i wear my confidence like a crown
dont you let your stares and scoffs
try and bring me down
be a little less concerned
its not a life and death matter
you'll end up getting burned
your religiosity
is inferiorating
even...exhilarating
dont think you've changed the way
i think, or even
the system in which i play
if anything you've made me stronger
you obviously dont understand
hurting a McC only makes us last longer
keep on shooting your barbs
i'll hang around
until you loose all your charms
there's no reason to hate
though i know
you'll end up at it anyway
in the end you'll see
you've wasted all that
precious, righteous energy
on something as small as me
as silly as me
as strong as me
its your fault, you opened this can
the one that showed just
how on my feet i can land
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Love: Parts One, Two, and Three
When speaking to a predominantly God-fearing audience, there are many things that writers tend to censor. We do this because the heart needs to be censored. Having impulses towards shooting heroine or snorting cocaine are things that need/can/do disappear when serving the Lord and denying sinful behavior. For me, spending my formative adult years in a college town, drinking became apart of the Petri dish of my mind. But now that I'm serving the Lord and growing as a human being, I'm aware of the fact that being reckless with my time, money, and body is not a responsible way to live anymore. There's just no room there, and because I love the lord and not myself, there's no more desire either.
However much the Lord dissolves things in our life that we have no room for, there is one subject that is very much apart of our lives because it is essential to life... or the creation of it.
It's that thing. The thing that we use bugs and fowl to tip-toe around.
It's that thing that we make pseudonyms for so we don't have to say the "actual word"
My mom was babysitting a group of kids for church one Sunday, they were about three or four. All the little nuggets were getting organized into a circle to learn about the Bible. As a warm-up, my mom asked each of them about their weekends. "What usually happens on your weekends?" My mom started with her schedule: "I usually get up and get Michelle up, then make her and her doll special pancakes in the shapes of bugs. Her doll gets a pancake with sprinkles." One particularly special nugget piped up after her in continuance, "On Saturdays I wake up and my parents put on cartoons, then they go into their bedroom and wrestle. Dad usually wins because mom is always screaming out and then takes a nap afterwards."
Needless to say, at a very young age, it comes up.
So what do we do? Ignore it until the youngster flips on MTV one day? Or goes to see the tween films that push sex on kids as young as 10 or 11 (yeah, Twilight Saga, I'm talkin' to you!).
NO.
I say, we go there.
I say we go there so far that even MTV is uncomfortable. That we use the big-kid words and make it something to not be ashamed of. We shouldn't start a pattern of making sex something that should be taught to our children by strangers in schools or televisions. We made our children, we wiped the poop out of the darkest places on that human being, we shouldn't ignore something that is so vital to life...their life.
My mother and I have always had an interesting relationship, but there was one thing she always was adamant about.
I remember sitting in the passenger side of her car after school telling her about my day. When the conversation died she said one day "You know what to do if a boy tries to touch you right?"
"MOM!"
"They'll tell you that they love you but they are just being led by their hormones."
"GOODNESS GRACIOUS MOM! GEEZE!"
Those conversations, as uncomfortable as they were, saved me a lot of heartache in my later years. For some reason all the things that people said about sex that were so direct that I squirmed in my seat would suddenly pop into my head when boys would corner me after school, telling me sweet nothings that seemed too good to be true. They were. I didn't. My friends, however, were not as fortunate. By the time we were each handed papers reading "Diploma" every single one of my girlfriends had their hearts broken by boys who told them anything they could to get them to sneak out of their windows, ride in their cars, and do things they probably never fathomed they would do with boys they were now trying to ignore in caps and gowns, with their arms around new recipients of their sweet nothings.
