This image I found today was titled "Before the Storm"
My friends this is where I am headed for the weekend. Oh joy.
I am taking a group of Sr. High students to spend the weekend at South Lake Tahoe. Please keep us (keep me) in your prayers. I am actually looking forward to the trip, but that may just be my need for a vacation out weighing the storm watch headlines.
In all seriousness, I think that this trip has the potential to be great, and I want to have a great time with the students who are coming. So please pray for safe travels, safety on the slopes (not me, of course with the foot and all) and for students to really have hearts and minds challenged this weekend by God through the times of worship and messages. I might have a chance to post while we are away, but don't count on it.
I just finished catching up on my friend Melinda's blog. After reading her post titledDouble Non Fat Irish Cream Latte I found myself thinking about all of the people I know who have lost someone lately that they had come to love, and count on to be around. It seems there is not much we can do to prepare for or prevent the loss of someone we have come to so utterly depend upon. Whether it is death or something else that removes us from those we have become attached loss is never an easy process.
It is amazing to me how quickly I become attached to those around me, even after times of great heartbreak when I swore never again to allow myself to become so attached I find myself still surrounded by those I love. The thought of ever having to go through the immense sadness if anyone of these souls and I should have to part is heart wrenching.
So I am left to wonder how do we continue to give ourselves fully to those we love with the knowledge that we will at some point be left without them. I don't mean this to be a depressing post, just an honest look at the heart that hurts for those who are in the midst of this sort of painful loss. My sympathy.
I guess love it all boils down to the fact that love requires risk and that means if we are going to love we are going to risk the pain of that love being taken from us.
"It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all" - though trite, really seems to be the answer here.
As a child a favorite phrase of mine was, "say what you mean and mean what you say." This came to mind yesterday as I was giving my sister Lizzie a hard time for not saying what she meant. Instead she was relying on the Jr. Higher's "you know what I meant" whine. To which I quickly retorted, "no, I don't."
This quick interchange got me to thinking, how I still value this childhood sentiment. How I wish people would just get to the point, state their feelings, and mean not only what they say, but realize the effects of their actions.
Lizzie is not really just using a Jr. High fall back, often we use the same reasoning..."they'll figure out what I meant."
What if instead of living with this assumption that others will go through the work of deciphering what we are actually trying to say, we just man up and say what it is that we really want to say?
The implications are many.
Is honesty really the best policy? I don't know. I want to believe that it is. I want to trust that if I were able to take on the difficult work of only saying and acting in absolute truth that it would result in better things for all involved. I just don't know.
The steps going down to my humble apartment are what one may expect, slippery when wet. Yet they sure caught me off guard Tuesday night as I made my way down the uneven pathway to my little home. Down being the operative word. As my slick soled FloJo (flip flop to those of you who don't know)made contact with equally slippery surface of the redwood portion of my stair and I found myself on the ground before I even realized I was falling. Actually, very little of me came in contact with the surface, mostly just my the top right section of my right foot. Being my mothers daughter I am quite accustom to falling, so even though it hurt (a lot) since I really, really needed to pee, I picked myself up and made it the rest of the way to my restroom. A minute later, my friend Brandon arrived, and let himself in, and by that time my foot had not only turned lovely shades of black and blue it had also become quite puffy. It was clear that our pasta dinner plans had just been tossed out the window,as I phoned my Dad to take me down to emergency.
Being the amazing Dad that he his, he kindly rushed over and helped me hobble back up my many steps, dirt stick covered path to his waiting car. We tried with no avail to make it to the local Urgent Care before the 9pm closing and then made our way down to the E.R. Where we were to sit for the next 3 hours.
The first hour or so, the waiting room was actually quite full, and the TV was tuned to AMC and Death Wish II. Not really the kind of movie I suspect most people who are waiting in for a doctor are in the mood to watch. Filled with scenes of blood, and dying, rape and people creating false identities to work in hospitals. As comforting as that was, I was pretty jazzed when we were the only ones left on our side of the room and got to change to the Food Network just in time to watch Anthony Bourdain eat the still beating heart of a cobra. Now I realize that while this still might not be something most people in a hospital waiting room would find comforting it is like being at home for me. And it provided just enough of a distraction to take my mind off of the pain shooting though my foot. Apparently two other people who walked in agreed and made their way over to our corner of the world to join us in the stomach wrenching fun.
It was right between the switch in Television programing that a nurse came out of the back to get a guy (who had apparently brought someone else in)saying to him, "I think she wants to say goodbye." Are you kidding me? This is not something you want to hear a nurse say. Perhaps a better choice of words would have been, "She is okay enough to stay without you so she wants to talk to you before you take off for the night." I don't know anything but, "I think she wants to say goodbye."
Of course there are other things you might not want to hear in the E.R., I know I was not pleased to hear that I had broken my foot, and that meant 6-8 weeks on crutches.
