So in addition to my paying job as a Barista and my non paying job as a Camera Technician, in about a month I will start as a volunteer ESL Teacher. Maybe someday I will get one good paying job.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

It's an amazing thing the internet.

Warning this is long, windy, whiny, twisty, dark and a bit emo...but every bit as important.

Today, is the first of a series of very long long days. I am attempting to reconnect with some older friends, people who I am both trying to find out why I stopped talking to people, and what made them my friends in the first place. I know for some specific people that I just always longed to have a deeper relationships than the surface chatter that occurs across the information highway, and never got to that point.

I was reading someone's journal today, which when you type it out kind of makes it sound really really creepy, but that is far from my point. See this person felt that they had dissconnected themself from the world just a bit too much. They felt that they stepped away from the slowly growing relationships of the internet in search of the more tangible local pool of friends/family/coworkers. It kind of made me go and analyze a bit of the internet relationships that I have had. Some of them stemmed off to create real friends in real places with real involvements in my own close family. Other just remained a surface leveled aquaintances, which is all they will ever really be.

There's even this one guy who IMs me every random time out of the blue. It's an odd kind of friendship. We exchange the trite and typical banter of 'how do you dos' and whats it. While at the same time we just kind of talk, a little bit at a time about abosolutely nothing. Yet randomly this guy opens up. 'I feel shitty today' he would tell me. Part of being a writer it what I always assumed, he tends to go off on a whim. Yet even to that extent I rarely know why is is that he feels the way he does, I just kind of understand. An odd mutual understanding of our crappy moods. If you were to look at the transcript for our conversations it would probably play out l like an info feed from twitter or facebook.

Josh is confused. Kevin is crappy. Josh is wondering why. Kevin is excited about his new Wii. Josh is feeling blue, etc. Yet where does it go, or does it need to go anywhere. It's kind of like being on the receiving end of a random cry for help, both ways. Total annominity in the worst way. Yet internet is an amazing thing. There are a few others who I have this sort of akward specialness about our conversations with, yet I can't quite figure out what to say sometimes. Even though I know some of you, I still feel like a creepy stranger. 

It happens in real life too though. Like this person who I use to live with is getting married soon, and I've never been to a wedding let alone invited that wasn't my family. I don't know what it's like to be invited into someone's circle of friends. As much as I know of people, and the events in there lives I was shown just how one-sided it was; I've realized I'm not particularily close enough to anyone to stay in their life in this way and it was depressing. It made me realize how much of my 'friendships' are just like the ones with random guy, Kevin. Just a little too shallow for anyone's liking. So...

...Today I reorganized my buddy list. 

Today I deleted a few people. Something I don't normally do.

Today I decided I want fewer friends I don't really feel connected to, and a little more solid people in my life.

I distinctly remember baking and rushing my last batch of christmas cookies, god knows they tasted awful.

Somewhere someone told me that with anything you create, your emotions can determine the outcome; this was the case. Somehow I managed to make them wrong (normally taking ten minutes they took 30 just to set up). Internally I was thinking of just going out on a good note, but in reality I was just trying to stretch my time and stay there---just squeezing in that last ounce of the atmosphere I was about to leave behind. I just wanted to stay.

The ride to the airport was quiet, on my front at least, but everyone else seemed to have something to say. They had their questions, stifled with an unabashedly akward silence. All the while I was just trying to hold back from crying, something I had done quite the fair share of in the few days I had between the announcement I wasn't ready to attend out reach and the flight date home. We said our goodbyes, and like most good Christian people we hugged. Out of All of the hugs in my life, those hugs lasted just a little bit longer than usual; as if to say: ‘I’m sorry’, ‘Don’t give up’, and a thousand other forms of what is the one-two punch of guilt and regret.

