Juxtapose

Feeling distinctly the Bored Suburban Housewife today, having done most of the important household chores and finished the Christmas shopping early (imagine that!), I have lugged myself, my cute little lappy, and some mittens and gloves up to a Starbucks to enjoy a pepperminty hot chocolate and get some homework done for work. Ironically, though my actual orientation period at work only lasted a meager four weeks, the homework for that orientation has woefully followed me all the way to now, fast nearing the four-month mark. Enough about work, though. I haven't had any of it this past week, and despite my complaints about it, waking up at the buttcrack of dawn to drive 45 minutes only to be greeted by a lot of, well.. buttcracks, is almost always preferable to me than sitting around at home trying to think of things to do. I do all my housework and then I do some reading and then I look at basically all of the internet until all that's left that I haven't surfed is a bunch of adult sites and Hillary08.com. Then I think of things I need to do outside of the house and I get ready to go out and do them until I realize that gas costs lots of money and I don't really want to spend money. So I sit at home some more.

So today, I'm snuggled up in the ambient lighting and warm music of Starbucks. I know it's awfully SellOut and very snobby and all that and that all those frappachinos are fattening and overpriced, but I find that even when I go and buy a simple coffee (which costs no more and no less than a Dunkin Donuts or even the cheap, nasty coffee I used to buy from the kiosk in the nursing building at school), I'm always the picture of relaxation. For anything anyone wants to say about these Starbucks dudes, they sure know how to sell a coffee. The baristas are always nice, the coffee is always strong and they'll take even the most complicated of orders with ease. And I have found the secret to ultimate cheapskate chic - the Starbucks in the mall is close enough to the other stores that I can pick up someone else's free wifi. Joy to the world!

I'm very much in a Christmassy mood this year, which is somewhat surprising for me. I'm no scrooge – well, mostly – but usually I feel like I could maybe do without Christmas. I love the sentiment of the meaning I ascribe to it, the symbolism of carols and hymns proclaiming a virgin birth, but as far as the whole rest of it, I have always thought I could do without. I hate Christmas shopping, I'm the worst gift-giver ever, and I struggle with separating the holy from the hideously profane that somehow worms its way into the whole situation. I'm not talking about Santa Claus. He's the least of our worries. I mean everything else – the money, the out-gifting competitions, the complication of such a simple message. I fully understand why some Christians don't agree at all with celebrating Christmas.

All the same, there is something holy about contemplating the manger scene. The helpless-babe-but-not, Mary and Joseph so young and probably confused, even if they didn't know it. And while it is holy, in reality it must have seemed somehow not very holy to be there amongst the animals and the elements, the bloodiness and messiness of birth that can make even the most sanitized and white of hospital rooms seem dirty. And yet, lurking under the surface, a tension that must have made all that were there think on the question that was boiling in their brains – could this little baby be the Messiah?

For one moment, He was a baby, and almost the next, so shortly, He was clearly God and Christ and Messiah. And now He reigns. How could this be?

Weeks ago, Mark and I went to the main street holiday stroll up in Nashua, NH, and amongst the free samples or crackers and wine and cheese, we went into one of the open stores, Aubochon Hardware, and found a lanky guy with a goatee and no shoes on, singing carols that were not at all Ambiguous-Winter-Holiday friendly. They were carols about Christ and His mission. And then he said the thing that nobody's allowed to say these days – he said that in the midst of this war and the sadness and the longing for peace, that the reason we don't have peace is that we do not have Christ. That Peace On Earth is a great goal that we should strive for, to be peaceable among men, but that peace begins in our hearts, as we settle the great war that strive within. We can stop searching, he said, stop despairing. We can have peace.

Went to a show tonight. Chaz almost got shoved into the mosh pit. When it comes down to it, those tickets were worth every penny.

Sar and I were talking yesterday over some Ramen in my kitchen. I know everyone thinks all I talk about is being a nurse but it's just one of those things that occupies a lot of my thoughts these days. I'm, unfortunately, not at the point in my learning and development in this thing where I can leave it behind me at work and walk out with a fresh new breath. I love the show Scrubs where Dr Kelso just steps out the doors to the hospital, takes a deep breath, and his crabby face melts into this grin as he leaves it alllll behind. I hope someday I can have something like that where it doesn't completely consume my thoughts outside of work.

Sar and I were talking about dying. She sees it far more than I do, being that she's in the ICU. It's funny how a place where you have to be so much more technically competent is also the place where you take whole classes on bereavement and how to talk to families with compassion. It's not that that isn't important on the floor where I work, it's just more that I get people that are still very sore from cracked open sternums and surgical wounds, but are running (a little bit) off the high of feeling that their problem is "fixed." A funny thing, really, to see the nervous faces people have pre-op and the "no worries" smiles they have post-op. The transition is huge, they feel their problem is fixed, even if it may not be, and even though they still have a few days of very squirrely health ahead of them and weeks and weeks of intense recovery afterwards.

I think it's funny how many things can go wrong with people, and how each problem comes from a different perspective. We have three big cardiac areas at our hospital - the cardiovascular operating suites, the cardiac medical unit, and the cardiac surgical unit. I'm in the latter of these three, and I mostly get post-ops. The CMU gets all the chest pain patients, the people terrified that they're having a heart attack (and they usually are). So I don't see that side of things often. I get the people with multi-system failures, the people for whom they're surgically intervening with hopes of bringing up some... quality of life... maybe. They're stable enough. They're sick, but often it's chronically or at least they are stable enough that the ICU just wants them off their floor so we in the middle-ground progressive care business can bring them back up out of the gutter. Sar, however, gets the people who are sick-sick. And death is a possibility for these people. We talked about that fear of death, just hearing words and seeing in peoples' eyes the total unknown. There is such an unknown without Christ. We were talking about how to comfort people in that case, when all we want to say is, God Is Near and Here Is Why. But there is sometimes no way to say that, per se. Such a scary thing, this world is.

I was happy we talked about that yesterday, because today I got one of those chest pain patients, the ones who have never had it before, the ones who were transferred to us from the small-town hospital because there was nothing else they could do for them, and the ones who had a massive heart attack for the first time in their life. And she was inconsolable, really. Afraid. Not the same terror, perhaps, that Sar saw in the eyes of the patient whose story inspired the conversation between us. But just complete, utter uncertainty. Like, "What can you do to fix this and how could you possibly do anything when I can't even make my own body do what it needs to do?" Just scared.

I forget, sometimes, about what a surety it is to know God, what an edge that takes off of the terror of just living this life. People can carpe diem all they want, they can drink every delicious wine and take in every scene of beauty, but all of us die. And, for most of us, there will come a day when no matter how beautiful we are, no matter how accomplished, we will feel our bodies are no longer truly our own. We will will our limbs to move and they will be too weak, we will pray our hearts to beat in a steady rhythm and they won't, and we will look at our faces in the mirror and realize how little control we have over anything. I don't really know how to end this thought.

This morning, upon awakening, I was greeted by a KingSize headache and a nose completely clogged up to the point of no return. My throat is sore, I sound like a donkey, and my lips are cracked, presumably, from sleeping with my mouth open. I got up, took a shower, then, setting my alarm for an hour later, at 9AM, went back to bed. And slept until 12:15. After I finally got up to the meeting (which I did not miss, thankfully) I went to meet Mark up at work to grab a coffee after the meeting was over. We had a nice peaceful walk to the Dunkins down the block on the main drag of the city. When we finally got to Dunkins and finally ordered our coffees (after the Dunkins guy got it wrong the first time), we had just sat down to eat when Mark heard somebody yell out of our line of sight. Being mostly deaf from stuffed up ears and sinuses, I didn't hear anything, and when Mark got up to see what was going on and I followed him, I found a well-dressed and pretty, well made-up woman convulsing on the floor in front of the counter, her friend or boyfriend speaking her name repeatedly and holding her head as she bucked. Another man in an Indiana Jones hat was crouched by her torso and I kneeled towards her feet to get a look into her eyes and pull her legs out from the gap between the counter and the floor, her heels slapping the tile over and over again.

When I asked if she had ever done this before, had a seizure before, the boyfriend said no. Dunkins boy, at this point, had gone outside and was talking on the phone. He came back in and it sounded like he was on the phone with the manager of the store, but when I asked, he was, in fact, calling 911. The operator was asking questions he didn't know the answer to, and when I asked if he wanted me to talk, Mark said, trying to be helpful, "She's a nurse!" This, of course, made me nervous, knowing that people were going to ask what to do, and knowing that as emergency first aid issues go, seizures are one of those things that you can't do much about besides making sure the person doesn't get injured by their own spasticity and making sure that if it's the first time they've had one, that they get medical follow-up. Dunkins boy didn't hear me, apparently, but instead answered the operator as best as he could. The man in the hat kept saying "She's unresponsive!"

I felt very sad, in that instant. Sad that there was nothing I could do and sad that this poor woman was now surely headed into the dark world of multiple CAT scans, MRIs, brain studies, and the like. Her boyfriend said, "She was under a lot of stress... maybe that's what caused it...?" But I didn't know. I have seen seizures before, multiple times within the hospital and once involving a classmate with epilepsy who had auras and told people that she was going to have one shortly. All these situations required minimal intervention besides safety and placing them in the recovery position. I'd time the seizure, and if they needed their dilantin, so be it, it was there to be used if necessary. But for those people, this sort of thing happens all the time. For this poor girl, there was nothing to do but wait for the ambulance and hope that it stopped before five minutes long.

Suddenly, there were all sorts of stupid-looking people standing around and staring that had come into the place while the action was going on. They didn't help at all, and one lady even stood by the counter, as if ready to order. Dunkins boy stated, in a nervous voice, that he had to stand outside to wait for the ambulance, so, "Uh.. it's just that I'm not going to be able to get anyone any coffee right now or anything..." I sent Mark out to watch for ambulances and Dunkins boy stood and looked more nervous.

Her face lolled towards me, her seizure subsiding, her throat compulsively swallowing multiple times, her pupils dilated and her lips leaking foam, and as we rolled her over onto her side, I wiped off her cheek and put my scarf between her head and the floor. She nodded at our questions in slow motion, her pulses at warp speed. The ambulance finally came, three minutes later, and I stepped back to our table to let people do their job. She finally sat up with help and was ushered out, sleeping, on a stretcher, her boyfriend clutching her purse and jacket and, sweetly, my only-recently knitted and very, very soft scarf.

