The Amazing Race

So, if I use the promotional fares to fly Nashville to Chicago-Midway on March 5-15 and promotional fares from Milwaukee to Denver March 6-11, I can combine two trips into one, actually see my family while I'm in the "north," spend more time with my cousin, have some crazy time with my friends from Madison, have some down time at my mom's, only take one more day vacation AND save at least $150. Yep, there's a fine line between crazy and ingenious.

I understand hate. I have at one time held hate against someone and have been the object of someone else's hate. Hate spins from fear-- fear of the unknown, the known, the supposed. I almost understand love. I love and am loved by my family and friends in ways I get and ways I could never fathom. Love comes from protection, understanding, vulnerability. Vulnerability--not something at which I excel. It's not something I even pretend to embody although it sneaks up on me every so often. I am open. I am opinionated. These qualities do not vulnerability make.

What I don't understand is hurt. Hurt comes when you least expect it. I'm not talking about emotionally-trying, tear-jerking chick flick scenarios or stepping barefoot on a 200 year-old, petrified, rusty nail. I'm talking about making eye contact across the room with someone you used to know. There, even spanned over a hundred faces, something hits you like a blow to the solarplexis; one that catches you off guard and robs you not only of your breath, but for a split second knocks all ability of sense or reason from your very bones so that you can never truly explain the feeling that happens next. Maybe that feeling is vulnerability. Maybe that's why I don't understand hurt, but I'm pretty sure I will whenever I buckle down and finally get that root canal.

M.I.A.

Sorry, I haven't really been jonesin' to write lately. (ha. that just made me think of all my friends with the last name "Jones.") Anywhoo... Sure I've been a little under the weather, but almost everyone I know has, too, which probably doesn't help anyone get better. Nah, it's more like I'm just chillin' and absorbing the world around me. Opening my eyes to detail and compassion I've been deflecting for quite sometime.

Which brings me back to this acronym: M.I.A. Missing In Action. Once a term feared by nearly 50% of the US population, now bandied about with jocular ease. My cousin recently married into the army. Since then, I've become more aware of our "forgotten troops" and the devastation of war--and the seriousness of it all. Last night "Pearl Harbor" aired on one of the 5 channels picked up by the rabbit ears atop my big, expensive television. It started an hour before the Grammys and, never having seen it, I kind of got sucked in and ended up flipping back and forth during commercials.

Cheesy love triangle plot aside, that movie seemed to break my heart, because it shook me awake to the ruthlessness of war. So many people effected. So much unnecessary hurt and pain. So many innocent lives not lost, but taken. And not just on "our side." It made me think of Theoden King's stance in Two Towers and how all he wanted was to protect his people. How he wanted to shelter and shield his realm from the coming onslaught. How destructive hatred rushed to his front door, whether he understood it or not. I don't understand it. Makes me kind of walk around as if someone switched my soles with lead plates.

WANTED: DREAM INTERPRETER
(Amazing Technicolor Coat Optional)

So, I have been having the worst dreams lately-- full of people yelling at me and hating me and then me getting upset and crying or yelling back. Apparently these dreams make me toss and turn more, too. In the middle of the night I'll wake up from one of these dreams to find myself sideways across my bed, head off of the pillow, at least one arm dangling over the side. And yet, as upset as I get in the dreams, they are just as upsetting when I wake up. The thing is: they're so freaking real. They have real people from different times in my life all together in one obscure place. The other night I dreamt that the boy I liked in second grade was picking on me all night at a cheerleading competition. Except, it was now. We were both grown up, I had graduated from college and we were at a pep rally or competition of some sorts for our city's high schools. I was dressed in a cheerleading uniform, but not the high school one, the junior high one-- surprisingly it fit. (I suppose there are some things that aren't too bad about these dreams.) It seems a few of the dreams have involved people from my old cheerleading squads--darn those cheerleaders.

And my dreams will be shaped by odd factual things like this one: oh, I can't go to a new church because Lindsay needs me to help with children's ministry at 10am (which was completely factual-- she had just told me that night). So then I show up where we meet for church and Lindsay's outside with a gigantic vulture picking stuff from her hair. Then the vulture covers her and surrounding people with excrement and flies away. I go inside to clean up and it's a dorm now and I can't find a free bathroom. Once I finally do, I emerge clean to find my childhood best friend, Beth, looking out the window of the lobby. I say something like: what the heck are enormous vultures doing in downtown Nashville anyway? To which she responds: It's because of all the humus. The end.

And there are always levels, stairs and elevators going up and down, up and down. Never on the right level, always running into obstacles. So I wake up totally stressed out.

Can anyone help put a stop to this madness????

Miss February

Hey friends. Shane asked me to be guest writer for today's story from yesterday's two'fer tuesday picture vote, so you can find me here!

