i miss watching nebraska football and having more than a mild distate for wisconsin driving my loyalties. there was just a turnover at the ONE YARD LINE resulting in us having the ball, colorado not so much having the ball and the score remaining 31 us 22 them with 0:17 left in the fourth. bwah ha ha ha. now i am going to brave the downtown traffic to be interviewed by the lincoln newspaper. there's something magical about this town. things make more sense here. i walked in the cold for hours with the only boy i've ever loved on wednesday. unfortunately that situation eludes even the ubiquitous rationality of lincoln and apparently will continue in our two separate lives even past christmas. my stomach churns. my detachment becomes more necessary. sometimes tears still flow, but not as often. i want to learn to cry out to God automatically before i long for that familiar-smelling shoulder to bury my head in. and until that happens, the opportunity to rely on m more than my real comfort is not allowed. so be it.
posted by renee 2:41 PM
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
I will bring them back to this place and let them live in safety. They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them singleness of heart and action so that they will always fear me for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me so that they will never turn away from me. --Jeremiah 32:37-40
Thanksgiving is coming. Tomorrow at 7 am I head south.
posted by renee 11:46 AM
Sunday, November 23, 2003
tonight i went to first avenue, got my coat full of smoke smell and my ears full of ringing.
three words:
yeah
yeah
yeah
it was karen o's birthday. they brought her out a cake during the encore and she blew out the candles all at once.
she was wearing a purple sequin mini skirt and tank top duct taped to her skin and neon pink fishnets. i love indie kids.
the locust is perhaps the scariest band ever. worse than converge. worse than... anything. every song was a thirty second explosion of distorted guitars and the loudest bass drum i've ever heard. and uninteligible screaming. oh, and did i mention that they all had matching muscle shirts and were wearing MASKS? a little frightening to be sure. but they were better than the first opening band, "so fox." all power chords and more unfortunate sequins and they couldn't sing. plus, poor stage presence. a sad combination. but again, the beautiful greasy haired party til you don't have any brain cells left coworker provided us with comp tickets, so at least i wasn't paying them. unfortunately my boss was also at the show. he is 31. he is creepy. he is an alcoholic. he is a sad lonely man who sometimes starts drinking at 2 in the afternoon and comes and finds me at concerts and wants to give me hugs. well, really just this once, but still. ick. i'm tired and smokey and going to sleep.
posted by renee 12:43 AM
Saturday, November 22, 2003
i'm sitting in my living room with our cat listening to a mix cassette tape given to me by someone special, drinking mountain dew out of a two-liter bottle, eating leftover stir-fry and thinking that culinary school sounds like fun and a liberal arts education is not all it's cracked up to be. is civic journalism good or bad? i would like to write "civic journalism, in my opinion, is good" and turn it in just to see what happens. too bad i have lost 22.5 points so far in the class and in order to keep my A, i can only lose 30. magna cum laude, here i come........
i'm serious about culinary school. how cool would it be if your homework was learning how baking powder works by making poppyseed muffins? mmm, muffins...
posted by renee 12:04 PM
new goal: learning how to calm down
i have never been good at this... we'll see how it goes. first step is to convince myself that it really is my goal. life is inexpressibly simple and incoherently complex at the same time. i must understand that this duality is not something i have to analyze or solve. sometimes it's okay to not understand. my brain goes a hundred miles an hour almost every minute i'm awake. everything i wish i was better at, everyone i wish i could spend time with, every way i could be bettering the world... and it's not constructive anymore, if it ever was. somehow i need to learn to simplify, to pare down to a minimum this cascade of "crucial" questions that are waving their hands at me in demand of answers all the time. most of the answers i don't have access to at this point anyway. i feel like i'm asking myself to think less and that there is nothing more disloyal to myself. but maybe loyalty to myself doesn't make it far up the hierarchy of qualities i should be striving to gain. i know i cannot keep hoping my life will turn some magical, effortless corner someday and i'll find all my mental shadows suddenly lit up and the cobwebs cleared away. it is a process. it is slow, it is sometimes tedious, and it is not always a road steadily up toward improvement. but somehow i have to gain control over my tendency to get caught up in my analytical wanderings. as i was putting a million leaves into bags tonight, i was, of course, thinking. this particular night, i was thinking about something i wrote earlier this semester- that the who and the what of my desire are in direct opposition: i want to run crazily through the world, leaving distruction and new life in my wake, and i want a boy who lets life come to him. so the question is: are my longings for a significant and unconventional life full of pride and not a true desire to serve the God i was created for? do i learn to tame my idealistic dreaming? and maybe, just maybe, does m's way of looking at the world make more sense? and the REAL question is: WHY do i always feel like i'm in direct opposition to MYSELF all the time?
