this is the stuff...

oh man, was today draining. way too many emotions.

it was great, though.

dinner was...well, awkward. painful. hurtful. hard to shake off in order to enjoy the night. i shook it off mostly. but it creeps back up.

went to fnl and sat with digs and a few of her former kids (Carolyn, Kaelyn, and Kirsten (?)) in the balcony. Aaron Kirk proposed to his girlfriend of six years in the middle of FNL News. it was so great, so awesome, so neat...it was exciting to be a part of it. i've kind of always thought "hey, that would be an awesome way to be proposed to"...but now it's been done. owell. it was so cool. but it hurt a little.

digs and i went to walmart to pick up the bekah pictures. they were sweet. little girls with blowfish hats on their heads are highly photogenic. and we headed down the baby doll aisle because we're STUPID and ended up creating a scene when we saw some real cute baby doll clothes, i recall people stopping their shopping routine to stare as dignal crawled the wall saying "I WANT TO HAVE A BABY" and i tried not to cry from laughter. we got some WEIRD looks. then in the checkout line we saw a toddler, a cute pale white-blonde little boy sitting in a cart while his mother checked out. every 10 seconds he'd stretch his mouth open as wide as it could possibly go and let out a very loud squawk. it was precious. i wanted to cry he was so cute. though we speculated that when we had those kids of our own, we'd hate our college selves for finding such antics cute.

so we were already maternally flaming quite a bit. then fnl...it was hilarious (we LOVED the opening). and the proposal....aaaaaaaaaah! so great. and so draining. the thought "WHY NOT ME" definately came to mind. when's it my turn?

then deneff's message at the end....ah. so on point. and the illustration he used --

A man asked a Hopi Indian why so many of his culture's songs were about rain. The Hopi Indian replied, "We live in a desert. Take a look around. Rain is something we don't often get where we come from. Is that why in your culture, so many songs are about Love?"

and the rest of the message...what if we were a campus that people felt free to be themselves in? what if people felt comfortable enough to make mistakes, to be themselves, to live and let live because they knew no matter what they'd be accepted and there would be unconditional love? what if we loved people not for what we'd get out of it but for them?

it was right on.


and then digs and i went back to her house, and anthony showed up. he'd been at The Show (a local concert, lots of different bands including Away With Vega). he was pretty emotionally drained himself. we told him what he'd missed, and he told us what we'd missed. we were all jealous.

then we sat around, some of us stuffing our faces, and talked. and were silent. and talked again. anthony brought up the love topic that deneff had spoke on without knowing the message or its subject, and pretty much gave verbatim what deneff had said. it was neat to hear it again in different words. we answered questions such as "what's the hardest thing you ever had to do." and anthony asked us how many hugs we got a day. suzin and dignal had the same answer -- none. unless you count the goofing off hugging your roommate that occurs every now and then, its none. which was kind of sad. then i shared my extremely insensitive theory on how to tell which kids on campus weren't hugged enough as small children. then i felt mean. i still kind of do.

digs wouldn't let me use my usual defense mechanisms. i only needed them once though. i didnt even know i had this particular mechanism until i wrote The Novel (which has yet to Be Published, i still dont know how to go about that).

it was nice to sit around and be serious with friends, and to share and feel okay in knowing what i want is not what i'm getting, we need each other, and God is in control.