I can remember only a handful of times in my life when I’ve literally had nothing to say…. moments where words just won’t even form, and pictures were moving too fast to grab on. This wedding is one of them.  Everything is swirling so fast I can’t grab on to a picture to describe it, and things come to me in bits and pieces, not fully formed thoughts. So today even though I want to decompress, you’ll have to wait over time for tiny details, because that’s how they’ll come to me, too.

I will say that the wedding went even better than rehearsal, and I was relieved, because you never rehearse the vows beforehand. Cory told me that I was easy and clear in terms of the repetition, which meant so much to me. The only mistake I made, which in my mind is hilarious enough to laugh about now, is that I accidentally told Bryn to say Cory’s name instead of her own. Luckily, she caught it. I said, “well, you might want to say your own name…” We laughed, and moved on. That’s it. That’s the sum total of dumbass attacks on my part this trip. I had a script, and I stuck to it, most of the time without looking up, because I wasn’t the focus. They were. To do anything to take focus away from them and put it on to me was unwelcome in my eyes. I hope that I was able to be heard in the back, but even if I wasn’t, there’s only two people in the world that had to hear what I was saying.

It’s like there’s this secret between the three of us, that only the three of us know how much significance to put on that memory. For those few minutes while they were taking their vows, we were the only three people in the room (well, the outdoors, anyway). I am very glad that I came early and spent time with Cory before the wedding, because I wanted to know whether he was the guy that was capable of marrying someone like Bryn, and I say that with stardust in my eyes… she’s not a person, she’s an event. When Bryn asked me if I’d do the wedding, my first thought was oh God no…. but that was because at that moment all I saw were pigtail braids. She was obviously way too young to get married. As the pictures in my mind of her aged up, so did my response.

Luckily, Cory turned out to be every bit the man she promised, and I was happy to do the ceremony. It would have been awkward if I’d objected, so I am really glad I never had to… he’s just amazing. He had to find out whether I was for real, too. He was nervous about getting a friend to do the wedding he’d never met, because the stereotypical “my friend’s doing the wedding” usually means that it’s unprofessional and lacks legitimacy. He told me that he didn’t know how seriously I would take it. I did, though. Meaning I did take it seriously AND that I knew how solemn an occasion it would be for both of them ahead of time, and to hold on to that feeling.

The only thing I wish I had practiced was my handwriting. Their marriage certificate certainly wasn’t made any more beautiful by my carpal tunnel pile of garbage.

I did, however, manage to get it “write” on the one line that mattered.

Signature. Of. Officiant.

Last night was the rehearsal dinner, which went marvelously because blocking was one less thing I had to worry about. The wedding planner had it covered. Standing next to the groom while waiting for everyone to file in was an amazing feeling…. as if a part of me was on the ground, and a part of me was floating above, recording it for posterity.

The weather was clear and cool as we all did our parts to make everything flow smoothly tomorrow. But even if it doesn’t, it will still be all right. A wedding is an event that has its own flow, and you just step into it, and kick with the speed of the current. A dog is going to bark, a baby is going to cry, an anything could turn into a thing. To fight it is to court disaster.

It seemed to be over before it began, even though we ran the service several times. I didn’t say much of what I was going to say tomorrow, because I wanted everyone in the wedding party to go to the wedding, too…. it also kept people from wasting their time when we could be eating chips and dip.

I’m just going to have to mind my robe. It’s a bit long, and I don’t want to fall into the bride and groom at any point. It would be mortifying, but over time, I’d joke about it, too. I just have my mom in my head telling me to be careful.

Speaking of my mom, I’m using her old suitcase and I found one of her ponytail holders in it while I was packing. It’s around my wrist, under my watch. She’s with me in spirit.

As is a small piece of Argo, because I remembered a conversation we had in which we talked about going to the coast, and the subject came up elsewhere. It’s like all of my losses are becoming the rocks under me as opposed to over, because thinking of them and wishing them good things is lifting me up from what was once an enormous well with weights holding me under.

Taking time in the desert, wandering toward my path rather than away from it, was just the thing I needed to do to feel this healed, remembering everything through fondness and not enmity. My world crashed and burned around me, but it has been an impetus to build something stronger in the ruins.

