Didn't We Almost Have It All?

I like to split my life into semesters because it's the easiest way I know how to turn my life into a television show. Each semester is representative of a season, and the breaks between class used to give me a break between each season, similar to the summer hiatus more television programs take. My life hardly fits into the semesterly format anymore, and in a year's time, semesters will cease to exist entirely. I have no idea how you split normal, everyday time into television seasons, but I'm sure once I'm faced with the issue, I'll find a way around it.
But in my television show, I alter the way I see things--no matter how boring or frustrating my life may get, I find a way to make it more entertaining or more dramatic in my mind. I make the frustrations mean something, even if they don't actually mean anything at all in reality. Some people would call that neurosis, but I tend to think it's just my way of constantly writing. I tend to make my life something I would rather see than what may actually be in front of me and because of that, I find no boredom in my life--every day is worth living to the fullest. The only problem with my method is when the lines between reality and my reality get blurred. And it happens to the best of us... the blurriness that is. It may not be a TV show in your mind, but we all have the things that we come to believe are true and they don't happen to particularly align with reality.

---

One of my favorite, most recent scenes that I play in my head happens every morning on the way to work. I recently found the song Underneath Your Beautiful, and I start it once I get off the escalator at the Metro Center subway stop.
If Shonda Rhimes has taught us anything about modern day television, it's that every powerful scene is best if accompanied by an equally powerful song. But as I transfer from Metro Center to Chinatown, the song grows in intensity, and once I get off the train and exit the turn stall and approach the summit of the final escalator, the song crescendos then grows silent. Sometimes I stop and watch the characters, slightly positioned cater-corner from the metro. There's the guy, and he says to the girl, I don't want to be your choice because you're not my choice. A choice means you have options--that there's a selection to choose from. A choice means that someone else matters enough to be considered. You're the only thing that matters to me. You were never just an option. And then he pauses, and they look into each other's eyes. I don't want to be your choice. And then I realize that I'm blocking the metro exit, and I wish that I knew how to screen write because that's good stuff. But I don't know how, and I'm now running forty-five seconds behind, so I walk on to work.

---

And that's when the perception is over. I may be the guy who has come up with multiple seasons of a fictional television dramedy, but I do understand when it's time to come back to the real world, and at times, it's a refreshing feeling. The image of the fake couple at the metro is perfect and eloquent and sweet, but it's just an image--at least for now. And when you can realize that it's just an image, it's almost as rewarding to be able to come back to reality and respect that story and that scene and those characters for what they were in the moment. It's similar to falling in love, or rather, falling out of it.

A little over a year ago, I was in love with being in love. I've come to believe it's a college senior year phenomenon as life is about to make a giant change, and if you can find something to place you in the moment, it may take your mind out of the future for a while. And it did, because for a while, I loved everything I was doing. I loved having someone to make out with, and I loved having someone to talk to. We had a song and inside jokes and mornings where we'd wake up in the same twin-sized college bed, and it really was amazing. And then it wasn't.

I've never been good at lying about important things, and once the new wore off, it became increasingly evident that the fairy tale I had produced in my mind was not what the reality seemed to be. But in too many cases, we waste time because we would rather believe that what we have is what we've come to perceive it as. So in the months before graduation, I tried to make it as fantastic as I wanted it to be. I knew what I wanted it to be, and more than that, I knew that I was the only one that wanted it that way. I was reaching for something that simply wasn't, and in a way, that's more painful than the whole thing being over. But then after too many walks and long conversations and disagreements about what the future might look like, I ended up sitting outside on a windy April unsure of exactly what I wanted to do. The conversation just wasn't happening--like, literally--it wasn't happening. So we sat there in silence for a while, and finally I said, I don't think we need to do this anymore. And there were tears, but for once, they weren't from me. I closed my eyes and leaned in for a final kiss because that's how all the best romances end, but when I opened them, I didn't really recognize the person that was sitting in front of me. And that was when I realized that I had fallen out of love. Or maybe more accurately, I had fallen out of love with trying to be in love. Like the image I see some mornings outside the metro, the love I had so strongly believed in had suddenly vanished once I realized how truly not there it was. It didn't mean that I didn't love the idea of it or love what I once believed was there. It was just the moment when you come to realize that a mirage is simply not tangible.
One of our greatest flaws as humans is the notion that we've ever understood what we need. In terms of the basics, I suppose we've gotten that down: the food, the water, the shelter bit. All of that seems pretty obvious. But where it gets complicated is when we try to figure out what will make us complete--you know, after the basics. It honestly doesn't take a lot to keep a human alive, but the struggle comes when we try and figure out what makes a human feel alive. And that's where we step in with our notions and presuppositions. It's just our normal reaction, even sometimes going so far as to try and make those decisions for others: an issue I had a year ago, and one that I've essentially imposed on a ton of fictitious characters. We try and make life what we think it should be with little regard to the idea that maybe life works itself out without our imposing hand.
But the learning process is difficult, so I stick with primarily forcing life decision on to the people who live in my head instead of the people who live... well... with me. I think, at least for me, part of it has to do with being impatient and the other part has to do with having control over something. Television is planned out beautifully, almost to the point that it's predictable. You have the season opener, then November sweeps, then February sweeps, and then the finale. You may not know exactly what's going to happen, but you have a pretty good feeling when it will happen. You have character development, and on the up and up, everyone can fall in love and experience the depths of life (with the aforementioned musical background). And as for my life? There's hardly anything scripted about it--it's about as close to reality TV as you can get. And when it doesn't follow script, all you can do is wait for the next scene and look back and say, Maybe it was never supposed to go that way at all.

