Love Wastefully

Material Reading

I used to love F. Scott Fitzgerald.  And it is true that The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels of all time, if not the novel.

But I started reading The Beautiful and the Damned primarily because it’s on a lot of people’s lists of books I ought to have read by now.  Also because I was eager to read more Fitzgerald. After reading This Side of Paradise last summer, I was hoping for a similar experience.

But the storyline is not exactly thrilling—the big crisis so far has been whether to rent a house in the country for the summer and keep the New York apartment.   Rich Americans, check.  Spoiled and egomanical love interest, check. Coming of age at 30, check.  I’m about halfway through and I feel if something tragic doesn’t befall one of these characters soon it will have been an utter waste of my time.

Wife Gloria doesn’t want to become pregnant because it will spoil her figure.  For other women it’s fine, that’s all they’re good for—she actually says this— but she is too pretty.  Husband Anthony is afraid of the dark. 

If only Fitzgerald didn’t seem to have so much sympathy for his protagonist and his insipid wife perhaps I’d be more inclined to continue the endeavor of reading it.

As it is I am less than enthusiastic.

EDIT**** I finished the book.  I still have not forgiven F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Dickens

I think reading a little Charles Dickens in honor of his 200th birthday qualifies as a very good idea. Sick of Huck Finn anyway.

That’s the book we’ve been reading in my American Literature class. My COLLEGE American Literature class. And I really thought this class would challenge me, but no, once again I’m in a literature class that consistently digs up stories I’ve already read in high school, and insisting that I will see more in the story with my “mature” eyes. The really troubling part is that the curriculum for these classes are set by the school. So no one who takes this class in the future will get a better education out of it.

For the Twain section, we should be reading Puddnhead Wilson.

And if we end up reading Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where are We Going, Where Have We Been?” I will lead an insurrection. These are wonderful stories, and great literature, but I took the class and paid the money so that I could enjoy and analyze something different. Certainly I expected to be reading something at a higher reading level than I read in high school.

My Life Reimagined

In the past 13 months…oh so much has happened.  I hope it will somewhat excuse my absence from my blog when I explain, briefly what has happened.

1. I met and married the love of my life.  My husband is so amazing, so much more than I deserve. (And my in-laws are great too! Really!)

2. We found out we were pregnant.  (I was pregnant, obviously, but he definitely helped.)

3. I moved twice, most recently to take a promotion in Austin, a place that has always been my Texas town of choice.

4. Did I mention that promotion?

5. My sister also married the love of her life in July. 

6. My grandfather remarried. 

7. My parents moved from their home of the last 14 years, giving up the pastorate in the town where I grew up to take another pastorate further away from me in Austin.  It is very strange, very surreal to think that I now have absolutely no reason to ever return to the place where I grew up. The only family I ever had there was my immediate family.  My friends have moved on as well.  It’s really not likely that I will ever have occasion to be in that part of the world again.  And that’s kind of bittersweet.

8. And most importantly I had a son.  A beautiful baby boy, Sawyer.

Could I have imagined any of this a mere 13 months ago?  Well maybe I could have imagined it—I do have an (over)active imagination.  But I bet I would have imagined some of the elements a little differently, and certainly I wouldn’t have been able to imagine them falling into place so unusually.

I probably would have imagined something perfect, something crystalline.

I didn’t get that.  But if my imaginings would change reality, I wouldn’t reimagine this for anything.

Maybe at some point, I will be able to continue this blog a little more systematically. Hopefully this entry will be the start of that.

But I really can’t imagine what will happen tomorrow. 

el-oh-vee-ee

The way I love you it’s like taking off. It’s like flying. It’s being too alive and exuberant for worry or gravity or disappointment.  It’s needing to experience the expansive blue sky from higher, from way up there. It’s being not at all earthbound.

The way I love him is like swinging. It’s throwing my head back a little but not too much. It’s wanting to be free and rise uninhibited, but ultimately being afraid to vault out and away into the naked open air.  It’s being attached by links with grooves worn in them from the long succession of other similar attachments.

