Internet Bard

We had some incredibly beautiful weather over the weekend here in southern Indiana. Saturday, I visited Indianapolis, courtesy one of my clients. I drove out to Raceway Park for the NHRA MAC Tools U.S. Nationals. I spent the day watching shockingly adept professionals doing their thing, in a job they all clearly loved.

The Team Kalitta guys, rocking their automotive awesomeness thing.

When I drove back home, I jumped off I-65 at Columbus, had a gyro at Dimitri’s, and traveled the rest of the way back via S.R. 135. It’s a glorious, winding stretch of state highway that runs through Brown County State Park. I had the windows down and was listening to classical music from the local IU radio station.

Story, Indiana. Which would be a great book title, I think.

I don’t know that many women who would enjoy both drag racing, and a scenic drive with opera blaring from the radio, in the same day. But I totally did enjoy it. Sometimes, my past (which is, let’s face it, more than a little redneck) seems totally incongruous with my present, particularly my work life. I have entirely the wrong pedigree for an advertising agency. But Saturday was one of those neat moments when my past and present actually fit beautifully together.

There was a moment when I had left the woods of the park behind, and was driving through this immense sea of deep green soybean fields, rippling in the breeze. The sun was shining, the air smelled great, and I was just struck with the perfection of the moment. It was like a postcard from heaven, signed by God, “Wish you were here. Oh, wait. You are. Enjoy!”

Stopped off in Salem, at a place called “The Cheddar Depot.” Because really, how can you not stop at a place called The Cheddar Depot? Right? They had sugar-free fudge (for my diabetic spouse and my father-in-law, who is in visiting). They also had pumpkin fudge, which was full of sugar and intended for me (and the kids, and my mother-in-law, but mostly, yeah, me.) It’s like a Starbucks pumpkin latte, only FUDGE. Oh, yeah.

Got back to scenic Palmyra in time for a cookout at my son’s best friend’s birthday party. It was actually my second birthday party of the week–the first had been Friday night, for my husband’s good friend. That was also a great time of friendship and food, celebration and reconnection.

Sunday? Sunday was amazing. The message and music during worship was encouraging and real and honest. Once again, I was struck, as I had been on my drive Saturday, with a sense of belonging. Of being in exactly the right place.

I love my church, but sometimes I feel like everyone there looks like they stepped out of a Target commercial. I feel old and out-of-step and self-conscious. But Sunday, my self-consciousness slipped off like a cardigan that had grown too warm and uncomfortable. I enjoyed the sense of shared intent, a whole community with our minds and hearts at least trying our best to tune to the same pitch.

Monday was a lot more low-key, but it had its moments as well. The delicious scent of hanging fresh laundry in the breezy, sun-spattered shade of my back yard. Grocery shopping (which I actually enjoy). A nice visit with a girlfriend.

So that was my holiday. I hope yours was restful, energizing and full of grace.

I have an awful confession to make: I like Taco Bell.

Well, wait just a minute. Let me amend that. I like the food at Taco Bell.

My commute is anywhere from a half hour to an hour each way depending on traffic, but there really aren’t that many dining options between work and home. When it comes to fast food (or “quick service” as they prefer to be called these days), it really comes down to Dairy Queen or Taco Bell. When pressed for time, I usually pick Taco Bell.

I like the Fresco tacos, even though I think calling it a “weight loss program” is a pretty big stretch. I just tried the “Cantina” tacos, and the pork one was actually quite tasty.

[Then again, I currently have a bizarre yogurt, cilantro and lime fixation happening. I've eaten more Cuban and Indian food this summer than I think I have my entire life, just to get my fix. Also, I'm drinking a lot of limeade. But hey, at least I'm preventing scurvy.]

But the local Taco Bell is an oddity in one respect. They have to employ the slowest fast food workers I’ve ever seen.

My dad told me once that when it comes to restaurant kitchen cleanliness, it’s not about the prices on the menu. It’s all about whether the customers can see the kitchen or not. He did a ton of restaurant stainless steel fabrication work during his career, and he’s been in almost every kitchen in Louisville at one time or another. So I pretty much trust his opinion on the matter.

