kitsch

 

I’ve been told everything changes when you fall in love. I have always thought that was a crappy way of expressing that you’re just a sucker. My cynical shoulder angel pacifies and tells me that such phrases are simply ill phrased and used to try to impress the blasé, kind of like the time when my friend Mollie reenacted her favorite scene from The Patriot one afternoon while I puked my guts out from a bad migraine in the seventh grade. I picked up The Odyssey the other day and felt like I was force fed this lie yet again as I rolled my eyes to the fact that Odysseus feels the need to feign his love for Penelope by fighting off Cyclops and having adventures with his men, floating the ocean on a magical veil, feasting with kings, and sleeping with total babes. Homer romantically reinforces Odysseus’ love for Penelope by remembering to tack on the idea that Odysseus only thinks of Penelope when he sleeps with them, of course. What a dedicated hubby –if any literary character has mastered the challenge of taking thoughts captive, he is my gold medalist. I have trouble deciding who I feel sorrier for though: Odysseus for being so blind to his true desires or Penelope, with her angst-y offspring, waiting around for her sly fox of a husband who is suffering a major identity crisis.

I was struck the other day at how much Penelope reminded me of my brother. John is thirteen and stuck at home with our obnoxiously emotional younger sister who fights for attention with Henry, the family poodle. John called me last weekend while I was on a date to complain that our sister had been practicing her cheerleading routines over a dozen times right across from his room and had been picking Henry’s eye boogers and leaving the clouded Kleenexes on top of his freshly laundered clothes. His voice sounded strained and he ended his call by asking when I would be coming home. He always does this, as if I can magically melt his problems away. While I find it somewhat annoying, it does help build anticipation to upcoming breaks from the college grind. I clutter my life at school with enough binge socializing and academia that there is rarely enough space in my slowly frying brain for thoughts of home. But I always tell them I miss them, which isn’t entirely true. I want it to be though. I convince myself I am needed at home and guilt myself with John’s pubescent voice in my head and find myself making a surprise trip home, just me and five loads of laundry.

In my mind, going home is a refreshing idea but John’s behavior is appalling. I make a three and a half hour drive to appease this sympathy drainer and I come home to a house riddled with gaming systems, online social networking, a basketball hoop, and a chubby neighborhood kid we call Beans. I’m lucky to get an afternoon with John, not without fighting Beans for his attention though. The emotional roller coaster I go through to see the guy who guilts me into coming to see him, only then to toy with my affections while being ruled by these agents of separation. I curse them all -except Beans.

I’m frustrated that I let it all bother me. In years past, it wouldn’t have hurt me in the slightest. Like Odysseus with the goddess Calypso on her private island of paradise, I know I would be happier back up at school stuffing my face with cheap Mexican food on the weekends, enjoying the company of my sleep deprived friends. That’s what I should want. Sure, I’m not exactly eating forbidden beef while planning on how I destroy each suitor of John’s attention, yet every semester I find myself tearing my bed sheets off, stuffing them in my laundry basket and taking them home for my annual washing, hoping my dorky little brother will distract me from washing them. But you see in years past, there wasn’t John. It was just my five sisters and me. As much I hate to admit it, when John was born I might have fallen a little bit in love. And begrudgingly I submit to you he might have changed everything in my life. While he and Penelope share a romantic connection and John and I just a platonic one, I can’t help but cry out with Odysseus when I spy John logging onto Facebook and unconsciously signing off his whipped older sister, “by heaven you’ve stung me now!”

What can I say? I suppose I’m a sucker.

sometimes i look back on my life and can't do anything but giggle. and thank god that things change. i'm grateful to those who've been gracious and allowed me to grow and learn. and those who didn't always make for good stories. hmm. maybe i'll make better mistakes tomorrow.

“The great guide of the world is fashion, and its god is respectability—two phantoms, at which brave men laugh. How many of you look around on society to know what to do. You watch the general current, and then float upon it. You study the popular breeze and shift your sails to suit it. True men do not so. You ask–is it fashionable? If it be fashionable, it must be done. Fashion is the law of multitudes, but it is nothing more than the common consent of fools.”

