I'm Late for a Very Important Date

Or not. In any case I'm a white rabbit running after the end of this semester. In layman's terms, I'll have no time for serious blogging until mid-December. But in an attempt to keep myself on some kind of schedule, I've decided to post a short poem that I wrote just now... in like, five minutes. I'm trying this thing where I don't shy away completely from ehhhh...cliché, I guess? I feel like I've begun to have a good enough handle on things to know when I'm using them to my advantage. Anyway, here it is. Tell me what you think if you'd like.

I’m forever searching for you

In the corners of my eyes.

Hoping to see you hurry by or

Maybe, for you to catch me searching,

And for me to find that same look

Of lost and found

Making the contours of your face go soft and bright,

Like sudden sunlight defeating

Gray-bearded clouds of doubt.

"I will be who and what and where I am."

So I had a completely different thing planned for my second blog, but I was so excited about this thought that I decided to share. You may or may not know me very well, and so, you may or may not know that I consider myself a Christian. Sometimes, even I don't know why anymore. I feel like so much of my personal philosophy doesn't match with what I was taught to believe, but at the same time so much of my personal philosophy is inextricable from those same teachings. And I got to the point this year where I thought, "God doesn't want me. Obviously He isn't seeking me out. I'm too busy for Him and he doesn't care enough about me specifically to find me where I am." I imagined this great bubble being blown between us, getting bigger and bigger until I couldn't see through the soap to Him. Or I imagined God as being on a ship that was sailing away from me. "Fine," I thought, sort of childishly crossing my arms. I gave up.
I was driving up to school today and decided to opt for NPR over my usual iPod. Two beautiful shows about religion came on, one about a preacher who recently came out to his congregation and one about a Rabbi's new book, The Dignity of Difference. One of the major points of the latter being you can believe deeply in your own personal religion, be it Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or Judaism; in fact, it is wonderfully important to do so. But God is so much bigger than the ways we can think about him. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks more accurately translated God's message to Moses at the burning bush from "I am that I am" to "I will be who and where and what I am." I may or may not have said an amen aloud in the car. (I totally did btw.) So much for God not finding me where I was. Through these men, I felt like God was saying, "I know why you are frustrated. But everything doesn't have to be the way you were taught and everything you were taught doesn't have to be invalidated either." He met me half way. I'm by no means saying everything is better and my confusion as found its way into harmony. But God hasn't given up on me, not even when I gave up on him. Maybe, just maybe there is hope for me yet. There is enough hope for all of us.

http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2010/dignity-of-difference/video-intheroom_sacks.shtml this is a link to a video version of Rabbi Sack's interview I was listening to on NPR.

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=131096915&m=131096699 this is one about the gay preacher, Bishop Swilley.

First Post

I'll admit that I am a big copy cat. Enough of my friends have gotten blogs that it started to sound like a good idea. So hear I am, in cyberspace...pretty clueless. I don't have a premise exactly. But I'm a creative writing major at GCSU and I'm hoping having a blog will keep me from annoying my roommates too much by blathering on about whatever it is I'm writing this week. It's entirely possible that I'll just end up reading them my blogposts...hence making the problem even worse. Whatever. We'll see. I'll probably do some journal entry stuff too...maybe post some links to things that interest me.

To start things off, I'm going to sacrifice an excerpt from a Creative Nonfiction piece I'm working on. It's from an essay called "First."

First Mistake

On that first day, September 15, 1991, I was born into a cacophony of senses, each one nameless and terrifying and like the others. I was born into a flood of light, though I did not know it, and sound, though I could not tell sirens from symphony, and cold, which I understood only as the opposite of where I was before. I sucked in my first breath of painful unyielding air, my lungs inflating all at once like a balloon when it gives way to the pressure of breath for the very first time— and I screamed. I knew then that I had made a terrible mistake. Why else would I have screamed so fiercely? I must have slept so much in those early days, hoping I would wake up from this dream, this thing they called the world. “The world”: they said, with what I came to recognize as light in their voices. “Here baby; I have given you the world.”

That's All Folks!