in short: i need to learn to CALM DOWN
posted by renee 12:54 AM
i am lazy with blogging. our cat is insane. last night i had my yarn all tucked into its oh-so-domestic wicker basket in the livingroom and this morning the ball i'm working with was severed from the already knitted part and strung all over the diningroom and up the stairs, and another skein which had been left with a wrapper on it was found naked and unravelled... the paper was later discovered two stories up in the attic with little fang holes in it. i just don't know quite what she's trying to tell me.
also: i seem to be having trouble with the idea of being loved for ME... love from God is different- it's vertical love, and it keeps getting reinforced that it has nothing to do with me, really. hmmm... i am being humbled daily. amazingly, i still have some pride left... keep working on me, God
as john piper said today, i want to be aware with every breath i take how stunningly undeserving i am and therefore how much i should not be surprised when bad things happen and should be amazed when they go well, which really is most of the time.
i get to go home for thanksgiving after 9 days. sounds good. although a whole holiday centered around meat seems rather sketchy to me. (don't EVEN pretend it's really about being thankful- it SHOULD be, but is not)
anyway, i need to do some recovery work on this scarf. boo on dagney.
posted by renee 3:54 PM
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
most of the papers i write have separate paragraphs of unrelated thoughts at the end of them. i get bored writing about whether or not civic journalism is good and start thinking and therefore typing about something else. as i was deleting a poem i wrote the other day at the end of a mindless information for mass comm exercise, i wondered what would happen if i left it there. i like revealing my real self to people when they're not expecting it, but it's generally in a more chalky medium and left without signature... i don't think my TA cares about my love life anyway, so i will turn in the boring five questions with no interesting tidbit to top it off. then i wrote a long honest paragraph and thought about posting it and thought better of the idea. it's time i got over my blog-idealism. anyway it's all been said before. the ones who give the best compliments also hurl the most debilitating insults and one does not quickly recover from being called "heartless" if one is anything like me. i am pretty sure i am not heartless. i love many things: knitting, rilo kiley, my friends and family, amelie, reading books, that it can be 59 degrees one day and snowing the next, halls cough drops, tofu, and ben gibbard. but sometimes his voice comes back into my head and i doubt myself. i wish he'd be quiet. time to go to class.
posted by renee 2:36 PM
today, while i was driving home, i took a different route and got myself slightly confused. when i found the street i was looking for without any real backtracking, i was proud of myself. and then a magical thing happened. the radio was off, the traffic was routine, the route was as natural as a positive magnet reaching its opposite. and i realized when i turned onto my street that my brain had been quiet for almost 10 minutes. 10 minutes of peace in my head. no questions, no shouting, no wondering, no composing perilously long sentences about everything going on around me or far away from me. for TEN minutes. i should like to have a break from myself in the stillness more often, as they usually come in the form of emotionally wrenching films. i can attach my emotions to other people and surrender myself to a glowing screen easily enough, but in silence it is a much greater gift. mmm... and now, with pictures of johnny depp the pirate floating across my mindseye (brought to you for the unbeatable price of $1 courtesy of the Roseville 4), i will surrender myself to the escape of sleep.
posted by renee 12:30 AM
Monday, November 10, 2003
really, talking at all is talking about yourself
revealing your opinions
sharing what you know
so i talk a lot
maybe i'm self-absorbed
i hope not
my dad says i make God smile
God makes me smile
what a rewarding relationship...
posted by renee 9:42 PM
Thursday, November 06, 2003
i just realized today that i've never really seen anything die. well... bugs. but not a mouse, not a squirrel, not a rabbit. i've seen dead things. i've even seen dead people. but i have never been present at the exact moment when something died. i wonder if anything will change when that happens. i also wonder how badly i'd do on my sociology midterm tomorrow if i fail to study tonight as well as ever attend the lecture. oops.