Why You Mad?

I grew up in a very loving home, but to be fair, you could insert any emotion into the sentence "I grew up in a very ________ home," and it would probably be applicable. I come from a people of strong reactions, and I've learned the hard way that the rest of the world just doesn't quite function the same way that my family does. Last week, as Kellie Pickler won the mirrorball trophy on the 16th season of Dancing with the Stars, I sat on the couch counting the number of times I had touched each pillow (5) as they announced the results. Partially obsessive-compulsive charged, partially emotionally charged, I needed to do whatever I could to see Kellie win. And I'm not sure that my persistent touching had anything to do with her victory, but when they announced it, I let out a throaty yell from the couch lifting myself from the cushions. My roommate Ben recorded it, and it hit me, I must be like an animal to these people. All the tears and yells and laughter... they don't even know what it means.
And that's always been the problem--getting people to understand. It's not so much that you need someone to talk to after the fact as much as you need someone to just kind of get what's going on when it's happening. When I come in with a 6 pack of beer, My Best Friend's Wedding, and a pint of ice cream, I want someone to be able to look at me and say: hm, the movie means he's sad about relationships, the ice cream means he doesn't think it's going to get any better, and the 6 pack is because he doesn't care. That's a complicated puzzle, and it's hard to expect anyone to ever get it--not without a solid 5-10 years of experience with you--but when you find those people, it's more important than you know that you hold on to them--especially when the uglier emotions come out.
And that leads me back to sophomore year of college--a year that has provided me with some of the most absurd stories I've ever written. If you wanted to shine as a student in campus affairs, you were a resident assistant. Because our class was super competitive, we had a list our freshman year of who we thought would get hired--naturally, I was a shoo in. Before my first year, if you were an RA, you were pretty much set in a position to be an RA until you graduated. However, when it came time to be placed in your next building, we were shocked: we all had to reapply. I dove into my presentation and application to distract myself from what had been on my mind for months--the fruitless crush that I had based the latter half of my sophomore year on. I could control this application. I could control the accompanying presentation--or so I thought.
When we signed up for interview times, I went for the earliest spot that I could find: third. I didn't realize who had signed up before me though. Being an overachiever, I got there early and what did I see? The love interest... and the other man. About a month before the interview, I knew that I was out of the weak link of the love triangle, so I had avoided the situation entirely. That was the only way I knew how to deal with it--avoid it. But there they were sitting and enjoying spots 1 and 2, and there I was... number 3, which seemed oddly appropriate. The other man was spot 1, so we were sitting together waiting on the first interview to wrap up. Once it was over, the other man came and sat next to me, and I said, "Isn't your interview over? Why are you still hanging around?" He responded, "Oh, I just thought I'd wait until this one is over... you know, for support." And then he smiled. Instantly, I felt my stomach start to fall, almost so fast that it could have broken the chair I was sitting in. To anyone else, it would have been annoying, but to me... it was devastating. It was exactly what I needed to break me before I went in for my interview, and it worked like a charm.
I stepped into my interview with my literary themed presentation with fun little titles like "I Know Why the Caged RA Sings," and other things like that, but my performance was lost. I walked into the room in a daze--the year before, the whole interview felt like a conversation, even when I was getting hit with really hard questions. This interview though was more like a train wreck happening at seven miles an hour. I went through each slide and unconsciously read directly off every one. All of my moves were awkward, and when I asked for questions at the end, the panel sat in front of me with the most confused faces without a single word to say. I walked out of the room devastated--for more reasons than one.
I knew exactly what I needed to do, or more so, exactly who I needed to go to. I got in my car and drove directly home--to the people who taught me to react the very way I've come to call normal. I drove thirty minutes home and hopped out of my car, slamming the door behind me. I walked inside and saw my dad. I need a gun. Without saying anything else he said, Which one? I responded, The .45. My dad walked to the gun cabinet and got it out with two clips, and turned around and asked, Animal or human target? I just stared at him for a moment with my pissed off expression, and he said, Human target it is. And then we walked outside, I put on the earphones and shot 10 rounds into the target, unloaded the clip, reloaded the next one, and fired 10 more shots. I took the earphones off, and he asked, Alright, are you ready to talk about what happened? And then we went in and I explained everything: the crush, the other man, the interview... all of it.
For clarification, I don't shoot other people when I get angry. This isn't Bad Boys or anything. And when I was shooting the target, it's not like I was imagining anybody's face on it. But there's something special about being able to walk into your house and ask for a gun and not have anyone asking what you're going to do with it. It's a side effect of someone knowing you well enough that they just get it. So my response happens to be shooting inanimate objects, touching things obsessive-compulsively, and celebrating a little bit more outwardly than the next guy. For other people, it may consist of being completely reserved to pretty much every emotion across the board. Doesn't matter how you handle it really as long as there's someone around that understands how you react and why you do it.