Life is about moving around in space and time and matter, molecules bumping into one another and cells knitted together in a shell of skin. We're here and then we aren't. God persists. Time persists, in a way, but not in all ways. And then, every once and a while, while we're moving around through the invisible existence of the air we breathe and displace as we walk, we leave little pieces of ourselves behind. Like a scarf that ends up in the hands of someone completely different than it started in. There is no telling what a day may bring. Kiss the ones you love. Serve the Lord your God with every breath. Life is quick.

If only I could live out my own words.

Mrowrrr. Happy Thanksgiving to ME!!!

Life is busy, times are good, I am loved and employed and well fed and very, very content.

I work, I come home, I clean my house and kiss my Mark when he returns from work and I'm not sure what I did before all this. School is no longer a part of my life and I wonder how it went so fast. Instead of thinking on this too long, I snuggle up into my blankets and warm myself with tea and my feet on the steaming baseboards. Such a funny life, really. I know this is the nature of everything in my life right now, that is, being married for not quite a year, working a new job that pays well, having no kids and no real pressing responsibilities other than paying our bills and reading our Bibles. But even so, even with all those funny little things, even with the late nights and opposite work schedules and long commutes, I am just enjoying so much this quietness and calmness and sweetness. Life is cozy and interesting.

Mark makes me laugh a million more ways than I could ever count, I bend over backwards to do the stupid silly things that make him laugh, forgetting everything I've ever vowed to myself I would not do to make a boy happy. I guess what I'm saying is that I thought I loved Mark when I married him. I even thought I loved him when he first asked me to date him, but I didn't know, didn't have any idea the potential or the catalyst that marriage could be. I mean, I just did not know how much more I could love him over time. I loved him romantically, I loved him as my friend. But now, I just don't know. I love him in some funny other way that just feels like home. He is home, my other half. Like I'm not sure how much Whole there could have been before him.

Like I said, content.

A few minutes ago, after I took out my little potroast from the fridge and nestled it lovingly among some potatoes and onions in the crockpot, I spent a few minutes relaxing with a lit book I had for the second college class I took back in the day, when I was but a wee child, really. In it, I found wonders of poems I hadn't read in literal years, probably not since I took the class in 1998. So much of the book is crappy - multicultural doublespeak and essays trying too hard to prove a point, with none of the beautiful, gentle subtlety of words that makes language so versatile and wonderful. But amongst the over-verbose rambles and brambles of some pages, I re-discovered some really incredible poetry and prose. The poem I'll leave off with was one of my favorites at the time I first read it, maybe because it's beautiful but still quite a bit morose. I find myself, even today, stunned by the simplicity and quietness and beauty of the words, the haunting sadness, almost as if a mountain man, in simple, quiet honesty, were telling it himself. These are the things that make me curl up inside, on my quiet couch in my quiet house, smelling the curls of cookingsmells from my kitchen and loving the whole and entirety of life.

"Mountain Bride"

They say Revis found a flatrock
on the ridge just
perfect for a natural hearth,
and built his cabin with a stick

and clay chimney right over it.
On their wedding night he lit
the fireplace to dry away the mountain
chill of late spring and flung on

applewood to dye
the room with molten color while
he and Martha that was a Parrish
warmed the sheets between the tick

stuffed with leaves and its feather
cover. Under that wide hearth
a nest of rattlers,
they’ll knot a hundred together,

had wintered and were coming awake.
The warming rock
flushed them out early.
It was she

who wakened to their singing near
the embers and roused him to go look.
Before he reached the fire
more than a dozen struck

and he died yelling her to stay
on the big four-poster.
Her uncle coming up the hollow
with a gift bearham to days later

found her shivering there
marooned above a pool
of hungry snakes,
and the body beginning to swell.

The best AskMe thread ever known to man.

Shivers.

12.22.2003

Praise the Lord!!!!

For His mercies are from everlasting to everlasting and He hears the sorrows of every man, woman, and child. He considers us daily, taking account of our doings and walkings and He sees our lips move, spouting off foolish prayers, but hears the voiceover of the Spirit, making intercession for us when we cannot even hear Him. He pours balm on our wounds, shadows us from the wind and rain, and gives us water and honey from the rock, flowing streams of nourishment from the Rock. He rules with greater than a iron fist, but allows the grungy beggar an extra measure of mercy. He gives us all an extra measure of mercy, and somehow, despite the fact that we all, every one of us, receive that extra bit, it never becomes commonplace. His grace covers our stink, our stench, and our hollow vanity and works, and His love and blood has covered our sins. There is none like unto him, the eternal, ineffable, altogether Almighty God of heaven. We fall at His feet while He reaches to lift our chin. He gives us dignity that shines while we wallow in the slop. He is with us from birth as we slip-slide into the world, covered in blood and amniotic fluid, He is with us as we are little ignorant children. He follows us as we leave Him, only to return on our knees again and again, and His face remains the same, His manner towards us is unmoving and unchanging with the tides. He is at our side in death. For some He pleads to turn, for others He awaits their arrival. In the end, our faces will turn to His and we will see that it has remained as He has, eternally characteristic of Him and of His so great love.

Dio legei egeire ho katheudon kai anasta ek ton nekron kai epiphausei soi ho Xristos.

"Therefore, it is said, Awake up, O Sleeper, and rise out of the dead ones, and the Christ will give you light." Ephesians 5:13

I have the sweetest of friends and the best of times.

I am so blessed.

Guess who has the day off and spent the morning cleaning her whole house because it was very dumpy and washed laundry because she had no more clean undawears and did dishes because we're almost out of paper plates and swept the floors so my wookie hair wasn't floating around all over it and went out and bought groceries and who is now doing a little bit of nothing for a while!

ME!

And guess who is coming to see us! Heidi! Josh! Kate!

I am looking forward to our weekend vacation... :)

Words like these break my heart and seep in through the cracks so I don't forget them. Words like these fill in my empty holes. Words like these reverberate in me with every step and every breath of my waking day. God's eloquence is so simple to understand, so perfectly put, that at times like now, I'm not even sure how I would try to interpret it, other than to say this: It is peace to my soul.

For the benefit of those who haven't spoken to me lately, I would like to explain that I have been avoiding blogging for the following reasons:

#1 - I'm crabby

#2 - All I've been doing these days, it seems, is going to work

#3 - When I come home from work I am just all depressed and possibly crabbier than when I left to go *to* work

#4 - I still have no idea what I'm doing and how to manage my time and I'm still terrified that I'm going to miss a brady with a heart block and give a beta blocker and end up bottoming out my patient

#5 - I'm possibly off orientation on Monday (yikes)

#6 - I spend most of my free time sleeping or crying

So. Lest I come out with a more morose and neurotic post than what I've already dished out, I've been holding back despite the urge to wake up at three AM (and one... and two... and four... the way I have the last three weeks) and blog about this stuff.

Anyways, completely unrelated, but I couldn't help but notice a terrifying trend in a picture that was sent to me from D. Shaughn, our local reporter/photog/friend. It was taken at the wedding of a really dear friend of ours' last Saturday. It was a lovely day, lovely wedding, lovely couple. Suffice it to say - big surprise - I cried.

As far as the picture goes, please observe:

Note the way in which Mark and Daddy-o's heads seem to be morphing seamlessly one into the other. They both lean forward; the glasses, the classic wife-haircut, the blank stare that says, "Hooray, a wedding," with a period at the end of the sentence. Sure, Mark is a rosy/pasty combo with blonde-brown hair, while Dad is more green/yellow on black, but it could definitely be a match.

I love my happy face in this picture. It looks like my RealSmile, not my picture one, and I love my cutiewootiepatootie Teds and Ray in it on either side of me looking worn out and bewildered about the whole ordeal of not calling the bride by her former married name anymore. And I like the way my ruddy Dutch-German husband looks so out of place amongst all the sallow yellow-olive-green tones of my gaggle of Greeks. How'd I ever end up with a name like Van Der Hyde anyhow, I wonder? I always enjoy the raised eyebrows when I introduce myself to people who assume I am unmarried. More often than not, they laugh and say something like, "Of the New York Vaaahn Dah Hydes, I presume," and I always say no and giggle a little at the thought, because if they ever spent a day with us they'd know there is no old money in our bloodlines. Still. It makes me feel a little bit fancy anyhow. Van Der Hyde. Very distinguished.

I'm off the floor for the next two days. I plan to sleep in tomorrow, as does Emvee (he's off tomorrow too), go see a movie (because Mark got free tickets from work), wash some dishes (because I made more dirty ones today and they're piling again), and not think about beta blockers at all. Or chest tubes. Or pleural effusions. Or Tridil drips. It shuts off now and I'm determined to sleep through the night without once waking up from a dream about titrating insulin drips. Give me a break, I can't believe that I'm dreaming about this carp.

G'night.

Things that make Mark have a really dopey but cute smile plastered on his face for hours on end:

Buying a Wii and setting it up. :)

When you hold my hand and we pray over our late-night supper of Ramen in a kitchen full of dishes I have been too lazy to wash.

When I watch you work on one of your many projects and I can see steam coming from your ears as you compute the angles and composition of your art.

When you wear the hat you were wearing when I first met you.

When you tickle me to tears and bruises from flailing my arms and legs.

When your arm is around me at church.

When you call in the middle of the day and give me a chance to hear your voice.

When I Ha-cha-cha and every time it makes you laugh and I know I could get whatever I wanted from you if I tried.

When I wake up from a light sleep and that thing happens where my heart is overwhelmed and breaking with love in a way I can't logically process or emotionally comprehend.

When my vision is white with anger and your voice is as level as it always is.

When you walk the broken stairs up to Donna's apartment full of catsmell and sadness and loneliness and you take her funny little gifts of food and you hug her with as much sincerity and love as you would a dear friend.

When my pride is squashed beneath your simple logic.

When we are late-night highway-speeding on the back roads of Chatham in the summer.

When you're drinking Mountain Dew in Grandma's worn white wicker chairs and talking about current feed prices.

When you come home from work after such a long day.

