On Buoyancy and Sad Country Songs

I’d like to believe that my ability to remain buoyant ranges somewhere between “above average” and “excellent.” Both literally and figuratively. (If indeed a scale existed for such a thing.)

I’m at the pool right now in an attempt to not work for a full 24 hours for the sake of my mental and physical health, even though it’s August, which is why I’m thinking about such things.

In the water, I can stay afloat for a long time with minimal effort. Like, to the point where it surprises people. Perhaps some of it is body composition, but I think a lot of it is an internalization of bel canto breathing (holding a store of air in the lungs at all times and refilling air before completely depleting it, which is a singing technique we practice in choir) along with an ability to stay calm in the water.

Figuratively, I’m the person who stays afloat no matter how hard things get. Usually.

But this summer has been hard. My dog got an aggressive disease and is no longer with me. My professional life (which I usually excel at) feels like no matter how many hours I work, I just can’t dig out enough to satisfy anyone who is relying on me for the countless things people rely on my for. I know I’ve made several people mad at me recently, which also is not common. And I learned this week that the man I had a hopeless crush on (who admittedly, never made a move and probably didn’t feel the same way) will not be returning to work where I work, so it’s fairly likely that I’ll never see him again. Which in some ways is closure to my wondering if anything was ever going to happen between us…but also just makes me feel really disappointed. And sad. Which is ridiculous because why should you be sad over someone you never even had the chance to be with to begin with?—but feelings aren’t always logical, so there you go.

I’m like a country song waiting to be written.

I’m still above the water somehow, but I feel like all the air has been sucked out of my lungs. And I just can’t help but wonder how long it takes before the buoyancy ends…and whether I will be smart enough to get out of the water before it does.

On Tolstoy and Apparently Catching Feelings

The other day, an image with a Tolstoy quote happened across my social media feed. The quote was about the sadness of love never realized but lingering in stolen glances and unspoken words and never becoming what it might be. It was perfect. The post said the quote was from Anna Karenina, which I have started twice but never finished.  (Some day…)

The thing is, I think the quote was a fake. A smart fake, like AI knew me well enough to presuppose that I would be inclined to stop scrolling for a quote about love not yet realized and also knew me well enough to know I’m a fan of Tolstoy. 

I’ve tried to find evidence that this quote is real—and it’s nowhere to be found. I know that if it’s real, it’s a translation from the Russian and there could be multiple similar versions out there because that’s how translations go—but I can’t find anything remotely similar in any of my searches.  I’ve decided not to even post the direct quote here so as to not have the Internet pick it up and try to convince someone else that it’s real.

But I can’t even tell you how deeply disappointed I am to find that this quote is a fake. It felt real. It was so heartbreakingly beautiful. It felt like Tolstoy knew exactly how I feel about…him.

The man I’ve tried without success to put out of my mind. The man whose dark brown eyes compel me to meet them even when I know I’ll be lost (and yet also found) the moment our eyes meet. The man whose gaze lingers with mine long enough to make me hope. 

The man who has yet otherwise to make a move. The man for whom I feel as much confusion as I do desire.

I wanted the Tolstoy quote to be real because I wanted it to bring me clarity somehow. It did not.

Along the way, I found another Anna Karenina quote (this one presumably real):

“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeking her as one sees the sun, without looking.”

This I understand as well. It seems less satisfying than melting into someone’s eyes, but maybe it’s the first step toward emancipation from the spell he casts. 

Or it’s denial.

Why Are Crushes So Complicated?

I don't date much--intentionally.  Case in point: my last relationship ended roughly 7 years ago, and I haven't gone out with a single guy since then. 

And even though I was 100% sure that I didn't want to marry the guy from the last relationship and that breaking up was the right next step, it took time to process the relationship in the wake of its ending and even longer to heal.  If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've seen posts from various stages of that healing process.

When I finally emerged from that fog, I was certain of one thing: I was done.  No more wishing or hoping or trying to find a boyfriend who might become "the one."  I was going to stay single for the rest of my life because I had things to do with my life and dating is messy and seriously, what's the point...?  And if God had other plans for me and wanted to drop someone right in front of me and make it obvious that I needed to change my path, He was sovereign and could do that.  But otherwise, I was done.

And I have been very content in this mindset until recently.

There's this guy...  

I don't even know what to say about him because I haven't talked about him to anyone else in my life--you heard it here first, folks--because what do you say when you are a grown adult and you have a crush on someone and the signals are so very, very mixed that it's literally impossible to tell if he's interested back or if he's just being nice?  

Writing about him makes the crush feel real...but is it real?  Is there even enough there for it to be worth being real?  To be worth second-guessing my I'm going to be single forever mantra?

