Road Trip!

This Friday I will be leaving on a road trip up to Houghton to visit my friends Abby and Ryan. I will be riding in a car with four other people. For about nine hours. One way. I'm not a fan of road trips, in general, but I'm trying to reason with myself that this trip will be fun. The following are some pros and cons. Let's start with a con.

I'm not a big fan of driving. I just want to be there, already. Driving is such a waste of time. You can't multitask at all. Well, you can't multitask very safely. I have in fact written out checks, wedding cards, and grocery lists while at the wheel. I have compiled said grocery list from flipping through a flyer. I have read the next page of my book, or the next chapter. Granted, all of this was (mostly) while traffic was stopped at stop lights or really long construction delays, but it's still probably not the safest thing ever.

On the other hand, driving with people is a much safer form of multitasking. You get to socialize while traveling. And if you're not the one driving because you're riding with people who actually like to drive, you can read or make lists or write checks with no major repercussions on the horizon other than maybe a little bit of carsickness.

I do get a little carsick sometimes when I sit in the back seat. Just in the nauseated sort of way. This comes from seven years in which I've mostly driven myself everywhere.

On the other hand, I have these acupressure wristbands that look like something out of a movie from the 1980's. They work. I won't have to spend the whole trip trying to sleep my way through the carsickness.

Speaking of sleeping, on the long trip down to Pennsylvania I have the back seat to myself. This means I can stretch out for naps. On the trip to Houghton, I won't be able to do that. I'll likely be sharing the back seat with two other people for the whole trip.

On the other hand, these two people I'm thinking of are Lisa and Mara. If I fall asleep leaning against the seat behind me and end up against one of their shoulders, it won't be awkward.

And then there might be sing-alongs, and reading out loud, and trying out our Office character skills, and those really deep conversations you can get into in a dark car when nobody has to make eye contact with anybody else. And at the end of the trip there are two friends waiting for us, and a weekend full of both invading each other's space in ways that will be good for the practice of patience and of spending time together in ways I love.

Sometimes I just need to talk myself into things to realize how great they are.

I don't get it

When I was 8, I spent a lot of time in “junior church.” Junior church, for those who haven’t been, is sort of like youth group, but for kids. So there is some attempt at having lessons and meaningful discussions, but mostly the kids get to run around and goof off in the basement, which is something those in the sanctuary above us would have frowned upon had we been up there.

I have a lot of junior church stories, because apparently most of my childhood church memories come from Oak Park. And I’m sure I’ve told the following story before, but it is one of the most prescient stories of my childhood, so it keeps coming up.

After the lesson, the free time was often spent with the boys chasing the girls around the basement. (It’s only now that I wonder if these were the mornings when the teachers had just been so overwhelmed that they were giving up for the rest of the day.) I distinctly remember one particular time when the boys were trying to snatch purses from the girls, and most of the girls were squealing and running. I, however, was standing firm in the center of the room, calling out to the other girls, “If you don’t want them to chase you, just stop running and they’ll lose interest!” A boy ran past me and grabbed at my purse. I yanked it out of his grasp and gave him a withering look.

This story is a good illustration of my personality on several levels, but for the purposes of this post, it's a good illustration of the fact that the guy/girl dynamic mostly escapes me. I don’t like the double-talk and the backstage chatter and the dissection of meaning. Not that I haven’t done it, because I totally have. But it just gets…*annoying*. And it often seems like such a pointless waste of time.

Example that inspired this post: overhearing a group of guys in the cafeteria at work talking about how “whipped” somebody was. I thought to myself, “This guy is either disrespecting the other guy’s girlfriend, OR he actually believes it’s really nice that the girl calls her boyfriend so many times a day, and this is a weird male way of expressing that.” I don’t understand.

And as the song says, “We don’t like what we don’t understand—in fact, it scares us.”

On a semi-related end note, if I ever am “seeing” somebody in the dating sense, and anybody starts calling him “whipped,” I’ll probably hate it so much that I’ll try to break up with him.

Summary: I don’t think I operate like normal girls.

