Wish List

One last thing.
Christmas shopping has been funny this year. I keep seeing all these things that I want and am not buying. Maybe I used to buy more things for myself more often. Yes, I know I did. But I also wanted different things.

I used to want really fancy, useless things. Now I have all these needs.

Like...

I need these because walking to and from school in the icy weather is ridiculous in Tom's cloth shoes, as I learned today:


I need this for the same reason as the boots; too too cold:


I want this, Britt understands:


I want something like this:


I'd like to wake up on my birthday to find a drawer full of new socks and underwear and a new scarf. I'd like to have a new bottle of perfume and a fresh selection of pajamas to wear. I'd love to have a new, warm blanket.

New eyeliner I need. New lipgloss. New blush. More cotton balls. More nail files. More Starbucks. More cupcakes. More chocolate soy milk. More eggs.

There's really no end once you start listing it, right...

Ahhhh, that was fun, though.

Old Birthday Reminiscing

My birthday is almost here again. How weird.

Reading through my old blog from years past, I really liked one of the birthday posts I cam across, from two years ago. If you were reading then you may remember {I remember those days as my brilliant, witty days, before the onslaught of my boring blogger personality this spring}. I hope that some of these things are more true and that some are less:

"So today is my 29th birthday.
And I'm looking over my old journals, to see who I was last year, and the year before. I'm pretty much nothing like who I was a year ago. How scary is that?

Sometimes I want to lay on the brakes and shout, "NOOOOOO, STOP!!!!" Just because the speed of change is rocking my boat and tearing at the fabric of my very life.


But I don't. I just go to sleep, wake up, make a few commentaries and deal with it.
Am I doing the best job?
Gosh, I don't know.
I wish I wouldn't be self-destructive, that's something new that I'm coping with. I let things fall apart, just to watch the glass break. I play the role of outside observer in my own life sometimes, and it could possibly ruin me if I let it. I hate that.

But I see beauty.
And goodness.
I recognize an ambling butterfly for what it is, and I am delighted by warm breezes.

I have virtue.

My heart is not abolished within me.

It lives and is growing.
Fast and quietly.

My new favorite quote is from Rainer Maria Rilke, from the book that Andrea gave me, "Letters to a Young Poet." He says in one of his letters:
Be patient and without resentment.

How great is that. Simple, refined and monumental. It is the best advice to start a new year with.

Be patient.
And without resentment."

Oh Past & Love

I just got a love blast from the past.
Someone I adored. How I adored him so pointlessly. Sigh.
I'm sure he really cared for me, in one of those ways that didn't mean anything but he thought was still supposed to mean something to me.

In a way, it's hard to remember hoping for something to happen with him. I was naive about him and so fruitlessly optimistic. There was what I believed was going to happen between us, and there was what I believed had already happened to us and when nothing came of it all, I severed my connection to fruitless optimism once and for all.

I suppose a lot of things have changed since then. In those days I was like low-hanging fruit, easy to grab and take. There were so many things I wanted and so many dreams that I thought I had no way of achieving on my own. I was waiting for someone to come along and change all that, and just about any person could have convinced me that their dreams needed my partnership to make them come true. When you don't have any plans of your own, it doesn't take much for someone to convince you to go with them wherever they are going.

These days, everything I want is in the palm of my hand and I don't need anyone else to ride in and save me from living the dream, so the stakes are a lot higher. Also, I used to work hard for men; I'd be where they wanted me to be and I'd wear what they wanted me to wear and I'd be who they wanted me to be. But I'm not a 25 year old girl and I don't work hard for men anymore.

I suppose I wish I knew about all this at 18 or 21 (or even 27). That a good man doesn't run you around the tree and make you do all the work, just so he can say he has you on his leash. That the best men, and they are out there, are the ones confident enough in themselves that when you're around them, you forget about what's wrong with relationships and you feel more like a woman than you've ever felt before.

I remember being young. And I remember wanting to be someone's ideal; wanting to do all the things that an ideal woman would do and wanting to be all the things that an ideal woman would be. I've found over the years that the only women that men think should be ideal are the ones in the Victoria Secret magazines, and almost any other woman can win the heart of a man by humor and a little empathy. Men are simple creatures, really, which I like. They don't like being criticized or mocked. They like to be flirted with. They don't know how to act properly around women and they're absolute fools about the women they like. I wish I would have known these things when I was young enough to want to win the heart of men.

