my heart is a glorious machine;

Right, so, we're all familiar with the concept of alternate realities branching off from different outcomes of actions and decisions, but I was watching telly today and this background conversation in Willow and Tara's sociology class got me to thinking -- well, actually, it got me to pacing around the room talking to myself and gesticulating wildly and making happy squee noises of intense geekitude. Anyway, apparently they were discussing perception? It went like this --


Now, what the professor probably meant was that there are countless perceived realities, but what if alternate realities could also spin off of perceived realities as well as possible outcomes? Mind you, I know very little about this sort of theory, and I am by and large formulating these thoughts as I type, but -- what if for every perception there was an alternate reality in which that perception was truth? The problem with this is that a) it's confusing like whoa, and b) there are so many perceptions, many of which don't make very much sense. (Why hello there, Harry Potter, master of the incorrect assumption!) Would the perception have to reach a certain level before it could branch off into a separate reality? At the same time, what is reality but how we filter it? Think of Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, which shows four different versions of the same event. (Now, that wasn't quite the film I originally thought it was going to be -- I was picturing a treatise on memory and how four different people might remember the same thing differently, how they might notice different things, not how they might tell other people what occurred and therefore lie. Memory is biased, but less biased than telling. Only now I want to make the film that I thought this was going to be, using different colour schemes and angles and details and lighting for each memory --  Aaagh. Anyway.)

Also, I have ceased to make sense even to myself. Someone else say something? Am I completely off the wall? How interestingly could this be developed into a science fiction novel? :p

I think that every year around my birthday, I say something to the effect of, every year around my birthday, I fall headlong into a roiling pit of existential angst. Which is true, and seems to get truer with every passing year. You know how I say I miss being excited? I really miss being excited right now. My eighteenth birthday's in six days and I haven't got plans, I haven't got the nice bats-in-the-stomach shutting-the-door-so-I-can-wring-my-hands-in-excitement feeling that I always used to have. Though really it's the lack of plans that bothers me most, because as I have said many, many times, I am deeply ritualistic by nature. I like things to be Just So, and I like to arrange them, and surround significant days with significant rituals large and small. Last year Dad and I went to the city, and the art museum, and it was glorious, and I can't think of anything other than that, or anything more significant than that, and you know maybe I just want to get lost in some city somewhere and ride the subway without any destination in mind and take photographs of graffiti and people waiting for buses and lamp-posts and buildings with vines growing all over them and trees growing out of the pavement. I want to do something quiet that I won't have to recover from afterwards, something that has the flavour of watching the night sky at Grey Fox last year, or on the picnic table of the cabin in October, or walking through the art museum last birthday, or the walk I took by accident when there was almost rain and the sun was setting, or running through Pittsburgh at night with Dad trying to find a suitable place to eat before going to a concert sort of in a library, or watching Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet perform songs so strange and beautiful that my soul rose straight out of my body and fluttered birdlike over the amphitheatre.

(Maybe I should just say, Mum, Dad, can we just go driving around in the city for my birthday? And then we could come home and rent Once or something, and I could lie out on the roof and listen to something beautiful while the sun sets. Except, gas prices, reality, argh.)

And you can't create those incandescent moments; they come unbidden. I try to arrange them and they don't come; they're not like pigeons, you can't leave them crumbs and hope they'll come in flocks to collect them.

Furthermore it bothers me that I'm about to be eighteen, that I'm on the threshold of legal adulthood, and I haven't got much of anything to show for it. I don't like meeting people I haven't seen in a long, long time, because there is always the question, so, what have you been doing? And I have to fumble for things. What have I done in the past several years, besides little things? Sometimes the little things were lovely ones, but they were still little things, and I think, I'm the least grown-up person I know, and possibly the dullest. Other people go out and have adventures, or find adventures; I tell stories and make adventures out of the things that weren't. I haven't got a job and I haven't got any hobbies that get me out of the house, and even the hobbies I do have -- writing, photography, music -- I haven't exactly done much with. I think about going busking sometime, and then I think I'm too shy, and this city is too small anyway. I write a few words or a few sentences in the same story every two days or so. Sometimes I remember to take pictures of things. I don't work hard at it. I'm awkward in my own skin. I don't know whether I'm meant to grow into it, or take it in to fit.

And none of the people I am or pretend to be are the person I want to be, and they don't match up very well. I feel like a patchwork quilt sewn over another patchwork quilt with thick, black, awkward stitches.

Of course because I am too ritualistic I think that eighteen should be some sort of gateway, that I'll start solving my own puzzles and stop standing so crookedly and make something out of myself but things never turn out the way the patterns work. (Sometimes I wonder if there's an alternate universe in which I actually love mathematics, because all of the patterns and progressions and lists and arrangements don't mesh with me, haphazard and clumsy and messy and thoroughly literary, seeing and tasting in colours and emotion and intuition and photographs.)

Maybe I'll get a job, and finish a story, and find a college, and a major, and a purpose, and learn how to be excited again, how to love people, how to be optimistic. I don't know. I don't know.

