Honesty is a policy...

You've been warned. I don't want however reads this to think that I am this deeply depressed person, but I need an outlet again. Something. So here's a piece of it all.

A lot has happened. I have changed, my life has changed. I have seen things that I will never forget, even if I try. I have seen things that I will not forget, because I can't let myself. You know, the other day I was just fighting it out with my mom. Shouting and fighting because I didn't know what to do. These past few months have been harder on me than I could ever imagine. I have gone from extreme to extreme, and no one would be expected to remain healthy under that strain.

I was shouting, and fighting...because I did not know what to do, or if I could even do anything. Because it feels like every time I come home, or every time I leave I am on my own. It feels like I am left behind and forgotten and that is something damn hard to deal with. I try to stay in contact with people, but it seems like it is all too little too late. I have had so many restarts, do overs, second chances, and I have burned so many people in my destructive path. I should be in therapy, some sort of therapy somewhere with someone, but more importantly I should be going back to god on this. Instead I'm here. I'm writing it out just to make it that much more tangible, so it exists somewhere outside of my inner turmoil. Which there is a lot of, I'll have you know. I have serious issues, that when I bring up stop people in their tracks. People worry that I will continue to break beyond repair. People worry about me. Now that is just unexpected. I have things that I am just going to have to deal with head on, I have people. These people want to see me stay changed. They don't want me to regress into a hole. I have a savior, and he is watching out for me.

I took this picture in Vancouver. It's a simple self explanatory picture, and probably one of my favorites. Fire, is one thing that forces change. It burns and manipulates whatever it touches until it is otherwise unrecognizable. Instant change. You can't hide what it does either. A lot of times you have to start over after a fire. It does what so many of us want to do, but can't find the will---all without a second thought. Sometimes though things just have to change, we don't want change, we don't think we can handle change but life moves on with or without us. Life burns us, saves us, helps us. So here I am, changing, being changed and I would like to share my changed life just a little more.

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?

Handle With Care

"Why Am I afraid to dance, I who love music and
ryhthm and grace and song and laughter?
Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the
beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth
and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to Love, I who love love?"

Eugene O'neil
The Great God Brown

Commercial Drive. Did anyone ever know how much I hated this place? How much I despised and loathed all of it. You knew I loved it, but did you really know that I hated it more than any other place in the earth. Heck, I thought I was done with it. It was like an old photograph, in that it found it's beauty in it's character and grime; It's life in it's nooks and crannies and down the alleys you never should go. The sky was beautiful, hell...the people were all gorgeous. All the while something so ugly, so hideous had tainted my own love for Vancouver. Now before I go any further I must say that I really do love this city, more than any I've been to...now continuing.

My crappy pride. My terrible evil inner self that caused me to be such a bratty child, all the while I would attempt to present myself as calm and composed. Have you ever seen a bratty child try to act grown up? It's a little cute and well-intentioned but all the while a ridiculous scene that never ends with maturity. I hated that I was not a good person there. I hate that some have considered me to be abusively angry and at times for no reason I would just be so mad, so mad. I know it seems silly, but I really can be that mad...at myself. You see it's all because of pride that I forget things that I love. I love to watch life happen, yet I'm afraid to live it. I love love, yet I fear and hide from it more than anything or anyone I know. I just didn't understand the concept of love.

So recently, I went back to something else biblical I didn't quite understand. The severity of the cross, so I listened to one of the most graphic, insensitive, vile, no mercy sermon on it. I loved it. It was by a speaker named mark driscoll, and he delivered this speech at the reform and resurge conference in Seattle this past august. I think because all of my life the cross was this fluffy happy symbol churches gave to you. It was on all bibles, and ornate necklaces but I never really understood it. I never understood just how much pain he had to go through. Looking back, it forces me to see myself as just how selfish I'd been. So I started reading Luke, again, and this time I'm working through it slowly but surely. I've never really read the bible through a whole chapter so bare with me, this is new.



I've learned something though, if not it was drilled into head by my mom, my family, my friends, my job, my own brain---which overworks every stinking thing. As much as I hate this terrible evil crappy place known as Ohio, if god wants me here...that's where I'll be. Where we have the coldest winters, and the hottest summers. Where drinking and watching men fight to the death uniformly over a small bundle of mess wrapped in a sheeth of rubber is the most popular form of entertainment, and the fumes of an old factory makes you dizzy with anger at the polution we cause. I hate rubber town so much, that if god really wants me to stay here, than that will have to do. Heck if God wanted me to spend the rest of my life in an amazing city, or a polar ice cap, or even the dodgy side of london in the back alleys---SO BE IT.

Because I would hate it more if I was somewhere I wasn't supposed to be. In this spirit of travel...I applied for another school. This time you may have heard of it, although I hear they're getting a new building and moving a little down the road; you might have passed them at some point walking through Vancouver. They would walk the streets wearing funny aprons and spouting silly promises, or better yet, I think you've tried their soap. Yes, my friends I have applied to that fun city you all know I hate.

More specifically I talked to Mark, which took a lot out of me. I haven't written a blog about it, simply because I wasn't sure. I think I'm sure. I've tried to apply for other schools because I just wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. Drats though to that crappy mean bully of a god who wants me to go somewhere specific, who pushed me in the direction of a city I had never heard of in the first place (in a country with play money none the less). Then to top it all of he sends me back to Ohio, because I wasn't ready yet. Darn him, but I think he knows what he's doing. I'm trying here, to see the plus side to it all. Ohio isn't a terrible place, I think people even move here because it isn't. We have great produce, and culture in our cities. We have an abundance of resources to dabble in, and places to create our dreams. Heck, Akron invented Purell, Instant Oatmeal, the first breakfast cereal, and the first graded school system among others. Alchoholics Anonymous originated here! That means Ohio was the first group of people to try and get help, so maybe it is a place for the refugees of life. Come and deal with your problems, before moving on and such.

Then after the first time I tried to post this message I get a post card from someone in San Fransisco, suggesting I apply to their January DTS. Go Figure. Like I really need anymore help second guessing myself, come on. Honestly! HONESTLY, GOD---you bully!

I want this Vancouver school to happen, key words though: I want. If it doesn't happen, I will wait, because I'm the only one who can make myself wait. A few things need some prayer though, first---It will need more students for a school in January (which they're are currently one other than me that I know of in both Vancouver and San Francisco) and secondly I will have to pull the funds and make it happen. I need God's help in this though, because I just can't have someone donating me a 1000 dollars at the last minute despite they're good intentions when it isn't supposed to happen. It's like the first picture I took in this post, where the statue is holding on to the water and it's just slipping through her hands. You don't try to grab water. You can help it a little though, to get where it needs to go. God will have to make it happen, and I've give that up to him. I'm just going to wait at the stop sign until then. So Hey God, won't you be my traffic light? Heck, why not drive the car, I'll just take a nap now.

Word of the Day - Clemency

Clemency is an associated term, meaning the lessening of the penalty of the crime without forgiving the crime itself. The act of clemency is a reprieve. Today, pardons and reprieves are granted in many countries when individuals have demonstrated that they have fulfilled their debt to society, or are otherwise deserving (in the opinion of the pardoning official) of a pardon or reprieve. Pardons are sometimes offered to persons who, it is claimed, have been wrongfully convicted. However, accepting such a pardon implicitly constitutes an admission of guilt, so in some cases the offer is refused.