Super Dollar Magic Kingdom: A Folklore

Today, I went to the doctor because I found a lump when I was taking a shower. I found the lump on Sunday, so for four days, I feared for the worst. Through my own examination and web research, the signs all pointed to cancer--and not in the way that you say, "I have a headache," then go to WebMD and self-diagnose that you have a brain tumor. (Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. We're all freaks.) This was one of those situations where it really seemed like it could be cancer. I decided to limit the people I talked to about it--I didn't want the sympathy. I was mad. I was scared and I was mad and I was hurt and most of all, I didn't want to die. I didn't want to fight it either--I just didn't want it to be.
Today, I met Alex Trebek, and if I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times--This. Is. Jeopardy. And I could barely enjoy it because I was sitting there, engrossed in potential-cancer land (not to be confused with the much more lively children's game Candy Land), and all I could think was, "Yeah, that's right motherf----r. This is Jeopardy. You don't even know." And all I wanted was someone to accompany me to the doctor--someone to tell me that I was being overreactive, someone to tell me that it was okay if they told me it was cancer, or someone to joke with once we found out it wasn't. But that's not what happened. I sat in Dr. Nguyen's office thumbing through a People Magazine, probably wrinkled from the humidity in the room. The office was sticky and lonely and lingering with all the frustration and worries from everyone before it. I couldn't control my hands, and I dropped my keys when I gave my insurance card to the receptionist because I was so nervous. And all I wanted was to be back--back at Super Dollar Magic Kingdom.

***

Freshman year of college is weird. Weird and hard. You're trying to figure out all these things about what it means to actually be in college, and there's always a wrench that gets thrown in there. For the most part, it was easy. Just the basics of being a college freshman, but as the end of the Spring semester approached, the wrench happened. Things weren't right at home, and because of that, I didn't go back that often. I removed myself from the situation because the energy wasn't the same: it didn't feel like the place full of love that I left. My parents were arguing more, and it was weird because my parents always loved each other. They still do to this day. But at that point, it didn't feel like it, and soon after the arguing started, they would call me. The conversations were always ambiguous, but it always led to the same conclusion: things weren't going so hot for my parents.

So one night, I grabbed my friend Kasi, and we went to Pearsons: the dining hall/run-down dorm that no one lives in anymore. There were couches in the lobby, and we went there because we knew no one else would be there at midnight in March. I immediately bought myself a Coke because... Coke cures most ailments, and I lost it. I cried and I yelled and I cried some more, but it was interrupted--we heard the sound of a malfunctioning machine, and as we looked over, we saw a dollar bill floating gently to the floor. Jesus once cured with leprosy, Moses parted the Red Sea--and on a cool March evening, a Coca Cola machine gave me back my dollar. 

