Well, almost. At present it’s only twenty-nine years and three hundred and sixty four days. And I sit here on my bed in the glow of a bedroom lamp, glaring at my throat because it just keeps coughing for no flipping good reason (pointed look, bad throat!), thinking about all that’s come before and all that’s promised to come along. Simon posted a Happy Birthday greeting on my “Wall” on Facebook- I thought about posting back, but I probably would have only said something snarky and uninspired like, “Shut up and leave me alone!”

I warned you it would be uninspired.

Anyway, I didn’t do it. And I won’t. And I wouldn’t because what have I got to be mad at him about? Other than the fact that I was metaphorically down the street from his house last year and when I rang him up, instead of saying “Sure, drop on in” like a good neighbor, he told me to bugger off as if I were a sheep thieving bandit. Maybe it’s an accurate description. At any rate, he was frightened of me and I can’t help but feel the worst about that in the end.

I also got an email from Herbie. Boy, was I ever crazy about him . . . with his crazy corkscrew hair and Tourist Bureau of Canada clothes, with his ‘ism jokes and french pronunciations . . .  and he’s going to be a father. Geez, what happens? One day you’re some kind of raving lunatic, usually with a borderline alcohol problem, la-di-da-ing your way along,and  then a few days later you’re thirty years old waiting for your wife to have a baby. Amazing. I think he’ll be a good dad. He has a way of centering on someone in such a way that they feel that they themselves are the one constant in the universe. I’ve never experienced such a thing as a child but it certainly sounds beneficial.

So . . . what’s there to say on my 30th? Not much, except I’m looking for a house, will probably be getting married soon, want to get started on a doctorate program, and am pretty convinced I have a sexual addition. Nothing really that spectacular. I’m hoping to keep learning, keep growing, keep writing, and more than all these others, keep becoming more and more refined and like God. I’ve been encouraged of late in the Word. Just that there is the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Just that God is good and righteous and merciful and on the throne. Just that God can redeem anything. Lessons I learn over and over again, and sweeter each time.

I’ve also thought perhaps I will find a different Bible Study, not that the one I was attending is bad. It’s only that I was listening to LaSayre Bradleypreach tonight with his beautiful crotchety old man voice, and I thought, When I go to this study, I don’t find myself going away having learned more about God. I find that there is a good deal of emphasis (and understandably so) on who the Holy Spirit wants me to be and how do I really have Christ in my life and paying  attention to the places where I’m screwing up. (I admit that I may have missed the point, and if that’s the case, forgive me.) But, although I get the importance of those things, I think they really make sense for the group who are for the most part 26 and younger. 26 and younger is a really great time to ask those sort of questions, when your life still really does seem fluid and like you’re still carving out adulthood from it, figuring out who you are at all much less in Christ. I asked them of myself , usually between shots at that age, but that’s really a whole other line of thought. The point is . . . and it is not to say that I think I have any more claim to spiritual greatness than anyone else, merely that God seems to have steered me in this direction .  .  . but the point is that God is the center of everything, and He’s working in us each day, and He’s graceful and has provided through dependence on Him the ability for us to be able to be gracious to one another. The point is that this is real and we are a family and we should meet each others needs and experience depth and help and compassion with and for one another. I’m not saying that those things don’t happen there, only that I have not experienced them in the way I’m trying to explain. Perhaps I haven’t given it enough of a chance, I’m sure I probably haven’t. What I’m trying to say though with all of this is that if I sit and ponder about God by talking about myself and positing on things I should improve and need to learn because of God, surely, am I not still in the end just talking about myself?  Am I not misdirected somewhat in my focus?

I could be wrong. I really could, I’m not just trying to be falsely humble. I’ll have to pray for direction in it. But I am lonely for true fellowship and real definable growth. I hope I find a place where that can happen.

Well, that’s it for my Birthday dissertation, and I see now that it really is my birthday. Happy Birthday to me! :)

I finished my exams for this blitzkrieg round of summer school and am on to the next one on Thursday. Ahh . . .what joy! The paintball blast ice cream took the brunt of it.

Anyway, I came home and took a nap. It was wonderful. And then I woke up and took Emmy outside and there was this young man standing outside talking on the phone by his shiny red hatchback. I squinted in the sunlight. Then I hobbled back inside with my dog and felt a lot more like the Hunchback of Notre Dame that I would have liked.

(in all honesty, I wish I had boots like that.)

It isn’t so much that I was adandoned in a church as a baby or only befriended by a jerkface clergyman or that I have a thing for gypsy girls named Esmeralda. The real issue is the slightness of my excursions from home of late. Studying is to blame of course, so I suppose it’s only the old thing of The End of something. My exams went well, my time was well spent in preparation, but . . . there is much more time today than I’m used to.

Sometimes I think that it would be good to move away, really. Just any old Somewhere Else. This place has already been scribbled on too many times. Case in point: Today I was late for my exam so I had to make it up at a coffee shop across from UC while my professor graded papers. I don’t know if you know this, but a few years ago this particular shop used to be called the Buzz?  It’s called Taza these days. The entrance is met by two flights of stairs, one to the order counter and the other to the seating area. Anyway, the one and only time I have ever been to the Buzz was with Mark the First, my affair du jour in something like 2002. Not expecting the plethora of stairs, I promptly fell down all of them in what can only be described as one of those long cinematic type scenes where everything slows down and my body bounces horribly from one cement slab to the next, legs flailing, patrons looking up sharply and over their shoulders with alarm. The tinkling of ceramic coffee mugs, the chatter of college kids, and the faint drone of indy-pop music are all silenced as everyone waits, in slow motion, for me to stop falling. Finally, when I reach the last step, time speeds to normal, sound resumes, the waitress rushes over to ask if I’m alright and Mark, leaning over to help me, says, “I’m not going to lie to you, Marianne: a lot of people saw that.”

