a lament

i feel like there must have been a standard operating system with which every human was sent to this earth. (sometimes i make the effort to not end sentences with prepositions, but it sure sounds stupid, don't you think? good riddance to that rule!)

i don't actually know what features would have been included in such an operating system (besides the light of Christ), but i know at least one feature i wish would have been included, and that is the ability to accurately pick up on social cues.

i am ridiculously gullible and i can't tell when people are joking. i think people are laughing at me when they're just laughing, i think people are mad at me when they're feeling nothing at all, and i think people are in love with me when they don't know i exist. i live a lot of my life on my very own page, and i'd like to change that.

that's all.

twittering

i am not a twitterer, and i have no plans of becoming one. you're probably surprised by this, or you should be surprised because i am so hip!

i think i've already mentioned that i keep learning things about myself that i was previously oblivious to. example: someone just told me that i whine about my stomach hurting 1 of every 2 times we're together. here i've been thinking of myself as a tough person and i'm a total lightweight. what a disappointing discovery.

here's another one. i like to think of myself as an early or at least normal-speed adopter of technological trends, but i'm just not. i was the last of my friends to have a cell phone, though the first to have a pager (which probably explains this whole post), and i'll probably be the last human i know to have a smarty phone. i'm half-cheapskate and half-moralist, but i'm sure i'll wear down because it happened with harry potter, and it can happen again.

so (for now) i don't twitter on the internets but i CAN'T STOP twittering in my brain. like, i start making beans for dinner and i think: tweet: "making beans." or, worse, i'm at a chieftans concert in chicago, and i think: tweet: "chieftans concert in chicago." these twitterings clearly don't add anything to the experience--no analysis, no reflection--just twitter at its most shallow "my life must matter because i'm telling you about it." worst of all, every time i translate my boring daily activities into tweets, i have to feel what it feels like to be bored by myself again, which, considered cumulatively, is rough on morale.

i don't think it is fair for a social networking platform that i don't endorse to rewire the inside of my mind. get out twitter! get out!

neither can live while the other survives

sugar addiction or non-twitching eye: which will it be?

if i can't have world peace when i blow out my birthday candles

i'll pretty happily exchange that wish for this one: at least one shining happy memory for every person on this earth. i have a brilliant set of past-lights in my pocket, and they cheer my dreary days. i have so many i can sort them into categories: pick-me-ups, make-me-cries, remind-me-that-i-have-a-hearts, laugh-laugh-laughs, too-dear-to-shares, my-life-is-a-movies, thy-life-is-a-miracles. isn't it nice to have a secret place for your own treasures, that no one can find or take away?

next point. i'm going away on wednesday to hear large writers read largely, and this helps me not feel too small.

the motivation for a post soon to come where i explain for myself as much as for you why i believe what i do

i have been so out of touch lately. i hardly catch the news in snippets over radio as i drive to and from work. i don't know that an op-ed and a blog post in response count as news, but i read them both and found them interesting. i thought you might too.

here's the short version in representative quotes.

op-ed by ian williams (never met him): "A culture that walks in such tidy lockstep has the advantage of homogeneity, and will always look good on paper. It certainly works for my many cousins, whom I love. But some of us who have experienced the Mormon life firsthand would rather choose a messy, colorful America lurching forward without so many confines — every day and twice on Sunday."

blog by james goldberg (friend of mine): "But you seem to think that your world is the real world, and that the real world is something I'm impossibly distanced from...You know the world, I would guess, far better from how it looks on paper than from how it looks up close."

yes, i find this stuff interesting because i belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or Mormon), but I also find it interesting because it raises these questions for me:

• is it possible to fundamentally understand or experience another person's reality?
• what habits, practices, etc. do i have that enhance or limit my ability to understand the people around me?
• how do we talk civilly about things that matter most to us?

poetry

for we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

for in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked.

for we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.

...therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (for we walk by faith, not by sight:) we are confident, i say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.

wherefore we labour, that whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him.

--from 2 corinthians 5

death is an adoration of God

you know how there are seasons of life where you practice one same thing over and over like a dance routine or a spelling bee list or whistling for the first time?

my long season is practicing letting go. every day all day long round and round. i've told you this before.

lately it's been work. i can't be any everything and that is hard. i can't be perfect most things and that's hard too. so i'm working on drawing lines and getting back Bs and sometimes Fs because that's just the best i can give, and what you probably already know that i'm just learning is that it feels great to fall short when you give your best because you don't have to wonder if you could've done more. i'm giving my best and walking on.

death is an adoration of God, the priest said, because it is the inevitable and proper culmination of a lifetime spent learning to let go, and not just for the sake of sake but for God's sake.

and then--death be not proud--we let go of death too.