Signs That "It" Still Exists...

Recently, I've had an inner debate going on. To believe in or to give up on love. Crazy coming from me of all people I know, but true. I feel like I've been on a very long quest to find the real thing, the kind of love that has inspired the greatest of people and been selfless and pure. Such love, I know is so rare. The kind of love that resists temptation when there is no way flaw or error will be found out. The kind of love that doesn't fade with time but grows brighter with the passing of each day. You know, all those romantic truths you might have hoped for but gave up on or still belive in and search for yourself if you don't already have them.

Last week in an odd place, I found signs that "it" still exists. The "it" being love. It was in a movie called Chaos Theory. Ryan Reynolds has quickly become one of my favorite actors and one of the reasons is for his role in this film. Mind you, this isn't one of the best films, I just think he does an incredible job of playing the slightly above average guy that desires to live a good life and love his family despite difficult circumstances. In it, he resists the temptation to sleep with an extremely beautiful woman. He fights himself and his emotions to win his family when he finds out his daughter is not biologically his. In brief, he loves, he genuinely loves his wife and his daughter. When things get ugly he doesn't give up. He has some crazy thoughts on the way (which are normal given the circumstances he encounters) but he never gives up.

The other place was in a docutmentary on the late Randy Paush of Carnegie Mellon. There aren't enough words to say how incredible this man was and if you care to know what I'm talking about indepth, google him or read his book The Last Lecture. His love for his wife and children as well as his abilty to truly live life are absolutely astounding.

So there are signs that "it" still exists. The movies remind us and that's one of the reasons why we love them so much and real people show that the love portrayed in movies is not just a fiction. Thus the search continues, the search for the "it" that still and does exist.

Poem: When Words Aren't Enough

Dear, it’s just not right
How life can turn and twist in ways
That we cannot control
I won’t pretend to know all of what you
Are in too much pain to say
If I could I’d play some strings
Remind you that He knows
He can speak words better than our lips can tell
And if there’s peace
May it run to you and embrace you
With all that you care for

Of Needles and Hay...

Last night, I had a conversation over IM with a friend in TX around 1:30 this morning. The following is part of our conversation and spured from my quote, "Finding a good man is like looking for a needle in a haystack." It might shed some light on the whole "nice guys finish last" myth.

ME: Why do you think people reject you?
HIM: not sure, i guess i dont look good enough
or they say they want something, but really just want a douchebag
ME: You're not a model, but you're not ugly
you're just your average, warm hearted guy
HIM: and that gets me nowhere
ME: and there are lots of women that are sick of the pretty boys/ bad boys
It gets you further than them, because you're real and not up for games.
HIM: maybe in a perfect world
ME: games waste time and wound hearts
oh shut up
really
stop it
rather than think of what you don't have
You MUST think of what you do have and sell yourself on that
HIM: I think im done putting effort into it
ME: If I were there I'd smack some sense into you
:P
HIM: wouldn't help
ME: Oh yeah it would...
you haven't had my kind of sense
:P
HIM: :-\
ME: It's set many a man straight
male friend that is
really...
you need to think of what good things you have and believe that they are worth good in return
nice guys don't finish last
they have fewer divorces
HIM: I don't want any
ME: and life long, lasting, deeper and more intimate relatioships
Nice guys are part of the hidden treasures of the world
Finding a good man is like looking for a needle in a haystack
these are all TRUE statements
HIM: too bad girls prefer finding hay
ME: not true
most often we can't recognize hay from needles until we have our hearts broken a time or two by hay
but we learn
and we don't settle for hay
we save ourselves for needles
those are the ones we want to marry
and have children with
and grow old with
NOT hay
Do you hear me?
HIM: yea
ME: I'm speaking as a woman to you...
so you can't say women don't think like that
I'm speaking to you as a woman who has had relationships with "hay" and ended it because they were "hay"
As a woman who's saving herself for a needle
the right one
HIM: and broke the hearts of who knows how many "needles" on the way
ME: what?
I never intended to break any hearts
never
HIM: who knows how many good guys have liked you, and got passed up because you went after the bad one instead
ME: You have no idea how many bad boys I've turned down looking for the right one
you have no idea
my personal "hay" has been the guys that wear sheeps clothing...
the ones that seem to have everything right from being involved in the community to adoring their mothers
but it was all FAKE
And if there were needles along the way... they never asked me out
they never made a real attempt to let me know of their feelings
or their timing was wrong
HIM: sorry
ME: if they did
no need to appologize
I'm just telling you like it is
I've never been into "bad boys"
ask anyone that's known me for a long time and they will tell you the same
HIM: i believe you
ME: There are good women out there that have been decieved...
don't fault them for it
look for those women
those who are looking for neeles in a haystack of wrong men
she's out there...
I believe that
She's not me...
but I believe she's out there
and...
you're being awfully quiet
HIM: just listening
so to speak

A Decent Road Map of Love

"Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails..." ~ I Corinthians 13:4-8

Different Orbs...

