Mexico, 2008

This is quite a bit to read, so if you make it through, I’ll be quite impressed, and rather grateful, to be honest.

I’m sitting in my completely cluttered apartment, listening to Malvinda Reynolds’ self-righteous yet piercing folk song “Little Boxes,” and contemplating what exactly to write. The first two weeks after high school teaching have ended have been interesting, to say the least. I spent June 22-June 28 in Ensenada, Mexico, in a yearly house building trip. Rather than respond politely or most likely, flippantly, when asked how that was, I thought I’d also try to answer that here. So let’s begin, shall we?

Mexico- how was it?

hard. good. nothing. everything. clever. overwhelming. anticlimactic.

My Spanish is weaker than I remember, and my self-consciousness is considerably higher. As usual, I was witty and delightful and wondrous and droll and amusing. And honest, broken, resentful, moody, and easily hurt. And I felt every one of those things when in Mexico.

First of all, I suck at building things. My mind is clever, agile in fit shape. Mentally–I’m an athlete at the height of his game, in peak form. Physically, I’ve spent so much of my life rejecting physical strength and external masculinity that I feel my keen, graceful mind is entombed in a prison of solid doughy flesh, self conscious in the vet en beenderen of my body. My hands are clumsy and unsure.

On some levels I feel like I’m seven again, running windsprints in a parking lot for my coach-father, who looked longingly at the physical prowess of other men’s sons in order to push back the weight of his own mortality. I don’t know if he ever realized that every whistle blow, exasperated sigh, open-handed slap to the face, unsolicited comparison taught me to hate my body and shy away from the halting efforts of my flesh in favor of the consistent victories my mind afforded.

This week I cut rebar, nail-gunned plywood, shinnied up ladders, and–most significantly–made concrete.

No trip to Mexico for me is complete without some mothereffing digging. This time, I spent two days in front of a wheelbarrow, shoveling contents into its greedy innards, the rusted and flaky red paint stretching like the aged skin of some infirm dragon. The golden proportions were all that mattered in my mind: ten scoops of sand/gravel, three scoops of CEMEX cement (seriously, what company DOESN’T end in ‘-Mex’ in this country?), and copious amounts of water, literally obtained from a ten gallon drum in front of the half-built homestead.
Scrape. Scrape. Shovel. Pour. Slop. Repeat.

Once in the wheelbarrow, pull the sand-ment-agua mixture toward you with a shovel while a partner does the same opposite you. Eventually, you’ll make a circle, mixing and churning and scraping and pulling and mulling and making. There is nothing else to do.

My racing mind, already disgusted by the slow pace of my sweaty, gelatinous flesh, races ahead, arching far above the baking Baja dust roads and soaring, phoenix-like in the rush of clear azure spaces above. It soon, however, runs out of words to say, puns to make, bills to remember to pay, defenses to maintain, and crashes, Icarus-style, to earth, having burnt through all the mental chatter within the first sixty minutes.

Then the fun begins. Then the darkness, the obscuridad, seeps to the surface like an oil spell. Long buried shame. Remembered mistakes. Continued self-doubt and self-loathing. The voice rise around me, like silent snakes, and stealthily whispered perfumed poisons into my ears.

You are fat and ugly and disgusting, they hiss, silkily.

You are defective. No one will ever love one such as you. There is nothing masculine, nothing beautiful, nothing of value about you. Give up now, you stupid, fat fool.

These barbed words, filled with the venom of doubt and loathing, are obscenely attractive. Somewhere far away, I stop shoveling. My breath stops in my chest as I allow for a second the poison to sink in. I feel strangely cold under the baking, oppressive Mexican heat of midday.

“Are you alright?” Tiffany asks, noting my shovel paused in mid-concrete pull, ending our circular motion.

“Of course not. I’m against the war,” I joke back weakly, and resume working.

The serpents still circle my ears, hissing, “You’re the reason she tried to kill herself, you’ll never find peace, vote for John McCain this fall,” and other equally ridiculous, foolish statements.

Concrete was the major moment for me in Mexico this week; two days of mixing, pulling, digging, searching for sand grains, checking fo rmoisture, hoping that the correct shade of ugly olive green emerges in my cracked dragon basket of a wheelbarrow.

Concrete is where my mind was silenced and the shit floated to the top. I thought today, maybe, just maybe, that’s what Jesus felt during his forty days in the desert.