It wasn't until I was in college that I decided to dive in to the dating scene. And boy did I. In high school, smart girls are seen as dangerous. When I talked with high school boys about intellectual topics, they would be caught off gaurd and shy away my from my directness. However, the college set of man-boys seemed to value me for the one thing that high school boys shied away from: my mind. I found boys in class who shared the same views as me, boys who weren't afraid to talk to me in the dining hall and carry an intelligent conversation, boys who wanted to hear their girls talk. Brainless bras were laughed at in college, girls who waved pom-poms to get glittery crowns were now being laughed out of the parties they used to dominate.
They were old news, I was the morning edition.
It was nice.
I dated for about three months. I got so cocky that I would leave a romantic coffee date with "okay, I'm meeting someone else at the coffee shop upstairs, so I'll call you later." or "What's your favorite color? Blue? mkay, goodbye."
I played around a lot. Letting friends and family know I was enjoying my new freedom, but never really felt the urge to "settle down." Why do so when so many wonderful and handsome boys were more than willing to give me their attention, no strings attached. So that's how I lived, so strings attached....
That was, until I met him.
the one
The one. The one who suddenly isn't returning YOUR texts, and YOUR calls. And you sit there going, "who is this guy? psch, I have a dozen guys ready to go....so why do i want this one?"
The one who you found yourself looking for in a crowd.
The one whose conversation you would sit and pine away over hours after its brevity had ended oh so quickly.
The one who, though there may be twenty in a room that you could spit on and would love it, you stumble over your words for this one.
I pinned and whined and cried for this one.
I hated it. It was such irony, such "karma" that I couldn't believe it. I saw all the moves before they were coming. The polite brush-off, the disinterested looks, the intentional forgetting of words exchanged so that you were sure just how tiny you were to this person.
Needless to say, this was the "one." I wish that in all our conversations, my mother had told me that this would happen, I remember the descriptions with chagrin. The one who, among all the boys who would step over bodies for me, talk at me, try to seduce my intellect, would one day be a "one" who was the exception to all the rules designed to protect oneself. The one you would want to rip apart the rule book for.
The one you would chuck yourself off a balcony for (happened). The one you would drive for hours in the summer sun in rush hour traffic without an a/c just to see for a few hours (happened). The one who you would dress up like a ridiculous thing for on halloween just because you knew they like it (happened). The one you would give up almost anything for, just because you loved them so much that they became apart of you (*sigh....* happened). *Note: some of the things described above were things done for me, I hate to ruin the story but I was his "one" as well....*
My one. My only. My everything.
It happens, it happens to everyone.
Sometimes, for the really unlucky ones, it happens more than once...though I've only heard rumors of this happening...I can barely imagine
I feel really bad for those people.
So me and him treated college like our personal playground into adulthood. We kissed, we fought, we laughed, we stomped around all mopey for days over each other. We were about as dramatic as any teen/twenty pair could ever be.
He hated it. I hated it. But we loved each other so much.
So much that my love for him pulled me to him, like a string attached carefully from my heart to his.
I knew him inside-out. I knew his mannerisms, he knew mine so well. He knew me to the point where I would find myself looking up and wishing he was there to read me like a book in that moment. To where I was cracking inside jokes for audiences who would reply, "What?" when I knew his would be "Awesome!"
After we had split and I moved away from our playground, I found myself texting him impulsively.
He would have to remind me, "michelle....we aren't together, remember? You can't text me anymore."
I would remember, like a rock fell on me and crushed who I thought I was, and snap back into my new self. The one who nobody really understood. The one who couldn't have intelligent, nerdy conversations with anyone because nobody met her on her level like he did.
I did it way too often. Calling him and hearing a curt response on the phone.
"What?"
"Hey!"
"What do you want?"
"Oh ... I just wanted to tell you about my day. The craziest thing happened..."
"Michelle...."
"What?"
"We're not together anymore."
Every time I heard it, it was news to me. It was a new realization that my mind couldn't figure.
"Michelle, your other half is gone now, become whole again on your own."
Eventually I did. It was good for me. I learned how to go through a day without reporting every detail to someone else. I Learned how to deny myself many impulses I had originally obliged. I started to become a new and stronger person. Those feelings of clingy-ness subsided. Those impulses to need my "other" were gone.