There's a local watering hole that I've gone to weekly with a good friend for quite some time. We're regulars there and they know us by name. He's one of the very few men in my life that I know will give me unbiased advice concerning men and romantic relations without having his own romantic agenda. Women, if you have a friend like this, you know that they are worth their weight in gold.

Well, I had been pining over someone and something that happened yesterday. It really got to me, more than I wanted it to. I talked with a girlfriend in California about it. I met up with another girlfriend in the early evening. And then later on in the evening, I talked to him. I was furious. Both girlfriends suggested to cut all ties and that had been my emotional leaning upon the receipt of some news. I was in pain and I wanted to run for the hills.

After a couple hours of talking and partaking in our normal sarcastic routine of joking about anything under the sun at the bar, I couldn't stuff my true emotions any longer. More than angry, I was hurt. He noticed it and I started talking from the heart, telling him what was really on my mind. And unlike my female friends, he was able to give a unique perspective, a male perspective. The more he talked, the more I understood that men and women truly are from different planets. On the surface I'd known that for quite some time, but I didn't know the details of how different we really are. We function so differently its mind blowing. As he let me in on that perspective, it was immensely helpful. The more he talked, the more I understood and the more I could emotionally and mentally breathe. I'd even go as far to say that it was what he said that saved another relationship from being wrongfully thrown away. He had nineth hour words of wisdom and insight that a woman could never give. She couldn't give them not because she doesn't want to, but because she's not a man.

So here's to good friends, wisdom, and the oposite perspective. I wouldn't trade my girlfriends in for the world, but there are some things we as women just don't get without consulting the other side.

Poem: History Repeated, But Not Quite

Rays slipping through my door
Another day arrived
Standing in between this and that
That was similar to now
Mistake was similar even then
But not the same
Passions raged inside, uncontrolled
Over a what if
A friend from long gone
And he strutted
Molding him into what he thought
She wanted
Long phone calls, texts, and IMs
His heart rose and waited
Thinking she could be "the one"
If one were to exist outside of what He said
I pushed, cried, fasted, and sunk in low
Seeing how things would play out,
Yet not completely sure in foresight
And I killed it
Set a torch to all of my dreams entwined with him
Wrong or right?
Who knows, but history is history...
Nothing crystalized
With the woman who shared the name of Jesus' mother
Years later his heart hung by a string
As I became a what if and a burned romantic bridge
Him never to return and forever labeled as friend
Even now...
I've gone through the mental and emotional acrobatics
Now bending flexible over and through
Anything to stay centered and protect
You and myself
Avoiding premature actions
Carefully treading
Bowing my heart to Him
Not caught up in wrongful passions like before
History's lesson I have learned
Leaving room for the process
I was always the one you could be you with
No need for mask or putting on another "you"
You, the real you was and is
What I've always admired

Piano Days...

Years ago, when I was a little girl, my mother had a friend that owned a beautiful Baldwin piano. At seven, I would create little songs while the two of them chatted over coffee and and talked about the greatest new thing, juicing. Mind you, I was seven in 1988, so juicing was big then, just taking off in the health world. They were into vitamins, organic living, and juicing, while I was amazed by his piano.

Back then, like I am now, I was amazed by anything that could create music. Back then, my father owned a store with a lot of antiques and other things. Often someone would bring in a musical instrument and my father would purchase it for sale. The back of his store had a huge office and paved area. He kept his antique car there with it's couch-like seats and suicide doors that was bathed in a beautiful midnight blue. When I wasn't playing with his car or twirling around in his office chair, I was playing an instrument. You name it, I figured out a way to play it. Violin, trumpet, French horn, saxophone, clarinet I played them all. It's not that I can say I made "music" then and if you've had a child or learned how to play an instrument yourself you know that the beginning sounds are more noise than anything else. But my Dad didn't care. He was great like that.

When I was eleven, my parents got divorced. It was a terrible time, more terrible than the word terrible lends itself to. My mother and I left everything in Connecticut and relocated to Pennsylvania. Not too long after being there, I received a package from my father. There was a beautiful new winter jacket and a clarinet in the box. And even though the marriage of my parents failed, I was still daddy's little girl and he understood the language of my heart more than anyone else could. His sending a musical instrument was a silent way of saying, "Honey, I know there is music, beautiful music in your heart." My mother understood too as she would say that music skipped a generation in my family and came to back to me. She would say I was like my Great Grandpa Baldoc who played the viola for the Boston Pops Orchestra.

