an end of the year poem.

my dear friend Lindsay challenged me to write a poem summarizing 2008... she gave me some rules:
1. be detailed (I tried)
2. Make it poetic it wording (tried, I'm not great at this...if I pay too much attention, then I go crazy)
3. repeat "no time to wait, here's to 2008" throughout the poem (I kinda did this)

here is what I came up with....

1 January 1, 2008
P.F. Changs I wish I hadn’t ate
This situation I did create
I should have resolved to just lose weight, but alas,
No time to wait, here is to dear old 2008

2 News about March brought me the most tears yet
The ambush of sadness I will never forget
I hate that she was so alone, though I can relate
But knowing my Father will never forsake
Grieving doesn’t wait, which is what happened in 2008

3 I teach school and for April I await
To learn about E.S.L. is my fate
I get to travel to N.Y.C.
Foreshadowing, I hope, my future degree
Not to restate but it sure doesn’t wait, I’m telling the story of 2008

4 May comes and my babies finish KK
Being their teacher made all of my days
But it was time for me to go away
So I left Memphis for the Sunshine State
Only the beginning of my moves in 2008

5 In July, a monster I do meet
Dealing with Bridezilla was a huge feat
The wedding over, surely did elate
And future decisions I did debate

6 August came and to D.C. I went
Hoping for awhile to feet content
No big job came and I wondered what that meant
My soul, in its lonely state, did torment

7 Much of the time I held in my tears
To let them out, I thought, might let win my fears
Instead I wrote letters, from my heart I was straight
Asking the Lord, how long must I wait?

8 Friendships went more than they came
I often wonder how certain ones remain
I feel stuck opening up for fear that they’ll leave
Unable to be grateful for the time I do receive

9 Vulnerability, I hear, is risky but worth it
But deep within my heart it is hard for me to do it
Stability, security, I want to be fixed
But in one spot for now I cannot exist

10 October brings me “home” to teach
Enabling my mind once again to reach
That place where I find joy and being with people, innate
I wonder if soon my previous notions will reinstate
A welcome relief, here in 2008

11 My birthday month, twenty-four seems so old
Although waiting for so so much to unfold
Dad comes to visit, Mom shows up, too, and tightly I hold
As if to remember what my heart feels like not cold
Their coming to see me is their best surprise to date
With Thanksgiving I learn that to Wheaton I will go, and on time, not late
Which leaves us less time to wait, as we near the finish of 2008

12 December is here and sadness remains
Sometimes I cannot shake the pain that flows through my veins
I look to the future and try to shed the past
But worry that my efforts will not long last
2009, I only hope can bring
More love for a Savior for whom I will cling
I cannot make promises for what my actions will dictate
Only that there is no more time to wait, for the end has come for 2008

can of worms.

"It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we do not know at all that is the same with others." - sheldon vanauken


over and over and over again this quote comes to me. trust is SO hard for me! especially when my faith in people has been wrecked over and over and over again.

driving in my car to my 'happy' music makes things easier to overcome. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it really is true. some of my freest moments have been turning up the music and just driving. there's just something about it.

I want to finish this post someday...but not now. so this is my official "note to self."

think I'm gonna stay home, have myself a home life.

home is the sweetest word in the English vocabulary. or, at least to me. I love it.

my list of things to accomplish before Wheaton time is getting shorter... I am down to finding a place to live & getting a physical & sending in my financial aid info. three really important things, but feasible. I can't believe that this is going to happen. I'm a little freaked out, but in a good way. it's weird to have my world shaken again... in a way, I think I'm stalling from having to declare any place 'home.' by going to school again, I'm able to set up home but not commit to the long term permanence of one place. and that is such a relief.

resisting sleep.

sometimes I think we stay awake just because we feel like we have to.
because to go to bed at 9pm seems silly.
when really, we end up staying up late... often to do nothing.

what do we have to prove?

divine appointments.

I love my mom. I love that she uses spiritual cliches, if you will, but I love how at the end of the day, I cling to them.

cliché |klēˈ sh ā kli-; ˈklēˌ sh ā| (also cliche)
noun
1 a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought : the old cliché “one man's meat is another man's poison.”
• a very predictable or unoriginal thing or person : each building is a mishmash of tired clichés.

