Clouds drift by overhead.
It looks like rain is coming.
I am immoveable here against this wall. I feel cement under me and against the middle of my back. I watch the clouds while finishing off the last pieces of fruit from a ziploc bag. The grass barely twitches in the breeze. Like me, the grass watches the clouds.

I sit. Or I stand. Nobody interferes. Nobody intervenes.

It looks like rain is coming, but the sun brightens the cement where the clouds are thin. I sit here.

I leave. Nobody interferes.
The American Dream.
?

Good and Bad, A Day in the Life of

Some good and some bad, in no particular order:

I spent the entire day counting down the hours until school was over. My mind is not in the game, as the pro athletes might say. Maybe because I spent the weekend having fun; maybe because I spent all last week not having any fun. Regardless. That's no way to spend an entire day.

I explained my social ethics book, Solitude and Democracy: Understanding the Politics of Your Soul to my mom over the phone. "If you want to understand something, teach it to someone else." That's what I've always heard and in the case of this class, I think it's working. I've explained it now to Jared, to Jaz, to Shelby in part and now to my mom. I'm crazy about the book. Crazy. Today, I had to turn in a reading paper for the class that details my understanding of the current chapter, including its thesis and key words. The professor turned to me after looking through all the papers and kissed his fingers the way the Italian chefs do to say something tastes magnificent. He said, "You got it!" and something else. Later in class, when I answered one of his questions, he pulled out a watermelon Jolly Rancher and tossed it to me. Those are his favorite. I'm his favorite.


An hour later, while sitting at my desk studying math, I started to nod off in my chair. I went over to the bed to cuddle with my overstuffed pillows for a "short" afternoon nap. Just something to take the edge off, you understand.

Three hours later I woke up, smelling like a mixture of exhaustion and vanilla. Not a good moment. My study time was gone and I still felt like I could use a few more hours of sleep. I pulled myself out of bed, put on my gym clothes and skulked defeatedly to Preston {the gym}. I watched Bill Clinton on Larry King Live while accomplishing the most mediocre workout in months. I didn't do lunges or squats. I walked home slowly.

While I was sleeping, my History professor sent me an email asking if it would be okay if he shares my paper with the class, anonymously. This is the paper that I stayed up all night writing last Sunday. Some of the students came to him after getting their papers back, wanting to know what type of paper is looking for in these assignments, so he is going to give them mine. If I wasn't so exhausted, I would be ecstatic.

Marissa, my roommate, is going to stage an intervention if I don't start getting more sleep at night. That's what she told me tonight. Then she offered me some low-fat popcorn and we talked about why I've never read the Left Behind book series.

Now I must get back to the math I was doing six hours ago and I hope that I don't fall asleep again.

Lots of love.

I Hear Love, Did I Leave the DVD Player On?

I keep hearing myself say "I love you." While walking up six flights of stairs. While listening to professors. While doing math homework. While staring off into the distance.

Like whispers that are echoing endlessly through my ears, bouncing around in the chambers of my heart. It's a strange phenomenon. In math we might say that this type of event is a set whose only member is the empty set. It's happening and not happening at the same time.


I need to face it: I've watched too many romantic comedies lately. They're probably breaking my brain somehow so that I'm hearing myself saying things that I'm not saying.

But I leaned over the railing today and gazed into another world.


To say such a thing to a man--
--is much more lovely than anything that could be heard.



I am fascinated beyond belief with the intersections between men and women. We're so coarse with each other in our modern world. But I can still fall in love.

Belle of the Weight Room Ball

My biggest moment of the day was in the weight room when the guys on the other benches made a scene over my arm workout. I work hard in that nasty room. But I live in a legs culture and two things I certainly have never had are long, skinny legs. Instead I have long, thick legs like that beer horse that has lovely, wavy hair at the bottom of its sturdy legs.

I usually wear T-shirts to the gym, but today, nearing the end of my laundry cycle, I wore a sleeveless little spandex number. I was like a neutral toned version of an 80s workout video. All spandex-y and tough, and in the mood to pump some iron.

I had to wait for a long time to get a free bench and I took to the weights like I owned the place. Miracle of all miracles, as soon as I lifted those awkward metal wonders, my muscles practically popped out of hiding and veins showed up out of nowhere. I felt like the world's proudest body builder at that moment. It was like a novice's dream. There I was, just me and the mirror, and about twenty very bulky men who clearly have strong affinities for tanning beds.

I earned my membership into the weight-room world of glory tonight. Yesterday, I was just another girl on the cross-trainer. Funny enough, the pressure of all the eyes on me distracted me and I flubbed my routine. I spent all my energy on round one and could barely lift my arms over my head, let alone real weight, for the remainder of my sets.

Now, telling you that this was the height of my day, should give you a little insight into how the rest of it went. But in case you want a better picture, I'll admit that I tripped over my own shoe twice in front of the same person. Then I received homework back from my probabilities class in which I got a 27 out of a possible 47 because I used the wrong equation on EVERY PROBLEM!! My first class was cancelled and my second class was confusing.

You can see how being the belle of the weight room ball was actually an honest delight after all of that. Oh, the fallen pride. Oh, the crumpled joy. A 27 out of 47? Ugh.

Alone with Others {It's a Doozy}

We're talking about moral isolation in my Social Ethics class. One question the material poses is, "Why are some of us more prone to alone-ness?" So now I present to you:

Tuesday's Rabbit Trailing with Allie

The author of the book we're reading says that at every moment we're in a solitary state, and yet at every moment, even when alone, we're also with others. The others that we're alone with are the people, whether present or absent, who love, terrify, motivate or challenge us. The imagined approval and disapproval of these "watching" people end up being a measure of "true North" in our lives, guiding our decisions and opinions by proxy. Depending on how you're wired, you might be capable of more love, trust and depth of feeling for your others than for the real people in your life.

