Sunday exemplified a cool, beautiful Ohio autumn day.  I noted so on the way to the funeral.

I hate funerals and everything about them.  I hate how the body never looks like the actual person.  I hate how people small talk and watch hand held TVs in the parking lot.  Mom cried and hugged Mr. Rohr very tightly, longer than was necessary as she sputtered condolences on his shoulder.  Truthfully, I know she longs for him to melt tearfully in her arms as they both weep.  Who doesn't secretly aspire to be that person?   Everyone wants to be human together. 

Everyone wants to be that one... but these people don't want our sympathy tears.  They want to smile tightly and make small talk because everyone knows and expects that they just want to stop living for a little while.  They just want to curl up and die too.  They don't want to be vulnerable- everyone already knows their hearts are open and bleeding on the parquet floor.

I secretly, or not so secretly now, hate how funerals are a trick of all we know.  When the corpse looks like plastic and we know those grieving just wants to be left alone, why do we play into the lie?  Why put lipstick on a mannequin?  They do not help us say goodbye.  We are not saying goodbye.  It is not goodbye.

I have always loathed the obligatory nature of cell phones.  I hate the Catch 22 of disappointing either the situations interrupted by the sporadic nature of the calls or those trying in vain to reach me.  If I would have been asked last week, I would have said I would rather toss mine into the sea.

After this week, I know I lied.

My phone was stolen by a troupe of fourteen year old girls while I was working.  For three days they deleted everything belonging to me and spent twenty-five dollars buying ridiculous ring tones and taking pictures of themselves. 

I will spare all reading this my personal feelings and simply ask that any who would like me to have their numbers (for the first time or otherwise) would send them to me via my school email:

firstname.lastname@student.indwes.edu

Thanks to all of you, and I am thrilled to hear your voices again.

After a couple days of substantial doubt, I feel things coming together.  The smell of espresso under my nails is a welcome and calming grit.  I find the hectic nature of quick and beautiful beverages soothing, as though waitressing has been training me in the art of patient pressure. 

I can hardly wait to be back behind the bar.

I am not living in Canton as of next year.  My parents have no idea, and now is not a good time to tell.

This house was never really mine, anyway.  My room is where my parents graciously allow me to store the meager possessions they bestow upon me.  My car is the junk neither of them will drive that costs more to save than to scrap, and it is generously lent to me.  I dare not deny these things are indeed generous, but why should it sound so obligatory? 

I know this is most likely the best thing I have ever done for my mother.  By leaving I hope we can restore our relationship properly and openly, as one person respecting another.  I hope she knows how much it hurts me to go, but in the end perhaps she will realize I love her too much to hate her forever.

Change must begin somewhere, and I am the catalyst.

Jarrod is an angel for putting up with my doing this right now.  I think I'm almost done finagling with my site, and I'm quite pleased.   This is all my original work and design (Thanks Illustrator for hours of fun!!)

Look at how pleased I am.

Meh- sleepy sleepy sleepy.  My site is officially under construction.  I'm thrilled I finally have something artistically productive to do in my spare time.  Good thing everything needs a little greasing up.

Last night, my travels took me to a vast cornfield, almost as expansive as the greenest sea with a tiny red boat of a house on its horizon.  The morning light was hazy and gray, deeping the brick on the old church as we passed singing; rather, you sang to me.  We poured over recipes, our large plastic bowls empty and growling for the fruit we would buy.  The cardboard road sign was just ahead, "Tomatoes and Peaches- $5".  How could we not argue over our latest meal?  We had the world open to us.

The oddest conversation I have heard while cleaning tables began with a customer describing the effect of fresh mountain air to our resident smoke stack.  This might be topped solely by the officer who recognized his waitress as a girl he had arrested three years prior.  I do not think even the guy with welts from the helmet he wore to smash beer bottles on his forehead makes the top five.  The fact is undeniable:  my coworkers are as interesting as the varieties of gunk caked on every stacked plate in the kitchen.  They are all pleasant people in their own geriatric way, and most have yet to taste thirty.  Liken the environment to The Office- each person is wonderfully quirky and perpetually swimming in a puddle of cynicism.  Al might have the only valid excuse; it is pretty hard to beat the guy with MS for whining rights, and he is one of the most cheerful in my book.

The best parts of most days has been figuring out clever ways to inspire a smirk in the rusty corners of their mouths.  I have danced around like an "idot" and made smiley faces on barbequed plates.  I have slipped people money and done extra work.  I have beaten them with vicious rhetoric and they have loved every minute.  Mostly I have attempted to love them as creatively as I know how, if only to ease those lasting pangs of dissatisfaction and pain. 

I can honestly say I have never known so many single young moms, so many weekday drunks, so many people wanting and hoping and dreaming for things they are sure will never see reality.  I have never seen so many who deserve so much better than the mud puddle for which they have settled.  God, I love these people, these beautiful people that amount my pleasant attitude and innocence to snorting crack.  I wish I could show them that life is not a pipe dream.  True life is real and alive and on the brink of all their troubles.

I wish I knew how to show them Jesus.  I know for now I must settle for some very clever words.

"Let us be creative in our love for one another."

I have discovered my long- dormant quirk:  I have a strange penchant for journals, but I never use them, at least not well.  I love to stack those beautifully bound things on my shelves filled with nothing but lined paper.  I wonder what that says about my longstanding dream of a den/ library.

You know it's been a long day when you look in the mirror and realize your crack babies are crying for root beer and you eyes remind you of a bad domestic violence joke.

Yay bed and maybe a job. =D