A good friend of mine is right on the edge of falling in love.  I could not be more thrilled.  Or sad.

Selfishness is so awful!

This reminds me of one of the most funny TV episodes I have likely ever seen.  On the day of Monica and Chandler’s wedding on Friends, it is feared that Chandler has decided to leave Monica at the altar.  Everyone is devastated, and then of course must not let Monica know anything is wrong until they have first spoken to Chandler.  Rachel is given the task of stalling Monica and does so by trying to gain Monica’s sympathy for the fact that she has not yet found someone for herself.

It is ironically not funny at all unless you know that Rachel is purely doing this to distract Monica from the situation at hand.  Knowing the whole story makes it completely hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZjrTBD7sJY

All kidding and TV clips aside, I am so overjoyed.  Naturally as I watch a friend walk through any major life change that I have not experienced myself it is a challenge.  I will experience an array of emotions I am sure.  Altogether I will rejoice.  True love is utterly deserved by many, and this one takes the cake.  I am looking forward to seeing the whole thing unfold.

This weekend has been one of a lot, and A LOT, if introspection.  I went on a ‘wilderness retreat’ (complete with wi-fi) this weekend with some girls.  It was a good time, but stretching for my soul.

Normally when I go on these brief soul searching missions I find out things about myself that I knew all along but I still find myself helpless to do anything about.  This time someone confronted me with something that I hadn’t really thought about before.  My life, in the significant parts, has been a history of intense emotional/spiritual experiences.  These experiences really happened and are true/relevant/valid.  However much of what I am and what I find important is emotionally based.

No reason to swing the other way and assume that my emotions/emotional experiences are suddenly invalid, nor to assume that I never exercise my mind (duh, can we say graduate school?!).  However I would like to allow myself some time and space to consider giving more of my time to investing in roots:  faith, habits, the present, reality.

That area of my brain is at best extremely dusty and at worst totally atrophied.  It could get interesting.

Wondering whether life was better before I knew.

Today I went on a tour for work where I probably met at least 20 people I have never met before.  They were all very casual introductions.  I was with my boss who is an intensely humble man, and people seem to sense it, so they are very very polite and kind to him.  People give him a lot of room and a lot of respect.  He deserves it.  Really.

Meanwhile I am still pretty shy during corporate events and  stood behind him like a giant fat scared puppy.  However, I was profoundly affected a few years ago by a little Meg Ryan quote that discusses the importance of using your last name when introducing yourself.  Therefore I am pretty good about standing up, shaking a hand and saying my name loud and clear.

Until today.  Until today when I met the most fabulously handsome guy just sitting there behind his supervisory cubicle at which point I thought to myself good gracious you must be totally too young for me, but I do not care.  You are so handsome and innocent and look at your perfectly tousled hair and could you be any more burly and yet you have this slight edge about you that says at work I am so good, but anywhere else:  bad.

And when he reached for my hand,  I just squeaked.

I hate this statement, but it is true:  a lot is happening, and nothing is happening.

Today I sat in a meeting for work going over our revised benefit policies.  Don’t get me wrong, I am so grateful that I have a job with benefits, and I will never be sorry or depressed about that.  At the same time it took everything that I had, while  sitting there watching some guy in a suit talk about percentages, to not cry.

There is a man in my life that I love but we won’t end up together.  If we do we will have been completely duped, and I worry whether we’d ever really be happy.  It is what it is.  I hate being a woman going through something like this because everything compiles, one thing right on top of the other.  When I have a good day, everything is good.  A bad moment appears and suddenly everything is completely bad.  Everything.

I sat today in the meeting and in my brain my entire life converged in the midst of this benefit lecture.  I realized that I have no family to support, no children for which to use my pre-tax daycare exemption, and wondered if I ever will.  It is sad that so many things in my life are absolutely perfect (and I mean perfect), but I have to find the one missing piece and sit and stare at that?  I feel like in some ways I am a total Pollyanna and in some ways I am the biggest Debbie Downer in the entire world.

Who cries over insurance?  Really?

I recently read the most depressing article I have ever read in my life.  I feel like throwing in the towel, settling, running away, and hiding all at once.

I feel like I make a pretty good effort to avoid thinking about how much I think the status of modern culture represents an idea that the world must be about to end.  Of late I have felt like I just can’t ignore it.  I wonder, intently, how I got to be in the place that I am, the age that I am and in the situation I am in.