Alone-ness: I suspect that those of us who have a high level of engagement when we're out with people in new experiences will tend to feel that these experiences demand a focus and attention level from us that makes us temporarily deaf and blind to the guiding presence of the others that we've let be our "true North." It tends to make us feel like we don't know where we're going or if we're "on the right track" until we get alone again.

Everyone knows that disapproving and shaming people have a really big impact on us, so most of us try to steer clear of anyone who presents us with such blatant abuse. But in a less obvious way, a cynical city like Nashville also can have a really big impact on what kind of others we invite into our head.

He's working on his music all the time, but he's not even that good.

She's starting her own business, but it's never going to take off.

They're getting married but they don't even like each other most of the time.

Everyone wants to be around her but they don't know her like I do.

Cynicism nearly destroyed me because its piercing and merciless gaze turned around and found me standing behind it, completely vulnerable and just as worthy of mockery.

We have a vacuum within us, gasping for guidance, and it will be filled. So we look for the wisest, strongest voice in the crowd and when we find it, we put the bit in our mouths and hand the reigns over. Sometimes it's the smart-ass who has a one-liner for everything, and he becomes the person staring back at us in the mirror. Sometimes it's the ministry leader that has a loophole to explain why every good action is just a bad action in disguise, and they become the doubt that there's any point to Christian discipleship. We can jerk and dissent the idea of it, because it makes us look all too weak and fashionable. But it may also turn out to be the truth about our nature, whether we acknowledge it or not, so it behooves us to at least examine ourselves and question it.

A final note regarding the Christian hope.
The joy of the Gospel is that Christ sent His spirit into the world and from the way the apostle John tries to explain it, "Whoever keeps His commandments remains in Him, and He in him. By this we know that He remains in us, by the spirit which He gave us." Not that John was any kind of classical version of Freud or anything. But this understanding of the possibility of the work of the spirit of Christ in our lives tranquilizes that hefty psychology and stuffs it into a rental car's trunk.

If the voice in my head and the other presence that guides me, is the spirit of Christ, and is not a construct of the imagination to approve or disapprove, but an actual presence external to me that is directly acting upon me--that's a mystical wonder indeed. It is my opinion that the more the spirit of Christ becomes our other, the less alone we'll have to be, the more joyful our alone-ness will become, and the better steered our lives will also be. They'll certainly still be guided in a strong way--but we can trust that wherever we are guided will be a place of infinite possibility and hope.

"End Rabbit Trail Here"

I'm Sort of a Maverick

I'm watching the end of Top Gun on AMC right now, and no matter how many times I've seen Goose die and watched Maverick toss his dogtags into the turbulent sea...I still get all choked up every time I see it.

The sad truth is that I shouldn't be watching TV at all right now because I should be sleeping. It's Monday evening and I never went to sleep last night. I spent a few slices of my weekend formulating the perfect thesis for my ancient civilizations creation myth turned values framework essay. Unfortunately, none of my clever ruminating bore any edible or sowable or even showable fruit--I spent four hours at the library rechecking my primary sources, desperate for some spark of brilliance to light me up. After the library closed at midnight, I spent the next hour and a half walking around the campus with my notebook out, trying to distill my murky argument into two or three coherent and magnificent points. At two or later I sat in the lobby of the enormous computer and technology center, eating a bag os Snyder's pretzels. Then finally I began to create my rough draft.

I finished up the last few sentences and printed the ridiculous thing out just after seven this morning, and frankly, I felt awesome because at that hour it hasn't really occurred to you body that it's been trickd into skipping a whole night's sleep. My body thought we were headed home to bury our weary self under the blankets for a deep hibernation. Not so much.

I drank legitimate coffee. The reeeeaaaallll stuff that the big kids drink. I was hoping it would prop me up for the full day of classes. I fell asleep in my Econ class while doing price elasticity equations.

So I'm finally free to sleep and I use this precious time to watch Top Gun instead. What a goon.

I'm sitting at FIDO with an incredibly blank sheet of what the romantics might call, "Crisp, white paper" in front of me on a wooden table that is soft and worn away by the chafing of plates and mugs, and the deep etches carved by the pens and pencils of brilliant students, corrosive indie beatnuts and a host of coffee shop regulars that dot and fill the rest of the stereotype spectrum.

I used to sit in the booth closest to the bus tubs back in 2005 when I first started coming here three or four times a week. In those days, hardly anyone I knew came to the Village to socialize, so I felt as if I had discovered a parallel universe where organic relationships and authentic community lined up at around 7 o'clock each night for a cup of Bongo brew and giant piece of cake (or was that just me...).

I had it in my head that I wasn't quite the person I should have already become; I had it in my heart as well-- I was simply out of touch with myself. So I did the only logical thing a 26 year old administrative assistant who never finished school could do: I purchased a Latin textbook, escaped my Purpose Driven Brentwood enclave each night and began to teach myself Latin from a little booth here on the edge of the universe.

I did actually learn some small bits of Latin--like, "Bis das, cito das." But while I've completely forgotten the meaning of the words I tried so hard to learn in my little booth world of miracles, I've never lost the feeling that FIDO is one of the most magical, special places in this whole city--and it's still the place I escape to and the place where I challenge myself to become the person I'm most afraid to be and most afraid I'll never truly be.

The sheet of paper is still crisp and still blank at the moment.