oh bananas.

i’m not sure what to about this blog.

our friends in california don’t know i have a blog. or maybe they read it through matt’s and i just don’t know it, which is fine i suppose. but i’ve hesitated to be forthright about it - not because i have anything to hide, but because it allows me to hide. i’m much more articulate at the keyboard than i am face to face, and i think that’s been part of the reason for my struggles during our time here in dallas. while this writing and reading has been fun and a release for me, i think the one thing it’s hindered is my relationships (or potential relationships) with other people. i’ve become shy and introverted and awkward, which is something we poke fun of most of the time, because i know it’s not me. i don’t know who it is.

the last few weeks i’ve felt lighter, and more hopeful and maybe even the slightest bit more myself than i have in 3 years. i don’t know what God is doing, but i feel him pulling me out of the little mud pit i’ve been sitting in all this while. this church plant has been good to my soul. i find that i’m in a constant state of prayer because nothing seems to be stable about our future right now, and praying is really the only thing i can do. god takes care of the sparrows. i need to cling to that.

i’m trying to feel my way around this whole pastor’s wife thing. i know that the only way that matt and i are going to grow a healthy church is if we are transparent, and open, and honest, and full of love and aware of our brokenness. and willing to share our brokenness and god’s grace over it. and i’m growing aware of the fact that this must be done face to face, and not behind a computer screen.

my only regret is that i didn’t grow deeper here in dallas. i chose to shy away from people and be paranoid of looking like a big dork. but, i think i’m coming to grips with being a huge dork. and that makes me hopeful.

so, about this blog. i don’t know what to do. i think it might be time to take a break in order to protect my future friendships with people in los angeles and maybe just breathe some fresh air. and get refreshed and renewed. and re-learn what authentic relationships look like. and maybe when i’m ready, if i ever feel ready, i can come back.

i think that’s what i’m going to do. maybe one more post before we leave and then yes we have no bananas will go on a little vacation.

matt and i will have a blog set up for updates on our lives in hollywood and how god is working through the church plant. so we’ll still be around. i just won’t be hiding anymore. we’ll be the light we’re supposed to be.

here goes nothing.

talkin’ texan

boss: have you checked on your flats?

me (looking down at my shoes): what about my flats?

matt: your flights. she said have you checked on your flights…

other words/phrases we’ve picked up along the way:

jeeew-lie (july)
you look lack death wahrmed ovah (i learned this one when i showed up to work without makeup)
fixin’
if rowan doesn’t get his ree-view turned in this afternoon, i’m gonna eat his lunch
‘ppreciate cha
pertinear

i really have grown to love texas.

(ps - thanks for your prayers, looks like matt’s fixin’ to be a pastor!)

it’s go time

and we’re off!

matt’s final interview is on friday, and he’ll be preaching on sunday (ephesians 2:11-22, on peace despite difference)

pray for us

love you guys.

sir i have not any

so last week i started packing up our apartment. we’re moving in with one of my bosses (ha! ha! HA!) in small town ennis texas for a couple of months until we make the big trek to you-know-where. we’ll be moving into a very large 100 year old house in the middle of nowhere. i’m very excited for this. very. excited. while the idea of two families sharing one bathroom is a little… foreign.. i think we really need this time of rest. time in ennis passes very slowly. and we need that right now. slow. whew. there’s a pool. open space. a dog for yagi to hang out with. homemade lemonade in the fridge at all times. and just a very loving family watching out for us. they’re making us rest. i don’t think we’ll have a problem.

in the mean time, i’m packing. we’re trying to bring as little as possible with us. one of the pieces of advice that we’ve heard over and over again is to pack light. condense, condense, condense. we’ve been spoiled in our uptown apartment. i have a feeling that our place in los angeles is going to be much much smaller. tiny even. i’m looking forward to living more simply. i suppose we have no choice. but looking at how much stuff we have, it’s hard to believe how many things we own that we just don’t NEED.

my prayer is, while we’ll certainly be sucked in by the hustle and bustle of a gigantic city, our home life will be simple. i don’t know what that looks like exactly, but i know that it doesn’t involve 5 ginormous kitchen appliances that only do one thing. or a large variety of knick-knaks that would make any grandma jealous. or the 25 additional coffee mugs that my mother in law bought me just-in-case i have 25 additional people over for coffee on any given evening. and how in the world did my husband end up with so many pairs of socks? i mean really. so many socks that i can’t fit them all in his dresser drawers and now some of them are in my own.