Swinging will never be flying.

But maybe it’s the closest a human can ever really hope to get. 

The List

For Carrie, who inspired (and requested) this list.

This is a list of (in many cases much) older celebrities I have a crush on. And not like “Oh, he’s really smart,” or “He’s so funny!”  but a legitimate crush, as in: “My God! That man has it all!”

1. Robert Sean Leonard.

2. Patrick Monahan.

3. Alan Rickman.

4. Johnny Depp.

5. Adrien Brody.

6. Eric Whitacre.

7. Wes Anderson.

8. Hugh Grant.

9. George Clooney.

10. Robert Downey Jr.

11. Anderson Cooper.

12. Jon Stewart.

13. Tom Hanks.

14. John Cusack.

15. Jim Carrey.

16. Kenneth Branagh.

17. Denzel Washington.

18. Anthony Kiedis.

19. Daniel Day Lewis.

20. Richard Starkey.

21. Brad Paisley.

22. Trent Reznor. (Who should probably be a little higher on this list.)

23. Colin Firth. (Who definitely should be a lot higher on this list.)

I think that’s the highest number I can reach on this list without feeling too silly. 

And I don’t know, I think you can tell a lot about people by who they have celebrity crushes on.  Well, maybe not a lot.  But you can probably tell what movies I’ve seen.

—Edited using a 15+ years older than me rule, since that was the point of this whole exercise.—

Say whaaaat?

So, Mike the security guard was not helping me because he was “one of the last southern gentlemen” or because he would “never leave a lady stranded”, or whatever other bull he spouted. He was helping me for the express purpose of hitting on me later. AND he bought me a Ty beanie baby after the first meeting—and I’m not really into that sort of thing. And if Thurs. and Friday are any indication I can expect him to be parked behind my car, waiting for me to close. [I do not approve.]

What I said to Carrie—who was cool enough to allow me to discuss the situation with her: “If we can assume that a reasonable person would understand that after the first meeting is NOT the appropriate time to buy someone a gift, then we have no alternative but to consider him an UNreasonable person.” Which is kinda scary.

I think I’m with Kanye on this one.

So I get to have one of those fun little “I’m sorry but I’m not interested” chats with the unreasonable stalker security guard at my new job. Somehow, I do not feel at all secure.

And this happens to me at every new job I acquire, so I think I can safely begin to question whether the fault could actually be entirely mine. I think I’m just too friendly. [I’m blaming Sunday School. The teachers always put such an emphasis on not hurting anyone’s feelings and sharing and being nice.]

In other news: I saw a guy who used to come into the library and who was always kind of a jerk to me. He came into the store with his mom yesterday. When he walked in, I saw the look on his face, the one that roughly translated means: “I know I know you from somewhere but I can’t place you, so I’m just gonna pretend I don’t know you until you say something.” So I did. While I was working the register he sidled up to the desk to check out. I told him I was surprised he didn’t recognize me, and then he said that of course he did recognize me, he just didn’t know from where and that he had determined not to act like he knew me because he didn’t really and that was kinda lame. So I apprised him of how he knew me, and even complimented his regular study habits in front of his mother—who I saw seemed very proud of her progeny at that moment.

And then it happened. I made this guy who has always been rude to me, hold an actual conversation with me. (He was with his mom. There’s no way he was going to be an a-hole. So I took advantage of that.) And y’know what? Soon he was asking questions about my classes, my major, some of my creative writing projects and my future plans. And for the first time in interacting with this guy, sometimes twice a week, for over a year—give or take some summer months— he smiled at me. And I’d like to think he discovered that I wasn’t so bad after all. Because that’s what I discovered about him.

It’s these kinds of intersections of all of our lives that fascinate me.

Speaking of the library, I called THE BOSS today to let him know that I won’t be returning until spring. And he said he’d hold my job for me. Stevie-ism of the week—which applies to THE BOSS right now:

“That’s beyond Cool. That’s like if Cool had a way cooler older brother who wouldn’t even hang out with Cool because Cool was so lame compared to Older Brother Cool.”