If so, How did you stand it?
What did you see?
How good did it feel to reach that solemn, transcendent calm post-experience?

Construction is hard for me as it is such a very masculine activity and I am so terrified of my own masculinity, of the power of my maleness.
I reject it, often burying it like the wretched servant did with the talent his owner gave him, leaving the unsolicited burden under layers of moist earth far from light and air and truth. Every nail, hammer, plank, Cemex© bag, wrench, skillsaw, tar paper, ladder, wheelbarrow dug into the dark parts of the garden, through loam and silt and even scratching through sticky, indifferent clay to the masculinity cloistered within.

And I did not like this digging, unasked and undesired, into the soil of my heart. But it happened anyway.

Each day in Mexico we woke up at 7 am, got to work a little after 8 am, built things until 4:30pm, then headed back to the church to hold a Vacation Bible School (VBS), an entertaining, instructional, and outreach program to the children of the dusty streets.

The VBS part is always easier. It’s entertaining, human, simple, relational, easy.

I gambol, trip, fall, slip, grimace, and grin. The children laugh. They are entertained.
Children are almost as easy to fool as adults, if you’re a born performer and have two and a half decades of smoke and mirrors under your belt.

Yet, after eight hours of house construction, performing for, loving on, playing with street children is a very real chore. Team members’ words infuriate me where usually no offense would exist. Weariness bleeds into guilt as I silently, desperately plead with God for it to be seven o’clock so the madness can end and I can zone out over dinner.

In a rare self-righteous moment, I try desperately to see Christ in the faces of those children. Especially in the eyes of those who haven’t yet learned to lie, bluff, or be ‘okay.’ I love seeing those who aren’t yet faking normalcy, as we must, to be come adults and not suicides or husks. So I scrape the tattered walls of my ‘empty heart cup‘ (as Ms. Brooks would put it) for love for these children and find mainly pottery flakes and chipped paint.

I pray, haltingly, cynically for the means and hope to love them, myself, Jesus, you. I mouth, help me overcome my unbelief, my cynical exoskeleton, my broken soul, my ‘intelligent’ indifference, and learn to see with new eyes.
Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Luke 11:34-35.

Um, right, I’ll get on that, Jesus.

Matrimony

What else has happened these past few weeks? Every freaking one is getting matrimonial!

On 6/17, my fellow teacher, Paul, married his longtime partner, Pete, in one of the first same-sex ceremonies in San Diego. After nearly twenty years together, they wanted to b e recognized by the state. It was tender, loving, and beautiful. On 6/19, I helped my friend Ryan get an engagement ring for his (now) fiancee. They so deeply love each other, it’s amazing, and beautiful and challenging. I was mildly envious.

On 6/21, two of my favourite friends, Rob and Jimiliz, got married.
I was the best man. Let me preface by saying that I hate weddings. (I did tell Rob this when he asked me, and he didn’t back down, weirdo). Ik haat hen.

But this one was different. They deeply love each other, yes, but they also love God. And that love splashes back and loves each of us around them, challenging us to care, love, and serve. They care for other people deeply. They care for dignity. They care for rights. They care that God’s love can be seen deeply in others, in a radiant, radically inclusive community. I want that. I want to love God enough to bring him glory and in turn learn how to love any woman crazy enough to have me. I want to draw others into a community that radically loves and changes and inspires because Jesus gives me hope and meaning. That’s what I want. I found, to my surprise, for the first time, actually wanting this. I, who had hidden my thoughts, and feeligns and fear s far away underneath a facade of clever togetherness, wanted to be able to love in this way. That rocked me.

That was what came to mind when Mario, pastor of the local church that we worked for in Ensenada, asked me while driving his dusty truck through the winding, gutted dirt roads of Ensenada hillside slums, ¿Está casado ya? ¿Por qué no?

I found I had hours of reasons and stories and examples and cynicism, and bitterness, starting with my parents own spectacular failure in the marital department to my most recent experience in dating in a girl who tried to use me as her life preserver to keep from sinking into the back depths of her own soul. Instead, I just looked at him and said, Hay mucho que puedo decir, pero yo sé que tengo que esperar algún tipo de respuesta.

There’s been a lot to learn.