Lindsay told me a few weeks ago that someone told her that we tend to reject cliches, but cliches are used because they express truth, and truth that is wrapped up in a familiar package, i.e. a saying we know by heart due to repetition.
I've rolled my eyes more than once when I've heard a cliche but for me, usually nothing is worse than spiritual cliches. Maybe this is a horrible thing to admit and I have a hard time writing it because I sound like I'm blaspheming. but alas, I use them too, much to my chagrin.

I don't know when the last time I heard my mom say it, but she loves to talk about "divine appointments."

she's not the only one either... I remember the pastor of a church I used to attend say it too. I definitely consider it a cliche. "well, that was just a divine appointment!" however. I think I had one last night.

I've been feeling pretty down about different things lately... I have this fear of getting left behind & never feeling like I am apart of something... pariahphobia, perhaps? sadly, and of course, it has to do with relationships.

I'm 24 now. when my parents were my age, they had been married to each other for four years. when my grandparents were my age, they had been married for five years. and when my great-grandparents were my age, they had been married for six years. I know we live in a different time but the pressures remain and only intensify as I get older.

so last night I was at school on a break between the two classes I teach and one of my fellow teachers basically stops me in the middle of the hall and just starts talking to me. I don't really know what we started talking about...oh yes, moving. I told her about how I was planning to start grad school in January so I'd be leaving Virginia and Martha just started encouraging me.. she said, "You are young and beautiful and smart and you're going to do great...don't give into the pressure to find someone and get married. It'll come when it is supposed to...so many of my friends gave into the pressure to marry and now they're divorced. I was the last one of my friends to marry but now we are so so happy and I have a beautiful daughter. My husband, he is wonderful, he listens to me. Make sure you wait for the man that listens to you. He respects me and we enjoy our time together so much." She went on to tell me about how she and her friend, when they were single, committed to praying together that God would give them husbands in his timing and that they wouldn't push anything to happen with a man that wasn't what God wanted for them. She kept saying to resist the pressure.

And although I DO want to get married and have babies, it is so obvious that the timing is not right now and what I'm really feeling is pressure. I don't know where it comes from... maybe it comes from me and the expectations I put on myself or prior expectations I put on myself for where I would be when I was 24. I'm not sure...but I am sure that the conversation with Martha was exactly what I needed to hear...and the Lord is good that way.

as for this season of my life:

Isaiah 40:31

"They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength."

gradually not suddenly, at least for some of us.

I read this today:

Psalm 89:1-18
vs. 15

"Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence, O Lord."

learned hebrew: yada. verb. to know; learn to know, to be acquainted.

I love that it is about learning. that God gives us time to get to know him, to reach the point of knowing him and learning how to acclaim him. it made me think of Philippians 3:10 .

"I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death..."

know greek: ginosko. verb. to learn to know, come to know, to understand.

although I want to become more like him, I find a lot of peace knowing that it doesn't all happen at once- it is a long term commitment to finding more out about him.

the glue.

sometimes I feel like it's my responsibility to make sure that everything flows perfectly.
with my friendships, I sometimes don't say anything because I don't want to disturb the peace.
with my family, I feel pressure to make sure that everyone has warm fuzzy feelings for each other so that our time together is edifying and beneficial to all.
it freaks me out a bit. I understand that realistically I cannot do much to prevent or encourage things from going the way they are intended to go and life is so much bigger than what I can contribute or control.
as I was thinking all these thoughts earlier this line came into my head: "you hold all things together" and I googled it to help me remember where in the bible I had read that before.

Colossians 1:16-17
"For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together ."

november.

finally. the best month of the year has arrived: november. sweet sweet november. but not like that lame keanu reeves movie. more like, my birthday month. yeah, I'm not biased towards this month at all...

I haven't written on here in awhile. I've been "paper blogging"... i.e. writing letters to my friends.

Lord Byron once said, "Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company."

this is so true for me. in my loneliest of moments here, I've picked up a pen and just written. it really does change things. it makes familiar things and people feel not so far away.
this evening I went and did one of my favorite things. I went and got a cup of coffee from my favorite little shop (today they were serving pumpkin spice blended coffee, amazing.) and went and sat down by the potomac and read. I read my bible for a bit and then picked up where I had last left off reading g.k.chesterton's "the everlasting man." so, I had no idea that he would be so funny. I caught myself laughing out loud more than once. sometimes I feel like the authors that I read could have been my very dear friends. sometimes what I read jumps off the pages and resonates completely with my whole being. I often feel understood... I feel less complicated and more as if there are people out there that must be at least a bit similar to me. I want to be understood but I always want to be me, too. understood yet still unique. it's an odd balance. not to say that in order to be understood, someone must be identical to you, but there must be an element of sameness.

