042411 -- Along for the Ride
Apr. 24th, 2011 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I was late again to work today.
Now, this time, it was not my fault. And I wasn't even that late. Now, missing Easter service? Totally my fault. Set my alarm for 7:45 in the morning, woke up with the alarm, turned it off and somehow went back to sleep. Woke up at 9:05 and felt horrible, until I really thought about it and realized I couldn't be rational with myself. I mean, really. I was expecting myself to function on a whole day with a half-hour of sleep. So I cut my losses, set my alarm for 11:15 to get to work on time, and went back to bed.
Woke up again at 11:45, WITHOUT my alarm. Now, if i had been at Brookover, I would have probably made it. But I was at the 'rents house, with a bag to pull together, no food to take with me, and a dog who needed a bathroom break. I clocked in at 12:06. Not horrible.
Besides, WHIZ has no Solicitation and Distribution policy, or at least not a strict one like my other job does. Which means I can read my Bible here.
Am I mad about missing church? Yeah. But this week wasn't without church, as they had a Good Friday service, and it was late, praise the Lord. So even though I missed the 'praise the Lord, He is risen' part, I did get to see the bad part of the story. And I cried my way a good portion throughout. I cried when I saw Brent for the first time in ages. And it made me sad inside that he wasn't doing what he wanted to be doing. This was a man I had tremendous respect for, the Mark Smith of my high-school days, who had quit his pastor job to go to Jamaica...and that had fallen through. He's driving a truck now, for crikey's sakes.
And it draws some striking parallels with where I currently am. Neither of us particularly want to be taking calls at six in the morning or driving trucks, but that's what God has us doing right now. I remember when I did my talk at Navs, speaking on how "no matter what God has us doing, let us do it for God." I remember why I signed up for the job in the first place. And I know I have to do it for God. But it's so stinking hard when my entire schedule is messed up and I spend way more time with myself than with anybody else.
I was talking to a friend Thursday night (online, of course) and he got me thinking about my future. Jobs. Careers. Because I was basically an idiot for majoring in music. And I will have to pay for that mistake for the rest of my life. Sure, I might not have a lot of debt or anything like that, but I have a degree I'm not sure I can use. I'm not using it now. And you all saw what happens when I'm alone for too long. It doesn't get pretty.
He asked a good question. What do I want my career to be? And at that moment, I had to leave him alone, because I started crying again. I'm Emily. I never wanted a career in the first place. I consider going from job to job to be a glamorous thing. I know I can't take money from me, so having enough to get by and to make an occasional purchase is good for me. Nothing like this spend-easy girl who escapes to Polaris because she hates Zanesville. (Nothing wrong with the escaping. Everything wrong with the spend-easy.) I knew that this wasn't my permanent home, so why try to invest in it?
I wanted my career to be God. And that night, I realized that fact was still true. That's why Brent can drive trucks, and I can work at a call center, and why Matt Stuckey can work at Starbucks. Because we don't actually have careers. We have a passion.
Meanwhile, I'm late to work on Easter Sunday, after sleeping right through service. It's nice and warm outside, but also rainy, which means it's feeling like April. Which also means that today reminds me of EVERYTHING I HATE about April. But then again...isn't everything I hate also everything I love? The Lost Magnum. Len. The 18 Days. If I could go back and change any April I've had, maybe I'd make tweaks, but I wouldn't really change a thing. Because April is right before May, and May is right before summer. May is when the flower blooms. (Seriously...wherever I move to, I don't care. I just want an amusement park there. Both MemR and TTR readers know differing reasons why. They're all true.)
Despite all of that, despite all I've been through, I've come through on the other side. I know what -- or Whom -- I stand for. That moment I realized I still wanted my career to be God, I lost every tie to this world that I could have ever built for myself. Because God calls us to be not of the world, but of Him. There's a clear and distinct difference all through Scripture. And it's not an easy thing to do. But for me, I've made it as natural as not-being-a-Christian. Sure, it's easy for me to go back to being 'normal,' since I was raised that way, but it's also now easy for me to go back to God. Because He's always there, with His arms open.
