and not really insiteful like that, right?

I'm oddly enjoying writing a little bit more, and I've found it and other things to be oddly calming. So I decided to change my blog a bit. Template number four for this budding blossom of a bloggity nook, and finally a picture (albeit the absolute worst I could find) to go along with all nine of the languages you might be able to read my blog in. My writing looks pretty in Korean!

I haven't a clue if it actually makes any sense but sure, play with the buttons in the upper right corner and have a ball.

Working on a few things here personally though. One of which was really being able to ask questions of people without seeing them. Not one who readily flung their lives into a mad phone text flurry the minute they hit the market; I am a hiding texter. I lurked and hovered. Adding to that---the person I was on IM was a completely different person than who I really was in person. The merging of the two created an overliterate long-winded gobble. I was trying hard to ask questions with weight without making it seem like these are little blippy boxes on a screen. Yet recently It's just been different. I realized I can't change the world with the text message; more likely that I can't make someone like me either. It can really be great to hear real news from people though.

Acceptance of this was an attempt to throw away surface conversation, but without it how would I be able to be the chatty barista I've caught myself being recently?

I guess it helps to not be in control all the time, and just let things flow. Now about that whole authority issue...we'll get to that soon!

Random bit. I watch Grey's Anatomy religiously by the way, and am continually impressed with the filming production on that show. That pass in the hall between Denny and Izzy was amazingly shot and really captured the emotion. I was slightly less impressed with this recent arc, although it was nicely cut into chunks to keep drawing me in and almost caring about Meredith. It helps that she finally slapped off her wishy wash attitude and confronted her mother. So dark, so twisty.

I Turn My Camera On

Sometimes things just have to come down

“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing;
it also depends on what kind of a person you are”
- C.S. Lewis

Truth be told. I've been thinking...

...and you all know what happens when I THINK.

There are few things in this world that truly get me going. By nature I am as lazy a being as one could expect from a twenty something aimless undergrad; by nature I have no motive. Which is for the longest time I thought was true. Then presented before my eyes were millisecond long blips of hope.

Simply Ideas. In and out with barely a spark of reflection. Almost as if something, somewhere was trying to just tell me something; usually something I know, have always known, and just really needed a nudge in some direction. So one day at a time, I try to fight nature. I thought I couldn't get a job, I got a job. I thought I couldn't get up in the morning to work those five o'clock opens, I haven't missed one yet. For some unknown reason though, when it comes to seeing the light in any given situation---I seem to only see it in everyone else. I don't expect anything from me. Keep with me, I do have a point.

So what do I do when I find something a little maddeningly enjoyable. I think I can't keep up. I make excuse after excuse. And then not surprisingly, I fall behind. It's my vicious cycle of life self destruction, and this unusually selective warpath knows right where to hit me. Despite this, I'm going to give some things I left behind another chance. Heck I even looked things up in the BIBLE!

"But I have raised you up ^[a] for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth. "

Exodus 9:16

So yeah. I still have a point.

This past may I bought a camera.

Now I had almost all but given up on art but I felt the need for a creative output. My photos started off crappy, and I didn't really have much faith in them. This camera is my first real camera. I picked it out and I bought. Since then, I tried a little harder. Now they are just a little bit less crappy. Who knows! Maybe in the future I would consider them subpar (as I am my own worse critic). The point being when I turn my camera on, something in me is slowly changing for a positive direction. The photos that go along with every entry were always taken by me. Crappy or not, I couldn't bare to use someone else's work alongside my dribble, changing their intention---so I had to take action. If I can't use something I get, then something had to be created. I even urge you to take a look. It's been a slow learning process, but it's an awe-inspiring revelation when it something just clicks---quite literally.

Recently though, it seems just a pleasure to learn about anything. I still want to know when I do a good job. I want to know how to take that compliment, but more importantly I want to know when I don't. I want those failures, and missed chances. They are becoming less of a burden and more of a repurposed force. I was directed back to a church that I felt slightly burned on. Big, showy, flashing lights, and overinflated egos preaching to hundreds of hormonal teen christianese shells. Well since I've been gone, the old pastor has moved on. They have a few less lights, and a few less bodies...but they seem to want that connection now. It's like maybe the spirit is coming back to them after they turned off some of those shiny bright lights. Horrid, Blasphemous, insect comparisons aside---I think I can understand them a little now. I even went so far as to join a life group.

Now if only we could do something constructive, despite how fun monopoly and Wii Sports can be in a group setting.

One day at a time, right?

Word of the Moment.

Repurpose (re-pur'pes)tr.v.
re·pur·posed, re·pur·pos·ing, re·pur·pos·es To use or convert for use in another format or product: repurposed the book as a compact disk

That Was the Worst Christmas Ever! - Part II

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

-Robert McCloskey

I distinctly remember baking and rushing my last batch of christmas cookies, god knows they tasted awful.