I remember when they first told me that I was not going to go. I looked like a patient about to be forced into a psych ward---minus the straight-jacket. Flailing aimlessly, angrily screeching; something in me was dying...and then I crashed. I couldn’t handle them telling me that, and I was digressing into my most basic animal instincts. I was fighting it both inside and out, feeling as if an unbearable poison was forcing its way through my veins, paralyzing all rational thought. Over the next few days I mellowed, or more so I was tranquilized by irrational fear.

I was going home a failure, a then incomplete mess. Standing in front of me was the daunting fact that everything, and I mean everything I had planned for in the next months was going by the wayside. I was returning to Ohio---but I wasn’t supposed to be back yet. I was seeing my family---who weren’t expecting me until March. I was turning twenty and thrust into “Happy Holidays” mode, but I honestly wasn’t happy. I was pushed back into my life, my reality, questioning everything that had happened in the previous months. I was home. The sad part though is really just how hard people tried to make me happy. It was like trying to warm over a slab of marble. Something in me had felt like it died, and I was regressing into the stages of grief; or maybe it was a good grief I just don’t know.

"This is what I'm thinking, this is my point."

When I got home, when I decided I wanted to be a little better than I was last year, I took off like a rocket. This past year had a definite direction to it. Despite being severely depressed for a majority of it I was a force of movement. A week into it I had a job, that same week I had two, and then I just took off. I wanted something and I wanted control over it. There were times this past year where I was ridiculously angry. I tried not once but twice to retry a discipleship training school. People would say they were proud of me, but I knew that it wasn’t my time yet. The first time was in October, I had hoped and prayed for a school, finally finding one that just screamed me. It was in Montreal, and I was enchanted by the idea of attending a working internship of a school. It was my first big rejection in a while, but they where honest---they felt they couldn't help me. So I talked to Mark, which took forever. Only to hear from Hilary in a Newsletter the school I wanted to attend was canceled. I almost applied to another school, they actually called me three times, but I didn't go. Looking at my situation left me a little troubled differencing reality and determination, holding on to an archaic tendency to move in that fixed direction. Something about the fixation to leave a town combined with the impatience of being stuck in a town really throws you.

It’s weird looking back at mistakes made, because initially I would have just dwelled on not being able to correct them---but now? Now I have this innate want to hold onto my mistakes, to actually…learn from them. I know now that I want to learn, I desire to learn. That’s probably the healthiest habit I’ve ever picked up in my life. So as the one year mark came around I was feeling just a little bit of a failure. I was finishing up a semester, and slightly worried of failing. I was at one job for the longest period I’ve ever been in my life, and slightly worried of being fired. Was anything really wrong? No! Nothing big, I just didn’t want to be at this point at this time. I wanted things to work out slightly differently. I was quite literrally worried because I really had nothing to worry about, go figure.

So I procrastinated a little...then a little more...then a lot until today really.

So what has happened since---November?

I went on vacation, a real honest to god vacation with beaches, gelato and everything! It wasn't quite wonderful, but it was something. Especially our last meal---easily the most gourmet meal I ever had (and I picked it). I learned a bit about Gullah. I've watched fifty Korean movies (eight Japaneses, two chinese and one soap opera too). I survived the three month mark at my job, and now the six month mark. This is a landmark of commitment. I stayed home...so far. I catered the deserts for my work Christmas party. I went to North Carolina, and realized Durham has a street that looks like Commercial Drive. I saw my family again, they're all a little older---yet exactly the same. Christmas came, Christmas went, and then I turned twenty-one. Heck I went out and bought a SINGLE beer. It was bitey, with hints of coffee and the color of Guinness. I passed with a B, and signed up for two more classes. I realized I liked photos, and even started a page for them. I watched an entire movie in a theater without talking, and with smuggled cheesecake. I made Sugar cookies from scratch; gingersnaps too. I also chased seagulls.

" 9known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; 10sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything." 2 Corinthians 6:3-10 (NIV)

"Dear, dear Corinthians, I can't tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn't fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren't small, but you're living them in a small way. I'm speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!" 2 Corinthians 6:11-13 (the Message)