There is a lot that happens in our lives, and I'm told that all of these moments and events shape us and make us who we are.  They build character and teach us about ourselves or about the human race in general.  I have found this to be true, but it simply does not make living life any easier.  I find that I am given hope only to have it destroyed.  The repetition of this brings me low, to a point where I don't dare to hope.  Then I remind myself that, "These three remain:  faith, hope, and love..."  Yet I fear to hope only to be let down again.  Maybe if I don't hope for something, the thing I hope for will happen.  It's weird and confusing, but there it is.  There are some possibilities for my future, I have recently been given reason to hope, but I am scared to hope.  Scared because I don't want my hope or confidence or whatever to destroy my chances. Living where I am I have been given much more than I've had for the past two years.  I find that I grow very comfortable, but I am very aware that I need to start pulling my weight.  It'll happen, I grow impatient, but as my mother always says, "God is seldom early, but He is never late."  Ack, it is hard to hear sometimes when I am anxious, but true.  I also must remind myself that I cannot say, "God, here are my plans, now bless them."  Rather I must make a conscious effort to say, "God, your will be done in my life according to your great wisdom."  Very difficult for me to do regularly, and even harder when I do not see a clear path.  Everything will work out, no worries, I'm just unloading.  "We're all lost in the woods, even the Captain.  The only difference is he likes it there."  "No, the only difference is that's the only place I can see a clear path."

More Time on the Train

There are things in this world that cause me to shift my focus.  I think that part of what makes me me is the fact that I usually make the choice for that shift to be for the positive.  Over the years I have found myself in some disappointing, difficult, and not altogether proud moments.  In a couple of weeks I will be moving in with my Grandmother.  Why?  Two fold.  Partially because I would like to spend some time with my Grandma while I can, but also because I have no where else to go.  No job (though a handful of prospects), no home, nothing else to shoot for other than getting a job.  I’m at a stage in life where I can’t move anywhere else until I have a job.  I would really like the opportunity to teach, to do theatre, to grow myself and my resume in that direction.  I’m not sure that I will be given that opportunity, but perhaps.  It will take time to tell but it could certainly still happen.  There is a large part of me that is anxious about what my future holds, but there is another part of me that is excited, terribly excited, to see where things will go.  I’m desperate for the opportunity to teach, to show my ability and my prowess in a real situation.  A situation where people can’t say, “Oh, but you’re just a substitute, that’s different” or, “You were just a student and that makes a difference”.  The biggest frustration for me is the knowledge that if I were given the chance, oh what a difference I could make.  For some reason though, I am having an awful time getting people to give me the chance.  Other people fall into situations, and I have fallen into my fair share, but it seems sometimes that I can work and work for a chance but am never given the opportunity for whatever reason.  In the past I’ve had some very erroneous ideas about how jobs work and what jobs I was qualified for.  I have a much better understanding of the market I’m in now (though not a total understanding I must admit) and feel very confident, no not confident, very energized about what I can do and about what I will learn to do.  My whole life has been on lesson after another, perhaps the greatest of which was to recognize a lesson from life when it presents itself and to pay attention.  In a very unsure stage in my life I find the definites and hold on to them.  God is a definite, my love for theatre, and my passion for teaching are also definites.  I am so thankful for these assurances.  I do sometimes doubt my chances of getting a job in what I want, my ability to get into a doctoral program not to mention whether I will be able to handle the work or not.  Long hours of studying and reading and writing.  No matter what though, I know where I need to end up and that is in the classroom teaching theatre.  I know it may not happen now or next year, but someday, whether its in high school or college, I know that’s where I need to be.  That’s where I was made to be.

Cuppa Joe

So, I love coffee.  I didn't always.  I actually used to despise coffee.  Then one day I moved near some old friends.  One of these friends loved coffee dearly and he would make coffee every time I came to visit.  He would answer the door when I knocked and say, "No pressure, you don't have to if you don't want to, but I made some coffee!"  He might as well have been offering me a million dollars in his eyes.  I couldn't say no.  So the first couple of visits I chocked down the coffee, then before I knew it, when he offered me coffee I was every bit as excited about it as he was!  Now I love it just for the taste, I don't need it, I just really want it.