And like all good things, it completely went to our heads. Kasi and I looked at each other in amazement. Could it be? Could one of the main sources of non-human dollar thievery actually be giving us our money back? It was the vigilante of Coke machines, and we didn't care--we took advantage of its kindness. We figured out that the machine would spit the dollar back out every ten minutes, and it wasn't long until our friends became suspicious of why we would come back to our dorm with six cokes in hand. 

We made an agreement: we would tell two other people, one apiece, about our treasure trove. We would invite them into our ranks, and they too would experience the beauty that was what we had titled "Super Dollar Magic Kingdom." So, I told my friend Ellison, and she told Bridget. Soon after we decided that to clear up roommate issues, they had to tell their roommates, so then it was the six of us--we would take turns with the machine, inserting the same dollar in every ten minutes, and over the course of a month, we cleared out the Coke machine twice. But after a while, it became more than a Coke machine. We talked about our business there: the stuff that didn't matter and the stuff that did. And at the end of the night, we would sneak back into Copeland Hall with backpacks full of drinks just because we could. And when people would ask us where we got all the Diet Cokes from, well, we'd just lie.
The fateful day finally happened that we returned to Super Dollar Magic Kingdom, and the machine had been replaced. Apparently, after about 110 beverages missing, the Coca Cola company finally got the picture and decided to start charging again. And with that, the saga of Super Dollar Magic Kingdom came to a close. In college, we all grew apart and together and apart and together, but when we reached our senior year, we were celebrating the final 100 days until graduation with the rest of our class, and we all ended up back at the same table. Sadly, there were no free cokes, but there was free champagne, and that's pretty much all you can ask for in life. I don't know if they remembered it, or most of the stuff we had been through, but when I looked around at that table, I saw the people that had gotten me through college--all at the expense of the Coca-Cola company.

***

I was a mess waiting for the doctor to arrive. He asked me the basics: allergies, family history, smoking and drinking habits. I didn't understand why we couldn't get straight to the real issue. But when he finally mentioned the lump, I felt dizzy. I had been swallowing all this for nearly a week, begging someone to give me an answer that only a doctor really could. He inspected it, and then quickly responded, "Justin, that's not cancer. You're fine." And then, naturally, as an entitled grad student I tried to explain how many things it had in common with cancer, and then he explained how many things the lump didn't. He said, sometimes, things just grow--we don't know why, but it's a cyst. And it will probably go away.

Then it was over. All the worry and panic and stuff was just simply over like that, but it was the four days waiting that was harder than the actual visit. I wanted to be back in Pearsons on the nasty couches. Not because I want my college life back or because I can't let go. It had nothing to do with that. It has to do with the five other people I was sitting with. We need people, and we need that support. We get through and manage life when we lean on each other--and the fact that anything can be solved over a Coke, regardless of all that carcinogenic aspartame. 

Our Favorite Sins

My friend Anna and I were in her bed watching Grey's Anatomy one night during my junior year. Callie's mother told her that she would not be attending her wedding to Arizona because she couldn't stand the thought of her daughter marrying a woman--she couldn't stand the thought of her daughter, who she loved, spending the rest of her life in Hell. I immediately became disgusted, while Anna literally cheered the mother on. Immediately, I turned around and looked at Anna as if she had slapped me across the face. Anna is one of my best friends, but there she sat, cheering on a fictional mother as she told her fictional daughter that she would be spending her eternity in Hell for... marrying a woman. Anna and I immediately got into discourse with Anna's greatest defense being the morality of the Christian religion, her upbringing, the book of Leviticus, and the very limited references made in the New Testament (let it be noted, none were said by Jesus). I, in response, quoted a theme that occurs repeatedly over the course of both the Old and New Testaments: judgement. We'll discuss the aftermath of that conversation later.

