Juxtapose

So, I've been under fire lately for allegedly "b'dapping!". For those who don't know, to "b'dap!" is a verb, and it originates with my sister Tess. Tess is animated and happy, smart, witty, and sassy, but she's also sometimes the possessor of loud outbursts of exclamations of hot air of some sort. She's happy go lucky, so I think sometimes that translates into her saying whatever pops into her head, even if it doesn't make sense or is contrary to what everyone else is thinking. It's not a bad thing, just very Tessa. Sometimes b'daps! occur when she's trying to tell a story at the dinner table and her mouth won't work as fast as her train of thought will, so everything runs into one unintelligible string of b'daps! that lead everyone at the table to say, "Again. And SLOOOWER." B'daps! always need the exclamation point, so that it shows the force of the b'dap!!! This is serious stuff.

So, lately I've been b'dapping! a bit. Not intentionally at all, and in various ways and forms, and don't talk to me about it because I'll deny it in any other form than what I'm writing here right now, but I'll admit that a b'dap! or two has slipped within the past few weeks. This leads me to question the reason why this is happening. I've always been kind of a loud person, but not for the same reason Tess is. Where Tess has her opinions strong and isn't afraid to say them aloud, I've always had trouble sticking to my guns and with almost anyone other than my family, I'll be the first one to "agree to disagree" because I have a hard time debating my side in a respectable manner. Most of the time I'm loud because I can't hear a darn thing due to allergies and clogged ear canals. So it's not the loudness so much that is any different, it's just... I'm a little giddy, lately.

I've never been the most popular girl. Tess is the social butterfly in the family, and her personality is very charismatic. Her friends love her, she's got a list of messages on the answering machine each day, and we're lucky if she actually sleeps in our house a few times a week because otherwise she's out with her buddies. When I was her age, I was in my little bedroom with a notebook and my favorite pen, writing out my daily woes and the trials and tribulations of the world that had taken residence on my shoulders. Maybe I ruminated too much, maybe Tess ruminates too little, or maybe we just were the opposites of each other, no better and no worse for the wear, but this is all just to say that we're very different. I've always considered Tess to be a little giddy, in a levelheaded way. She has a lot of joy and is very passionate about things. I've struggled to have joy in myself, but I've found all of it in the world around me and in Christ. In and of myself, I'm a wretched soul indeed, lost in my own thoughts and self-despair. Tess somehow seems to bubble over in her personality with some joy that's just there, sometimes. I've always seen that in her and I know other people do. I see why she has a million friends and I was barely able to make one at her age. She's special.

Which brings me to my own b'dapping! as of late. There's a boy living here at my house now, in the Lego room, who claims to have two fiances. He calls Tess and I his fiances and I'm happy to share him with my sister. I don't mean to make everything sound all Markmarkmark, but he's kinda been growing on me lately, you know? I think I'm giddy right now, just a little bit, because he's here. This is fun stuff. The other day Mum said, "Yeah, well, you know Cass has been b'dapping! lately..." And I snapped, all defensive, "So what!!!?!?! Just because I'm HAPPY for once?!?! I'm not MOROSE anymore?!" And then, I realized what I hadn't thought about before, and that's just how cheery it makes me to have Mark around. I say stupid things to get him to laugh, I dance around like an idiot to make him smile, I have a lot of fun with him here, in a novel sort of way that wasn't possible when there were miles and miles separating us before. We do normal dating people things like go get coffee together and watch teevee and
make up dumb games to play when we're bored, and we laugh a lot. It's really nice. And I know that I wasn't unhappy before I met him, and I know things won't always be happy in our life together, but it's a great addition. To take from an email I wrote to my friend Jen the other day, it's weird how God works because it's only been in the past few years, since my late teens (17ish), that I'd gotten really comfortable with being a single girl and going to school to be a nurse and flying off to the edges of the world with no commitments, happy in what God had for ME as in, Me Cassie-without-anyone-else-in-the-picture, not Me-and-dream-guy-I-hadn't-met-yet, and then it was just like everything opened up and Mark was there and God was like, "It's okay, you can want to be married too. Martyr complexes don't impress me." And that makes me really happy that at the time when I least expected it God gave me something that I had forgotten how badly I had wanted in the past.

So, on the whole, with life's little and big ups and downs, I'm happy. God is good. Having a boy or girl doesn't create happiness or take it away where it never existed, but it's a new dimension, I guess, that I've never felt the full extent of before. Life is complete with or without them, if God has us that way at any given point in time, but it reminds me that I'm living every day, gives me something to look forward to that I haven't thought of before, makes me treasure the time I have living with my family and being in college and able to go out with my friends and do stupid stuff. I think that the past three years spent with my Sarahs and my brothers and sister and my Sven and my RIers and my Mark have been some of the best of my life. God is so good.

So many changes. It's worth a b'dap! or two, I think.