And I think I've finally figured out the crucial point. Excuse me while I bawl all over RIngo.
I love Sarah Dessen. I've always loved Sarah Dessen, from the first moment I read her. I heard through the grapevine (perhaps my sister was a ringlet) that her books were very good. I tend to categorize teen girl fiction into two groups: supernatural romance (even Maximum Ride fits into this, and yes, we're talking about you, Fang) and gossipy high school true to life story (we're talking you, Gossip Girl). Both genres equally turn me off, and I always try to find something in the middle. I knew Dessen's books were more the latter than the former from said grapevine, but the books themselves looked pretty thick, which is always a good sign in my book. If you're going to spend time writing a book, WRITE the book. Not that more pages means more substance, but put one of Dessen's books up against Pretty Little Liars and you'll see what I mean.
The first one I read was Lock and Key...which was quickly followed by This Lullaby, which is my favorite so far (HATE SPINNERBAIT!), and then Just Listen. One thing I really noticed about the novels were not only how well-crafted they were, but how Dessen spins her worlds together much like an episode of OFF/Track. Characters make guest appearances in the other novels all the time, and it's not a constant thing, but it just seems natural.
I quit with Dessen for a little while after my library habit shifted over to a you-pay-too-many-fines-so-just-buy-the-book habit. But at Kroger the other day, they had a display up with information on Dessen's newest novel, What Happened To Goodbye, coming out in hardback in June. To help promo it, they had four of her other books on sale -- Lock and Key, Just Listen, and two I hadn't read yet. I jumped at it -- because at Kroger, you get the books for cheap.
The first one I read was The Truth About Forever, and then I read her second-newest one, Along for the Ride. Dessen's books are pretty characteristic, but different all the same. They're all first person, narrated by three-dimensional characters who go through changes, see things differently with boys, friends, their moms. Along for the Ride is about a girl named Auden who spends way too much time studying, and on a whim decides to go to the beach with her dad for the summer. I'm not going to spoil any of the rest, but I do have to type a certain paragraph because, like my 'career is God' moment, it just kind of smacked me in the face. Yeah, I cried at work, at four in the morning. So what.
"Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder -- if not impossible -- to lose."
The minute I read that paragraph, I knew exactly what it was talking about.
It finally made sense. God can't use music in my life. It's still got that predisposition, that if I make music, I better be pretty damn good at it, even famous, or else it is a waste of my time. Using music becomes all about music and not about God. It becomes about me, standing on a stage, worrying if I can make enough money with it. Maybe God's picking "B" for me. Mostly kidding on that part, as I doubt He would want me to quit.
But since I've started music, waaaaaay a long time ago, it's always been something only I can understand. Because of my synesthesia. No matter how I try to connect to people with it, I can only get so far, because they don't experience music like I do. And I get frustrated when people can't see the beauty of my music, when to them it's not even a beauty at all. But God understands that beauty. It's been my place to run and hide whenever I've been stressed. And maybe Jake is right. Music is my way of connecting with God, whether it's pop or rock or J-pop, as He transcends the language boundaries. When I listen to music, I am connected with God. And I need to relearn how to use that for God, if I'm ever going to really use it.
But I know now my career can't be music. It needs to be God. And I have a better feeling of what God wants me to do right now, since music is out. See, I can't fight for my music. It's always been easy. Whenever I try to get my music out there, I'm super-shy about it. I still run and hide when I play it for people. Maybe that's okay. Maybe my music is only supposed to be heard by God. And I need to learn to be okay with that. So after Almond Dust, I think I might take a nice good long break from trying to be ridiculously famous. Not because my music's not good. I know that from going to Nashville. But I need to put it in perspective.