Seriously, I realize that the economy is in the toilet, civilization is probably about to end, by the time I retire taxes will likely amount to about 60% of my income and I will be a bag lady, there are starving people all over the world, people fight in senseless wars and little kids can’t get medical care, and no one cares about it unless it gets them ahead financially.  Really, the world is pretty much going to hell in a handbasket.

Then there’s me, who can’t sleep most nights, not because I read articles about actual relevant world issues, but because I read an article that told me there are just more women than men and it’s likely the ugly ones will end up alone.  I don’t sleep most nights because I worry that most nights I will be all alone.  I love people but feel like I might actually die from loneliness.

Maybe I’ll actually die from selfishness!

Came to our town recently.  Last night, actually.  Well, she sent her people.  She is apparently looking for the best karaoke singers across the country.

I was so looking forward to writing a series of posts on how I got to sing for Oprah, but it was never meant to be.  I stopped by the filming location last night (which happens to be one of my favorite places anyway, so I was looking forward to it!) and ended up waiting outside the door for an hour because they were over capacity.  And it was chilly without a coat, even for me.

As I waited in the cold surrounded by cranky chain smokers I was able to listen through the windows to the competing singers.  Several of them were utterly talented.

See, when I was younger it was really important to me to be famous.  I wanted to be a talk show host, singer, actor, whatever, when I got older so that people would think I was important.  However, last night after I finally gave up and got back into my warm car to head for home, I realized that it had worked out for the best.  The singers I saw performing were more talented than I by a vast margin.  Also, I thought to myself, wow…if ever I were famous and needed to tour because of some talent/fame related job, I would have to leave everything that I have now.  In other words I would have to leave everything that I love right now.  I tell my students all the time that I am just one of those nerds who really sincerely loves my job.  Oddly there is this little part of me that thinks…I don’t know that I could happily live long without it.  I actually like it that much.  Sometimes I wonder how all of this happened…

That being said, it still would have been really cool to be on the Oprah show.

Awhile back I had this random dream.  It was so every day life blazé you wouldn’t think I’d have even remembered it but for some reason I did.  I was in a kitchen and I was cooking something.  In the dream I was married; my husband and I were assisting each other in cooking.  I took a bite of the food I was preparing and passed it to my husband for testing.  He agreed that it was satisfactory.

I was at a friend’s house the other night and experienced an identical series of events, though I was not married, I was only cooking.  I have always been fascinated by deja vu and occasionally experience it very strongly.   I was joking when I said, “Wow, deja vu.  I have obviously cooked here before.”  Ironically the other night is among the first times I have visited this kitchen.

As I finished preparing food and moved on to the next steps in the evening, the dream came back to my mind.  Whenever I dream about something, I always dream about a place I have been before.  I put things into a context with which I have some level of familiarity.  If I dream about cooking for example I am at my house or my parent’s house or a specific friend’s house, whatever.  I dreamed this cooking dream in a place I had never been before. These things often come back to my mind only after I have experienced the deja vu.  For example, I recently experienced deju vu in my office, another place I dreamed of before I actually had been in the room.

As I sat there thinking about this in the moment, I wondered:  maybe this doesn’t really count as deja vu because though I am in the same kitchen and I was still cooking, I am not married.

And then I laughed out loud for a moment.  Partly because this was funny to me and partly because I was hugely uncomfortable all of a sudden.  See, a lot of people have different thoughts about potential meanings behind deja vu.  I happen to choose to view deja vu as some kind of encouragement, like my mind knew I was going to be here, or providence/omnipotence knew what might be ahead a gave me a little glimpse beforehand.  That was funny, encouraging.

Also I realized that I am constantly having to come to terms with my weaknesses.  When I was younger I believed that the only connections that mattered in life were cosmic ones, and a little deja vu or some emotionally moving spiritual experience would cause me to consider selling everything I owned or moving to a different country, or both.  I suddenly wondered whether I had the maturity or character to see beyond some minor deja vu episode or whether I would revert to my former ways and try to figure out why providence thought it important for me to take a bite of food and pass it to another person.

In a way I feel a little sad that things that once made us a bit vulnerable can have a tendency to hang on.  However, I guess it might also be fair to say that I am grateful for the occasional bump in the road, for being aware of my own weaknesses, and for the opportunity and the free will to slow myself down enough to think that just because I’ve ‘cooked in this kitchen before’ doesn’t mean I’ll be cooking in this kitchen forever.

My life has been a bit crazy lately.  Not in a bad way.  I am still a total nerd in the fact that I get up in the morning and I actually look forward to going to my job.  I love it that much.  What is weird, is that I find myself in a surprising situation.  It is ironic that I, the developmentalist, was naive to the fact that transitioning back into life as a full time professional might be unexpectedly challenging.