The inexplicable phenomenon that happens when our eyes meet is amazing.  Electric.  (Is that what chemistry feels like?  My last relationship had other positive qualities, but chemistry was not one of them, so I don't know.)  But this guy and I are so very, very awkward around each other otherwise, and I just don't know how to read it other than to try to ground myself by asking, "Has he asked me out?  Because if he hasn't, maybe he's just not that into me." 

And he hasn't.  Maybe that's the answer.  But something in my gut still wants to believe otherwise.

We had a couple good interactions earlier this month that gave me hope that maybe he was interested and something would happen.  But then...crickets.  And when I ran into him today, it was not great.  He talked about the weather and then he pulled out his phone and then someone else said hi to him and he started talking to them and that was it for that conversation.  Ouch.

I hate that I care, but I do.

I made a meme earlier this week that said, "I deserve more than maybe we'll run into each other in passing."  I didn't post it anywhere, but I'm trying to remind myself that it's true.  

That mixed signals probably aren't worth the emotional energy.  

That actual love involves both people giving and receiving and is not one-sided.

But ugh...why are crushes so complicated?

Fair or Equal—And Stuck in the Middle

 You would think that after 14 years of your parents being divorced, you would no longer feel caught in the middle.  

And mostly, that’s true. But every now and then it pops up when I’m visiting: which parent are you spending today with?  What happens when both parents have expectations for your time on the same day but neither communicated clearly until you were to a point where it was going to end up awkward for someone regardless of the outcome?

It shouldn’t matter.  I am an adult whose parents divorced after I was out of the house, and I should be fully capable of setting these boundaries and choosing what I want to do.  Which I do (and did again today).

But I never signed up for this.  They may both be happier now not married to each other (which I fully believe is true), but they didn’t exactly consult me when they split.  I never got the opportunity to negotiate terms.  I’m just…stuck in the middle. 

Anyway.  I’m going to go out now and have a great day with the parent I said “yes” to and try not to feel guilty about the parent I said “no” to and try to remind myself that “fair” and “equal” are not the same things (and that nothing about this is fair, regardless).

To my random readers who haven’t given up on this blog, thanks for listening!

Being Alive

Few people are writing about how it is, actually being alive, post-COVID. 

It's a bizarre sociological phenomenon.  Extract from your world the nay-sayers and anti-maskers and you find yourself surrounded by people who are afraid and rules that are meant both to manage that fear and to manage a public health crisis.

I read an Atlantic article recently that dealt with reasons why some people hide their COVID diagnosis from those in their world, which I found fascinating.  One of those reasons is the idea that somehow to be sick is to be lacking in virtue.  If you are sick, something must be wrong with you.  If you are well and strong, all hail the conquering hero.

Well, I'll tell you.  I am a healthy person--sick maybe once a year, if that.  I am also a rule-follower, which means that when my city and my place of employment started issuing recommendations for COVID safety, I was all in.  I was careful.  I was safe.

It didn't matter.  

I came down with the plague near the beginning of November.  I maintain that it happened on election night, when a friend and I ventured out to our favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant and then this man ended up spewing his political propaganda over us, unmasked, throughout our entire dinner.  The symptoms started a few days later.

People ask me what it was like to have had COVID.  The first thing I tell them is that while I can describe my experience, the most notable thing I've observed is that literally everyone who has had it has had a different set of symptoms.  It is a weird, weird disease.

The hard part for me wasn't the illness--or even the fatigue, which yes, was awful, and took about 6 weeks to completely disappear.

What was hard was what came after. 

When you first go back into society, people keep their distance.  They aren't trying to be unkind, but they are afraid, and even when they know you're past your isolation, they don't really know that they are safe from you.  You take a nap in your car because your office floor is hard and you're afraid people will be scared of your germs if you nap out in the open on a faculty lounge sofa.

Everyone else wears a mask to be safe, whereas you wear your mask to make them feel the illusion of safety.

You wish you had a sign (or a T-shirt) that said, "I've already had it" so that people would know they're safe around you.

You carry your documentation of diagnosis on a plane just in case a rule changes while you're traveling and you have to defend...something.

And even once these things pass, you realize that your world has changed and the way you view it has shifted.  The world is hyper-focused on getting the vaccine (which yes, you'll get at some point, but where's the rush if you already have antibodies?) or staying vigilant against the virus, and you no longer worry about these things.  You wear a mask to help others feel safe, and you social distance because, well, you like to do that anyway.  

But being alive post-COVID comes with a different set of fears.  Someone you know dies unexpectedly from a heart attack catalyzed by post-COVID inflammation that he didn't know he had.  You get on the treadmill for the first time in months and all you can think is, I feel strong enough to do this, but what if that happens to me, too?  

You take deep breaths, frequently, just to remind yourself that you can.  You wonder if you will ever be able to sing, really sing, again, or whether you are destined for coughing fits to interrupt it for the rest of your life.

You feel grateful it wasn't worse.  And you didn't infect anyone else (that you know of).  You find a renewed purpose in life because you could have died and didn't and that has to mean something.