In the meantime, reading that passage made me realize what, perhaps, I should do instead. What I have the courage to do. See, I still run and hide when I play my music, but I have no trouble getting up in front of people and reading an excerpt from a book. When I think of music publishers, I want to throw up. When I think of manuscripts and rejection letters, it makes me think of throwing a bonfire. With music, I'm always making it alone. Writing is something I can share, not just because more people do it, but because language is something you can share, colored letters or not. Reading came easy to me, but writing did not. Whereas I was creating melodies from an early age, I had to do the writing thing from scratch. I vaguely remember Hilliard, maybe even Fishers, and trying to write out a recipe for peanut butter and jelly on one of my mother's recipe cards. I couldn't get any further than the first letter in each word. After I finally got the difference between P and R down, I wanted to write all the time. I wanted to create books. As Little Rabbit, I had a dream where I was standing in the Holy Land (yes, that same bookstore in Easton...it's been there a long time) and having God speak to me through the pages, saying that someday, I would be there as well. I wanted to write novels. Synergy. Bittersweet Daliram. That translated into NaNoWriMo. When I got to Miami, I didn't stand up for my music after long. I did at first, but then it was shoved in a corner. But I did stand up and say, "No freaking way am I writing another novel-in-a-month alone." That's when I decided to become an ML, and lead NaNo in Oxford. Whereas my music got slammed with criticism, and I kept making it for myself, I always wrote with the intention of reaching people. Even if I wasn't very good. I knew I was horrible at times. The Maristar Project sucked, but I'm rewriting it. I remember how relieved I felt when I finally finished the first volume of Spangler in Dorsey Hall. Editing that same novel in a PT Cruiser on my way back from Florida. Ringo's a crazy laptop. Whereas Manzana, my desktop, has always seemed like a music creator, Ringo's been a writer, and that is something we have been able to bond over. I create music sporadically over the years, yet I have been keeping a constant journal since the summer of 2007, the summer I met Jesse.
I know I didn't make it to Easter service. But that's okay. I'm sure it is. And I know my fingers will hurt after I write this. They're even now starting to hurt just a bit, especially in the left part of my hand. But that's why God gave us paper. Sam Siree. Karen Russell and Suzannah Perks. And Michelle Simmons. And my job. I can't make music at my job, but I can sure as heck write a rough draft.
I know what I want to do now, or perhaps what I need to do. I need to wait for Dylan. I need to see what he's doing with his New Jersey stuff. And then, if he makes it in, I am quitting my day job. I am moving with him to New Jersey, and I am finding a coffeeshop. And then, I am writing the world's next great novel, uninterrupted, just me and Ringo and whatever notebook I have and lots and lots of double chocolate chip frappucinos. And if he doesn't make it in, I might just still do that. Because life isn't about the choices we make, or even who we know here on Earth. It's about the journey we make with God, where He leads us, and what He's got us doing. I don't need to sit through some service to discover that, especially a service I'm going to sleep through because it's at an awkward time.
Maybe I'll move to Charlotte. Maybe I'll get a new part-time job and write nonstop. Maybe I'll stay at my current job down there. Maybe I'll move to L.A. Or New York City. Or Prometory, Utah. Because with writing, you can do it anywhere. A move is not required. You can do it in Zanesville or Oxford or on a space station. And, no matter where you go, there is a NaNoWriMo group, I can all but guarantee it. I just hope, wherever I go, that it's not too big that they want another ML. Because, at this point, I can't see myself doing the event without helping to lead it. But if I can't, I understand that too. I'll still wear my hat and my shirt and pound out words like the dickens (literally) all November long.
As I subtly realize I have a script to finish, and I've been here for an hour. Whoops.
In the meantime, while I write, the music soundtrack on my computer will continue on. And together, music lines of color will blend together, weaving with the lines of color I write here, creating one strong thread, a tunnel of magnificent color that only I can see...but here, right now, you can understand what I'm writing, and that in itself is a miracle.