When it is over, this wedding will become a part of my self-confidence that I’m moving in the right direction and not the wrong one. We get few signs we can see from God and point to them as moments, but this will be one of them.

I know. I rehearsed it.

I can honestly say that I feel incomplete without Dana while walking through Portland, especially with a family we both know and love. She is my phantom limb, because everywhere I look, a story runs through my mind, this seemingly-eternal conversation because when we talked, it was always a tennis or bowling match. We took turns with our favorite details, or one of us would set it up and the other would knock it down. We had a knack for comedy, an innate sense of who got the punchline because it sounded better in that woman’s voice.

Being Southern, we also never let the facts get in the way of a good story…. in the words of Armistead Maupin, jeweling the elephant. Details over the years began inflating… you know, like in a fishing trip where you catch an enormous fish and after ten years, you say that it was 10 or 20 pounds heavier? But it would only happen in the interest of making people laugh harder.

I also think about her a lot because hello… I’m officiating a wedding. I really had an aversion to a big wedding to her, and not because I haven’t dreamed of a pipe organ, brass section, and full choir since I was a teenager. It’s because while I don’t think this all the time, it is the place where I was the most internally homophobic. It was what if we planned a wedding, and they laughed at us or wouldn’t come? And, of course, I never really figured out who “they” were. I hate myself for thinking that way, but when Kathleen and I got married, you cannot believe how relieved I was that only my dad and my sister were with me. Barely a whisper, and incredibly meaningful. The only reason that my mom wasn’t there is it was a Sunday after church and she had her own church job. My mom might not have been as on board with the whole gay thing as I would have liked, but that would never have gotten in the way of attending a moment that important in my life. She would have recognized it wasn’t about her.

I think that as I began to wrap my brain around it, I would have been excited and giggly. It was being utterly caught off-guard by Dana talking to our priest about it without talking to me first. I know Dana well enough to know that it was just as spontaneous on her end, because we don’t plan things in advance. We’re both attracted to whim. We’re ADHD, so it’s one of the things we do best. I know for a fact that she did not mean to hurt me, and definitely didn’t know my thoughts & fears on the matter. What I learned about marriage was in the years we were together, not a ceremony. I learned by breathing it…. hour by hour by hour….. year by year.

Part of what happens with divorce is that you’re not only grieving backward, you’re grieving forward. A rock sits on my chest when I think of all we gave up. There were excellent reasons for it, but those reasons do not come with any kind of pain relief or inflammation reduction. If only acetaminophen and ibuprofen could handle emotions. For now, the best it gets is Klonopin, where it doesn’t stop my mind, but stops the physical reactions, like cortisol levels going through the roof, racing blood pressure and heartbeat, and being buried under all the lost jokes, all the lost laughter, all the best parts of knowing someone as if they are part of you.

I grieve the part of myself that died, because I am no longer the person I was with when I was with her and lose it when I pretend/predict how we would have grown. Tennis matches that would have added to our collection. But this grief, just like all my others, doesn’t go away. I just change in my reactions to it. Sometimes it feels like movies play in my head in the stories that might have happened, and I smile because they’re just as funny as when we were together. I just judge myself on how close I got the essence of our humor in my head. Like knowing after seven years and change of being married how close I got in what I think her  response would be…. but never when I’m sad. Only when I am thinking about the Laurel and Hardy we became. When my mind divides itself and I’m both sides of the conversation, she’s still funnier than me. I am proud of myself for getting to the point that what she would think of x or y is no longer my first reaction.

I have pushed it down to third or fourth. Progress.

We’ve worked together and lived together, so there are very few experiences I have that there isn’t a joke between us, so the new memory connects to the old and my mind drifts, saying her punchline.

The difference for me is now when I think of her, I only remember her hilarity and nothing about the, ummm, unpleasantness. Because first I lost my best friend in the world, and I never mistake the part for the whole.

I just saw the most disturbing scene of my whole life, and I hope never to repeat it.

It was shopping day. I went to a repair shop and got my “dress up” Mickey Mouse watch I’ve been meaning to fix for three years patched up. I got my old glasses fixed at the place where I got my new glasses that won’t be ready for two weeks so I’m not blind my whole “vacation.” I went to Dollar Tree and got enough food to last me a few days, including mini chocolate bars and bubble gum for the plane… disappointed they didn’t have the smoothie packs I use every morning… If I’m not allowed through security with mini chocolate bars, TSA can have some fun on me.