This week, Jason Collins of the Wizards, formerly the Celtics, made the very bold announcement that he is gay--the first athlete of America's four biggest professional sports. I wasn't going to put much commentary in the conversation because I had already tried to state my position last year during the whole Chick-Fil-A debacle (oh, you didn't read What a Waste of Waffle Fries?!). I actually defended the idea of purchasing food from Chick-Fil-A. But what inspires me to address this Jason Collins issue is the comparisons that have been drawn throughout this week. I hear about how Tim Tebow has been persecuted for being a Christian and how terribly he has been bashed as a Christian player, while Collins is being revered for being an openly gay athlete--and that's where my issue comes up. Tebow, a Christian, has been bashed? As a child, I used to try and make the case about what it was like to be white or to be a boy or to even be a Christian. There's a lot of prejudice in the world, and I'm not saying that there's not prejudice against white people or men or Christians, because there is. There truly is. But in my twenty-three years of life, I can say that I've never been told that being any of those things was wrong, and I was surely never told that I would go to Hell for them. My eternal damnation was never on the line because of my race or gender or religion. And I dare say, this is not the Crusades anymore. Christians are not blamed for blowing up buildings; Christians were not gassed or burned in small confined spaces. If the Christian religion's biggest current hurdle is being criticized on MSNBC, then I think we're doing okay.

Posted the morning after the Collins
announcement

And I say we because I, myself, am a Christian. I find my religion to be immensely personal and not the topic of frequent conversation. My prayers are mine and God's, my beliefs are only applicable to me because I don't think it's my place to determine the rights and wrongs of others. I struggle enough doing right on my own. But I find it hard to explain to agnostics, atheists, non-believers what our message is and who we want to be when in the midst of our own "persecution," we use announcements like Collins as a "general reminder" that homosexuality is a damning sin. 
I don't write this to defend the followers of my religion or to convince others whether homosexuality is a sin or not. And I definitely don't write this because I'm a lover of sports. I'm an atypical cookie cutter man--I find very little interest in sports. I recently joined a volleyball league in DC, and it's practically a miracle that I did that because sports were the source of my unhappiness for the longest time. When I tried the whole sports thing in elementary school, that was the first time someone called me a girl. Toward the end of elementary school, when I wasn't coordinated enough, that was the first time I was called gay. When I moved to middle school, that changed to faggot. I wanted nothing to do with sports because when you weren't good enough, that's the kind of thing you became: a joke, a mockery, what others observed as a second rate human--and then after getting called that long enough in the sports setting, it began to stick. I was called those things outside of the game, and then it was my eternity that was in question. I went from not being good at sports to being eternally damned.
So when I saw the story of Jason Collins this week, I nearly cried reading it. He spoke of why he kept his sexuality a secret for so very long. He talked about how no one had done this in a major sport before him. He brought up the way that gay people have been viewed in the sports community, and then just for a paragraph or so, he talked about his faith. He spoke about his religious roots and how he still holds on to those things he learned, and he spoke about judgement. But when I think about Collins' proclamation to the world, I don't see it as some giant thing for the professional sports world--though it is. I don't expect a string of players to come forth and announce their homosexuality. I do, however, anticipate that this is the beginning of a new normal--where it's no longer okay to call someone a faggot on the playground because he doesn't know how to properly throw a football. Because calling someone  gay should not be an insult. And for the gay kid that does know how to throw a football (please teach me--I can't throw a spiral to save my life), I imagine that this is the beginning of a time when we'll evaluate his skills and not his personal life.
So, back to Anna. I left Anna's room that night out of frustration. We didn't go back to discuss the conversation because there was no way I could convince her and no way she could convince me. We didn't even mention the topic for months. And then one night, she sat with me on the porch of our dorm and she began to cry. She told me that everything she had ever known had been turned upside down. She explained to me the gay people that she had met and how great of people they are. She told me, If you ever told me you were gay, I just couldn't believe that alone would send you to Hell forever. I just can't believe that, and it doesn't make sense to me anymore. I don't look at that conversation as a victory--like I had beaten her or something. I did, however, look at it as a victory because her world had been challenged and for once, the idea that one sin could damn someone to Hell forever became incomprehensible to her.
And that's what I urge the world to do--to quit putting weight on your favorite sin, or any sin for that matter. Worry about yourself and quit trying to interpret what God views as okay or not okay in other people. Do not use the triumph of humanity as a crutch for an unrelated agenda. We did not tell the world this week whether or not it's moral to be gay--that's honestly not a question that anyone should be discussing in a public forum. But with it being such a point of contention, ask yourself if you are moral--in every sense of the word. Ask yourself if you've sinned, and then cite James 2:10. I do not see homosexuality as a sin, but I do see the persecution of others in the vanity of your own beliefs to be. We moved forward this week--we're one step closer to eradicating the terrible stigma that comes with "being different." And I don't think Jesus could be happier about it--his words in The Bible are meant to push our humanity forward. It's surely not meant to be used as a roadblock to keep us further separated.