Destinyisnow's Xanga

Leaving for Good

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 14:27:54 GMT

I think it's time to consolidate my blogs. I've not been able to truly keep up with two since getting to college, and I don't expect life to slow down much until retirement. By then, blogs may not exist. It's a new season of life anyway, and Xanga, well, that was my high school obsession. But I'm old(ish) now.

It will take some time for me to adjust links and such, because there are still Xanga friends I want to keep up with etc. I just need to figure who they are, what their blog links are, and then code them onto my new site. Which, by the way, you can catch here. (Not like links to that aren't everywhere on this page anyway.)

So, if any of my friends who still read this would, please post here to let me know if you blog regularly and give the URL for that so I can start making my own reading list (Google Reader, anyone? Oh yeah.). Second, update your links—and a bookmark—because I fully intend to blog regularly and well on my blogspot. (Like the latest post about the dog? Read it.) If you're interested.

I'll leave this site up for a year or so, then close it entirely down.

So long, ya'll. It's been good times, many memories. =)

*thinking

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:16:26 GMT

Society rejects the handicapped, poor, elderly, and helpless because we see in them a clear reflection of the condition of our souls. Naked. Weak. Discomfiting. Pride serves as a feeble covering for our inadequacy. What does it matter when the emperor wears no clothes if everyone says he is robed in splendor?

Pity, too, cloaks identification. If you feel sorry for someone, it is from the tower of self-confidence, not the depth of understanding. The poor remind us that we all are hungry, inadequate, empty. In their hollow eyes, we see our mirror image, so we look away, and walk quickly by.

You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. (Revelations 3:17-19, NIV)

We will always be weak. Humans versus nature, sin, heaven, hell? Please. Yet we still scramble to rebuild the facade each time it crumbles under its unsupported weight. It is so much more comforting, more genteel, to play a giant game of make-believe.

Accomplishment, talent, do not contribute to our worth. They serve as a mortal currency to value an immortal soul. We are precious because we are made in God's image, not for how we can perform. Without God's scale of importance, we are slaves to our own; chained to a cruel taskmaster of our own creation.

When we face our own failure, we can choose—choose to bury it under layers of fashionable clothing, a devil-may-care attitude, cars, houses, a trophy wife, brilliant children, burning intellect; or we can be honest, admit our natural inadequacy, and bring it to the One who turns fools to gold.

Hidden pain only festers and deforms. Opened pain dissolves into beauty through grace.

::splash::

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:19:23 GMT

My car is so clean you could eat a meal off it. It is so shiny you could perfect your makeup in the reflection of its sheen. Perfection so, well, perfect, is only achieved by four hours of work.

Four hours, that is, if you're a girl.

It all started around three o'clock. I bounded outside in my swimsuit to sudse and rinse my car and mom's car. Mine because I am in this clean-freak mood, about to pack up and head back to school, and my mom's because I've been driving it all summer while finding myself a new one and getting it ready for Hillsdale.

Scrub scrub. Grant came out in his swim trunks, and I enlisted his assistance, periodically shouting over my bubbled shoulder, "DON'T TOUCH THE CAR WITH THE HOSE! Spray it with your thumb!" He put up a good fight but tuckered out around five o'clock, when I headed inside to change and start dinner for the starved masses.

Dinner prep took a little longer because I allowed Patience to actually help. I don't mean the "here, you can set the table" help. Mmm mm, she made muffins while I chopped vegetables and marinated chicken.

Understand that help from anyone under twelve years old, unless they are particularly well-trained, is really a time setback. You open the oven, turn around to grab the chicken pan, and trip over a three-foot gnome. It peers up at you with astonished eyes and a flour-whitened face, evidently wondering how on earth you happened to be in her way when you had been standing in that very spot for five entire minutes. You set out the salt next to the stove for sprinkling, run to the basement for dressing, and, when you return, the salt has vanished. "Where on earth is the salt?" you cry, but the little gnome is humming to herself in the pantry, completely oblivious to your panic while she pours salt into her batter.