Now, this time, it was not my fault. And I wasn't even that late. Now, missing Easter service? Totally my fault. Set my alarm for 7:45 in the morning, woke up with the alarm, turned it off and somehow went back to sleep. Woke up at 9:05 and felt horrible, until I really thought about it and realized I couldn't be rational with myself. I mean, really. I was expecting myself to function on a whole day with a half-hour of sleep. So I cut my losses, set my alarm for 11:15 to get to work on time, and went back to bed.
Woke up again at 11:45, WITHOUT my alarm. Now, if i had been at Brookover, I would have probably made it. But I was at the 'rents house, with a bag to pull together, no food to take with me, and a dog who needed a bathroom break. I clocked in at 12:06. Not horrible.
Besides, WHIZ has no Solicitation and Distribution policy, or at least not a strict one like my other job does. Which means I can read my Bible here.
Am I mad about missing church? Yeah. But this week wasn't without church, as they had a Good Friday service, and it was late, praise the Lord. So even though I missed the 'praise the Lord, He is risen' part, I did get to see the bad part of the story. And I cried my way a good portion throughout. I cried when I saw Brent for the first time in ages. And it made me sad inside that he wasn't doing what he wanted to be doing. This was a man I had tremendous respect for, the Mark Smith of my high-school days, who had quit his pastor job to go to Jamaica...and that had fallen through. He's driving a truck now, for crikey's sakes.
And it draws some striking parallels with where I currently am. Neither of us particularly want to be taking calls at six in the morning or driving trucks, but that's what God has us doing right now. I remember when I did my talk at Navs, speaking on how "no matter what God has us doing, let us do it for God." I remember why I signed up for the job in the first place. And I know I have to do it for God. But it's so stinking hard when my entire schedule is messed up and I spend way more time with myself than with anybody else.
I was talking to a friend Thursday night (online, of course) and he got me thinking about my future. Jobs. Careers. Because I was basically an idiot for majoring in music. And I will have to pay for that mistake for the rest of my life. Sure, I might not have a lot of debt or anything like that, but I have a degree I'm not sure I can use. I'm not using it now. And you all saw what happens when I'm alone for too long. It doesn't get pretty.
He asked a good question. What do I want my career to be? And at that moment, I had to leave him alone, because I started crying again. I'm Emily. I never wanted a career in the first place. I consider going from job to job to be a glamorous thing. I know I can't take money from me, so having enough to get by and to make an occasional purchase is good for me. Nothing like this spend-easy girl who escapes to Polaris because she hates Zanesville. (Nothing wrong with the escaping. Everything wrong with the spend-easy.) I knew that this wasn't my permanent home, so why try to invest in it?
I wanted my career to be God. And that night, I realized that fact was still true. That's why Brent can drive trucks, and I can work at a call center, and why Matt Stuckey can work at Starbucks. Because we don't actually have careers. We have a passion.
Meanwhile, I'm late to work on Easter Sunday, after sleeping right through service. It's nice and warm outside, but also rainy, which means it's feeling like April. Which also means that today reminds me of EVERYTHING I HATE about April. But then again...isn't everything I hate also everything I love? The Lost Magnum. Len. The 18 Days. If I could go back and change any April I've had, maybe I'd make tweaks, but I wouldn't really change a thing. Because April is right before May, and May is right before summer. May is when the flower blooms. (Seriously...wherever I move to, I don't care. I just want an amusement park there. Both MemR and TTR readers know differing reasons why. They're all true.)
Despite all of that, despite all I've been through, I've come through on the other side. I know what -- or Whom -- I stand for. That moment I realized I still wanted my career to be God, I lost every tie to this world that I could have ever built for myself. Because God calls us to be not of the world, but of Him. There's a clear and distinct difference all through Scripture. And it's not an easy thing to do. But for me, I've made it as natural as not-being-a-Christian. Sure, it's easy for me to go back to being 'normal,' since I was raised that way, but it's also now easy for me to go back to God. Because He's always there, with His arms open.