I keep going back to what sheldon vanauken said in "a severe mercy" :
"It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we do not know at all that is the same with others."

and that is a constant resolution of mine. and I fail miserably everyday, but I want to find the courage to speak with an unlocked heart.

edit:

this is not my first post about being understood and probably not my last. I'm glad I have this written account of my feelings on the topic because I'm hoping this means I'm reaching some sort of conclusion. it seems as though God is making sure that this gets worked out in my brain as I produce similar thoughts from different angles. I'm not gonna lie, I'm more intrigued by... me, apparently.

no una buena idea.

this is probably the last place I should be expressing my thoughts given the past two days. I'm reminded of the "four Hs" that I learned about in the Czech last summer that one undergoes while experiencing culture shock:
1. Honeymoon
2. Hostile
3. Humor [at least, I think this is the third one...I'm having doubts...]
4. Home

I'm not gonna lie, my honeymoon period is always very short lived. I'm a reality sort of gal. I would definitely say that I spend a lot of time in the hostile zone. My feelings are easily crushed and yet my good moments are incredibly good.
I also keep thinking of Frances in "Under the Tuscan Sun" after she made a rash decision to buy a house in Italy.

"The trick to overcoming buyer's remorse is to have a plan.

Pick one room and make it yours.

Go slowly through the house. Be polite, introduce yourself, so it can introduce itself to you."

that's how I'm feeling about d.c.
I need to pick one or two places and make them my own. I did it, too, in "my" basement... as I've put things on the walls in the "living room" but even though I am most at home in this space, I am also most alone here.

I think I glamorize the idea of "home." what does that mean? when I was little, I knew home. I knew it so well. but now, I don't know.

stop this train, I wanna get off and go home again...

Last night I had a really strange dream. And upon waking up, I realized it might have been one of my funniest too. Not only were Pam and Jim from The Office there, but the world was also possibly ending.

Basically, I've been watching the news a lot and I saw the hurricanes on the weather channel last night. Well, in my dream there were at least four hurricanes all coming towards me (I'm not sure exactly where I was). But then, it was like this underground world was exposed and everyone was preparing to evacuate to the underground place.

I kid you not, in the dream I had less than an hour to get what I needed before I went underground and all I kept saying was, "I need a really big cup of coffee from Starbucks." ha ha. Gosh. So it's nice to know that if I am ever faced with the earth's demise, I'll be fine as long as I have my coffee. Wow.

I'm not sure exactly where Jim and Pam were in all that... they were having relationship problems but I don't know.... really weird.

identifying with biblical Job.

Job 6:1-2

"Then Job replied: 'If only my anguish could be weighed and all my misery would be placed on the scales! It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas - no wonder my words have been impetuous.'"

I never really liked the story of Job. It is a doleful story, one that makes me get all melancholy and out of sorts. I know that Job comes out "on top" and that God never actually abandons his servant Job. The redeeming part is nothing short of amazing. However...it hurts me to see Job's friends give him bad advice and imparting judgment on Job's life and actions.

Nevertheless... I read Job 6 this morning-- specifically focusing on the verses listed above. And I understood. It makes sense to me for the first time.

I identify with Job's desire to communicate his despair. He wants Eliphaz to SEE his misery, not just to hear about it and then give "advice." A few months ago I was reading a chapter online of the book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon. Mr. Solomon writes,

"Depressives use the phrase 'over the edge' all the time to delineate the passage from pain to madness. The very physical description frequently entails falling 'into the abyss.' It's odd that so many people have such a consistent vocabulary, because the edge is really quite an abstracted metaphor. Few of us have ever fallen off the edge of anything, and certainly not into an abyss. The Grand Canyon? A Norwegian fjord? A South African diamond mine? It's difficult even to find an abyss to fall into. When asked, people describe the abyss pretty consistently. In the first place, it's dark. You are falling away from the sunlight toward a place where the shadows are black. Inside it, you cannot see, and the dangers are everywhere (it's neither soft-bottomed nor soft-sided, the abyss). While you are falling, you don't know how deep you can go, or whether you can in any way stop yourself. You hit invisible things over and over again until you are shredded and yet your environment is too unstable for you to catch onto anything...I think depression is not usually going over the edge itself (which soon makes you die), but drawing too close to the edge, getting to the moment of fear when you have gone so far, when dizziness has deprived you so entirely of your capacity for balance."