I say I don't need it, but there are some days when I really do just need a cup of coffee.  Regular and black.  This past Sunday was one of those days.  I woke up to go to church and I was dead on my feet.  I just didn't sleep well the night before.  I decided not to make any at home since there would be plenty at church and it would only be a bit.  I ended up falling asleep several times that morning before church.  I finally drug myself out the door and into the car.  I stumble (literally) into the church and my pastor starts bombarding me with questions that I just don't care about at this stage in the day, all I can think about is getting to the kitchen.  I finally get away from him (since he was interpreting my lack of focus as dislike for what he was saying) and make it into the church kitchen.  The glorious pot stands before me, I swear a halo appears around it, I approach, and just before I grab the handle one of the ladies of the church utters the most horrible words I have ever heard, "It's decaf, we're out of regular." 

I can't tell you how much I just wanted to cry.  Seriously.  I felt stupid, but I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes.  So, I poured myself an cup of decaf hoping to glean any residual caffein from the black muck that now stood in my styrofoam container.  One taste and I knew it was a fruitless endeavor.  And once again I felt the overwhelming desire to cry.  I didn't, but nor did I accomplish much in teaching Sunday school, and church was an enormous struggle to stay awake.

I got home and had a small lunch and went to sleep.  I awoke feeling even worse.  I just didn't want to move, but I had to, I had a rehearsal for an in class scene in less than an hour.  Then it hit me...I had instant coffee in my fridge.  Not my preferred coffee, but it would do.  I struggled to make the coffee.  But the first sip and I knew everything was going to be alright.  

I got up this morning and did my normal routine.  Filled the coffee pot with water, scooped out the coffee, pushed the on button and prepared my cereal.  I sat down and ate a couple spoon fulls of cereal then took a sip of coffee.  I felt like crying again.  It was so good.  So much better than the instant.  I just sat and relished it a while.  When I finally got back to my cereal it was soggy.  But I was ok with it, I had my coffee and life was good.

Fail

Ever feel like you fail at everything you do even though you don't really?  Why is it we as humans tend to focus on the negative in life?  We can have ten successes in a day and one failure can ruin everything, even if it's minimal.  Then, after that first failure we begin to note and expand every other failure in our lives.  What is wrong with us?  Or is it just me and I should be asking what's wrong with me?  Anyway, I'm out.  Rock on.

Then With Alcoholic Talkativeness.

"You've just told me some high spots in your memories.  Want to hear mine?  They're all connected with the sea.  Here's one.  When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires.  Full moon in the Trades.  The old hooker driving fourteen knots.  I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me.  I became drunk with the beauty and sining rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself--actually lost my life.  I was set free!  I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky!  I belonged, without past or further, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!  To God, if you want to put it that way.  Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch.  A calm sea, that time.  Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship.  The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight.  No sound of man.  Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me.  Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together.  Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came.  The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams!  And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience.  Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide.  Like a saint's vision of beatitude.  Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand.  For a second you see--and seeing the secret, are the secret.  For a second there is meaning!  Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

He grins wryly.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish.  As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!"

A Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Chickaboowa

The sun is shinning today, and that is wonderful.  I love the spring, not because of the beautiful weather, but rather because of the promise of summer it brings.  Right now all that seems so far away.  There is too much between me and that end right now.  So much to do, and absolutely not time in which to do it.  Almost makes me feel sick.  When I say there is not time, there is of course time, I just have such a propensity to waste that time that is so graciously given to me.  I try to remember why I'm here and what that means, but then I just get overwhelmed.  That's not to say that I don't do any work, cause I do, a lot of work.  It's just that I don't feel like I'm getting enough done.  Oh well.  This is what I signed up for, here we go!

I'm discovering the beautiful world of Pandora.com and loving it.  What a wonderful thing.  I've got all my favorite forms of music separate stations so I can listen to whatever mood I'm in.  Next I think I'll try combining genres and see what happens there.  Terribly exciting.

A lot to think about these days.  Just here at school and in the world.  I feel like my head is going to explode.  I often don't even know where to start.  I definitely miss the days of living in my small hometown where there were so many stars, and song birds, and clear skies, and just a real and different sense of freedom.  Things were odd because life ended there at 5 pm, but it was wonderful because there are different ways to be alive other than staying up late.  Going for a walk in the woods.  Helping to cut some wood.  Cut some grass.  Drink a cup of coffee with the early sunlight pouring in the windows.  Cooking some breakfast and enjoying it with friends and family.  