So, after this incredible feeling of “I’m gettin’ shit handled,” I’m driving home, cruising down University and slowing down for a red light. All of the sudden, a young Indian woman starts running across the street between cars, about 100 feet behind the crosswalk- against the green turn light- and is bulldozed over by a car that was going toward the left turn lane.

Luckily, she was just hit by the front of the car and the tires did not run over her body. She was able to get up and walk to the median, as people start running from the far side of the street to help her. Someone runs up to the car that hit her to make sure he doesn’t get away, and my light was green before I got to see whether he just rolled up his window and drove off, or whether he actually turned around to call the police.

I’ve heard of people getting hit by cars my whole life, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it happen. In the state of Maryland, the driver has, at best, only partial responsibility for the accident because he hit a jaywalker. The law says that the driver only need pay medical bills, etc., if he or she was the cause of the accident. I just hope the driver was a good Samaritan and waited until the police and ambulance arrived.

I was terrified for the girl, because whether it was her fault or not, it was excruciating to watch. She was carrying lots of stuff, and, on impact, dropped all of it. In skiing, we call that a “yard sale,” and the description was apt in this case as well. Hair ties, her hat, and her shopping bags all crashed to the ground, and the contents spilled into several lanes.

Possibly for the first time in my life, I got intense road rage, because all these people are picking up stuff in front of my car and the cars behind me are honking at me to go. I suppose I can’t really be mad- they weren’t aware of what had just happened and couldn’t see the pedestrians in front of me. Wait, that’s not true at all. The car behind me must have seen what happened, and was still just a giant dickhead to me.

Surely they could’ve seen that a full-size sedan did not have enough feet in front of him to brake to a full stop as the girl was running, trying to make it before my light turned green.

In the nanosecond after the accident, I wondered if she was dead. It took her a minute to get up, and I audibly sighed with relief. I’ve never been hit by that many pounds of metal, so it was shocking in a good way to see that she didn’t seem permanently injured…. although it’s probably too early to tell. She may have been walking on adrenaline and imagination, and could conceivably have a brain bleed as well.

It’s hard when you see something like that and say to yourself, “she should have known better,” because you know you’ve let your judgment impede your compassion, at least for a second…. It was hard to tell how old she was, though. She could have been anywhere from 15-30. Perhaps she was just naive, and perhaps she was distracted by seeing people she knew on the other side of the street. Whatever it was, I am sure that we will both be mindful of properly using crosswalks from now on.

I have to admit that when I bought a ticket to go see the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs play the Sugar Land Skeeters, it was a circuitous route. Apparently, there is a new baseball team in Portland called “The Pickles,” and because I knew I wouldn’t be in Portland long enough to see a game, I wondered if they would come east.  They, in fact, will not. It’s not even the same league. So, I’m looking through the Blue Crabs’ schedule and notice that my home town team (though put in long after I left) is going to be in Maryland the weekend after I get home from Bryn’s wedding. The ticket was less than $20 ($13 plus all the fees they seem to make up), a great price to see my two of my three favorite states duke it out.

For those that are unfamiliar with the area, Sugar Land is a suburb of Houston to the southwest, in one of the country’s fastest growing counties, Fort Bend. It’s called “Sugar Land” because it was the home of the original Imperial sugar factory. My family moved there the summer before I started 11th grade, and I ended up going to school there for a not so small reason- Houston traffic. The rule that you had to live in HISD to attend HSPVA was put in action when I was in 10th grade, so I was grandfathered in if I wanted to stay. However, the thought of commuting 45 minutes (more if the traffic was bad) to school seemed daunting since I’d just gotten my driver’s license.

It was not a small decision to switch schools, because back then I didn’t know that the symphonic band at Clements was actually better than the one I was currently in. They didn’t have a jazz band, so I auditioned for choir, instead. My two claims to fame from those years are that I was the first student to be in the top band and the top choir at the same time, and the first student to be openly gay.