But you are alone.  Even when you aren't.  Because relatively few people get what it's like to be on the other side of this.

This is being alive in the aftermath.

"Thank You, Thank You, Silence"

It's been a month this week, hasn't it?

This will not, I fear, be a well-crafted or particularly deep post, but I feel like I have to decompress from this week somewhere and my personal FB circle (most of whom are truly lovely people in real life) has turned into a whirlwind of political rhetoric and knee-jerking, and I just don't feel like I can write freely there right now.

In R.E.M. terms, the week started out very "Shiny Happy People," didn't it?  

It did for me.  I was coming off the first real rest that I've had in a year (thank you Christmas break), and for the first time, I felt like I was truly past the weeks upon weeks of post-COVID fatigue.  I stepped back into a critical work week with energy and vision and joy.  For a couple days, anyway. 

And then Wednesday's sh*tshow at the Capitol happened. 

And suddenly we devolved into "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)."

I try not to write about political things, particularly in a public forum, because it never ends well.  So, I'm not going to say all of the things I'm thinking.  You can guess or read between the lines.  (Or search for memes about the recent departure of the Secretary of Education.)

But I hate being right when what I'm right about is a bad thing, and boy, was I right about this one.  Everything that happened on Wednesday....  How did more people not see that coming?  It's been stirring for months.  Of course it was going to happen.  (My mom and I, who deeply disagree on the topic of our current leader of the free world, had this conversation while I was home for the holidays.  I tried with everything in me to convince her that he was stirring this up and it was coming, and she was so sure I was wrong.  But I digress.)

I'm grateful the mob's attempts were ultimately unsuccessful.  Though I still fear for our country.

Wednesday night, all I could do was watch the news.  (I hate the news.)  When it was clear that we hadn't even made progress on Arizona by midnight, I went to bed.  But my brain wouldn't stop.  So, I did what any self-respecting over-thinker might do and started creating new Spotify playlists.  Because that's an important use of time.  I actually really like the two playlists I put together, too.  They give me joy.  (They did not, however, give me much sleep.)

Thursday and Friday were a storm of online term launch activity and student petitions.  Nonstop.  The decision fatigue is real.  Seriously, don't ask me anything right now.  The answer is "no."

But the true bright spot in my week occurred Thursday night when a dear friend introduced me to Netflix's new series, "History of Swear Words."  You guys.  If you are the sort of person who is not offended by profanity, you simply must watch it because the catharsis is real.   Especially this week.  It's the perfect combination of etymological education and comedy, and I found myself laughing deep, full-body laughs.  As well as saying lots of...well...words that I'm not writing here. 

And those words make me think of free speech, and free speech makes me think of the fact that today, a couple of prominent social media platforms finally suspended a certain political figure's accounts--an action I have been longing for over the past four years.  

In the words of one particular non-R.E.M. song that, yes, did end up on one of the new playlists: "thank you, thank you, silence."

Keep Your 2020 Vision

It seems like a lot of people view "2020" as the personification of their pandemic problems.  Maybe that's how we cope with uncertainty, fear, and change.  We give it a name and make it a scapegoat.

Hey, 2020, give us back our toilet paper!

Hey, 2020, please put your mask all the way over your nose.  That's it.  Good.

Hey, 2020, I think you're on mute.  Could you just click the...?  Yeah, that's better.  Thank you. 

Everyone I know is ready for 2020 to be over.  Including myself.

Yet as we wrap up this past year, and as I write this for posterity, there are a few things about 2020 that I hope we never forget.

We were resilient.  We stood toe to toe with hard times, and we found ways to fight past them.

We were creative.  We solved problems we hadn't even dreamed about with very little notice and often limited resources.

We embraced technology in a new way.  We had to step out of our comfort zones, but look at us now on Zoom and Teams, in our LMS's and our Google classrooms.  We have expanded our reach without even realizing it.

Yes, 2020 needs to go.  (Don't let the door hit you.)  But I hope we don't lose our 2020 vision.  The world has changed, and we have changed, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to be trapped into merely going back to normal once the pandemic subsides.  We need to take what we've learned and continue to move forward: to be better and to do better and to be the agents of positive change in the world.

Let's hold onto our 2020 vision as we move forward into our new (and hopefully post-pandemic) future.

A Planetary Escape (Or Not So Much)

When I reflect on the year 2020, one of my first thoughts goes to a dream that I had near the beginning of the year. I had just come back from seeing my family for the holidays and ended up getting sick. That was back before COVID was a thing anywhere other than perhaps Wuhan and being sick was just...being sick.  The flu, or whatever.

