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. (: