At the beginning of September I wanted to post some great photos of our camping trip at Lakeview, but I didn’t have time to sort through all 3 of the family cameras and pick the great ones to post. Then I came up with something else I wanted to write about, but I didn’t feel like I should because I hadn’t posted the pictures yet. And then I did another great thing (with pictures) so I should have posted those…so basically I have like 10 posts in my head that never made it to blog and I feel horrible about it because if I don’t blog them I’ll probably forget them for like, forever, so I really should sit down for a few hours and just catch up all that with a massive backlog of posts. However, I don’t have a few hours. And I’m learning when there are things needing to be done, the best approach is to start somewhere. So this is me getting back into it. I’m re-forming the habit, here and now.

Life as a gainfully employed twentysomething is pretty fantastic, all things considered. I spend my days working my tail off, playing my little part in the fight for liberty and virtue and doing my best not to break the website. My evenings and weekends are recklessly divided between teaching, freelance work, farm chores, hangin’ out with the fam, and enjoying the company of any of the eleventytwelve people who I am fortunate enough to call friends. I’m beginning to have money left over at the end of the month. I’ve met more new people in the past six months than I ever did in high school or college. Tonight I spent my entire evening with a group of coworkers-turned-friends, and just had a grand time with people I didn’t know 6 months ago. We ate and drank and talked and saw a movie and ate and drank and talked more. My horizons are broadening in all directions: socially, politically, mentally, spiritually. Being a young grownup is whimsical and wonderful and really quite surreal.

Of course there are dark days. There are grumpy days and depressed days and hectic days and lost-perspective days and overwhelming days. And some weeks those days outnumber the whimsical, lighthearted days. And I’m learning that those sorts of days are okay, too…they’re a vital part of growing and becoming better. And stuff like that.

So, there. I’m back. More tomorrow. Hopefully.

• given a talk at GVSU on how Classics and liberal arts relates to “Real life”

• fixed my barn roof
• attended a lecture by Laura Ingraham and went on a date with Micah to “Grand Rapids Symphony plays Disney”
• spent a lot of time with friends

I will talk about tall this stuff eventually. Right now in my “spare time” I’m cleaning up the notes from my talk into a more coherent mini-essay, which I will post ASAP (and which will also be posted on the GVSU Classics website. I have lots of photos to post too. But keeping up with freelance and trying to make fixes to the church website leaves not a lot of time to blog-post, I’m afraid.

So for now, I just wanted to share a quote from one of my favorite new blogs, Stacy from Louisville. This is a paragraph of the most authentic and heart-wrenching prose I’ve read in quite a while.
Stacy says:

“This world makes my soul ache. The fact that I was made for eternity but born into a world of sin is like being captured in a net. Even when circumstances in my life are stable the ache is still there, reminding me that eternity is just a whisper away. For me, the crescendo of following Christ reaches its culmination the split second I experience eternal life without sin. But for now, the ache remains. I’m telling you, there’s not one thing authentic in me other than the reality of my failures.”

Read the rest of her entry here.

Seriously, you wouldn’t think that my name on a piece of cardstock would be this exciting.

but it so is.

Anyway, there I was, tooling through the rain-soaked 30 MPH streets of Grandville, in the sort of neighborhood that has lots of perfect houses and some schools and nursing homes and whatnot, when I came upon a rather large traffic backup (large, that is, for suburban Grandville). The backup was caused by a flock of about 50 ducks who had decided to congregate in and around the road. They were large ducks…not your average Mallards with green heads, but rather of a rotund, fancy-speckled grey and white variety.

The suburbanite Grandville motorists were obviously quite perplexed about how to handle the situation. Thankfully, everybody was benevolent enough not to plow right through the mass of quackers. Instead they stopped, and inched forward, and every now and then a car would get through but then several ducks would flop back in and block the lane and others would commence bathing in the gutter.

Being somewhat late because of my detour, and in a rather foul mood to begin with, at first I just rolled my eyes and waited my turn. But after waiting a few minutes and barely moving at all, the absurdity of the situation caught up with me and I realized, “Duh. I live in farmland. I so know how to fix this situation.”

Out here in the boondocks, the neighbors’ chickens and ducks can’t be trusted to stay put and you’ll sometimes come across a few on your way to work or church in the morning. You have two options: sit and wait, or do something. (Or if you’re my brother, you just plow them over.)

So I hopped out of the truck (barefoot because I had removed my work shoes on account of blisters) and, waving my arms, swept towards the fat grey and white ducks in an effort to shoo them out of the road and back up onto the lawn of the nursing home from whence they presumably came. As I did so, I gently scolded them in the voice I reserve for the dogs and the horses–that voice being a loud, screechy falsetto which likely grates on the nerves of every human in earshot–saying, “Duckies, Duckies!! Get out of the road, little duckies! Ducks don’t belong in the road, nooooo, they definitely don’t!” (et cetera.)

The ducks were a stubborn bunch and unafraid; they’d let me get within two feet before nonchalantly waddling back towards the curb and hopping up onto the sidewalk. It took me a few passes to get them all out of the road.

And as I went back to my truck, my fellow motorists honked their horns, clapped, cheered, and whistled at me out of their windows. It was pretty terrific.

True story, the end.
(Boring blog isn’t boring anymore.)

You’re right. But that’s possibly because boring life is boring. This week I: worked, taught, worked more, went swing dancing with some co-workers, worked, cleaned my barn and my bedroom, worked, taught, and now…I’m working again!

I’ll try to be more interesting next time. I really do have some interesting stuff to say. Eventually. When I’m feeling less boring.

Tonight Tabitha came over to go riding and I got to show her my storybook homeland. We shambled through the pine forest, ducking under too-low branches and getting slapped in the face with pine boughs, and we rambled through the meadow, out into the newly-mown hayfield, and down the dirt road. The horses were content just to plod their way along, allowing us to talk and laugh our way through the world. I like it when I get to share my animals and my little piece of paradise with my friends.

We had fun.

Tonight I’m working on the fileboxes, that is, filling them with the piles of paper I’ve been intending to file. Just now I happened on a particularly old folder, filled with all kinds of random papers dating back to high school. Many of them were fairly amusing but my favorite was a seven-page long single-spaced printout of an instant messenger conversation (I know, it’s scandalous) between “Butsayav” and “Trekysevenofnine”. (That would be Abby and I–she was just that hockey-crazy and I was just that nerdy…and yet somehow we still managed to be best friends…) It was all about how this particular boy was sending Abby mixed signals and she might be falling in love with him but really, he was probably just joking, and it was just so heartbreaking…there was four pages of that…and then on the fifth page, this gem of a quote:

Butsayav: oh man….it’s so complicated to be a teenager…

Trekysevenofnine: girl, tell me about it…

And that is just so hilarious. Back then we were both still under the illusion that once you get to be an adult things would just automatically fall into place and you’d be awesomely cool and know how to do everything. I was convinced that 18, or at the very outside 21 was the magical age when all of this adult-knowledge was suddenly implanted into one’s head. I’m not sure how it was supposed to happen exactly–probably alien visitation at night.

I guess the adult-wisdom-aliens forgot about me because here I am, a whole twenty-two and a half, and while I can do cool things like drive a car and drink booze and write PHP (but not all at the same time), I don’t actually know anything at all.