beauty in the breakdown

I'm ending my weekend with a sunburn, several bruises and a little blood. Nothing serious, just the side effects of a little actual free time spent in the sun on my bike. Would have been a lot worse had there been a car behind me when I took my fall...

In general though I feel a little burned and bruised  right now. I keep trying to talk myself out of emotions with negligible degrees of success by reminding myself that time goes on and usually heals. On the other hand I truly want to be a person that lives my life -- every aspect of it and it's not always going to be perfect or pan out the way I want. Either way, my apologies for the extended absence and the lack of eloquence in this entry. I simply can't seem to find the means to step away from the emotion enough to weave this in better words right now.

Next Saturday I'm going to the wedding of one of my best friend's from high school. This is the friend I road tripped with last fall. (links are to my entries from last fall.) He and I finally caught up this week for a solid conversation after about 6 months. No real great way to explain the situation, but I learned that the reason he's been avoiding me is because he and his fiance fight about me a lot and because he hasn't been able to resolve how he much he cares about me with the fact that he's marrying her.

We don't have any official dating history with each other, but everyone we know has always openly talked about how we'd end up together and it's been a [dangerous] game full of gray boundaries for almost 15 years now with us as well. I feel like I'm losing one of my best friends and being pushed out of a group I've always counted on in addition to my concern about his decision to marry her at all. Add in the fact that I was accidentally not invited to the reception and my own mix of feelings about the situation and you can guess what's keeping me up at night and how much I don't want to attend a wedding  next weekend.

I wish I had the mental power to recreate this with more graceful prose, but it's just beyond me right now.

I'd love to hear from those of you still out there!

I’ve somehow managed to read all these in the past couple weeks. They’ve hardly made a dent in my to read list, but 11 in a couple weeks isn’t bad.

• ·         Five for Sorrow 10 for Joy

• ·         Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas

• ·         A Wind in the Door

• ·         A Wrinkle in Time

• ·         Truth and Beauty

• ·         Blue Like Jazz

• ·         On Writing

• ·         Three Cups of Tea (almost finished)

• ·         Five Quarters of the Orange

• ·         The Shack

• ·         The Things They Carried

tea of the day: English Breakfast by Stash (I needed the caffiene

"To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less than what you really mean; that's the whole art of joy and words." -C.S. Lewis "Till We Have Faces"

Local musician, university alum killed in ‘freak’ crash

I have no words tonight. At least not a single one that can come close to saying what I really mean. Four people I went to college with each played a role in a tragic "freak" accident and only three walked away. My heart aches for those three and the fourths family. Lives have been forever altered and their worlds thrown off kilter.

I'm posting this a week late in honor of St Patrick's Day, since I managed to completely bypass posting in honor of one of the best holiday's of the year. I actually wrote it last year, but I still like it.
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I think my St Patrick's Day fascination originated with my maternal grandmother. Ever since I can remember she was taken by anything with shamrocks or leprechauns on it. I'm sure the local drugstore loved her this time of year. My sister, brother and I always ended up with some form of light up pin or crazy hair thing in honor of the day. She lived a couple hours from us, but she and my grandfather were a huge part of our lives growing up.

Grandma was part Irish and in love with Ireland. She often spoke of traveling there and was thrilled with the knicknacks I carried across the ocean for her when I beat her there. My grandfather enlisted in the military and spent WWII in the Pacific theater, which seemed to be enough traveling for him. He loved the farm and really only left to visit his children and grandchildren. Grandma was a different story, she seemed to want to see and do everything she came across -- something I can relate to. She married young, was an RN and soon become the mother of 6. She loved to learn, later in life going to midwifery school and interning deep in the Ozarks in her 60s despite arthritis and awful living environments. She was an incredible cook although her love of salt, gibblets, and onions seemed to manifest itself in higher and higher ratios the older she got. We loved going to their house -- the farm was our own childhood fantasyland much better than the Disneyland I have never seen could ever be. We'd explore the nooks, crannies and endless closets of the home my grandpa built and hide in the laundry shoot my mother had hidden in with her siblings as a child. We'd pick raspberries and apricots and swing in the hammock in the yard. We'd cross the board over the canal, chew on mint leaves, and hide easter eggs in the loft of the barn. We'd daydream of our uncle and aunts stories of growing up. Of milking cows, weeding sugar beets, and grandpa jumping a 7 ft fence and chasing a bull with a railroad tie. These were our legends of childhood, amidst Paul Bunyon, Jonah, Moses, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln.