You can see into the kitchen at this Taco Bell pretty clearly. What you mostly see, every time I’ve been, is a group of teenagers who look dazed and unusually relaxed considering the venue. They’re mostly just standing there much of the time, with a vaguely disoriented look that says “what was I doing again?”

Don’t get me wrong, people. I don’t expect a gourmet experience from a fast food chain. Heck, I don’t even really expect good food, if we’re being honest.

I do sort of expect the food to be, well, fast. Given the name and all.

At one point last night, I really expected one of the customers to just say “You know what guys? I know what goes into that thing I ordered. I can see the ingredients from here. I’m just gonna come on back there and throw it together myself. I’ve got other places to be tonight.”

Prepare yourselves for another “I have five minutes to write a blog post” blog post, friends.

You know what I’d do if I had more than 5 minutes to write this blog post? Nap.

Five minutes is not enough time to nap. Especially if you’re hanging out at the Hob Knobb Coffee Shop. I know they love their customers (hence the free wi-fi) but I’m pretty sure they draw the line at being “short-term flophouse for exhausted bloggers.”

A few random updates, since my posting has been rather sporadic lately:

The HRH is now a first grader, and has realized her lifelong (since age 3) dream of becoming a cheerleader.
Yes. There is such a thing as first grade cheerleading. They cheer at the first grade flag football games.
First grade football? Is awesome. They don’t need to tackle each other. Half the time, they just fall over from the sheer weight of the helmet and pads. 1000% more entertaining than watching our high school team get creamed again.
My son got a death threat. The situation appears to have been handled by our local law enforcement, but it did scare the bejeebus out of me and Chris.
Son’s reaction? Totally nonchalant about the whole deal. As is his wont with most things in life.
Still planning on changing roles at work. Still excited about it. Still not at liberty to discuss it much.

Well, that’s about all I can cram into 5 minutes. Whatchoo got going on?

Everything is going to be alright.

Really.

I am always secretly a little paranoid about my notebooks. I am that person. The one who dumps her unfiltered thoughts and opinions into notebooks and journals. Really, it’s better that way. If I didn’t purge some of the excess mental cogitation somewhere, it might end up bursting out of me in a really unfortunate moment of poor judgment.

Case in point: I was in a meeting recently where someone posted a scathing (and thinly-veiled) Facebook critique of another attendee, forgetting that Facebook has foreshortened the law of six degrees of separation by several degrees (to roughly five minutes). This lead to a painfully awkward moment when the offended person read the status aloud to the entire room, and pointed out that “While I’m not in your network, lots of people are in both your network and mine. One of them felt like passing it along.”

Yeah. Awkward.

But even if one of my journals ended up in the wrong hands, it’d be okay. Far worse things have happened. Everything ends up alright, eventually.

Alright is a highly subjective state, though.

I’m a mystic at heart, which means I truly believe the words of Julian of Norwich, “And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” For me, being a mystic simply means I don’t need to know the mechanics of the divine to believe in the divine. I’m okay with a certain level of mystery and the unknowable. And I understand that “everything will be alright” doesn’t mean “everything will work out the way I think it ought to work out, with a nice, pain-free resolution for everybody.” I am blessed with the ability to believe that in some way that I don’t really understand, everything works out in the end.

But the end can be a long time coming.

Everything will be alright, but some things seriously suck before you get to the “alright” part. Some things, you should definitely avoid if you possibly can.

One of my kids got a death threat last week.

Hearing that a kid was taken off the school grounds in handcuffs by the police because the kid had a “hit list” that included one of your children is one of those things that sucks and should be avoided if you can possibly manage it.

It’s especially not fun to get this news via text message during a business dinner when you’re in another state. Because that makes it really difficult to immediately begin digging a bunker in your back yard, so you can stock it with canned goods and wi-fi and insist your family move in for the next decade or so. That was my initial reaction, anyway.

But there’s plenty of heartache to go around. The parents of the other kids that were threatened. The parents of the kid who was removed from school. (I know them. They’re good people. Who are probably as baffled as the rest of us by this.) The kid himself—because if he was serious about it, how does a thirteen year old kid get to that dark a place? And how scary is it to be in that place, where that seems like a viable choice? And if he wasn’t serious, if he was just trying to freak people out, or build a “rep” (whatever that means), he’s getting a harsh lesson in “why there are some things you just don’t say, and certainly don’t put in writing.”