I had a couple really vivid fever-dreams during the first weeks in January, and this was something I posted on my Facebook account on January 6, 2020:

So, true story. I had a hard time sleeping last night, due to the crud I’m battling, and at some point, I watched an episode of Lost in Space, which my family and I started watching over break and I got hooked on. Penultimate episode of season one, I think. I watched the episode and then was tired enough to sleep. All was normal.

Until the dream. 

I’m still in my room, in my bed, but some great catastrophe has just hit the planet (whatever planet I’m on in the dream), and I’m awakened not by anyone else but by (I swear) a clone of myself. There is an orange light outside and smoke in the air. And then the two Janas proceed to have a conversation. 

J#1: Where am I? What’s going on?

J#2: It’s an emergency. An asteroid has hit the planet and we’re going to die if we don’t convert your bedroom into a spaceship and fly away.

J#1: ...whaaaat? My head hurts, I have a fever, and I’m so tired. Can’t someone else do it?

J#2: No, you’re not listening. WE ARE GOING TO DIE. UNLESS WE FLY AWAY. RIGHT NOW.

J#1: But I’m not a physicist. I’m not an engineer. I’m not any kind of a scientist. I studied literature and I kind of have a knack for computers. I don’t have the first clue how to convert my bedroom into a spaceship. You need to call someone else. RIGHT NOW.

J#2: There are no phones. No radios. No scientists are coming to help you. Somewhere in this house, there’s duct tape and a wrench, and you’d better get to it.

J#1 [really panicking at this point]: You’re not listening! I have a fever! My head hurts and I just want to sleep. I’m not a physicist! I don’t have the tools to get us off this planet! I’m going back to sleep and if I’m still here in the morning, I guess it’ll mean you’re wrong.

J#2: I’m never wrong.

J#1: zzzzzzzzzzzz......

#andthenIwokeup

 I have thought about this dream a lot this past year because it felt (in retrospect) like a prelude to what was to come.  

 

Perhaps the details were different--perhaps I was concerned about duct tape rather than toilet paper shortages--but the whole "we need to get off this planet" motif?  Not the worst idea ever.

Do you ever wonder whether your dreams are more than just the product of spicy food or watching too much Netflix before bed?  I do, sometimes.  What if our dreams really do point us in the direction of something true, something hiding beneath the surface of our subconscious that we have discovered about the universe?

 

If we really believed that our dreams carried this level of significance, how would we respond to them?

On Serendipity and Missed Opportunities

A few days ago, I was on a series of flights heading to an undisclosed destination (though for the sake of narrative, let's call it Grand Rapids).  As I was settling into my window seat on my last flight, an airline team member got on the intercom to announce that a passenger from the prior flight had left her cell phone on the plane and asked that everyone look in their seat back pockets for it.

There was, of course, no phone in my seat back pocket, but I did discover a pair of glasses that someone else had left behind.  The guy sitting in the aisle seat (nobody was in the middle seat, because COVID) offered to take them up to the flight attendant.  We then proceeded to have a slightly snarky exchange about people who can't manage to keep their possessions under control and how there really is no excuse for that--unless you are also managing kids on a flight.  That broke the ice and we started talking.

(Not long afterwards--or at least it didn't seem like very long because we were talking--the woman who lost her phone finally called it and a passenger found it--and the entire plane of people cheered.)

The thing you have to understand about me is that talking to strangers on a plane is one of the things I typically give great effort to avoid.  I will sleep, or I will read, or I will pretend to listen to something with headphones in order to avoid airplane small talk.  

I mean, I kid you not, on my first flight of this same day, a woman in the seat behind me spent literally the entire flight talking about her Lululemon leggings and shopping for Lululemon leggings and basically everything a person never wanted to know about the entire Lululemon legging connection.  (At least, she was talking about it before I fell asleep and again when I awoke at the end of that flight.)  I'm sorry if anyone reading this is a fan of overpriced yoga pants and therefore offended by my comments, but the inanity of her conversation was mind-numbing.

This guy, on the other hand, was kind of amazing to talk to.  He was smart and funny (I laughed more than I could remember having laughed in quite a while) and was the kind of guy who actually asked questions and listened and remembered things.  And he was very attractive.  Different from my usual type.  No ring.  And although I couldn't see all of his face due to the mask he was wearing (because COVID), he had piercing, deep blue eyes.  Even if the conversation had been bad, I could have looked into those eyes for days.  But the conversation wasn't at all bad.  It was really good.  

I can't remember the last time I had such a great conversation with a guy (on a plane or otherwise).

I think it surprised us both when the announcement came on that the plane was about to land.  He told me that he normally didn't talk to people on planes and that he really enjoyed our conversation.  And there was a moment where I really thought he was going to ask for my number, but either I gave a bad signal or he decided not to for whatever other reason, and he didn't.  And in a similarly fleeting moment, I thought about offering my number, but I chickened out and didn't.  And the moment passed.