I leave for Illinois in a little over a month. God help me.
How am I feeling?:: contemplative
What’s playing?:: Malvina Reynolds – Little Boxes

 

6:05 Airport waiting…letting go?

You said the thing you said and you twisted me up
I don’t feel any different but there it is in my head
Stuck like glue, like a molecule
Like my brain, a speeding train
I’ll never be the same
Will we always be the same

You did the thing you did, and it twisted me up
Now I’m wrestling with reality
Waiting for the bell to ring
And you kill me, you still me
Come find me, don’t loose me
That is all I want, that is all I want

Beneath my happy demeanor, and my general encouragement and delight toward everyone around me; beneath that, lies a good deal of discomfort, anger, even a bit of fury. This is a strange sensation for me, as I am quite frankly, very rarely angry. But I am so angry. And so hurting, and so irritated, and covering it so very poorly, picking fights with people who dont’ deserve it, taking offense where none exists, finding new reasons for venting feelings I don’t want to acknowledge–in short, dealing very poorly.

The simple truth is, the traumatic events of February that happened between me and another person haven’t really been dealt with, personally, and they haven’t healed well. I’ve simply found other things to do, and while I have had a LOT to do, this is a bit excessive. Stuff with E devolved quickly, tragically, almost comically into a horrible farce of everything and reconfirmed so much about I fear about even attempting to share openly with people. I dont’ want to be in a relationship, if relationships are simply allowing heartache or destruction, which is something I’ve always feared. I’m not some die-hard theorist that believes that love is a bourgeois convention but I’m close. I think it’s great for others, but I so desperately want to wall my heart off as if it were a rare cask of Amontillado used to lure an unsuspecting nobleman to his destruction.

And in the morning when I wash my face
I see happy, I see tired
I see ugly, I see peaceful
I’m waiting, running, I’m not angry or wired
I just get a little worried sometimes

Then I do the things I do, but they still twist me up
I’m wrestling with my sanity
Listening for the bell to ring
And I kill me, I fool me
Can’t find me, don’t lose me
That is all I want, that is all I want

The sky, the rising sun… Solitary
And you my only only one… Solitary
No time, no end believe… Solitary

I genuinely care for everyone around me and want to let my friends know that they are legitimately special and worth loving. But damnit, I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling, I’m tired of thinking, and I’m afraid that I’ll never figure all this out, particularly after I move to the Midwest, and become even more distracted by the absurdity that is my hectic existence. I’m having huge issues trusting people around me now, and it’s been hard to talk to God and admit to the Deity that I love that I also struggle with trusting him. I struggle with letting this anger go. I struggle with realizing that what happened with E. was not my fault. I struggle with recognizing that the same grace I extend to others c an be obtained for me, and I struggle with believing that God is bigger than all this.

I *know* he is on some levels, but this is exactly where faith comes in. I have a shitty situation, compounded by family problems and a father who is dismissive of my graduate school choice (as if a man who failed out of college has a substantial stake in my academic endeavors). I kjnow fully that the only way out of this is to trust God in his infinte power, to acknowledge who he is, and to really come in a true manner that acknowledges my totall messed up-ness and tries to embrace him in spite of it all. But that ish is haaard, fools. And totally not what i *want* to do.

I’m trying. I’m trying to let some of this go. I’m trying to work through all this before I leave.

But I’m angry, I’m uneven, I’m not together. I think I’m making steps toward it, but I’m nowhere near understanding for sure.

And I thought, perhaps I’d be honest about all that.

So welcome to a rare insight into my thoughts, and perhaps this will explain how and why I’ve been acting like I have.

On an unrelated note, I’m sitting here, tired and overcaffeinated at the southwest terminal at the San Diego airport, grating my teeth at the news my flights been delayed. Yet in the back of my thoughts I smile at the memory of this afternoon, when students held a surprise going away party in honor of me and another teacher, and gave us gifts and told us how much we meant to them. I’m going to hold to that, because I make a difference. Because people’s lives are better on some level because I’m here. I’m going to hold to that for now.

But I won’t let that define me. ‘Cuz God knows I’ve gotta learn how to accept grace and not just see my value in helping others.

And speaking of God knows…he knows I’m trying to learn how to trust him. Silly Deity.

How am I feeling?:: anxious
What’s playing?:: Skye – Solitary

 

Transitions and Leavings?

