VEDA is over and I am so happy to be back to blogging.  I’ve missed it here.  But, I’ll only just say hello before I wave goodbye again.

I wrote a version of this post a week ago in anticipation of this day.  I knew then that I needed a break.  I don’t know why people normally unplug, but between a daily vlog, two blogs, dailybooth, tumblr, and twitter, there has been a lot of me on the internet this month and in the background of it all, I’ve been falling apart, putting myself back together, and then falling apart again.

I love having this whole internet life and, even more so since VEDA, this amazing group of people who make me laugh and listen to me be pathetic.  I think I just need to take a minute to find some peace and face things instead of distracting myself from them.  In other words, dear internet, it’s not you, it’s me.  Yeah, that old line.

I’m not actually unplugging.  I mean, I’m only human and I need the internet for work and school.  But, I’m going to disappear from everything except for email.  You can still reach me there.  Otherwise, I’ll see you in a week or so.  Love your faces.

Do you ever feel like you could talk for days and still not say everything on your mind, all while knowing that if anyone took you seriously enough to sit you down and say, “okay, spill,” you’d have to backtrack and say, “oh, well, I don’t really know where to start” and then they would say, “start anywhere; start from the beginning,” and then you would go silent and they would just stare at you?

Fall is approaching like a tidal wave, there is so much to do, and by the time my next day off comes around, I will have worked 11 days straight. But, really, it’s none of that.

It’s, well, that’s the problem.  I don’t know how to explain what I feel.  It’s always something and it always feels new.  I’m not anxious really.  More restless.  And I’m so unconfused about most everything that the few things floating right outside my grasp are taking up 95% of my thoughts.

People confuse me, which is not my passive aggressive way of saying I hate people or what is this world coming to? I read this description once of INFJs that we like our external world to be very orderly, I think as a way of dealing with the dynamic and inconsistent way we feel inside.  My external world is full of these things I can place into categories and order and reorder however I see fit, but people, who I let in more and more all the time, don’t follow that order. They throw me into chaos, which is exciting, but exhausting.  I like people in my life who I can depend on.  People who always let me know where I stand. And since I’m quite selfish and tend not to bother with people I don’t like, that leaves a small group of people who I care about, but who unsettle me, no matter how much I try to figure out exactly how they fit into my life and shove them into those boxes.

I also have a lot of what am I going to do with my life thoughts plaguing me.  Or maybe not so much the what right now, but the how.  I used to think things like, I just want to be happy, but then I became happy and found out there’s a lot of life left to figure out. Sometimes it’s as silly as thinking that I want to have the kind of life where I see every good new movie that comes out.  I think these thoughts are my way of dealing with my current schedule, which is so rigid and stuffed full that it doesn’t allow for many decisions.

I can see I make the mistake of trying to force things to be settled and at peace when they can’t and don’t need to be, but I guess that’s how I deal with things.  And maybe now that so many of the pieces are fitting together, I’m in a hurry to have the whole puzzle complete.

If instincts are intended to protect you from harm, then I have good instincts.  There are a lot of people who struggle to say No, but I’m really good at it.  It comes out of my mouth before I can even think something over.

But, in protecting myself from harm, I too often protect myself from fun and excitement and the things I want.  I don’t like conflict or drama or looking stupid or asking too much of people, so I don’t put myself out there.

I know all of this, so I try harder to stick my neck out.  With encouragement, I’ll wander further away from home.  But, at the slightest rejection or disappointment, I retreat.

After retreating, I realize that whatever I was scared of really isn’t that big of a deal.  I see that I overreacted.  I see that I almost lost out or did lose out, because I ran when I should have stood my ground.

All of this results in a lot of confusion.  I try to fight my instincts when I see them doing me more harm than good, but I can’t always tell the difference between putting myself out there and subjecting myself to unnecessary pain and embarrassment.

I think things over and over until they only become more confusing to me.  I go back and forth trying to decide whether to risk more or retreat.  One extreme or the other, because I don’t want to do nothing.  It’s hard to decide whether to do one thing or the complete opposite of that thing.  Strange to think any question worth asking could be answered legitimately in two such opposed ways.

I make so much of the decision and in the end it makes no difference, because it’s hard to move on from things you want and I don’t trust my instincts anymore.

I hate to be completely unoriginal, but I love the Fall.  It’s my favorite time of year.  Southern California doesn’t pull it off very well, but I can pretend.

As last Fall approached, I was overwhelmed with feelings of dread.  I was nervous about starting a PhD and worried I’d committed myself to working too much, but what I didn’t tell anyone was that I was stressed to death about money.

This Fall is so different.  I can do the PhD thing.  I can do the work thing. And I am so close to being out of debt.  I’m still anxious about a lot of things, but mostly just excited.

Here are some of the things I have to look forward to this Fall:

• Amazing classes. This is my last year of coursework, so I was torn between taking the classes I’m most interested in and the ones that will better prepare me for teaching or, more immediately, passing qualifying exams.  I went for the classes I was most interested in, which means I’ll spend my semester studying death, atheism, and democracy.  It’s a weird thing I do here.

• Two-day weekends. I’ve been working six days a week since the beginning of the year, and I am not a fan.  Really long hours I can handle, but never having a break, because you have to spend your only day off catching up on sleep and laundry and homework is wearing.  It makes me feel like I’m on a hamster wheel.  This semester is as crazy as ever, but I somehow managed to pull off two day weekends and I will be defending them with my life.

• I get to see Vampire Weekend at the Hollywood Bowl in September. I do love Vampire Weekend and I have always wanted to see a concert at the Hollywood Bowl.  I forget that I used to be a very big concert goer in higher school and college.  It’s a habit I accidentally dropped when I became broke and left my concert buddy in another state.  This is my first concert in more than a year.

• Meeting bloggers. First Alex and then Bri.  If you’re going to be in the area, please let me know, because I’d love to meet you.  We just had our Southern California VEDA Meetup yesterday (video here).

• I’m going to Washington in October for a wedding. Maybe Southern California doesn’t do Fall well, but the Northwest most certainly does.  I won’t be there for long, but I hope to get a chance to visit my undergrad, because there’s a reason all of their promotional pictures are taken in the Fall.  Seeing my oldest friend get married will be pretty cool too.

• Getting out of credit card debt. I am doing everything I possibly can to make this happen by the end of the year, but the weird thing is that I’m not just looking forward to the end date.  I’m looking forward to these last four months of going for the goal.  I know no one believes me, but there’s a part of this getting out of debt thing that is actually fun.  All the same, I can’t wait to be out: to have accomplished what is probably the hardest thing I have ever attempted and to have my money be my own again.

• Whatever magic comes my way. My blog tends toward the things not going the way I want them to, because those are the things that occupy my mind, the things I need to work out in writing.  But, my life on the whole is pretty damn awesome and I am both happy and incredibly optimistic about the future.  I’m trying to keep my eyes open, because sometimes I get too focused and miss things right in from of my face.  I hope that life keeps throwing me awesome things, and I’ll try to do my part and be bolder in taking them on.

Summer ends and Fall begins for me next week. As much as any of the above, I look forward to writing all about it here on my blog.  VEDA has been a welcome distraction this month, but writing is my thing.

I don’t know how it happened that the internet knows how much I weigh, how much debt I have, my religious and political beliefs, but because I’m open about these things, people often congratulate me on my honesty.  In blogging more than anything, I care to represent myself as accurately as I can, so I was relieved in recent conversations with a few bloggers when they said things to me like, “It seems like you still have your guard up” and “you seem very careful about what you write.”

It’s interesting the way the truth about yourself comes out even when you don’t articulate it.  I was trying to reconcile the person I’ve always known myself as with this internet person who talks openly about things that have never had a place in polite conversation, and I couldn’t do it until other people gave me insight into the person they see.

I’ve always been very reserved. I’ve always filled journals with my feelings instead of sharing them with other people.  In some ways that’s changed in the last couple years, but I’m still the same person and I still have a lot of walls up.  I’m not keeping any deep dark secrets, but I’m not an open book and it’s pretty rare I express anything I haven’t thought a lot about.

There are things I used to keep hidden, but once articulated discovered were never worth keeping secret.  My debt, for instance.  But, there are more personal things I still haven’t found a way to write about.  No one is demanding strict honesty of me and I think we all understand that a lot gets missed, especially on a blog, but there are things I want to talk about and don’t yet feel like I can.

This post is in part motivated by something I’ve been vague blogging about all Summer and what’s so strange to me is that I keep trying to talk about it and I keep failing, because I am not okay with just keeping it to myself.  Years ago I would have turned it over and over in my head and that would be it, but now I’m tortured with wanting to say more.  That’s probably driving me more insane than the actual subject of my vague blogging.

In addition to a blog, I also have a lot of people I can talk to, but I feel like there’s still this big hurdle for me to get over when it comes to sharing some things with other people.  I really hope your brains are filling in my vaguery with things far more interesting than the truth, because otherwise I would feel ridiculous. If I could just have your ear for a second, though, I would say, “Ahhhhhh,” by which I mean I am extremely frustrated with myself.

Today is my four year California anniversary. I made the drive from Washington by myself.  I just knew it was something I had to do alone and my parents didn’t object, though I found out later that they had some heated conversations behind my back and didn’t tell my grandma until I’d made it safely to California.

Grad school felt like a decision I’d made on a whim, though I researched schools, applied, and waited impatiently for a response.  I applied to just one school, because it was the only place I wanted to study theology.  I wasn’t sure about moving back to California (I’d spent my first year of college here), but it was at least familiar.

If the grad school thing didn’t work out, I would do something else, but I found out I was accepted before it became necessary to assemble Plan B.  I can think of a lot of alternative plans I would have been happy with, but I needed to get away from home and I knew theology was not something I could ignore.

I didn’t remember until I was reading old journals that I felt this need to prove myself and I felt like I could only do that in a place all by myself.  I guess it comes with being the youngest.  I hate to say the words, but I didn’t feel like people took me seriously and I guess I wanted to prove myself by pursuing my dreams away from the people who knew me.  It was just an insecurity thing, really, because I don’t think much about proving myself to anyone anymore, least of all my family.  Not since I proved to myself that I could do it.

It was not easy.  My first year of grad school, I was sick and dizzy from nerves and stress that made eating difficult.  I had a lot of big feelings.  I didn’t have enough people in my life to talk to, because I’d left them all behind.  I found out I really had a talent for writing and theology.  I adopted a school of thought that put to rest the war between my faith and education.  And I didn’t run away when things became difficult, even if I did think several times of how easy it would be to jump in my car and head straight up I-5.

