You have to, you just have to trust me!

I had another one of those dreams last night. This one was different though, better. I was over it only an hour or so into work. Perhaps while the monotony of the job is conducive to simply letting my mind wander, I can lose myself in it sufficiently to stop any recursive trainwrecks of thought.

It is my dad's birthday today. We had a really good dinner, then played Scrabble as a family. Reez won by oodles, with Mom in second, me in third and Dad coming in last. It was fun though, the first time that I can remember us playing Scrabble. We are usually a card-game family.

On a different topic: I was thinking at work today, what is the best way to get rid of misplaced attractions? I know the most effective way: douse it in cynicism. That is the method that I used all the way through well... through that magical evening a few years back when I started to believe in love again. Because that is the problem with using cynicism as a cure to crushes: it is like using arsenic to cure a fever. Your blood will cool very quickly, but you are left dead. Perhaps some blessed portion of you, "my readers", don't know the technique I'm talking about. It involves developing a hopeless/senseless attraction/crush and immediately killing it with one of three options, depending on why "it would never work out":
1) If she doesn't seem open: She's not in my league. She would never be interested in me.
2) If she seems immature: She's just another insecure girl looking to use me for her ego. She wants attention more than love.
3) If it's more to do with me: I'm sure it's just my loneliness looking for anything to fill itself. It's more about me wanting attention than anything to do with her as a person. I am "damaged goods". (Go to option one)

As you can see, if these thought-patterns are used on pretty much every attraction you have (based on a childhood assumption, carried into adolescence, that every attraction that you have is hopeless) it kills the belief that true mutual love exists, or at least that it will ever happen to you. These are the conditions that I lived under until I was almost eighteen years old. I realize that there must be a better way, a way to believe in the real possibility of love while dealing with attractions that, for whatever reason, have no future. That is what I learned on that night in January, that there is something better than hopelessness, and I have been looking for it in every situation since. I just haven't found it yet in this case.

So in the meantime I have been trying to use a watered down version ("I just broke up with someone last Feb, I can't be sure that any relationship I get into will be more than a rebound"), but every use still leaves you a little more dead on the inside. Maybe the way is just to live with the difficulty of hopeless attractions and keep your eyes on the hope that is in Christ? I have that hope; I know what I am waiting for and I will wait until it is the right time, even if it is years from now. I have no interest in the temporary. My problem is not the future, it is the right-now.

For now I am, as I have said at various points, "chilling in neutral" or "rockin' it single-style" and I am comfortable with that. It is just that, every time I meet or get to know a girl and that attraction starts, I start thinking: "Is this the right person? Is this the right time?" and I generally have to conclude that at the /least/, it is not the right time. Which leaves me unable to either take or leave the attraction, unsure of whether when the right time comes, a month from now or three years from now, the problems will vanish and this will end up being the right person at the right time. And so I pray, and I wait for my Savior to come through for me. Perhaps that is the solution that I am looking for after all.

Rainer Maria Rilke's take on the situation:
"People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

"Whoever I was then, I can't ever be again."
-L