.charles spurgeon "the common consent of fools"

I find it odd that at the end of the year it's compelling to review, package up, and file it away. But I do it every year. Remember back in the days when xanga was the old facebook? Every year there are new years surveys that sweep the virtual world, asking vital and fascinating questions as to whether or not you have received a speeding ticket in the duration of the year or which of your friends or relatives have given birth. These were the questions that I thought would entice friends, to heighten my sagging personality, and make the blogging world do a double take on angsty me, Bri Suitt. I have always been this way. I'm more confident with my words than my skin. I feel bolder and wittier behind a computer screen or blank sheet of paper than I could ever be behind a class room desk or the counter of a coffee shop where the cute barista is waiting to be flirted with. I have found it to be rare to stumble upon such reviews by other desperately needy, like-minded survey filler-outers and find them intriguing. Or just bearable. My suspension of disbelief can only go so far until I start realizing these people really are not as enviable as they are making themselves seem. Obviously I believed my reviews were exempt from such eye rollers. I must get it off my chest that all those years of blogging my year review were really just an excuse to be noticed by someone. Even though that someone was usually just Eli, a big time gamer and pyromaniac from Atlanta with a voice resembling Kermit the frog and whose pants always suggested an impending flood. But still. At least Eli read my crappy thoughts. Plus, I could always reinvent him, which I usually did, pretending he wasn't unsettling and geeky but instead, beautiful and mysterious.

But why do I do this? Why must I crave attention so? I blame this fault on many things, middle child syndrome being the largest culprit. Really, I believe the desire to be known is one of those things that throbs out of the heart of every one, every where. But maybe not. Maybe I'm passing off owning up to my personal flaws to every single person on the planet. Even now, this very moment I'm suppressing the urge to talk about my year, about my adventures of living in Missouri, that I have a new cousin that was born a few hours ago, how I almost changed my major, or that I nannied a kid with asperger syndrome who gave me one of his drawings, how I landed a cool photography internship, how I was daring and caught a duck and let it loose in a dormitory or shaved my head, or that I got hit on by a junior higher, who wrongly pegged me as a cougar of sorts. But I'm not going to indulge that desire. Because not only have I realized that other people find rare entertainment out of it but they leave reading such indulgences thinking you're egotistical -and rightly so. Plus I'm above this. This time you're going to have to grovel about my year.

I'm already hating not telling you about my year. Part of me wants to show you the beautiful and mysterious parts of my year, like my imaginary Eli -the parts that if pieced together just so, make me seem effortlessly adventurous, adorable, independent, and intriguing. There's another part of me begging to just reveal how god awful I am -to confess to the empty blog world all this crap I'm dealing with all because it's my fault and no one else's. I have a raw desire to just spill a stream of nasty disappointment because well, that's me. But there's a middle ground that I'm teetering ever so carefully on right now. I think it's called the truth but I won't know until I read this a year from now and either roll my eyes or sigh confidently. But here it is.

Really, I'm just trying to figure out how to be content, to like the skin I'm in, love well the people in my life, to focus on my passions, to be a godly woman. Goodness, some days I'm just trying to figure out how to not disappoint. The whole attention thing is my band-aid to the gaping wound. God is showing me where I need to quit trying to impress myself with the barbie band-aid and just take it off and and take a big wow at the festered and seeping boo boo. How do you allow yourself to be okay with not being okay and trust God with the nuts and bolts of your dismembered self? That's where I am -at the intersection of 2009 and 2010. My prayer is next year I'll be past that. That there will be an unspoken confidence in my relationships with others, that when I spend time with God I will be less constrained to my flaws that keep me from kissing his feet, and that I will live with more intentionality. This sounds well in type but I know that I know it's going to be messy in reality. It always is. You want to know why? Because I'm a mess. That's what Eli said.

happy new year, friend.

kenny burris died this morning.
i'll never get used to death.