I’m really very different from the person I was four years ago when I moved down here.  We share a lot of the same feelings, but while she was always teetering near destruction, I am on much more solid footing.  She needed for things to work out, because she didn’t know what she would do if they didn’t, and I need for things to work out, because they’re what I want.  She was worried about depression, and I disappear from my desk at least once a day to walk out feelings much more manic.  We’re both confused about what people need and want from us, but while she tried to figure it out from the sidelines, I’m trying to figure it out from the trenches.

And, California.  California grows on me more and more every year.  I could only get away with I’m not really a California kind of person for so long before I noticed that it’s lovely here and there’s so much to do and walking outside at every odd hour you can think of wearing a t-shirt does not get old.  I always thought I would end up back in the Northwest, but four days of overcast when I was last there was wearing.  Rain, I love, and nothing beats a gorgeous August day in Seattle, but I forgot about all the grey that fills up the rest of the calendar.  I still want to live other places, but I’m enjoying my time here in California and I’m not ready to go anywhere just yet.

Here’s to another four years, California. I’m not leaving without a Ph.D.

The thing about blogging is that it’s just predictable enough to make you think you can understand it, but unpredictable enough to regularly take you by surprise. You can generally count on other bloggers being supportive and awesome, assuming you’ve made friends with the best of them, but you never know what people will respond to. I’ve written posts I thought people would care more about, but then I was surprised that anyone was interested to hear about me and my Dad.

Nothing has taken me by surprise more than VEDA (Vlog Every Day in August). I wanted to do it just because I like vlogging and I like challenges. I thought it would be cool if maybe I could get a couple people to vlog for the first time, because it’s such a good way to get to know someone. If I expected more than one or two people to take me up on it, I wouldn’t have promised drinks to first time vloggers!

Vlogging is kind of scary at first and technical and every day is such a big commitment, but without me even pushing, people started signing on. I don’t know what got people started. Most of their reasoning was along the lines of, “Eh, it sounded cool and I’m up for a challenge.” From there, the crack-nature of vlogging took over. As everyone quickly realized, it’s addictive.

More than people just agreeing to do it, I’m surprised by the community we developed almost instantly. From the beginning, we’ve been out to support each other. I think that has to do in part with the medium of video. It’s so, I don’t know, personal in a way and real. It makes a difference seeing people speak. I had to blog about it, because something is going on over here.

I’m sure there are people annoyed by our endless #VEDA talk, so I tried to get a little quieter about it, but then I remembered that I can’t please everyone as much as I always try. We have an awesome group of people doing something awesome and that’s too cool to be quiet about. But, it’s not too late to jump in and even just make one vlog in August. Trust the 25+ of us participating, vlogging is addictive and too much fun. And, remember, there’s a drink in it for you--Coke, a screwdriver, Blue Moon, whatever you’ll have.

Thanks to my fellow VEDAers for making August awesome. I start class again on the very last day of VEDA and I can’t think of a better way to have spent my last month of Summer.

Below is my vlog from yesterday.  It features my friend Elyse who I’ve know since, well, you’ll find out if you watch.  Me laughing like an idiot is something I never realized was completely missing from my blog up to this point.  Yeah, that’s how I do it.

I’m sitting over the heat vent on the floor next to a window. I’m in Washington and it’s cold here. Summer came and left last week. I suspect it will be back, but for now it’s raining. I used to sit in this same spot and write. I used to make lists here too and plot out my life of perfection.

This is not the house I grew up in (there isn’t just one of those). We moved here the Summer after I finished high school. I took off for college a few weeks later, but then came back to finish my last three years locally. There’s so much said about childhood homes, but what about the one you lived in when you discovered all of the things you love and became the person you are?

Not that I feel particularly nostalgic for this place. Home used to come with such heavy baggage and now it’s just a nice vacation away from the real and a place to spend time with those people I’m forever connected to. I don’t get homesick or sad or wish I was here when I’m living my life in California. I’m happy there. I needed a place to go and figure things out for myself.

But, I don’t have it figured out. Sitting by this window like I used to, I have this strange confidence I’ve always had that if I just think about something long enough, I’ll understand it. But the longer I think, the more things become about feelings and fiction, so I can’t remember anymore how it all really happened. I’m not sure whether to make up my mind to move on or just try harder.

I’m struck by how feelingless home has become now that I don’t live here and it doesn’t hold much power over me when I’m not here. I thought maybe things would become clearer to me just being away and they haven’t. That’s for the best, I think. Now I can enjoy being with my family, seeing the few friends who haven’t taken off for other parts of the country, and spending time in a really beautiful place.

I have an amazing family. The solid kind of people you don’t have to worry about all the time. The kind who make it possible to go live anywhere you want and occupy yourself with dreams and introspection. The kind who are there for you if you need anything, but are otherwise willing to let you live the way you want.

Thinking about all the things I’ve done since I last spent long hours sitting here writing, I’m optimistic. If you can come home and be proud of all the things you’ve done since you were last there, then you must be on to something. Especially if you’re a hyper self-critical, anxious, kind of perfectionist. I’m going to be okay.

I leave tonight and there’s a lot of coffee still left to drink.

I’m having a hard time writing this week.  There are a million things I could say and a lot of quarter-written posts about things I care a lot about, but I don’t feel like finishing them right now.  I was walking back to work after lunch yesterday, thinking I’m going through something right now and then I was like, when are you not going through something?  I totally called myself on that one.

