This Road That We Travel...

My first ever photoblog post to communicate the end of my time at UNCG.

Friends. 

Saying Goodbye to my job. (Tuesday)

Last Hoorah with my Roommate (Wednesday).

Packing. (With Tonisha)

Graduating! (Thursday).

Driving Home (Saturday).

Thanks for reading/looking or whatever you do in a photoblog. I may get on and write actual words later.

Life at Home: Monday

Mine are way more professional.

"All you need is a Little Faith to ease this old world's aches and pains."

These are the words on the poster that hangs on the ceiling. I have been looking at this poster every six months to a year since I was four. The shaggy old dog lying in the grass with a small kitten on his head have lost their color. The green grass, and fur of the orange tabby have all but disappeared into shades of grey.

There's a jump as the chair begins it slow lowering back and Kelly's smiling face appears above mine. I have had the same dental hygienist since I was four (except once–I ended up with my neighbor who works in the same practice). I stare up at the faded, tired old dog while she scrapes the small metal hook against my teeth. I watch his forlorn eyes as she turns on the small buzzing toothbrush. Grape toothpaste, every time.

As she finishes she hands me a magazine and tells me it might be a few minutes, but she'll tell "Doc" I'm ready. I flip through the pages of Self magazine. Dr. Volmer comes in at a pace paramount to a slow drip of a faucet. He says hello at the same pace and asked how I am at the same pace. He pulls the chair over at the same pace and lowers my chair so far it feels like I may fall back on my head. He runs his metal hook over my teeth at the same pace. Every visit he has a little less hair and his faucet drip pace is a little slower. He mumbles a slow, "Beautiful teeth" to which Kelly enthusiastically concurs.

I am released and they both stare as I stand up. "Am I good? My teeth not falling out?" I put forth an effort to extract something new from him. A slow laugh (same pace) and a shake of a head. I follow Kelly to the front desk where the ladies who run the bills give me the thumbs up. They'll just file my bill with my Mom's insurance card.

I go back through the familiar waiting room with the old Andrews High School yearbooks and dated Highlights magazines and pull open the solid red door. The old brown outdoor carpet covers the three steps down to the parking lot. I throw my free floss in the purse on my passenger seat and pull out, headed for the library, not for books but for the librarians....but that's another story.

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Till My Lungs Give Out

If you look at the sidebar of this blog you will see the amount of posts I had last semester is vast in comparison to the three I have had this semester. This is in part due to my increased business of schedule and in part due to my apathy.

Mumford and Sons has a song called, "I Gave You All" and in that song there is a line, "...if only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy I could have won...". This semester I won in so many ways. The Lord blessed my socks off in many relationships that have encouraged me and in many ways changed my outlook on life and myself...it's been fantastic. But I lost in a huge way when I stopped actively pursuing my personal relationship with God. I began to realize this about a month ago and began to plan how to fix it. This is wrong on so many levels, you don't plan to fix, you just fix. There is a certain level of disgust that I have with myself over this, but this morning God just began to remind me of His Grace. As soon as I stopped planning and turned around to face my shadow God is here, fighting with me.

Today I sat out in my hammock to sketch about these thoughts and ended up writing a poem that in effect sums up my semester. I have failed (see past thoughts on failure here) but God takes me failure and all and it is indescribable. I am sharing this with you all so that you know even more that anything awesome in me is God and God's grace alone, because when I leave Him, I am nothing. My life means nothing. The blessings in this semester in the midst of my failure is a testament of His unfailing love for me. Indescribable.
   

"You see the depths of my heart and you love me the same, You are amazing God."

I lie awake.

I turn it over in my mind.

The lie processed into truth.

I'm wide awake, and still dead asleep.

They pass by.

They see the smile, the tear.

Another pass and they see lips and eyelashes.

By and by, they see my face, but its behind a veil.

Inside, chaos reigns.

Inside, my eyes see into my head, my heart.

Finding chaos, my eyes focus out, to you.

He supremely reigns, but I am immigrating away.

Called firmly back.

Called with love and care.

I firmly believe it is best to return.

But I'm back against a wall, refusing to step.

Stunned by Freedom.

Stunned, as my ground begins to shake.

Truth by a lie is no sort of foundation.

Screams of freedom escape my lungs.

Leading the attack.

Leading me with a strong hand.

Obliterating the fear in my "safety".

We go attack the lies.

Till my weak soul lives free.