And now we are in two different cities in this state, will be leaving this state on different days, and will each go back to our respective homes in different cities in different states, most likely destined to never see each other again.  Because let's be realistic: the whole "if the universe means for you to meet again you will meet again" mantra really only works in John Cusack movies.

I'm kicking myself for not at least offering him my number (because what's the worst that could have happened--he'd say he's not interested and at least I'd know?).

He dropped enough information that I could look him up and reach out if only I could convince myself that doing that wasn't weird and stalker-like.  Just as I gave him enough information that he could do the same, if he wanted to. 

Most likely, this blog post is the last anyone will hear about this encounter.

But if nothing else, that conversation has caused me to hope once more that maybe, just maybe, all of the decent, intelligent, handsome guys aren't married or gay or completely unavailable in some other way.  Maybe great guys really do still exist.  Maybe there is hope that another such serendipitous moment might occur with someone in the future.

And hopefully, I'll make better decisions when that happens.

..."And Your Spouse"

I think that parties that invite you "and your spouse" are a slap in the face to single people everywhere. 

It's like you don't even exist--you didn't even warrant the accommodation of "plus 1."  It is so literally inconceivable to the person doing the inviting that someone on the guest list might be without a spouse that it doesn't even cross their mind that there is anything wrong with inviting spouses.

It's American church culture, for one thing, which by extension, is the culture I work in.  If you're married, you check a box.  You make sense to people.  You start dating someone, and sure, you're not married yet, but you at least still make sense--and now everyone can pester you about when you're going to get married.  But you become single again, and suddenly, you don't check any boxes.  You don't fit anymore with all the couples--and they are everywhere.  Because in your culture, it doesn't make sense not to be part of a couple.  And most people like to fit in.  (Or they just want to be coupled.  I don't know.)  And if you are that person who doesn't want to be shackled in that way, you just don't fit. 

So, what do you do?  Do you graciously decline?  Do you accept and attend solo in a sea full of couples?  Do you accept and take a "plus 1" in spite of the fact that the person isn't your "spouse"?

There's this party that I've never been invited to before.  And for the four+ years that the ex and I officially dated, he never took me because I "wasn't his wife" and it was for [his group of employee types] and their spouses only. 

(In retrospect, that tells you much more about him than about the event, doesn't it?)  But the party.  I don't really care about parties, generally speaking, but it always stung that I couldn't go because I wasn't his little wife. 

Because I wasn't ready to be his little wife. 

Because I didn't want to be his little wife.

And now this year, I am invited on my own merits, except I no longer want to go.  Because of him, on one level.  And because of the general awkwardness of being the only person without a spouse in a room full of spouses, on another level.

I hate Christmas so much right now, and it's not even Thanksgiving.

Day Lilies

I have these lovely day lilies in my front flower bed.  (If you know me well, you know that flowers aren't really my thing, but there's something about the day lilies that always makes me smile.)

They are spring embodied in fragile flesh.

Every year, they rise from the ground, golden phoenixes from the ashes of winter.  Hopeful.  Alive.

But the thing that gets me is that even as they begin to bloom in the spring, they also begin to die.  By the time I get around to weeding around them, there are always multiple dead strands among the living.  It used to bother me, pulling away those brown, dried-up pieces.  It seemed heartless, wrong.

The more I think about it, though, it's the opposite.  You have to prune away what is dead to make room for the living.

And every time I cull the dead leaves, life erupts in glorious splendor, as though they were just waiting for the opportunity to be free from the stranglehold of death before they could bloom.

I wonder about that.  I wonder what happens when you are brave enough to cut away the parts of your life that are dead or no longer growing. 

What change then comes? 

"When You Are Careless...."

One of my favorite movies this year was The Greatest Showman.  Seriously.  I saw it three times in the theater and have already watched it once since purchasing it.  It's destined to become a long-term favorite.

But there's one aspect of the story that always leaves me frustrated.  SPOILER ALERT.

It's the storyline between P. T. Barnum and Jenny Lind.  Now, I don't know the real historical story--I'm just going off the film.  The filmmakers build up this fascination that Barnum has with Lind, along with what I consider to be a mutual flirtation that escalates until the moment in which she tries to take things to the next level and he realizes that he needs to go home to his wife.

Seemingly everyone I've talked to about this movie views this scene as a victory for morality because the man stayed faithful to his wife.

I disagree.

What I see in this scene is a man who lets himself become infatuated with a woman who is not his wife.  Rather than fighting it, he crafts a set of circumstances in which he is frequently alone with her.  He gazes at her.  He travels with her.  She leans her head on his shoulder while in the coach.  And the tension builds.

He consistently leads her on, making her believe that he is interested in her, but he changes his demeanor in the moment in which he rejects her advances to make her believe that she is the crazy one for having fallen for him.  She responds badly, which I think is understandable.