Making It Right (part two)

I've been thinking more about my post from Thursday, and felt as though it could stand expanding. Because while the most important part of making things right is realizing that you can't do it alone, that's not all there is to it. I for one have wasted far too much time sitting around waiting for God to fix me without me having to expend any energy or put any thought into what's behind what I say is wrong with me. It's possible to do this with relationships, too.

For instance, I've had a lot of relationships that went south, without (or more usually with) my active participation. "Every time you raise your voice I see the greener grass," as Alanis says. Most of those relationships came back around after I had given up on them. I hadn't done anything, but they were given back to me as unearned gifts. This, combined with the fact that the way in which I chose to participate often got me into relational trouble in the first place, makes it easy for me to take a passive "wait-and-see" attitude. Which can be good. Sometimes. But it can also be making the other person do all the work, making the other person responsible to come to me.

On the one hand, over-passivity. On the other, over-aggressiveness, pushing people where they weren't meant to go. I try to walk the line.

If I feel that I have wronged someone and that they are aware of it, I trend towards one of the two extremes above: ignore it or go way too confessional. Either one just adds baggage. In the first case, I end up wondering how much the person remembers, how much our relationship is being affected in subtle ways, how much staying silent can be a form of lying. In the second case, I wonder what possessed me to reveal so much about my motivations and inner life to somebody who was really only wanting to hear "don't worry, we're still friends."

If I have wronged someone and they are unaware of it, sometimes it might be for the best to let them remain unaware. For instance, I had a college friend whose boyfriend broke up with her after telling her he thought she still had feelings for her previous boyfriend. Later, he felt the need to confess that really it was that he had just been using her to try to get over somebody else. I'm not sure that was helpful. I think sometimes we confess to make ourselves feel better, not to heal a breach.

There are situations in which total openness is valuable, but maybe those are only for very close friends and people who are planning to marry each other. My example for this: someone I know whose husband only told her he sometimes suffered from severe depressive mood swings after they were married. A confession that wouldn't have been about an error before marriage became a huge wrong after it.

I once heard somebody say, "People don't want your apologies, they want you." It has the ring of truth. I'm going to wrong and disappoint people, and they're going to wrong and disappoint me. And yet it's amazing what honesty can do. It's amazing how easy it can be to forgive and be forgiven when we repent sincerely and don't drag our self-protection into it ("I'm sorry, but I only did that because...").

Is there a simple 12-step program for forgiveness? No. But what if that's because it could be even simpler, if we didn't spend so much time complicating it?

What if it's as simple as love?

Making It Right

This might be the hardest part about life: people need people, but yet people disappoint people. 

I want to believe that people are more than what they seem, but maybe I'm making them up and they aren't even what they seem. I want to trust, but I have so many good reasons not to. A little voice in my head tells me people are out for what they can get from you, however they can get it; they will use you up and throw you aside without even blinking if you give them half a chance. (Don't think I exempt myself from this. I'll be the first to tell you I will let you down in almost as many ways as I let myself down, and almost as frequently.) Perhaps worse than the pain of disappointment is the self-inflicted pain of never letting people get close enough to disappoint you. Because they almost always get in under your guard anyway, and then you're hurt twice. 

People who need people aren't, as the song claims, "the luckiest people in the world." They are the only people in the world. And yet we are frustrated so often by our inability to connect in meaningful ways, by our shallow love and weak or nonexistent trust.

On Tuesday night some friends and I watched a documentary about a woman who used to be a stripper and a drug abuser and a lost soul, a woman who was pursued and loved by and in turn came to love and pursue a patient and gracious God. She now devotes her life to connecting with girls in the industry who are devaluing and debasing themselves. Some people in her community were not okay with this, as though God couldn't use somebody who had sinned so much.

"What could I do to make it right?" a friend asked me not long afterwards, a hypothetical question in response to the issue of hidden sins coming to light. "If you found out about something I had done that disappointed you, what could I do to make it right?"

The first answer that came to mind was "Nothing." It's the wrong answer. And the right one.

It's the wrong answer because it's not who I want to be, who I'm called to be. I may not have committed many of the big Socially Unacceptable sins, but I am daily guilty of selfishness, of loving myself above others, of trying to fix myself, protect myself, take care of myself, live by and for myself. Me. Alone. Nobody else. But if nothing can make it right between and among people, nothing can make it right inside of one person, either.