I will never have such a relaxed way of life as I do right now, and I feel like I'm wasting it.  All I ever do is stress out.  When I should be doing something I sit around and stress about how it's not done.  

Bleh.  I'm done.  I don't write this so I can dump on everyone.  I should save these thoughts for my personal journal.  It is a beautiful day today and I'm loving every ray of sunlight that makes it's way down to me.  I think I might go home and take some time there in my house.  I can work there rather than try to work here and fail.  I look forward to the walk home.  Wiedersehen!

Brother, can you spare a dime?

What a fascinating modern age we live in.  It seems as though everything we as Americans once knew is coming to an end.  With the economy in complete turmoil everything seems to be topsy turvy.  We all have questions on our mind.  What will happen?  Will I still have a job in three months?  Will I still have a home in four?  Will the stimulus package work?  What will happen if it doesn’t?  We see our hopes and dreams dangling delicately in the balance.  As painful as that is, I cannot help but hear my grandmother’s voice in my head saying, “I told you so.”  

The worst part is, she is right.  For generations now, since the end of the Great Depression, credit has been a way of life.  Credit card, loan, and interest are household words.  My grandmother always said, “You can’t spend money you don’t have.”  Well, as it turns out, she seems to be right.  As I watch the Dow Jones slide further and further down, though perhaps not as fast as in October, my financial mistakes, and the mistakes of society in general come into prime focus.  

I owe a lot of money.  I owe on a credit card for this laptop, but mostly I owe for student loans.  Without these loans I never would have been able to go to college.  This is how I justified them.  I would go to college, get an education and then make enough money to pay them back in a timely manner.  Now I see this may have been erroneous, and as the economic climate grows darker (though not nearly as bad as we’d like to think) I’m having to face a painful reality that maybe I will not be making the big bucks as I had hoped ... as I had counted on.  So what do I do?  I keep doing what I do.  I love to teach, and one way or the other that is what I will do.

The main question that resounds in everybody’s head is, “Could we have prevented this, can we stop it?”  The answers, respectively, are no and no.  We could not have prevented this, though we could have made it less painful, and we cannot stop it, though we can help each other and make it less disastrous.  Due to the fact we all have, or rather many of us have, debt, our economy is in crisis.  President Obama says, to fix this we must be able to borrow more money on credit from the banks.  I firmly assert that this is an awful mistake.  Borrowing will help us now perhaps, but what happens in ten years, when we are even more in debt, and the economy takes another down turn?  Are we going to look to the federal government to make it possible for us to borrow more money?

We should have listened to my grandma.  Right from the start.  With credit and loans we get things we want, things the neighbors have, things our parents never dreamt of having.  However, when a recession hits, it hits us hard because we have nothing to fall back on.  No savings, at least none after creditors have their way with you, no bonds, no stocks worth mentioning, nothing but the hands of those who want to be paid.  When I asked my grandma if she remembered the stock market crash of 1929 she said, “Yes.  I remember it in the newspaper.”  I was so excited to hear about people jumping off of buildings and the like, however she went on to say, “But we didn’t notice.  We were poor before, and we were poor after.”

Perhaps she was onto something there.  It is true, our economy has never been higher than it was in the last few years, but maybe that just sets us up for failure.  Maybe we need to live with less, deal with not as much, learn to live without those products we get from China.  Maybe if we just lived with what we need instead of what we want, when the next recession comes, we won’t feel it as much.  Maybe it will be like my grandma says.  Maybe we won’t be poor before, we’ll just be living like it, but the point is we won’t be poor after either.  At least not destitute.  If something must have money we could pay in cash, instead of relying on credit.  

This idea definitely would change how we run our lives.  First off, I would not be in college.  I would be somewhere else, doing something else.  Who knows what.  I would not be writing this on my lap top, but rather on a piece of paper, or on the computer at the public library.  Are these sacrifices I would be willing to give up?  Apparently not, cause I am still in school, I still have this lap top, and I have no plans to pawn it.  But maybe we should teach our children to live without credit.  Get out of debt now, and live a life free of loans.

It is true that this would change everything we know.  Perhaps we cannot do it.  I don’t know if I can, but it is just a thought.  Something worth considering, and something certainly worth trying.  Who knows how things will turn out.