I learned to do things on my own, laugh at things on my own, go out into the scary unknown alone and conquer my fears without having someone in my corner rooting me on.
It was great, though I missed my cheerleader.
Then one day he told me he had been dating someone else. I was like, "that makes sense" since I had done the same also. We were grown-ups, doing the grown-up breaking-up thing that people do. We were gracious, acknowledged the weirdness, laughed at it, and said adieu.
It was a really nice breakup because we got to gradually ease out of it. Once we stopped fighting our emotions and just started accepting the onslaught of sadness, it became easier. The conversations got more and more sparse, the subject matter had greatly shallowed until it had just become a monotone listing of the the weekly events, as dry as the crackling, crinkling newspapers that spoke of the same things.
Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more alone. My life as far as relationships had become much light a weight-lifter's journey. I took the stance and braced myself, slowly started extricating myself from things that dilluted my most meaningful relationship. I stopped attending youth events that were weak in the word and strong in the fun. I stopped hanging with people who were the same way, preached beautiful things yet lived an ugly thing. My life slowly whittled away until it was bare of any meaningful relationships...
Except one.
I would wake up and speak to him.
I would talk to him until I fell asleep.
I would tell him about the funny things that happened.
I would cry to him about the awful parts of work.
I would stress out, then come to him and be comforted.
He was the missing piece I had been missing.
He had become so much more special to me the more I gave myself to him, until we had become like one person.
Can you guess who my new love was? Have you seen me spending quality time at headlands reading with him? Have you seen me at church hanging with him and our family? How about our long walks of intense introspective talks? How about our beach time, our wonderful wonderful beach times?
Yeah, Jesus. Yessuah. Messiah.
Son of the living God had become the most special thing to me in the world.
I didn't miss anything about my old life, I knew this time was for us.
I knew that I had married myself to him with the promise of a new exhistence, and I knew that just like any marriage, we needed some serious honeymoon time.
That's what this was, just like the newly married couple living in my backyard (a rental in my backyard, they were real people, not pets) who locked themselves away and basked in their reverie of each other, I had found my missing piece and was devoting myself to him completely. No need to go out and play, no need to party hard, or even confide in anyone else. Not forever, of course, like Corey and Danielle I would eventually emerge from my fortress and re-enter the social world someday.
But for now, I was listening to my DADDY'S advice and taking it slow. Meshing my heart with His and becoming One with his person.
That is my love life so far.
I'm twenty-one and falling hard for a lover who will never let me down, and teach me to love others in a proper way. Its been a bumpy journey to this point, and the worst part of any huge life lesson as we walk with Christ is this: waiting. But this wait is particularly enjoyable because the waiting is with a new friend who is pouring himself out on me.
Praise God, the story ends like this.
However much the Lord dissolves things in our life that we have no room for, there is one subject that is very much apart of our lives because it is essential to life... or the creation of it.
It's that thing. The thing that we use bugs and fowl to tip-toe around.
It's that thing that we make pseudonyms for so we don't have to say the "actual word"
My mom was babysitting a group of kids for church one Sunday, they were about three or four. All the little nuggets were getting organized into a circle to learn about the Bible. As a warm-up, my mom asked each of them about their weekends. "What usually happens on your weekends?" My mom started with her schedule: "I usually get up and get Michelle up, then make her and her doll special pancakes in the shapes of bugs. Her doll gets a pancake with sprinkles." One particularly special nugget piped up after her in continuance, "On Saturdays I wake up and my parents put on cartoons, then they go into their bedroom and wrestle. Dad usually wins because mom is always screaming out and then takes a nap afterwards."
Needless to say, at a very young age, it comes up.
So what do we do? Ignore it until the youngster flips on MTV one day? Or goes to see the tween films that push sex on kids as young as 10 or 11 (yeah, Twilight Saga, I'm talkin' to you!).