2006 is nearly over; to the grave with it, I say. I've had enough. I'm quite ready to wipe the slate clean. Preferably with wire-wool and disinfectant. 

I've had my triumph, though, I reckon, but I can't think of this year without seeing Baby Jabez's makeshift grave in my mind, and Dad's office empty and the walls painted over, and sometimes it seems that the world is so thin and sharp and fragile, and I might cut myself on the bits of it, and yet other times it feels so vast and wonderful and also very strange, but not--quite--awful. 

You've had your glory moments, Banui, you stupid git; you know you have: Virginia Beach, being swept out of all that mad aftermath into a sort of dream world (even if your CD player did die from sand inhalation) and romping with midenianscholar; standing on that rooftop with the dim purple thin-sharp-smelling softly glowing city below you and the wind pulling the water from your skin. You've had glorious bicycle rides and those magic Saturdays cosied up with quilt and cocoa and chocolate and Neil Gaiman for the very first time, and that burning October, kicking up leaves in the road, and you are living in a hundred-year-old rectory: what could be more romantic than that? You can finally really call your musical tastes eccentric, you've sung in public twice, you've got several songs, words and music, to your name (even if you only wrote the lyrics to two of them), your writing voice is finally distinctive, you've got a fountain pen, you've got a kitten, you're wallowing in fandoms, you've got the best friends in the universe, and somewhere, even if you're having difficulty lifting the curtains, there is a God who loves you tremendously. Don't be daft. Sometimes, life is a marvellous thing. And grief and pain and struggle might be--oh, like all the rubbish you've got to put into soil in order for things to grow, or like, perhaps more aptly (even though you've stolen this one), the waves that smooth out driftwood into something beautiful and unusual; you've got to learn to ride them, is all, or learn how to float, or breathe, or something, and maybe the trick is that you haven't got to do your own breathing; maybe that's the only reason anybody ever gets to shore. 

Here's to a new year, with--so far--no mistakes in it.

but tension is to be loved
when it is like a passing note
to a beautiful, beautiful chord

So. 

In regards to my previous post, which I didn't have enough time to write properly and now have equally little time to explain properly--rather, I have worlds and worlds of time, but little on the computer--I'm not leaving Christianity, or the church. I'm a little sick of the church, though, seeing as I've been hurt by nearly every single one I've been to, including the church that claims to be there for the people who got hurt by the church. I wish I could take a break from it, and then go far enough away that I could find a place that suited me, with pastors I felt I could confide in, but that won't happen until college. I will go to whatever church my parents go to until I move out, because I know fellowship is important, but often I feel as if that's all I'm getting out of my churches. The sermons at our current church are--not often very meaty. Add to that the fact that my thoughts towards the senior pastor are somewhat less than friendly. (Many of the people, however, are wonderful. I don't ever mean to discount them.)

I'm just tired, I think, of all the extra stuff. I wish I could find and practice a sort of pared-down Christianity--one that doesn't have the modern trimmings and trappings that mean nothing--among people who don't see Christianity as a sort of subculture, a sort of conformity; people who don't believe that to be a Christian means to listen to certain kinds of music and read certain kinds of books and watch certain kinds of movies and dress in a certain kind of way. (I'm not talking about modesty, either. I like modesty. But I find it somewhat odd that there seems to be a certain manner of dress among most of the Christians I know--I can't explain it, exactly, but there's a weird sameness to it. The colours always seem to be the same sorts.) 

Sometimes I'm reluctant to tell people that I'm a Christian, not because I'm at all ashamed of what I believe, but because of the connotations the title itself carries. People think of uber-conservatives, religious freaks, the Crusades, Christian media, and they also feel a certain seperation. So, I'm a Christian, you're a Bhuddist, and you're a skate punk. And you're a businessman. Let's all hang out in our corners of the room, eh? I don't believe Christianity is a way of life. Believing in God--the real God, not some composite made of all the bits that interest or please you--is life. It's life, the way it should be. It's a regaining of some of what we were created to be. Matt Slocum said, "We forget how it is supposed to be: we were made for perfection." And then we sinned. Loving and serving God is reaching back towards that perfection; it's the only way to truly be human. And in a way, yes, that would make us different from other people, but it doesn't put us in this other box on the other side of the table. "I've found truth. Maybe someday you will, too."