Day 3 on the cardiovascular surgical unit (CVSU, for short). Overwhelmedness factor, on a scale of 1-10: 7,000,000. Comfort measure of choice: reheated, leftover mac n' cheese dinosaurs. I just ate a t-rex and I do feel better. A little.

So it's finally sinking in, as I just realized right now, that those people I knew four years ago who I heard needed "triple bypass surgery?" Yeah, those ones that everyone (including myself) was all worried about and tsktsking about in concern because of the horror of that unknown, hideously complicated, sternum-sawing operation formerly known to me as the "triple bypass?"

Yeah, well, I guess it took me four years to realize that they exist to me now as my CABG x3 with LIMA and bilat saphenous patients. Not only that, but that the same "quadruple bypass" patient (actually CABGx4) that I had formerly so gingerly handled in my thoughts and prayers is the patient I'm now getting up and out of bed the next day after surgery. And, by the way, COUGH! Breathe in deep, you only got your chest cracked open, ya weenie! For goodness sakes, we can't have you getting pneumonia!!!

Anyways, I always remembered adults talking in low tones about the certain death of friends undergoing open heart surgery. Not that it's no big deal now, because it is, but everything has a new spin on it. You read a patient history but it really tells you nothing. So, some guy comes in and his history says that he's had five MIs. So? So what? I'm all, "Okay.. so, not really the issue right now, what do I have to focus on to keep this guy from dumping during my shift and hopefully after that?"

The thing is, I'm not thinking, like a normal person should, that having five MIs means that the poor guy has had five heart attacks. Five! What fear! What terror to live with! That's some scary stuff. But by calling it an MI, I can function without thinking too hard with feelings and letting my focus get distracted. So it's a CABGx4 for me and A-grams and, whatever, so what, dude has tubes and wires sticking right out of his chest. Just... right there. Lift up the johnny and there are some little wires all taped to his chest. Follow them to the source and where to they go? Oh, whatever, they just snake their way into his chest, connected directly to his heart so that if he "codes" (ala, his heart STOPS BEATING, for crying out loud), we just hook him up and zap him and hooray we're back in business.

So this is all exhausting. I sleep beta blockers and dream Crestor and I guess I'm just not able to think of much else but being a nurse right now. I really am looking forward to the day when it will be a job that I can (somewhat) leave behind at the hospital with me. I'm proud of what I do, happy with my choice of career, I love patients and I love medicine, but I don't like being defined by my job. I think everyone in nursing school likes a little pride in their chosen occupation - you sit through hours of boring lectures on the importance of handwashing and careplans that you'll never use, take three-hour exams with complicated, subjective answers, and then, at the end of it all, you still have to pass the boards to make your degree count towards a job. So a little pride and self-definition goes a long way in getting you through two or four years of exhaustion, really. So you put your stethoscope on your rearview mirror, you freak out about your boards, you buy cute stuff to use at clinicals (kelley clamps, expensive clipboards with built-in calculators, and those white oval bumper stickers that say "RN" on them) and you're just really excited to be a nurse. I did it, and what do you know, I made it through okay in the end. Well, to the end of the beginning, anyways.

But now, right now, I feel like a big dumpy know-nothing, and the last thing I feel I could be defined as is a nurse. I'm putting all my energies into this project of learning everything that nursing school never taught me, and that is a whole lot of stuff. All in hopes of someday being competent. There are no exam grades and I've already passed my boards. So why is this so hard?

Because it's real life. Well, I'll be darned. It all happened so fast.

I need more dinos.

One of the hidden benefits to living within 200 yards of the town highschool - band practice at seven AM. By the time the parades come around I should be able to play the drums with the best of them.

Emvee and I did Boston on Saturday.

Being in my own place has its advantages - breakfast this morning was a small but satisfying teacup saucer of kalamata olives, feta (domestic, unfortunately), oregano, and olive oil, eaten with my fingers and some syrian bread. I can't help but feel a little indulgent. The salt is excessive, yes, but overall it's healthy and delicious and it brings me back to very warm memories of my Yiayia, of Mum and Dad and sitting around the dinner table talking after eating. I miss a lot of those things. In fact, eating olives and feta transposes me all the way to the Mediterranean, by the blue sea, whitewashed concrete housing, and old men playing bouzoukis. I've never been, but in my mind, I'm somehow connected all the way over here in dinkytown, USA, on the busiest street in the town, traffic whizzing by my head as I type at my kitchen table.

My problem is not so much that I imagine, but more that I'm, in a way, very sensual in the way that I experience the world. I love smells and sounds and tastes and touches and sights. Everything, to me, has a bizarre sense all of its own and the transmogrification effect that feta and olives produces is the same thing I feel when I watch people walk by me while chatting in their own world, or the reason that, of all the great stuff he does for me, the thing about Mark that makes me feel most loved of all is when he holds my hand when we're out and about walking. I love the senses. I turn my music up as loud as I can without making myself more deaf than I already am, so that everything throbs and swells around me - I never could get my head around what was so wrong, according to my church, about that darn "Beat" that was supposedly not of God, as it seems heavenly to me.

When Mrs. A talks about her memories of raising her four kids and laughs about some funny memory in the only way she ever allows herself to enjoy life, my eyes well up. She regulates everything, counting to the ounce her water intake and only eating raw foods and certain healthy things, and yet she is always searching for happiness, for joy, for fullness of existence. She has never found it, and she can't even enjoy a single little sweet taste of a fatty food, or a salty food, or a sweet food. The small indulgences of life. She has no joy because she has no Christ to take away the restraints she has put upon herself in order to live a temperate life. But to what gain? Dust to dust - a thousand years of temperance can never be Christ to her. So when she talks of her children and she reaches so far back into her memories and her face lights up with joy, I cry a little for her because that is the only joy she will let herself have, and it is not enough.

I deal in the warmth of the sun after a winter of darkness, the taste of saltiness on my tongue and a cool glass of water to chase it. I would travel the world, but not at the expense of listening to Teddy and Ray tease each other into fits of giggles. Good music, good food, good company, all so precious and so wonderful and so ethereal, so wholly of God and void of any state of chance that is pushed by the scientifically minded.

Once, in Bible school, there was a strange guy named Eric Baker who was in my Greek class for a few semesters. He has some wacky ideas, some wacky hairdos, and he was just not like the rest of the guys there. Sitting outside on break one day, he started talking about John Piper, who, at the time, I had read a great deal about. He started talking about Piper's writings on the so-called "Christian Hedonism" idea, which sounds very inappropriate but, if given more than one seconds' worth of skimming, is really just a way of saying, "Stop being fuddyduddies about the gospel and show some joy about the things the Christ has made possible through His blood." None of this went over very well with the Bible school set, however, and for months, poor Eric Baker with his permissive, too progressive, post-modernistic ideas was the topic of conversation and great debate. And for a while I wondered, exactly, what was so unBiblical about joy, or about experience. I don't know how many times I've been taught at church that worship is not an experience, that faith is not feelings, that joy is best expressed in a temperate manner.

But I don't know how to be temperate anymore. I don't know how to experience the Bible, the gospel, the songs and the prayers in this stilted manner. This temperance is taking away my joy, my love, my faith, in a subtle way that leaves me cynical about everything about the church.

I can't help but sense and feel and weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh, because I can't make myself any different. As we read through the book of John this past month and reached the crucifixion story, I find that the thing I can never get over is the nails. If I was there, so long ago, I think I would have wanted to touch the nail-holes in His hands. I would have been as foolish and as sinful as the worst of all the scorners and the sinners, but I am sure that if He stretched out His hand to let me touch that place where He was pinned to the cross, that would be the sight to my faith, if there ever was such a thing. I love those holes more than any hymn. I can't wait to touch them someday.

My breakfast, today, tastes like the Holy Land, a place where Jesus walked.

Wake up
Wondering
When this all occurred,
When this soundly sleeping
Body
Materialized
In My House.

Wondering
How this came to be,
My House,
My Life.

Movements already memorized,
The day
Beginning,
A dance of
Familiarity.

Already.

Has it been so long?

And remembering,
Stupid
As I ever have been
(And prone to greater with passing time),
I know this place.

This body,
Soundly sleeping
Undisturbed.
A single waking eye,
Goodmorning.

I can't remember anything else.

See subject!!!!

"Only you can start this fire in my heart, set me a blaze tonight
Cold no longer
One day my fight will be over, but for now I'm looking straight ahead
And its all for you
So I'll let you rise, I'll let you rise in these bones
Our eyes have grown dim finding no rest in ourselves
Renew us o' lord, light the fire within
Burn, renew this heart
Burn, and rise from these ashes
Burn the fire within
Burn rise up from these ashes
Burn, and cleanse these bones
Burn, renew my heart because I'll praise you
Burn until the day that you will return
Nothing more than to see through your eyes
I want nothing else but to see through your eyes
Burn in my heart
Take my heart, set me free, light my fire"

Still unable to net myself a sweet nursing job at this point, and incredibly sick of well-wishers telling me that they "thought there was a nursing shortage," which requires me to explain that to train a nurse costs X million dollars up front and the new grad programs around here are competitive and blah de blah b l a h BLAH, I have been subpoenaed back to my former employer whilst the current office manager is vacationing with her family in Wisconsin.

It was slow most of today. I'm thankful for the work, and the money, but I do wish there was a little more to do. It was a bit of a tornado in the office area, so I ended up doing some paper sorting and filing and stuff, which sounds like not-so-much but really is, because there were at least ten different billing categories (heat, bank statements, insurance policies, malpractice insurance, etcetera) and at least a half a years' worth of unfiled statements of each type lying around on the desks and counters. Basically, every piece of mail and printed out recipe for organic garbanzo bean soup that had arrived since I quit working there had not been filed.

I found out the hard way that any kind of writing on a tee shirt is totally out in the office setting. It's not like there is any hard and fast rule about dress at the office there - the younger doctor wears her grungy sneakers to work all the time. I try to dress nicely, obviously, and I put way more effort into my appearance for work than I ever do otherwise, and yet today I had no suitable top to wear with my skirt, so I just wore my nice little tee shirt with "Greece" written on the front, given to me by Sar many moons ago. A tad casual, but better than showing up with no shirt on at all, is what I say.

