Using the Good Stickers

When I was a child, I didn't use the good stickers.
Those heart ones, with the glitter --
yeah --
those stayed in my sticker box.
My sisters didn't use their good stickers either.
Instead, we would hoard them up like little misers until someone suggested we trade.

Trading stickers.  Yes.  The best part of my childhood.

One by one the stickers would be pulled from their boxes and lined up facing the potential buyer.
Two unicorns for the big, shiny heart...
Three little Lisa Franks for that one big Lisa Frank...
(How Lisa broke our hearts with every spotted puppy and rainbow unicorn!)
The trading would get fast and furious, with Bekah (the sweetest of we six) always the wiliest, most heartless trader on the floor.  Somehow she managed to secure all our most coveted stickers while keeping her own.  (Oh, Bekah, you always did get what you wanted.)

But like I said, despite the frenzy of our own little Wall Street, when the floor was closed for the day we didn't use our stickers.  They were our treasures, more rare than black opals.  On special occasions, like when sending a gift to my penpal in Georgia, I would use one of the Good Ones; this always meant you were a dearly loved piece of my life, because with the sticker went at least one-sixteenth of my heart.  So rare was my sticker usage that up until college I had a sticker box with a decade's worth of "the good ones" squirreled away.

My niece isn't like me.  She's an only child, so she doesn't have to share every little piece of everything that comes into her life.

She uses her good stickers as soon as she gets them. (And the 10-year-old inside me dies a little each time she sees the paper peeling off its backing. Don't use the good ones! she screams.)

And We Change

I wore a strapless dress today.
My 16-year-old, baggy-shirt-wearing self would not approve.

The Cabin in the Woods

One day,
I was talking to my baby sister who,
like me,
is an introvert.
And I said, "Sometimes, when I'm so tired of people I can't stand it anymore,
I mentally go to this cabin in the woods--"
and before I was finished she screamed out,
"I HAVE A CABIN, TOO!"

My sister just got a job as the relationship manager of her IT department.

Also, she's ginger. The jokes are endless.

Homeopathic ER

Uncovered

From a very young age I learned the importance of knowledge; mainly because I discovered that when you couldn't verbalize an experience or emotion, the world punished you.  It was your sister who started it, but you who got the spanking; there was a real sorrow in your heart or pain in your body, but you were told to go to your room and cry because the adults around you didn't want to hear about it.  I hated childhood, because it was so isolating; I would never go back.  The world does not bend to understand the heart of a child, it works instead to bend the heart of her or him.

So, I learned to read when I was three years old and by age eight was reading everything I could get my hands on, including my mother's 20-year collection of Reader's Digest.  I didn't know what sex was, but I was reading about kidnapping and rape when I ought to have been reading about Barbar the Elephant and Ramona Quimby, Age 8.

Thus it began: my life-long project of grabbing Knowledge and wrapping it around me as a cloak against the winds and the rain of the angry world.  In adulthood I have pursued subjects at which I excel, in which I can own my coveted Knowledge.  I write, because I read, and I understand the written word. I am a linguist, because I understand people's hearts and can wrap my own heart around their burning need to communicate, to be heard.  I travel, because it gives me Knowledge of the world and its people, which in turn makes me a better linguist, which in turn makes me a better writer.  I have jumped off cliffs and lived in boldness in so many ways, but always in ways that produced more Knowledge, without too much pain to myself.

And now I am 31, needing a more steady income than being able to pick out an accent in a crowd can give me.  So I am back in school to become a sonographer.  Great income, get to work with people (which I'm relatively good at), and have travel/ministry opportunities.  It's a good path for me.

But.

The program requires physics, and physics requires algebra, and I haven't taken algebra in 10 years.  Not only that, after I finished algebra at the age of 21, I turned and started running away from it as fast as I possibly could, because I didn't understand it and couldn't (quickly) excel. In short, it was too painful.

So this summer as I study physics, my cloak of The Right Answer which has protected me for so many years has been stripped from my shoulders, and I am found beneath it to be naked and three-years-old, shivering and crying.

Malala Yousafzai

"We realize the importance of our voice when we are silenced"

And this is why I told someone the other day that one of my best friends lives in Jersey.

(I'm @GracefulEwe.)

I always knew I liked Dustin.

James Patterson

"I'm comfortable in my own skin, but I'm certainly not impressed with myself."

Lover Of The Light

My favorite part is when he's picking out the tie. So simply elegant.
Also: Mumford (+) lyrics = A+++.

Baba W

She was so much older than my grandmothers, because my best friend's parents were so much older than my parents.  But with the age, perhaps, came the wisdom. 

And peace.
She was peace, personified.
She was joy.
She was graciousness.

How can I describe her?  How can I give you a taste of this beautiful slice of my life? A person wanted to be around Baba, felt better around Baba, couldn't help loving Baba. Baba was so much at rest with who she was and what the world was. She is what comes to my mind when I think about who I want to be. I miss her rolling Russian accent. I miss hearing her pray in her native language. I miss her roses and her back house and her kitchen and the little jar of candy on the coffee table. I'm glad I knew her, and grateful that her memory is almost as strong and fresh as her presence even years after her passing.  It...she...reminds me to hold on to peace and let myself give grace.

God, that I might be like Baba.

Storage

Well, it's happening. The infamous storage unit in Oregon is being emptied and its contents reunited with their owner.  The truck won't get to me for another two weeks, but two weeks is a short wait when I haven't seen my things in three years.

(Things.  In French, directly translated, les choses.  I said this a lot in France, because I say it a lot in English.  Months and months into my stay a friend finally said, "Rachel, we just don't say les choses like you're using it.  Say, maybe, mes affaires instead."  Way to teach me not to be so vague, Cyril.  Your voice will be in my head til I die, correcting me every time I use the word "things." Kudos.)

So tonight I am listening to All Good Things Come From the Desert and rearranging mes affaires yet again, anticipating the tight squeeze it'll be once my second half arrives.  Half my wardrobe.  My favorite books, to be added to the almost ceiling-high stack in my closet now.  Dishes I still won't need for a while.  A bike.  My desk - that last one so important and greatly missed these passing years, but I find it a bit painful to think about fitting it into a crowded bedroom that already has to make room for my niece's toys, a bed, and two dressers.

My things.  Mes choses.  Mes Affaires.

And Christopher Miner.

The rearranging, the anticipation, the music...I feel like I'm 26 again.  I feel like I'm neurotically in like with T.J. and discontent with my life.  It's funny how just the right combination of things can throw you back like that.  I'm not discontent, and I no longer like T.J., and I'm certainly not 26.  But music can rub on your heart scars sometimes, pulling them just the right way to remind you there was once a wound.  It's not bad.  Sometimes it's nice to remember what life was, even to enter the emotion for a second, like watching a sappy movie.

Did you now scar tissue can have its own blood supply?  Scar tissue is not, as so many assume, dead tissue, but living. That's why its still sensitive sometimes. But the little pinching reminders are good.  They say, "This is what your life has been; this is what you've been through.  Remember, and be grateful.  Embrace the growth."