coconut creme cupcakes

I can't sleep.

I'm lying in bed at home (and by this home I mean my parents' house), listening to Coldplay and Damien Rice and over thinking. I think it's culture shock. Too many people growing up, leaving home and coming home, going on adventures, doing nothing. I stood on the beach yesterday and felt like I was fifteen years old. Today I felt old enough to start thinking about settling down and whispering suggestions about starting a family. I teeter every time I lose my sense of balance. I've had so many perfect moments in the past couple of weeks. Finding out how to show I care about the one I secretly care about, toasting to friends and true love and difficult times around the camp fire, wandering up and down the beach of the boundless lake with the most wonderful people, flying into the City at night so close to the buildings I could practically see the people in Times Square. Finally watching the season two finale of the Office.

And this is a sort of perfect moment, too. It's awkwardly unsettling, this quiet moment when I'm just thinking about life, because despite all the perfect moments, you have to deal with all the imperfect ones as well. And, maybe I'm just a little bit strange, but thinking about these things conjures pictures in my mind, not of my own life but of some other one, someone else's story, and the stories I make up are about me but they're about someone else. I used to think it was a great insult to say that you can see the author in a story, see how they've inserted themselves. I still think there takes a certain amount of craftsmanship to conceal your tracks, but now I believe that the stories with the most heart are often written when they come from the author's true heart, from the experiences and joys and pains held there, the invisible story teller whispering, "Don't you see the truth in this? Don't you feel it yourself?" I believe the reason that I love The 4:05 so much is because I wrote it trying to answer a question I was struggling with at the time and the answer I found there gave me hope. And as I lay here, unable to sleep, thinking about the big questions in my life right now is the same as thinking about the stories I would like to write. They are inexorably tied.

I was watching the director commentary of Walk the Line on the plane today, and writer/director James Mangold talks about how the characters and the actors are just real people, how beautifully the sincerity of the story plays. I've hardly written anything, really. But I think that the stories I will write over the next fifty years will be about real people as well. They will be about Real Me. Maybe, if I spin them with enough craft, you will see how they are about Real You, too.

As my dear H. D. Martin once said, sometimes there is only truth - and there is beauty yet in that.

God bless the Queen and save America

Last week was my one year anniversary of arriving home from England. I tried to make it commemorative. I wore my English gear, shared a pint of cider with a friend, and had a cup of tea while watching a British movie. I also ended up going through my photobucket page, skimming through all my pictures. It did make me miss England, but life is good.

The day I came back from England was also the day that my parents handed me my letter from Michigan. It was a pretty emotional moment, even though we all knew what it probably said. It demanded a decision of me, when all I had to do previously was hypothesize. Sometimes I feel like my time in England was a pause button in my life. I was leaving one school and going to a different one, trading one life in for the other, and while I was in England I was making those decisions about what I wanted my new life to be.

My life has been a little disjointed, at least geographically, and it makes it easy to look back and see how things have changed. Sometimes I think people don't stop and reflect back enough. So much has happened in the past year. My life is so vastly different from what it was or from what I thought I wanted it to be. You lose things and gain new things. You lose contact with old friends and make new ones. You buy new clothes, get new haircuts, get new names. You struggle with different things, and you grow in new ways. I wish people would stop and take more time to recognize these things, to look back and see how they've changed and evaluate where they are, if they are living the life they want, if they are where they want to be.

This is not where I thought I would be. It's not all that bad. : )

I'll Slice Your Life

It's weird the way your first impressions change - or don't.

I've had the privilege of making "home" a place where I had previously had only a handful of isolated memories. When I first moved here, most places were associated with my previous memories of them. But things change, and I can remember how I used to view certain aspects of campus - I even remember things that were gone before I made this campus home, like the tree stump with the brick wall in it they tore out to make room for the museum addition - and sometimes it makes me smile, how different my perspective was. Campus used to see so big and intricate - and it still is, but now it's familiar too. It's funny the way memories are retained and yet perspective can change, almost like there are two versions of a place, and the way sometimes you can see both of them at once. Some places don't change, though. Places I don't visit frequently, even a couple I do, still have the exact same impression on me as they did three years ago. I don't mind, necessarily. With a memory as bad as mine, it's nice to have some strong memories. It's just weird and interesting, at least to me, the way people's perspectives can shift and change.

Sounds like a great theme to build a story on to me. : P

My Friends are too Cool

Today I got car splashed twice. Before last winter, when I got snow splashed, I thought that only happened in movies.

I got some pretty cool news today. Not quite like winning the Nicholl, but it's still pretty thrilling for me!