posted by renee 5:51 PM
i have often wondered which is more important: to find someone who knows and loves the depths of you and proves it, or to be able to love someone else with your whole self. to love or to be loved... both are selfish in their own way. but yesterday i realized why it is so difficult to reach a peace about the tension in my mind. we cannot experience true love in an ingoing or outgoing sense while earthbound. God is the only one who really knows my depths and certainly the only one who can completely love me and show it. and without God i am incapable of truly loving anyone else for selfless reasons. i have much to learn and am greatful that i have a patient God... i am anxious for the day when distractions and confusion aside i will dwell in the perfect balance of love that i was designed for.
posted by renee 2:19 PM
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
also, my roommates are hibernating in the attic out of fear of my disease
and: i am going to get a brown wedding dress because who's ever heard of that before?
that was sort of a hypothetical question
...okay, i admit it... now i'm loopy on sudafed
...no they didn't pay me to endorse their product
...i vow to never say "bad news bears" more than once a day EVER again
posted by renee 6:46 PM
they should send middle school kids on field trips to metrotransit after dark. that's where i learned that crack is bad. nyquil messes you up, too, though, as yesterday's entry and my new tendency to talk to myself demonstrate. in short, everyone is graduating, dropping out, getting married or some combination of the two. i am not. i am going to sit out my boring 4 years and then who knows what. the only normal part about me. i have discovered that i don't want a career. but who does these days? i mean, we all saw what happened to michael bolton, samir nagawhatever and peter gibbons when they tried to have one. i wouldn't mind a job, particularly one in which i am allowed to talk to myself in my sad sick scratchy little voice, but definitely not a career. i don't want business suits and high heels and briefcases full of papers i've convinced myself are important when we all know it's a load of crap. school is a load of crap, too, and it's weighing heavy on these whiny shoulders this evening. i have to write a paper about whether or not the news media is liberal now. why? because i'm PLAYING ALONG... not because it's important : )
someday, abby will come here. we will rollerblade around lake calhoun. we will bike up to the cutest library in the world. we will eat vegetarian thai food and drink premiums. that is all.
posted by renee 6:43 PM
Sunday, November 02, 2003
2784 squares of toilet paper made with recycled paper and without dye used on my nose
99.6 degrees on the thermometer
14 pieces of halloween candy left from the kids
... 13 pieces of halloween candy left from the kids
5 of November is WEDNESDAY not MONDAY therefore homework does not have to be done now
4 crusty facial orifices: 2 eyes, lips, nose, ewww
3 days and
2 nights at camp courage makes
1 girl very sick
i am back from what should have been a fantastic weekend. well... i'm not sure the problem is just the germ overpopulation in the general region of my sinuses. i played my cello for hours. that was fantastic. i knitted and taught leah how to knit. i missed lisa. on friday night i was so moved by our speaker's stories of revival. i can feel the capacity inside me to be a part of something so big. something so obviously centered directly around God. i have a deep desire at my core to be diminished. i want to be less and less so that God can use me and shine through me more and more. i have proven time and time again that i cannot do anything that benefits him on my own. but i am sick of going to retreats where during the meetings you get all emotional and cry and pray and then you leave and drink hot chocolate and play cards all night. i stood up to leave on friday practically bursting but was deflated before i got to the doors. i wanted to pray bigger prayers. everyone else was tired. no wonder God doesn't work in our generation. we don't care. i want DEPTH to my fellowship. but i don't know how to make it happen. i'm sick of going to church and leaving with nothing to talk about but where we want to eat. i couldn't play cello for worship this morning because i knew my sick state would not allow my heart to really be in it. instead i sat in the back and could barely get myself to sing. and i missed lisa who knows how to get to the root of things.
when you build a wall you build it thick
and crouch in fear behind the rows of brick
the you that can squeeze through these cracks in mortar
is wan and worthless doing such injustice to the truth
in the face of such an onslaught
will you cower or stand
with the grace of your Defender
please be brave
posted by renee 4:29 PM