It was distracting being there. And all over the city it’s like that. I drive home and pass by the Walgreens where Mark the Second and I used to go to buy sodas and cigarettes and talk about his life in the Drug Years. I go to work at the shelter and am reminded of when my clothes used to strain over my belly where it held my sweet little Natalie, before she had a name, when she was still the Biscuit. I go up to Field’s Ertel and think of the snowy evening when Simon carried me so my feet wouldn’t get cold. I drive down Creek Road, I go in the house, and the curtains are all still there, and its overwhelming how tactile the remembrance of my mother is, like she’s still there. In all my usual places, I think of the grief dinners and grief breakfasts Stephanie and I had.

Are memories such a bad thing? Of course not. The real trouble is that many of them are unpleasant ones. Not unpleasant in and of themselves, but in situations and with people that turned out unfortunately, either through my own action or inaction or through that of who I was with. I don’t think of myself as someone who’s been prone to disaster, and in fact, there are so many blessings that God has bestowed on me that I shouldn’t ever be able to complain, about anything, ever again. And it isn’t as though I always remember these things. I can be mindless and free of them. But their propensity to come to me unbidden is unsettling.

Maybe I’ve done what I was here to do. Maybe it’s time to be moving on.

Simon,

I hate your guts. Except that I don’t. And I want to.

The truth is that I don’t hate you. I don’t even know you. And I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon. It’s cool. I’ve made my peace with it. But you have yet to hear it.

(more…)

So I have done this thing. I have called the mighty phone number. I have learned the truth of the ages, or at least what seems like ages to me because I’m a freak who is annoying and somewhat obsessive.
The truth is not great.
But the Truth is great.
And so I suppose the lesson in all this is that what I must pursue is the Truth and nothing else.

(more…)

I just got out of my three hour French class, and it was divine. I think I’m in love. All those “c’est”s and “voudrais”s. Heaven!

And as I was walking down the stairs and out into a cool spring evening, it struck me suddenly that I knew these stairs. What is it about a college campus? The way the air smells, the non-skid strips on the linoleum steps, the weight of books carried over the shoulder. It’s like being in a Meijer: once you’re inside, they’re all the same place. And it was a good familiar feeling strolling down the overwide sidewalks basked in dim street lights. L’amour, my friends, l’amour!

In other news, I still haven’t heard from Simon, so I thought I’d do a poll. YOU vote! Yes! You! Can!

Here are your choices. Simon hasn’t talked to me in three months because: (more…)

So today is Simon’s birthday. I know, I know-THAT guy again?! But I still haven’t heard from him and I have to say, I feel a little concerned. It’s really all his fault. I mean, the last I hear he’s in a car accident and he’s fine, really, he’s fine, but then a couple of weeks later,  he tells me he has to go get some freaking brain scans, and then . . . nothing.

Sigh.

In a related story, according to VH1, the New Kids on the Block are (is?) making a comeback , “cleverly” disguised as “NKOTB”. It seems unfair. They can, and I can’t?

Whatever.

So my old boss called me this afternoon and asked me to come in to cover the overnight shift tonight. Fine. Great. Wonderful.

And she also asked me to take the same tomorrow because the woman who usually comes in is in the hospital and no one knows when she might be released. Fabulous. Super. Happy to oblige.

And after work I have an interview at Kristen’s mom’s workplace. Fantastic. Cool. Bring it.

And when I get to work there’s a knock down drag out fight over whether or not the door should be left open in one of the rooms, futher complicated by a language barrier and stressing the already taut nerves of a group of domestic violence survivors. Manageable. Pithy. Taken care of.

And I’m sitting up in the early morning hours, chugging a 20 oz. Diet Coke and playing Text Twist on Yahoo.com, when my sister calls and asks me, So, how’s school going?

Anxiety. Panic. Disaster.

(more…)

So I talked to Simon tonight, online. Mostly because I was procrastinating getting my resume finished and sent out. Well, maybe not mostly, but in part. And it was really . . . alright. It was completely just fine. It was what it was.

I’m surprised to say it, and moreso that it’s true, but I think I can really deal with this. My sister may not believe me because I’ve acted like such an idiot in the pursuit of this, well, let’s admit it, melodramatic demand for this boy. But talking to him as something of a chum was . . . nice. I actually enjoyed it. I think I’ve finally been through the crux of this crisis and now I can look at myself from the other side, with a bit of a chuckle about how silly I’ve acted and more pleasure in the act of knowing my friend than would be gleaned from forcing myself on him.

This is a good thing.

And I believe that prayer is what has brought me here. I know that the Lord is my strength and that his will is perfect. Not only complete but without error. And . . . this is just another piece of it. This is just the last chapter. And I’m being led into the next.

I want to run away. I don’t want to be here anymore. I can imagine myself in places all over the world, sitting, accepting, some place that is quiet and strange to me. I can see myself breathing out my days with some sense of . . . peace? With some sense of rest.

I can’t sleep at night. I either refuse to go to bed because of some free floating anxiety or I wake up again and again and can’t fall back asleep. Grief is choking me. It creeps up on me while I lay in the dark with my eyes closed and suddenly I hear my mind say, “My mother is dead.” It’s as if I just realized it. I weep. My mother is dead.

(more…)

Which it turns out is not that far when it comes to biking.

Yes, believe it, I bought a new bike last night! And after riding it today for about three and a half seconds, my legs were so worn out I could barely stand up to get off the thing. OMG, IHM! But the good news is that if I keep it up I’ll be able to ride for five seconds next time, and eventually I may even be able to work up to a whole minute. It’s gonna be awesome.

(more…)