For all this trouble, I find it particularly hard to turn down offers of real help from house gnomes, because after you say yes and give them something worthwhile to do, they get this look in their eyes, a glint of seized opportunity.

Or maybe that's just the chocolate sprinkles they munch while your back is turned.

Anywho, dinner pulled off decently, and I was back to wipe off the wax that I had so wisely swiped over the car right before dinner. Perfect, I smiled, I can be useful while waiting for the wax to dry! What a smart little thing I am.

I forgot that I was female. Leaving wax on a car in eighty-five degree heat for two hours is a bad idea for white girls with skinny arms.

But I was determined. I brought out an array of soft cotton cloths, just like the wax jar demanded, and began scrubbing furiously in a circular motion. It took five minutes to clear a patch the size of a snack plate on the rear left window.

I was still determined. I attacked the car with cloths for the next ten minutes, not even grunting OR sweating.

There are advantages to being female. Quickness of removing wax is not one of them. Patience trolled by, released from dinner dishes by me for her "help" in the kitchen. "Can I help?" she said. Was she kidding? I obviously needed all the help I could get, even if it WAS offered by a kitchen gnome. I tossed her a towel.

After a while, Hope came out and made the same offer. There I was, with two gremlins and four towels, buffing away while nothing really happened. We had the bright idea to use credit cards to scrape off the extra top wax, which really did help. After about an hour, we took a chocolate break and surveyed our work. Barely one side of the car finished. The gnomes flicked on a techno CD, and we went, happy and oblivious, back to work.

Another ten minutes, and dad came over to see what was occupying all the house females for so long. Quiet is so unusual from our species, he knew it had to be something special. Seeing our predicament, he picked up a towel and began scrubbing the other side of the car. Wax flaked away like banana peels in the hands of a hundred monkeys. Ten minutes and a few good-natured chauvinist jokes later, the car was shiny and spotless.

Feminists have it all wrong. Women aren't supposed to work. MEN are supposed to work for WOMEN.

The name is Chocolate. Dark Chocolate.

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:35:45 GMT

The name is chocolate. Dark chocolate.

There are a lot of imitations, but only one is the real deal. And that's me. I've been around the block a few times, seen things no one would admit to seeing nowadays, they're so corpulent. I mean, chocolate covered cherries. Chocolate covered cherries! You people think that sounds so delectable and elegant, biting into it and savoring every sticky drop. What no one knows is how long those sticky drops have been coagulating on a shelf somewhere, blending their flavors. No one knows how much white, overprocessed sugar has to be glued onto the cherry to keep it from rotting away. No one knows the amounts of dye they soak the things in to keep them from appearing dead and mushy.

It's the same everywhere. Peeps. What is that? A peep? And milk chocolate? Don't even get me started.

But now that I am, I guess I'll continue. You're not going to learn anything if everyone hides the truth, and everyone hides the truth. Truth is, milk chocolate is what they make out of the wimpy cocoa beans. Don't look at me like that. It's the dad-blamed truth. The ones who can't make it make milk chocolate like the ones who can't make it choose the army national guard instead of the marines. I said don't look at me like that.

Futher, just dark chocolate is not enough to make you one of the few, the proud, the dark. There are imitations everywhere. People buy chocolate from Walmart and eat it on their couch, grinning madly at their conquest. What a sham. You can only be dark if you are dark. Sound elementary? It's because real dark is seduction, pure and simple. Nothing added, nothing taken away.

So don't be throwing names around if you don't know what they mean. Get it straight, get it simple, get it sultry.

Dark Chocolate.

Let's talk about brokenness.

Tue, 23 May 2006 22:03:13 GMT

(If you read only one of my posts this entire year, read this one, please, and think about it. This is important, and true. And, honestly, it has nothing to do with anyone and everything to do with everyone. So shush and read.)

Everyone feels that they have hurts which no one else can understand for scope and uniqueness. "Nobody knows // the trouble I seen," they sing in a mournful tone. Trouble comes, and it comes so often in this worn-over life that they begin making bricks, and then a tower out of their self pity and hunger, shutting themselves away row by row.

