COBB MOUNTAIN

I spent last week on Cobb Mountain, CA, with my sister, Alyssa. She leaves today, and though her summer was filled with a fair amount of drama and menial labor, I'm sure it'll be difficult for her to leave. It was her home for the summer. It was my home for one week, and it was sad for me to leave. Where is it? Well, if you drive to the very northern point of Wine Country in northern California, up through Napa and Sonoma Counties into Lake County, and then you keep on driving, past the bed & breakfast town of Calistoga, up, up, up into the mountains, past a couple little mountain villages and rustic resorts, until you are the furthest away from civilization that you could possibly get. Then you pull into Pine Grove Resort and Spa on Cobb Mountain, which is a very fancy name for a place that consists of a pool, some half-finished cabins and a pile of ecclectically decorated trailers.

Oh, there's also a "general store," a bingo hall and "The Grill," where you can get hamburgers, hot dogs and ice cream cones.

But despite its humble accomodations, it was the perfect place to get away for a week and spend some time journaling, laying out and conversing endlessly with my sister, who I miss very much. We cooked dinner in her dumpy cabin, we hiked around the camp, and we piled on my bed to watch Young Guns on a laptop computer. There were no cell phones, no TV, no housing developments, no chain restaurants or strip malls. Just clean, dry air and a sky full of one trazillion stars. The mountains in California are yellow because there is no rain in the summer, and they are covered with low bushes and thin trees with red bark. We hiked to a series of waterfalls that are where God must hang out when He takes a break from keeping everything together. I wish I had a digital camera so you could see my pictures. I sound like I'm romanticizing, but everything I saw really was a world away from everything I've known.

I also visited wineries - stone buildings, gardens, rows and rows of vines across mountain faces, fountains and the peppery flush of red wine (I now know how to properly taste it). I spent a night in Chico, CA, to see Pedro the Lion play and slept on the couch of a man by the legal name of DNA. I hoofed across San Francisco with my good friend Geoff and pretended to be a photographer. Yes, I did see the Bush Man.

My objectives for this vacation were to rest, to spend meaningful time with my sister and to have adventures. Check, check and check. Vacations are interesting; you go to somewhere totally foreign to get away from everything you know, and you're glad to be away, but you also miss the familiar. Being close to Alyssa, though, I really didn't feel too far from home. By the end of the week, I was ready to get back to (hurricane-stricken) Orlando (mostly to see my true love), but being back is tough. I miss not having expectations piled on my shoulders. I miss the total lack of to-do lists. I miss the sun and adequate sleep and time to write for as long as I want to. Speaking of which, my lunch hour is almost over, so I'd better wrap this up.

I did vow to bring more creativity and rest into my regular schedule. There's no reason for us to be killing ourselves every day trying to do it all. I'm convinced that happiness lies somewhere in the balance of hard work and time to rest and express ourselves with people we love.

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE

on sunday night, philip and i went to go see Napoleon Dynamite. it was easily as funny as we expected it to be (infinitely funnier than the last comedy i viewed in the theater - Starsky and Hutch), and, in addition to containing some classic lines ("i'm gonna do whatever i feel like doing, GOSH"), i found that i really did identify with the characters. While napoleon and friends are conspicuously geeky, something i have meticulously avoided being (at least to the casual observer), their idiosyncracies and quirks are much closer to mine than i maybe even want to admit.

living in rural idaho in the mid-'90s, napoleon - characterized by his parted 'fro, moon boots, and drawings of ligers ("pretty much" his "favorite animal; it's like a lion and a tiger mixed") - pedro - characterized by a classic premature mexican 'stache, Jesus and mary iconic candles, and "sweet bike" - and deb - characterized by her side ponytail, caboodles, and lanyards - make up a sort of (sub)urban tribe, all vastly different yet creating a community that makes sense to them. obviously misunderstood by their fellow high school classmates, napoleon and co. are picked on, rejected, or at best, pitited. yet despite their displeasure with how they're treated, the trio never tries to be anything they're not. unlike other high school comedies such as She's All That, in which, to the relief of the audience, the star geek becomes cool and attrative, napoleon is flailing ungracefully at the tetherball in the final scene, and i loved him for it.

when i was in middle school, my three girlfriends and i dubbed ourselves the "fliquers" in an attempt to combat the clique of "popular girls" of which we were not a part. our flique passed notes in the form of a paperback book on whose pages we wrote; we nicknamed the boys we liked things like "window with a view," "mihole," "OEOEA," and "luap the lion." we relished band; we listend to Amy Grant's Heart in Motion at sleepovers. we were misunderstood and left out by the cool girls and rejected by the very boys we so endearingly nicknamed. but we had each other. rather than try to find a way to fit in, we formed a subculture and found a place to belong that was safe and bizarre and beautiful.  

in high school, my friends and i - one girl the same as middle school, and the other two new - were no less weird. in fact, how strange we acted probably increased. now our jokes were peppered with things like leap cows, v-teams, markie the unicorn, hoochie the leopard, and knitboy. our quirky teachers provided us with endless entertainment - mr. steely's back room, the secret affair going on between mr. davis and mrs. erickson (masked by the need to "borrow her calculator"), mr. o'neil spying on us during prayer, the detzner strip, mr. culp balancing stools on his chin, mr. mckay throwing chalk, mr. bartel wanting to "talk to you so much!" ... as a supremely untalented cheerleading squad, we made up individual cheers for the guys on our team ("paul! he's tall! so pass the ball to paul tall paul!"). we threw small stuffed animals around in study hall. we called ourselves the "pigeons." we were undeniably weird, and we had a blast.

this quirkiness followed me into college, when, during my freshman year, we stole a couch from the hallway and made awards lists for each other of our most unique attributes (i won "longest legs" and "pointiest nose," among other things). my group of friends sophomore year on refered to ourselves as "ladies in waiting," and while we militantly rejected dating relationships, we talked about swinging from the vines, abdul muhammed, and "b-kat - where you at?" we "washed the windows" to prince's "kiss" and and tooled around on duct-taped motor scooters honking the feeble horn at people we passed.

even now, i find myself in groups whose behavior, from the outside, would seem foreign and odd. i hang out with people who say "happy sabbath" to each other, and i get up at 6:30 in the morning to power walk around my neighborhood with my roommates. my own relationship with philip is filled with so many inside jokes and made-up terms that if you were to tape record and listen to one of our conversations, you'd probably shake your head in bewilderment.

i read one review of napoleon dynamite that said they could relate because "we all knew people like that in high school." not me. i could relate because i have always been one of those people - weird, wonderful - a part of communities that are a little left of center. we care massively about things that are in effect very small. we break out into a fluid dance and then run awkwardly off the stage when we realize we're still going and the music has stopped. we remind each other of what our skills are. we've got wigs for when one of us has accidentally shaved off all their hair. we're misunderstood by the outside, but we make perfect sense on the inside. anyone who has ever been a part of a community like this ought to be able to "get" napoleon dynamite.

wanna play me in tetherball?

AWARENESS

the process of me becoming an official floridian was completed this morning, as, for $171.85, i purchased a florida license plate. the process went without a hitch, except when the woman helping me at city hall discovered i was still in the system as a male. the problem was fixed with a simple phone call, but i have to admit, i was a little befuddled at the ultimate incompetence of the man who helped me at the DMV last week. hopefully he was new.

i debated telling the woman that i had already tried to get the DMV to fix that little gender problem once, but i opted not to. i think people who work in any type of customer service hear enough complaints. for example, yesterday i scooted over to Bath & Body Works at the mall to pick up more shampoo and conditioner. b&b works has this bio line that works really well and smells really good. and the conditioner isn't runny. i hate runny conditioner. well, when i got to the store, the shelf containing the bio products was nearly bare, a small clearance sign hanging there sadly. my stomach dropped. no! they couldn't be discontinuing my product! this had happened with a face wash i really liked there several months ago, and that was almost more disappointment than i could handle. i found another face wash that works okay, but has nowhere near the refreshing cleansing power of the old face wash. i sought an employee and asked about the fate of the bio line. it had indeed been replaced by a new, "more natural" line of products. "NOOOO!" i howled. "bath and body works ALWAYS does this to me!" the attendant helpfully suggested i try the new line; she actually likes it better. no, i assured her, i would not like it better, because i do not like the new face wash better than the old face wash that got discontinued. she just looked tired and said i should buy up all the clearance bottles. when i reflected on this experience later, i felt very bad. this poor b&b works employee was just trying to get through her day, and i spoke crossly to her about decisions she had nothing to do with. this was crappy of me, and i asked God to forgive me, and so when i thought of complaining of the DMV employee's ignorant twice-repeated error to the city hall tag woman, i thought no, she will not benefit from me opening my big mouth. so i just stood there patiently and wished her to have a nice day when i left.

i want to attribute this very small improvement in my awareness level to the fact that for the last two days, i've gotten out of bed early to sit out on the porch and spend some time in prayer/quiet/reflection/whatever you want to call it. i don't say this to brag. in fact, i've been meaning to get up in the morning to have such a time of quiet for about 11 years now, and i'm just now finally doing it. it's a practice i highly recommend. this morning's experience was fairly dry until i shut my eyes (mostly out of sleepiness), and suddenly the sounds of the morning were so sharp that i couldn't believe my ears. i heard insects buzzing, i heard the calls and chirps of probably about 20 different kinds of birds - the melancholy coos of pigeons, the harsh caws of mocking birds, the gentle chirping of sparrows. it was almost deafening. i walked inside feeling more centered and calm than i had felt in a long time.

RHYTHM OF LIFE

there's a lot i could talk about today ... the mixed-message church service philip and i attended on saturday (do we only pledge allegeance to a heavenly kingdom, or do we flag wave and sing "America the Beautiful"?) ... how surreal 4th of july fireworks are over the ocean, in the rain, with hardly any people around, quiet but for the booms and thunder, in a group but feeling disconnected from every human being alive ... how well chicken kabobs go over at a party ... how my 16-year-old sister laughs at me for spelling "nuptials" wrong on public webspace ... how it's my other sister's 22nd birthday today, and i can't remember the last time i spent her birthday with her ...

but i think all i'm going to say today is that i spent saturday afternoon with philip and our friends david and amy, who just had their baby, ana, two weeks ago, and i love being around david and amy for many reasons. they are peaceful people. they have a sustainable rhythm of life that energizes them rather than drains them. they have many relationships, but they're not running around like crazy people trying to maintain all of them. they take naps and eat healthy food. their house isn't full of crap; their lives aren't driven by materialism. when they sit on the couch together, they cuddle. when david looks at a picture of his wife, he says, "look at that woman. i can't believe what a beautiful family i now have." they talk about deep subjects and read books. they don't own a TV. they write music. they ride bikes. they had ana naturally. when i'm around them, i see how life can be - how it doesn't have to be hectic, and it doesn't have to require bigger and bigger paychecks. i see what God had in mind when He thought of marriage and child birth and raising a family. and it doesn't seem so impossible to get to that place.

saturday was a good day.