She is not without blame--she allowed herself to get emotionally involved with a married man and then threw herself at him--but he is the one who led her on.  He is the one who should be accountable for the greatest portion of blame, and yet, in the film, he is not.

She is right, I think, when she tells him, "When you are careless with other people, you bring ruin upon yourself."  And although kissing him in front of the cameras was mean and an exercise of poor judgment on her part, I can kind of understand why she did it. 

What if Barnum, in the moment of reckoning, had given her a real and honest apology instead of mumbling something about his wife and needing to go home?  Not some vague story, not some maybe-it's-an-apology-if-you-read-between-the-lines pseudo-apology to make him look like a good guy without addressing any of the real issues at hand, but a real, heartfelt response covering what he did and what he was responsible for.

Sometime to the effect of, "I am an idiot.  I lacked self-control and behaved toward you in ways that I shouldn't have, even though technically, I didn't cross any lines.  I have led you on, and I am the person responsible for leading you to respond to me as you have.  I made bad choices, and they hurt you, and I know I can't undo the confusion and pain that you must be feeling right now, but I am sorry and will do anything I can to make it right."

But we don't get that in the movies, do we? 

A Different Story

I learned this evening that a few days ago, a guy I knew from high school--(three years ahead of me--he was a senior when I was a freshman), a guy that I once had a crush on, a guy who was all the things you wanted to look up to at a young and impressionable age--took his life.

What makes the world grow so dark that a person can't see another way out?

It baffles me.  I can't speak to knowing every sort of pain that exists, but I've walked my own dark roads at certain times in my life.  I can't imagine, even in the worst of those moments, wanting to end it all. 

So much hurt for so many people.  Wasted and useless.

It could have been a different story.  It should have been a different story.

On Mindset and the Woman at the Airport

A few years ago, I was waiting in an airport that was small enough that you kind of had to sit near your gate because there was nothing better to do.

It was evening, and flights were delayed, and emotions were high.

And there was this couple, maybe in their upper-20s or lower-30s, with a toddler.  I don't even remember what set them off, but they started fighting, and the fight turned very loud and very public, very quickly. 

The woman said something about an online course she was taking, and the man just tore into her, verbally berating her, telling her how stupid she was, how she had no business being in college, how she was just going to fail at that like she had failed at everything else in her life.

And she started crying.  And no one did anything.  Including me.  I still regret that.

Why am I talking about this?  There's this course that I've been revising, an online learning strategies type of course, and one of the key elements I've been weaving into the content is related to mindset, which I believe is critical to academic (and life!) achievement.  In all honesty, I've been working on the course long enough that I utterly loathe looking at it right now.  I don't want to finish it, even though I'm down to just the final tweaks.  I keep putting it off.  Most days, I just...can't.

But then I think about that woman at the airport.  The one who was trying to better herself.  The one who had an abusive, negative, self-defeating voice literally screaming in her ear in a public place, repeatedly telling her that she was dumb and incapable and a failure.  The negative voices in her world must have been so loud--I can't even imagine.

I think of her, and and I think of other very real and very scary stories I've heard from some students in our program, then I think: we have to change this.  Maybe we can't change the people around them, but we can help them change the way they view the world.  We can help them find voices in their world (and in their heads) that are supportive and positive and believe in the seemingly impossible.

If there is one takeaway that I want these students to walk away with, I want them to believe that change is possible.  They don't have to be whatever message everyone has always spoken over them.  They don't have to be helpless.  They don't have to be stuck in the same circumstances without hope. 

You can change your mindset, and you can change your world.  With God's help.  I believe that with all of my heart.

Racing to Beat the Devil

There's a strange sense of clarity that comes while you're running.  Sometimes, anyway.  It's like the world stops--the clock doesn't, thank God--but everything inside your head turns simultaneously fuzzy and focused.

Some days, it leads to profound thoughts.  Other days, you find you're racing to beat the devil.

At least, that's what Stephen King would call it, I think.

Silver flew and Stuttering Bill Denbrough flew with him; their gantry-like shadow fled behind them.  They raced down Up-Mile Hill together; the playing cards roared.  Bill's feet found the pedals again and he began to pump, wanting to go even faster, wanting to reach some hypothetical speed--not of sound but of memory--and crash through the pain barrier.

He raced on, bent over his handlebars; he raced to beat the devil.  (Stephen King, IT, 233)

Today was one of those days for me.  So many things.  An amalgamation of thoughts, worries, dreams, and desires.  I like to joke sometimes that normal people wouldn't last a day inside my head.  It's like the dream world in the movie Inception--sure, the possibilities are endless, but watch out, buddy, because it will turn on you, and it will eat you alive.

Normal people, of course, don't have years of practice with living inside my head.  I do.  And most days, I hold the villains at bay.  But every now and then, I find myself racing to beat the devil.  Harder and harder and faster and faster because as long as I'm running, it all gets pushed away.  And it needs to be pushed away.