Last night I learned not to rummage around in the dark in your duffel in the pockets you know contain razors, even if you think they're capped. They probably aren't anymore.

Do you ever get scared about losing people before they're gone?

Someday I'm going to make a film on how Facebook has changed social relationships. It's going to go on the festival circuit and win a massive number of awards.

Comeback Tours

Today my roommate from sophomore year is getting married. I luckily am getting to go to her wedding, which is halfway across the country, and visit Old School Land for the first time in a year.

I don't know how many people get to revisit their pasts a lot. It sorta happens a lot for me. Ever since I came back from England, every single place I have lived/visited has been an important place for me in my past. Sometimes it's hard because I don't feel like I'm making any progress forward. Sometimes it's hard because I realize that I have. It was a little ironic, because I flew back to campus on the same day that I got into England exactly a year ago.

I was on the plane Thursday, and I almost started crying a couple times. I was so excited to finally be going back to what had been my home for two years to see some of my closest friends, but I was also a little sad. I have no regrets in the way I've lived my life the past year. But at the same time, I thought of everything I had missed at my old school for the past year, what my life could have been like if I stayed. Now that I'm here, it doesn't feel like I've been gone for a year. Except when I'm hanging out with people.

One of my writing buddies for Script Frenzy has a plot that involves someone coming back to a place after being gone for a while. And as soon as I get home, I'm going to start typing out a whole bunch of notes for him about what that's like. Because, when you stop to think about it, it's crazy the cyclical nature my life has taken. But if that's really what my life is like, if I'm going around in circles, it's more like a spiral that's expanding outwards. We're at the same place again, only we're enjoying those memories as we pass by. I'm here again, but I'm not the same person I was then.

And sometimes moving forward is going back.

But for now I have a ridiculously cute dress that I have been patiently waiting to wear and lunch with one of my best friends in Old School Land ahead of me. Can life get any better? I submit that it cannot!

"no need to wonder what's been on my mind"

It's 1230, my computer just crashed with my original post, and I still have at least an hour's worth of work ahead of me. I haven't been able to stop thinking for the past two weeks. You know my entire life can be summed up in song lyrics?

Our pastor today talked about the church community, the real relationships and true love and genuine trust we're supposed to be able to find there. Ever wonder what would happen if we stopped lying to each other? I try to be honest in my relationships, to be open, genuine, etc. etc. I'm wondering about what the next level's like. Do people really want to see the honest you (or me)? Aren't they more comfortable not knowing? Maybe I'll just adopt a policy of if you ask, I'll tell.

I was looking through my old posts, and I saw this that I wrote sometime in the fall:

Just pray that God makes it really really really obvious what He wants me to do. I know what I want to do and I know what will probably end up happening, but I want to make sure that I do what He wants. I'm scared that I'll just have to make a blind choice, and that God will show me *afterwards* that I made the one He wanted. I want to know before I do it.

When I was applying to colleges, I made a deal with God. According to the terms of this deal, I felt pretty good about whatever He told me to do. I guess I was just sure that He was going to clearly guide me into what He wanted me to do. Then I realized that this deal was *mine* and that I had set it all up for Him, and really, He hadn't agreed to anything. And when it came time to make my college decisions, I didn't have that clear voice of God telling me what to do. I just had to make the smartest choice on blind faith. As a result, I've had to spend days where the one thing reverberating in my head over and over again is, Why the heck am I here? Not why am I here in the existential way, but why am I here, at Michigan, doing the things I'm doing. Because the thing is, I don't feel God's guidance. I don't know what He wants me to do here. Right now I'm getting pulled through life by its sheer force, my faith tied to my wrist on a string, convincing myself that I did not make a mistake. A huge $40,000 per year mistake. I know I didn't. I would probably have that fear at any new school. The adjustment period, you know.

I felt like I should know what I'm supposed to be doing here by now. I feel like I should know God's reason. I feel like I should *hear* Him. And I talked to my sister about it, and she was amazing. She always was the more rational one. The thing is, after talking to her, I knew that it's coming. Whatever it is, whatever God has planned for me, I'll know what it is soon enough. "Yes I can see a light that is coming for the heart that holds on..." My faith is a string. It's so frail, it's so little, but it's holding up my entire life.

And even if it was a mistake, God knows how to make it better.

I can't stop playing the songs of my life over and over again in my head. I can't keep from returning to the convictions that mixed up my life in the first place. I can't stop thinking.

I blog a lot more. I talk a lot more. I almost started journaling again.
I'm looking for a friend.
I'm trying my best. I'm trying my best. I'm trying my best. I promise.