Does any of this make sense? At all? My father and I had a long conversation about this on Sunday, and he actually agreed with a lot of what I feel. He says I would like the churches in Africa, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh--people are there to love God, to worship Him, and to fellowship and grow with other believers. There isn't the pomp and circumstance and materialism show that many modern American churches feel is required of them. I'm sick of 'worship' bands that get applauded after every song, and play like it's a concert, instead of encouraging the congregation to actually worship God. (I was pleasantly shocked when I visited midenianscholar's church--the worship band was stripped down, and the leader wasn't showing off. He was instructing the congregation on what the songs really meant, how they should fix their minds on God isntead of just the music. It was amazingly refreshing!) I've been growing more and more frustrated with how much show is going on at my church. Last week, we had worship, then a special song, then an over-long movie clip, and then the sermon. Once in a while, a short film clip or a song or a skit is great--it gives you a sort of context. But having such things every week makes me feel as if the church is trying too hard to entertain me. Life isn't all about fun. I like having fun (although my sense of fun is--twisted, seeing as I get insane joy out of sitting around with people discussing weighty topics), but not everything needs to be fun. And just because something isn't fun, that doesn't mean that it's going to be dull. As an example, I feel uncomfortable calling the film Hotel Rwanda, about the 1994 genocide, entertaining. It had me riveted. It was possibly the only film to have me sobbing at the end. It was not dull. But it was not fun. It was, however, important.

If I could create my own church--which would be kind of a mess, because I would make an awful pastor and definitely need someone older and wiser than me instructing us all--I'd put it in a beautiful, wide-open building. I'd have art on the walls--not always specifically Christian art, although some of it would be. The rest would have to do with Creation and joy and beauty--people enjoying themselves, alone or together, or images that symbolise things such as love, or hope, or paintings and photographs of flowers, trees, landscapes, mountains, et cetera. I'd have a lot of windows. That way, when people came in, they'd be struck by beauty, and see the beauty of God through the beauty of His Creation. I wouldn't have a worship band. I might have a guitarist, or a pianist, and a string- or wind- instrumentalist, and a singer. The songs wouldn't be so popular that all the meaning's been choked out of them--they'd be written to be easy enough for ordinary people to understand, but not overly simplistic--songs with actual doctrine in them. The senior pastor would be someone with a great deal of integrity, someone who is a man of prayer, of deep faith--someone who knows what he's talking about. And I don't know. Maybe most people wouldn't want a church like that. Maybe a lot of people would. I just want something that's real. 

Well. I think I've lost track of what I'm saying again. I guess my real thing is this: I wish, in a way, that I had never been a pastor's child. Being involved in the inner workings of the church makes it so that you see all the absolute worst of it. It gets discouraging, especially once you get old enough to understand almost everything that goes on. I think my father makes an incredible minister, but I wish I hadn't had to see all that I have. It's made me a lot more cynical than I would have liked to be, especially at such a young age.

I didn't update for days because I had nothing to say, except I do have things to say, loads of them, and yet I can never seem to untangle them into words clear enough to type. And I don't know, exactly, if what I want to say is lovely or dreary, or rain-grey tired, which seems to be what my life is, once again, descending into. I feel tired, and though I have a compulsion to write in my pretty new hardback notebook every night, there doesn't seem to be much life to it, and when I read it over in the morning I'm always dissatisfied. 

I miss being on holiday and having things and people and the city. Egad, I miss the city. Sometimes I feel so compressed in this little town that I feel as if I may go mad, and yet there are too many things that tie me to it: the Meholicks, the Peaceable Kingdom, my backyard, the shop where I take my guitar lessons, Dad's music friends (who I shadow admiringly). I suppose that wherever one goes, almost, one leaves a part of oneself behind, and while one may have one true home, one still feels spread about, with a bit of an anchor here, a longing for there. I miss Boston sometimes so much that it almost hurts, and it's not just the city-feeling, it's Boston (and the Boston area in general), even with the mad traffic and the madder politics; it's the flavour and the places: Louisa May Alcott's home, creaky floors and furniture preserved in frozen antiquity; New Bedford with its still-cobblestone streets; the jammed-together tumbledown houses, a hundred, two hundred years old, divided into apartments; the history, Paul Revere's tiny house gasping for breath amidst city traffic and skyscrapers; the subways with their grimy windows and graffitti and strange people, and the subway stations full of vendors and noise and advertisements and people. It's the culture: the sheer number of writers who were born in or who lived in Massachusetts for a significant time is staggering. The museums, the subway musicians, the free concerts, the way you walk into a shop and hear five different languages at once, or look across the cityscape and find a mosque, a Catholic church, and assorted temples--Jewish, Buddhist, and who knows what else.

You know? It wasn't the same in Virginia Beach, and it won't be the same in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles (although I would never move to California: no winter, and too much pop culture!). 

I don't know what any of this has to do with anything, actually. I'm feeling tired and nostalgic and tired, trying not to be depressed and failing. I watched television today, tried to read, ate a little too much, played the same song three times on my guitar. I'm so sick of this house, and yet the idea that we may have to leave it abruptly frightens and disconcerts me. And I hate, hate, hate this not-knowing, this not-planning, this too-familiar uncertainty: I don't know what I'm doing in a month, or two, or three; if we'll be getting back to our feet, or if Dad will still be looking for something. I'm counting on college as an escape: no matter what happens, I will get out in two, maybe three years. I hope it doesn't take that long, but I never know anything. It took five years to get out of New England. (And here I am, wanting so badly to go back. That's how I know there was something amazing about it: even after how awful most of my time there was, I still love it like mad.) 

I don't know what I'm saying, now.