Anyways, this guy comes into the office who must have started coming there since I left because I don't recognize him. He gives me a weird once-over and says, "Why, hello!" Well, "why, hello" to you too Mister Wears-A-Wedding-Band. For a rather short balding man, he was very aggressive and he had a very arresting sort of smile and look about him, his perfect blue dress shirt and meticulously groomed salt-and-pepper facial hair. I'm pretty much over my Intimidated Ostrich years at this point, but it all came flooding back in a second and I turned instantly into a huge weenie, relegating myself to the back room where I could sort out Verizon Wireless statements into month order in peace, without the weird man looking over my shoulder while reading his golf magazine.

Weird Man was seen by the doc, said a gracious thank you to him, and then turned to me, asking, "Did you get that shirt in Greece?" Gah! Shut up shut up shut up! Weird Man, I did not get the shirt in Greece, my friend Sar gave it to me as a present. I have family there but have never been. Yeah, it would be nice. I don't have enough money, though. *Scratch head with left hand so my ring is visible* Nope, nope.. don't really have the money, but yeah, it would be fun. Weird Man says that I might never have the money so I should just Do It While I Can, and gives me a look over the top of his rimless glasses like this conversation is going to get him a complimentary ten dollars off of his copayment. Great, thanks for that advice, because I totally have 3K lying around for plane tickets, and I'm definitely needing to burn some money because that's what I look like - Moneybags McGee, filling in as office manager for two weeks because I have nothing else to do all day.

Before I can ask myself, he says that he doesn't need a receipt for his copay and I say, "Well, you make things very easy for me then."

Then (and here's the kicker), he says, "Well, I may be cheap, but I'm not easy!"

Like, okay, whatever, I'm happy to make shallow conversation and all, and believe me, I do all the time to make people happy and feel comfortable, but what I wanna know is - seriously, who says that? Here's your receipt and I hope you have a great month and thankfully I will not be here when you return. I'm glad he thinks he's Rico Suave and that I'm going to be so sweaty for him with that lame banter and smallbaldingman-overcompensating come-on attitude, but it just wasn't doing a thing for me today.

It's funny, but for all its sadness that it holds for me, I found myself wishing that my opera singing, buffalo-tattooed, ten-years-my-senior admirer were there instead of this big jerkface giving me the leer. At least my opera singer never leers. Instead, he compliments me - on my hair, on how kind he thinks I am, on the way I always make time to talk with him, on everything. Sure, it makes me a little uncomfortable to fend off compliments coming at me solidly for a half an hour, but there is a genuineness to them that comes from someone who really is lonely.

Earlier today, I did see my opera singer friend again, and I like him more and more every time we talk. Today he told me that he went to Word of Life Bible college in NY, and I told him I went to Bible school myself, once. We had a nice chat about stuff and life and everything, and, as I always do, I thought about the tons of people I could think of to set him up with.

It's funny. I know a lot of single people. Some of them are truly content with it and are patient for all the right reasons and even though they may want to have someone, they know how to use all the time in between now and when that happens without living in crisis all the time. All of that is awesome and I completely understand. I would hope that I'd still be like that five or ten years from now if I were single still. And yet some are searching so hard (or think they are), and can't seem to "find" anyone. They're the ones who are always admired by nice guys, but who are always saying that they're missing something. Too fat, too not-this-personality, too dumb (but said in nicer words). And I wonder sometimes what we're looking for and whether what we are looking for in our twenties is really what we'll be looking for later on in life. Maybe the aim for ultra-smart, ultra-witty, super-spiritual, good looking but in a doesn't-have-to-put-any-effort-into-it way isn't what we really want all the time. It all depends on whether we want someone who will put their job as priority over their family, time-wise, for perhaps the rest of their life. Whether we want someone who can leave us in awe of their personality or someone who will be as human as we are when we fail them for the millionth time as a spouse. Whether we want them so high in the clouds that they never see God in the here and now. Or whether we enjoy the physique of someone whose mouth says that fashion and form are vain but does not speak it with their actions.

And so I return to my sweet opera singer friend, who I suspect schedules his visits so that he is able to talk with me a little while longer. Walking through the grocery store with a limp from his bad leg, I envision him as not being so desirable, with his hefty 6 foot 4 frame and plaid shirt visible above most everyone else's heads. Nobody would know that he goes to church every Sunday and sings in the choir, or that on his arm he has a tattoo of a drawing of Jesus that his daughter made as a little kid, or that he went to Bible college and still remembers the teaching tools for children's ministries that he learned there fifteen years ago. Least of all, I'm sure nobody would see that in his heart, he is lonely, watching as the world passes him by without a companion, and happy just to talk to beans-for-brains me for half an hour.

The thing is, he's not a brain surgeon, or exceptionally good looking, his old faded tattoos don't speak well to the spiritual moral majority, and he apologizes for every other thing for fear of offending, so he doesn't cut an imposing, aggressive alpha male figure. He isn't twenty five years old and into fast cars or big manly trucks. But I could bet that he would treat his wife rightly, that he would teach his kids about Jesus, that he would serve in church and enjoy a home-cooked meal made by someone other than himself for once. He would work to pay the bills and thrive and flourish under the attention of someone who give could herself to him. I think he would.

The really sad thing is this: I think he would be happy meeting about just any nice Christian girl who would give him the time of day, because that's pretty much all I do for him and he talks like I am an angel incarnate, and I know lots of nice Christian girls who say that they would love to be married but that all the great guys are taken. The girls I know that are looking don't really know what they're looking for, and, if I had the chance to do something about it, I don't think I would ever bother wasting him on them anyhow.

I'm a big fan of the Clash, thanks to my super cool, ultra-punk parentes. Once upon a time when they were but younguns in love, one bought the other "London Calling" on cassette. Little did they know that one day their nerdy daughter would pick it up and ask where they got it. "Wait... Mom bought that for you? You guys were, like, really cool!"

And so they were.

Anyways, I'm way past learning how awesome my parents were when they were younger, and now I'm just trying to fill their shoes - and I have, even to the point of needing New Balance E-width shoes and coming within a half a size to Mum's wakeboard-sized duck feet. I bought Emvee London Calling a few years ago as a birthday present and he really liked it, and at the time I didn't even know that I'd end up inheriting all his junk when I married him three years later, so he burned me a copy so I could listen too. This was my secret plan all along, really - buy Mark a present but think of myself too. heh.

So it's all old news to everyone by now that a few nights ago, some bald guy in fatigues was prowling around our house at midnight. I thought I was imagining things, because I'm a big paranoid weenie all the time and I'm trying not to be so pessimistic about life, but I still turned out all the lights in the house and tried to see if anyone was outside through the windows. I eventually dismissed my fears, but it turned out that there really was someone outside because the next day at church, our landlady told us that her daughter, the renter who lives behind and directly abutting our apartment in the house had some guy pound on her door and throw a chair at her window. He wouldn't go away so she picked up her phone and dialed 911. The guy just walked down the stairs, like, no big deal, and left, not even breaking into a run until he was some twenty feet away. Ridiculous and terrifying and I haven't slept particularly well the last few nights, let me tell you.

All this to say, as we were driving home from a nice little date tonight while listening to London Calling's "Guns of Brixton" when I joked that the song is totally about me if anyone ever tries to break into the house again.

Mark said that someday when they make a movie about our life, that song will be playing in the scene where our house gets broken into. Instead of the guy breaking into the neighbor's house, in the movie, he'll be breaking into our house and he'll kick in the door and it will be a momentary freeze frame of splintering door hinges and dust, and right then, the song will start to play, softer, then really loudly as I totally jump into action and the whupping begins (me being the whupper, bald dude being the whuppee).

It will be such an awesome scene, seriously. Summer blockbuster. In the trailer, it'll probably have just a little bit of the whupping as a teaser, but definitely that song will be what is playing during the trailer, because, you know. I'm so awesome like that. And because the movies are a lot more unscary than real life is sometimes.

These days, I've been reading a lot about frugality and finances and the heads and tails of the two. I've never been a big spender, nor a big earner, for that matter, but I managed to make it out of a 20K/year college, thanks to big blessings of generous people and good grades and jobs, with what I consider to be a fairly small amount of debt. It's all student loans, which is a good thing, considering that it can be deferred, interest is low and locked at that low rate, and the total amount of it is not much more than you might pay for a low-end model of a current year economy car. All things considered, I'm pretty happy that I made it out okay and that the likelihood of any job I get will pay well is very high, so it is a very manageable debt. Mark got out of college with NO debt, bought himself a truck that runs well, bought me a gorgeous engagement ring, and got himself up to Massachusetts with savings still in the bank.

All in all, I don't worry about money too much, but being currently unemployed certainly stirs the pot a little, so I've become the caped crusader of pinching pennies. There are about five million blogs out there about crazy people who decide to live on 12K a year by not buying garbage bags and spending five hours a week organizing and gathering coupons and stuff, and that's basically extreme, but theres a lot of good stuff to take away from all the insanity. I like the little tips about saving money and living on the cheap. Mark and I walk around the mall almost every weekend just to people watch and get some airconditioned/heated exercise and look at cool stuff, and we never end up buying anything, really. We go to Target and Mark looks for his other mistress, the Nintendo Wii, and we never find one, so we just keep walking. There's always some weird person with green hair and a carebears backpack walking around to look at, and the last time we went, we got to hang around for a while and watch people sitting pitifully in line for hours, camped out in front of the Apple store, waiting for an iPhone. Entertaining! Fun can be cheap!

Mark and I are different in our spending habits. I'm more likely to spend money on things that will persist for some time that I feel are valuable to me and can be used over and over. I might buy music, clothes, or, my favorite recent purchase, a fancy schmancy coffee travel mug, but I will use all of these until they absolutely fall apart, and I only buy them after I've considered them for a really long time. The downside of this is that when I see something that I want that I know I would use that fits into these categories, I will have it on my mind for weeks and weeks. It may only be a six-dollar purchase (like my coffee mug), but if I see it in the store and I think it's the coolest thing ever, I'll be thinking about it for a month nonstop before I finally break down and buy it. Did I need it? Maybe, maybe not, but now that I have it I use it like nobody's business.

Mark, however is more likely to pay for experiences - a date to our little Mexican restaurant, a concert, a movie rental, or the money for gas to just drive around for a few hours doing not much of anything except for talking. He very rarely buys bigger purchases like clothes or fancy electronics. He's not the type who needs to impress people with his possessions, and I really like that about him.