I think Mindy Smith has been reading my mind, or perhaps my blog. I swear when I wrapped up this post I had only heard tell of Mindy Smith but never really heard her music, especially not the song Hurricane from her debut album released just one week ago. weird.

chorus
I need a hurricane to empty out this place
Seems it's the only way
To salvage any sense I have left
To move on

Little Dirty Confession

No--not like that. Shame on you. What I mean is this: I hate bathing. No, not the actual act of cleansing or being clean; I hate the thought of being vulnerable to cold, unforgiving tile floors and spastic, inconsiderate water temperatures.

In high school I would wake up insanely early just to take inexorably long showers. Our wonderfully large shower had enough space for me to sit down in the corner, legs fully extended or knees drawn to my chest while hot water rolled down the marble-esque walls and through my clumped bed-headed tresses, dripping from my sleep-swollen eyelashes like spring-ravaged icicles, making merciful saline-free trails down my pillow-creased cheeks and pooling near my knees or feet before finally slipping home through a drain of chrome.

There I would sit for nearly half an hour, if not more, sometimes drifting back into slumber despite the risk of drowning in my own personal little sponge bath-waterfall of sorts. The rhythm of the beading water lulled me into subconscious dreams of tepid summer rains steaming on contact with cracked, sun-scorched blacktop. Had it been late college I may have dreamt of racing that summer rain; rolling thunder stirring in me an almost Pavlovian desire to lace up my sneaks and log in some serious miles--especially at night in Madison with my roommate KD, pushing each other every step up Bascom Hill before spontaneously tacking on another mile or two.

That shower was, and still is, a wonderful retreat where I could be alone and content and subdued. Now, however, it takes a long run or some other sort of sweat-inducing activity for me to set one toe in the frigid, icecap-runoff-spewing, wannabe-porcelain contraption that is my current bathtub/shower from which I scramble to leave before all semblance of hot water. (did I mention it works better without a shower head? So it's like playing with the garden hose every... well, whenever I scrape up the courage to bathe) Luckily for me, decreased bathing is surprisingly healthy for your hair and skin. Luckily for those around me, my love of work outs tends somewhat stabilize my sporadic bathing frequency. The next place I live in, I should make sure there's a steaming-hot-shower-guarantee clause in the agreement.



**Just for the record, my dream house will have bathrooms like Ashley's parents, with heated tile floors and amazingly large, you-can-actually-submerge-your-entire-body-at-once bathtubs with separate showers in order to remedy the horror that is the ice-box-bathing-experience.

Melissa means "Honey Bee"

Ok, so I admit it, you scared the hell out of me and I wasn't ready. What I was ready to do was to find anything and everything wrong with you in order to get out. In the end, all I could come up with was that you just didn't seem to see anything wrong with me. You called when you said you would. You sent me thoughtful packages with inside jokes and hidden memories. You bought a plane ticket to come see me. Your brother asked why I couldn't fly down to see you and meet him, meet the whole family. Your mom sent me a gift in one of your thoughtful packages-- a pewter frame and a nice, little note (I didn't have the heart to tell you the glass had shattered en route). We had only been dating a week and then two and then three and then I started to break out in hives.

I liked you a lot and I admired you more. I knew you were a mature man of God. I knew you were going to be an amazing husband and a loving father-- just not to me and not to my kids, even if I would have wanted that-- which I could have, maybe, in time but not right then, not at that time in my life--maybe not even yet. It's so hard to explain how I know these things, I just do. Kind of how you know the feeling of wet or how the smell of something tastes; you don't know how, you just know. I suppose it could be like how you know when you're in love-- though I might not be the right person to judge that. But I can judge when I'm not, and when I won't be. I just know (the hives might help).

I got a message that you called back the next day. Terrified, I picked up the phone to return the call, bracing myself for the verbal shredding of the century, waiting to hear how much your mom hated me now. But you thanked me. You thanked me for being honest. You didn't second guess me and go through a thousand "why"s. You thanked me for knowing and for following what I knew. I guess deep down you knew, too. That call confirmed my decision. That call saved our friendship-- because we were friends first and are friends still. And I can't express how much that means to me.

You got engaged and married the next year and I am still as sure as ever when I won't fall in love- and sometimes I still break out in hives. Unfortunately, I am still a day late and a dollar short delivering the news to the other "you"s. Not because I am unsure of him, but because I'm still trying to talk myself out of what I just know. I want to give him a chance. I want to believe I'm wrong. I want to be wrong, just once. But I've learned I have to trust in what I know and trust that I'll know when I could fall in love. So I'm waiting. Waiting to just know like I know the smell of a fresh cantaloupe or old cedar-- the way I know my mother's cough or my father's laugh-- the way I know my favorite song from just one chord--the way I know when I'm not in love- and won't be, regardless of the hives.