In many ways, I love it.  I FINALLY have a 9 to 5 job (well, as 9 to 5 jobs go these days) and there are nights when I can come home for the evening and just relax because I am completely calm and at ease.  I am so utterly glad that I don’t hold people’s livelihoods in my hands in any way anymore, and that my job is to hopefully push students toward being someone better and stronger than they currently are.  That is exciting.

I am sure my nature is not going to change overnight and I think I still might take on too much sometimes.  I try to get too much done in a day and then I am disappointed when I don’t finish everything.  I only hope that I can learn to work more intentionally rather than randomly (or, I guess, “smarter, not harder”) and give my best to everything.

I look forward to being in the moment, to doing things on purpose, and to hopefully really having a positive effect on people.

Lately I have been having those weird mornings where I wake up and I can’t remember if what happened while I was dreaming is actually real, or if my life is what was happening in my dreams.  Sometimes it actually takes a few hours for me to figure out which truth is paramount.

I have these days occaisionally, but lately it has been every single day and that has been weird.  Some relatively shocking things have proceeded from my mouth and my behavior the last few days.  I am not sure what to make of it, but I am sure I will make something of it.

Part of me is thrilled and elated at what has transpired and part of me feels like I have been shot out of a cannon.  I am in the ascent now.  The tops of the trees seem lightyears below me and I feel complete freedom.

Somehow I know, though, waaay in the back of my mind, that I will eventually hit the ground and be irrevocably injured.

Yep, I am making something of it.

See, right now I don’t notice because the wind is in my hair and I am happy—I am free—I mean, good grief I can fly, what is there to complain about?!

And so the two sides war together because I don’t actually know how high up I am therefore I don’t know how long it will take to hit the ground.

Here’s the basic story without the analogy.  I am very, very lucky to have a wonderful committed terrific group of friends.  They keep me on my toes, challenge me, sing karaoke, make me laugh, listen to me complain, push me to be better, the whole nine.  Some of these people I have a long history with and some of them are new to me.  Of concern to me is one who is only arguably relatively new, but in the last several months we have become much closer friends.

I could go into the whole story, but that would only be boring and seem a little complicated.  The skeleton of the story is that we met, nothing of significance happened, we started spending time together, people got the wrong idea (because he’s a guy and I am not one), we both panicked, we took some time off.

For the last few months we have been hanging out a lot more and to be honest I treasure every moment.  This guy has a reputation for being quite difficult to get to know and I made a secret commitment to do whatever I could to get to know him and let him know I care about him.  Maybe it worked.  I feel very close to him; closer, actually, than I have to someone in a long time.  ”Feeling close” to someone is no big deal, until you figure in our genders and some related political issues in the group we hang out in.

I don’t know if it was a moment of weakness, idiocy, truth or desperation, but not long ago I sat him down and told him that I am so very thankful for our friendship.  I further said that sometimes I get confused because I feel so close to someone who has at times hurt my feelings, and yet at other times the comfort that I feel when I am with him makes me think that if he wanted to he could actually win my heart.

Yes, I said that to him.

He let those comments lie and did not specifically address them and hasn’t.  I am actually okay with that; I didn’t say it to make him wonder or to test our friendship or to pressure him to provide some sort of DTR related explanation.  I am so, so happy about the way that we function and I don’t really want to change anything.  I enjoy every moment I spend with him, he makes me laugh, he is affectionate when I ask, and sometimes when I don’t, and he has been there for me at my moment of need.  He has shared parts of his story and seems to speak quite freely with me—he has said himself that he is surprised with how much he tells me and what we talk about.  I care for him a great deal.

I think I feel a little complicated about this because of some of the confusion in our history…that whole somewhat of a Ross and Rachel-ism that happened months ago.  That might be why I think about this and can’t figure out what’s real when I wake up in the mornings.  It is almost as though I want to beg the question: if you are so happy with him, then shouldn’t the two of you be more?

But I don’t want to ask it.  I am so, so happy.

So…is it so wrong that I love things the way they are and I don’t need them to change?  Can I somehow turn off this part of my mind that wants to be so analytical and just let myself revel in what is actually real?  As a woman who (obviously) analyzes, I just long for such a thing to be possible.  I just want to shut up, turn off that section of my mind, and let myself be happy.

Maybe I am looking for you, the reader, to give me permission.  I appreciate your feedback so that I can avoid analyzing to the point that when I stop flying and hit the ground I break every single bone in my body.  Thanks.