And I think I've finally figured out the crucial point. Excuse me while I bawl all over RIngo.
I love Sarah Dessen. I've always loved Sarah Dessen, from the first moment I read her. I heard through the grapevine (perhaps my sister was a ringlet) that her books were very good. I tend to categorize teen girl fiction into two groups: supernatural romance (even Maximum Ride fits into this, and yes, we're talking about you, Fang) and gossipy high school true to life story (we're talking you, Gossip Girl). Both genres equally turn me off, and I always try to find something in the middle. I knew Dessen's books were more the latter than the former from said grapevine, but the books themselves looked pretty thick, which is always a good sign in my book. If you're going to spend time writing a book, WRITE the book. Not that more pages means more substance, but put one of Dessen's books up against Pretty Little Liars and you'll see what I mean.
The first one I read was Lock and Key...which was quickly followed by This Lullaby, which is my favorite so far (HATE SPINNERBAIT!), and then Just Listen. One thing I really noticed about the novels were not only how well-crafted they were, but how Dessen spins her worlds together much like an episode of OFF/Track. Characters make guest appearances in the other novels all the time, and it's not a constant thing, but it just seems natural.
I quit with Dessen for a little while after my library habit shifted over to a you-pay-too-many-fines-so-just-buy-the-book habit. But at Kroger the other day, they had a display up with information on Dessen's newest novel, What Happened To Goodbye, coming out in hardback in June. To help promo it, they had four of her other books on sale -- Lock and Key, Just Listen, and two I hadn't read yet. I jumped at it -- because at Kroger, you get the books for cheap.
The first one I read was The Truth About Forever, and then I read her second-newest one, Along for the Ride. Dessen's books are pretty characteristic, but different all the same. They're all first person, narrated by three-dimensional characters who go through changes, see things differently with boys, friends, their moms. Along for the Ride is about a girl named Auden who spends way too much time studying, and on a whim decides to go to the beach with her dad for the summer. I'm not going to spoil any of the rest, but I do have to type a certain paragraph because, like my 'career is God' moment, it just kind of smacked me in the face. Yeah, I cried at work, at four in the morning. So what.
"Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder -- if not impossible -- to lose."
The minute I read that paragraph, I knew exactly what it was talking about.
It finally made sense. God can't use music in my life. It's still got that predisposition, that if I make music, I better be pretty damn good at it, even famous, or else it is a waste of my time. Using music becomes all about music and not about God. It becomes about me, standing on a stage, worrying if I can make enough money with it. Maybe God's picking "B" for me. Mostly kidding on that part, as I doubt He would want me to quit.
But since I've started music, waaaaaay a long time ago, it's always been something only I can understand. Because of my synesthesia. No matter how I try to connect to people with it, I can only get so far, because they don't experience music like I do. And I get frustrated when people can't see the beauty of my music, when to them it's not even a beauty at all. But God understands that beauty. It's been my place to run and hide whenever I've been stressed. And maybe Jake is right. Music is my way of connecting with God, whether it's pop or rock or J-pop, as He transcends the language boundaries. When I listen to music, I am connected with God. And I need to relearn how to use that for God, if I'm ever going to really use it.
But I know now my career can't be music. It needs to be God. And I have a better feeling of what God wants me to do right now, since music is out. See, I can't fight for my music. It's always been easy. Whenever I try to get my music out there, I'm super-shy about it. I still run and hide when I play it for people. Maybe that's okay. Maybe my music is only supposed to be heard by God. And I need to learn to be okay with that. So after Almond Dust, I think I might take a nice good long break from trying to be ridiculously famous. Not because my music's not good. I know that from going to Nashville. But I need to put it in perspective.
