Monthly Archive

I’m eating Cheerios with cold milk on a one early, rainy Thursday morning. It’s been raining for almost the entire week and I’m not sure whether to think that’s horridly ironic, wonderful, appropriate, or just uncalled for.

Now is not the time to say very much about the past few weeks but I have come to appreciate the small things in ways I hadn’t before. Like the band Schaeffer put it, “the tragedy is that we don’t see the beauty until we feel the pain but then it transforms everything”.

Happiness is:

1. A sandwich.
2. Copeland cds. (Beneath Medicine Tree especially, just don’t listen to it if you’re already almost crying.)
3. A lunch from Steak N’ Shake to go.
4. Solid State Records cds.
5. Talking with coworkers
6. Meeting up with old friends that you haven’t seen in a while.
7. A Mae concert in the basement of an old church.
8. Listening to interviews with bands that make you laugh during an afternoon at work.
9. Fixing a problem on a webpage.
10. Discovering new music by people you never knew existed. (Kenny Morgan!)
11. Hanging out and talking with friends late into the evening and laughing til you cry.
12. Not having to worry about what I’m going to do for lunch today.
13. Waking up early and not being drowsy.
14. Getting the enigmatic alarm clock to work.
15. My Moleskine notebook.

Just some things that have brightened my week.

And the sun is shining again…

“One plus one must equal three. Not two, not one, not negative four.”

These forty-eight hours have been monumental.

How I didn’t see all this before, I have no idea.

Yep, it’s 3am again.

Tonight I’m not out to make some profound point or to poeticize what’s around me. This time it’s just me talking. In fact I don’t think I’ll edit this too much beyond the point of removing some of my excessive commas.

I don’t even know where to start this time. Today was rainy, drippy, soggy, and for the first time in a long time… Today was lonely. Really lonely.

I think I’ve discovered that I tend to shut myself down during corporate worship. Spontaneously driven worship and worship in informal settings is fine but corporate worship really bothers me. Don’t get me wrong, I love singing, we have a fantastic worship team at church, and the song selection couldn’t be better. It’s just that for the past five or so years church worship has always been a show. It’s difficult for me to transition to a place that’s much more open and where the environment is full of people that are -actually- worshipping and not watching anyone else. It’s really hard. This morning as I was driving to church I was singing and really lifting my spirit up to Christ but that immediately changed. I pulled into the parking lot, said hello to my friends and then the worship right off the bat. In the middle of the first song I noticed a completely change. Somehow I can worship much easier just alone in my car to songs that haven’t even been dubbed worship songs than I can in a mostly dark room full of people I love. There’s a part of me that I completely shut up out of sight when I rise in my row to sing. There have been a few exceptions but on the whole it’s a personal pattern. I need to work on that.

This morning coming home from church I was wishing for an empty house to come home to. I was in want of some thinking space.

Tonight was Josh’s last night before he returns to school. I didn’t talk to him much other than the first night we met at Caribou but I respect his opinion and am grateful for how understanding and non-judgemental he was (is). He had a good perspective on Stephen’s decision to head back to school and that helped my mood quite a bit. As I talked to him about my plans for school I felt like he was truly listening regardless of how basic the questions (and answers) were. I remember when I first met him he just outright asked me why I had switched churches. It was a hard question to answer because of his position at my other church but he quickly reassured me and I was able to tell him my honest answer without being critisized. It’s hard to find people like that.

I appreciate it when people are honest with me. I truly enjoy hearing other opinions even if I happen to think otherwise at the time.

Tonight at Andy’s house was very soggy. I was inside the house whilst everyone else was outside around the fire. I was sipping coffee and trying to just let myself rest in the company of the people around me. I finally moved outside only to discover that it was raining. Not so much pouring but more like standing under a mist machine for a long time. It gives everything a nice coat of cold water and leaves the air thick and nasty. I love rainy days but today wasn’t a rainy day I liked very much. We remained outside for a few more hours and the amount of rain was never grew heavier or lighter. It was a steady drizzle that made all tables and benches off-limits for our dry jeans and made our hotdog buns and graham crackers soggy. Wouldn’t be surprised if I got the seats in my car wet from being out in the rain for so long.

You still never told me if you were lying and I’m guessing the anti-confrontation has been passed through the family. Whatever. I can’t decide if it’s something worth mentioning and I also can’t keep it from rolling around in my head.

And multiple people are leaving/moving/going. Won’t list names. It’s just overwhelming. (Superwoman: Whatever, I’ll just pick up a hobby. “Keep myself busy”, as it were.)

Today the anger/frustration flared back up. I can’t make him choose, I can’t be vocal much longer than I have to because I haven’t found a decent man’s way to funnel it correctly without donning acidic sarcasm, and yet I am at the same time trying to learn to not to keep quiet. I almost have to resort to my old emotional habits this time around but I sincerely hate to put the lid back on because it’s often unhealthy. So I’m fighting a nice internal battle with myself. Doesn’t help my frustration one little bit. I don’t know what to say, how to say it, what not to say, and how not to say it.

Tonight coming home was horrible. The air was so incredibly thick. If I used my brights eveything was foggy and if I didn’t use my brights I could barely see the yellow lines beyond where my feeble headlights hit the ground. I was able to go slow and there weren’t many people out… But still.

They are in the middle of repaving one of the roads I was driving on. Since it’s a brand new layer of road the lines have not been painted; there are just these tiny strips of yellow to vaguely mark the lanes. The fog was so thick tonight that I couldn’t use my brights (lest I willingly hurl myself into a white curtain) but at the same time it was so dark otherwise that I couldn’t see where the strips on the road were.

Tonight literally all I could do was stay inside the orange barrels lining the shoulders and follow the small strips of yellow that came into the light of my headlamps. I aligned my car to the strip in front of me then drove my car and myself headlong into the darkness waiting for the next strip to appear. Yellow strip, darkness, yellow strip, keep driving, yellow strip, more darkness, yellow strip to the right, the black seeping in. I couldn’t see a thing.

I almost pulled over and cried. I couldn’t pull over; I didn’t know where the shoulder ended. So I did the latter action without doing the former.