2.23.2009

Only a Dream?

Ever since I can remember, I've felt like God speaks to me through dreams. I remember my first case of deja vu when I was in kindergarten: our class lesson on Moses seemed so familiar, down to the last details. I remember not long after that dreaming about middle-eastern men surrounding men with guns drawn in a great arena, waking up, and naturally scurrying to my parents' bed. I remember my sophomore year of high school, at our old house on Dateland Ave. in Palm Bay, I had several dreams on the week of Easter that were so vivid, so deep and realistic, that I remember them in great detail to this day. Last night was the latest.

Meghan is always concerned about safety, about making sure that every door is locked, that the garage is closed, and that windows are shut. I'm always aware of these things too, but it's not the first thing on my mind. However, last night I found myself in the middle of a very graphic dream that had to do with this very thing. I was standing in our living room talking with a random character from a game that I enjoy playing (I'm not sure if there's deeper meaning to this, but I was playing it just before bed) as I stood near the front door of our house. It was nighttime. Suddenly, in my mind's eye, I watched the lock start to slowly turn behind me. "Dream Me" took notice and whirled around, twisting it back into the locked position. However, the resistance on the other side didn't stop, and I found myself in a battle with this unseen force to keep my house safe and protected. They tried to turn the handle, to unlock the door, and to barge their way in, but I held on with everything that I had, and even had to get help from the random character to make sure it stayed shut.

I woke up and my heart was pounding. I immediately wondered if this was just a dream, or if it was God's way of waking me up to some very real terror. All I could think of was what I would do if it was real; what would I do if someone had invaded my house? How would I protect my home and my family? With all this racing through my mind, I tried to calm myself down and remember that it was only a dream. Suddenly, I could swear that I heard the front door open. I froze. It was the dead of the night, somewhere around five in the morning, and I was terrified. I didn't know if I was just imagining it, or if I had really heard it. I lied there in dead silence, waiting to hear something, anything, trying to sharpen my senses in the darkness, trying to quiet my heartbeat. Soon, though, the sleep overtook me again and Meghan's alarm went off for her to get up. As she was in the shower, I pressed my ear against the door, trying to hear anything that may be lurking in the rest of the house. Finally trying my luck, I cracked the bedroom door, looked through the house, and found it just the way we had left it the night before. It was all just a dream...

It was all so real. It was one of the scariest things that I've ever dreamt, and I've dreamt some pretty scary things. But the more that I thought about it through the day, and even in that moment, I knew that it all had a deeper meaning. I've come to realize that the home is my family, our marriage, our home together, Meghan and I. And the door: it's the gateway to that home, allowing various things in and out. The lock is the measures that we have in place to protect that family, that marriage, that home. The random character? Maybe that's Jesus... he seems the most likely candidate. And that force... that force on the other side of the door... that's all the things that try to invade our life, to invade our home and terrorize us, to strike fear at our hearts where we should feel safest. And there I am, holding onto the handle and the lock, struggling and fighting to keep that door shut and our home safe.

As I've thought about it all today, those feelings and those scary, silent moments haven't left me. I've kept reminding myself of them in order to make sure that I don't forget. I don't want to forget what it felt like to be helpless, to feel out of control, and to know that the only thing standing between our family's safety and our fear is God. Sometimes in life it takes the "crisis moments" to bring us closer to him and to force us to acknowledge his presence, but I don't think that God wants me to wait for that moment to see him. I think he wants me to know, now, that he's here, and that he's always going to be right there alongside me, keeping that door closed and keeping me and my family safe. But at the same time, he wants me to know that I have to fight too, that I have to fight every single day to make sure that those protection measures stay in place. I have to be the man that my family needs me to be in order to keep our marriage from invasion, to keep our home from fear, and to make sure that we stand close to God. Otherwise, that force creeps in, that fear returns, and we'll be left with our hearts pounding, wondering what we can possibly do to escape it all. I never want to know what that situation really feels like.

It had been a long time since my last "poignant" dream where I knew God was clearly trying to speak to me. I honestly couldn't even tell you what the last one was. But this lesson, this dream, is something that I won't ever forget. The feelings may fade, but the lesson has been learned. I hear you, God, loud and clear.

2.17.2009

New York, New York!


As a young boy growing up on the east coast of the most northern section of South Florida, I was still somehow brought up Southern. This naturally had to do with my parents, both of whom were raised as good Southerners themselves in turn by their good Southerner parents. A part of this upbringing is learning to hate all things that fall north of the Mason-Dixon line, which, of course, is a rather ambiguous line that I couldn't begin to tell you where it lies. I could tell you, though, that New York City and all things surrounding it (Boston, Connecticut, etc.), was "Yankee" territory, and as such wasn't even worth thinking about.

