"Probably I shall be bad again"

Today the boys are having four (count them... four) friends over after school for an all-afternoon water-gun-fight. Pray for me. :)

I went to see X:Men 3 last night with Dane . . . it was a pretty sweet flick. All I remembered about the first two was that I fell asleep on Joe's shoulder in both (I'm a total narcoleptic in movie theaters), so every thirty-seven seconds I was rudely asking questions about the plotline and continuity and such... but I had fun anyway. I can't speak for Dane.

We ended up sitting on the tarp-covered sofa outside the Academy and talking until one. There are only two people in the world who can literally read my mind, and it's really very convenient because I never have to tell them anything -- because they already know. So we sat out there for a while under the stars in the warm breeze, the kind that only a dusky summer evening in the Shenandoah Valley provides. There's nothing in the world quite so comforting as an old friend, who knows all about you and loves you anyway. "Friendship," as George Eliot put it, "is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words."

And so I stared up at the stars and thought out loud to him for a while about how deeply unhappy I am, about how lost and alone I feel, about how messed up my life is.

And he pointed out something -- that my abstract grandiose plans for self-improvement (always "someday" plans) are simply too broad and sweeping in their current formulation to actualize.

"Donna," he said, smiling. "You don't have to fix everything in your life all at once. Just change one thing at a time. Do one thing differently, and stick to it."

So that's what I'm doing today. For the next twenty-four hours, I'm eating healthily -- something I haven't done for nearly a year. Maybe it's small, maybe it's not the conquest of the darkness, but it's steeling me for bigger battles with myself to come.

"How can I tell what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I am not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from his mercy . . . One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable . . . the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I am not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's." (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited)

"Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself." (Francis de Sales)

Desperado

Item: I got my tragus pierced. Unfortunately, I cannot spell tragus, and have resorted to referring to the locale of my cool new piercing as as that "sticky-out part of my ear" (which really doesn't clear things up all that much for anyone because, sadly, in my case, that's my entire ear)

I just put the boys on the bus, and have the house to myself.

I feel really oddly hollow this morning . . . detached. Something inside me is all spent . . . empty . . . gone. (You're losing all your highs and lows / Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?)

And there's just this engulfing wave of sadness that I haven't been able to shake for weeks. I know I need to snap out of it, but easier said than done.

It's funny. I was thinking yesterday that thematically, one of my all-time favorite motifs in love songs is that of the persistent guy following a girl all over the country to be with her - Collin Raye's Little Red Rodeo:

Oh, how fast can I go?
Gotta catch that little red Rodeo.
She drove off with my heart
I gotta let her know.
Need the girl in that little red Rodeo.

Or my current favorite, Jack Ingram's Wherever You Are:

Wherever you are
No matter how far
Girl, I'm gonna find my way to you
Through rivers of rain
Over mountains of pain
Do whatever on earth I've gotta do
I'll follow the dream
I'll follow my heart
Girl, I've gotta be
Wherever you are.

Mind you, I've never really had that sort of relationship. (I think Joe might have driven to Pennsylvania once to visit me.) As a rule, guys don't tend to drop everything to come find me and tell me they want to be with me. Which is fine. I don't expect them to. But regardless, I think there's something in my fascination with the image that speaks to the human condition. Everyone wants to be loved - to be wanted with the sort of urgent immediacy that comes from a man in love realizing what it is he wants for the first time - to be desperately, passionately sought after.

The day after commencement, Fr. Heisler gave an amazing homily in which he quoted (of all things) James Blunt's "You're Beautiful". He told us that Christ too, like the guy in the song, looks at us, beholds us, fathoms deep in love -- "sees our face in a crowded place", as it were -- and tells us . . . "you're beautiful." But he said that the tragedy of the song lies in the last line - "It's time to face the truth / I'll never be with you." It indicates how the world, while desiring a love like that: real, abiding, persistent, passionate . . . has despaired of finding it, because they have never experienced an encounter with the Divine Love.

