how i'd like to be rememebered

i read this in the obituary for my dad's aunt:

"She will be remembered as an elegant woman of great grace and civility who had a gift of appreciating and lifting others. She leaves a legacy of faith and testimony that will be an overarching influence to continually bless her posterity throughout their lives."

isn't that very nice?  wouldn't you like to leave on that note?

neither here nor there

you know what the awesome thing is? i'm happy. this is especially awesome because life is never what you (i) want it to be, and i'm happy anyway.

have you ever been the kind of happy that you don't know where it comes from? that's how i am, and even though i know where it comes from (God is goodness and goodness is all around), it feels mysterious and miraculous anyway because i don't understand how and when it gets inside me. it's not while i sleep because i wake up grumpy and gruntled (i'm using this word incorrectly in protest because it should not mean what it means) from chronic bad dreams. it's not while i'm in the shower singing 90s songs that weirdly come to mind every morning. it could be (depending on the day) while i'm crushing fruit in my new blender (today, i had a delirious thought that i would come home and cook frozen chicken in my blender. obviously, i really look up to that blender.) but somehow, the happy sneaks in and i laugh out loud while i'm driving to work even though i'm tired and worried about the people i love and wondering about the people who love me.

when mom died, i just didn't think i could be happy during sad. i didn't think the resurrection was for now. i didn't think spring could be my season, but every year i melt a little more and this year i felt downright puddly. it is so nice that i don't get to only be blessed by things i understand.

for most of my life, "happy" has not been one of the first words people have used to describe me. ("you mean that happy child?" "that's no happy child--that's SID!") i've spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out if i could become authentically "sweet" having been born a cynic, and i've concluded that i can't. jello can never be creme brulee (that's for you sis). lizzie can never be jane.


but happy is for all of us. this i believe.

i am so young in front of my life, which, though it is one of the reasons for being happy, reminds me often that i don't know it all or even most of it. i really want you to know that i believe in unhappy as a valid season of life. i'm just grateful for the springs too. i can't see down my path, but looking around me, chances are high that there will be rises and falls. i hope this happy will come with me.

let's hear it for the boy

tonight sis and i watched the new footloose. it was not high on my must-see list, especially since my man zac wasn't playing the leading role, but red box is kind of like zoltar: you take the magic it dishes out.

it exceeded my very low expectations. even better, it reminded me of one of my favoritest scenes from flight of the conchords: brett's angry dance.

that time i was famous

guess what guys? i was on my first podcast. you should check it out here.

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?