Should I try to take you in?
Pretending what you have not felt
In passion sorrow sleep or death eyes closed
Eyes closed
Eyes closed
Eyes closed

Here there´s only faith no doubt
You can be taken anywhere
Here is where you choose the place
With pleasure and pain in equal share
A refuge for truth and deceit
Where all who come are taken in

Should I try to take you in?
Who´ll pity me if I forget?
It´s said to be and not to be in love
Is to regret
Regret
Regret
Regret

Here there’s only faith no doubt
You can be taken anywhere
Here is where you choose the place
With pleasure and pain in equal share
A refuge for truth and deceit
Where all who come are taken in

Should I try to take you in?
Who´ll pity me if I forget?
For those who’ve never been in love
Need to forget
Forget
Forget

–Tracy Chapman, “Taken”.

Oh my, i guess it’s been some time, hasn’t it?

I’m sitting in my apartment right now, willfully ignoring grading sophomore quizzes on World War II, and sipping some rooibos tea out of a bizarrely pretentious china cup given to me for Christmas. It’s blue and white, with a touch of gilt around the rim, a little spot of chinoiserie in my little house. I realize I’ve invited precious little people to my place, and spend so many more hours outside of it than in it, but it’s a strangely comforting thing to be home tonight. I’ve lowered the lights, lit some candles, and its just me, my tea, and the endless cascade of thoughts that rush and tumble inside my brain, constantly pinging off each other, neurons flashing bright with anticipation, confusing and God knows what else.

I realize that, per usual, this is probably my first night home without something “to do” in nearly a month if not more.

It’s an odd feeling, to not be rushing, constrained to do something, hours busy from the alarm clock until the crashing into bed. It forces me in a lot of ways to look around, reassess, figure out just what the bloody hell I think I’m doing. As usual, I tend to find myself careening madly in a dash, trying to care for everyone, put on a show, be outgoing, smile, work hard, and get all of my shit together. With my personality, I tend to stuff down negative feelings, and choose to avoid negative thoughts and emotions in one of the few socially acceptable methods–busyness and interaction. Besides, street drugs are expensive and cliché.

Should I try to take you in? Who’ll pity me if I forget?

I’ve been all over the map lately, and I feel like everywhere and nowhere. I’m struggling to be so much more than just this. I want to be a better friend, an inspiring teacher, a relevant Christian, a loving human being, and a sincerely lovable man (whatever the hell that means). I recognize that I’ve grown so much, but I see so much more room for growth. I see so much weakness. I see so much brokenness in myself. I look in the mirror and I see brokenness. I am always willing to embrace, overlook, accept, validate broken people around me, but I see nothing to validate in my own brokenness.

And the kettle’s blaring again. I’m growing positively British in my beverage choices tonight.

Let’s talk about spaceships–or anything–except you and me, okay?

It’s been so hard lately. And that sounds foolish and whiny to say. So hard? As if I were the only one, or that my experiences were novel. But a lot has gone on. A promising relationship with a beautiful and funny girl took an unexpected turn that ended in a lot of tragedy, heartbreak, and devastation that I know I’m not even really beginning to understand. I’ve been rocked in a lot of ways, and I don’t want to believe that I’m lovable. For so long, I believed that I was destined to play the best friend role, and I’d accepted, “dealt with,” and worn the label proudly. I’d waved it like a banner, I’d identified with it personally. I’d made peace with the idea of the neutral, sexless friend who didn’t have emotional, personal, romantic needs because he was above those, because he was deathly afraid of turning into his father, a man who routinely used, abused, and exploited women around him. Then she liked me. Really liked me. I didn’t know how to deal. I still don’t. And it all went to shit so fast, eh? And so horribly, horribly wrong. So broken.

And what’s that saying again–’they’re only words, and they can’t kill me’?
But I can’t even spell them, and the cadence to what she says is well.
Let’s talk about spaceships–anything–except you and me, ok?