A couple weeks ago, I tore up my list of Summer goals.  I just didn’t want to stare at it anymore.  It was making me feel like a failure, because I somehow can’t force myself to be a robot productivity machine.  Because I have big ass, distracting feelings.

At the same time, I’m not really a go with the flow person.  Though, at this point, I’d have to dig my heels in deep to stop this forward motion.  My life is pretty much settled for the next four years or so.  This is the least lost I’ve ever been, which is strange, but also frees my mind to think of all the other possibilities out there.

I’m overwhelmed and yet also bored, because, I don’t know, I want magic or something.  Not really magic, but something to take me by surprise.  This settled life is not sufficiently surprising.  I’m not saying I miss the crippling uncertainty, because I don’t.  I’m a better and happier person now.  Just wanting.

I’ve actually had a lot of fun this Summer, even if most of it has been on the internet.  That sounds a little pathetic, not because we aren’t all real people interacting, but because there’s computers separating us. #winetoreach, VidCon (okay, that was with real life people), and now VEDA–they’ve all brought me that warm and excited feeling.  And genuine fun.  I think I’ve more than made up for practically disappearing from twitter this Spring.  If I do that again, someone please reach through the internet and pull me back.

I’m working on letting go some, not because I don’t still have big dreams, but because I’m moving toward them all anyway.  Maybe that’s not even worth saying, because I will probably change my mind another twelve times.  I’m not an indecisive person, but it takes me a while to see things clearly.  I don’t see clearly right now.

I should also probably say something specific to someone in particular, but I don’t see that clearly yet either.

I just veer back and forth between chill out and conquer the world, which leaves me saying a lot of the same things all the time.  Sorry for that.  I probably need to get out of my head a bit.  Feel free to offer distractions.

This is your friendly reminder that I will be vlogging every day in August.  Except, I won’t be doing it alone.  Somehow I picked up another 19 people.  You can find them all here.  We’d appreciate your support this month.

Here’s what I left out of my first VEDA vlog: just about everything.  That’s the awesome and terrible thing about vlogging.  I talked for four and a half minutes, which was a minute longer than I intended to talk, and yet I didn’t say half of what I planned.  I think it’s about time I teach myself the fine art of the jump cut.

In every video, I intend to talk a bit about what’s going on with me and then move on to a topic.  I didn’t get a chance to say that I’m sorry I wasn’t around for #winetoreach, but I had a great time last night with friend to me for the last 11 years and friend to the blog since I told her about it in late 2008, Lisa, who is leaving today first for DC and then to Paris.  Even though I’ve known about this trip forever, I was somehow surprised when she said she was leaving today.  I don’t know who I’m going to talk nonsense with via facebook message all day.

Now to the vlog, which is brought to you by 2.5 hours of restless sleep.  I won’t be posting most of the vlogs here, but this is the first and also seems significant to my life, which is what this blog is about if it’s about anything.  If you want to watch future VEDA vlogs, subscribe to my YouTube Channel or just watch for the links on twitter.

Things I mention in this video: Ze’s “Busting the Cycle” and my old post “Breaking the Cycle.”

Let me just start with the number one reason you should vlog: it’s really fun.  That’s something I learned the very first time I gave it a try.  My exact words: “I think I’m going to be doing this vlogging thing, because–er, at least once in while–because I just tried it and oh my gosh, it’s a blast.”

Talking to a camera is incredibly awkward, but it is also such a rush.  I write quickly, but I still edit heavily as I go.  I try words out, rearrange sentences, delete, cut, copy, and paste.  Vlogging is much more spontaneous.  For an always deliberate person like me, it’s exciting to see what I will come up with on the spot.

A second reason to vlog is that it’s a different medium.  People have told me that I speak the way I write, but I think seeing me speak is different from reading my words.  I say different things, I make strange faces, I emphasize words I’d never put in italics, and I laugh at myself.  There’s this whole element of performance.  You could say the same thing about writing (it too is a performance), but the two are so different.  If you’re looking for a new outlet, vlogging is worth a try.

A third reason to vlog is that it gives people a better sense of who you are.  I know we’re all here to communicate ourselves and connect to other people, and vlogging is quite possibly an even better tool for that than blogging.  When people see you, they get a better sense of who you are.  They feel like they know you.  Blogs are no doubt better for delving deep, but there’s something that cannot be beat about seeing a person–like you would if they were standing in front of you.  If you read my blog and watch my vlogs, I’m going to have a hard time surprising you when we meet in person.  Unless you think I’m short.

I love to vlog for all the reasons above, but I’ve always felt quite aimless at it.  I don’t know what to vlog about or how to integrate it into what I’m doing here.  I tell myself just to focus on writing, but I like the rush of vlogging.  About a week ago I decided it would be cool to vlog every day for a month.  If I don’t do it in August, I won’t have time again until next June (that’s depressing).  I thought, yes! And then, no! And then in a waffling moment, I tweeted about it.  @phampants said he’d been considering doing something like VEDA (which originally meant Vlog Every Day in April, but works for August too) and we decided to go for it.

Here’s the deal: I want to see you vlog, if you don’t already.  Obviously you don’t have to vlog every day in August (though we’d be overjoyed if you joined us), but if you just did it once, that would be awesome.  If you’re not sure what to vlog about, maybe reply to one of my videos or adopt a topic that Pham and I talk about.  If you don’t know how to record or upload a video, it’s really easy and I can help.  Consider your first vlog a favor to me.  I’ll owe you a drink.

