Every few months I get it in my mind that I should write more.  It's always true, and I'm always undisciplined so I don't.  Maybe the theme of 2015 will be discipline.  I recently completed a 40 Day fast and frankly I was amazed that I could do something like that.  It's not that it was so great an accomplishment in the scope of human history, but discipline has always been my worst thing.  I was the kind of kid that ate their entire bag of Halloween candy Halloween night.  I'm still that kid now.

I think one of the hard things about "first posts" is that I always feel some sort of need to explain who and what I am and that's overwhelming because... well, I'm eccentric and I kind of do a lot of things.  I'm currently 32 years old, unmarried and childless.  And yet, my life is full of kids.  I'm not technically a youth pastor, but my house is generally filled with kids from my church who look at me that way.  And I love that.

I'm also a social worker.  I have a job doing case work with a foster care agency.  Sometimes I love that and other times I hate it.  I see a lot of abuse and neglect and the worst sides of humanity.  And naturally, I also see the helpers... the people who give of themselves and make real sacrifices to help a strange child just because they need it.  The part of my job that sees trouble kids succeed, I love.  I also do early intervention with a friend's son who has autism.  And I love that too, because there's nothing quite as much fun as seeing the light of a new discovery cross a child's face.   I'm a substitute teacher, when I find the time.  And I love that.  I love being around kids.  I love all of the energy and the optimism and the untapped potential.

I'm a seminarian at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio.  And sometimes I love that.  I love learning new things.  I love being challenged.  But I don't love that I never seem to have the time to give it everything I have.  Sometimes I suspect that I could be pretty good at school if I gave it 100% of my time and attention.  But I love the other things too much.  I'm just doing my best to balance it all out.

So I don't know what this will look like.  But I'm going to give it a go.  I'm going to try write often.  If not every day, then every few days, or at least every week.

Rebuilding Pompeii

2014 feels weird.  Every year of my life before this one, I was kind of given a mission by default: I took care of mom.  There were lots of other things I did, including running around hectically after Jesse, Christian and Jonah and their friends and legions of youth group kids, depending on the season.  And of course, grad school, too, and keeping my GPA above a 3.5 in grad school isn't always the easiest thing.  And work.  I've done a lot of weird jobs to keep afloat so I didn't have to work full time and have to abandon mom.

After dad died and before mom died, I was generally up before dawn. I had to get mom's stuff for the morning together before I could leave the house.  I had to arrange for people to check on her while I was away.  I had to arrange to give myself opportunities to call her every hour or so to make sure she was okay.  I'd go to work, or school, or to pick up Jonah in Bellville.  The average day meant two trips from Shelby to Bellville and back, but often times it was more.  Throw in sports or doctors visits or dialysis three times a week or trips to the vet or whatever other ordinary things that life throws at you, and I was going, going, going all the time.  Meanwhile the constant texts and phone calls because I need to know that things aren't spiraling out of control here or there or anywhere.

I would get home at night and cook dinner.  Sometimes I would come home in the evening, cook dinner, run off somewhere for a while, and then come back again to get mom in bed before I had to run off somewhere else for a while just to get all the things done.  And even when I would finally actually get in bed, usually after midnight, I'd be up multiple times through the night to do things for mom because being terminally ill means that going to the bathroom in the middle of the night is an adventure.  Every day and every night was potentially an adventure for years, because being that sick means that there is always an emergency or there is about to be one.  All the time.

Between the illness and the fact that the drugs which tame pain cause hallucinations and what looks like seizures and random fits of vomiting, there was mom's paranoia and her loneliness and her grief after losing dad.  When I try to talk to people about what it was like to take care of someone who on her healthiest day could be unstable and unpredictable because she had bipolar disorder, I have to temper my need to be told "you did a good job" with the urge I have to rip the face off of anyone who could criticize her in any way... because, I loved her.

Anyway, I don't know how this is getting so long.  My point was, I used to run a lot and sleep very little and somehow I managed to keep my life together.  I have no idea now how it ever was that I did that.  Because now I feel completely put out if I have to drive the grocery store five minutes from my house.

It frustrates me to no end that it seems like no matter what I do in life, I'm always letting someone down.  I thought that when mom died, it wouldn't be so hard to keep up.  Not that I was looking forward to her dying by any means, but it just seemed logical that with fewer things to do I would be able to organize things finally.  I would have time.

But there's never time and the needs never seem to stop.  I have to fight this urge to just withdraw from everyone and everything because I know that isn't healthy.  It's nearly 5am and I didn't sleep at all last night because it's lonely being alone sometimes and when I'm anxious I just want someone to talk to and there's nobody here.  So I stay up talking to myself inside my head and words and thoughts spill out on this page without resolution.

I know that even if I weren't alone, people would get tired of hearing about it.  I know that many people already have.  I try not to talk about the misery, but I can't stop myself somehow.  I have to tell the same story over and over again because I can't figure out what it's telling me in my head.  And until I process whatever it is, it won't stop haunting me when I'm trying to sleep, eat, drive, breathe, be...

I don't know where I'm going now or what I'm going to anchor my life around.  I'm just sort of drifting.  Waiting for the next horrible tragedy to set things in stone, so there are no choices and I just have to survive again.  Because when your focus is just survival every day, the priorities are so much clearer.

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?