On top of that, the most momentous thing ever happened. All the work I’d been moving towards, all that effort, the last two years here in SD–paid off, and I was rewarded beyond my wildest dreams. I got into graduate school. Woot! I was accepted to five PhD programs, and they all wanted me. They thought I was smart, they thought I was brilliant, and in a lot of ways, I flashed back to April of 2001, seven years ago, when I was a wide-eyed, slightly more conservative senior in high school, when the world was changing, but at the very least I still thought things were and could be ’simple.’ I’ll never forget the day I got the letter saying that I was a President’s Scholar to Stanford. “For all your hard work,” it said. “This recognition is for you.” Mom wasn’t home. I was by myself. It was two days before my seventeenth birthday, it was 3:15 in the afternoon, and a warm breeze floated through the smoggy Los Angeles air. And I sat on the floor and cried. I’d gotten in! I’d done it! I’d done—-was that all? Was that all it was?

And in that moment I knew that I’d never be defined totally by my studies. I happened to be a guy who did well academically; that wasn’t who I was. And somehow I feared that this shining jewel of academia, this instant stamp approval of my cleverness, wouldn’t be enough. I needed something else. I needed to grow. To grow up. To see so much of myself outside of academic cleverness.

And with a heavy heart, but with a sense of purpose, I went to UC San Diego, and as this journal shows–did so much. I did grow up. I learned so much about myself. I plumbed the depths of my loneliness, and I learned that Jesus was more than just a secure belief–he was supposed to be everything. And I began to see through my own energetic, friendly personality–I learned I was far more deep and complex than that, I began to learn to share that, and I began to see that I couldn’t be everything to everyone. And in the meantime, I led tours, TA-ed classes, advised residence, scaled mountains in Africa, and studied scriptures from Jesus to Jainism.

And I experienced the euphoria of success, endured the heartbreak of not getting into PhD programs, and marveled at the f—ing awesomeness of becoming a high school teacher that impacted students. And now this circle is closing. The period I wanted so much to end, the time I wanted to be over–has come, and I don’t know if I’m ready.

I can’t believe that I completed that cycle. That yesterday, I told Stanford again, no thank you, and again decided on a well-regarded but less “name-recognition” school. The University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign. An amazing academic institution in the middle of effin’ nowhere. Surrounded by cornfields, but full of awesome thought and knowledge. Man, what the hell have I signed myself up for?

I thought about this today as I walked to the grocery store, the April breeze pulling at my wayward afro tendrils, the music of Tracy Chapman and Say Hi To Your Mom pulsing through my earbuds. I have no freaking clue what I’m getting myself into these next five years. Ten years ago I was a freshman in high school, a diehard Republican conservative and shameless know-it-all that stil wanted to be likable. Five years ago, I was an over-involved, overeager sophomore getting ready to start orientation leading and resident advising, a process that would involve me losing my identity in the job, and having to find it again in Jesus while alone on a mountainside in South Africa. Five years from now, I will be 29, with ridiculous stories, and hopefully in the final stages of my dissertation. I’ll be Dr. Tallie, and will still not find my identity in the damn academia, but be inspired by it. Ten years from now–hopefully a tenure track professor at a respectable university by 34, engaging and caring for college students, reminding them they are meaningful and that they are valuable while being a bizarre, entertaining performer o’ knowledge. One can hope.

One final thing, since this return to journaling is long enough. These past two days my school, F——, has been doing a program known as “Every Fifteen Minutes” in which drunk driving has been examined in a deeply emotional and frighteningly powerful way. Designated students were taken from class (one of mine was taken first period) by police officers, who announced their death at the hands of drunk driver and placed a picture with an obituary in every room. I was incredibly shaken because it was so possible–death comes so swiftly, unpredictably, and unfairly (at least by my estimation). Later in the day, we were treated to a horrifying tableaux in which students had perished in a drunk driving accident, and emergency teams came to pry their dying bodies from twisted car frames, painted crimson with their own blood. Today, there was a mock funeral, and the parents and students read final farewell letters, emphasizing the immediate, destructive consequences of drunk driving, poor decisions, more brokenness. I cried for nearly an hour, my breath coming in quick gulps while I struggled to look composed in the assembly as a teacher, taking in how broken we all are, how messed up, how hurting, how needy. How twisted and shattered. My mind desperately wanted to come up with something else to meditate upon, spaceships perhaps, or a witty comeback. But I was left with brokenness, and the need for hope. Hope that I do find, unwillingly in God, in a Jesus I struggle to trust and hope in. And I was reminded of how while I am so accessible, loving, and caring, I trust very few people deeply. So few are let in to see me on a deep, real level. So few are trusted because they might hurt me deeply. They might leave me. They might, like several people, end their own lives selfishly (or attempt it), leaving me broken in their wake. So I find trust is very hard to come by, although I offer it unflinchingly to others. And last week, I really realized that I trust Jesus so very little. And he keeps asking for me to trust him. And that makes me furious, because he’ll let me down, I think.

