Strange Day

Today was a weird day.  I woke up this morning wondering why my alarm was going off on a snow day. That's right, I thought it was a snow day.  As I woke up, I realized that I had been dreaming that I was at home and my mom and I were cleaning out my room on our surprise snow day off.

I got to work and felt strangely energetic for that time of morning.  It probably had to do with the free pop we currently have in our break room.  So much caffeine is surging through my veins right now.  I worked on getting freight put out and apparently was having so much fun that before I know it I look at my watch and realize that its 2:00 PM and I was supposed to go on break half an hour before.  I never miss break.  Weird I tell you.

And then it got really slow and so the last two hours went so much slower than the first several.  And when I went outside it was 86 degrees.  I had a jacket on coming into the store and was sweating on the way home.

Okay, so three weird things happened and it wasn't a super weird day after all.  I just wanted to tell you that I dreamed it was a snow day when the high nearly hit 90.  In September.  In South Dakota.

Oh, and we also found one of these at the store today:

In unrelated news, I just found out that three of my best friends and I all get to go to Kansas City together in November.  Couldn't be happier.

So its midnight and I should be getting to bed if I want to try to maintain some sort of normal sleep pattern, but when the urge to write comes, it is not wise to let it go to waste.  And here I am.

I just read an article.  And I mean just.  Maybe thirty minutes ago, tops.  So my thoughts may be convoluted and not quite there yet, but here goes nothing.

This article was in Relevant magazine. (someone with better English skills remind me, are magazine titles italicized or underlined?  Or maybe neither.  I forget.  Italicized it is.)  It was an article about "How to prepare for your dream job without quitting your day job."  Or something like that.  Quotes are not exact.  Too late to go and look them up. Sleep beckons.

Anywho... this article discussed the challenges that we face when we think about, dream about, or go for, our dream job, our One Thing.  The article ended with the point that we often let the voices talk us out of doing what we dream of doing.  Now, everyone has voices, most have negative voices.  Some people listen to these voices, some don't.  So I'm not saying I don't have these voices.  I'm not even saying that I don't listen to these voices, because sometimes these voices win.  Especially the voice that says, "Why quit a job you are good at to pursue something you could fail at?  Why throw success away for a dream?"  What I'm saying about these particular voices is that I'm not quite there yet.  Meaning, these voices are not what keeps me from doing what I dream of doing.

The point previous to this one talked about fear.  The fear of failure, of not being good enough, of not being ready. (Also, this article said Ready is a myth.  No one is ever really ready because in order to do something that you've never done before you, well, have to do something you've never done.  Practice makes perfect but buying a guitar is the first step of practicing.  And that guitar may end up being a waste of money because it sits gathering dust in your room.  OR, you may end up learning that one song that you've been dying to learn and find yourself dancing with the guitar around the room singing slightly off key but you feel like you're in a rock band.  But you never know until that beautiful Mitchell is yours. Worth every penny.  Moving on  now.)

Aren't you all lucky?  I'm too tired to actually think through what I say before I type and so I'm writing like I think.  It makes me afraid to ever look back at any of my college papers knowing how many of them were written this late at night.  And back to the train of thought. Where were we?  Ah, yes, Fear.  Fear of failure, mostly.  And again, this is something I do face. I'm afraid of going for that One Thing and ending up flat on my face in the mud as people point and laugh.  But again, this is not what is holding me back. One day it might, but I haven't reached that door, that wall yet.

I realized, reading this article, that the thing holding me back is not simple fear.  Fear is involved, but not yet fear of failure.  I think I'm afraid I'll go for that One Thing and pursue it and get so invested in it that its pretty darn tough to back out and then realize that I don't really want to be that at all.  The thing that is holding me back is that I don't know what the One Thing actually is for me.  I'm 24 years old and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. (As another side note, is it weird that I sometimes still refer to people at the "next stage in life" (read that, married with kids) as "adults," even if they aren't even older than me?)  I think that if I knew without a shadow of a doubt what my One Thing was, I'd give up anything to get it.  I think I just want someone to tell me, because despite the fact that a certain friend of mine insists that she loves the fact that I'm decisive, when it comes to this, I'm not decisive at all.  I'm still a little lost.

Maybe its just like that guitar.  I spent hard earned money on that guitar and on picks, strings, tuners, stands, lessons and countless other things.  Maybe if I go for it, I'll end up letting it gather dust and "not-quite dirty enough for the hamper, not clean enough for the hanger" clothes.  Or maybe I'll end up a rock star on stage.  Even if the songs are cheesy, the stage tiny, and the audience third graders.