Problem is, at some point you have to stop running.

He was going uphill again now, speed bleeding away.  Something--oh, call it desire, that was good enough, wasn't it?--was bleeding away with it.  All the thoughts and memories were catching up--hi, Bill, gee, we almost lost sight of you for a while there, but here we are--rejoining him, climbing up his shirt and jumping into his ear and whooshing into his brain like little kids going down a slide.  He could feel them settling into their accustomed places, their feverish bodies jostling each other.  Gosh!  Wow!  Here we are inside Bill's head again!  Let's think about George!  Okay!  Who wants to start?

You think too much, Bill.

No--that wasn't the problem.  The problem was he imagined too much."  (Stephen King, IT,  235)

Leveling Up

It's getting close--my birthday.  I'm not telling you the exact day because you're the Internet and you're not allowed to know.  Even though--let's be realistic--you and your hive-mind probably already know.

But I bring up the topic of birthdays because I'm trying to remember a birthday in the past few years in which I wasn't completely stressed out and panicky, almost beyond reason (though I hid it well).  Not because of getting older (I'm a fan of birthdays--I consider them occasions in which I level-up on life), but because of the relationship I was in.

I was terrified that somewhere in the packages, there would be a ring.  A ring that I didn't want.  Completely and utterly terrified.

It seems so easy to say that now.  Strange.

Before him, days like my birthday were filled with longing.  If only I had a man, if only I had a man, if only....

I don't feel that now.  It's been replaced by this strange clarity that I'm choosing to define as "freedom." 

I don't have to get married if I don't want to.

I don't have to spend the rest of my life barefoot and pregnant if I don't want to.

I don't have to stop working or doing other things that are important to me just to make someone else happy.

I have seemingly endless opportunities to choose what to do with the rest of my life.  

Life is good.  I'm ready to level up once more.

Trilogy

A million years ago, otherwise known as 1995 or thereabouts, I was listening to Michael W. Smith's "Lead Me Home" album in the back of my parents' minivan as we drove home from a family vacation.  Maybe I was drowning out my parents' fighting--they fought a lot when trapped together in a car for lengthy periods--or maybe all had gone silent and music was what remained.  The specifics elude me now.

But what I do remember is riding into the dusky twilight and hearing "Trilogy" for the first time.  I think it changed me.

At some point, I picked up the piano music and it became part of my regular non-piano-lesson repertoire.  It's not fancy, musically, but it has some lovely moments, and it catches the breath of my soul literally every time I hear it, sing it, or even just play it.

Tonight, I found it again.  And after playing through it a few times, I find myself caught once more.

I.  The Other Side of Me

The part I have never understood.  The love part.  There's such an inherent intimacy in these words. 

If I were the ocean / You would be the shore / And one without the other one / Would be needing something more / We are the shadow and the light / Always love me / And never leave me now / Now you are the other side of me.

I think about my recently ended relationship and I wonder: would it, could it ever have been what this song describes?  Probably not.  Not if I'm truthful with myself.  But maybe it could have.  If...this.  If...that.  If...so many things that are not and will not be.

But of one thing I am certain: I have literally no conception of this type of relationship.  Every now and then, I'll encounter couples who have been married for a long time and not only still like each other but seem genuinely happy and in love.  It's the strangest thing.  It just doesn't compute.  It's like I'm in a museum, staring at them through a thick glass wall, and there they are: this model of something I can't even wrap my mind around.  There is no logic to explain it. 

II.  Breathe in Me

If ever there is a song for the dark night of the soul, this is the one. 

I used to be / So sensitive / To the light that leads / To where you are / Now I've acquired / These callouses / With the darkness of / A cold and jaded heart / So breathe in me / I need you now / I've never felt so dead within.

Now this, I understand.  The dark places, the calloused and hardened heart, the feeling that these bones are dead and the only hope is the ruach, the breath of life (הִנֵּה אֲנִי מֵבִיא בָכֶם רוּחַ וִחְיִיתֶם) (Ezek. 37:5b).

And yet it's never when I'm in the darkest places that this song finds me.  It's when I have hope once more.  It's when I remember Whose life and breath I need in me.  And suddenly, I want to play it over and over and over and over because maybe it reminds me that there is light on the other side of darkness and there is hope on the other side of what once seemed dead.

So breathe in me.  I need You now.

III. Angels Unaware

Maybe there's a light in my soul
Maybe it flickers like a neon sign outside an abandoned hotel.

And so hope flickers.  And light returns.

Maybe there are things you just can't know
But can you say there are no mysteries
In that house you choose to dwell?

And perhaps also with hope and light and breath come a reminder that we are not islands unto ourselves.  That no matter what dark night we have traveled through, there are others.  Those who need us to step beyond our own struggles and lack of faith and help them.  But do it unto the least of these. 

Maybe we are entertaining angels unaware.