NO.
I say, we go there.
I say we go there so far that even MTV is uncomfortable. That we use the big-kid words and make it something to not be ashamed of. We shouldn't start a pattern of making sex something that should be taught to our children by strangers in schools or televisions. We made our children, we wiped the poop out of the darkest places on that human being, we shouldn't ignore something that is so vital to life...their life.
My mother and I have always had an interesting relationship, but there was one thing she always was adamant about.
I remember sitting in the passenger side of her car after school telling her about my day. When the conversation died she said one day "You know what to do if a boy tries to touch you right?"
"MOM!"
"They'll tell you that they love you but they are just being led by their hormones."
"GOODNESS GRACIOUS MOM! GEEZE!"
Those conversations, as uncomfortable as they were, saved me a lot of heartache in my later years. For some reason all the things that people said about sex that were so direct that I squirmed in my seat would suddenly pop into my head when boys would corner me after school, telling me sweet nothings that seemed too good to be true. They were. I didn't. My friends, however, were not as fortunate. By the time we were each handed papers reading "Diploma" every single one of my girlfriends had their hearts broken by boys who told them anything they could to get them to sneak out of their windows, ride in their cars, and do things they probably never fathomed they would do with boys they were now trying to ignore in caps and gowns, with their arms around new recipients of their sweet nothings.
It wasn't until I was in college that I decided to dive in to the dating scene. And boy did I. In high school, smart girls are seen as dangerous. When I talked with high school boys about intellectual topics, they would be caught off gaurd and shy away my from my directness. However, the college set of man-boys seemed to value me for the one thing that high school boys shied away from: my mind. I found boys in class who shared the same views as me, boys who weren't afraid to talk to me in the dining hall and carry an intelligent conversation, boys who wanted to hear their girls talk. Brainless bras were laughed at in college, girls who waved pom-poms to get glittery crowns were now being laughed out of the parties they used to dominate.
They were old news, I was the morning edition.
It was nice.
I dated for about three months. I got so cocky that I would leave a romantic coffee date with "okay, I'm meeting someone else at the coffee shop upstairs, so I'll call you later." or "What's your favorite color? Blue? mkay, goodbye."
I played around a lot. Letting friends and family know I was enjoying my new freedom, but never really felt the urge to "settle down." Why do so when so many wonderful and handsome boys were more than willing to give me their attention, no strings attached. So that's how I lived, so strings attached....
That was, until I met him.
the one
The one. The one who suddenly isn't returning YOUR texts, and YOUR calls. And you sit there going, "who is this guy? psch, I have a dozen guys ready to go....so why do i want this one?"
The one who you found yourself looking for in a crowd.
The one whose conversation you would sit and pine away over hours after its brevity had ended oh so quickly.
The one who, though there may be twenty in a room that you could spit on and would love it, you stumble over your words for this one.
I pinned and whined and cried for this one.
I hated it. It was such irony, such "karma" that I couldn't believe it. I saw all the moves before they were coming. The polite brush-off, the disinterested looks, the intentional forgetting of words exchanged so that you were sure just how tiny you were to this person.
Needless to say, this was the "one." I wish that in all our conversations, my mother had told me that this would happen, I remember the descriptions with chagrin. The one who, among all the boys who would step over bodies for me, talk at me, try to seduce my intellect, would one day be a "one" who was the exception to all the rules designed to protect oneself. The one you would want to rip apart the rule book for.
The one you would chuck yourself off a balcony for (happened). The one you would drive for hours in the summer sun in rush hour traffic without an a/c just to see for a few hours (happened). The one who you would dress up like a ridiculous thing for on halloween just because you knew they like it (happened). The one you would give up almost anything for, just because you loved them so much that they became apart of you (*sigh....* happened). *Note: some of the things described above were things done for me, I hate to ruin the story but I was his "one" as well....*
My one. My only. My everything.