Just the day before, the same priest told me that Christ is deeply in love with me -- that His eyes light up when He thinks of me. And I started crying. Because I understood, for one brief, fleeting moment. I remembered the way Joe's face would break into smiles when he'd been waiting at a crowded dance for a while and I finally walked into the Commons. The way so many boys over the years have looked when they told me I was the most beautiful woman in the world. Most of all, I thought of that look a boy gets in his eyes when he really, really wants to kiss you, when for one blissful moment the whole world stands still and you're the only two people in it. And I realized that all of these things are just a pale reflection of something so much more permanent, so much more substantial, so much more passionate and real. That the greatest love story the world has ever known was already written on Calvary Hill.

And then I get this achy feeling in my stomach that this longing, this damnable craving which I've been experiencing for years, but ever more and more urgently since Joe left - is for something deeper and more inexorable than any human love can ever provide - something which is only going to be fulfilled by one thing. I'm caught in a frenetic whirlwind of seeking after imitation Christs, but it's all leaving me so hurt, so alone, so empty. (These things that are pleasing you / Will hurt you somehow)

I'm still running from Him, but I can't run forever. Maybe guys don't chase me all over the map, but Christ has definitely followed me, calling me, to hell and back again this year. When will I wake up and listen? (You better let somebody love you before it's too late.)

I guess Augustine summed it up best in the Confessions over sixteen hundred years ago: For Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord.

Unfortunately, like Augustine, I find myself praying all too often these days, "Make me good . . . but not yet."

Snakes and snails and puppy-dog tails

I love my new job. The boys are great -- they're teaching me how to play with Kinex (my engineering genes from my dad somehow failed to kick in properly, I'm afraid), I'm teaching them Miss Mary Mack, and we're all having our horizons expanded a little bit.

I've discovered a few things about the Male of the Species in the last 48 hours.

1) Head-butting and socks in the stomach are signs of affection in Boyspeak.

2) Any object within 30 meters will, inevitably, be turned into an assault weapon or projectile of some sort within fifteen seconds or so.

3) Boys always think they're right. Girls actually are.

4) Excrement is always funny. The same goes for vomiting, dismemberment, and gruesome deaths.

5) Boys have an uncanny ability to unearth an infinite number of permutations of puns on the last name "Shute".

Of doubts and doormats

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. --Anais Nin

It's funny. I don't like to be honest with myself. People tend to think of me as an effusive, open person, and in some ways, I am. I mean -- I'm honest with them. Just not with myself.

To everyone else, I'm (as one friend put it) "really dumb for a smart girl" -- the kid who graduated with highest honors a year early last week and is perennially talking about deconstructionism, Dante, the decline of modern civilization, and debunking The Da Vinci Code -- but capable of getting into massive quantities of trouble. I'm the spoiled brat with the heart of gold, the effervescent center of attention with the smile that could melt steel. My energy is "exhausting", as Dane kindly put it recently, and as JJJ said the other day, I can be a "real b----" - but to know me is to love me anyway for some inexplicable reason. I'm quick to laughter but equally quick to tears, I make friends easily but I lose them easily too, I can debate apologetics with unsurpassable alacrity and yet more often than not live a life in violation of all that I stand for, I rail about modern culture's obsession with feminine perfection yet habitually subject my body to cruel and unspeakable torture because it doesn't look like Mischa Barton's. Go figure.

In me, choleric and sanguine fight for dominance, arrogance and low self-esteem peaceably coexist, and deep-seated narcissism is tempered by the self-loathing that lurks just beneath it.

And yet somewhere in between the big brown eyes and the asymmetrical smile, the liters of Mountain Dew and the drama-queen antics, boys fall in love, or at least very deep like, and I reel them in and then drive them away, because... hell, I'm so afraid. I've been afraid of people loving me ever since Joe went away. And sometimes it feels like it's better not to trust people at all than to trust them and have them walk out of your life and take your run-through-a-paper-shredder-beaten-to-a-bloody-pulp heart with them.