Now, I'm not sure what I want from love. Not enough, probably. I'm not interested in winning the hearts as much as the minds of men. The rest is up to them.

A Good Start to December

As I was reading the Psalms for the day a minute ago, Psalm 61 grabbed me, so I'll put part of it here for you:

"1 From the end of the earth I will cry to You,
When my heart is overwhelmed;
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
3 For You have been a shelter for me,
A strong tower from the enemy.
4 I will abide in Your tabernacle forever;
I will trust in the shelter of Your wings. Selah
5 For You, O God, have heard my vows;
You have given me the heritage of those who fear Your name. "

This is exactly how I feel about my relationship with God--about my journey so far.

He has been the rock that is higher than I am, when I feel overwhelmed.

He has been my tower of defense that I run to.

He has been my shelter during storms.

Changes and Chances

There is so much life left to live.

There is something hopeful in that. Something optimistic.

Sometimes I feel like I've lived and died and lived and died a thousand lives. I feel like I'm an old wineskin, and yet I'm still here, still being recreated into something newer and incomprehensible to all I've been. It's difficult enough to accept the changes and chances of this life. Without having to keep adjusting your dreams and re-analyzing your situation again and again. And no matter how prepared I feel, sometimes the plainness of life and the complete and utter lack of influence I wield over it can be shocking. I hate to feel powerless.

When the going gets tough, it seems easier to take whatever comes at me and turn it this way and that until it fits into everything that I've already seen and felt and understood. It's much harder to take a new thing and say to myself, "This, this thing...it's a new thing. It's something I've never felt, never known. I can't respond in the typical ways. It's something I don't understand."

It's hard to look at my world with fresh eyes and see it for it's problems and it's beauty. It's hard to ask that of myself every single day.

I guess that's the difference between reacting to life and responding to it. Or to living it.

My roommate has a poster in her room that says something like:

The goal of life is not to find yourself.
The goal is to create yourself.

I know there are better, more spiritual ways to say something like that that don't ruffle our theological feathers. Yet I like what it's getting at. We can't wait for things to come at us and then look back and define our lives according to what we let happen to us. We have to dream and have a vision for our lives, and we have to pursue it with God as the master architect beside us. We cannot let ourselves become just anything, considering our lives were bought with real blood for something very specific and very personal. We're not just statistics.

I've been really touched by some of the gospel stories out of Luke this past week. We can choose who we will be--the throng of people that stood around Jesus listening to his weird parables and watching miraculous things happening--or the leper who came to Jesus from the crowd and said, "If you are willing, you can make me clean." I don't know why those words mean so much to me. But what a thing, to want something different for yourself that bad. And to go get it.

There really is more to life than changes and chances.

Bowling Green Files

I'm alone in Bowling Green.

I'm listening to Radiohead. It's tempting when idealizing my life to myself to remember that only a few hours ago I was sitting at a window booth at Noshville with two beautiful, intelligent women and laughing while eating delicious eggs.

It's tempting to idealize myself like that because five minutes ago, while I was unpacking my bathroom stuff, I was startled by the presence of a giant grasshopper in my 60s-era mint bathtub. And with all the warmth of my Christmas heart, I turned around, opened the right hand door of the cabinet below the sink, lifted out the green foil canister of Comet, turned back to the bathtub and dumped a pile of it onto the grasshopper. Then I turned the faucet on and lifted the metal tab for the shower nozzle.

Five minutes ago, that is, I killed a grasshopper--the only discernible presence of life in my quiet, woodsy cottage.

At least I wasn't laughing when I did it.

Black Friday

I'm sitting in the basement of a McHouse in Brentwood/Franklin, where Shelby lives now. We're listening to Griffin House and I was looking up possible Spring semester classes in the kitchen while she made pico.

There are so many good memories with this girl. She's the best possible sort of person to have in your life. She makes the bad times good and the good times better. If someone tried to be her best friend in my place, I wouldn't let her go without a fight. And I would win.

It's cold down here and the whole day is ahead of us. In our pajamas, it feels like anything is possible. I wish we could just do something fun and self-indulgent, like the old days. There were actually days when we felt like we could spend as much money and time as we wanted on things that didn't matter at all. But we'll go our separate ways in a few hours so that we can work out and get our stuff done. Self-indulgence has to wait. I guess that's what they call self-restraint.

I will go to Target to look for Scrabble. Because I don't want to go to my family without having something like that to take with me. And other things I need are probably there, too. I guess some people woke up really early to hit the stores today, right? I was sleeping, so I don't know about that.