So I started taking lessons in the fifth grade. Played in the concert band, honors band, and orchestra until I graduated from high school. My school didn't have a football team and all the cheerleaders were made fun of, so it was actually "cool" to be in the band and/or orchestra. We didn't carry the stigma of "band geek." In hind sight, it was a very healthy environment for people with artistic leanings given that it was a public high school. And after high school, my clarinet went with me to Italy. I played with a worship (music) and drama team in various parts of Italy for four and a half months. My guitar was there with me too, but that was more for private enjoyment than public display.

When I went to Thailand two months after getting back from Italy, I brought my instruments with me. I would bring my guitar to class and play with my high school students in the last 5 or so minutes of class. They loved it and it provided a good bridge between us. It seemed as though everyone in Thailand had some artistic gifting of some sort. And just as my students were somehow awed by me, they continued to amaze me. It was there that I donated my clarinet. The school had so much talent, but not enough instruments.

I wanted it to be a private thing, the donation that is. But when I told my host father (who was a teacher at the same school) that I wanted to donate my clarinet, word spread. The school officials made a little ceremony. They asked me to play for them and hence I played. They took pictures as if I was handing them some medal of honor. And I guess I was, handing them a small medal of honor, a piece of my history. It was the last gift my father had ever given me. It had made it through the streets of my hometown to the streets of Italy and into the hands of Thailand.

Back then, I was sorting through some things, trying to figure out where and what I wanted to do with my life. I was good at a lot of things (theatre, music, photography, writing, etc.), but I thought that I was not great at anything. So, I layed down many of my passions to focus on one, writing.

But when I started attending college, I kept going back to a more private and innocent love, music. I'd sneak away to the basement of my dorm and step into what I thought was a sound proof booth. Taking a break from Aristotle, Erasmus, or whoever else I was reading, I'd play my thoughts out over white and black keys. Whatever I couldn't get out in words, I could express through music. Playing piano and forte with crescendos and decrescendos, sixteenth notes to whole notes; I could somehow express what I otherwise could not.

Until one day, I stepped out of the booth to see the dormitory staff clapping. Surprise, the booth wasn't sound proof. They asked where I'd learned how to play like that and I told them I hadn't. As they asked when I'd be playing next, I felt very uncomfortable and just smiled with an "I don't know." The next semester, I took lessons and was luckily able to use the class for the honors college I was a part of. When no one was around, I'd steel moments with the baby grand in Light Auditorium. It was like I was having a private love affair with a piano... and I was. It continued until I left that university. When I came back to the US and started school in Maryland, my love affair continued. I would steel moments with the baby grand in the Memorial Chapel.

Even to this day, the words that don't find their way to paper or to screen, find their way in music. And someday, I pray that I a vision I had years ago comes true. That I come home from work and find my beautiful daughter playing the piano. Natural light is flooding the room. I put my briefcase down on the counter and sit down next to the man I adore, the man I said "I do" to. And I remember the days when she was little and making noise.

The Layer In Between: Thoughts on Bloging

For the past year or so, I've dealt with a dilemma concerning this blog. Ex-boyfriend's girlfriends have used it as a means to keep tabs on me and the fidelity of their men. Potential romantic interests have used it as a means of getting the inside scoop on my thoughts. An ex-fiance will also stop here from time to time. Quite frankly, I have wrestled with the public eye and the desire to be anonymous yet known all at the same time. It's strange that I have no problem writing about the inner workings of my heart and life while complete strangers read, but I have a problem with being known by the people I should keep an open door to. I guess this blog is the middle layer between personal journal and professional writing.

It is an uncomfortable place to be at times. Some people use their blogs as political soap boxes, some use them as if they are business webs sites, and others to display various talents such as photography. But for me, this blog and all that it does and does not say is a platform of me. It is a ground for me to get comfortable with you as my reader and for me to exercise a more informal, personal, yet public writing voice. There are a lot of personal things that I start writing here, but for various reasons don't publish. At times my voice is incredibly loud here and at others it's barely audible.

At certain points in time I have thought of killing this thing that I created so long ago, but for various reasons it lives. If I'm going to write a book and use my name, I need to get used to the idea of friends, strangers, and less than ideal connections reading my work. For the purpose of privacy and any future relations, I've considered using a pseudonym. If you've kept-up with this blog for some time, you've heard me mention this before. There are positives and negatives to each option, but no conclusion has yet to be reached.

So with all of this said, welcome. Thanks for reading and being patient with me as your writer as I get more comfortable with the idea of having a real audience, you.