I think I'll take that chance.

Horror

I've never liked horror movies.  I hate to be startled, for one.  I can't stand the gore either.  I know its fake, but even when I know there is no way that the scene would be possible (think Monty Python when the guy gets his arms chopped off) it still bothers me.  Add to these reasons the fact that in horror movies, at least one good guy dies and the good guy is never supposed to die.  I just don't like them.  Never have and, especially after this weekend, never will.

This weekend I experienced a scene straight out of a horror movie.  My roommate and I were heading home Sunday night, driving down a road we often take when we see this lady on the side of the road waving her arms. She begins to run out into the middle of the street and stops in front of us.  I put on my brakes, locked my doors, and concluded that she must be drunk.  As we got closer, I realize that she may not be simply drunk after all, but that she is begging us for help.  It was dark and my memories are muddled but as my headlights shone on her, I realized that head to toe, this woman was covered in blood.  And I don't mean just a little.  I mean more blood than I would think would be possible to be on the outside of someone's body and that person still be alive, let alone walking.  I specifically remember it dripping from her face. I'm sorry, its gruesome, I know.

What happened next is jumbled in my brain.  It didn't last long, but I remember her pounding on the passenger window of my car, calling 911, fumbling with my door lock, and flashing my lights at the car coming towards us to stop and help.  We didn't even have any real time to react before the other car pulled over and opened the door for her to get in.  I look back at it now and realize that I never even thought to take her to the hospital.  I was fully prepared to grab the blankets from my back seat to try to stop the bleeding once 911 had been called, but it never crossed my mind that the hospital was only a few blocks away.  I'm glad that stranger was thinking a little more logically than I when he pulled over.  For all I know, she could have died as I waited for an ambulance.

They pulled away, leaving my roommate and I stunned and flustered for a few minutes before her boyfriend and his roommate arrived.  We had only just left their place so they made it there faster than the police did. Its a strange thing, waiting for the police to arrive, sure a psycho-killer is just around the corner.  I was glad the boys were there.  We stood off to the side as the cops investigated.  I kept trying to stand in a place where I couldn't see the blood dripping down the side of my car and also from the pool of blood in the street, but it was tough.  I've never seen that many police cars in one place before, never given a statement to police about a crime.  Let me tell you, it is nothing like any detective show you've ever seen.

They had to take my car to document the blood as evidence for the investigation, so we left and came back at three in the morning to pick it up again.  Did you know that the PD doesn't clean up evidence on confiscated items when they return them?  My roommate and I had to don our rubber cleaning gloves and fill a bucket with water and do it ourselves.  I stopped by the car wash on the way home as well.  The next morning I took some Windex to it as well, which I'm sure isn't good for the car but lets face it.  A few more rust spots isn't going to change the value of that thing much.

It turns out the woman will live, thank God.  She was attacked by an acquaintance, another woman, with a box cutter.  There was alcohol involved. She had emergency surgery as soon as she arrived at the hospital to fix the deep cuts on her face, neck, and back.  The woman who attacked her has been arrested.

Now this next confession is breaking down walls that I put up to look strong and put together, but I'll admit, the experience shook me up.  Being out when its dark is creepy these days and I lock the door to my car whenever I'm alone or someone is walking to close to my car when I'm stopped.  I've successfully avoided the road this occurred on because the blood puddle was still there when I went to get my car and I'm not interested in seeing how a week with no rain affects something like that. I hear someone say "box cutter" and I shudder a little.  I have no interest in seeing violent movies any time soon.

I know from experience that these affects will pass.  I did eventually get to the point where I could see a big white truck coming toward me on the road without instinctively wanting to swerve the other way, but until that point, I could be having a perfectly normal conversation while that moment replayed itself over and over again in my head.  That is how this, too, will be. Eventually I will get to the point that I don't think about this every hour, or even every day. Already, the shock is fading.

What struck me about this, what I can't get over, is how random it was that we were there.  If we had been heading straight home instead of to pick up my roommates car, we would have never even known that this had happened.  If we were there five minutes later, we would have come upon a police road block.  Five minutes earlier, we would have been oblivious to the horror happening inside the building next to us.  A whole string of events led to that point.  So why us? Was it random, or was there a purpose? That is the question that still haunts my brain.