simple simons. simple flexible simons. that will be our motto.

professional? really?

so today is administrative professional’s day (APD). formerly known as administrative assistant’s day. formerly known as secretary’s day.

it’s a fun day. my office is quite generous and kind about it (last year they all pooled together and bought my plane ticket to chicago for my marathon!). i have 7 bosses. saying that always makes me laugh. one boss always gives me an orchid which i cherish but inevitably kill once i take it home (my goal this year is to keep it alive for at least one month). another boss takes me for a very nice lunch at a shee-shee restaurant where they give you napkins that match your pants and say “that’s an excellent choice, miss” when you order. another brings me an assortment of treasures from all his business trips… a hello kitty doll from china, truffles from paris, a star wars dvd set from japan (he gets me).

and every year one of them accidentally forgets and stops at my cube to apologize almost on their knees begging for forgiveness, which is really the only bad thing about APD. not that they forget, but because the begging for forgiveness part causes me to blush all shades of red and nervously laugh and beg them not to beg. because, dude. i staple your papers and file your files and make sure you don’t forget appointments. that’s all. and most of the time i’m not that great at it. and sometimes i play really mean pranks on you and laminate everything on your desk. or forget to tell you that the CFO is coming to your office and you’re elbow deep in a pastrami sandwich with your shoes off. or slip and fall on the bamboo floor while escorting one of your veryimportant clients into the conference room. AND YOU STILL PAY ME. not only do you pay me but you actually seem to still like me despite the fact that i still really have no idea what i’m doing, even after three years. that’s a gift enough. thank YOU for not firing me.

for real.

excuse me, your face is blue

yesterday matt and i went to get frozen custard at wild about harry’s.

i love harry’s. love it. harry himself usually makes an appearance and he’s just like everyone’s favorite grandpa. and the custard is just so fresh and good. we just needed some time to slow down and breathe a little.

we went to the back where the seating is, and i was so sad to find that harry had put a flat screen television in the corner of the room. a really loud one. i wanted to cry! i looked around and saw families eating custard together, necks craned up toward the television. a little boy actually missed his mouth with the spoon because he was distracted and dropped some custard on the floor. the whole room was silent.

matt and i sat down and i was trying to have an open mind about the television. i often feel bad for not having one in our home because matt is such a huge sports fan. he hardly ever gets to see any games unless he wants to go to a bar or a friends house. however the good, quality time we spend together during the evenings keeps us from getting cable. even the times we spend listening to npr while we lay on the carpet seems to be more valuable and interactive than with television. i can’t explain why.

anyway, i couldn’t take more than 5 minutes sitting inside harry’s. there was some guy screaming in my ear about dodge rams and i could barely hear matt talk to me. so we sat outside. and the sound of traffic and honking was like a choir of angels compared to the noise inside. i woke up still feeling sad about it.

and i hope this doesn’t come off as a pretentious rant about the evils of technology. i mean, heck i’m blogging right now, aren’t i? i send a million emails a day, don’t i? but i have to say that our culture is moving far far away from personal, interactive relationships.

the other day i met this guy at one of our resident events. he seemed like a genuinely nice, interesting guy and we talked a lot about music and where we grew up, etc. etc. only i felt like i wanted more from him. mainly, i felt like i wanted to make eye contact with him. because his eyes were on his silly phone the entire conversation. and we were having a meal together! with other people around us! it was dark outside, but i could clearly see what he looked like because the light from his phone illuminated his face. it made his face blue. i looked around the restaurant, and half the people in there had their phones in their hands while they ate. most of them glanced down at them during lulls in conversations, or even mid sentence to check their emails or send a text. then i suddenly felt very very lonely. like my-chest-hurts kind of lonely. and i figured that everyone in the restaurant probably felt the same kind of loneliness despite the fact that they were around people and obviously texting/emailing someone far away. i can’t explain it. there just wasn’t any depth or richness in conversation. it was just lonely.

one of my friends told me that he texts about 800 messages a month, but hardly uses his 200 minutes on his phone plan. he said that when he wants to tell someone something, he doesn’t want to always go through the “hi, how are you? great how are you?” thing. which, in some ways i understand. (and i really like this guy a lot, so i don’t want to come off as judgmental). sometimes you just want to say “meet me here at xyz” or whatever. short and concise. but, sometimes i want people to ask how i am. and i want to ask how they are. and i want a genuine answer. and sometimes i want to touch the person i’m talking to and look in their eyes and walk arm in arm and eat off their plate and talk about how much we hurt and about the time their dog bruno ate an entire family size bag of jellybeans. and sometimes i want the term “hands-free cell phone” to mean that their hand/body is literally free from any type of mechanism that wasn’t already there when they exited the womb. well, except for clothes of course.

