Les Mis

In the last couple of days, I've started surrendering to this new reality of non-stop work. At this point, I am looking at a month and a half without a full day off...and the last day off was a required national holiday.

Now my thoughts are wistful memories of better times...times when my life was more than it is now. The soundtrack to Les Miserables swells in my heart...

"There was a time when my evenings were free. I went to the store and cooked my own dinner. I remember a time when my clothes were clean. I had space and will to care for my living... I dreamed a dream of friends and health. When life was more than work and sleeping. I dreamed a dream of being single and free. When hope grew strong and I didn't resent this damned-job-that-leaves-me-worn-and-feeling-like-I-still-didn't-accomplish-anything-and-I-can't-get-away-because-I-only-get-two-weeks-off-a-year-which-is-horrible-for-ministers."

Okay, so the poetic swell in my pity party fell apart there at the end. This is my busy season, but somehow the slow points of the summer never slowed this year. It is a full-throttle ride into the chaos of fall and then the pressures of Christmas. Oh, but to wait for the Spring. The blessed spring slows down...at least I think. Until then, I will always have the company of dead fictional french people.

"I dreamed a dream...."

homesick

This last month has been busy. I really only remember working and feeling homesick.

Homesickness is a strange and lonely thing as an adult. It hits me during big holidays and every few months. It creeps in and stays for a few weeks, always hanging in the back of my emotional make-up, ready to move forward and overwhelm me with a wave of grief. At its strongest, I can almost feel it radiate under my skin. It is a very different thing from depression, although they sometimes go hand in hand.

The strangeness is that I do not know what "home" I am sick for. I yearn for a permenant solution, but my world is too large and too divided for "home" to have a single place. I miss my family. When I feel "homesick," it is for Texas, my parents' arms, the smell and feel of the family land, and my brothers' laughter. I know that going there will lessen the ache, but moving there will not take me "home." It has been too long since I lived in Texas and, like many people who move away, I am more of a visitor than someone who belongs.

Home could be here, on the east coast and 1500 miles from my family. Here is where I have community, an actual house, and where I feel comfortable in my own skin.

All the same, these last weeks bring forth that familiar ache. I am thankfully busy with work...busy enough that I only have time for passing moments of homesickness. Of course, this week I will still be busy because I am the only single loser who does not have a family with whom to go on vacation.

From my quiet office in an emptied building, I watch all of the families of my church migrate to the beach. Their pictures appear online and summer brings this language of beach towns, streets, and restaurants that sounds like french in its strangeness to my North Texan mind. The blazing reminder that I am not from here and that there are things I simply don't understand. This is not yet "home."

Oh well. At least this week I will be free to have full-blown pity parties for myself...no one will be here to interrupt my misery. The pool should also be pretty empty. I can swim in peace.



A quote from the ABC Family movie Revenge of the Bridesmaids: "Great being home, isn't it? Surrounded by familiar faces that will never understand you."

pink fingernails

I painted my fingernails today for the first time in years. It was not out of creative impulse, but practicality. I spent the last week tie dying t-shirts for work and my fingernails are black. The pink nail polish was my weak attempt at trying to NOT look like I had zombie hands.

The results were disappointing and surprising. First, my fingers still look like zombie hands, only with pink mixed in with the black. Second, I re-discovered the mind altering affect of nail polish.

With pink nails, I am now constantly aware of the fact that I am feminine. I am not "me" typing on a laptop, I am a girl with pink nails typing. It wasn't "me" who deposited a check into the bank atm...it was my girly, non-gender-neutral hands. I feel like a ten year-old all over again! It is fun! At least, I think it is fun.