But he hasn’t yet. And I’m trying to trust him, love myself as much as I do other people, and try to accept my brokenness–all while getting ready to enter a radically new phase of my life.

And so winds down my seventh and final year of life in San Diego. And it’s a mixed year indeed, no?

Should I try to take you in?
And hope for the prefect docile pet?
Hope that you’ll not defile or wreck my home–Sweet home, Sweet home, Sweet home.

Here there´s only faith no doubt
You can be taken anywhere
Here is where you choose the place
With pleasure and pain in equal share
A refuge for truth and deceit
Where all who come are taken in….

 

Dress Rehearsals and Mexican Fires

“This is life. There is no dress rehearsal.”
–Georgia Lass, Dead Like Me

What a whirlwind it’s been lately.

I didn’t really think that I had time or inclination to write, but I’ve been on such an extended emotional roller coaster it only seemed fitting to type some thoughts out while I could still make them really known.

The past two weeks have been an absolute blur. School ended on June 20th, and yet I had no time to process, as I had houseguests over the weekend, and a very special wedding to attend. While the ending of school came and went with out much ability for me to process no longer being a first year teacher, the other events hit even harder–I adjusted to seeing and hosting very dear friends that I rarely have the opportunity to visit with now as they live in San Francisco, and I went to Mo and Jason’s wedding where I was moved by how much they love each other and horrified by the absolute foulness of people I once ignorantly believed were my friends–but whom instead chose to cast me in the role of a villain that I simply never was.

After an intense drive up and down to and from Los Angeles, I hosted friends for another day, then dropped them off at the airport a mere hour and a half before getting picked up at 7 am to go to Ensenada, Mexico, where I spent a week ostensibly building homes (and ignoring stressors and the very real hurt of false friends). Having gone last year, I thought I had some semblance of an idea of what to expect. No, I had no clue for what I’d see, feel, touch, experience. I was picked up by my friends Will and Stephanie, two college sophomores with a huge amount of heart and energy that I’d known for some time back in L.A. (Steph in particular–we’ve been friends for a decade), and groggily crossed the border, singing songs and listening to bad pop music on occasion from my iPod.

We did several things in Mexico; first and foremost, we built a house for a family in the local church we were working with. Valeria, her husband, and her three daughters (Sonia, Miriam, and Sara), who were gracious, loving, and very kind. When we arrived there was just a large concrete foundation poured. In the remaining five days, we built walls, separated the house into three rooms, installed windows, electricity, lighting, drywall, papered and plywooded the walls, put a roof on, sealed it, built and installed doors, textured, primed and finally painted the walls, and did finishing touches. In short, in five days with some definite Divine help, we created a casa straight out of the polvo. Weird.

When we weren’t doing that, we as a team of 16 odd folks visited families in need of prayer, prepared a children’s service, shared with church members, helped a local family in building a squatter home on a hillside from garage doors, watched a drug raid on a nearby home, laughed at me as I was confused with Lenny Kravitz by local children who wanted my autograph, and worked to crazy exhaustion.

When in Mexico, i tend to adopt a different name, Timoteo. I use it mainly because it is cumbersome to explain in Spanish why your name is “T.J.” Do you call it T.J. in Spanish–like “Tay Jota”? or do you simply Spanify the existing name (“Tishe”). And don’t get me started on my real name (“Tyrone”? “Tiron”?). Timoteo removes those obstacles. I chose it three years ago, when I was looking for an easier name in Mexico City. I couldn’t choose between the young headstrong leader, Timothy, or the incredibly loyal yet tragically doubtful Thomas (Tomas). I personally feel Tomas would’ve worked better, but I was being optimistic at the time. And I tried to remember more of who Timothy was, and how he, like me, had a strong Christian mother and grandmother, and a very confusing upbringing with his less than Christian dad, his cultural differences, and his attempts to understand the world around him. So Timoteo I was. Indeed.