I didn’t know that I was the first to be out, though. I learned it when Lindsay was a freshman at Clements, the year I was a freshman in college. Apparently, there were a bunch of kids with rainbow ribbons on their backpacks and Lindsay asked them about it. She told me that they said, “we do it in honor of this kid, Leslie.” You could have knocked me over with a feather. In retrospect, I’m not sure I’ll ever do anything more important in my life than pave the way for others to be brave in a conservative Republican suburb.

During my 11th grade year, I went back into a very large closet and told no one, because in a magnet school like ‘PVA, none of my church friends and school friends crossed over (as if it wasn’t obvious just by looking at me….). My senior year, my dad left the ministry and all bets were off. I wore my pride rings every single day, I flirted with girls (one in particular), and to my surprise, no one thought anything of it. The reason I was so surprised is that HSPVA was a nightmare (this is a link to a paper I wrote my senior year about my time at ‘PVA) some days. On others, it was fine.

I owe Sugar Land a lot in terms of my growth and development, but not sure I owe it enough that I automatically believe the Skeeters should win. 😉

It’s a little before 1300, and I’ve already had a day and a half. I lost my glasses this morning, and somehow I knew I was going to find them with my shoes. I was, in fact, correct. I’d put them on my laptop’s side of the bed and they’d fallen off. I’m looking for them frantically when all of the sudden, I hear a crunch.

I got in touch with Zenni, and they’re sending me new frames and a tool to pop the lenses out of my old ones for free. But then I thought I might be able to get new glasses quicker at the local shop. So, I go and their next appointment is Wednesday at 3:00. I go ahead and make the appointment, because I need a spare pair, anyway, and I have vision insurance. I can only hope that they are better quality than Zenni… and probably will be, because I can try them on in the store, rather than having to guess. The keyhole bridge glasses I have kind of make me look like that guy you avoid because you think he might be a perv. Such a disappointment, because online they looked so cute and timeless. Instead, they take up my whole face. If my hair was really long, they might be acceptable. Right now I look like a Marine recruit without even meaning to…. my hairapist got a little scissor happy.

My hair grows fast, though, so I really don’t have anything to worry about. And I still have prescription sunglasses for driving. I’ll just have to look like a perv at night. God, doesn’t that sound appealing….

Despite my hair being that short, it actually is really cute on me, as long as my glasses are small & cute as well. At least I only have to wait 7-10 days to get them back. Though my appointment at my local shop isn’t far away, my lenses take a while to make (I’m guessing) because they’re prisms. It usually takes three or four weeks for me to get them online.

But the real anxiety was hearing the crunch under my feet and knowing I hadn’t stepped on recycling.

I have one last shot at getting glasses sooner, and I’m about to leave to go see if it works out. I had my eye exam at LensCrafters in the mall, and I think my prescription is valid. I just need to see if they’ll take my insurance for frames. This is not how I wanted to spend my day, but it’s a necessary evil.

When I said a prayer asking for relief from grief, I suppose I should have been more specific.

It seems as if there is no limit to the amount of grieving I can do, and it’s not for lack of wanting to stop. I listen to peppy music, I go for walks, I do everything I’ve been taught to change my mood, and yet, my mind still wanders back to the days I lost Dana, Argo, and my mother. No one ever dies conveniently, but it was a body blow to lose my mother when I was still so lost in the throes of grieving the loss of my wife and my friend, and in Dana’s case, both.

Dana was my best friend in the entire world the whole time we were together, but officially for almost four years before we admitted we were in love with each other and didn’t just love each other. The rumor mill started long before that, but when I met Dana and we first started hanging out, my heart had been marinated, grilled, and handed to me on a platter. I didn’t have room for that kind of love in my life, and a best friend fit the bill nicely. I didn’t realize until probably two years had gone by that I was stopping myself from dating because I’d rather hang out with her. There were too many things to explore, like hiking and endless amounts of Trivial Pursuit in every genus imaginable, and in various states of sobriety.