It is true: no one has been wounded in particularly the way you have, because you are the only one of you in existence. But isolation by experience is entirely a post-modern construct formed by self creation.

What all those fancy words in the last sentence mean is that humans, when we believe we create ourselves and our own world by each action and experience we have, eventually end up on an island, separated from man and God. This separation breeds the "cult of the individual" -- not the wonderful attributes of individuality and uniqueness, where we celebrate our God-given differences, but the cult of individual which raises each person to the level of god over their own lives. Post-modernism says, "You make your own standards. You measure your own experiences. Therefore, what anyone else says about the way you live cannot be true unless you bear witness to it inside because only you can measure what you have lived, as you are the only one who truly understands what it is like to be you." Post-modernism separates us from God by declaring that our thoughts are our truth. To stuff be His thoughts if they don't "speak to me" or "address my situation."

Persons caught in this have thus allowed their broken places to separate them from God, the only source of healing. They look at their ruined lives and proclaim, "I have a right to be this way! I'm the victim! Look what happened to make me this way. No one can say how I am wrong because they don't know what I've been through." This attitude accomplishes the abominable by elevating darkness to the position of light, untruth to the position of truth. "I don't care if it's true for you, it's true for me." Our thoughts, if bent this way, slap the face of God by deposing him from his being, his essence, of real truth.

No. Truth exists outside of our experiences. Yes, it can be desperately difficult to find that truth through the rain, blood, and tears. But it exists. The way out is not by believing your version of truth, which may or may not really be truth at all (probably not, considering that you are human and therefore deeply flawed), but by believing the real truth. Where do you get that?

Must I even ask?

I marvel so often that the events and duties I dread beforehand often turn into sunshine and rainbows when I have actually set my teeth and begun them. My fear was not reality, but it became that reality until I decided to do what was necessary and right. Ironically, that very action is what released me from my prison of fake, frightening false truth. Too often we allow the same in our relationship -- or non-relationship -- with God.

Life sucks. As Paul said, we are "pressed but not crushed, persecuted but not abandoned, pressed down but not destroyed." God's great design in allowing pain is that it send us scurrying after Him. So many times I have been the little child tugging dreadfully hard on his belt, whimpering, "Um...daddy? Daddy! I'M SCARED!" Just as a doctor sometimes has to re-break a bone that set incorrectly after a fracture, or a surgeon often has to cut away malignant tissue, so God also uses pressure and hurt to take away older hurts. When we run from His careful hands, we destroy the opportunity He had set up to heal our hearts and, in the process, ruin ourselves even more.

Run, baby, run. But run to, not from.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 18:27:40 GMT

We went out today to explore in the back forty, and the back west forty, and the back north forty, and the neighbor's back south forty and the other neighbor's back east forty. It was a long jaunt, but Noah, Hope, Patience, Grant, and I were undaunted in the face of thorns, mud holes, and uprooted tree stumps that look like black bears from a long distance away. Still, being the slightly yuppie farmer children that we are, we took the dirtbike and four-wheeler on our way to the woods and stream until the machines could go no further without lopping off tree and human limbs in forging forward. We dismounted, and I peeled helmets off and slid gloves and hats on. Noah broke us all staffs sufficient to prop ourselves up as we meandered under and over trees, rocks, streams, barbed wire, quicksand, and ancient Maya burial grounds. (I made those last two up.)

I dubbed Noah the leader of the group since he had an obvious agenda anyway and the rest of us were just in for the ride. The satisfaction on Noah's face was undimmed by Grant's insistence on running ahead and tripping into mud puddles in his eagerness to prove he could, at age six, keep up with the best of "the big kids."