Stay tuned for a photo blog of my last bit of time in Greensboro. (Still working on getting images off three different cameras)

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missing capitalization friendship with ray lamontange

good evening.

right now i should be writing on the twenty page portfolio that i have to turn in next week. or the article that i failed to turn in on wednesday (for the first time all semester–it doesn't feel good and yet i have yet to fix the situation). instead i am writing this blog, maybe i'm hoping some focus will come from it. like if i write something low pressure like this i can get some work done on serious stuff.

i have also decided capitalization will not happen this post. go figure.

right now i am sitting in the prime corner booth of tate street coffee house listening to elijah ogden go to town with his acoustic guitar. i love coffee shops. each are unique and i could sit all day in this environment. let me clarify, individual coffee houses, starbucks is only delightful to meet someone in, it feels something akin to a office space to me. too uniform. too commercial. it doesn't have to be a hodge-podgey mess inside like tate street (which is full of very random, and in some places regrettably awkward art and a delightful mish-mash of chairs and tables: example, before i got the booth with they upholstered top i was at a half-moon shaped table with a sun painted on it) but it does need something unique, that someone in a office didn't decide should be there (like in coffeology, there is an odd painting of a man in a black hoodie in front of a gold sun behind the register, and one day i saw him stopping in for coffee. i don't even want to ask about it because the mystery is too fun).

tate street's samoan latte, and coffeology's baci latte are competing hard to be my favorite.

right now i am sitting the back of the long room that makes up the sitting area in tate street. i am sitting watching all the people coming in and out and feeling nostalgic. i love this. this way to spend an evening. this city. there are so many places that i would love to live, i never figured greensboro would be one of them. i have maintained the position that i could never be happy in a city and maybe greensboro, being small of size and full of green loving hippies that have established nearly as many parks as parking lots, has spoiled me. maybe i'm just overly content and can find something to love everywhere i go, but if i am not living here next year i will miss it.

i think the large in-house latte is smaller than the to-go one. i have considered feeling gypped, but decided there are more important things to be up in arms about.

right now i am thinking about the idea of missing. we miss people, places, things. what does that mean? what is the logic of missing something? does it imply discontent or just a love that wants to defy separation? you miss something when you don't have it, but you want it, so i suppose it could be both. i aspire to miss things not out of discontent, but out of the deep love. i have talked to people who believe that relationships are somewhat ended or at least majorly affected by distance. whether that be physical or emotional distance. for example if someone moves across the country but you still talk not much will change, but if you live down the road from each other and work in the same place and go to the same church but don't talk then that is emotional distance. i will not disagree completely, i will also not disagree whole heartedly. i have friendships that remain just as strong though there has been nearly a year with little to no contact. i can't explain that. i also have relationships that seem strong but all but dissipate over the course of a few months with no clear assignment of blame. what is the qualifier? this is something that has never bothered me much because i have from a young age resolved within myself to be a friend to whoever i meet for as long as i live. i may have no contact with someone for years, but if they called and asked for help or wanted to catch up, i like to think that i would do my best to be there for them. the problem with this mindset is has left me with a somewhat one-sided view of friendship. i just don't think about many other people's side of the friendship, or rather i don't think about anyone else wanting to be my friend. i have a hard time imagining that. not necessarily as some form of low self-esteem, but out of a basic assumption that hardly any one (and believe me there are a growing number exceptions to this so don't feel slighted if you are reading this...because i have so many people in my life that bless my socks off) appeared to care as much as i did. then i got to thinking outside myself and how apathetic i know i can appear and decided that i probably look pretty uncaring to a lot of people when i'm really not because people don't go around with the words, "hey, i'm your friend unconditionally" written across their foreheads. it is something that many people wouldn't buy even if it was written there, because friendship tends to be best shown in action and if i went ten years without contacting a friend they would probably have little reason to call despite my honest intention to be there for them because i have done little to prove it. so its cyclical. and my friend is not very wrong at all about the basic, just maybe not as positive about the mechanics of the idea.

that did not end up being so much about missing as it did about friendship. whoops. who knew?

right now i have not written a word for my homework. but i cleared my head a little of thoughts (about friendship? no idea that was up there) so now i will close with an ode, in prose, to how much i love writing and how it almost always gives me more than i gave it. that was it (the ode). now i'm going to wrap it up and decided whether i want to stay in this booth with ray lamontange for the next hour and attempt homework or decide that it is saturday and its okay i've ignored it then write my own stuff or go home, watch some bones and hit the hay.

final sidebar: what people chose to wear is quite simply fascinating.