#10: hope/esperanza; y la Ke toca puras buenas!

Lately postsecret.blogspot.com has become a site I check weekly. Sunday, the day I go to church and review in my head all the awful things I've done all week and hear words of Christ's eternal hope that I won't always be like that, is the same day this weblog is updated with postcards from the utterly hopeless. Waves of people reveal secrets to faceless readers and to a mysterious person named "Frank" who moderates the postcards put on the site. All manner of confessions are here, although I'm sure some of the submissions Frank gets don't make it to the internet. I often wonder if the same conundrum presented to the priest listening in the dark of the confessional - whether or not to report someone who confesses heinous crimes to an ear the owner has vowed is a one-way channel - gets delivered to Frank's mailbox on a daily basis. What does he do when people write in that they've murdered someone, or that "by the time you read this Frank I will be dead and done being miserable"? And in the tiny, nearly illegible footnote to the message, of which PostSecret contributors are so fond, the admission: And if the pills haven't worked I'll have found some other way... What does he do?
At the bottom of the page is a number for HopeLine, a suicide help hotline. And I wonder, reading through the list of postcards dotted with confessions of disbelief in God or abuse at the hands of the church or even plain rebellious behavior, all edited as the week goes by with comments from members of the PostSecret audience affirming how helpful this website has been - vowing that their lives have been saved by checking this site and reading a tastefully decorated postcard and calling 1-800-HOPE in the middle of a dark night of the soul... what would a HopeLine operator say that could really help someone not to kill himself or herself?
Listening to the Latino radio station La Ke (The 'K' plays all hits!) after reading The Other Side by Ruben Martinez, a hopeless, hopeless book filled with movements that are constantly being redefined, creeds that are ever re-evaluated, and factions that reproduce rebellious clones of themselves at the prolific pace of cockroaches, all undependable, all shifting, and at the end of the day all meaningless as I watch the author come to the end of his 170 pages and still find nothing around which to wrap his palms and hold on, I wonder what is left in the world if there isn't Christ for you to believe in. I've thought of everything in his book a thousand times over in the past eight months, many times more in the first two than in the last six, and I know there aren't any solutions to the problems he's seeing. I didn't have to travel the world like he did to know it's a world of pain. I know not even art means anything when it's accompanied with rhetoric, not even suffering has redemptive value if nobody pays attention to people's struggles, and not even politics matters when nobody has a conscience. But when I believe there's more to it than this mean scrabble for scraps of food to keep our ungainly bodies moving, that there's something to put in the space after being born and dying, then there's a point. It's as if the greatest test is not to despair after seeing how meaningless a Christless world is, and to truly believe that a world with a Christ actually does mean something.
It has everything to do with your relationship to Him and nobody else, with your total trust in His plan and His power, and your realization of your utter weakness, and nothing to do with finding out the answers to your questions or how much more like Jesus you were with every passing day. Every evening He is asking you, "Did you help the hungry out of your own resources? Did you pray to Me for the sick? Did you treat the people you saw downtown or in the gas station with My kindness?" He is not asking you, "Did you save the world (because, you know, it wasn't enough the first time I did it)? No? Well, you're quite a waste of time."
There isn't much difference between the confessions of the people on PostSecret and myself. I couldn't call HopeLine because I don't think they could tell me anything to which I couldn't make an objection. Christ is that person to whom I can make no exception.
Jen calls me
"You're being a dork. And you're normal."
"You mean the same thing happened to you?"
"Yes. And we're normal. Remember, we're pretty alike."
Just when I needed Jesus, the friend who sticks closer than a brother, to actually drop by the pad and help a girl out, he sends me a transcontinental phone call to remind me that not only does he never leave me, he gives me friends who are as faithful as is humanly possible.
My wonderful boyfriend has been taciturn all weekend. I think he is realizing that I am a terrible girlfriend. I think we are both realizing he is a much better boyfriend than I am a girlfriend. My nearest approximation of a 'love expression' involved fish bones in pasta, an opera about an axe-womb of a princess, and a closed restaurant. Other all-star attempts have involved me cleaning his whole room, washing and folding all his laundry, or cleaning his kitchen, all things that make him feel bad when I do them, as much joy as it gives me to do yucky things for him so he doesn't have to do them. Also, as much as I love going to the grocery store to get him things when he's sick and keeping him company when he's under the weather, he thinks it's imposing on me. I wish I could find a good way to show him how much I love him, not just tell him.

#9: it's really happening...

The realization has just struck me. Browsing through the Spring 2006 schedule of classes for the English Department searching for some minute clerical detail I needed, I realized that this is the last time I will be looking at a document like this. Never again will I greedily lap up the pages of CRN numbers that have faithfully promised wild intellectual adventures that were new every ten weeks for the last four years. Never again will I crouch with my newsprint paper schedule of classes and a ball point pen, scratching out asterisks next to enticing Russian literature seminars that hold the promise of profound revelation buried in pages of patronymics and philosophies, underlining ponderously titled upper division English classes based on book lists 99% of the world has never even seen, or circling the graduation requirement classes that would bring me one step closer to leaving the College of Letters and Sciences forever. I am graduating, and I haven't felt nostalgic about it until just now.
Three years ago, by some precocious awareness that was quick to leave, I gave some advice to an acquaintance who was in the place I find myself in now. As I sat on the green lawn of the quad, waiting to go take the last final of my freshman year, I told him not to worry about the goodbyes he would say to the details of this college scene, not to grieve too much for the academic environment he was leaving. I told him it was part of life to learn to make graceful partings. Mastering gracious goodbyes was included in the curriculum of a four-year university. I only hope I can take my own advice well enough to check off that degree requirement. I've done everything else I was supposed to do to be given the distinction of a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English with an emphasis in teaching. Now only the test of my ability to move on boldly, with aplomb and courage, remains to be passed, so that I can say I have truly completed my education.
with love, thanks, and pomp and circumstance,
Allison

#8: this is the Wolfman, inside yo' radio!

Do you know those nights when the radio is playing all the right songs? Tonight was one of them. It might still be one of them. Quick, turn on the radio and listen to your own heart before they start playing something else. I wish I'd lived in the time of Wolfman Jack, when every show he spun was a never-ending stream of perfectly chosen hits. I asked Andy once if he knew the feeling you get when you're out, where you know everyone else in the town is excited to be out that night too, and everyone you see just had to get out of the house that night. (He said he did, and I know he knows exactly what I meant.) Wolfman Jack was tapped into that. Watch American Graffiti to know how I feel. I can't wait for summer evenings like those - where the night doesn't even really begin until it's cool enough to go outside, and even driving in black darkness with a few people along for the ride is a journey of intense significance. Nobody needs to say anything. You just need wheels, warm air blowing through the windows, and a working radio.
I finished a novel in 2 hours and felt the rediscovered pleasure of being a bookworm. I used to tear through pages like a bum through a hamburger. Lately I've been too busy for my first, passionate love, the one which demanded my eyes, my hands, my time, my body frozen and huddled in a corner of blanket, and which possessed my mind. I used to have no hesitations about declaring to the world that I loved to read, but I've somehow gotten away from professing my love. Reunited and happy, sustaining the mildest of headaches that is only there to remind me how I developed it, I plan to devote more to books and words than I have recently.
I don't really know what I'm doing writing on here. It lets off steam and makes me feel better. It's a different place for my words to travel to, though a much less exciting destination. I would hope for millions to read this and for one particular person to do as Salinger said and call up the author. But maybe my writing has to fit J.D.'s other criterion - being good - before my telephone will be ringing again. I can wait that long, and besides, I could use improvement.
they're playing our song, so let's dance-
Allison