Wednesday, April 2, 2008

A potpourri of thoughts and things.

This is going to be a really schizophrenic post, as I have about a million things on my mind that I want to blog about, but my thoughts are pretty muddled right now. So I'm going to do as best I can to make each point quick, bulleted in a way (but not literally) so you, the reader, don't hate me later.

+ Yesterday on the bus I drove by a house with plastic Easter eggs dangling from each branch in bright colors. It automatically flashed me back -- in that crazy movie effects kind of way -- to my childhood in Joplin, Mo., when we used to do the same thing. It was *our* tradition. We stopped when we moved to Nebraska because we didn't have a tree. But in my mind Easter was always those eggs, dangling, and chocolate eggs filled with marshmallow. There was no religion, no Jesus, nothing. Just dangling plastic neon eggs.

+ My grandfather's yarzheit is Sunday. He died one year ago, and some of you may remember that I couldn't attend his funeral for lack of funds and timing. It still hurts me that I couldn't make it, and it's so strange to think it's been a whole year. It seems that I'm on a cycle of change every year, and this past year is no different -- everything, EVERYTHING, is different than it was a simple 12 months ago.

+ It turns out that the World Evangelical Association posted a full page ad in the New York Times stressing how much the Christian world loves Jews and apologizes for not doing enough in the past. It then goes on to talk about converting them all, or else, you know, the entire world will suffer hell and damnation. This whole "we love you, now convert or you're damning us all" thing is getting old. It's the world's oldest guilt trip and has resulted in the mass murder of Jews on dozens of occasions. If you tell the world that Jews are awesome, but they need to convert and they just won't, what's the logical answer? Well, if there are no Jews to convert, then the world is a better place. I mean,
We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of theWorld (Acts 4:12).
... believe away. Please, do. But your precursing this with an apology for the destruction of my people throughout millenia doesn't make this any more light hearted. I just. I guess I don't know how these two worlds are supposed to not collide. I know plenty of Christians (some who are my closest friends) who are perfectly happy and well-adjusted as Christians and have never, not once, "preached the Good Word" to me. Why can't *all* Christians be this way? Feel free to chime in, oh Christian readers. There's also a great blog post by Yair over at the JBC about his response to this statement by the WEA.

+ I realize that I haven't really given much of an update on life other than grad school stuff. So what can I say? There's a lot going on. Monday of this week was great and I felt wanted by everyone I wanted to feel wanted by. Then Tuesday cloud 9 started to slip out from under me and from then on it's just been frustrating. It took all I had to not call in sick today. I just wanted to sleep. I get this from my mother -- if you sleep, the depression and anxiety fade away, right? But I knew that wasn't my answer. There's issues with my parents and that ever-irritating car that is in my name (as are the loans) but that they have ownership of (and are making payments on). It's a crappy situation, and I want to be out of it. There's the grad school decision (that is almost fully decided) and other things like stupid crushes. There's also budding friendships and poetry writing, but it's all so benign and unnecessary for the rest of the world to know about, that it just isn't worth the hassle of writing about.

So there we are. There are just a few of the things. Just some of them. I like to think that when I write things down, they'll be removed fully from my thoughts -- like a tumor being carefully removed by small incisions from caring, well-trained hands. But most of the time, writing things down just creates more thoughts and I'm left at this uncomfortable divide where I can't block things out, but I can't handle them anymore (and that's where the sleep comes in). But even now, I'm not sleeping well (do I ever?).

Anyhow, be well friends.