because that would be awkward.

whoa

our move is becoming more real this week. my palms are sweaty right now just thinking about it. this whole adventure so far has been a lot of waiting waiting waiting and then WHOA! and then more waiting waiting waiting and a lot more WHOA!

this week’s WHOA came on friday when matt scheduled his final interview at a church plant in alhambra. memorial day weekend. pray for us! we’re also finalizing plans to leave our apartment ministry at the end of may. we’ll be moving in with our dear friends in ennis, texas for the summer while matt finishes up school and (lord willing) we start raising support. we have little experience raising support and i have to say that i’m nervous. i suppose that’s normal. yes, it’s normal. the nervousness. not raising support. raising support is very counter culture. which is why i’m nervous. ahem.

as of late, the conundrum (note to self: amazing word) is being here. being here. right here. we know that plans are shaping up for the end of the summer, but it’s not the end of the summer. right now is now. and i don’t want to be at the end of the summer this instant because there is so much going on right now. and right now is good. very, very good.

so my intent is to be excited about the WHOAs but only long enough to smile and thank god for them. and then focus on amber’s baby. matt’s graduation. zach smith coming to visit. abby’s long pigtails. rowan’s tetris tournaments. trolley rides in the most amazing weather spring has to offer. busting out the skirts and flip-flops. watching yagi frolic. lemon cake. rooftop sunbathing. sweet tea. oh the sweet tea!

so if you find me dazing off into space daydreaming about los angeles and all the glorious things that may come with this adventure, please feel free to (gently) bring me back to right now. because, for real, that’s where my heart wants to be. with you.

in da club

matt and i painted the town red on friday night with a bunch of my officemates. they wanted to show us the night life up in addison, so we dusted off our passports and left uptown.

typically, when matt and i go out, we are pretty low key [read: nerdy]. folk rock concerts, library bars, margaritas on the patio, etc. etc. however, on friday, we learned a few things about ourselves:

1) we can’t dance anymore. i knew this one was coming, but i didn’t understand the severity of our condition. i will say that matt is a MUCH better dancer than me. he still has some rythm and can pull it off without too much effort. i, on the other hand, had no idea what to do with myself and mostly just stood there wondering:

“wait… where is the acoustic guitar? where is the guy with the whiney voice? what is this thumping bass? okay. calm down. just kind of swing your arms around a bit. okay. don’t do that. ummm… running man? do people still do the running man? no? okay….”

we were lucky that the people around us were very forgiving.

2) from what we heard on the dance floor, i’m pretty sure i can write a hip-hop/r&b dance song and go platinum. it would go something like this:

(phat beat)

uhhhh…. ohhh yeaahhh… yo baby baby
let’s get on the dance floor and shake it
shake it like you havin’ a seizure
i wanna please ya
i won’t leave ya
oh yeah, uh huh, oh yeah
baby baby baby
yeah yeah

3) never judge a book by its cover. our IT manager, claudette, can dance. she can DANCE. don’t let the computer and glasses fool you. she drops it like it’s hot.

after, we spent the early hours of the morning playing xbox. i like running over pedestrians on grand theft auto, and matt did pretty well shooting my officemates on halo. don’t worry, we’re just testing out all the video games our children won’t be aloud to touch with a 10 foot pole.

it was fun. however tomorrow night we’re going back to our normal nerdy selves in order to see colin! meloy! solo! at the granada. dancing not required.

uhhhh oh yeah baby baby.

well do you, punk?

conversation through the cubes:

me: row, what is that line in dirty harry? you know, that clint eastwood line about feeling lucky?

rowan: what? umm…. “i’ll be back.”

me: did you even think about my question before you answered or did you just spit out whatever action movie line you could think of quickly?

rowan: of course.

me: dude you’re not even listening. are you playing tetris?

rowan: i need an orange cube! AN ORANGE CUBE! **bad words**

boss walking by: keep up the good work, troops.

my boys

we’ve been too busy to grocery shop this week. so the inmans have been very creative with what’s left in the pantry. matt called me at work just now to inform me that we ran out of dog food, too.

“…. so i made yagi a cheese quesadilla and threw in some salami.”

love it.