So for all of the times I worry about all the little things Mark might want to buy, I buy the bigger things, and over the course of time I've found that it's pretty much even and that we're living more frugally than I really expected we would. Taking stock of all our expenses and comparing them to budgets I had made to help myself break down my expected expenses, all the areas where we could flub up and spend way more than we should have been much, much lower than I budgeted for, and the things we have less control over, like the money we have to spend on gas each month, are the things that tend to run higher than I thought they would.

Food, overall, I've decided, is my favorite thing to budget. I've found that, especially over the summer, when it's hard to cook in the over, I've been making tons of stir fries and veggies and stuff like that. Basically a bunch of cheap, generic, frozen vegetables, a little oil and soy sauce, and rice, which is cheaper than dirt, seriously. I love stir fry and it's totally the only way Mark will ever willingly eat a vegetable, even if he does still pick out all his carrots and put them on my plate. We eat pretty well and nobody is starving. My all-in-all crowning achievement for this month was how much we spent on groceries - $67! For the month! I am so cheap that nobody can dispute my cheapness!

As you can see, I am in need of a job.

I'm twenty-two today and I feel basically the same as I felt when I was, like, twelve. That's the real weird part.

Very near to a year ago, Mark, Drew, and I were blessed enough to worship at Heidi's church out in Washington state. It was different - more hip, more cultural, louder music. It is a fairly famous church, its pastor considered one of the most influential Christian men around today, and indeed, even now Mark and I have taken to listening to podcasts of his sermons, almost a year later. I was struck with the edge that Mark Driscoll speaks with, the conviction in his voice and in their ministries. The church isn't like any I've ever been to, and while his congregation of twentysomething young marrieds with piercings and probably-regrettable indie tattoos sat to listen, along with their babies and toddlers in tow, I felt a genuineness to everything there.

I liked the way that he spoke about the totems of the Seattle culture, the jokes about overpriced coffee, silly tattoos, clove cigarettes, and intentionally messy hair - never condemning, but never placing much importance on them either, always bringing the people back to the essences of the Bible, the teachings of Christ, the history of man's rebellion from God. I loved that as unflappable as he was about things pertaining to dress, sins committed in the past, and present spiritual needs, no matter how basic, he draws a line that begs for the traditional, the things that are sometimes lost even in the culture of churches I've been to. He decries homosexuality, women in leadership, the new waves of feminization of manhood, and he embraces and rejoices the roles of men as strong, fathers, leaders, lovers, and disciples. He speaks with conviction. He just gets it.

I find church culture stuck in the same mires, the committees, the music, the attitudes that say that Christian school and some manner of Christian Culture should raise your children. People fall through cracks, parishoners talks some more about how horrible the world is getting and gape incredulously when the righteous fall.

I have learned a few things about myself over the past year. I have seen that I am independent to a fault. I have seen that my selfishness supersedes any of my existing favorable qualities. I have understood that any problems I have with the perceived character flaws of other people around me are better off being brought to God than to that person, because, most often, it's me who is most flawed. I have seen that love towards anyone is only ten percent in the saying and at least ninety percent in the doing. Most importantly, I have learned that I am the most impatient, strong-willed, and prideful person I know and likely will ever meet. I know this isn't breaking news to anyone that knows me, but sometimes I just need a refresher.

My heart is slowly getting turned back to God. Not that I had left, but I went through a spell of discouragement, depression, feeling sometimes as lost as I had felt as a young teen. I have been waiting for God to appear again in the things that once inspired me, and I have not found Him there. I didn't find Him, really, in the sermons at my church, I didn't find Him in my very fruitless jobsearch, I didn't find Him every time I have caused a conflict over nothing with Mark. I didn't find Him in my failures.

But He is here. I find Him new everyday these days, present and living in Me. This morning, while looking through some downloads online, I found a recording of the song I heard that morning in Seattle, played by a band of young adults sporting drums and a theremin. It was played loud and low and throbbing, its march echoing the beats of my heart.

"How deep the Father's love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He would give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure

I'm not really all that interested in the prospect of yard sales. Sure, I'm the queen of thrift, that's pretty much undisputed, but I like to do my browsing in places where the former owner isn't giving me a running commentary on the history, price, and usefulness of whatever item my eyes might unknowingly drift over for a fraction of a section. I also don't enjoy thinking about, you know, Mrs. Ethel Jones' electric breast pump being resold right before my eyes. Gross. I like the anonymity of Salvation Army and Goodwill, where if the person next to you is breathing down your neck, you can move to another aisle.

Speaking of Salvation Army, a year ago, I was there with Heidi while she was visiting, or at least I think that's who I was with... Heidi pops up in lots of my memories and sometimes I have to be reminded that it wasn't actually her. hehe. Anyways, I bought this dress for ten bucks that was definitely vintage. The sixties-ified tag said it was a size twelve, and while I have definitely had slimmer years than this one, I have yet to graduate, ever, to a modern size twelve, so I had a hunch that it might be older. Polyester blend to the core, it brushes the floor, even when I wear heels, and diagonal stripes of brown, cream, black, grey, and white flow down it like liquid dreams. I have never looked so awesome as I do in this polyester ten-dollar dress. If I was being inaugurated to the presidency, I would wear it to that and then wear it again to the inaugural ball, DOUBLE-DIPPING in the outfit department. That's how great this dress is.

My only problem with the dress is the dressiness of it. It's difficult to wear to just any old function, and it's not really church-usable, either. Unless I was hitting up church right after being inaugurated, of course. So finally, this April, just a few days before graduation, I got a chance to wear it to a little ceremony my school had for seniors graduating with honors. I put on some heels and a little makeup and wore my sweet dress and that day, from some of the more fashionable of my classmates, I got five separate inquiries about where I got it and how cool of a dress it was. Now, I know. Big deal. But nobody at school ever asks, "Hey, Cass, where'd you get that sweet tee shirt that you've worn no less than thirty times this semester?" or, "I just LOVE those jeans that you got at WalMart!" So this was probably a new record for me. I didn't go to my graduation, because I was in a friend's wedding instead, but if I had gone, I'd have worn the dress again amongst all the new dresses bought for the occasion, the cheapest of which my friend spent a tidy $100 on.

This Saturday, however, breaking from my morals about this sort of thing, Mark and I went to a couple of yard sales on recommendation from our upstairs neighbor and his girlfriend. I was skeptical. The first one we went to had mostly old people, which was to be expected, because it was being held right on the lawn of the town unitarian church, hallelujah, hallelujah, we all love each other, let us hold hands. I wasn't too impressed with the offerings, and when I got to the end of the line I was especially skeezed out by the lady selling multiple home-made old-lady garden placards. The ones that are supposed to look weathered and country that say stuff like, "My husband says I have to choose between him and my garden; Boy, I'm going to miss him!" I recoiled and walked back down the line while Mark egged me over to another cluster of junk-hawkers on the pavement.

While I was walking, though, I found what has to be a gem of the modern art world - a trio of paintings depicting Del Monte bananas. I had to have it. It was as close to an Andy Warhol as I'd ever get and I w a n t e d it. After I dragged Mark over, he decided he wanted to "think about it" and dragged me back to the pavement group, where I fidgeted around, waiting to buy the bananas. I noted that such a fine work probably shouldn't be left for long because it was sure to be scooped, and Mark humored me. We asked about the price and I prayed to be saved from temptation should it rise above twenty dollars, but hallelujah, hallelujah, all if full of love, the girl gave it to us for two bucks! While we were paying, Mark saw another sweet deal - a vintage orange Pyrex mixing bowl with a wheatstalk motif, similar to the sweet green vintage Pyrex bowl set I was given by my in-laws. Twenty-five cents! This woman was crazy, but I wasn't prescribing anything!

On to the next yard sale we went, as I clutched my paintings more tenderly than any child, and there we found another great and awesome thing - the Perfect Half Desk. Maybe, if you haven't been around the apartment or spoken with him for a few months, you might not know about Mark's search for the Perfect Half Desk, so, for the sake of all two of you, let's just say that Mark's been looking for a desk for the kitchen that would be fairly narrow, shallow, and have drawers to put stuff in. A secretary desk, basically. We have gone to every antique store in the region, scoured Salvation Army's overpriced and over-used furniture section, shopped for factory seconds in The Pit at Bob's Discount Furniture, contemplated Target's particleboard offerings, and have always come up dry. Mark has been in a constant state of unrest about this, always commenting on how close he got to the Perfect Half Desk on craigslist, how this one time he had one, but it got away. It is at least fifty percent of the conversation in the apartment - where is the Perfect Half Desk, if it even exists???

Then, there at the yardsale-benefiting-diabetes, he saw it. And the price.

He said, "I love this desk, Vern!! This could be the one! What do you think??" It was the same color as the wood in our kitchen, it had room for a chair to go underneath it, it was narrow and shallow with a sturdy leaf, and it was fifteen dollars. My heart rejoiced at the thought of never hearing about the search for the PHD ever again. The lady selling it made sure to let us know that there was a water stain on the top, barely noticeable. I laughed a hearty, "Ha!" As if I cared about a water stain on the PHD???? As if! One water stain could not mar the perfection I saw glittering in Mark's eyes as he ran his hands over it. I got a little jealous.

He said, "Do you mind if I think about it and walk around a little?" She said, "Sure, but that guy over there is walking around and thinking about it too."

Mark's hand moved to his wallet, fifteen dollars were handed over, and when he loaded that little desk onto the bed of his truck, he fretted over whether to lay down a tarp and how to place the bungees for stability and whether the drawers should be taken out while in transit, and I knew it was true love, because Mark doesn't fuss over very many things in life. It was then that I knew I wouldn't be hearing much about the search for the Perfect Half Desk from then on, except when reminiscing about days of yore before he found Her.

The electrician that has been coming to our house to fix the fire alarms asked me once about how we have all these random things hanging on our walls and said that I must know someone who is an artist. I explained that Mark is Art, I'm Science, but we mix it up a little too, you know, just for kicks. Like, he's into history but I'm way more into music, but for the most part, we work it out and it's not too messy, except for the fact that we have random things hanging on our walls. He said he thought that's how all marriages worked, in his opinion.

Anyways, what I mean to say is, I have my banana paintings, Mark has his desk. This is how you make a marriage work, I guess.