If vlogging is not your thing and this post did nothing to convince you otherwise, it would still be really awesome if you could support me through the month of August.  I won’t be posting all the videos here, so the best thing to do is subscribe to my YouTube channel.  I’ll tweet out the links as well.  I plan to keep the videos short, talk for a bit about what’s going on with me, and then talk about some kind of subject. If you want to interact or suggest a topic, that would be double extra awesome.

This is probably not the last time I will try to convince you to vlog, so keep resisting if you must, but I’ll get to you eventually.  I do have a history of winning people over.

It is maddening to realize how much control you have over your life.  I know it’s easier to believe that things happen as they are meant to, but I don’t believe that at all.  I think things happen because I make them happen and because I live in a world full of other people making things happen.

I’m not even talking about how terrifying it is to accept responsibility for your life.  I’m talking about the existential crisis that comes with being privileged and happy: there are just so many things you want to do and not enough time to give them all the attention they deserve.

The anxiety I feel right now about what to do with the time I have is crushing me.  And it’s not even that dread-filled kind of anxiety that makes everything seem impossible; it’s the adrenaline-fueled anxiety that makes me want to run around in circles, because there are just so many awesome things to be done that I don’t know where to start.

I swing back and forth between telling myself to calm down, to cut myself some slack, to focus and thinking world domination is really a good plan, stop limiting yourself, just do all the stuff that makes you happy.  Trying to talk myself down off a ledge, I say things like, “your life is big enough to include all of these things” and I’m sure it is, but right now it is overflowing.

Earning a Ph.D. takes everything you have.  So does writing novels. This blog is more time consuming than I often admit.  I could never give up the time I spend connecting with people on the internet.  I can’t stand to be in debt a second longer than I have to.  I want to read like I used to and run like I used to.  Must keep filling journals.  Vlog more. Want to do something related to politics.  If there’s any time left over, try to be the put together kind of person who wears outfits and does her hair.

I try to focus and eliminate distractions, but then my world explodes again and I find myself engaged in every direction.  I used to be hell-bent on perfection and that was passionless.  This is not that.  But, it’s heavy and distracting and overwhelming.

I’m searching for the magic words to calm myself down, but I can’t find them.  I don’t know that calm and simple is really what I want right now.  There’s something to be said about exciting and complex.  I guess the big question is how do I want to live my life? But, I can’t answer that question without giving conflicting answers.

If there’s one thing you should know about my Dad, it’s that he collected dead Christmas tree lights as a kid.  If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I think that’s the most hilarious thing ever.  Not just Christmas tree lights, but dead Christmas tree lights.  Who does that?

I’ve always had something of a unique relationship with my Dad.  My parents divorced when I was 5, so while I lived mostly with my mom, I spent every other weekend with my Dad.  My Dad remarried soon after the divorce, but then when I was about 11, that marriage ended as well.  That’s when Dad and Ash weekends began.

It’s hard to ever make up for not seeing your dad every day, but we did our best.  Our weekends consisted quite simply of doing whatever we wanted.  We ate bad food (tacos on Fridays, pizza on Saturdays), watched movies, and spent hours in our favorite used bookstore. My brother and sister were older, so they didn’t go to my Dad’s house like I did.  It was my chance to play only child, my chance to spend time with my dad, and my chance to escape the normal life I lived in another town 40 minutes away.

Maybe if I’d been a kid who needed more parenting, then it wouldn’t have worked.  But, my dad and I got to spend our weekends together just relaxing and hanging out.  I don’t know if I realized then how lucky I was to have that time with my Dad, but I enjoyed it.  Per the custody agreement, I only had to spend every other weekend with my dad until the age of 12, at which point I could decide for myself what I wanted to do.  I kept going until I left for college at 18.

My relationship with my Dad has changed as I’ve changed. Though he loves business and numbers, and I love fiction and theology, we’re such similar people.  The kind who write lists and have goals and can happily spend hours on end alone.  The kind who are confused by people who don’t do what they say they’re going to do.  The kind who work too much.  We used to bond over our love for reading and now we talk politics.  He makes fun of me for being so liberal and I don’t comment on how he grows more liberal by the year.

He held out for me doing something more practical.  Getting a business degree, for instance.  But when he realized I wouldn’t be happy doing that, he became the biggest cheerleader of my academic pursuits and my writing.  He asks me all the time if I’m working on my fiction and tells me just how cool he thinks it is that I’m getting a Ph.D.  No one else in my family has a love for school like we do.

My Dad is above all the most dependable person I know and maybe that sounds like a boring quality, but it’s really nice knowing that every time I step off a plane at SeaTac, he will be standing at the bottom of the escalator waiting for me.

I’ve always been an album person.  Even now that they’re in danger of going extinct, I get to know artists through whole albums and not just individual songs.  The music I listen to, I listen to over and over again, rarely letting anyone new in.  That’s just how we do it in my family.  Here are some of the albums I’ve come to associate with certain periods of my life, because I listened to them on repeat for months on end.

This album was 8th grade for me. Semisonic was my first favorite band--the first that was all my own. I love all of their albums, but Feeling Strangely Fine was how I found them (it has "Closing Time" on it) and it's probably my favorite. I remember listening to it on my discman while riding the bus and walking home from school.

