Every New Beginning Is Some Other Beginning's End...

I'm not sure what I'm doing here.  When I was an undergraduate student, I used to keep a blog.  It was a couple of years worth of thoughts and memories, nearly a thousand entries worth.  It is both sad and amusing to look back on now.  Embarrassing at times, sure, but it's fun to look back on the person I once was and not be completely horrified by that person.

So maybe that's what I'm doing here.  Beginning to pick up the pieces of thought after a major disaster.  Keeping a record of all this building I'm doing, so if I ever get lost I can find my way back.

I think a lot about death.  I lost both of my parents between January 2012 and June 2013.  My father was sudden, and my mother was long and drawn out.  Both losses were horrible and even though it's been a while now and I can sense the space between the present time and then, I'm still grieving.  I'm still figuring out who I am.

At 31 years old, I'm living in a rental house in a horrible neighborhood wedged in between two abandoned houses.  I get scared at night sometimes when I'm alone, but I guess all of these experiences will make good fodder for epic stories later on in my adulthood if I survive them.  I get to see colorful people every day.  Occasionally I'm treated to a good fight in the alley way or a drug bust or something and I get a front-seat view from my upstairs windows.

I'm a substitute teacher and I mostly enjoy it.  I'm no Dorothy Zbornak or anything, but I like the flexibility in the schedule.  It allows me to go to grad school and it allows me to watch Jonah and those are the things that matter most to me.

I'm a seminarian.  I've been doing seminary studies since like 2010 and I still don't have a degree.  I'm not sure if I'm even half-way done.  I've learned an awful lot though.  I have no idea what I want to do when I graduate, if I get graduate.

A lot of the time, I feel like an adult orphan.  But I'm rarely alone.  My house is always full of people.  Friends and relatives of Jonah, friends and relatives of mine, and youth group teens and their friends as well.  I also have a cat.  I never thought I'd like cats, but he's surprisingly good company for someone like me.  He's not overly needy or overly compassionate, so I neither feel the obligation to faun or over him or to be fauned over myself.

So that's a beginning.  A something.  I don't know what it will look like here.  If it will be political, or religious, or some unhealthy segway of the two.  Or if it'll just be a record of my experiences, a pseudo-non-mommy blog of some sort.

Well, we'll see, won't we?