Line upon Line

While my brother was away in Florida for the spring semester, he and I didn't communicate a lot.  Quite frankly, he's not much one for the whole "keeping in touch" thing, and I sort of shrugged and figured I'd see him when he came home.  Which I did.

But there were a few things I kept in contact about.  For instance, there was a switch-up with the traffic light a few blocks from our house, and I knew he'd like to know that it was on the four-way blinker system finally.  I told him that.  I mentioned that our favorite character came back to Adventures in Odyssey.  Well, maybe not a favorite, but it was a dark day in our house when Jason Whittaker was written off the show (worked for the NSA and randomly had to go into witness protection or something--it didn't make much sense unless they were just writing the guy completely out of the show), and then behold! Jason returned!

So I had to tell him.  Obviously.

The other thing I did take the time to tell him was that they painted lines on our road.  This might not seem like a big deal to anybody, including our neighbors (or, possibly, my mother, who said, "wait, those are new lines?") but we've never had lines before, and they don't make much sense.   

See, our street is long, and each block has its own set of rules.  On our block, you can park, but only on the right side of the street.  (I don't know my left and right very well, but I know that if you stand in one direction, it's the right side of the street, so I couldn't go wrong with that.  Ha!)  Further down, you can only park on the left side of the street.  In some places, you can't park on either side.  So, in order to accommodate all of this, they painted the lines accordingly.

You can't see that well, but if you squint, you can get the idea that looking down this road, there's more space on the left side of the line than the other (in order to give room for the sometimes-parked cars).  Way down, however, it switches to the line being in the middle of the road (because all the space will be for driving, as no parking is allowed), which looks weird.

Okay, here's a close-up view of the tragedy.  Those lines DO NOT match up.  I understand why, truly I do, because of the whole sometimes-no-parking thing, they have to move the lines accordingly, but there was a reason that we didn't used to have lines.  And that is because some of the people who live on our street and/or have to drive down it often (I'm sure it's more than just me.  Maybe.) get irked when it looks like a drunken man marched to and fro painting lines wherever he pleased.  I avoid driving down our road now, because I don't even like to look at it.  It's just weird.

And then of course, they decided to erase some of the lines.  On two blocks, and two blocks only, they painted/whatevered over the yellow lines, now making a not-so-attractive black swath in the middle of the street.  It's weird.

All this to say...  Whoever makes the line decisions in my city should clearly consult the residents of the street, because the residents would be able to instantly understand when things just won't, um, line up.  So to speak.

Sigh

I have been reminded more than once recently that, uh, I have a blog.  Remember this thing?  I used to, you know, update it every once in a while.  But for the last few months (let's not focus on just how many, shall we?) I haven't written much.

I could spend time dwelling on this and making apologies, but I've decided I won't.

What I will say is that I just recently had the privilege of introducing Goodnight Moon to the boy I nanny.  The first read through he seemed to be bored, but soon I had him looking for the mouse in every picture, and going through the pictures again.  It was fun.  I don't even know the last time I met a child who hadn't somehow already heard that book.  I did cave to my OCD tendencies and point out to him that in the "goodnight mittens" page, the line features only mittens, which is silly, because in the full picture of the room, there are mittens AND socks on the line.  That always bugged me as a child.  Also, has anyone else noticed that it takes more than an hour for the rabbit to go to bed?  Because I feel like when I was a kid it didn't take an hour+ to go to bed.  Now that I'm older and I read the Bible and straighten up my room and such, it takes much longer, but even I don't need more than an hour to lie in my bed and say goodnight to everything in my room.  Not to mention the fact that him having mush by the side of his bed is just weird.  Was it his midnight snack?  Couldn't the old lady whispering hush (who is actually an old rabbit, let's be honest) have removed it before she left?  Because the mouse was sniffing it and that's just gross.

Uh, anyhow, whether or not you believe it, I do like the book.  I just have read it a bunch of times this week, so it's a bit fresh in the mind.

And that's where I leave off.  I really have to read more books not written for five-year-olds...

Seeking: the impossible

So, I'm weirdly picky about certain things (light switches, microwaves, windshield wipers, and silverware settings, just to name a few). But there are some things that I'm particular about in a more haphazard way. For instance, my room is allowed to be messy as long as I still know where everything is. My books are half packed up in boxes (a girl only has so much shelf space!), and the labels leave somewhat to be desired, but I understand exactly what's in each box, so it seems perfectly acceptable to me.

There's one thing that I'm weird about, though, that has no rhyme or reason. I make no secret of the fact that I tend to keep a journal. Perhaps not as faithfully as I should, but I like to keep them full of enough fodder so that if I don't burn them (this is a distinct possibility), my children will have an interesting view of my life. Now, I know some people keep journals in regular notebooks, but personally? I like to think that if I'm going to all this trouble to write down all the potentially interesting parts of my life, it might as well be in a book I like to look at, and one that is Just So.