It happens, it happens to everyone.
Sometimes, for the really unlucky ones, it happens more than once...though I've only heard rumors of this happening...I can barely imagine
I feel really bad for those people.
So me and him treated college like our personal playground into adulthood. We kissed, we fought, we laughed, we stomped around all mopey for days over each other. We were about as dramatic as any teen/twenty pair could ever be.
He hated it. I hated it. But we loved each other so much.
So much that my love for him pulled me to him, like a string attached carefully from my heart to his.
I knew him inside-out. I knew his mannerisms, he knew mine so well. He knew me to the point where I would find myself looking up and wishing he was there to read me like a book in that moment. To where I was cracking inside jokes for audiences who would reply, "What?" when I knew his would be "Awesome!"
After we had split and I moved away from our playground, I found myself texting him impulsively.
He would have to remind me, "michelle....we aren't together, remember? You can't text me anymore."
I would remember, like a rock fell on me and crushed who I thought I was, and snap back into my new self. The one who nobody really understood. The one who couldn't have intelligent, nerdy conversations with anyone because nobody met her on her level like he did.
I did it way too often. Calling him and hearing a curt response on the phone.
"What?"
"Hey!"
"What do you want?"
"Oh ... I just wanted to tell you about my day. The craziest thing happened..."
"Michelle...."
"What?"
"We're not together anymore."
Every time I heard it, it was news to me. It was a new realization that my mind couldn't figure.
"Michelle, your other half is gone now, become whole again on your own."
Eventually I did. It was good for me. I learned how to go through a day without reporting every detail to someone else. I Learned how to deny myself many impulses I had originally obliged. I started to become a new and stronger person. Those feelings of clingy-ness subsided. Those impulses to need my "other" were gone.
I learned to do things on my own, laugh at things on my own, go out into the scary unknown alone and conquer my fears without having someone in my corner rooting me on.
It was great, though I missed my cheerleader.
Then one day he told me he had been dating someone else. I was like, "that makes sense" since I had done the same also. We were grown-ups, doing the grown-up breaking-up thing that people do. We were gracious, acknowledged the weirdness, laughed at it, and said adieu.
It was a really nice breakup because we got to gradually ease out of it. Once we stopped fighting our emotions and just started accepting the onslaught of sadness, it became easier. The conversations got more and more sparse, the subject matter had greatly shallowed until it had just become a monotone listing of the the weekly events, as dry as the crackling, crinkling newspapers that spoke of the same things.
Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more alone. My life as far as relationships had become much light a weight-lifter's journey. I took the stance and braced myself, slowly started extricating myself from things that dilluted my most meaningful relationship. I stopped attending youth events that were weak in the word and strong in the fun. I stopped hanging with people who were the same way, preached beautiful things yet lived an ugly thing. My life slowly whittled away until it was bare of any meaningful relationships...
Except one.
I would wake up and speak to him.
I would talk to him until I fell asleep.
I would tell him about the funny things that happened.
I would cry to him about the awful parts of work.
I would stress out, then come to him and be comforted.
He was the missing piece I had been missing.
He had become so much more special to me the more I gave myself to him, until we had become like one person.
Can you guess who my new love was? Have you seen me spending quality time at headlands reading with him? Have you seen me at church hanging with him and our family? How about our long walks of intense introspective talks? How about our beach time, our wonderful wonderful beach times?
Yeah, Jesus. Yessuah. Messiah.
Son of the living God had become the most special thing to me in the world.
I didn't miss anything about my old life, I knew this time was for us.
I knew that I had married myself to him with the promise of a new exhistence, and I knew that just like any marriage, we needed some serious honeymoon time.
That's what this was, just like the newly married couple living in my backyard (a rental in my backyard, they were real people, not pets) who locked themselves away and basked in their reverie of each other, I had found my missing piece and was devoting myself to him completely. No need to go out and play, no need to party hard, or even confide in anyone else. Not forever, of course, like Corey and Danielle I would eventually emerge from my fortress and re-enter the social world someday.