I'm used to having the world at my doorstep, boys wrapped around my little finger, guys who tell me what I want to hear. And I fill the vacancy within me with plenty of such quasi-romances. But the doormat guys who I seem to attract have never loved me for me -- they've just fallen in love with a construct of their imaginations, the superficial likability that is me, but as soon as the bad, shitty reality becomes apparent, they're gone. That makes the pulsating voice resound in my head, the one that tells me I don't really deserve to be loved anyway. And sometimes, I buy it. And I curl up into a ball and cry. In the end, I control the boys around me because I fear what they will do to me otherwise. Every once in a while, the facade cracks and I genuinely fall in love with somebody. But that scares me shitless more than the rest, for then I start feeling weighed in the balance and found wanting, and I'll end up doing anything in my power to prevent people from leaving. In the end, they all leave anyway. And I pretend I didn't want them there in the first place. It's a vicious cycle.

And it's so not what I want anymore. I'm too old to play such childish mind games with myself. I can't go through life fearing people because they might leave me -- because it keeps turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm through with controlling and manipulating and pleading. The next man in my life will have to actually be a man, will have to damn well prove to me that he's in it for the long haul whether I like it or not, that he wants me for who I am regardless of the stupid mistakes of my past and the flaws I have now. I want a guy who will say "Damn it, woman, I love you and I'm going to be with you and you can freaking well deal with it." I'm waiting for that elusive guy who stays because he wants to stay and not because I asked him to, the Great Non-Doormat who will wrap me in his arms without being wrapped around my little finger.

Someday. I figure it'll take a good decade and by then I'll be worthy of such a guy.

Our doubts are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft may win / By fearing to attempt. --William Shakespeare

Hell is oneself, the other figures in it merely projections

If I could use one word to describe how I feel, it's tired.

My body is tired. My mind is tired. My soul is tired. I just want to relax in the gentle tide, ebbing and flowing, stationary and peaceful, to partake in the numbing waters of the Lethe, but alas, a la Jay Gatsby, these waters only ceaselessly bear me back into the past.

I'm sick of it. I'm spent. I'm in pain. and I'm just sick of being hurt. All I want is a future, a new future, bright and beautiful and clear. Behold, I make all things new. Even me?

I don't know how to forgive. And I don't know how to let go. I hate too many people. Too many people - especially guys - have hurt me too many times in ways too big for me to even begin to process in my current state of mind. I'm angry, unbearably angry. And yet I feel like God is trying to use me in some way, trying to offer me something, but I'm like a grubby child with a fistful of candy that's bad for me, refusing to give it up. I'd rather fester in my own little black pool bitterness than aspire to anything better. It's easier, anyway.

I'm battered, I'm broken, and I'm alone. How easy it is to embark on a philosophical foray into solipsism... there's just me. And if there's just me in this massive, unfriendly universe, what difference does anything make?

Why should I bother loving people? They never love me back.

Whatever. I don't give a crap anymore. I'm done loving people. There's no point.

Finals!

Help, I'm about to fail all my finals!

Gah...

Must... graduate... eyes on the prize...

The best days are the first to fly

Optima dies prima fugit. The best days are the first to fly. It's from Virgil's Georgics -- it's also the epigraph to Willa Cather's My Antonia. It's one of those vaguely nostalgic, carpe diem, cherish the moment, ubi sunt? kinds of sentiments. I like it. It'd make a sweet tattoo. Hence, the title of my new - and improved - blog. :)

I've decided the whole artsy debauchery thing really is only attractive and appealing in a guy -- think F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, etc. It's one of those unfortunate but unavoidable double standards.

Anyway, I'm a girl, and I'm starting to realize I really don't pull off the whole materialistic hedonist thing well.