What is this existence we live? It is only vapors and dust, gone in fizzles and poofs and then, most likely, quite forgotten over time. Very few things persist, and those that do will never stay in the headlines for long before they are archived and stored away for the next middle school research paper, four pages, double-spaced, topic assigned (and not chosen). So strange, this. Some nights I cannot sleep but to think on this.

And yet I remain compelled to live it fully nonetheless.

So. I truly am, as the tee shirt Dad gave me for Christmas once said, "Flypaper for Wackos." Basically meaning, no matter where or when I go somewhere, I am likely to gain some sort of weirdo following me around. I use the word "weirdo" in a kind, gentle, and loving way. It's descriptive, not a put-down.

I was at the supermarket today, shopping for Mrs. A (a job I can never seem to fully quit), when this kindly-looking guy with a thick French-African accent turned to me with a smile and commented on how much he likes fresh fruit, all while fondling the mangos for freshness (apparently). I said, yes, me too, I'm all about fresh fruit. He took this to mean I was interested in a lengthy conversation and asked me if I was from Lowell, because he was. He pointed towards a wall of the supermarket and said, "Right over there is where I live, just around the corner." I said I was from Dracut, but fairly close. I smiled, you know, like, nice, great for you, all that stuff. Then he told me he worked as a nurse for the nursing home where Yiayia was back when she was alive. I commented on how nice of a place it was and how happy we were to have her be in such a nice place and with such nice nurses. He nodded, said that it is a nice place and oh, are you a nurse?

By this time, I'm wondering if this is like, some God-commissioned angelspy who happens to know everything about my life but just wants me to repeat it all for the heck of it. I said, carefully, that yes, I was a nurse, and no, I wasn't working, and no, I hadn't applied at his nursing home. He said that I should, but it was hard work. Yes yes, nod nod, for sure, it is... I made some niceties and said how good it was that people were willing to do nursing in a long-term care facility like that because it's such hard work and anyways, I'm on the clock, nice speaking to you, see you around maybe.

Then he was like, "So.. you live in Lowell?" I said, no, nearby, but maybe someday(???!!?!). Hadn't we been over this before? He said, "Hold on! Do you have a pen?" I said no (lie). He ran up to the produce boy, grabbed a pen from him, and took my shopping list from me to. write down his number and name. He said, "I hope you find a job. My name is Julius. Keep in touch, okay? I have a nice apartment - two bedrooms, nice, big bathroom. Very nice. Keep in touch. Nice meeting you!" And off he went, shaking my hand as he left. As I wondered what he meant by giving me his number (was he trying to get a date or was he trying to find a subletter for his apartment, or was he looking to mentor a nurse?) I noticed that I didn't see him leave the store. I can only figure that he either ascended into heaven in the soda aisle or I blinked and he ran off. It makes me wonder whether, if I called the number, rather than ringing in a dingy two-bedroom-but-spacious Lowell apartment, I might call the number, only to hear it ring and ring and ring, waiting for Gabriel to pick it up, the glossolalia of angels humming in the background.

-----

Handzel's Dad was in a motorcycle accident on Friday night and passed away the same night. I have been in quite a pensive, contemplative mood as a result, my heart broken by the strain of the heaviness in it for my dearest of friends and her sweet family, also my friends. I have always thought a lot about death, but in a way that is detached from a lot of true-life experience with it in the sense of tragic death. I always thought a lot about my Dad, who lost his father, my Papou, when he was only 24 years old. My Dad had to take care of all the funeral-related issues, as well as take care of my Yiayia in her grief. At the time, my Dad had me, only a baby, and a new wife and a house, and I guess that as a kid, I always thought that, at the time when Papou died, my Dad was a grown-up. To me it seemed that 24 years old was basically adult, a time when dealing with the death of a parent was young, but not young enough to be improbable or dealt with in the manner that a "young" person might have to deal with it. Since I've been a little older, grown up, gone to college, gotten married, I realize now that 24 is still very young. I realize that even in our youth we're living on our own, paying our bills, getting married, raising children, and facing death and taxes and life in general. I thought I saw a little more clearly how hard it must have been for my Dad to lose his Dad at such a young age.

Anyways, even up until Friday when Handzel called at 10:44PM, I thought I knew. In fact, really, I still don't, I guess. But when I got that call as I sat up on the couch in my quiet little apartment, I heard the choking sobs over the line as Handzel tried to explain in a fury of hysteria what had happened to her Dad just a few hours before. My heart filled with the horror of the feeling of being 300 miles away from my friend and being unable to fix the one thing that would take away the sound of the shock and sorrow in her voice at that moment, and as I heard these primal sounds of grief escape my own mouth, the likes of which I have never felt or expressed for anyone ever before that very minute of my life, I realized, finally, just a bit more clearly, how very young it is to lose your Dad in your twenties.

Hug your mom and dad. Kiss their cheeks and tell them you love them.

I feel very insignificant right now - along with my life's circumstances. My heart breaks.

My six-year-old neighbor, Sophie, lives with her mom in the back half of the house we live in that's split into apartments. She comes over and visits frequently, which is nice because her mother and I are both kinda shy people who keep to ourselves. Sophie kinda brings the whole group together at times. If I leave any of the curtains open or the door is slightly ajar, she knocks on the window or lets herself in the front door to say hello and find out "how my summer vacation is going." I like having nice neighbors.

Mark was taking out the trash and Sophie was outside and wondering where I was, so she came in the front door and told me that she was just stopping in to show me her poison ivy, which she just found out she was allergic to. She got bored of small talk after five minutes and asked if we could tell funny stories instead, and I said that would be great. Five minutes later, bored once again, she decides that we had better tell knock knock jokes instead, meaning that every joke and riddle is prefaced by the words "knock knock" whether or not the joke involves any doors or answering of doors at all. Among my favorites of the night:

Soph: "Knock knock!"

Me: "Who's there?"

Soph: "What did the scissors say to the paper?!?!"

Me: "Ummm... 'Cut it out?'"

Soph: "Waaaaaait! HOW DID YOU KNOW!?!?!?!"

Weird Dream #3 (Last night) - Mark was peeling crayfish in bed to give to some missionaries at our church, but he was leaving their little crayfish exoskeletons all over the place, like, on my pillow. As a result, i got very perturbed because I felt like I couldn't sleep. I was afraid their little antennae would get tangled in my hair.

I also made a fantastic chili last night for supper, with tasty spices and an ethnically diverse cohort of beans, and I did this in real life, not in my dreams. That may have been the root cause of my crayfish dream, but I just don't know.

I awoke this morning feeling like going back to bed, but I decided against it. The one thing that's disadvantageous about our apartment is the fact that there are lots of windows. While nice during the day, I tend to close them at night so people don't see me Elaine-dancing to the radio while I wash my Everest sized pile of dishes. I don't mind if people see that, but, you know.. I just don't give that sort of thing away for free. Since I'm very much dependent on sunlight to actually get me up and moving, the lack of even a little crack of light leads me to sleep in an extra two hours, and even then I feel like the living dead when I do get up. And so I woke at 6AM, threw open the curtains and opened the blinds, and stumbled into the shower. Now I've been up for three incredibly productive hours, wherein I have cleaned off my desk full of papers and rearranged them into a neater pile, washed dishes, done everything on my to-do list, and scoured the web for jobs. Just as it was feeling as if there is nothing left to do, I looked at the clock and realized what time it was and just felt this crushing panic at the thought that I was late for class. Then I stopped, thought about it, and thought to myself, "Not today, Cass, not today."

And so I typed out this blog. Because right now, at this very minute, I have nothing to do. It won't be true for long, but for now, right now, I have time for just a little blog.

Dream # 1 (Monday night):

At some sort of festival, I meet up with mum, Chaz, and Drew, all of three having pierced noses. Mom had a monroe (which looked, might I add, very classy indeed), as well as both nostrils pierced with little sparkly studs, barely noticeable to the naked eye. Drew also had both nostrils pierced with diamonds, as well as a strange clear retainer thing over his nose that connected the studs, almost like a Breathe Right strip only made of clear plastic, and bulkier. Chaz had a nostril pierced AND a stud in his ear. That's how Chaz rolls, bucking the trend and all. I immediately broke into the group on the defensive, whining, "Mooom! I waited all these years to move out so I could get my nose pierced because you said you didn't approve and now you've gone and gotten one!" Mom was all, "Whatever! I felt like it!" [Cue alarm clock.]

Dream #2 (Last night):

I am in the house I am always in in all my dreams, the kinda big creepy one with tons of windows that I'm always afraid people will look into. In this dream, though, the reason I'm afraid is that there is something in particular that's trying to get in whenever it sees light through the window (it's dark outside), so I keep shutting the shades but Mark keeps leaving them open whenever he leaves the room. So anyways, I go into the bathroom and notice that this big black dog is right in the window, so I bark menacingly at him to try and get him to go away but he looks up and growls and barks this bark that's huger by far than my weenie one. I run out of the bathroom and close the door but I discover that he has opened the bathroom window and now is trying to push open the door! Gah! Just when I think he's gone away, I notice something black move in the living room and suddenly I realize that it's a bear cub and just when I figure that out, Donna comes rushing in the door, grabs the cub, and starts cuddling it in a blanket and calling it a cute puppy and I keep saying, "No! DOnna! It's a bear! Not a puppy!!!" in terror. [Cue alarm clock.]

As of today, I'm graduated!!

I like to think about myself in good terms sometimes. Things like how I like to think I'm nice to most people and try to love people for who they are and try to meet people at whatever state they may be in at any given time. I even like to think I go out of my way to help people and give of myself to them.

Well, some days I'm not very good at that. Some days I like to think I'm very loving and accepting but really, I'm not. And those days it just so happens that my husband, the very quiet and very unobtrusive Mark, the one who is a lot more subtle than I will ever be, decides to help me out. Like today, he'll say, "Let's call so-and-so" and it will turn out that that's probably the one person in the world I think it will be hardest to hang out with. It will probably be a person that isn't really the most fulfilling of company - not the type that you can have intellectual conversations with, or that will help you be edified and grow into a higher level of character. Probably the person is actually maybe someone who might have caused a lot of hurt in my life, and maybe even it might not be the most rollicking fun time ever with this person. In fact, Mark will have to remind me that this person, even if it's hard to spend time with them, might really need to keep in touch with us and that I might need to swallow it and just keep in touch because if I don't, I might lose that person forever, that part of my life.