Which brings me back to my original thought. Everything will be alright. I wish I could give all the parents, kids and teachers involved a giant hug, and say “Everything will be alright. I know you don’t necessarily believe that now. I know you might not be able to see it now. But it will. Someday all this will be a bad memory. How bad a memory is largely up to you, and what you do next.”

Greetings, internet friends. I am freaking out this week.

First, I am freaking out because I am in the process of leaving behind my current vocational specialty, where I am Generally Acknowledged as Awesome, and diving into the New Thing Where I Am A Relative Noob. Vocationally-speaking, I learn fast and fall forward, so within a few weeks I should be over that particular anxiety. But still. There are those “this is a new thing” butterflies to deal with.

But that is not the 50 foot cliff of TMI that I was referring to in the title of this post.

Put bluntly, I’m a currently nervous wreck over whether or not to date my husband. [Editor's Note: My timing, as usual, is impeccable as this is our 19th wedding anniversary.]

My relationship with my spouse is best described by our mutual friend, Facebook: It’s Complicated. See also: this link.

For any Reader Friends who’ve never been married with children, I should clarify the difference between “date night” (not to be confused with the Tina Fey/Steve Carrell movie I still haven’t seen yet) and “a date.”

Date Night (Strictly my personal definition. YMMV.): 1. A family business meeting over dinner, between married parents, so they can work out the administrivia of the household without having to yell “STOP KICKING YOUR BROTHER!! NOW!” five times during the appetizer. 2. An opportunity for a married couple with kids to salvage whatever remains of their respective sanity by leaving the kids with a sitter, going to a restaurant that neither hates, followed by seeing a movie that you can marginally agree upon. See also: comfortable, easy, companionship.

Date (Again, my personal definition here.): Spending focussed one-on-one time with someone with the goal of building mutual romantic and sexual attraction.

I’ve said that I have an amazing relationship with my husband. This is true. Considering our past, it’s amazing that we’re still married and we still like each other a lot. He’s my favorite person to hang out with. Marriage is about so much more than sex and romance. It has to be, because frankly, those things are pretty hard to maintain and ridiculously easy to screw up. But for the past few years, my recipe for marriage has been:

• 1 pt marriage-as-spiritual-discipline
• 1 pt domestic partnership
• 1 pt co-parents
• 1 pt friends-with-benefits

Which sounds boring, but in reality was a wonderful, secure, stable, safe place to be. It was a relationship where I felt comfortable and healthy and happy–three states of being that were conspicuously absent in my twenties.

Friday night, I thought I was going out for Date Night and ended up on a Date.

Like, “best conversation you’ve ever had topped with literal shooting stars” date. Like, still catching myself grinning goofily thinking about it three days later, DATE.

By Saturday afternoon, the panic started creeping in.

Setting aside our peculiar marital history (which, you can’t), I am not a person who typically handles romantic love in a healthy way. They don’t call enneagram 4s the “tragic romantic” personality type for nothing. Dangling romance in front of me is like waving a cosmo under Lindsay Lohan’s nose as she’s walking out of rehab.

I’ve been channeling my passion and my emotionally-centered, heart-on-my-sleeve-ness into work, into my faith, into pretty much anything and everything BUT my marriage. And don’t judge me, because the reward has been two or three years of blissful, wonderful drama-free stability for the whole family. No crazy emotional highs and lows. What amounts to (for me), glorious zen-like calm and serenity. You have no idea how awesome that has been.

Crap. Crappity, crap, crap, crap.

You know where I am now? I’m freaking 15 years old again, trying to decide if it’s a smart idea to continue to date a guy I know deep down I like too much for my own good.

You may now return to your previously scheduled programming. Thanks for letting me vent.

P.S. While I appreciate my internet friends and their concern for my wellbeing, and I LOVE comments, please do not jump into the comments with some trite piece of “wisdom” like “once a cheater, always a cheater,” or alternately “you just need to forgive and forget.” I can assure you, I have been making all my major life decisions for the past several years with the input of all my mental faculties, spiritual leadership from my pastors, and advice from people who know me well off the interwebs.