In terms of driving out The Gorge, we called it “hiking o’clock” and “beer-thirty.” McMenamin’s Edgefield was halfway between Portland and Multnomah Falls, so generally we’d stop there on the way home for a pint. Multnomah, though, was only our starting point because there was an easy parking lot. We’d start there, then end up

somewhere over Wahkeena Falls or Angel’s Rest. At Angel’s Rest, I laid down on the rock and Dana held onto my ankles as I tried to get the perfect shot, because the rock pointed downward at a steep angle… and I can’t remember how we came up with it or when, but it was repeated that day. The setup is either one of us having to call our fathers. “Steve (or David)? Dana (or Leslie) was bein’ a dumbass and got herself killed.” The colors in the photos I took that day aren’t nearly as rich as they were in person, because back in those days, camera phones took quick and dirty pictures, not semi-professional quality like they do now. Although I will say that for a two megapixel camera and 640×480 resolution, this shot isn’t terrible. You know why I don’t have a better one? That was the longest, shittiest hike I’ve been on to date, and I am reticent to do it again. First of all, from Multnomah Falls, it’s about a mile and a half to the trail head to go up to Angel’s Rest. Second of all, it’s about an 11 mile hike round trip. On the way back, it started raining cats and dogs. Soaked to the skin, we almost cried when we got back to the trail head and realized it was still another one and a half miles to the car.

But, no pain, no gain, right?

There are too many funny stories between Dana and me, but right now the ones on my mind are about taking pictures. The setup on the first is that you have to know Dana loves genealogy, and I, to put it succinctly, do not. To me, it’s kind of boring. I let my grandfathers do all the work and just listen when they’re done. Dana will do things like call up historical societies. She did so and found out that one of her ancestors was buried at Beth Israel cemetery in Portland. So I had this bright idea that we should go and take pictures of the headstones with a “light dusting of snow.”

I’m laughing so hard I can barely breathe now…

We start driving and I forget that SW Portland is at a much higher elevation than SE, and when we get there, we are fuckin’ KNEE DEEP. We pull up in front of the caretaker’s house and Dana rings the doorbell to see if he can help her locate her ancestor’s headstone. He says, “where were you four hours ago?” It’s starting to get dark and the snow is falling even harder.

Tears are starting to roll down my cheeks now.

She asks if he has a map, and he says, “not one that you can read.” Dana gets all indignant thinking he’s just being shitty to her and tells me as such when she gets back in the car. I said, “it’s probably because it’s in Hebrew.” A light dawns in her brain that we’re at BETH ISRAEL CEMETERY. We decide that it’s getting too dark to see anything, anyway, and start home. We end up having to pull off to the side of the road to CHAIN UP due to my brilliance. It was a nice idea, anyway.

Another of my brilliant ideas turned dumbass attack was in Sacramento, California. Counselor, Dana’s sister, lives there, and we’d gone to visit her and the parents. We used to have code words that meant “get me the hell out of here” when being with family became too much for either of us (introvert and ambivert that we are). I said the code words and off we went for a drive. I think we went to a liquor store because as the resident mixologist, I was usually the one that made drinks for everyone in the afternoon. On the way home, we saw this field of sunflowers, and I told Dana to stop the car. Since we were on the highway, she knew I’d found something I wanted to take a picture of…. something I did often. To Dana’s credit, she ALWAYS stopped…. and didn’t leave me there, not even once. 🙂

To get the highway out of the picture, I crawled down into the gulch and before I knew it, I was past my

ankles in mud. It didn’t bother me, because I’d learned early that if you wanted a great shot, sometimes you had to pay for it. How much did I pay, you ask? Well, once I was that deep in the mud, I couldn’t get back out. I tried everything I could to struggle upward, because I’d just gotten new running shoes fairly recently and they needed to last me for a while. After about ten minutes, I finally realized that the only way I was ever going to see Dana again was to untie them and try to get my feet out that way. I managed to successfully get my feet out, but when I reached down for my sneakers, they were stuck as if superglued. Dana saw me walking across the highway in my socks to the convenience store where she parked. I opened the door and she looked at me knowingly. “…but I got the shot,” I said. I can’t remember whether she said anything or just sighed. If she just sighed, I promise I knew exactly what she meant.