But Mark will call this person up because I don't have the gumption to do it. He will call them up, make arrangements to pick them up. He will greet them with a smile and a warm hug. He will treat that girl like a lady, open the car door for her like a real gentleman and close it for her, and he will talk to her just like any other person in the world, without a prejudice and without condescension, though she would probably be spoken to in that way by most middle-class people. He will take her (and me) out to eat at the nicest place we can afford and he will spend more on a meal there than we have spent since we went out for a "fancy dinner" on the last day of our honeymoon, and he will do it all with a smile and hug them when we drop her back off.

And, amazingly to me, after we drop this person off, I will look in the rearview into the backseat of the car, where he is sitting so that this person could sit in the passenger seat and not alone in the back, and I will say, "Thank you SO much," and he will say, without any comprehension of the enormity of my gratitude, "For what?"

I think my brain is going to explode.

We've been married for three months. Weird.

Sooo. Courtney gave my blog the work-up and now it's happy and colorful (I know.. I know..).

I don't have much to say because I'm kinda sleepy and done with today already. I took some pictures mostly for Mom VDH to see the house, but since I know nobody will believe I cleaned the house unless there is some form of proof. So check out flickr.

In honor of Spring, which apparently is hesitant to show its face, I went on a cleaning rampage of sorts today. I got up really late after basically sleeping in all morning, and then I was seized with the urge to clean everything. I did loads and loads of laundry, washed the dishes in the sink, cleaned all the floors, put away all the clothes loitering on my floor, went through pikes of receipts, paid bills, rearranged the tables and computer desks, got risk of the boxes hanging around, and took down our European, seven-foot-tall, lime green Christmas tree and all of its ornamentals. The house looks fantastic and we had Taco Bell for supper and tonight we're going to watch Blair Witch Project and drink tonic.

I'm not Irish but it's been a good Saint Patty's Day nonetheless. Without our wonderfully Irish friend and brother, Brian, I would not be living in this cute little apartment with this cute little husband and a totally awesome new doormat that we got from Target. I owe more to the Irish than I like to admit sometimes. :)

Some things I will never get used to. Like fifteen year old girls with long acrylic nails and dyed hair and pregnant bellies. Or pushing the HPV vaccine like it's the end of the world. Or the girl who came into the clinic today, drunken father in tow. She was made up and long-haired, a manila folder of information and paperwork under her arm. He was unkempt, long greasy hair in his eyes and covered with a baseball cap, his body clothed in grungy tee shirt and jeans, his toes nosing their way through holes in his shoes, half a cup of cold Dunkin' Donuts coffee in hand. The two of them looked as if there were no way they could possibly coexist in the same household and yet... she brought him in so they could sign paperwork to get her onto insurance - welfare - and her body language showed a tension of extreme embarrassment. The medical assistant went to work asking him if he had brought in his paystubs to show his income level (as such are some of the required documents for getting on MassHealth) while another medical assistant turned away with a look of grief in her eyes. As the father, daughter, and the MA moved to sit down and talk through the paperwork, she commented on how sad it is to see such poor people in the middle of such a wealthy country. This particular MA is from Brazil, and was a practicing physician there but is unable to practice in the U.S. without almost starting school all over again. No doubt, she has seen poverty before. She told me that the saddest thing was not that people were just poor, because you can have no money but still live and thrive, but the fact that people do things to themselves to put themselves into poor situations in life. She said, "I don't know why people in this country don't grow up when they have kids. That's when people need to learn to grow up!"

Indeed, as father and daughter walked out the clinic after saying goodbye, she reached up behind and patted him on the shoulder, not unlike one would do to a young child, while saying gently to him, "Good job, Dad."

I've started my internship finally and it's not as fabulous as I had hoped, but, like, what did I expect from clinicals, right? I mean, they aren't even supposed to be fun. But 100 hours is 100 hours and it must be done, all hundred of them, all.. one hundred... of them...

Last night we ate in the company of our friend Monica from church. Monica is Honduran and animated, her hands flying and her stories running together as rapidly in English as they do in Spanish. We are loud when we're together, Monica possibly louder even than I, and we ate and talked and played Mario Kart and Rummy while eating the chocolates Mark brought home today.

Later, cozied up, my eyes rolling back in my head from sleepiness and my belly full of meatloaf and potatoes, I was enjoying just the quiet. I was thinking about how Mark goes to work every day at this job that is in no way really his thing or perhaps very enjoyable at all, and how I complain about boring clinicals to him while he's working a boring job himself. I felt guilty, mostly because I do think it's kind of ridiculous how I do that sometimes, and also because feeling guilty is one of those things that I do. It comes naturally to me, that guilty conscience. I leaned back a little to prop my eyes open and I told him I was sorry that I can't work as a nurse right now because of school. He asked me why I would even worry about that and I said because, you know, I want to help with money and stuff and I feel badly that all I do is go to school and clinicals and we never see any money out of either of those at the moment. He rolled his eyes and pulled me close. I could hear his thoughts that he didn't say as he contemplated how to deal with this particular reoccurring guilt of mine once again. He smiled and said, quietly, "Money isn't everything."

I just made chocolate chip cookies for probably the first time in my life. I made a terrible mess of myself with batter in my hair, on the coffeemaker, all over the microwave, ground into my shirt, and all over the floor. Thankfully in the process of trying to clean up the aftermath on the counter I must have just stepped in all the stuff that was in the floor and smeared it around so well that it's no longer visible to the eye. Like waxing the floor, only more natural. Problem solved! For some reason, I got out of the shower and this was the very deepest desire of my heart to do before the other stuff that I had to do today. So, as of 7:30 this morning, I now posses a plate full of chocolate chip cookies waiting for eaters, of which there is currently just one. Me!

I brought some over to my nice neighbors, but I waited a few hours to make sure they were awake. :)

I am a domestic machine.

..I have finally gotten placement for my capstone internship.. in the second half of the semester. :D I will be missing the entirety of spring break, but at least I'll graduate. :D

The place seems fun, different, very community-oriented. I'm not exactly sure what I'll be doing there, but it looks challenging enough. I'm terrified and nervous and have no idea what is going on besides where to park, get my ticket validated, and when to show up, but I know I'll be wearing scrubs and that's what counts.

Life is very different these days. I enjoy being in my own house, making my own food, washing my own dishes and sweeping my own floors. I still hate vacuuming, but I guess that just means I'll have to only live in places with hardwood, linoleum, or tile, although, as Sar knows, I've always been partial to linoleum anyways.

So the place where I'm interning (and if you would, pray that maybe someday after it's done I might be given the opportunity to work there) is a community school-based clinic mostly working with immigrants and the poorer side of the city. It's funny how after all these years, some of those silly insecurities come out just because of the setting. For a moment, walking into the school, I felt a little bit like I was in highschool again, and instead of wearing heels, dress pants, and a blouse under a long wool peacoat, I was in baggy jeans and a black tee shirt, my face all broken out and bearing that look of confusion and nerdiness that can be smelled out by the cool people and that can't be hidden except by the steeliest of willpowers. I suddenly felt like all the confidence that I have built up over the years was all stripped away, a sham, reminding me that the "fake it till you make it" still means that you're faking. And it does help, that faking it - to be the expert, as Mum has reminded me many times when I've had trouble being in a teaching role, sometimes you just have to play the part and take heart in the fact that though you might not know everything, you know more than the people you may be teaching. So I've faked a little (make that a lot) over the years in my quest to not necessarily bury my nerdiness, but to make my nerdiness a little more comfortable in a social setting, and it really has worked. I feel confident in a lot of ways; my makeup largely stays in its bottles these days, I start my own conversations, and I can smile at people on the street. God is gracious to me, and I hope I can show it now.

But at the highschool, it felt strange, like I hadn't grown up all this time. I wondered if anyone would mistake me for a student. And then, it all of a sudden became comfortable with the realization... I have five or six years on these people! I'm a professional! I'm an adult! I pay rent! I cook casseroles and fold bathroom towels! I run to WalMart to buy toilet paper! I am wearing heels and a peacoat!!!!!

I guess I've been an adult a long time now, really, just in stealth mode. I know I have, actually. But today, clopping along the cobblestones clutching my folder and my jacket to me against the cold wind, I felt it. I imagined my husband at work, all day, doing a job that I'm sure he never would have wished upon himself, but doing it nonetheless just so that I have a chance to finish up at school. I thought of how thankful I am to have our own apartment and be able to pay for food and heat and even the occasional Taco Bell lunch date on the weekends when we're together. I thought of how it's only a few more weeks of school for me until I have a choice as to whether or not I ever want to return to it. I thought of how, inside my wallet, I have a card with some numbers and the seal of Massachusetts on it that says my name and, beneath it, "Registered Nurse." This was all a nice reminder, straight from God.

God brings us so far. God has brought me so far. He carries me like the child that I am, dragging my feet and sometimes in a tantrum, up and over and around any hills and valleys. I have sometimes wondered what curse this is that I have been given, this sadness that sometimes doesn't leave, the unexplainable and particular ache that prods me towards the contemplation of my uselessness and inferiority in the light of God's greatness, but sometimes I have another feeling that perhaps it is no curse. Perhaps it is simply a peculiar way of God's grace, letting me know, sometimes painfully, that thing we love to repeat: that He never leaves me or forsakes me.

Thank you, Lord, for the confidence I have in you.

Today was my day for random errands. I hiked up to The Nash early this morn to get my social security stuff changed to my new name because until then, I can't change anything else. I walked right in, got seen within 15 minutes (which was, oh.. four hours shorter than the wait at the Lowell office) and got my name changed. That was easy. In fact, incredibly easy. Like, you'd think that changing your social security stuff would be this complicated thing, but it wasn't. I was all ready with about fifteen forms of ID - passport, license, nursing license, school ID, all this stuff - and they didn't use a darn one besides my license and my marriage certificate. So, hallelujah.