Poem: Gathering Some Things

Gathering things
Letting go the pieces of ruins past
And gathering the sediment of me
No more need for brokenness and heartache
What He said is good
Right all along
Sensitive yet strong
Broken but unbreakable
And he was wrong to idolize my body
Cage me into his perfection
Painted a beautiful picture of farce
I was wrong to put him in the center
And let him slowly strip me of identity
Without knowing until it was already done
It all happened so slowly
Constantly sacrificing my happiness for his own
Believing it would all turn around
Until all I stood for was denied
Invalidated and seen as worthless
Foolishly I believed
Bought into the big lie that he was "the one"
His vision was his own lust
My name was its label
Never loving for what was,
But what he could make me into
The perfect mother figure
The perfect model fiance
The perfect intellectual
The prefect teacher for his school
The perfect one in bed
He saw what God called beautiful
Put his own label saying "not good enough"
The three that followed were attempts to remedy
What only God and I can fix
Lack of patience blinded me to what was
The broken status of my heart
And though I am in a tunnel
I am nearing its end as light gets brighter and brighter
Each day passing
Leading me into the strength and wholeness
Known before the train wreck of him ever occurred
Completely content in the skin He's given
And the path He's given me to tread though not entirely visible
Alone now for a purpose
While keeping my ear to His heart

Thoughts, Responsibilities, and Waking-Up in Reality

Over the past month or so I've taken a break from life and really relaxed. After a long run of 11 months of classes, I was long overdue for a vacation. Recently, I've spent a lot of time alone reading, writing, playing the guitar, cooking, and doing whatever else I needed to get reacquainted with rest. Prior to that mental vacation, I would wake-up with intense anxiety and hit the ground running and keep running until my body called it quits and I could no longer keep my eyes open.

Now recently, I've been coming to the point where I am fully rested and in need of stimulation, mental stimulation. In order to quench my mental thirst, I've been reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Saul Bellow's Something to Remember Me By, various things in the Bible, and a lot of news. More specifically, I've been thinking about our responsibility to each other politically, emotionally, and intellectually. I've been wondering what if anything I can do to contribute to the betterment of society and life. More concretely, where's my place here?

A few summers ago, after my first semester in college, I felt like I was actually contributing to US society. It was the first summer and probably the only time in my adult years that I've felt truly challenged intellectually. From reporting for the newspaper of my home town to working on the Veterans History Project for the Library of Congress, I genuinely felt like I was making a contribution. On top of those two jobs, I was also doing consulting work and was a program manager for a senior citizen center in that same town. The synapses had fired from my first semester and continued to blaze as I realized I could create my own challenges and continue to grow and stimulate myself outside of academia. And on a more personal level, my then boyfriend (a very handsome UC Berkley and Harvard grad)had been temporarily transferred to Florida. So I poured myself into my work sometimes waking up at 4:30 a.m. to write an article for the paper. That summer and the business encirlced in it were two fold, I wanted to be and continued to find avenues for challenge and wanted to busy myself so I didn't miss him too much. Later our relationship folded due to him not coming back to the area and I used my work again as a means of trying to "get on." Had he came back, there's a very likely chance that I would not still be single and unmarried, but that is neither here nor their.

So you might be wondering how this figures into the now? Well, I'm entering into a season of extreme mental thirst. A season where I need to push myself to feel fulfilled and to feel of use. I'm currently looking at a year of living outside of the ivory tower and needing to and exciting about creating my own avenues for growth. There isn't anyone in the picture to get over as there was before, but there are opportunities worth seizing. Within the next few months, I plan on getting equipment together to start working on the Veterans History Project again. I may also do some local news reporting. In the past, both were a good means of owning up to responsibility, intellectual responsibility, as well as a good means of touching people where they were and paying homage to their experiences and our history. Teaching and/or tutoring might somehow too fall into this mix.

Concerning the Veterans History Project,I understand that most of our troops coming back from Iraq will most likely not feel comfortable talking about the details of what they have seen and experienced from the war that is currently going on. Many of them may not be at liberty to speak in depth about their experiences,but I would like to give voice and audience to their stories as well as to any war-time veterans willing to speak concerning previous wars. Their stories need to be heard and I in part feel responsible to make sure that that happens and its time to act on that responsibility.

Too often those of us who live in the ivory tower for too long forget about the responsibility we have to our society and to our country. Just about anyone who's been to college has at some time or another become numb to the outside world and forgotten that they have a roll in the big picture. And as humans, we become myopic, thinking only about that which effects us directly. Relationships may blind us to the bigger picture, jobs may steal us away from time to invest in the bigger picture. Our future, not just our future as individuals is in question. So I ask you, what roll will you take? What path will you blaze? Or will you continue to walk sleepily through our world never touching the importance of the reality at hand?

After a long vacation and a trip away from the ivory tower, I woke up to the reality that our world needs us to act. So act...

A Verse of Meditation from The Message Translation

Romans 12:1 "Place Your Life Before God"

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out...