Love...

"Murder or stealing or adultery might be a flashing, neon blue line, but gossip is often only a faint silver thread: innocent, hard to distinguish. But then when I look back on a conversation, it strays so very far away from what love is supposed to look like."

Sarah Edwards is brilliant.

She also happened to touch on a subject I had been thinking about lately. I gripe a lot lately and if it's starting to getting on my nerves I'm scared to think of how it looks to everybody else. They must be thinking...geez is she on her period all the time or what?...I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be the person, or even a person, who is always talking behind somebody's back. I don't want to say anything about anybody that I haven't told them to their face.

When I was growing up I was taught that talking behind somebody's back was wrong because the person wasn't there to defend themselves. However my recent line of thinking goes beyond that. I think it's wrong because, as Sarah said, it's not love. If somebody's behavior is irksome or annoying or worse actually dangerous and stupid, and I tell everybody except them how I feel about it then not only am I not expressing love because I'm spending all my time speaking negatively about something, I am also not expressing love because in the end the person can't know to change a behavior if they are not aware of it and nobody tells them. So it is grossly unfair for me to complain about something to somebody else before I have informed the subject of said annoyance. If it were me I'd want my friends to tell me.

I have several very honest friends who told me that my driving sucked and was scary...I changed the way I drive. It took a little while and working on a lot of insurance claims to really see what everybody was talking about, but all the forces combined with three months of driving out west changed the way I drive. I don't think I'm the best driver out there and I get very nervous when I think I'm with somebody who will be critical of my driving, but I'm generally a safe driver and people aren't scared to ride with me anymore. Or maybe they just don't tell me anymore....oh dear...

Anyway...that's beside the point...what I'm trying to say is that I either need to be honest with friends if something bothers me, or I need to keep my mouth shut. Period.

Waiting on the World to Change

Well I fought and I fought but I knew they'd get me eventually...

I had to switch to the "new" blogger. It kept getting harder and harder to find the button that would allow me to keep using the old one and finally I got a message saying that I had to switch whether I like it or not.

I guess in the end it's all the same, everything seems to look that way anyway, but it was the principal of the thing!

Why am I so adverse to change? I change all the time, I move, I learn, I move, I travel, I move. So why is that I get upset when other things in my life change? I want everything to stay the same except for me, I'm allowed to grow and expand my horizons and change wholly and completely through and through, but if the color of the shutters on a neighboring house changes I flip out. Very odd.

You know what else is odd? I bought lemon squares today. Okay there is nothing inherently strange about buying lemon squares, unless of course you are either a. allergic to them or b. a cat. Now that would be weird...but I digress...so I bought lemon squares today, you know what...I've decided I don't want to tell this story anymore, so let's pretend it ends here.

Have you ever wanted to be a cat? I have, I still do. I want to be a lot of things like a deer and a panther and wolf and a dolphin and a horse. None of which involve being a secretary for an insurance adjuster. I also want to work in wildlife rehabilitation and be a vet, and I want to take amazing pictures for magazines and travel the world while building homes for people that can't do it themselves. Above everything else in the world though....I want to be a bird, not even some big exotic or powerful bird just a swallow or a wren, actually probably a cardinal, not the evil kind that had it in for the musketeers, the little red ones that eat seeds and flit around. Except I'd have to be a boy, because who wants to be a female cardinal, all brown and quiet. That would be silly.

Hummingbirds are nice too.

Prodigal Daughter Returns to Blogger

I went through and caught up on Megan's blog today

It made me want to blog again, I miss it

I'll start tomorrow

Youth in all its glory

I have just fallen even more in love with Sarah Edwards and I almost wanted to go down and edit my short list of amazing people. However, I have found her brilliance so enchanting that I decided she deserved a blog entry all her own. She amazes me with her wit and charm in a way that assures me that Elisabeth was not just a random fluke but that both were products of a loving family that put an emphasis on education and allowed their children to be the brilliant, creative, inspiring women that they are.

Sarah Edwards you restore my shakeable hope for the future. I only wish I could be more like you, but I was running late when God was creating personalities and ran past the eloquence line and begged two helpings of crazy to try and catch up with the others.

My only complaint my love is that I must first sign up for Xanga before I can see your blog, it was a small price to pay because I knew I would be more than rewarded I just hope others make that sacrifice as well...or is this your way of weeding out the dispassionate and uncommitted? In which case I commend your upholding of standards.

I obviously have none and am so desperate that I even disabled the comment blocker so now anyone can comment. *sigh* We cannot all be so inspiring as to have the luxury of filtering our readers.

I tip my cute little black hat to you.