So the thing is, it's easy to change your name with social security, with the feds, the Big Guys, you know, Big Brother and all that, but then I went down to the RMV to change my drivers' license over, and they won't accept my old social security card plus the receipt (FROM THE SS OFFICE!) that says that my name is legally changed. So now I'm waiting for my card to come in the mail, because, you know, there's no way ANYONE could ever print out a fake SS card that we're not allowed to laminate or whatever. But someone is totally going to go up to the social security office in New Hampshire and print out a fake name change receipt on their letterhead. But.. whatever.

It all goes back to the old caveat about how Devil Patrick, our wonderful governor here, wants to have free this and free that and universal for all of every resource available to taxpayers, and how you can be from anywhere and come here to Massachusetts, illegally, and you can get a near free ride because people decide to feel badly for you, but I pay m'darn taxes and have lived in Massachusetts my whole life and I have to sacrifice my first born to keep my license legal.

Anyways. I went to the registry and got the paperwork and read it in the car. Of course, I need the seventeen forms of ID for real this time, as well as a utility bill or bank statement. All our bills are in Mark's name, and I know from Mark's experience trying to change his license from VA to MA that they won't accept credit card bills as proof of residency, so I drove down to the bank, determined to figure this out.

Well, the bank needs a utility bill. I said, "But everything is in my husband's name... is it so bizarre that people get married these days? Do husbands and wives pay separate bills now?" The guy said, "I don't know. I'm sorry. I need your license with the new address or a bill from utilities."

So I went home and sat, crabby, for a few minutes. But then i went on the RMV website to check for some loopholes, and there, bright as day - change your address ONLINE. Ha! So I need a utility bill to prove I live where I am if I go into the RMV physically, but if I sit on my butt in my apartment and log on from there, I can change my residential address with no proof. I am so confused.

I am turning the world upside down on it's head.

And Sarah Jo is really far away.

/complaints

It's terribly snowy and grey here today and lots of people keep riding their ATVs on the street what sounds like two inches away from the house. People are skittering and sliding all over our street today and everyone sounds like they're trying out for the local drag race track.

I'm chilly and Emvee is at work. I don't want to shovel anymore.

/complaints

Some mornings (most, these days) I am far too tired to do anything but drive to wherever it is my car in taking me. I gradually wake up over the course of the drive but I am not cognizant enough to truly take anything in besides the very necessary things like the brake pedal, the gas, and maybe the windshield wipers, if the car has warmed up enough by then.

This morning I was more awake and when I am awake and driving and sitting in stop and go traffic for 45 minutes, I like to look around at other people in their cars. A lot of times I like to watch their lips move while they're singing along with their music, and try to assign them something good to listen to. Sometimes this little old Asian lady in a black Lexus will be next to me. She's listening to George Thorogood. Or the guy wearing a camouflage boonie hat and sunglasses in the green Kia Sportage who is listening to The Beatles.

But today I looked in my rearview to see a black Honda CR-V, the woman inside in a standard peacoat-type jacket, her hair perfectly done, her face a lot of chiseled and sharpened lines that looked to be honed more by plastic surgery than flawless aging and exercise, and her eyes covered with dark and enormous bug-eye sunglasses. She was talking, not really singing, to herself inside her cavernous SUV, her mouth moving bit by bit. And there, slipping out from beneath her behemoth sunglasses, were torrents and lines of quiet tears. I couldn't see sobbing, or rending of clothes, or gnashing of teeth. Just two big long silvery lines of saline running down the artificially-rendered crevices of her face. She looked like an attempt at being pulled-together and unaffected, with the inability to actually do so. My heart is still a little sad for her.

On the news yesterday driving home, I heard that Anna Nicole Smith died. My own eyes welled up a little for some reason. I don't really know much about her, really, except for the stuff everyone knows, the blondeness, the topless dancing, the Playboy modeling, marrying of tycoons and reality shows and the like, but I felt distinctly human at that moment and I felt her very nondescript, ordinary humanness at that moment as well. I let myself imagine a little bit (I am doing so now) the vast and meaningless vapidity that seemed to characterize this woman's entire life, and I truly, genuinely, deeply feel sorry for this... that... poor woman. Sometimes I think we (I) spend so much time lampooning people that we (I) forget that they are really people, with a beating heart and maybe an empty soul. I felt, and feel, very ashamed of myself at times like this.

I've now developed an indefatigable love and, I daresay, passion for Scrubs. I watched Garden State what seems like a million years ago now and I was totally unimpressed the first time, mostly because I was tired and completely, utterly fixated on the fact that Mark had his arm around me (it was early on in the dating days, what can I say). I didn't want to watch it the second time, but when I did, I couldn't take my eyes off of it, I was so absorbed in the complexities of the characters, the way they all seemed so simple at first glance but were so very mixed up underneath. I wanted to take them home with me. I cried when she cried, I cried even more at the very end. I loved that movie, man.

We went to see The Last Kiss, the movie that was supposed to be some sort of late-twenty-something version of the early-twenty-something movie that was Garden State. It wasn't very good, mostly consisting of lots of awkward scenes and semi-boring ennui, which despite my love of a good cloud of grey ennui, wasn't very thrilling.

For this reason, I resisted watching Scrubs. I try not to get into teevee because it just takes up too much of your life in terms of staring at a box all day. A brain melt, if you will, of hours and hours a week where you have to watch this or that show to stay up to date on progress and stuff, and I just don't have the time (or brain) to waste these days. Finally, one fateful night, at Nick and Christine's, we watched about five episodes of Scrubs in quick succession over plates of Stine's incredible chicken and rice, and I have been utterly unsalvagable ever since. I have to have it. We can't help but download the episodes when we miss them (which is every week now that Mark works Thursday nights), we watch them almost as religiously as I did the X-Files, which in Catholic terms would render me the Patron Saint of Piety, Our Blessed Lady of The Black Oil, Usted Senora del Dracut del Scully. That's how religiously I watched the X-Files.

I LOVE YOU ZACH BRAFF!!!

I don't know how to explain it, but I'm home. I'm here. It's hard for me to understand how someone who, five years ago, was only an acquaintance, now shares my entire life with me. It has been an interesting challenge for me to transition from singleness to reluctant sharing of my independence to engagement to marriage, and I'm not sure I could point to one moment of change that made it easier or less of a battle for me to give up the thing that I had been clutching onto for years that was always mine unless I was to give it away, and that thing, in an abstract manner, was my ability to choose. I knew that once someone made me choose it would be all over. In a line sung by the Smalltown Poets that has always rung infinitely, painfully true to me, "I was mourning the loss of the choices I'd lose."

I spent the earlier years of my teenage life fixing up lots of ideas about changing the world by means of much great deep thought and many a heavy novel. I have since turned those ruminations (I hope) into something a bit more tangible, more personal, where my hands can be in the change and it's not up to everyone else to get with the program. I *am* the program, really, as we all are, in our own little ways. But back then I had a lot of things mapped out to do and to be and ways to do things that were supposed to happen and I knew, for sure, that possessing the personality I did, I'd likely be single forever, leaving me lots of time to do things that single people can do that, perhaps, otherwise entangled people could not. I wasn't ready to be anything but independent, and I wasn't ready for Mark.

When he first asked me out and I told him I was pretty busy with life and stuff and, you know, stuff, he seemed okay with that...sort of... and told me that I was a "total ice princess." I felt a little swelling of primal pride in that - yes. The Ice Princess. That would be me. I think I said to his face that I thought it a mean thing to say but what I was thinking to myself went something like, "Heh. You know it, Johnny Reb. Welcome to frosty New England."

But now here I am, sharing a house with this person who leaves his socks all over the place, still hasn't figured out where anything is when he needs it, leaves every light in the house on while I worry about wasting electricity, and who, when I said I was feeling not-too-well the other day, said dryly, "Must be PMS... this should be tons of fun." And he shares a house with me, a complex and volatile mix of emotions, ideas, practicality, and passionate rationalism, with an icy heart wholly untouched by a single heartfelt plea that the one thing in the world we truly, really need for our apartment is a Nintendo Wii. And I think we're both pretty happy. I know we were before we knew each other, but now we're happy together.

So when I came back to church after coming home from Virginia, a lot of people made little noises with their mouths and said how funny it was that everything is so different now and how much adjustment I must be dealing with in my life and what a change from being a Girl to a Real Woman. I guess they don't realize that I have been striving to be a Real Woman since far before I ever intended to get married, and, perhaps more importantly, my best of friends are Real Women, with AND without men in their lives. I like to think that those sorts of things are defined by marriage so much as they are defined by God, but perhaps that is from my perspective, as thusfar the vast majority of my life was spent single. And that's good with me.

The thing is this - I've tried, in the past, to prep myself mentally for every experience of life I could think up, wondering what could befall me in my life ahead. I bent my character and my habits and whatever I could to see how much I could transform myself in ways large and small. I wanted to anticipate my life and meet it there, executing decisions in the future that I had made years before. And yet the one thing I never could have prepared myself for, in regards to this whole Mark thing, this whole, friends-boyfriend-fiance-husband thing, for all its little bumps and wobbles along the way, was how natural of a progression it ultimately was. And perhaps that is not so very surprising, coming from the God of natural wonders who carved out Grand Canyons and filled the depths of the ocean with the fountain of His hands. In these sorts of scales, I find Mark and I very, very tiny indeed.

I'm a Van Der Hyde!!!

I awoke this morning to the otherworldly sound of low drawls and conversation about car repair and wedding decorations, the sounds of the south and my family-to-be right outside "my" bedroom door.

I just called my friend Lynn to discuss details about how to get to where the wedding is. We hadn't talked in months but we've emailed and kept in touch every once and a while after having worked together at the Student Nursing Association at school and going to Honduras together. She's conveniently living in VA at the moment so it has somewhat miraculously allowed her to come to the wedding. This is all grood (great and good) but I think the most enormous thing that she said was when we were goodbye-ing and she said, "See you Saturday!"

SATURDAY????? What the heck? I'm getting married on Saturday? Okay... whatever.

In other news, the only other notable thing at the moment is that I've got someone posing as a radio station intern on Flickr who is trying to get me to send him/her/it pictures of my feet, by means of saying that I was referred by someone on Flickr for the stations's "Prettiest Feet Contest." Let's just say that I don't have any friends who would vouch for me having the prettiest feet ever. Except for Mark, but I blinded him with science and love, so we know he doesn't count.

See you all soon, shortly after I've been Vanderized.