Yep, so not what I wanted to hear, but better than..."I think she wants to say goodbye."
Jan 13, 2008
I think it is safe to say that I have decided on my personal favorite theater experience this year. Sad to say that it is not a 2007 Golden Globe nominated film. It is however the best film I saw in a theater in the 2007 year. My favorite film that I viewed in a theater was Casablanca. Which for those of you who know my history with this movie may surprise you. For those of you who don't know, I used to hate this movie, but looking back I think it is because I saw it for the first time when I was too young to appreciate it. Seeing it at the Del Mar on the big screen, how it was meant to be seen made this film almost magical. I held out for a long time, before deciding on my top film for the year, wanting to have seen all that there was to see, but after Fridays trip to the Nickelodeon to see Atonement, I have lost hope that there was in fact a film worthy of an award for best picture this year. That is not to say that I hated Atonement, only the last half of it left me truly disappointed. I was able to lose myself in the first few scenes of the film. I liked the characters well enough, but from the moment the plot jumped four years ahead to WWII the film lost it's appeal for me. It seemed to lose all of its rhythm, and the love story fell into a heap as it became more and more unclear what was truth. Maybe it is this lack of fine tuned story telling in the assortment of films to hit the big screen this year that has left me with no options. It seems like Hollywood has lost its ability to tell us a good story. Sure we have more special effects, and more creative editing, and more money, but what is all of that worth if we have lost the ability to tell the story well...
I am lucky enough to have some friends who are doing big things with their lives. As I was chatting with my friends lately about their endeavors to start up new buisnesses along with my own I thought I might take a chance to offer some free promotion to those of my friends who are just starting out.
I don't know if that is an actual saying or just something that my mind has complied into a saying that fits my week. (now I am thinking it was originally when you smile)Whatever the case I started crying on Wednesday when one of my students went missing, and with all of the rain that we have right now, it sure seems like the whole world is crying with me. As it should. The world should be in grief over the state of our youth culture, where lives are being torn apart by early introductions to a messed up grown up lifestyle. Where teens are expected to grow up fast, and yet are unprepared to do so, where they are not only experimenting with drugs but using them, not only depressed but showing it on their arms as the let their own blood flow to ease the pain they are holding inside. My heart it broken not just for my student who has left home, but for the many students who are experiencing similar situations. For the Jr. Higher's who are out late, alone, lost in a world they stumbled into, for those who have been sent away to get the help that they cannot find here, for the kids who are having to be moms and dads because their parents are acting like kids. My heart is broken and I weep as does the world outside. And I cry for the parents who have lost hope who have no more answers and who feel like they have lost all ability to relate. I grieve for you all and for our society as it only seems to be deteriorating faster.
For Christmas one of my students Brianna wanted to get me a new fish. It was not till today that we both had time to go pick out the new addition to my fishy family. We made the most of the time though, and went to lunch at Sweet Pea Cafe, for amazing crepes. While waiting on our order Brianna, Lizzie (my little sister) and I played a few rounds of cards. I totally lost the first time but I redeemed myself, and beat the pants of them in the last round. After enjoying our various crepe creations we headed back to Scotts Valley to the pet store. As we drove Brianna read my new book, Nasty Bits by Anthony Bordain out loud to us. Man can we multi task. Lizzie finds my taste in books despicable, but I think I won Brianna over.
We arrived at the pet store slightly more educated on fish, or at least how one might enjoy seal if they ever needed to. With our new found appreciation for fish we headed inside to pick out the newest fish for my office. We spent a good while looking at each tank, and finally we picked out the fish pictured.
Again the guy at the pest, oops I mean pet store questioned my ability to raise fish. Concerned by my apparent lack of concern for his advice on mixing other fish with my gold fish. This one is tropical but not salt water, I would have maybe paid him slightly more heed had the tank at the store even been hearted, but it was icy cold, so if the tropics are chilly this time of year, than I suppose his point was valid. I will take my chances, seeing as last time they said I needed a 30 gallon tank for two little gold fish. I did get the tropical flakes for my new fish to munch on, only to get back and discover they contain all of the same ingredients as the gold fish flakes, except with shrimp added to enhance the color. Which the guy at the pet store said we did not need, the shrimp that is.
Seriously I think these pet store people take the fish selling a bit to seriously, its not like I am buying them to torture them or feed them to other fish, just for sport. I know some people do that, but would I really spend 30 min picking out a fish just to turn around and feed it to another fish? It's not like they are good at taking care of the fish they have in the store, all the tanks are dirty and there are dead fish floating in some.
Okay so that was a defendant rant. And kinda random, so I guess I wrote it on the appropriate blog. And of course with the new fish comes the task of naming yet another member of my fishy family. He (it could be a she, but I like boys better) is the only one without a partner, and it looks like it is sporting a mohawk so give me some names...