This means a few things. 1) It has to be spiral bound. This is more for the sake of ease than looks, but I like the look of a spiral-bound notebook better. 2) It can't be plain. There has to be some distinctive feature that makes me want to look at it. 3) The pages can be neither too narrow, nor too wide. If the pages aren't exactly to my liking, I spend inordinate amounts of time in my journal discussing why I don't like the length of the lines. No joke. 4) It can't look too girly, nor too blah, and it can't have anything that would make me laugh at its absurd cover in 10 or 20 years. 5) There are actually other things, having to do with the type of page, the way the lines look, whether or not the first page is blank or lined, and some others. I'll spare you the details.

All that is good and well, but the fact is, there's no such thing as the perfect journal. I refuse to have the same cover more than once (I think I was hit on the head as a child--there's no way this is normal), and I don't like to have the new journal waiting in the wings while I write in a current journal. It makes me feel like the new journal is judging me for being too slow. So I can't buy a new journal until I'm nearly done (or done, if I write too much near the end and lose track of how many pages I have left) a current journal. So that leaves me shopping (sometimes for days on end) for a journal that fits all of my weird quirks. I never find exactly what I want, but, though great perseverance, I usually find something that fits at least a few of my qualifications!

I like to think that I'm particular in this because I don't like to be picky in other parts of my life. That, obviously, is just wishful thinking, as I am hardly perfect and un-picky on other occasions. So anyhow, this all has been on my mind recently as I accidentally finished my old journal and didn't have a new one! I do now (it took about three days, but I got it), but I had to visit many places to find the perfect fit.

In other news, I realize that if I do indeed burn my journals, it will make all this trouble be for nothing. Maybe I'll burn the pages and leave the covers? That might work. Hm.

Jumble

Sometimes in my head the thoughts don't come clearly. Especially late at night, when I lay awake and think and I'm sure that if I just thought hard enough, I could categorize my life into neat little boxes, all the beads sorted out separately, so there aren't any orange ones in the purple box, or blue ones with the yellows. It's not possible of course (though hope springs eternal), but life would be more tidy, less bother. Not that life was meant to be a bother, of course, but it sometimes feels like that ride when you were a kid and you're spinning all around and you desperately want to put your arms up in the air, because in the pictures it looks like so much fun when people do that, but you just can't let go of the handle bars, because you're sure you'd fall out. But you can't. You know that.

Any way you look at it, though, there's that thread running through everything, that silver thread that keeps everything bound to reality, and when you stop to sort it out, to try to get your beads on it (which makes no sense, really, because why am I talking about beads?) you realize how strange your life has become. The Lord knows best, we say this again and again, and even mostly believe it, but when you look back you realize that you'd never have chosen what He ended up choosing for you. Your life would have been tidier, with point A coming firmly before point B, and on and on and on it goes through the alphabet, ending with Z for Rapture (which makes sense, because the Rapture is the end of our earthly life, even though it doesn't start with Z at all), but here looking behind you, even if you're only up to the letter I, or maybe J, you can already see that life doesn't follow a human pattern even thus far. His thoughts are higher than ours? That's the only explanation. Plus, you are where you are (I am where I am) and somehow it makes sense. His ways are higher, and they're always better than the best (because only the best gets to be better than itself).

Which leads us to ponder, why don't we trust all the time? because if we can see, even now at the J or K stage of life, that His arms are always carrying us through, wouldn't it make most sense if we like Him do His perfect work all the time? Today, tomorrow, and even on alternating Mondays (though those are hard days due to life being what it is), we should trust. We mostly don't (I mostly don't, but you can judge for yourself what you do, and don't do or trust).

So that brings us back to the beads, all in their little boxes, all mixed up because we sin. All mixed up because we live. Living isn't bad, it's just messy. The peach of on part of life gets mixed in with the maroon, and we just have to face up to the fact that it's OK. That even when we don't sleep (which is often) we'll be OK. That's what concealer was invented for (even if you don't wear it, it's nice to know it's around), and that's what coffee was invented for (even if you don't drink it, and miss it, and sometimes wonder why you gave it up in the first place), and that's why people don't expect much from a tired girl. Somehow this has nothing to do with what I was first thinking of--

--when I woke up. Even though it's the middle of the night. They say wonders never cease. I wish ceasing would be the thing that happens to insomnia.

Yes, I am obsessive

When my new boss was interviewing me, he decided I was tightly wound to the point of OCD. Well, there are some things that I am sort of OC about. A lot of things, actually. (I've decided that saying OCD is just wrong. How could I be "disorder" about anything? I don't understand that statement.) And I just realized that he might be even more correct than he thought.

After my first full day of work (I didn't want to count chickens before they hatched and do this prior to having at least a full day under my belt), I came home, went into my tasks in Gmail, and checked "get a job" off of my to-do list. Now you tell me, is it normal to have "get a job" on ones to-do list? Is it normal to remember it's there, and then check it off? I'm not sure, obviously, since I only live one life (I may be OC, but I'm not bi-polar, thankfully), but I was just remembering my weirdness and decided that maybe somebody could enlighten me on the rules of to-do listing.

Though this bodes well for my job, since apparently one of the things I'm supposed to do is successfully finish to-do lists. That's cool, lists are right up my alley.