Train Bridge

I believe that often, people become who they are expected to become.  The slightly sarcastic guy in the group becomes the always sarcastic guy because even when he tries to be serious, someone around him can't handle that and so they make a joke of his comment.  The blonde girl acts naive and dumb because she heard a few too many blonde jokes as a kid and now thinks that this is what is expected of her.  The smart kid in class sacrifices any semblance of a social life because he is always being told what a smart kid he is and he is terrified to learn who he might be without an A.  Its one reason it drives me crazy when people have such a narrow view of people that they seem to be surprised whenever anyone swerves outside their lines.  We put limits on each other so much.  And while it can be good, parents believing that their child can achieve their dreams, for example, it can also be bad, such as when a parent forces their own dreams upon their child against their will.

From here on out, there will be two anomalies to this post.  First of all is the fact that normally, when talking about this subject I would be talking about the negative parts of this concept and how we should be careful to encourage people to be more instead of putting them in a box. Secondly, the rest of this post is for one person and one person only.  I, of course, am making it public so anyone can read it, but my hope is that he will see it and read it and know I'm talking to him and that everything is okay.

So, to my friend,

I'm afraid we miscommunicated once again.  You saw that I was upset and I think you thought you were to blame.  I'm here to tell you that you weren't.  I was upset because I saw that I hurt you and that killed me. You compared yourself to someone else, someone who had hurt me and I hated that comparison so much, because it is so much not true.  I don't think I conveyed to you how much.  Its just that it usually takes some time for me to be able to put these things to words.  Even now I am realizing that this whole thing sounded so much more eloquent in my head.

I began this whole post with the concept of becoming who people believe we are because I find myself believing that I may just be the person you told me I was all along.  You treat me with such honor, such respect.  Every action towards me, every word tells me who I am. In your actions, you reflect the way that Christ sees me.  When I look in the mirror I see someone with worth.  I see someone beautiful.  I see someone with dreams that I am actually fulfilling.  I see someone funny, joy filled, who loves every moment of life.  Someone who can even look at the painful things with hope that they will be redeemed.  I have you, in part, to thank for that.

And now it is I who is on my knees every night, begging the God who heals that any pain I caused would be wiped away.

Priorities

Several weeks ago I went to a ladies prayer meeting and we talked about what we talk to our friends about.  We talked about a pastor who told the story about how he would call his mentor and start to talk about a situation and his mentor would interrupt him and say "Have you talked to God about this yet?"  Often the pastor would say no and his friend would say, "Go do that.  If you still need me, give me a call," and he'd hang up on him. More times than not, the pastor said, he never needed to call.

I was thinking about that during that time and I realized how true this is for me.  Granted, I am female, and if we are to believe everything people say about males and females and how we are different, then men are more concerned about solutions and females often just need to express emotion.  So, this particular pastor may have never needed to call back, but I usually still  need to talk through the emotions I'm feeling.  Still, when I think about how this concept plays out in my life, I am struck by how much truth there is in the concept of bringing things to God first.



I think of my friendship with my good friend and neighbor who lives just two floors below me.  We are lucky enough to talk now and then and she is a woman to whom God has given much wisdom.  I have found that when I talk to her, how I react to that wisdom changes very much depending on whether I've taken it to God first or run straight to her.  See, when I seek her wisdom without the peace that prayer brings, I often feel defensive and restless in spirit when we are done talking. But, when I have taken it to God first and then seek her wisdom, I often find confirmation of what God was speaking.  When I follow the correct order of things, she merely puts to words what God was speaking to my heart already and she gives me courage to do what I should.  It really is amazing what God does through other people when you allow him to.

Speaking of my good friend, I'm about to go hang out with her right now.  Aren't I lucky?

This post is dumb. If you don't read it, I won't even be offended.

Because I can't, or won't (you choose), talk about what is actually on my mind, and because I feel the need to write, I'm going to talk my opinion of four day weekends.  I love them.  Its like two weekends back to back.  Just for fun.  Sunday night comes, and that sad feeling that usually accompanies Sunday nights is wonderfully absent.  Because you wake up on Monday and its like going back in time and living Saturday all over again! Especially since with my job I only get two days off in a row every two weeks.  Four off is heaven.  Especially when Wednesday is not another day back in the store, but a fun-filled day learning about cold weather gear and getting cheap stuff.  Especially, especially when I do get back to the store I'll have lots of stuff to do, which after a slow summer will be welcome.

And that is all I have to say about that.  Its very possible that I won't have anything better to say until my addled brain gets some much needed rest.