It's the right answer because it's not up to the people who have wronged me, directly or indirectly--how many people do we wound arrogantly, casually, not even thinking of them at all?--it's not up to them to make anything right. They can't. It's not up to me to make it right. I can't.

But I know someone who can. I know someone who suffered wrong but never inflicted it. I know someone who loves me and forgives me because he is more than big enough and more than strong enough and more than willing enough to do those things. "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

And so I will believe that people can be more than what they settle for, because God doesn't settle for leaving us where we are (even when we're happy to be there). God catches up to world-weary ex-strippers and world-weary "good church girls" alike. God won't leave us or forsake us (Deuteronomy 31:8), even when those closest to us forget us (Isaiah 49:15). God makes it possible for us to love people and forgive people and trust people even though we know what they are capable of because we know what we are capable of (I John 4:19). God gives us all we need for our fullest protection and empowers us to throw away the shadow-armor we cling to so fiercely (Ephesians 6:10-17). No, we are never going to attain perfection here and now on this earth. But here and now is not all there is (1 Corinthians 13:12). 

God makes it right. God uses implausible people. And the God who turns mourning into dancing can surely turn deep disappointment to even deeper satisfaction.

"For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life" (Romans 5:9).

When she was young

Several years ago I had a major computer crash, receiving the error message "Hard Drive Not Found." This had been the computer I had all through college, and had been the family computer before that. I had a lot of stuff on it. I was distraught. Fortunately, I also knew a computer geek named Micah who was able to rescue my data and put it on a CD for me. I uploaded a few things from the CD to my computer, put the CD in a drawer, and forgot there was anything else on it.

Fast forward five years, and I turned to this CD so I could send my friend Abby an electronic copy of the classic work "Cooking with Suzanne." I discovered there was far more on it that I remembered. I have work on there dating back to 1990. Let me tell you, my writing style was not always this (still with me?) gripping. In fact, some of the diary entries from the early 1990's are almost painful to read, managing to combine over- and under-description. But other bits are salvageable, and I will be sharing such bits with you where I find them entertaining.

To start off, here is an excerpt from a letter written July 10, 1993. I find this an amusing look into my 14-year-old world:

"Jeremiah and I went on the Indy Go-Karts, where the phrase 'speed-demon' explained itself. Jeremiah collided head-on with a wall upon coming down a hill, and my Go-Kart was bumped by another driver. I was very tense, and it seemed to me that I was the only one that cared about slowing down on curves and hills. I think I will be a much more responsible driver than any of the others, with the possible exception of Jeremiah. After the Indy Go-Karts Jeremiah and I (with Kathy this time) went on the Slick Track Go-Karts, Go-Karts on an ice-like surface. I hope I never have to drive on real ice, because slipping and sliding around made my neck ache."

Love and obedience

My first first-grade Sunday School class was something of a disaster. Or rather, two or three boys made enough commotion to make it seem like one while it was happening. I understand I'm dealing with a large room of six-year-old children, but it is still frustrating for me when they don't listen to me. 

Ironically, our lesson set this trimester is on obedience even when it is hard. Our Bible verse for the morning was "If you love me, you will obey what I command" (John 14:15). I wrote that without looking it up. I doubt anybody else in the class could repeat it back to me with all the commotion at the back table.

I was thinking a lot about that verse today. When I was a kid, I thought it was kind of harsh. "Love me means you do what I say"? Why not just have slaves? Why bring love into it? I read the sentence as prescriptive, another command on top of the long list of commands. 

But it isn't prescriptive. It's descriptive. It's like saying, "If you love me, you will like spending time with me" or "If you love me, you will speak well of me to others." The heart is always revealed in actions.

The boys I had the most trouble from today were kids I hadn't worked with before much, or at all. I had a few problems with some other boys, too, but when I would ask them to stop they would stop...at least for as long as they seemed to remember I had asked them to do so. Which is maybe as close to the spirit of that descriptive phrase as any of us can ever get here on this earth.

I'm thankful for the Spirit who strengthens our memories, and for being able to see him working in six-year-old boys who love me enough to stop throwing papers around. Even if it's just for a few minutes.

