I have more dates this week than I've had in the previous decade.
On Wednesday we went to the Blue Nile for dinner. If you go, consider carefully whether you really want a booth. They're very hard to sit in, if you want to actually look at the person you're eating with. I spent the whole evening twisting sideways to talk to TheBoy.
The food was fairly good. And, despite the lack of silverware, I managed to keep most of the food out of my lap. The sampler platter is definitely the way to go - bits of many different dishes on a tray. Pick up a scoop of lentils or veggies with a piece of floppy bread (like a thick tortilla) and try to get it to your mouth without spilling. mmm.
Ok, discretion has gotten the best of me. (Better late than never, eh?) So my mutterings about kissing (or the lack thereof), impure thoughts, and one of prozac's side effects are gone for now. Oh well....
Laughing over ice cream last night, I looked up at TheBoy and realized that all of my week's worry about "unequal yoking" had vanished, and that being with him filled me with a deep sense of peace and rightness and joy. Surely some of my more conservative friends will say I'm deceiving myself, being led by my feelings, rather than the spirit of God. I disagree. If anything, it's a both/and rather than either/or. If nothing else, I've learned over the years that God does not act in the ways I expect.
How many guys are there that want to spend a date walking through the science museum, discussing archaeology and conspiracy theories and art and philosophies of child discipline and why we went to the colleges we did and our families and WTFWJD and the difficulty of admitting to myself that I'm no longer a GLE and if we'd like to go to Mars and whether mummies are creepy or cool. I am more truly me with him than I've been in a long time.
TheBoy is not who I thought I was looking for. But he may be who I was hoping to find.
The Bridesmaid Chronicles: First Dance by Karen Kendall
Truly the worst book I've read this year. In fact, it rivals last night's play for horror. And the play comes out looking wonderful. And yet, like a train wreck, I could not pull my eyes away. Let's just hope that between the publication of the uncorrected proof I read & the final publication they re-wrote the entire thing. Because it sucks.
One example of its awful sucky suckdom: one of the characters thinks to himself that, while making love to a woman, he's going to "put his fingers in her cleft and play her like a Stradivarius." WTF? (Ok, that quote is from memory, because I'm not going to look through the book to find it again. But it's accurate enough.)
Sweetness and Light : The Mysterious History of the Honeybee by Hattie Ellis
Fascinating. I learned so much about bees and how they've been viewed through time. And it made me want honey on my toast for breakfast. Mmm. Honey...
The Next Big Thing by Johanna Edwards
Quick overview: woman goes on reality show to lose weight because she has allowed her email-lover to think she's skinny. Of course, then she falls in love with someone who loves her just the way she is. I guess it's an ok book, if you're looking for mindless entertainment and can't watch tv.
Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20Th-Century America by Carolyn M. Goldstein
My favorite part was looking at the photos and old ads. The book itself (95 pages of text, but I'd say almost 2/3 of the book is pictures) is interesting enough. But honestly, I felt like I was reading someone's master's thesis. There's no way it's worth the $17.95 they're selling it for on Amazon. But I got it on clearance for about $3, which seems fairly appropriate.
Ashes of the Elements by Alys Clare
Enjoyable, but not as good as the first of the series that I read. I silently groaned when it turned out that the forest people did indeed exist and that, in fact, one of them seemed to have some form of telepathy. Just seems like a cop-out.
Fortune Like the Moon by Alys Clare
I generally enjoy medieval mysteries & this was no exception. Definitely a series I'll try reading again.
Lamb : The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
Somewhat heretical, but very funny. It was a nice surprise to really enjoy a book this much. And strangely, I came away with a greater sense of Jesus as a person, who would have had friends and gone through puberty and all the other aspects of his life I manage to gloss over.
May and Amy : A True Story of Family, Forbidden Love, and the Secret Lives of May Gaskell, Her Daughter Amy, and Sir Edward Burne-Jones by Josceline Dimbleby
About 40 pages in, I realized that my own budding romance is more interesting to me than that of strangers who died ages ago. So I stopped reading. Perhaps if I'd made it to the "forbidden love" part I would have stuck it out, but I didn't.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
I thought this was a lovely, strange book. Up until the end, which was disappointingly like "and then I woke up and realized it was all a dream." But until that point, I enjoyed the story and envisioned the movie I would make, a mixture of Indonesian shadow puppets and 50's-style animation. It would be great. But the end would switch to live-action.
The Ex Files by Jane Moore
One of the worst examples of chick lit I've read. (But wait! The review of the worst will come in a few postings!) It is none of the things written on the cover (such as sexy, sophisticated, complex, funny, unputdownable).
Dying to Call You by Elaine Viets
A forgettable mystery. All I remember is that the main character is a telemarketer. Alas, that did not raise my sympathy for her.
Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America by Elizabeth Wurtzel
I was so hoping to like this book, but gave up about a third of the way through. Just not what I need to be reading right now. And frankly, I don't care about the protagonist all that much. On the plus side, it made me think, "Hey! I'm not as messed up as she is!"
"And remember....I like you also."
The sound you don't hear right now is my high-pitched squeal of delight. Somewhere dogs are perking up their ears and barking.
And now I should just go have lunch, because my heart is pounding, there's a big goofy grin on my face, and I'm certainly not going to accomplish anything for the foreseeable future. Plus, I'm hungry. :)
One of these days I'll get back to my regularly-scheduled blogging & write up the dozen or so books I've finished recently. They're just so much less interesting to me right now than thinking about TheBoy, though.
So, tonight after our third date TheBoy said he wants to keep seeing me. And I want to keep seeing him.
La la la la la. I'm happy.
He likes me.