One of my birthday presents came early; it’s an American Giant rugby jacket… basically a hoodie without the hoodie part. I chose the rugby jacket over the hoodie because I, in short, wanted to. Yes, AG is known for “the perfect hoodie,” but I already have several and my Irish national team rugby jacket is on its last legs. Plus, the black puffy jacket I already own is also rugby style, so I won’t have the hood poking over it, which I have found in falls/winters past that it doesn’t look that great. I’m going to be wearing it a lot, what with the Maryland fanatical devotion to air conditioning and it’s supposed to be down into the 60’s tomorrow because of a HUGE storm that’s already here. Flash flooding is already happening, and I’m glad I got out early this AM to go to the pharmacy.

There are always people who think they can drive in this kind of weather without being able to see the street. That way, they drive into three feet deep water, hoping against hope that their little Ford Damnits survive… #dumbassattack

Getting home before the storm really picked up was a smart decision, because I can’t go without my medication. Withdrawal is nothing short of craptastic… headaches, nausea, chills, the WORKS. Oh, and I had to pick up some shampoo. So there’s that.

I also went to see Dunkirk a few nights ago, and though there’s not much character development, the cinematography is exactly what it feels like to have been there. It was as if there was a sand filter on the lens, adding to the tension. You’re literally on the edge of your seat with fear as people get shot, drown, pilots overhead making crash landings into the water and onto the beach. It’s sort of a summer blockbuster, but it feels more like a documentary, because it doesn’t seem like liberties are taken with the story. There’s no made-up romance, no fictional backstory. Just the horror of war, and plenty of it.

My favorite line in the whole thing comes from this exchange:

-Is it going to work?
-We’ll know in six hours.
-I thought the tides came every three hours.
–Well, it’s a good thing you’re Army and I’m Navy.

…and that’s pretty much all the comic relief you’ll get. Good luck. God bless.

Although I will tell you that I was way less terrified than in the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan… so there’s that.

Also reading several good books- the rest of the Jane Whitefield series and Al Franken’s new book, Giant of the Senate. All are fascinating in their own way. Jane is a guide who gets people off the grid. Al Franken is a guy that gets you fired up about saving the country.

Haven’t written for the blog since Sunday because I’m trying to flesh out Sarah Silverman from the time she blows chunks into the class fish tank. The book itself is called Fish Ralph, what her class calls her the rest of the year.

Other writers say to “write what you know.” I remember middle school. All of it. But Sarah is not a reflection of me, she’s her own person, and I like spending time with her.

Since I don’t have an agent, I may try to get it into Amazon on my own… but that’s putting the cart before the horse, because only Chapter One is complete.

It has a Harry Potter sort of arc, because even though it’s not fantasy, if the first book takes off, there is every bit the chance that the books will grow up as she does. But don’t think for a moment that her nickname will ever change. Kids don’t forget. Anything. I just don’t want to, again, put the cart before the horse and publish a complete series before I know if it resonates with people or not.

I write my blog for me. Novels, on the other hand, are, in an ideal world, supposed to make money.

Lindsay has been bugging me to work on this novel forever, because she genuinely wants to see what happens to Sarah. Now THAT is a compliment, my friends.

And on that note, Sarah is calling me. I better get back to her. You know how middle school kids are…..

Everything is starting to feel more and more real as my ticket to Portland is secured, my ordination papers have arrived, and in the next week or so, my wedding wear will be delivered as well. After checking with the bride, I chose a simple white monk’s robe with alb and cinctures (ropes that go around the waist rather than a stole). An alb on the robe means it’s basically a long, Catholic/Anglican hoodie. If you’re not married by someone in a hoodie in Portland, is it really a Portland wedding?

I also chose the clothes of an altar boy (basically) rather than a priest, because though the Church of the Latter Day Dude is legal, I don’t feel like I’m ready to put on my big girl clothes yet. Let’s save the stole and the ministerial robes for later, when I am ordained “Dude CC.” I came up with that. You can use it. Free.

I would have chosen brown over white, but it wouldn’t have matched anything else anyone was wearing, and I wanted to blend in, not stand out… even though a brown hoodie is my synecdoche for the city.

A synecdoche is a device in poetry where you use the part for the whole, like calling a car “wheels.” In this way, the wedding is syndecdoche for what I believe is my whole life’s work. Even if I’m never ordained, I’ve learned more about what I think of scripture by writing to you than most people do in years of schooling…. because then, you learn a lot about what other people think of scripture and it takes another few years to develop your own spin.