Don't make me turn this bus around....

Tonight while on Facebook I stumbled across a group for highschoolers. It's basically about how juniors and seniors are awesome and freshman and sophomores are so annoying. I hope they're kidding. I'm definitely going to give them the benefit of the doubt on that.

Because, seriously? High school. No one is as cool as they think they are. 

I was homeschooled, so I didn't really have major class system awe until I got to college. (I do remember thinking, as an 8-year-old, that 13-year-olds must have a much better grasp on the world. And that by 40 you had probably had enough time to figure everything out. Oh, little Suzanne! How sweetly clueless you were!) As a freshman in college, I was sure that the seniors knew everything that was really necessary about life. Things like what they were going to do after graduation, for example. 

During my first class of my final year of college, when we were going around doing the name/major/class rank introductions, somebody introduced himself as a senior. My first thought ("Oooo, a senior!") was quickly followed by a jarring, almost panicked thought ("Wait a minute! I'm a senior!"). That year I directed a piece for our theatre company's "Wandering Thespians" (we went into a class that had been studying that play/subject/etc. and put on a bit of a play). The three people involved were me, another senior, and a freshman who actually said something to the effect of "I can't believe I'm talking to seniors!" one time when we were sitting around companionably after rehearsal had concluded. My fellow senior and I looked at each other, shrugged, and tried to communicate that we didn't really have some mystical source of knowledge. I don't think he was convinced.

The moral of the story: Class rank doesn't mean as much as you might think. Physical age doesn't mean as much as you might think. And only sticking to one class or age range really limits you in your friend pool. 

So why can't you all just get along and stop being posers, highschoolers? After all, we'll always be whippersnappers to somebody. Or at least we will until we're old enough to be ignored by all the punk kids. (Will they say "punk kids" in 40 years? Keep this question in mind and report back to me in four decades.)

DISCLAIMER: Harvest highschoolers and family members who are still highschoolers, you know I love you. Or if you didn't, let this be your notice. 'Cause I do.

"I am today." -- Jarod

Since I needed to submit a headshot for the program for the play this October, and since Brittany is an excellent photographer, last night I went downtown and met up with her for a photo shoot. First we toured her office, located in an impressive brick building with a security guard and elevators and real wood finishes and giant open lobby-ish areas on each floor. Her office is full of books and nerds, which is excellent. Currently she works in an actual office with an actual door, and she dresses professionally, and altogether looks the part of a woman with a fulfilling career.

She introduced me to one of her co-workers as "my friend Suzanne...she's a playwright." I immediately felt like I was trying to pull some kind of con. I mean, honestly. Writing one play is just a fluke, right? There I was, trying to dress the role and seem like I knew what I was doing, but really I was so unprofessional and non-nonchalant abou this that I had been flipping out with excitement when I heard the news that my little play was selected.

When I arrived home that evening, I finished writing up my publicity homework. It took an excruciatingly long amount of time, mostly because I'm so conflicted when it comes to publicity work. I'm good at it, and it can be fun, but it can also feel too much like lying. And while it can be hard to write about other people or things, it's even harder to write about myself. (I've long confused self-deprecation for humilty and I am still trying to figure out what the latter really looks like.)

With all that said, today I'm thinking about image, and how we present ourselves to others. We tweak ourselves to fit different audiences. We try to make people like us. I've done more than my share of changing to fit an audience, and I always end up frustrated that I wasn't good enough for them in my normal state. I won't always be young. My face will wrinkle and (if heredity is anything to go by) my joints will weaken. I can't always be exciting, or funny, or intellectually stimulating, and it's tiring to try, to feel like people will only talk to you if you measure up to some invisible standard and will drop you as soon as someone more interesting comes along. 

I want to be truthful. It's so hard to be completely truthful, but I think it's even harder not to be, in the long run. I want to explore what it means to be all things to all men in a sincere way, like Paul did, not through manipulative self-marketing ploys but in finding the means to live contented. I want to let myself change for the better and to expect that the same thing is happening in other people. I want to allow plenty of space for pretending, but none for pretense. 

So am I a playwright? 

I am today.