I am no longer melting. Yesterday I felt sick and I'm sure it was the heat. My body just doesn't handle anything over about 85 very well. So this morning it was wonderful to feel the breeze on my arms as I walked to the office. Almost as healing as a massage, in some ways.
A few random things I've found interesting or amusing this morning:
Laughing Yoga - funny & strange. Don't watch it at work with the sound turned on. And don't click the link below the video!
super-neat keyboard - prototype of a computer keyboard that uses LCD to indicate what each key does. It can be reprogrammed for different languages or programs, which I find very cool.
Also related: the history of Russian typewriters
Last minute auctions - stuff on eBay that's currently under $1. Some interesting stuff, including oriental rugs. I'll have to check this out more at some later time.
And finally, mime death
Not much else to say. Dinner with TheBoy tonight (3rd date!). I applied for a job yesterday and found another one I need to look into. Now I'm just hoping I can concentrate at work for the next 7.5 hours.
I don't date. I never really have. So suddenly feel like I've been plunged into the middle of a game, but nobody remembered to tell me the rules. All of my boyfriends have been in Europe. We never did the typical "dinner & a movie" stuff. Just hung out and talked and shared life together. So now I find myself obsessing over things like what it says when I offer to split the bill at dinner. Seriously, I woke up at 4 am and couldn't stop thinking about it. I finally hauled myself out of bed for a sunrise walk around Lake Como.
My thoughts are that, in this day and age, I don't see why someone should be expected to pay for me just because of the bits between his legs. No worries about whether I "owe" him anything. No worries for him about whether I'm only showing up for a free meal. It's not like either of us has much money anyway. I don't want to make spending time with me into a financial burden.
This weekend I've been reading "Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity." In some ways, I think it ties in really well with our current sermon series on the development & history of Christianity. I've been thinking a lot recently about the nature of what we believe and know. Of what I believe and know. It's kind of eye-opening to remember/realize/grasp that the development of Christianity into a set of rules and doctrines that everyone must adhere to is a new(er) development, that there was great diversity in the beginning.
I find myself wondering how we made the leap from the things Jesus is recorded as saying to the things of Paul. It seems such a big shift, from a focus on telling everyone - especially the outcasts - that God is here and loves you to a focus on judgement and rules and things to do or not do. I know this isn't an accurate description of what's really going on in the Bible; more just my muddled, heat-dazed thoughts on a Sunday afternoon. How did someone who didn't even know Jesus become the one who shaped Christianity so much? Why did his teachings, which seem to have such a different emphasis from those in the gospels, become the accepted version? I am thinking a lot these days, and it's not just about boys. Some days it is just so hard to believe.
Toss out a prayer for me if you think of it, please. So much is going on - I'm applying for a new job today & searching for other options, going out on date 3 Monday night and fearing for my heart, struggling to understand and define the basis of my faith. It's exhausting and elating and terrifying and I really wonder where I'm going to end up at the end of it all. All I know is that it's probably going to be somewhere I can't even imagine this afternoon.
Last night I got to hold Oliver & Wesley for the first time. I just kept whispering, "We've been waiting for you!"
Spent 2 hours talking on the phone with TheBoy last night. I feel like I'm belatedly living the stereotypical phone-loving teen years I somehow managed to miss. The awkward pauses in our conversation are pretty much gone. I am shocked to discover how much I can talk. I am shocked to discover that I want to tell everyone I meet about him, rather than keeping my crush-feelings to myself; this has never happened before, that I can remember.
Jen and I had lunch today. Mmm. Soup.
She said I was radiating happiness.
I am.
I am happy. My chest feels like I will explode.
This terrifies me.
I want to throw myself headlong into life, without being held back by the fear of getting hurt.
Last night I dug out my journal and was shocked to realize I haven't written in almost a year. Where did it go? What did I do? I wish I'd thought to record even a little of my life. I suppose I could go back & copy in some of my blog posts. But the deeper things I've been pondering have no written record. And they may be the most significant changes in years.
It was strange to flip through the pages. Bits of pieces of my thoughts since 1999 jump back into the present. Oh, right. I had a crush on him? Why was I afraid of turning 28? Of buying a house? Why did I let depression drag me down and lock in me in a cage of loneliness? What would have happened if I had married him or him or him?
Sometimes it's strange to read my old prayers and messages to God. Good, in some ways, to see how I've grown and changed. But at the same time, hard. I've lost a lot of the hope I used to have, the certainty that God was active in my life. But at the same time, the faith I do have seems gentler. I worry less about trying to earn God's acceptance. The feeling that I have to do things to make God love me is dissipating. Sure, it's there at times. I get that twinge every time I realize I'm not being a GLE (Good Little Evangelical) - choosing the Simpsons over church, giving up on Bible studies, embracing my cynicism. But I don't think I've jumped on the Chutes & Ladders fast-track to hell just because I've stopped memorizing Bible verses. Believe me, this is a big change.
In another time-slipping moment today, I had a wild case of deja vu while looking at a website I'd never seen before. Strange file names slapped me with "hey! you've seen us before!" Times like this make me wonder about the nature of time and reality.
Tomorrow I have another date. I feel like I've gone all girly-girl, wanting to tell everyone I meet what's going on. My ability to concentrate at work (already slim, at best) has dwindled down to nothing. I am afraid and giddy, a weird flutter in my chest that I haven't felt in ages.
I like this boy.
And he seemed to like me.
Don't know how much more I want to say at this point, as he knows I have a blog & it's possible he'll run across it. Let's just say that I really enjoyed our date, awkward pauses and giggles and all.
Ooh. And I just got an email from him asking if I'd like to do something later this week. Hee hee.