Demonstrate Your Power

Some days, mortality creeps up on you.

Someone I know suffered a major medical trauma recently, and I learned about it today.  He and I aren’t all that close, but we work for the same university, and I have fond memories of singing with him on a church worship team a number of years back.  Really nice guy.  He’s a year or two younger than me—has a wife and young kids—and suddenly he’s in the hospital on a ventilator. 

It makes you think. 

How much of this life are we promised?  Not much—nothing?  And what is it that we do with the hours and the days that we are given?  Does it matter?  Do we make it matter?

More questions than answers, tonight, I’m afraid.

So, somehow, I found myself at the piano, playing through old worship team lead sheets.  Chuckling at some of the songs and some of the memories.  Wondering how it was that I bootlegged so much of that music.  And I came across one song that seemed to stick—an old Vineyard song that I think I first heard in Toronto back in the heyday of their revival services:

Hear us Lord.
Hear us now.
Lord have mercy.
 
Hear our prayer.
Hear our cry for revival.
 
Release Your power.
Break our chains.
Set us free.
 
Let us feel Your joy again.
Set us free.
Lord, come heal us.
 
Arise, oh Lord.
Demonstrate Your power.

I’m not sure what other prayer to pray tonight but this one.

[Work in Progress]

The metaphorical dead weight went first

With tears and farewells not so fond

The last of you lingered longer

Literally a part of me

Not living

Not dead

Not growing

But not gone

Today, I made the final cut

And left the last year on the floor

In savage shreds

To be swept

Away

And now these things remain:

The living

The new

And hope

On Thesis Present

(written last night)

I spent 10 hours in the library today.  I won't tell you it was dreadful, because you and I both know that I'm wired to enjoy research until my fingers start twitching from too much typing and my eyes flutter shut.  Give me books and journals (and coffee!) and I can be quite satisfied for a very long time.

Well, mostly.  Admittedly, it's not quite the same, working through biblical commentaries and articles, as it is to dive headfirst into real literature.  I kept stealing glances over at the rack where I knew the Mythlore and Seven journals lived.  Does anyone read them when it's not the semester in which the Inklings class is being taught?  Not nearly enough, judging by the lack of traffic in that part of the library.

I mean, Revelation is fun, too.  But the challenge I find in biblical studies is that the more you research something, the more it spins you in a circle until you are back to a principle that, on the surface, seems nothing at all like the topic at hand.  And if this were "just literature," you could make of it what you would and it might not really matter.  But it's not.

For example, if I had read Billy Budd and I had decided that Billy is not a Christ-figure, but rather, a moron (which does happen to be a position I hold), the end result would be that I think he is a moron, and that would be that.  You can agree with me or disagree with me, and perhaps we might even get into violent arguments about it, but at the end of the day, the only thing that would come of this is that I thought he was a moron and you did not.

Not so with Scripture.  With Scripture, you're not just reading for speculation and cerebral exercise--or even to be pointed toward epiphanies of truth (as Azar Nafisi would say).  Whatever you conclude is going to have to mean something when it comes to faith and practice.  (And everybody said: "Well, crap!")

Case in point: Revelation 17-18.  You exit the crazy angels-pouring-bowls-of-judgment-on-the-world scene of Revelation 16 and find yourself face to face with this fancy drunk chick sitting astride a scarlet beast alongside a river.  And you think it's all about Babylon.  Or Rome.  Or some wacko symbolism relating to the future eschatological age.  And maybe it is.  But...

It's also Isaiah 47.  It is so totally Isaiah 47 that it blows your mind when you first start examining the parallels.  The harlot representing Babylon, the imagery of rape and degradation, the arrogance that leads to destruction--all the while, a holy God longing to redeem His people.

And then you start digging deeper into Isaiah 47 and realize that maybe it's about Babylon on the surface, the sitz im leben, but really, what it's about is the Exodus.  It's like the song that they sang after Pharaoah's army was overwhelmed by the crashing-down-falling waters of the Red Sea.  Triumph and exultation.  A mockery of the enemy, even.  And although many circumstances have changed since the Exodus, the key issues remain the same from Exodus to Isaiah to Revelation, because the heart of the prophet and the heart of the apocalyptic visionary share their purpose in pointing people to a revelation not so much of what God will do but of who He is and how He desires to relate to His people. Which I kind of think is the point.

Tomorrow, I'll have to write up my thesis proposal, complete with all the Greek and Hebrew and limitations and delimitations and such.  The inner academic must be loosed.  It's going to be a while before I can talk about the subject as freely as I have here.  But this is what I find rolling around in me concerning the passages I've selected, and I want to capture these thoughts in this moment so that I can look back as I write this thing and remember the bigger picture.

He is the redeemer, the go-el.  Times and circumstances may change, but this does not.  We hope in the Resurrection because we still believe in a God who redeems His people.