I don’t do it without help, though. I have many volumes of William Barclay’s work on my Kindle, as well as John T. Robinson, A.W. Tozer, Paul Tillich, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of the books I’ve bought from smile.amazon.com (so that part of my purchase goes to Doctors Without Borders) have been recommended by guests on The RobCast and On Being with Krista Tippett.

What is interesting about Tozer is that he received his first call to serve a church without attending seminary or being ordained. I suppose the tradeoff was that it was in Nutter Fort, WV. There’s nothing wrong with West Virginia- it’s lovely. But when people ask where my church is, the last thing I want to escape my lips is “Nutter Fort.” Although, with my history of bipolar disorder, maybe it would be fitting. At the very least, hilarious.

It wasn’t until 1950 that he even got a degree. He taught himself everything he missed in high school, college, and grad school. It wasn’t until 1950 that he was given a Doctor of Letters from Wheaton College… and he began his ministry in 1919. We don’t believe a lot of the same things, but his story in and of itself is inspiring.

I also look to my father’s mother, who went to college while raising four kids and was invited to stay on as a biology professor, but didn’t want to move away from Lone Star and needed a job closer to home. She became a lab technician at the local hospital, where she jokingly called herself “the blood and tinkle lady.”

I learned this from talking to my grandfather on his birthday, another marathon conversation in which we covered everything from family stories to how we both reacted to Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. He said that he thought it was for younger people.

I’ve been thinking about that one line for days now, especially as I approach my 40th birthday and what I want my second act to become.

More kind, certainly. More loving. More open. Less quick to focus on the J in INFJ. Learning to ask for help before I need it rather than waiting until the absolute last second when I’m about to drown to admit that something might be wrong.

I can only think about what I want my life to look like emotionally, because physically, I am stuck. I am considering everything from high-power IT job to busboy. It doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to write every day, being able to further my work in the world that is only mine.

I think I need someone to look over my resume, because I’ve gotten a few bites, but not enough to actually lead to anything. It’s not fair- I’m too talented to be overlooked, and yet, I am. All the time.

Although I think I will go back to cooking, if only for a short while. I realized that I missed it when I looked at all my water bottle mix-in packages and I’d cut them all on the bias. I was also making pasta the other day and used food-grade scissors to chiffonade turkey and basil.

It was the first time I’d cooked anything in almost a year. I tend to run on sandwiches and snacks, because with Filipino, Indian, and Cameroonian roommates, the kitchen is rarely free. One of my roommates commented that she’d never seen me cook anything and wasn’t sure I knew how. I told her that I’d cooked professionally and she said, “well, you keep saying that, but I’ve never actually seen you do it.” I didn’t say anything. I just made aioli from scratch. I miss my Popeye forearms.

I also miss being able to eat whatever the hell I want because the job is such a workout that you need that level of caloric intake. Because first, there’s the dance with the brigade. Second of all, there’s the sauna that all kitchens are.

It’s like doing Zumba crossed with Bikram yoga for ten or eleven hours at a clip.

How did we get from A.W. Tozer to garlic mayonnaise?

It’s ok. I doubt I can turn water into wine at Bryn’s wedding. But if I do, I will go down in history as the second coolest preacher ever.

It feels like it’s been eons in writing days since I’ve posted, but you have to know that it’s hard for me to come up with something to write ABOUT. My life is currently very small, and I like it that way. I don’t get into any trouble. Prianka and Dan are off traveling… well, that’s not exactly true. Prianka is off traveling, and Lindsay is, too (I think… last time I saw a picture of her, she was in Costa Rica). Dan is in Vermont at a Russian language immersion camp, and won’t be back for over a month. I have tentative plans to get together with Ingrid and Leslie #1, but we haven’t firmed up dates yet. However, Lindsay will come back soon and it is possible that she will be in Portland the same week I am (fingers crossed).

