Summer of our Youth

Monday night and life is about to begin:
the hurling, unfurling, fleeting flight of humanity, caught
in their quest to return to their holes, some
rushing outside to linger in the sunlight while the rest
are unwelcome to join the whole. One
moment forgotten by few and it still unrolls along the swift
cliff of the beginning. We are the learners
of knowledge, the students of wisdom, but this is not the
most important to-do point now. We are
a school of fish and we've been oceans away for months
too long and this is the time to misbehave,
disobey, soak in the summer of our youth. We will pay
attention to what we must when the time
comes, but for now, this is our day and we will play.

We will play.

Everything Changes But You

"Finish Last"
Stellar Kart

People change and plans get changed and
Everything changes but you
Everybody moves around and
Everything gets pushed around but you
You always stay the same, stay the same

I want to finish last
Last in the world's eyes
No matter what I do
I will be first in your eyes

I am running in this race and
I am pressing onwards towards the finish line
You have promised me a better life
Far beyond this world, far beyond this place and time


This song has been on my mind lately. The first time I heard this song, I was 16 and I thought I had my whole life planned out. Things changed, as they always do, and a split second later, everything I had planned for had fallen apart.

The problem is that even though we try to pretend like we know what's going on in our lives, we don't. And when everything we thought we had taken care of spins completely out of control, we have to realize that there's only one person who never changes and it's his plans (and his opinion of who we are) that really matters. It's cliché, but so true and so hard to learn.

I am doing a different thing right now than I thought I would be doing a year ago, and that's ok. I'm human and that's just how human plans work. What I need to be thinking about is whether I'm doing what God has planned for me. And as long as I'm doing that, who cares if I'm not exactly where I thought I would be a year ago?

All the time, all the time

This morning, I was driving to work and doing all of the random stuff I do while I drive, including, but not limited to, having full conversations with myself and reminiscing about where I was going and what was going on the last time I was in Betty (the car), when I finally got to the place where I turn in to get to the parking lot of my office building. As I do every morning, I turned on my left blinker, signaling that I was about to turn left. That's when I looked in my rear view mirror and noticed that there was nobody behind me to care about my blinker.

I'm at a point in my life where sometimes I feel like there's nobody behind me to care about the decisions I make. I'm definitely not saying this is true, because I know there are literally dozens of people who would do anything to help me get out of any mess I may find myself in, but sometimes it feels like I'm alone.

It probably has a lot more to do with the being single thing than I would like to admit. I'm the kind of person who likes to feel responsible for someone, and needed, and most of the time I just don't feel that way. The truth is that I'm still struggling to find my place in this thing we call "college" (but feels like a prison sometimes). And while I'm struggling with that, I can't help but reconsider my decision to spend four years in Southern California. This may be my proximity to several large-ish fires and the smoke and ridiculously hot weather that comes along with that speaking, but there are times when I just don't like it in Azusa. Maybe I should have made decisions that would have brought me to a different place. Or maybe not.

All of this is to say that I know I'm not metaphorically sitting in my car with no one driving behind me. I know that. And, most importantly, I know that God is driving in front of me, meaning that he anticipates my moves before I even consider them. But every once in a while, I think it would probably be nice to have someone driving behind me who doesn't have directions to the place we're going.

Falling in love with love

I fall in love easily.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. I've been in love maybe hundreds of times in my lifetime. And I'm not just talking about falling in love with boys, although that does happen pretty often. I'm mostly just referring to people, things, ideas, concepts, books, authors, paintings, lyrics, colors that I randomly encounter in life.

It doesn't take much to catch my attention. I like interesting and unusual details that aren't typically found in what I'm experiencing. I like voices that are imperfect, hearts that are broken, flaws and scratches, spelling mistakes (even though they bother me to death), and patterns. I keep an inspiration folder on my computer, full of random items I encounter on the internet, and it's spilling over with beautiful things, maybe things that only I would find beautiful.



Once something has caught my attention, I fall in love in a matter of minutes.