While grandma made my favorite swedish meatballs, grandpa would come in from the farm and sit at the table singing silly made up songs -- "I take my shoes off when I'm in the house..." We adored it and we adored my grandparents. That table now sits in my apartment, a piece of history that I love. Countless holiday dinners were served to crowds packed around it's edges. Numerous bowls of 'porridge' and my grandmother's burnt black toast graced it's surface as did a seemingly endless stream of walnuts that we always seemed to be cracking while grandpa grumbled about ever having planting them.

Grandma made it to Ireland a handful of years before she passed away. After Grandpa died she joined a tour group with a friend. They did it all -- kissing the blarney stone and giving us all copies of a picture of her looking wistful on a stone wall in front of a peaceful cottage. She relocated to Zimbabwe as a nurse with a missions organization, returning home early due to safety and health reasons. Starting yet another adventure she went to work at the local HS creating a brand new program. She taught basic nursing and science classes and threw her life into her students. She helped them get into nursing school and college, feeding their interests, offering encouragement, and creating futures for many kids who didn't think them possible. I dropped by her house one afternoon in college and to find it overflowing with her students for a year end party. I was startled by the realization that my grandmother had a life I knew almost nothing of and exceedingly proud to be her granddaughter as student after student sang her praises.

She went in for yet another back surgery on St Patrick's Day 2004 and to everyone's shock never came out. I think that's how she would have wanted it. She would have gone crazy slowly dying and I think would have wanted the big stir her sudden death caused. Her funeral was just what I think one should be -- a celebration. There were tears and immense laughter. She lived a beautiful, imperfect, very full life. She was often frustrating and always loved. She couldn't let her favorite holiday pass without recognition despite the scheduled surgery. It's still comical to think of her long time surgeon discovering the shamrock stickers on her backside and yes, you can bet that my dad mentioned that admist laughter at her service.

On my bed sits a beautiful quilt she finished the night before her surgery. She was working her way through the list of grandkids, but I was the last to receive one and the only of my siblings. We picked out the fabric together and 2 years later she finished quilting it by hand -- in the shape of shamrocks.

Here's to a beautiful woman in honor of her favorite holiday. Here's to a woman who was everything a grandmother should be - lovable, loving, an amazing cook, a little bit crazy, and who spoiled her grandchildren. A woman I miss and a woman whose granddaughter I'm proud to be.

I am not a patient person. I am 26 and debt free save a quickly dwindling almost interest free student loan.  I love my job. It seems a little weird to write that sentence, but it’s true. This May marks 5 years since college graduation and 5 years since I started with my employer. I’ve helped to form and create each of the three positions I’ve held, nearly doubled my income and had the indescribable privilege of working for a manager that’s become not only a friend, but also one of the best mentor’s I’ve had. I’ve built a community of friends that have become family, travelled and paid off a car that hasn’t once forced me to hitchhike off any mountain passes. I’ve taken classes, completed certifications and read countless books.

I am a perfectionist. By all counts my 2007 looks great on paper. I crossed off a lot of things from my life list, completing my first cross country road trip and spending the bulk of my spring, summer and fall weekends camping and hiking around the NW. I took up biking, developed a friendship with my new brother in law and cut off 20 inches of my attention getting (I’m serious, it really doesn’t matter if I’m at home or in India) naturally blonde hair. I read books on writing and attended writing workshops, danced while Patty Griffin sang in the rain at the zoo and stood in line for half the night with my pregnant sister in law for the new Harry Potter book and autographs from a fake Dumbledore who struggled to spell his own name.

I am not a patient person. I am a perfectionist. He may have flaws, she faults and you may be slightly imperfect – I will want to learn your story more because of these. But I may not have imperfections. I will look at 2007 and chide that I didn’t take the GRE in August. That I didn’t see and protect myself from the aftermath of my roadtrip before I ever purchased flights. I will angst over money not saved, the shape I’m not quite in and the books I didn’t read. My stomach will churn when I remember the mistakes, stupid things I said and the tears I shed in front of others.

I am a perfectionist, impatient with myself to no end. I want to be a peaceful person. A person content in my own skin. Maybe there's hope for 2008.