Before I finish this entry, though, I thought I’d post a picture of myself that I took with my web cam. The reasons are twofold. The first is to prove that the web cam on my computer is not as shitty as I thought it was. The second is that I haven’t taken a profile picture in a long time, just using old ones because I’m not as wrinkly (I’ll be 40 on Sept. 10th). In short, this is what I actually look like this year. I’m one of those lesbians that looks like a ten-year-old (maybe 15) boy until you get close enough to see that I’m going grey and I have bags under my eyes, and wrinkles that thankfully go up, because I got them from laughing so hard. In this picture, you can also tell that I actually own boobs. That’s a rarity, because the more I dress like a boy, the less I get hassled by them. It’s so odd to be a lesbian in the world these days, because if men think you’re “one of the boys,” they won’t even bother coming up to you. And yet, flirting with boys is one of my specialties, as long as it doesn’t go anywhere. Attention is attention, and their humor is different than women’s. Not better or worse, just different. But if I make the effort to look all girly and cute, it’s way more male attention than I ever bargain for. Thus, the strangeness. Also, when I’m “all nellied out,” men seem to think I’m hitting on them even when I’m just being nice, polite, and Southern… which is not always, but often, all the same thing.

Thus the conundrum of what to wear to Bryn’s wedding. I’ve never been an officiant before, although I have “worn it like I stole it” in one memorable worship service, and even though I am a Dudeist Priest, I doubt Bryn and Corey want me to do their wedding in a bathrobe and jelly sandals (well, I haven’t asked…. maybe they do). Believe me when I say that I’m going to be good at this. I have done just enough worship services to have confidence that this wedding WILL go off with a hitch (see what I did there?). For the rest of my life, no matter how many weddings I do (Dudeist or UCC), I’ll always be able to say that my best friend’s was the first. She says she already knew that… asking me wasn’t a coincidence. I told her I already knew that, because I could read her like a book. And it’s true. I had a feeling that was the case.

I believe in my talent because I was “trained” by the best. It’s not just having watched my dad all those years (although that helps, certainly). It’s having a UCC pastor that was OFTEN willing to hand over the pulpit to me, and not just that. Letting me do the whole service front to back, from bulletin to benediction. Throwing me into the fire was the best education ever, and I think the reason she did it was because she knew I was testing the waters for my own career, trusting in my past (it worked). The only thing I’ve ever wanted to prove to myself is that I am just as talented as my dad (it worked). Though preaching is my passion, there is nothing in the world like writing a call to worship and hearing the congregation read them back to you in unison. It is seriously better than drugs, even caffeine.

The thing I’ve got to work on is refining my style. There’s nothing like manuscripting a sermon and flipping two pages at once and not realizing it…. and yes, I’ve done it. I also fell down the stairs to the pulpit after one of my sermons, and that was even more memorable than anything I’ve ever said…. both to me and the 300 people watching.

I also really love doing children’s sermons. One Sunday I pulled out a map and asked the kids how many different ways there were to get from Portland to DC. They traced their fingers along the highways and said there were so many they couldn’t count them all. I said “that’s how many ways there are to get to God.” The light bulb smiles that followed were priceless.

At Bridgeport, the pastor does not usually give what we used to call “the offering pitch.” It’s a member of the congregation who generally tells a story about how much the church has meant to them. I told the story of Jamie Brabham, an usher at our church in Naples, who, if he thought you didn’t give enough money, would pass the plate down again. As people howled, I said, “no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.” And that’s when I realized I didn’t have one damn dollar on me. #dumbassattack

This reminds me of my favorite Lindsay story. I’d just gotten my driver’s license, and it was my job to shuttle her back and forth to church. One Sunday she was the one who put money in the plate, and then leaned over to me and whispered, “can we go to Subway for lunch?” When I nodded yes, she said, “but you have to pay for lunch because I paid for church.” Dear Jesus did I have trouble keeping it together after that.

That was the year my father was pastor of Christ United Methodist in Sugar Land, where it would be remiss of me not to celebrate Lahonda Sharp’s retirement after 33 years. Lahonda was my choir director, as well as my mother’s. Though she and my mother got along famously, what I really remember about that time in my life is the comedic routines that exist between a choir director and a pastor. My dad and Lahonda routinely cracked people up like Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. Bonus points if you get that reference, and the bonus is that you’re old.

I hope that by the time I’m ready for my own call, or ready to start my own church plant, that I have someone I can “shake and bake” with, too.

Now that my mom is gone, I have run out of ideas. But that’s ok. I will meet that man or woman someday. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t met them yet. One step at a time.

Starting with a wedding.