But for now, I was listening to my DADDY'S advice and taking it slow. Meshing my heart with His and becoming One with his person.
That is my love life so far.
I'm twenty-one and falling hard for a lover who will never let me down, and teach me to love others in a proper way. Its been a bumpy journey to this point, and the worst part of any huge life lesson as we walk with Christ is this: waiting. But this wait is particularly enjoyable because the waiting is with a new friend who is pouring himself out on me.
Praise God, the story ends like this.
Best. Cable. Ever.
(ad a friend found on craigslist. inspiring? yes)
So I bought a great TV about six months ago and it is very nice. It's a 46" LED 3D TV and the picture is clean and very realistic. But when I would go to sleep at night, I felt like something was missing. I started upgrading items for my system one component at a time. It started with my stereo receiver and then was the speakers, cable box, changed picture providers, speaker wire, theater furniture, TV Stand...nothing seemed to give it the extra push i was looking for. My neighbor suggested a new HDMI cable. GENIUS! It's like an angel came down and whispered the secret of life into my ear.
I went to apply to the local University for engineering course and studied until I was top of my class. I went to India and gathered the finest gold and took rubber from the oldest Para tree in Brazil to build my own cable. Nothing seemed to work to my expectations.
I then made my travels to the local Best Buy to see what they would recommend...and THERE. IT. WAS. Audioquest had perfected the HDMI cable and they were selling it for the most reasonable price of just barely over $2000. As an engineer, I was able to dissect this cable and put it back together again without harming the integrity of it and can I just say it was like seeing my first child for the first time. No, scratch that....it was BETTER than seeing my child. I was able to plug in the cable which was the perfect length for my TV and watch it with the most intense colors I've ever seen. I would not only recommend this to a friend, I'd recommend it to anyone as proof that heaven exists and that it's located at Audioquest. This cable was worth an additional $200,000 in educational, engineering, and travel expenses to determine what I needed could be found at Best Buy. So for those "tech geeks" who think that everything is just 1's and 0's, I submit this: Are you an engineer able to produce a cable? I think not.
What's great about it: Everything
What's not so great: Food lost flavor, colors seem dull in real life
I would recommend this to a friend!
So I bought a great TV about six months ago and it is very nice. It's a 46" LED 3D TV and the picture is clean and very realistic. But when I would go to sleep at night, I felt like something was missing. I started upgrading items for my system one component at a time. It started with my stereo receiver and then was the speakers, cable box, changed picture providers, speaker wire, theater furniture, TV Stand...nothing seemed to give it the extra push i was looking for. My neighbor suggested a new HDMI cable. GENIUS! It's like an angel came down and whispered the secret of life into my ear.
I went to apply to the local University for engineering course and studied until I was top of my class. I went to India and gathered the finest gold and took rubber from the oldest Para tree in Brazil to build my own cable. Nothing seemed to work to my expectations.
I then made my travels to the local Best Buy to see what they would recommend...and THERE. IT. WAS. Audioquest had perfected the HDMI cable and they were selling it for the most reasonable price of just barely over $2000. As an engineer, I was able to dissect this cable and put it back together again without harming the integrity of it and can I just say it was like seeing my first child for the first time. No, scratch that....it was BETTER than seeing my child. I was able to plug in the cable which was the perfect length for my TV and watch it with the most intense colors I've ever seen. I would not only recommend this to a friend, I'd recommend it to anyone as proof that heaven exists and that it's located at Audioquest. This cable was worth an additional $200,000 in educational, engineering, and travel expenses to determine what I needed could be found at Best Buy. So for those "tech geeks" who think that everything is just 1's and 0's, I submit this: Are you an engineer able to produce a cable? I think not.
What's great about it: Everything
What's not so great: Food lost flavor, colors seem dull in real life
I would recommend this to a friend!
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