One year and a week ago today, I found myself self-consciously hurrying across a brightly lit stage, handed a diploma case (without the actual diploma inside), and shooed along into a life I thought I already understood. Marriage June 19th then moving to Chicago and finding a job to pay the bills, I repeated over and over to interested parents and grandparents and parents and grandparents of friends and my mother's coworkers and the professors who didn't know me very well and didn't really care where I ended up, so long as they tried to seem interested as they felt obligated. And I felt obligated to give them this very prescribed answer, to play the part in this last dance of hierarchical roles, until I finally drove away with the final evidences of my college education (ugly bedspread, cheap lamp, etc.) stuffed haphazardly into the back seat of my car.
One year and a week later, I know I could have never anticipated or prepared for this thing we like to call "adult life." (Really, it's not that we become adults after we graduate, but that the falsified semblance of life also known as the college culture has been broken down and carted away, like a movie set after the last scene has been cut.) Though my obsessive note-taking personality would have loved to have taken a class called "How to Be a Functional Member of Society 101" my senior year, I know that nothing I wrote down would have been helpful, partly because no one can ever hope to prescribe to every individual what they would need to know, and mostly because I would have no clue what important points I would need to write down.
So I suppose, in a roundabout way, this explains why I have decided to redesign and begin to write again on this blog. Unlike many other "periods" in my life, I don't feel as if I have changed into someone no one (including myself) knows, so that I must re-explain myself and my every thought in order to be understood. In fact, I would like this refreshing of sorts to move away from the religion of self-centeredness somewhat inadvertently encouraged by the unspoken undergraduate motto, "Discover yourself, develop your talents, be all that you can be." In fact, I would like the posts on this blog, as suggested by the title, to be completely miscellaneous, unrelated to any notion of "self discovery" except for the incontrovertible fact that they are things experienced by me, filtered through my brain, and then written by me. Oops. I suppose there are some self-centered aspects of the act of writing that just can't be avoided.
Back to my abstract explanation. You see, one thing I have learned since graduation is that life doesn't include as many categories as I had been previously led to believe, and yet the categories themselves are sometimes too subtle for us mere mortals to define. There is love and there is hate, no in-between. And yet both love and hate have their subtleties that sometimes disguise them as each other, twin sisters swapping name tags. There is peace and and there is fear, there is hope and there is despair. There are believers, and there are unbelievers. Though the unbelievers like to pretend they are saved, while we sometimes like to forget that we are, and it is easy to get confused.
I thought (a self-centered statement already, dang it) that my blog should come to reflect this. Life is, in short, miscellaneous. The large categories are all that matter, and yet the larger categories never seem to cut it in terms of understanding, of really seeing and knowing. There are no Sparksnotes for life, no back-of-the-book synopsis, no Life for Dummies how-to guide. Life is a thousand million puzzle pieces, some fitting together, others being pushed to the edge of the table to find a partner or two at a later date. I know they will all fit together some day, but as for me and my house, we can't even seem to find all the edge pieces.
My prayer is that you find hope in the randomness: the randomness of my posts, the randomness of my own scattered existence, the randomness you realize you share with me. It is harder, sometimes, to be confident, hopeful, joyful in randomness, the unknown, than it is to be patient in suffering. In suffering, we at least know there is an end. But in the random, the unexpected, the miscellaneous, there is no preparing, no enduring, only a living within, a trying to keep your footing while you're walking on the water. But when you begin to see the beauty of this uncertainty, how it points you toward the only true stability, hope grows into something close to joy.