A Picture in Less than a Thousand Words, though it deserves more

I ran across a picture today. It's a picture of a guy and a gal-- no longer boy and girl, not yet man and woman. I'd like to tell you a story about these two people-- some of it may be true, some it may just flow from my imagination-- I suppose I'll be the only one to really know.

***

Some people you meet in life will never leave you, whether you want them to or not. Some relationships form without the knowledge of either party involved. Some ties made can never be broken, no matter how hard you try. She knows this. She's tried. You can see it in the sadness trapped behind her smile, in the lilt of her eyelashes and the glaze across her entire expression. She's been here before, where he says what she knows deep down and yet cannot seem to accept. She's tried this before and she's tried to walk away.

The last time wasn't so much a walk as a peel across the state line. She sat in the driveway, car running idle for ten minutes that seemed like twenty with every tick and tock. Almost eerily, Jeff Buckley wailed Last Goodbye over the stereo. Slowly, she opened the door and the car lurched backward, threatening to roll down the steep gravel incline. Hastily she threw the parking break into gear, fearful it might impede her getaway. She'd taken her time, though, and written it just right so all she had to do was drop off the note and head out of town.

The termite-tattered stairs groaned even under her fragile frame. Her hand lingered near the doorbell for the last time. A roommate swung the door to on his way out for the day, warm spring air rushing into the dusty foyer. He stopped to look at her, ask her if she needed help, if perhaps she was lost. He didn't know her. Didn't recognize her. Maybe he'd seen her once, or twice. Maybe in pictures, but she hasn't been around for a couple of years and he was never asked to pay much attention. He didn't know the history and impact of message in her grip. She extended the envelope from her pale fingers, the guy's full name hastily scrawled across the front. The roommate took it and set it with the other mail. He'd get it later today.

Or did he? Seven months later, there they are in the exact position she prayed to avoid that spring morning: standing face to face, every inch scaled to a mile. His shoulders sagging slightly under the weight of his certainty in her hope dismayed. In her eyes one more bauble to the ocean between them. Resonating in their bones, Jeff Buckley's Last Goodbye one last time. That is, until the next time.

ever wonder what it's like to feel drunk for several days in a row? take my sinus medication... oy- such a fog.

Red Light, Green Light

So, here's the deal-- when did it become inherent to look into the cars next to you at a stop light? Everyone does it and I'm not really sure why. If you've ever noticed someone looking at you at a stop light, then you do it too. Because how would you know that they're looking at you if you weren't looking at them? It's not like there was a special section in this in driver's ed, it just happens. Once, at that time relatively new to the driving world, I stopped at a light and found some gross guy next to me staring at me and I said "ewww" only to remember that it was summer and our windows were open. But, seriously, I wouldn't have even known he was looking if I wasn't looking to see who was over there. For the most part it's a subconscious action, however, every once in a while, you'll catch someone's eye and realize that your little world inside your car isn't as safe and secluded as you think it is once you close the door.

People wave you to pass them, they thank you for letting them in, you can see them nod-- you can watch them apply lipstick or mascara through your rearview mirror. It makes me think that if we changed our perspectives just a little bit, red cars and black trucks would be replaced with roads of mobile picture boxes into other people's lives. Kind of a scary thought.

What?

You mean I'm supposed to write new stuff on here? Sheesh-- you people are never satisfied. Ok, fine. Stay tuned for the weekend edition.

Decaying Dreams

What's the deal with girls and old, dried out flowers anyway? Ok, ok, I know what you're saying, "Why ask me? You're a girl." Right. Not only am I a girl, I'm a girl who currently has old, dried out bouquets from recent weddings hanging in her hallway, who has innocently slept with rose petals under her pillow in hopes of dreaming of true love, who has kept everything from school yard game dandelions to my first dozen roses from a boy to a pansy plucked from the landscaping of Michael Jordan's front gate on an excursion to help my friend forget, if only for a moment, that his father alit from a bridge into a cloud of his own delusions of failure less than 24 hours earlier. My mom calls me a pack rat--I like to think of myself as sentimental. To me, these dainties represent more than my inability to use a trash receptacle.

They hang daintily from hooks and rods, they lay cradled in bowls and buggies; they appear pressed in the folds of encyclopedias, nestled between Egypt and Ethiopia. In a world of failing minds and decaying dreams they don't merely represent memories-- they are memories: tangible yet untouchable, poignant yet impassive, delicate and yet, enduring.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMILY!!!!!!

(please be my friend again)

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

Daddy did a star come to you?
the one that I told all about you last night
as we sailed through the sky?
Daddy did it beg you come home
cause when you're always on the road momma cries
late at night?
We all know that you're just trying
To give us a better life
But we'd rather be poor as church mice
If it meant havin' you more than part-time.

