We Leave with Nothing but Love

I often find myself wondering at the things that just took place. All day today, I have been pondering and praying over such things. The morning was unrestful, headache-y, and stressful. There was nothing I could do to help. And then all I could do was vocalize a prayer over the phone. The afternoon was sad and only partially productive. I am still dealing with the repercussions of a former bad roommate and seething apartment-mates over the matter. Story-sharing time was extraordinarily wearing. This evening was fun, but also thought-provoking in discussion about a close friend’s cousin who is trapped in his own floundering marriage.

What just happened today? So many experiences have been shared. So many words have been transacted. So many thoughts and emotions. And suddenly, I am alone in my clean apartment, listening to songs with no words, and eating dinner alone. My mind is transposed by a classic novel, but my soul aches to spread itself elsewhere. I want to help these people, but here I sit, alone. Have I done any good? Have I showed true love and care to every person? Have the 20.95 years of my life proven educated enough to effectively respond to each of these circumstances? Am I just another daft Talkative, like in Pilgrim’s Progress?

So before I sit down and let a few tears of desperation roll, I pray for discernment. I pray that this time I have been given would be spent well. I beg for understanding and stamina. I beg for the Holy Spirit of God to be my strength and my joy as I sit here and wonder.

There have been several seasons of dinnertime culture in my life. When I eat alone, I feel alone. I have felt the growing pains of a upper-classmen high schooler at a Christian school that required a hectic lifestyle, when I forgot the joy of eating with my family, and the natural flow of a dinner party.

When I went to college, I learned the game of spending hours on end in the cafeteria, having a dinner party with the whole student body. Now, as a junior in college, dinner parties are limited to weekends and vacations.  I learned this week that Woody Allen grew up eating dinners alone. For this reason, he has a funny perspective on family dinners.

I made another hat tonight. Incompetence overwhelms my mind, and I cannot sleep until I finish a project. So here is the beanie: blue, yellow, brown; with a spontaneous pattern I started on the way home from Imperial Beach while driving in a car with my family, trying to convince my parents that I would rather have a passport than a smart-phone.

Finally, here is the thought of the afternoon, as a result of reading at Starbucks with Nicole:

The word ‘romantic’ is notoriously slippery, and two of its many possible meanings are separately, and confusingly, relevant to Wuthering Heights. When Mary Visick sets ’social position and romantic love’ together, in opposition to ‘a mystical vocation’, she is clearly defining romantic love as the kind of relationship Catherine has wiht Edgar Linton, the process of courtship and marriage which leads to integration into what have until recently been regarded as teh ‘normal’ structures of society. This is the most common modern meaning of the phrase; it describes the kind of plot we expect to find in books labelled ‘romantic riction’. What Visick describes as ‘a mystical vocation’, however, can also be described as ‘romantic love’ if we take the word ‘romatic’ in a historical sense, to mean thne se of attitudes characteristic of the Romantic movement, which in England happened from about 1780-1830… This kind of ‘Romantic love’ derives its intensity from unfulfilled desire.

For Freud, the courtship-and-marriage pattern, which we see in novels from Jane Eyre to Mills and Boon, is the ‘normal’ feminine path through the Oedipus complex, in which the young girl looks for a lover who is like her forbidden father. …Children look for a confirmation of their own identity in a mirror image of themselves, which can be provided metaphorically by the answering gaze of another child, a brother or sister.Because the early nineteenth-century Romantic movement was very much concerned with questions of individual, as opposed to social, identity, its male poets characteristically reverted to this earlier stage of development, representing themselves as exiled from society by a relentless quest for ideal mirrors of themselves in the form of mythological or divine women, spirits of beauty or truth, sometimes conceived as sisters… Juliet Mitchell… claims that Romantic love, which ‘does not have a sexual object that is ultimately different from itself’, represents ‘the triumph of death over life’,  whereas what she calls ‘legitimate or married love’ is ‘the triumph of sexuality over death, the species over the individual’.

In the end, I have decided that there is a triumphant kind of romance that isn’t wrought with sexual concern, but instead is a lifelong triumph of death over life. For Wuthering Heights, it means that Catherine and Heathcliff’s romance is only resolved when they are together in the grave. Romance is the love that causes a man to lay down his life for a friend. The ‘romance’ that pervades society is merely form of  ’married love.’ Therefore, may we learn to be more romantic, and overcome the facade of modern romance.

http://www.trilulilu.ro/beugen2001/f33f56a55d717f?video_google_com=

Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra are wonderful.

May this Christmas season be preparation for our hearts to learn generosity, festivity, and love in a non-consumerist way.

May the joys of Christ’s birth provide good parties and enjoyable seasons for genuine relationships.

May we all find healing and growth through the terrors of hard semesters and spiritual difficulty.

May we learn to appreciate daily life better experiencing joy together.

May we love, forgive, and share burdens.

Monica’s addition to my term paper:
Did you know the guy who invented Vaseline ate a spoonful of Vaseline each day? He ended up growing luscious locks not just with the hair on his forehead, but also with his beard. It was a very magnificent beard and it brought all the girls to his farm. The farm was full of dinosaurs who also ate a spoonful of Vaseline each day. Their skin grew strong and shiny and the dinosaurs were known throughout Europe for their skin. People flocked all the way from the ends of the earth to get a glimpse of these magnificent beasts. In return for a minute of looking at these rare and shiny-coated beasts, they paid the guy who created Vaseline with pies of all sorts. Mince pie, apple pie, banana cream pie, and so many more types. The guy and his dinosaurs never grew hungry and were content to keep on inventing Vaseline and to eat many pies.

My term paper is about Pity and Government taxation policies.