I write all that to say that humans have a yearning, craving, inmost desire to be understood. You cannot measure despair, darkness, depression, or emotional hurt. You can only hope to adequately explain in the confines of language how "deep" or "heavy" your feelings are and with a deeper hope that someone might just feel the same things as you, feel as deeply or have experienced a similar heaviness that can in turn give you better words to describe your situation and state of mind.

Poor Job. Like I said before, he does not die in a state of despair, but to have no one to understand and being unable to adequately define the feelings you have in your own situation. It's heartbreaking. But, common. I don't think I have, "And the moral to this blog is..." except to say that I appreciate the people who love by sitting & sometimes not saying anything. And I hope that I haven't pretended to understand when I don't. If I have, consider this my formal apology. (:

confessions of a blogger

I cannot believe I blog. I think this is one of the most/only completely embarrassing thing I do. but there is just something about it. Supposedly I have an audience of one, at least.... but the numbers are small as I am a private person, and a mess of a person. I even pick at my own name!

So I decided to dedicate this entry to things my little ESL kindergarten [now first grade!] students said when I was their teacher last year. Gosh, some of these things I read and they make me laugh so hard I cry.

___________________________________________

Jasmine: I goin' make you a flower.
Me: You're going to make me a flower?
Jasmine: Yes.
Me: Why?
Jasmine: I like your face.
___________________________________________

Me: You're so smart! Where'd you come from?!
Luis: Mexico.
___________________________________________
[I just asked them things they saw at the zoo or maybe animals they saw in a zoo book-- practicing past tense]
Roberto: I saw an elephant!
Jose: I saw a bear!
Nathan: ... I saw Happy Feet!!!!
___________________________________________

[One of the non-ESL students ran up to me to give me a hug; one of my ESL students looked at the non-ESL student and said the following]
E: You is NOT in ESL!
__________________________________________

[Reading a story about things that make noises we hear]

Me: Does anyone know what this is called in English? [while pointing to a picture in the book of a bell]
Students: No...
Me: It's a bell.
Francisco: Like taco bell?

___________________________________________


that's all I can think of for now. if I think of anymore, I'll add them. I will surely miss teaching those sweet children.

eustace: revisited.

I am a mix of emotions.
It happens a lot like this, lately.
I have always been against the question "How are you?"
[unless you have an understanding with your friends that how are you actually means exactly that: how. are. you. Without that understanding, it's a horribly painful questions to answer. I always feel like a liar]
"Well." or "Fine." is my normal response. [I suppose I'm referring to my health]

But lately, even with the honesty agreement, I probably couldn't answer it.
I am:
happy / to be in a new place & feeling right about being here
nervous / about not finding a job in a timely manner
anticipating sadness / about soon realizing that I am 900 miles away from my family
scared / about the response or possible lack thereof

see?

I am a gallimaufry. sentimientos mezclado. or something like that. I don't even know.

even so. I just reread that post I wrote over a year ago about Eustace and me. he really is still my guy. It is remarkable how deep things go and the manner in which they affect us. And then, the reality that pushing things away, moving away, can never be the source of the healing. The healing comes from a series of events...often beginning with sorting things... admitting cause and effect, and then finally realizing that as a human, without Help, you would just become a bitter shriveled up person.

that's what Eustace was facing. remaining a dragon indefinitely. I've been that same dragon living in a dark cave.

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart."
I thought so too. which reminds me of the relient k song that says,
--you said I know that this will hurt
but if I don't break your heart then things will just get worse
if the burden seems too much to bear
remember, the end will justify the pain it took to get us there--
but when you're at this point, you can hardly see your hand in front of your face within a pitch black cave, let alone thinking of the end. you just feel the pain.

"And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt."
And when you're there, it's as if nothing could ever make it go away.

"The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off."
liberating yet terrifying. something to be felt over and over again, depending on the depth and amount of scabs.

"You know - if you've ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away...It smarted like anything but only for a moment."
which is always the hope. it is fun: to dare to wonder what you'd look like blemish free. asking: does that person really exist within my seemingly irreparably damaged being?

--I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?--