And then my growing taste in music basically got derailed for four years while I obsessed over NSYNC. After a really long wait for a new album, No Strings Attached came out in March 2000. Lisa and I saw them in concert that same month, our first concert ever. It was amazing and we ended up seeing this same concert another two times (and NSYNC a total of 6 times). After returning from one of the concerts where we had amazing seats, Lisa's mom said it looked like we'd seen Jesus. I knew then as I know now that there are some ridiculous filler songs on this CD, but it is still a pretty awesome pop album, the soundtrack to some of the most fun I've ever had. Don't think I wouldn't sell everything I own to see them on those puppet strings again.

I started listening to James Taylor in 2001. My Mom got his greatest hits album and everyone in the house was forced to listen to it as well. I couldn't resist for long. We saw him in concert September 16, 2001, and I can only describe that experience as a big group hug when everyone really needed just that. JT has been a comfort to me since. He was my best friend during that confusing time called figuring-out-what-to-do-after-high-school.

This album defines Summer 2003. It was the Summer after my first year of college. I'd started listening to Coldplay earlier that year, but not Parachutes. I have a really specific memory of driving around in my mom's car with the windows down, listening to this CD, "Don't Panic" especially. Coldplay is still one of my favorite bands, definitely my favorite to see live, and Parachutes is the perfect album to listen to when I'm feeling nostalgic.

I'd been listening to Travis a while before I got around to this album, but it is probably the one that sticks the strongest in my mind, defining 2004. "Writing to Reach You," which of course has special meaning to me, I always connect to December 2004, driving the streets of Tacoma in the dark, wanting something I didn't have.

I remember so specifically that I started listening to David Gray in January 2005, the month my life got turned upside down by my first theology class. This album had been sitting in my suggestions box from Amazon for years and one day I caved in and bought it. I don't remember loving another album so instantly and at a time in my life when I didn't know what to think about anything anymore. I love every David Gray album (he is my favorite lyricist) and as he's said himself A New Day At Midnight is probably not his best, but it has a special place in my heart.

I started listening to this album in November of my first year of grad school (2006). That was a horribly emotional year for me and this was just the depressing album to go with it. "9 Crimes" still breaks my hear every time I hear it and "Rootless Tree" is my go-to fuck you song. I remember a Thanksgiving trip to Spokane where I listened to this album on repeat and wrote my heart out in my journal.

Summer 2008. The Summer I started this blog, the Summer I was unemployed for a month (my longest stretch without a job), the Summer I wrote the novel, and the Summer I read all the Twilight books. I have to mention the Twilight connection, because it was an event featuring Stephenie Meyer and Justin from Blue October that made me start listening to the band in the first place. This album is the best thing I got out of that experience. And no one understands my love of "Congratulations" like @katieblogs.

I hate to repeat artists here, but I basically did not listen to any other album in 2009. "Battleships" is forever tied in my head to a certain adorable boy and "Big Chair" to walking the stacks late at night. This album fueled a lot of blogging.

Spring 2010. I love this album for its energy. It has matched my mood so much better this year than my normal depressing stuff. When I was in Arizona visiting my brother in March, I could hardly stand the minutes not spent listening to this album.

I had to leave some albums out.  It seems the pop music especially got the shaft.  And the truth is that every Semisonic, James Taylor, and especially David Gray and Coldplay album defines a time in my life.

What albums define a certain period of your life?

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]]> http://www.writingtoreachyou.com/2010/07/26/for-every-season/feed/ 11 http://www.writingtoreachyou.com/2010/07/23/i-think-i-broke-my-own-heart/ http://www.writingtoreachyou.com/2010/07/23/i-think-i-broke-my-own-heart/#comments Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:00:00 +0000 Ashley http://www.writingtoreachyou.com/?p=4698

If I thought the universe had autonomous power, I would swear it has it out for me.  I became a victim of my own thoughts when, while working on this novel, I wondered if a character would really be that upset seeing a relationship end.

I don’t know when I lost touch with those emotions, but the next day, I was put back in touch with them.  A series of unrelated events starting not long before I posted this left me thinking, of course she would be that fucking upset about it.

I don’t know what to say, so I haven’t said anything.  I thought maybe things would get to a point where I could easily write about it, but instead I’ve just been tempted to send out pathetic and vague tweets, a way of saying things aren’t right over here without having to explain myself in any detail. Somehow that seems rude, even if easily forgivable, when I know there are people reading those tweets who care about me and will wonder what’s wrong.

There really aren’t many details anyway, at least none that I am honest or anonymous enough to share.  Just broken expectations with one person that snowballed in my mind with a lot of broken expectations.  And then I realized I was broken hearted, even if I wasn’t completely sure why.

It’s that confusing thing where I’m really quite happy, but also hurting.  I think the worst of it was last week, but this isn’t the first time I thought I was over it.  This whole non-experience has brought up a lot of things for me.

Mostly it’s just incredibly distracting.  And sad-making. I hate that not hearing from one specific person undermines the effect of having a bunch of other people reach out to me.  I hate even more to think that I’ve probably done this same thing to other people.

I don’t like the way revealing something you’ve kept silent seems to undermine everything you’ve done in that time, especially the nonsense conversations that have kept me entertained at work. Not to get all Whitman on you, but I contain multitudes.

Does anyone remember that I used to post a list of random information every Friday?  I don’t know what it was about my life then, but I no longer have that much random information to share.  Today, though, I have a few things to tell you.

