parenting_ish

I'm not pregnant. I thought I would get that out of the way before I write a parenting blog post. Also, I think more about parenting than I do about dating. I major in putting the cart before the horse.

There's something that I want to work on doing now, as a favor to any future kids I might give birth to or raise. And this thing does not rank high on the list of things you can do to screw up your kid.

I want to work on having an open mind toward ideas that I think are dumb, dangerous, or have never heard of before.

I have hung out with high schoolers before who feel so misunderstood by their parents. It's painful to watch. The kid is trying to figure out their identity by trying out different things and the parent (it seems to me) is kind of flabbergasted and resigns to saying "whatever, let me know when you've grown up."

Letting people I love change for (what seems to me as) the worse is one of my serious weaknesses. I can't handle it, I freak out. In the end, the whole thing is not worth the emotional energy I spend on it, because God loves them more than I do anyway and me freaking out about it doesn't help anything.

I don't know how I can go about trying to grow in this area, but I am seriously looking into it.

To Do: Learning to Love You More

A wonderful book/website/project/to do list by the indie queen Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher.

Learning to Love You More

Here are some examples:

10. Make a flier of your day.

9. Draw a constellation from someone's freckles.

8. Curate an artist's retrospective in a public place.

7. Recreate 3 minutes of a Fresh Air interview.

6. Make a poster of shadows.

5. Recreate an object from someone's past.

4. Start a lecture series.

3. Make a documentary video about a small child.

2. Make a neighborhood field recording.

1. Make a child's outfit in an adult size.

...and all on the website, people send in their projects in response to the lists. It's the most wonderful thing I've seen in months.

The Next Step

Two of my friends are in very different places. The scary and helpful thing about having friends who are all a year older is that when I look at their lives, I look at the coming attractions in my own.

One just bought relatively nice (versus Walmart's) flatware. In response to my remarks, she said something like 'yeah well, I'm not getting married any time soon so I thought I might as well get stuff that I actually like.'

And my other friend is listening to "I can't help falling in love with you," or whatever it's called, sung by Michael Buble. She's been doing this for the last couple months ever since her boyfriend's been gone on a semester abroad.

I see myself going more and more towards door number one. I'm already looking at Consumer Reports, looking into buying a good vacuum that I don't loathe (vacuuming is my #1 most hated chore), and am excited about getting nice measuring cups/spoons and carving out a life for myself where I'm relatively self-sustaining (materially - as in, I'm not looking to someone to lend me an iron the one time a year I iron something).

A neighbor I grew up up with got engaged this past week. We're the same grade in school and went to middle school and high school together. We're very similar in background and everything else. It's a little strange, but not in an unpleasant way.

I saw my old roommate from freshman year randomly today while she was clearing ice off of her car in the lot behind my apartment. Apparently she's has been dating my neighbor that we share the lot with for the past month or so and I had no idea. She's had about 5 or 6 pretty serious relationships in college so far. The conversation falls flat when she asks about who I've been dating. There's just not much going on. And that's okay.

I feel kind of numb towards it all, like I'm exempt from dating. Of course, this comes and goes. But overall, I don't know if I'd know what to do with a boyfriend if I had one. I guess that's nice for right now. But I'm still looking for a good vacuum.

Love

I've been thinking about how to love others as I love myself. I'm confident I got the beginning of this idea from a talk I've heard recently but I can't remember.
I think I had this idea of loving others as I love myself as this unreachable level of loving others where I didn't even think about myself anymore and kind of dissolved into a nothingness of myself but only goodness pouring out of me.
I don't think that's true, but who knows. If I ever get there and it looks like that, I'll recant.
I've been thinking about how I love myself. In a lot of ways I'm not as easy on myself as I am on others. I don't always assume the best of myself. I want to get better. I think about things and repent. Sometimes I'm mad at myself for a couple days. Sometimes I'm exceedingly happy with myself for a couple days.
But the point of the scripture (as I've always heard it) is to want the best (as in, what God wants for them) for people. And I've always kind of sidestepped that by saying "well, I don't know what God wants for them" or just didn't think about it. But the way that I want the best for myself and what God wants for me is that I repent and concede to Him.

In Malaysia, Kevin Burrell gave a talk where he gave the best definition of repentance I've heard:
"repentance is giving as much of yourself as you know to as much of Christ as you know"