In the meantime, reading that passage made me realize what, perhaps, I should do instead. What I have the courage to do. See, I still run and hide when I play my music, but I have no trouble getting up in front of people and reading an excerpt from a book. When I think of music publishers, I want to throw up. When I think of manuscripts and rejection letters, it makes me think of throwing a bonfire. With music, I'm always making it alone. Writing is something I can share, not just because more people do it, but because language is something you can share, colored letters or not. Reading came easy to me, but writing did not. Whereas I was creating melodies from an early age, I had to do the writing thing from scratch. I vaguely remember Hilliard, maybe even Fishers, and trying to write out a recipe for peanut butter and jelly on one of my mother's recipe cards. I couldn't get any further than the first letter in each word. After I finally got the difference between P and R down, I wanted to write all the time. I wanted to create books. As Little Rabbit, I had a dream where I was standing in the Holy Land (yes, that same bookstore in Easton...it's been there a long time) and having God speak to me through the pages, saying that someday, I would be there as well. I wanted to write novels. Synergy. Bittersweet Daliram. That translated into NaNoWriMo. When I got to Miami, I didn't stand up for my music after long. I did at first, but then it was shoved in a corner. But I did stand up and say, "No freaking way am I writing another novel-in-a-month alone." That's when I decided to become an ML, and lead NaNo in Oxford. Whereas my music got slammed with criticism, and I kept making it for myself, I always wrote with the intention of reaching people. Even if I wasn't very good. I knew I was horrible at times. The Maristar Project sucked, but I'm rewriting it. I remember how relieved I felt when I finally finished the first volume of Spangler in Dorsey Hall. Editing that same novel in a PT Cruiser on my way back from Florida. Ringo's a crazy laptop. Whereas Manzana, my desktop, has always seemed like a music creator, Ringo's been a writer, and that is something we have been able to bond over. I create music sporadically over the years, yet I have been keeping a constant journal since the summer of 2007, the summer I met Jesse.
I know I didn't make it to Easter service. But that's okay. I'm sure it is. And I know my fingers will hurt after I write this. They're even now starting to hurt just a bit, especially in the left part of my hand. But that's why God gave us paper. Sam Siree. Karen Russell and Suzannah Perks. And Michelle Simmons. And my job. I can't make music at my job, but I can sure as heck write a rough draft.
I know what I want to do now, or perhaps what I need to do. I need to wait for Dylan. I need to see what he's doing with his New Jersey stuff. And then, if he makes it in, I am quitting my day job. I am moving with him to New Jersey, and I am finding a coffeeshop. And then, I am writing the world's next great novel, uninterrupted, just me and Ringo and whatever notebook I have and lots and lots of double chocolate chip frappucinos. And if he doesn't make it in, I might just still do that. Because life isn't about the choices we make, or even who we know here on Earth. It's about the journey we make with God, where He leads us, and what He's got us doing. I don't need to sit through some service to discover that, especially a service I'm going to sleep through because it's at an awkward time.
Maybe I'll move to Charlotte. Maybe I'll get a new part-time job and write nonstop. Maybe I'll stay at my current job down there. Maybe I'll move to L.A. Or New York City. Or Prometory, Utah. Because with writing, you can do it anywhere. A move is not required. You can do it in Zanesville or Oxford or on a space station. And, no matter where you go, there is a NaNoWriMo group, I can all but guarantee it. I just hope, wherever I go, that it's not too big that they want another ML. Because, at this point, I can't see myself doing the event without helping to lead it. But if I can't, I understand that too. I'll still wear my hat and my shirt and pound out words like the dickens (literally) all November long.
As I subtly realize I have a script to finish, and I've been here for an hour. Whoops.
In the meantime, while I write, the music soundtrack on my computer will continue on. And together, music lines of color will blend together, weaving with the lines of color I write here, creating one strong thread, a tunnel of magnificent color that only I can see...but here, right now, you can understand what I'm writing, and that in itself is a miracle.