Nightmare

I woke up this morning at 4:22 from the most vivid dream I've had in a long time. After I woke up, I realized that my roommate had turned off our fan and so I was sweltering underneath the piles of covers I insist on sleeping under and this probably had more to do with why I woke up than the dream. But it was still an intense dream and it still had meaning, I think.

When I was younger, I was haunted by my middle school years. Memories of prepubescent cruelty and crushes that never ended well would sneak up behind at the most random of times, forcing me to pull out my dad's old laptop to write story after story of girls who lived perfect lives on beaches and never once forgot who they were. One of the stories that I remember most clearly was called Seven Summer Suns, and it was about a girl named Summer Black who had seven summer romances. I never finished any of the stories because eventually the thing that I really wanted to write about would start leaking out of me and I would abandon my meticulously plotted out charts of which boy Summer liked at which point in time to write semi-autobiographical nonsense.

The thing that I really wanted to write about was a boy named Gun Hi Bae. He was a classmate of mine in 7th grade and a few years preceding that year. He wasn't one of my best friends, but he did sit behind me in my English/History class and sometimes we would make each other laugh. One day in 7th grade, he didn't come to school and our entire class was immediately alarmed because Gun never missed school; he was just one of those kids who either never got sick or never thought it was a good enough excuse to stay home from school. We found out later that his entire family was murdered the previous day because of sketchy business partners of his father, or something like that.

Later that week, we were all invited to his memorial service, and that's where I was in my dream, except it was outdoors and students from my graduating class were there, not my 7th grade class. We were all grown up, too, and I think that's where the nightmare part comes in. We were all grown up and no longer 12 and 13 years old and Gun was still just a 7th grader.

I woke up from this eerie funeral-dream and couldn't stop thinking about a hot tub conversation I had last night regarding the worst thing ever. At 4:22 this morning, I decided on what I think is the worst: Gun's story is the worst and most tragic thing I have ever heard and it's been haunting me for years.

Does my subconscious feel guilty for living through 7th grade? Or is this just my head's way of telling me to start doing something meaningful with my life?

You know what? Who cares? Tragic things happen in the world every day, worse things than what happened to Gun, and I couldn't matter less in that kind of a world. I may have a guilty conscience, but there are people dying out there, right now, and I'm not doing anything to help them.

Proverbs

She calls to me from the streets,

begging me to turn away from

the simpleminded way of the world.

Her cries tug at my lonely life.

She is the wife of my youth, the

sweet lady of wisdom, and her

advice is what I don’t want to

listen to in this moment.

I’m faced with a decision, two paths

to choose from: one leading into

the growing of the light, the

other disappearing into the falling

darkness. She pulls at my arm,

whispering down the back of my

neck the words to convince me to

choose her way, the way of gleaming dawn.

But the immoral woman is smoother

than oil and it is she who

succeeds in pulling me to her

side; we stumble blindly along

the crooked trail, over

stones and bones, unaware

victims of the deadly decisions

we do not know we are making.

stage parade

I was wanted once,

a perky yellow daisy afloat in a sea of bound-to-be-exported

roses,

driveling talent wasted and praised.

I was that girl once,

the girl with the smile and the hair and the style, taking her

place

in the center of the stage parade.

I saw clearly once

in a thousand shades of brown, blended at the edges of a

world

of standard blacks and mighty whites.

I am more than what you pretend to see.

Do yourself a favor and know me for what

I truly am.

I am 20 years old.

I am 20 years old and rapidly growing out
of the things that made me a child. I am 20
years old and no longer a young girl with
puppy fat and knobby knees. I am 20 years
old, but while the world is moving into adult-
hood, I still linger in the waiting phase of
life. I am 20 years old and if you expect me
to be engaged or child-bearing or self-
capitulated into what will be my life-long
career, you will be disappointed. I am 20
years old and I still have 80 years to
fulfill all of the things that are expected of
me. I am 20 years old and different from
others of my age, and the things that I
consider important are different also. I am
20 years old and I'm waiting to fall in love,
I'm waiting to make a complete commitment
to another human being, I'm waiting to
figure out what I want to do with my life.
I'm 20 years old and maybe I'm still a child.