When we arrived at a hunting outpost that looked more like a fortified tree house than the usual two planks of wood nailed along parallel trees, Noah led the way up. There we sat, discussing sneaking out here in the summertime to catch fireflies and tell jokes that Mr. Hentges always sent dad by email. Somehow, World War I came up and I gave the kids a short synopsis based on what I'd been learning in American Heritage, all done in a British accent, which pleased them immensely, as well as my determined protestations that they "furthermore address me as Lady Pavelski, Under-Secretary of British Defense." Noah was cavalier. "Crazy Germans. They weren't happy with starting one world war, and had to go off right away and begin another afterward. You'd think they might wait until everyone forgot they were trouble."

"That's not very politically correct, Noah."
"It's not very nice, is what you mean." And he laughed.

That quickly devolved into a heated discussion on the best way to fight wizards -- with magic wands, staffs, or by sending fairies after them as a distraction while we lured them into a sandpit? But they might escape from a sandpit; wizards are nothing if not tricksy.

At length, our play here was finished and we clambered down the wooden ladder to our next target point: finding out where the northwest pond stream ended. I said I thought it would end in going under the hills near Highway 13, but Noah wanted to find out for sure. He charged out in front, and we all strung along behind, Hope and Patience laughing at me when I inadverdently stepped deep into soggy black leafmudmush and screamed loud enough to raise a flock of birds. "Use your stick, Joy!" Patience yelled back at me. I think I discerned pertness in her eye, but she was too far for me to pinch. Besides, I was busy whacking primordial goo off my shoes.

We continually twinkled across a continuing network of fallen trees which crossed and re-crossed the stream at regular intervals. I started doing the Charleston as I walked across the narrow natural bridges, and of course Hope and Patience had to try. It was kind of dangerous, dancing on a tree log as you crossed an icy stream, but that made it doubly enjoyable. And how is it even possible to make dancing any better?

Then Hope accidentally hit Grant with her walking stick. It really was an accident, but Grant was not impressed. He started an inveritable cussout session in that childlike fashion which uses mainly four letter words, none of which are actual swear words. Words such as "Dumb dumb!" and "Stop!" and "Monkey-toed-idiot!" We all laughed at him when fury slipped him unhurt into a pile of sticks and leaves, only making him madder. Haply, Patience's discovery that her stick would sink into the murk of the stream nearly until swallowed whole stopped this tirade, and Grant was quickly engaged in dunking his stick down as far as it would go without pulling him along.

"Do you think college has changed you, Joy?" Hope sidled up behind me, wearing that look on her face she always wears when thinking something she's not sure she wants anyone to know she's thinking.
"I'm sure it has. Do you think so?"
"Yeah. You're more...well, I don't like this word, but you know what I mean...it's like you 'came out of your shell.' You aren't always reading in your room or working all the time. And you're louder."
"Louder, huh."
"Well, not in a bad way," she rushed to assure me, "but you laugh more." I grinned and poked my stick into the nearest earth clump.

When we had gone as far as anyone was willing to go in following the northwest stream, Noah and I were having a shouting match over how to get back. It wouldn't have been a shouting match hadn't he stood at one end of the field and refused to come closer for an in person conversation, but that's how it ended up because each time I stepped closer to him, he walked further away in an effort to entice me after him. Noah and I are not yelling people, but we are both independently-minded and self-confident. In this case, we were so at opposite ends of the "how to get home" spectrum. We both ended up being right. I took the direct route, he took the river route, and he got to the mini-bike and four-wheeler first. I think it's because he didn't have three short, prone-to-fall-and-cry people with him, but that could be just me.

After we piled our walking sticks upon each other in solemn reference to our wooded traverses, we quietly climbed onto the four-wheeler. Grant in front, Patience behind, and Hope really behind, I felt like the center of a Sushi sandwich. (Sushi because their fingers kept grasping wildly at my waist whenever I gunned the engine above riding at ten miles an hour.) Grant cackled madly and kept screaming, "Faster, faster!" and dissolving into more demonic giggles while Patience's face turned so white I could feel it changing color behind me and Hope pretended she was scared but laughed harder whenever I pressed the gas. After a few turns on our west forty and a visit past the horse pasture, I docked our ride in the barn and we all tumbled off.

Patience looked at me. "Can we have hot chocolate?"