My birthday was amazing. People have been very kind. My bosses at the store, whom I’ve known for all of 6 days, bought me a half a dozen chocolate dipped strawberries for my birthday from the chocolate shop. —And this is fine with me because neither of those ladies have a romantic interest in me.

I hope no one will classify this post as a blog entry, because it is in no way formatted as such. —It’s really just a collection of updated information clustered around a Beyond Cool picture of Kanye West.

Happy Birthday (Dear Me)

—I just sang “Happy Birthday” to myself.  How pathetic is that?—

I wish there were a way to write about this past year with witty verbiage and sly humor.  But really, all I can say is that I tried to love people. And I wasn’t always very good at it.  Between holding the chaplaincy for the choir and my personal friendships, however, I think some people got the message.  And even though there’s no one around now, people said that I helped them and that they felt that I loved them.  I just hope that’s true.

For myself this next year, I guess I want the same things everybody wants.  True love (or someone to recognize my genius). People to be around to prove that I really do mean something to them, because they mean so much to me.   I want a better brain and a bigger heart. A way to be exuberant and brilliant every day. A way to get everything done.  A way to find some peace and a way to deserve it.  But those things are unpromised and people are uncertain, so I’ll just give to myself whatever promises I know I can keep.  

1.  I promise I will pick an NFL team and follow football this season.  Find out what that’s all about.

2.  I will reacquaint myself with nature. I’m getting too soft. Camping trip. Go fishing with Dad and Grandpa. Ride a horse. Climb a tree.

3. I swear I will finish work on The Ballad and begin work on La Condesa.

4. I will enter 12 short story contests with legitimate literary journals.

5. I will read 100 books, of which at least 20 must be volumes of poetry and one must be The Bible.

6. I will learn to cook 12 entrees and 12 side dishes.

7. I will start sewing.

8. I will start practicing yoga again. Every morning.

9. I will figure out where I’m transferring after next Spring. (Or China, or Taiwan if I decide not to transfer.)

10. I will do these lessons weekly: Spanish, French, Mandarin, German, Latin, Italian, Gaelic. And every month I will continue my intensives project.  I also promise myself that if something intrigues me, I’ll find out whatever I can about it right then.

11. I will see something more of the world to inform my weltanschaunng.

12. I will explore visual art.

13. I promise I will get to California and spend a few weeks with Tia Lydia. I will figure out all the genealogical stuff and find my roots.  I will do my best to honor my heritage. (This also qualifies as research into La Condesa.)

14. I will finally learn how to check the oil in my car.  Learn how to jump a car.  (Learn to hotwire a car?…) Learn to drive a standard. Learn to stop the gas pump right on the money.

15. I will go at least one Saturday a month to the Quick Stop on Hwy. 110 where the old men eat breakfast and talk and just listen.

16. I will do some home recording.

17. I will take more pictures.  I will listen to more vinyl.  I will take more walks in the woods. I will wear more hats.

18.  I will take some archery lessons and on a related note, I will go to a Renaissance Fair(e).

19. I will try to be a better-informed and more involved citizen. I will try to live by following Christ’s example. And also, I will find a church home.

20. I will not date boys who are no good for me.

21. I will not put junk into my body and call it eating.

22. I will be the kind of woman my grandmother would be proud of and see a little of herself in.

23. And I will not be so obsessive about not ending sentences with prepositions.

24. I will grow in wisdom and love.

And that’s all I can promise anyone.

Reasons

If I miss you right now, it’s only because I just heard that song I never got to introduce you to.

If I miss you tonight, it’s only because I’m in a town  and walking down streets where we never were together.

If I’m thinking about you, the only reason is that I saw a movie and you didn’t laugh with me at the funny parts.

It’s not the familiar that gets me every time.  It’s not the places we’ve been together, or the things we did, or the songs we heard years ago.

It’s everything since then.  It’s the great, wide, alone and empty, world at large that doesn’t know even about us. It’s never getting over how much I want to show you things. 

What gets me every time about a new sunrise is just wanting to share it with you.