Somewhere someone told me that with anything you create, your emotions can determine the outcome; this was the case. Somehow I managed to make them wrong (normally taking ten minutes they took 30 just to set up). Internally I was thinking of just going out on a good note, but in reality I was just trying to stretch my time and stay there---just squeezing in that last ounce of the atmosphere I was about to leave behind. I just wanted to stay.

The ride to the airport was quiet, on my front at least, but everyone else seemed to have something to say. They had their questions, stifled with an unabashedly akward silence. All the while I was just trying to hold back from crying, something I had done quite the fair share of in the few days I had between the announcement I wasn't ready to attend out reach and the flight date home. We said our goodbyes, and like most good Christian people we hugged. Out of All of the hugs in my life, those hugs lasted just a little bit longer than usual; as if to say: ‘I’m sorry’, ‘Don’t give up’, and a thousand other forms of what is the one-two punch of guilt and regret.

I remember when they first told me that I was not going to go. I looked like a patient about to be forced into a psych ward---minus the straight-jacket. Flailing aimlessly, angrily screeching; something in me was dying...and then I crashed. I couldn’t handle them telling me that, and I was digressing into my most basic animal instincts. I was fighting it both inside and out, feeling as if an unbearable poison was forcing its way through my veins, paralyzing all rational thought. Over the next few days I mellowed, or more so I was tranquilized by irrational fear.

I was going home a failure, a then incomplete mess. Standing in front of me was the daunting fact that everything, and I mean everything I had planned for in the next months was going by the wayside. I was returning to Ohio---but I wasn’t supposed to be back yet. I was seeing my family---who weren’t expecting me until March. I was turning twenty and thrust into “Happy Holidays” mode, but I honestly wasn’t happy. I was pushed back into my life, my reality, questioning everything that had happened in the previous months. I was home. The sad part though is really just how hard people tried to make me happy. It was like trying to warm over a slab of marble. Something in me had felt like it died, and I was regressing into the stages of grief; or maybe it was a good grief I just don’t know.

"This is what I'm thinking, this is my point."

When I got home, when I decided I wanted to be a little better than I was last year, I took off like a rocket. This past year had a definite direction to it. Despite being severely depressed for a majority of it I was a force of movement. A week into it I had a job, that same week I had two, and then I just took off. I wanted something and I wanted control over it. There were times this past year where I was ridiculously angry. I tried not once but twice to retry a discipleship training school. People would say they were proud of me, but I knew that it wasn’t my time yet. The first time was in October, I had hoped and prayed for a school, finally finding one that just screamed me. It was in Montreal, and I was enchanted by the idea of attending a working internship of a school. It was my first big rejection in a while, but they where honest---they felt they couldn't help me. So I talked to Mark, which took forever. Only to hear from Hilary in a Newsletter the school I wanted to attend was canceled. I almost applied to another school, they actually called me three times, but I didn't go. Looking at my situation left me a little troubled differencing reality and determination, holding on to an archaic tendency to move in that fixed direction. Something about the fixation to leave a town combined with the impatience of being stuck in a town really throws you.

It’s weird looking back at mistakes made, because initially I would have just dwelled on not being able to correct them---but now? Now I have this innate want to hold onto my mistakes, to actually…learn from them. I know now that I want to learn, I desire to learn. That’s probably the healthiest habit I’ve ever picked up in my life. So as the one year mark came around I was feeling just a little bit of a failure. I was finishing up a semester, and slightly worried of failing. I was at one job for the longest period I’ve ever been in my life, and slightly worried of being fired. Was anything really wrong? No! Nothing big, I just didn’t want to be at this point at this time. I wanted things to work out slightly differently. I was quite literrally worried because I really had nothing to worry about, go figure.

So I procrastinated a little...then a little more...then a lot until today really.

So what has happened since---November?

I went on vacation, a real honest to god vacation with beaches, gelato and everything! It wasn't quite wonderful, but it was something. Especially our last meal---easily the most gourmet meal I ever had (and I picked it). I learned a bit about Gullah. I've watched fifty Korean movies (eight Japaneses, two chinese and one soap opera too). I survived the three month mark at my job, and now the six month mark. This is a landmark of commitment. I stayed home...so far. I catered the deserts for my work Christmas party. I went to North Carolina, and realized Durham has a street that looks like Commercial Drive. I saw my family again, they're all a little older---yet exactly the same. Christmas came, Christmas went, and then I turned twenty-one. Heck I went out and bought a SINGLE beer. It was bitey, with hints of coffee and the color of Guinness. I passed with a B, and signed up for two more classes. I realized I liked photos, and even started a page for them. I watched an entire movie in a theater without talking, and with smuggled cheesecake. I made Sugar cookies from scratch; gingersnaps too. I also chased seagulls.

So here I am. A little over one year later, a little bit older, and not so much the wiser but all the more eager to try a little more. What have I learned...well. God is slow. Painfully slow. In perfect conjuction, I'm obnoxiously impatient.

So he continues to push my patience just a little bit more. Maybe I'll see some of you in September?