Of course, then I married a girl whose family raised her like a good Ohio family would, and she naturally grew to like most anywhere, so long as it has somewhere for one to take an inexplicably long walk. New York easily falls into that category.

She spent a little over a month in the city this past summer training for her job and living in a dorm in Harlem. I visited her up there towards the end of her tenure and had a great time exploring the city despite my upbringing. I came to realize that the yankee folk weren't all that bad, although I'm sure some deep-seeded part of me cringed here and there. Anyway, it was a good enough experience to know that we'd enjoy coming back there someday.

So, we put a plan together, saved some money, shopped around, and found the best deal possible for a New York vacation. Christmas was right out because of costs and our collective desire to spend it with our family, even though she really wanted to see the Rockefeller Christmas tree, and New Years quickly followed suit, simply because nobody likes to be around that many people at once, even "woo girls." (you know, the kind that shout out "woo!" whenever anything remotely exciting happens: their round of drinks arriving, spotting Mr. Handsome across the dance floor, piling into a cab like their playing sardines, etc.) We settled on Valentine's Day weekend, which just so happened to coincide with President's Day weekend, giving us an extra, free day off from work.

IT WAS GREAT. We stayed in a hotel that we could have never afforded without the shopping around and experimenting with different packages on different websites, and the rest of the rather uppity crowd staying there could tell. I think it had something to do with us strolling in carrying a "thank you!" bag from a random drug store/candy distributor wearing our GAP and Express clothes while they lounged around in the lobby sipping $18 martinis in their 9-piece suits and Rolex watches. Whatever, we have character. I was always taught that was more important than money any day of the week (expect maybe Saturdays... I can't remember).

We did the usual site-seeing and restaurant hopping. We looked out over the city from the Empire State Building's 86-floor observatory (where the wind was whipping at about 35 degrees), we spent a couple hours looking at things we couldn't understand in the Museum of Modern Art (including some rather provocative pieces that even I blushed at), I lit up like I was six years old again when walking through the massive halls of dinosaur bones at the Museum of Natural History (the highlight came when Meghan and I sat down to rest our legs, and I overheard the woman on her other side claiming that a certain bone collection was a stegosaurus when it was CLEARLY a brontosaurus; I begged Megs to scold her, but all I got was a look that told me to quit nerding out), and we spent a couple afternoons in a row walking around Columbus Circle and Central Park. We ate barbecue, Italian, pizza, hot dogs, cupcakes, muffins, chocolate chip pancakes, "carrot hash," a B.E.L.T. sandwich, and I discovered a new love for the "cafe au lait," a half-coffee, half-steam milk creation that's half as expensive as my traditional latte and gives me about the same kick. Overall, we probably did more eating than site-seeing, but it was all awesome.

The best part, though, was just getting away together. For the past week or two, I was sick and then she was sick. Her parents were here for her birthday, I had to take a trip to Tallahassee, I had to take a trip to Orlando, I had to stay up late working on presentations, she had to stay late at work to finish weighing people in, and on and on it went. Our lives just started to take over our time together, and we both needed to push the reset button and just take a step back to catch our breath. To have a few days that were unplanned and unscheduled, to unplug and unwind, to hold hands and take a walk together, to sit on a bench and simply watch God's nature flowing, it was what we needed. She said it best when she pointed out how nice it was that there was this big, beautiful park in the middle of this always-moving, always-busy metropolis for people to take a step back and breathe. It was almost a metaphor for the way the past couple weeks had been for us, and it really tied the whole trip together.

Of course, on the way back, I manned up and took the middle seat, only to have the sneezing/coughing/sniffling teenage boy with the overgrown hair and a severe lack of couth sitting next to me. That's how much I love my wife. Lucky for her, the connecting flight to Tampa didn't have a middle seat, or she'd have shown how much she loves me too, believe that.

But now we're back, and it's back to work. I don't dread that so much, I just dread the laundry that we'll have to do tonight. NO THANKS! Of course, if we were still in NYC, we'd have to drag it down to the corner coin laundry and wait for a spot behind all those loud-mouthed, opinionated, liberal city-folk. Damn yankees.

2.05.2009

My One Love

Tomorrow is my wife's birthday, the first that we'll celebrate as a married couple. She's out right now with some friends from the school that she works at, enjoying things like sushi and martinis, things that even she couldn't get me to eat. Sure, now I'll try sauteed spinach without questioning it and take a big bite of baked mahi-mahi without a second thought, but sushi? PASS.