• #winetoreach this Saturday at 7pm PST.  If you’re not familiar, #winetoreach is a wine-infused chat party on twitter.  Wine is not actually required.  You just need to bring yourself to twitter on Saturday night and talk to me (@writetoreach) and the other people participating.  You should really try to make this one, because I won’t be around for the few Saturdays after this.  Just saying.

• It made my life that people understood my post on theology.  It’s just that it’s all so swirly and alive in my mind, and I wanted to capture that.  Reading the post myself, I didn’t think I’d succeeded, but people seem to pick up on it.  If you ever want to talk theology, email me (writetoreach@gmail.com)  or find me on gchat (writetoreach@gmail.com) or meet me (Southern California, Western Washington, or somewhere on Road Trip 2011).

• Speaking of Road Trip 2011, it’s going to be awesome.  I have no idea how it’s going to work out and I really dislike planning trips, but this is going to happen.

• Random fact I was just thinking of yesterday.  The school that the main character of my novel (the one I gave people to read) attends is actually the school from the movie 10 Things I Hate About You.  The one that looks like a castle.  It’s in my hometown.  My sister actually went there.  I went to another high school across town, but we played all of our football games in that bowl.  So, if you’re reading the novel, there’s a visual for you.

• I’m a little obsessed with this British show called Skins.  I only started watching because people on tumblr are always posting pictures of a character named Effy and I kind of want to marry her.  The show itself, which Effy is not a big part of until season 3, is pretty good, though I can’t say I’d recommend it to everyone.  The first two seasons are available for streaming on Netflix,  if you want to give it a try.  But, Effy is mine and don’t be surprised if I start wearing a bunch more eyeliner just to be like her.

• I’ve recently started using dailybooth.  It’s kind of like twitter, but with pictures.  You post a picture (usually of yourself that day) and then people comment or reply with pictures.  I’ve known about it for a long time, since YouTubers use it, but I just jumped in a week or so ago.  It’s fun, so  maybe you should join. Again, just saying. You can find me here.

• I haven’t posted about politics in a long time.  It’s not that I’ve grown less political.  I’ve just grown a little disillusioned (I don’t know if that’s something you can be a little of) and my opinions have become less popular. It’s not that I don’t know what to say, but maybe I don’t feel that comfortable saying it here.  It’s just that I take it all so personally.  I take everything personally, if you haven’t picked up on that.  But, I’m going to write about politics next week.  I need to figure it out for myself in writing.

• I probably won’t record a weight loss vlog tomorrow.  Actually, I’m a little unsure what to do.  I just don’t like how much space they take up on my blog.    I might just upload them to YouTube and not post them here.  Not sure, but I’ll let you know if you’re interested.

• At a lecture this week, one of my coworkers asked me if I was gearing back up for my crazy 15-hour days school-year schedule.   I thought, how dare he remind me of what’s to come!  It’s just that I’ve grown quite accustomed to sleeping and I’m not ready to give that up.  I’m also not ready to go back to working until midnight every night.  I still have a month and I will try to savor it, but I’m no good at that.

I think it’s about time I at least pretend to be working.  Hope to see you Saturday!

This is my 500th post.  I estimate that I’ve written about 300,000, words here, possibly a lot more.  That’s three novels.  And most of it is a mystery to me.   I guess that’s what makes blogs different from novels.  They’re serial.  I can say something one day and say the opposite the next.  It doesn’t have to be systematic.  If it’s honest, then it probably won’t be.

A lot of the words here are a mystery to me, because I don’t remember writing them.    I have an idea, a feeling, I write it, post it, read responses to it, and move onto the next.  In blogging more than anything else, I avoid brain crack.  I don’t sit on ideas and think about how amazing they will be; I put them down in words, throw them out into the world, and as a result, new ideas find me.  The more I blog, the more I have to blog about; the less I blog, the less I have to blog about.

Academic writing rarely gets read, journals aren’t meant to be read, novels take years to craft, and so blogging is this unique medium that catalogs my passing thoughts and connects me to other people.  When I think about the kind of blogger I want to be, sometimes I think I’d like this place to be more sophisticated, my words better crafted, fewer typos, less frequent but more insightful posts.  I hear people say that they don’t blog unless they have something to say, and it sounds good, but I always have something to say, and even if it’s of little consequence, it matters to me.

In defining whatever it is I do here, I’ve sometimes desired to be like other bloggers, but the minute I try, whatever it is that’s motivated me to write so many words starts evaporating.  I like to write a lot, I don’t like to edit much, I like to write as myself, I don’t like to write about things I don’t have strong feelings about, I don’t tell stories well,  I like to use words more than pictures, I don’t talk much about the day-to-day, I feel too limited by regular features, and I will always get distracted by other options before I remember these things about myself.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a blog manifesto.  It’s just that I didn’t figure these things out for myself until I wrote them.  I declare here and now that I will continue to publish hastily written posts on all the common and strange things that interest me.  They will more than likely be serious and I will mean most every word.

500 is a milestone I insist on celebrating because it took me so long to get here and it’s going to take me a really long time to reach another one worth celebrating.  On this special occasion, I’m giving away free hugs.  Except, fair warning, I’m a bad hugger.  In the first place, I’m just not the hugging type.  Not that I have anything against them, but it’s not a natural thing for me.  On top of which, my brother and sister and I all picked up this weird habit from our Dad where we pat people on the back when we’re hugging them.  It sounds nice, but it comes off a little bit more like, “please let go of me now.”   I never noticed I was doing it until my step-dad pointed it out.  He calls it the patented [LastName] Hug.  So, yeah, line up for your free one of those.