Daddy did your ears ring last night
when I plinked my very last dime in that well?
Could you tell?
Daddy I'd give all my money
To hear you follow honey with good night
And not good bye.
We all know that you're just trying
To give us a better life
But we'd rather be poor as church mice
If it meant havin' you more than part-time.

'Cause what's the good in a better life
If you never really feel quite whole?
What's the use in the finer things
If a house is never really made your home?
Cause a house is not a home
when it's got a great big lonely hole
Daddy, we'd rather be poor as church mice
If it meant havin' a daddy full-time.

I Try Harder (Second Best) part 2

Last night at youth group, a 15-year-old girl summed up what haunts my every hour, enervates me to a point of artistic paralysis and yet whets my anthropologic appetite all in one simple sentence: "Every thought I've ever had and everything I've ever done was someone else's idea." The simple thought that who I am is an accumulation of every person and idea since the beginning of time. The knowledge that ideas, just as matter, cannot be created nor destroyed both dehydrates and quenches my creative juices.

This thought nearly crushes my will to write. Anything I could write about has already been said. Every idea has already been expounded upon. All attempts to express my ideas or myself result in merely rearranging the dictionary. Why, then, should I even endeavor to produce anything at all when authors from the beginning of time have only been writing from the knowledge left to him or her by their predecessor?

And yet, if we follow the trickle down effect throughout time, we find gullies and culverts along the way. We find deltas, brimming with fertile silt from converging concepts, running over one another, mingling notions, birthing hybrids, stronger and steadier still. We find separate constellations and solar systems of thought, stemming from a wayside brook. We find new inventions, new ways of saying things, new translations and configurations to match our ever-transforming society, our respective cultures- new every day thanks to the constant battle between conformity and deconstruction.

So, why should I bother writing? Because maybe, just maybe, there is one person out there who teeters on the brink of understanding. Maybe, just maybe, stepping into my random rivulet will wash away the remaining groundwork, allowing them the freedom to topple with reckless abandon into discernment otherwise unattainable. Maybe, just maybe, that person is you. More than likely, that person is me.

Pulp Faction

I bought orange juice last night. Not an entire gallon, just a single serving, with medium pulp. Given the option, I would have chosen maximum pulp, but alas there was none to be found. Knowing the possible ensuing consequences, I raised the container to my winter-chapped lips and let the bittersweet texture roll through my mouth, down my awaiting esophagus to my acid-loathing stomach. You see, about a year and a half ago I was diagnosed with acid reflux and have cut back on a lot of the foods I love in order to appease my volcanic digestive system. While I have gone back to coffee, I have ceased my ritual breakfast of apple slices with peanut butter. I have descended to a lower zest salsa and given up a lot of mint and chocolate. I have not had orange juice since I don't know when.

Sitting in my car, I tipped back the last of the nectar, savoring every single drop. Yet, even as I licked a tiny bit of pulp from the rim, memories flooded back of sweeter sips still. I tasted the best juice ever in the Dominican Republic. Whether from the corner store carton or a vat homemade by the village women, my taste buds have never received such delectable succor from heat and thirst. While pondering this, other memories seeped in, not all happy, but all worthwhile.

I remember Allende, whose unused phone number still sits creased in my Bible. And I remember Elena, a sweet little girl of about 5 or 6 I met in a campo (village) set off from the road. We spent two days in the campo, painting a church and playing with the children. I met Elena the first day and promised to play again when we came back. Yet, on day two Elena was nowhere to be found, so another girl took us to find her. Along the way we passed beautiful gullies and trees brimming with ripe limoncias. Once we reached Elena's home, she ran out to great us in shorts and a t-shirt, her pigtails flopping with each bound.

To no avail, I tried to convince her mother that we would just be playing and getting dirty and a dress was not necessary, that Elena would be better off in her shorts and t-shirt. However, before she could come back with us, her mother made her put on a nice dress, to impress us I suppose, though I stood there in my bathing suit, wife beater and gym shorts. On the trek back home the day before, my Adidas sandals had ripped apart and now shone in the light patched with silvery duct tape. While we waited for Elena, I surveyed my duct-tape patched sandals, then sweeping my gaze to the dirt floor, up the clay walls and eventually around the sparsely decorated room.

I remember the thought of Elena returning home that evening, her best dress muddied and soiled saddened me greatly, knowing how fiercely my mother would react had it been me. Looking back, I wonder at the parallel of my own universe. I get ready in the morning, put on a face to impress a makeup-less world and carefully zip up my best dress only to slide through the mud. Every morning consists of getting made up only to return unmade by the end of the day. Yet, what good is life if we don't get our hands dirty? And what good are best dresses if we never wear them, afraid to soil them? Perhaps Elena and her mother had the right idea after all. Makes me want to wear my pearls while washing the floor; you know, if I had pearls--or washed the floor.