This picture here is from our wedding day, the best, happiest day of my life, of our life. I cannot fathom a more perfect day than the one that we committed ourselves to each other on. The weather was great for mid-May in Florida, everything arrived on time as far as food and set-up, and no one got lost (that we know of). But most of all, she was beautiful. I knew all along that I was going to cry in front of all of our family and friends, but it didn't matter. Seeing her round the corner in the rose garden and smile down the aisle at me was too much positive emotion for me to register. All the excess emotion came streaming out... It's like the blog title says: I'm an emotional kind of guy, I'm not ashamed to admit it. And honestly, there's no one who brings me more joy than the woman that I vowed to forever hold as my one love.

Now this isn't meant to just be a sappy, "Oh look at how happy we are together," post, it's not. I just want the world to realize that there are still men out there who are completely in love with the woman that they've committed their lives to. I've told her since the day that I realized I love her that she has made me a better person, and that I could never see myself with anyone else any more. We've been together over five years now and it's been the best years of my life. And although there have been hard times and some difficult challenges that we've had to face, we've faced them together, worked through them together, and I firmly believe we've set a good example for all the couples and individuals out there who are looking for someone to emulate.

So anyway, without getting too far into it, I love her. I told her long ago that she's my "heroine," the woman who's simultaneously saved my life and become my addiction, and she still is. She's always supported me in everything that I've wanted to do, while at the same time, she's made sure that I understand the big picture in things. So often I'm impulsive and reactionary, wanting to just go-go-go and get into all kinds of crazy situations (I'm a "starter," remember?) like getting married before we'd been dating for a year. She's smarter than that. She's more grounded than that, and she's passed that strength onto me. Of course, I'm still a little impulsive, but we balance each other out that way.

She also just found out recently that I'm a closet nerd. I secretly harbor all sorts of nerdy habits and hobbies, and despite just now realizing that, she's going to tough it out and stick with me. It's one of what we call "secret single habits." I won't tell you what hers are (marital privilege), but she can if she wants. Suffice it to say, she loves me regardless of whether I like to... well... nevermind, I'm keeping mine secret too.

So here I am, waiting for her to get home so we can enjoy one of our favorite past times, Thursday night TV and ice cream, and all I can think about is her. So to my one love: happy birthday. I love you. Oh, and if you're not home soon, I'll be eating your share of the low-fat mint chocolate cookie.

2.04.2009

Introduction


Some people say that the beginning is the hardest part, but I disagree. I've discovered, over time, that I'm what they call a "starter." It means that I can easily kick things off and get them going, but it's finishing the job, seeing it all the way through that really bogs me down and drains my energy. For instance, I love games. All games. Anything. It doesn't matter if it's on something like a PS2, the internet, the playground, or the kitchen table (you know, board games), if it's a game, I want in. But for as much as I love games, I have a dozen of them sitting in my entertainment center right now that I've never had the pleasure of finishing. I have no idea what happens at the end, all I know is that at some point, somewhere, I lost interest and simply walked away. So, all that being said, I have no problem starting this thing, and I've easily wasted a paragraph simply talking about starting it. How's that for a start? Hooked yet?

I suppose at some point I'll have to write about something tangible, meaningful, something that will really touch your life and make you think, "Wow, that was really insightful," and, hey, you might have already done that, so kudos to me if that's the case. In the meantime, the rest of you are wondering when I'll stop rambling and you can start getting some substance out of this. Is it now? The paragraph after this? Maybe on the second page or so? Now you're wondering how the hell I'm going to drag this out over two pages, let alone more. That, of course, brings me to another one of my favorite past times: dragging things on.

I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with work friends across the country where they've been ready to get off the phone but I've decided to have a little fun, extending the call an extra ten, fifteen, twenty minutes or so. And for those of you who know me, that seems pretty contradictory to my phone stigma. I hate talking on the phone. If someone calls me for no reason, just to chat, they better keep it under 5-10 minutes or they'll just make me upset. That being said, if I'm in that playful mood and eager to have some fun with someone, I may do just that. Ask around, it's happened.

OK, now where was I? Oh, right, insightful.

I'm not going to pretend that I've started this thing to make some sort of sense out of life. I'm not trying to delve deep into the human soul and get some deeper understanding of what makes man tick. I just like to write. I enjoy hearing myself talk, and enjoy reading myself write even more. I've found that the written word has its uses. You can think before you type, and even go back and delete things if they turn out to be over the line. That right there is something that the spoken word has been betraying me on all my life. I can't tell you how many sideways glances and embarrassed looks my wife has given me over the five plus years that we've been together. But here? Here, I can slow myself down, make myself think about it, and just take... it... easy... And that's what I want to leave you all with. I can't let you go without something, so I'll leave you with that, my parting words in so many e-mails, notes, letters and conversations. It's a motto to live by, and something to think about when life just gets going way too fast for you. It's what I repeat in my head when things start to get me a little flustered and I find myself getting frustrated. It's simple.

Take it easy.