You can come to California and collect your hug anytime or you can wait a year for me to come to you.  I am really quite serious about Road Trip 2011, scheduled to take place next Summer, where I travel around the country visiting bloggers.  It’s one of the things I’ll be saving for once I’m out of debt.  I don’t know how it will work, but I think it could be amazing.  Maybe some of you will even do some of the traveling with me.  Who knows. But, I’ll just put the hard work of planning off until later when I have even less time than I do now, and concentrate on the awesome for now.

Here’s to 500 more!

I know it would make sense with as much as I talk about writing to assume that I study English.  I used to.  It was always my thing and even though I considered every other option, it was the obvious choice for a college major.  But half way through my junior year of college, I got distracted by theology.  I finished my English degree, but I added Religion as a second major and when it came time to decide what to do next, I knew I wasn’t done with theology.

I’ve always had a hard time articulating how theology so managed to sweep me off my feet and make me believe that a life spent studying anything else would be inferior.

The classical definition of theology is “faith seeking understanding.”  If I had to give an even simpler definition, I would say, “figuring out why you believe the things you do.”  Theology almost always refers to Christian theology and it’s different from philosophy or the sociology of religion in that it’s done by insiders.  That’s the faith part of “faith seeking understanding”; you’re starting already with some kind of commitment. I am a Christian and I do theology.

I get myself into trouble with people who hear I’m a Christian and then assume they know what I believe.  I’m a progressive Christian who studies liberal theology.  I probably have more beliefs in common with atheists than a lot of Christians.  And if I’m being intellectually honest, I border on being agnostic, which means that I don’t think we can know if there is a God.  It’s hard for me to say why I still identify as a Christian.  Maybe I won’t forever.  For me it is partly cultural, but it certainly goes beyond that.  My thought is so shaped by Christian theology and even if there is no God or even if I’m not convinced we can know if there is a God, you don’t have to be certain of something in order for it to have meaning for your life.

I could go a million directions from here, but I’ll try to limit myself to the question of why I study theology.  The absolute best answer I can give to the question of why I study theology is that it’s completely changed the way I view the world.  And there really is no shift more fundamental than that.  Theology is not just about what you think of God or Jesus or the after life or homosexuality or science; it’s about how all of those things fit together into a systematic worldview.  It’s like a Rubik’s Cube where you change one thing and it affects everything else.  You say God is all powerful and then you have to explain why bad things happen to good people and why you act like you have freedom and power of your own if you’ve just said that God has it all.  But, unlike a Rubik’s Cube, there’s no solving it all; you do the best you can and sometimes that means admitting that you’re not sure if Jesus is really God or not and you have to sit with that uncertainty.

It’s maddening to pursue questions to which you will never find absolutely convincing answers, but pursuing them anyway will change the way you think.  It will force you to question everything you know.  It will reveal the subtleties of the world.  And it will force you to be creative.  I’ve never written much about theology on my blog, but it has so changed the way I think that it underlies everything I say here.

One of the most valuable things about theology is the way it breaks down constructs. Everything you do, you do based on some kind of belief, but the truth is that some of those beliefs are crap and you will realize it the minute you apply reason to them.  But, that’s just in the breaking down, and theology does not stop there.  It’s not simply destructive.  It’s constructive too.  You question everything you believe and it hurts and you’re not left with much when it’s over.  But, you start building again.

You start looking for answers, but everything is so much more complex than before.  It’s nuanced and subtle and dynamic and hard to hold onto.  You wade through all of that and find things that feel right to you, that don’t bend logic, that make sense with the world you actually experience.  Often that means being creative, viewing old ideas through new eyes, redefining words, making things up.  You build from there, but this time with the humility to know that your perspective is limited and the things you’re describing are always changing.

That is the point when the world comes alive and you realize that in every moment, you are presented with uncountable possibilities and whether you take the path of least resistance or make the biggest leap possible, you’re never the same this moment as you were the last.  And everything around you, from the humans you share your space with to the atoms that make up that rock are making similar choices, defining themselves by the choices they make.  Maybe God is there, persuading you to choose the possibilities best for you and every other organism, feeling your pain when you experience it, but your decisions are your own.

Theology is deeply personal, because the things you believe are always personal.  Literature would sometimes challenge me in that same way, but it was easier to lose myself in other worlds and academic jargon.  Making up words is a favorite activity of theologians as well and we can debate things of seeming inconsequence for centuries, but it’s always connected to something bigger–to the questions in life of the most significance.  Like, why are we here and where are we going?  I study theology, because I think few things are more important.  What you think about yourself, what you think about the world you live in, and what you think about the people you share this world with shape how you live, whether you’ve ever stopped to dissect them or not.  You’re always acting on a set of assumptions.

If this all sounds cold and academic, then I haven’t explained myself very well, but if it seems watercolory, one color blending into the next to make beautiful and ugly designs, then I probably have.  It is nuanced and uncertain, but real and important.  It is not about one sphere of life, but rather underlies them all and motivates us in everything.  Theology is also about real world practicality (like how do we share this world with each other) and ancient logic problems (mostly having to do with Jesus, like how is the bread really his body and how can he possibly be both human and divine), but those things I could find elsewhere.  It’s this experience of the world like an artist experiences a painting that makes me think that even if I never do anything with these expensive degrees, my time spent studying theology could never be wasted.