Stargate

Having reached a personal goal for the Paper of Doom by which I have been held captive the last few weeks (and will be held captive for another month, at least...Seriously, this is the biggest paper I've ever had to write. Blurg.), I decided to treat myself to an old Stargate Atlantis episode on hulu. It was "the Prodigal," for those of you in the know--the one where Michael comes back and tries to blow up Atlantis, or, as I like to think of it, the one where Ronon stops being a putz, finds love, and writes his first and only mission report. In any case, watching the show brought back fond memories of when I used to drive down to Seattle for Stargate Fridays.

I remember jetting out of Mount Vernon in my little red shoe,* singing along with whatever cd happened to be playing in the car, feeling the cares of teacher-hood peal away with every mile. I would park in the same old patch of grass along one of Seattle's impossibly slender side roads, experience the same momentary panic as I tried to remember which buzzer was Adrienne and Josh's apartment and which was their neighbor's, and hear the same joyous cries of "Sarahdunn!" as I climbed up the stairs. And then, oh joy! Oh rapture! How sweet it was to be in the company of friends, to exchange greetings with people who knew what you were like at 2 in the morning--but liked you anyway, to have impossibly long and intricate conversations about nothing of consequence, to share things of very great consequence and be understood (or at least to have the effort made). Those times were like water to my parched little soul after a dreary week spent all alone in my thin-walled cat-box of an apartment in Marysville.

Now we're spread out a little farther than before. Our lives are growing out like tree branches, and it makes me wistful. I really don't call or write half as much as I wish I did. I just read your blogs and smile when I think of you. Sometimes I tell the friends I've made here stories about you (good ones). But I'm so grateful to know you, and to have such a rich store of memories made with you that watching sci-fi reruns becomes like looking through a picture album in my heart.

I look forward to seeing you again, and adding more pictures.

Thanks, friends.

*'Little Red Shoe' is the name of my car. It was a gift from my Grandma (the name, not the car).

I probably should have just gone to bed.

They never tell you that having an adventure involves a whole heck of a lot of discomfort, that you'll be cold and wet and hungry, that you'll see unbelievable sights and do incredible things and nobody else will understand. They never talk about the singular difficulty of caring about personal hygiene when one has been battling monsters all day and sleeping in the woods at night. There's no mention of bug bites, blisters, sore backs, ungrateful villagers, ambivalent princes, and hours upon hours of trudging here and there and everywhere in between. Alone.

Of course they never put that stuff in stories.

Who would want to hear it?

Time Warp!

Let's pretend that it's still November.

I wrote this entry over the Thanksgiving holiday, but since I was at my uncle's house (where internet moves at a glacial pace) I wrote it in Word and forgot about it.  I just found it today when I was poking around on my computer.  So here you are.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays.  My very favoritest is Easter.  I love the rush of celebrating the resurrection, and all the busy newness of spring.  Everything is growing.  Everything is so full of potential, like the breathless pause before the symphony begins, or the boundless possibilities of a blank page.  I guess you could say that Thanksgiving is the other end of that thought.  It’s the time when things come to completion, when crops have been harvested, when nature lays down to rest after all the fun and frenzy of greener days.  I like that feeling of exhausted satisfaction, as at the end of a productive day, when you look around and take stock of all that you have.  You can’t help feeling grateful.  I like gratefulness because it involves seeing the value of what you’ve been given, and because it means that you are not alone.  When you appreciate something or someone, you are acknowledging that the object of your appreciation somehow makes your life better, and that means that you are not a complete universe unto yourself, but a small piece of an interconnected world.  Now it is possible that only a few of you, dear readers, have ever lost sleep because you were worried that you really were entirely self-sufficient, but those of us who worry about everything are all mighty grateful for our own finiteness.  I'm glad for my neediness, for my loneliness, because it means I was meant for relationship, for adventure and completion.  And if God means for me to be complete (and I believe He does), then who knows what marvelous things will happen to bring it about?

So thanks, everyone, for being part of the adventure that is my life.  I am grateful for you.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  Enjoy gorging yourself on Turkey and football.

*Ahem*

...and now we return you to your regularly scheduled program.

For Adrienne. Merry Christmas!

Ten ways to know if you are a minor character in a movie/tv show...

-Your conversations consist largely of random expository information (How've you been, Bob, since your wife died in mysterious circumstances last winter?)

-You have only one name

-You are the third fastest pilot/driver/draw/etc. (the second fastest is usually the villain)

-You face off against the hero after his initial ignominious defeat and before the climactic battle

-Your backstory can be explained in a single sentence

-You say things like "There are four of us and one of you..."