On Friday morning, I was part of a small group that woke up early to help on the second house. At 7:30 in the morning, we had been working for nearly an hour, and the marine layer settled heavy over us in our dusty hillside, the damp, cool air, coating us like a blanket, chilling and protecting us from the sun’s devastating rays later. Banda music played softly, and the sound of hammer and nails clinking interrupted the peaceful morning. Softly, in the distance, from our dusty hilltop, we could see the first wisps of grayish black smoke a few blocks away from a house. We thought people were burning trash, until we realized the house itself was on fire. I, along with three other guys, dropped everything and ran full tilt to the burning home. I tripped and ate it on the way, skinning knees and cursing under my breath in two languages. But I rose and we huffed over to the burning home. Soon the street was abuzz with people. Buckets proliferated, jugs and hoses and bowls carried water. I found myself doing everything from filling buckets to throwing water directly on the minor inferno, turning the smouldering pyrotechnics soon into a charred, ashy mess. Fortunately no one was hurt, but half of the family’s meager property was gone, absolutely devastated. We trudged back to build the ramshackle home we were helping with while the remainder of the team continued on the larger home.

When we last gave the keys to Valeria, she wept, we wept, the children wept, I think even God might’ve gotten misty. It was bizarre to see something that we, so messed up and broken, and little, were able to do completely out of our own power. It was a total trip.

Coming back was another story. Jon, one of the leaders at my old church in L.A. drove the truck carryign me and all the luggage. After dropping me off in San Diego, he promptly broke down in Del Mar, 20 minutes north. I then picked him up, took him in for the night, and then eventually drove him and the luggage BACK to L.A. before driving back down to SD that night–we were waiting for the SD body shop to finish his car. So I felt I was completely unable to process, as I had a houseguest
and was unable to separate myself from those responsibilities for the moment and really just sit and run through my emotions.

When Jon left on Tuesday (which was sad, as I enjoy him), I sat in my car and had a good cry for everything. For the friends who mistreated me in Los Angeles and treated me like crap for something i DIDN’T EVEN DO, for the immense poverty and injustice in Mexico, for all of my weaknesses, for my failings as a friend, for the first year of school ending, for the fact that I am a long way from being ‘whole” or happy with my lot in life, from the awkwardness of actually seeing God work in peoples lives–including my own. From not having had time to process, I cried four times on Tuesday, did laundry, drank coffee, lay on my floor, and thanked God for life.

My Fourth of July was my second one here in San Diego, and the first one where I felt like I was part of a ‘real’ community; my local community group/small group got together in a cool family’s house, and barbecued, hung out, and got to know each other better. It was surreal. Absolutely surreal. And I loved it. It was weird to feel love coming from a strange group of people coming better, a mission that’s been happening directly for a year now in North Park, and for awhile in San Diego in Ethnos, and forever in humanity with God. I dont’ know, understand, or comprehend the idea that I’m loved by God ultimately or fully, and I am puzzled at my chronic inability to live for myself. Terrified of ending up like my dad, I chuck my fully formed and articulated personality and needs anytime someone is remotely distressed, selfishly setting myself up for disaster, potential resentment, and frustration–I don’t know how to stop living for other people.

These past two weeks I’ve been a bit lost in feelings and emotions–unable to tell which were mine or belonging to others. It’s been hard to tell who I was in the midst of it all.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes,
I’ve made a lot of mistakes
You came to take us–all things go, all things go.
To recreate us–all things grow, all things grow.
We had our mind set–all things no, all things no
You had to find it—all things go, all things go.

I started watching a quirky show on SciFi yesterday called “Dead Like Me.” Intrigued, i bought the whole first season yesterday. I love it. The basic plot is that a select group of people after death are stuck being grim reapers, collecting souls and ferrying them to the other side. There’s a lot of loneliness, a lot of sadness, a lot of poignancy, and a lot of confusion. I see hearts and minds reaching out, dying to be loved, and trying their damnedest.

The quote from the top of the page came from the last episode. The week before the main character died, her mother told her that life wasn’t a dress rehearsal, that it waits for no one, and that there is life to be lived. And I am terrified by the fact that life exists out there, waiting to be savored and enjoyed, not just on the terms of others, but really on my own. I’m growing, I’m learning, and I’m terrified. And I’m trying to find myself at a point where I can forgive the terrible betrayal and hurt of former friends, although i’m not there yet.

And I’m getting more whole, hopefully–bit by bit.

Paz, mis amigos.