-Your bullets are proven ineffective against the monster and you just keep shooting

-You are the only girl, boy, foreigner, rocket scientist, person with a cool accent, person in a wheelchair, or lonely martian in the group

-You are defined by a single endearing quirk, and you find and fall in love with a person possessing that same quirk with only a significant look, a word or two, and thirty seconds of 'bowmp-chicka-wow-wow' music

-Your only line is 'Grrr!'/'Aaaaaah!'

So there you go.
Merry Christmas all!

(Tune in next time for the Minor Character's Survival Guide)

Christmas Eve

Hello friends! I am writing to you all from my mother's computer in Ridgecrest. It is Christmas Eve, and we are all in our respective happy places (and by 'we' I mean my mother and father and me). Mom is sitting under a light blanket, looking up pertinent verses to augment an upcoming Bible study lesson, Dad is dusting and rearranging the eclectic memorabilia that constitute the full extent of my family's concept of interior decorating, and I am just soaking up all the comforting family ethos that makes me 'charmingly quirky' to friends and 'just plain weird' to students. Whenever I am home (Ridgecrest), it's like a small but significant part of my insides unwinds, my inner kaleidascope aligns, some sort of deep-seated constant dissonance resolves, and things just make sense. Dad is looking at one of his favorite books, and regaling us with little known facts about the Ancient Celts and their subtle influence on Roman sculpture, when he informs us that he would really like to learn to speak Gaelic someday. Mom just sits next to me, radiating peace. I hope your Christmas Eve is just as lovely.

pretty

On his last visit to the Northwest, my dad bought me a Christmas tree. That's right, a little four foot tall bona-fide Charlie Brown Christmas tree. It currently stands "mounted" on an old cardboard shoe-box directly in front of my living room window, where the twinkling lights can thoroughly confuse any passing motorists who happen to look up. It's got two strings of colored lights wrapped around its diminutive frame. The bright little colored sprinkles of light are reflected in a festive cone in my window, very nearly doubling the Christmas cheer.

I just might leave it up all year.

Rain, Running, and Stories

It rained all night last night, and I mean RAINED, so that I woke up several times to hear water pelting down onto the skylight in my room (I love my skylight, by the way). I didn't mind it because today is Saturday, and I have no plans until tonight--except to write.

It's been ever so long since I last wrote, and many things have happened. Among these things is a sort of re-working of my insides (the invisible emotional ones, not my actual bodily insides) which is the closest I will come to making an excuse for the recent dearth in blogwork. It's taking up a big chunk of space on my hard drive and making all my other programs sluggish and unresponsive. I like to think that the other side of this process will bring you a stronger Sarah, or at least one who knows who she is and where she's going. We shall see.

In lighter news, you are now reading the blog of a runner. That's right, I, who have historically been the athletic antithesis of fast, run. And I actually like it (!). I never really ran before (not on a regular basis) because it was hard to ignore the fact that it looked and felt ridiculous to expend that much energy and still be traveling that slowly. But now I have friends who run with me, and where two or more are gathered, "ridiculous" turns into "social." My friends and I run three or four miles at least once a week. We keep trying for twice or thrice a week, but it doesn't always happen. Of course, our pace is alot closer to that of the tortoise than the hare, but it's the thought that counts, right? My favorite part is when we've just finished running, and one feels a delightful combination of accopmlishment and well-deserved exhaustion. Ultimately, I think the habit gives more energy than it takes. The work week hasn't been kicking my butt the way it used to... So my P.E. teachers were right after all. Fancy that.

On to the next subject: stories. One of my church friends has a little boy, a very cute little boy, who asks me to tell him a story every time he sees me. It's very flattering, especially when he actually listens to whatever I tell him. Sometimes the stories are the kind you usually get when you're making things up as you go along (like the surprisingly creepy one with the giant worm eating his way out of a giant apple in the mysterious old ladies' basement), but some of them were not half bad. So, at the behest of another friend who often overhears these stories, I have begun to write one of them down. I thought maybe I'd give it to her as a Christmas present, since, at the rate I write, it will probably be December by the time I get to the end. But the experience of actually writing a story with a beginning and an end is new and, mostly, pleasant. I've journalled and written poetry, but I've never been able to finish a story. However, if I can successfully resist my heavily ingrained perfectionistic tendencies, perhaps I will have a modest fairy-tale to share with you all in the (relatively) near future. Again, we shall see.

Well, I have to go buy toilet paper and shaving cream. But I promise to write again soon.
Bye, friends!