On decisions

So it's been a while.

I think I need to resolve to blog more often. For one, I'm a writer, and what is a writer who doesn't write? Useless. (The fact that I write for a living doesn't exactly exempt me from this; it's like how pleasure-reading falls by the wayside during college, because you're forced to read so much for class. But pleasure-reading is still vitally important, as is pleasure-writing.) (Why is "pleasure" such a bad word these days? Hm.)

 Also, if I write more often, I will (hopefully) avoid the novel-length posts that I end up writing when I go months in between. (Side note: "Hopefully" in its common usage was accepted by the AP last month sometime. Maybe the month before. Don't know how I feel about that ... Its original use, its correct use, was to mean "in a hopeful manner," as in, "She skipped hopefully to the mailbox to see if there was a card for her." But we've taken it to mean "I hope," as in, "Hopefully there's a card in the mailbox." And now we're allowed to do that. I like that language is alive and evolving, I get that, but I also like the rules and am afraid of what could happen if we loosen them. A short story in Mrs. Smith's 9th grade English class will forever haunt me; the sci-fi one about a guy who goes on a "time safari" or something, wanders off the path in the Mesozoic era, crushes a butterfly with his boot, and comes back to his time to find the modern world disastrously changed as a result. And everything is misspelled and awful. If we let language devolve into how normal people carelessly talk, then we'll all be writing in very ugly ways one day. And this is a long aside.)

What's consumed my life for the past month or so is a big decision: I'm moving into a house with friends! Doesn't really seem that big, does it? Well, it's not; when the idea first came up, I had a lot of resistance (I'll have to leave my own apartment! Can't have my bathroom as spotlessly clean as I like it! Can't walk naked from the shower to my bedroom! Giving up the apartment POOL! That kind of thing) but quickly came to realize that the potential benefits outweighed any negatives. And I found a beautiful beautiful historic house in the beautiful beautiful historic neighborhood here, and the owners are wonderful, and they're moving to Hawaii for a year and need someone to basically house-sit. Who better to do that than a group of flexible, 20-something-post-college kids? Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Except for the fact that 3 of our 5 are boys, and the other girl has another friend who is adamantly opposed to girls living with boys, and this friend has had an unreasonable amount of influence in the decision. So it's been a very frustrating, drawn-out process of my friend waffling back and forth, torn between what she thinks God is calling her to do and fear that the other girl will think she's casting herself into the pit of Hell. (True story.)

But anyway. That's mostly done now; we signed the lease a week and a half ago, so it's all OURS, starting July 1, and they dropped the rent down so my non-grown-up-job friends can afford it, and we're taking care of the 14-year-old cat Calvin, and there's a raspberry patch and an herb garden and a swing set with a fort and a laundry chute and windows everywhere. Sigh of contentment. Sigh of relief. Sigh of couldn't-we-have-avoided-all-that-frustration-by-just-making-grown-ass-decisions?!

Aaaanyway.

This process was a good learning experience, and a useful heads up; I now know how vastly different I am from my soon-to-be housemates. And I learned that I'm OK with that. Previously, with this group of friends (whom I hold in very high regard), I would have taken that difference to mean that I was somehow wrong; that they had their priorities/personalities straight, and I was being dumb. But nope! I can say that I am very glad to be the decisive, go-getter type of person that I am. Shit would not get done otherwise. So it'll be an interesting year — a perfect experiment, really. The idea-people will maybe learn to be a bit more feet-on-the-ground; I will maybe learn to loosen my grip on "the plan" a little bit; and we'll all learn how to love each other despite painfully grinding differences.

My housemates are the group that's in my profile picture on Facebook, plus 1: Courtney, Remy, Drew, and Drew's twin brother Chris (so, basically, the same picture, just imagine 2 of the guy on the left.) Chris won't be moving in until the end of the summer, after he finishes up an internship in Coeur d'Alene.

Oddly enough, none of our parents had an issue with the mixed-gender concept. My dad says he sees it as the same as a dorm - separate bathrooms, separate bedrooms. We're even going to have separate boys' and girls' floors. His only concern was that I would end up being the housemaid, cleaning up after all of them, but I refuse. I will make them clean ... lovingly. My mom's concern, that may or may not be valid, was "How will you date anyone if you're living in a house full of boys?" The boys themselves laughed at the idea of sitting down to grill a potential date, like 3 angry older brothers at once. The fact that these three boys are probably the only eligible young men in Yakima pretty much evaporates any fear about dating ... not that I do that ever anyway. So it'll be a good year to be good friends.

Back to the writing bit, though. My task last week was to help craft a letter to send to this doubting friend, to try to explain what our mission and vision are so she can get a bit more on board. It's something that I tend to undervalue outside of my job: Yes, I'm a writer, but what good does that do me? I've been a writer for so long (of the crappy middle-school English students, I think I was the slightly-less-crappy one that stood out) that I don't even think about it. Of course I can communicate articulately; can't everyone? Not so, it turns out. So that's been cool/interesting to wrap my head around. It's a gift, one that I can be proud of, and one that is useful outside of my writing-for-a-living thing.

Disclaimer: Blogging does not equal writing.

I would like to write more, though. I tried my hand at a slam poem last month; I like how it turned out, but it will be a long time before I'm able to share it, I think. Long time. It's an odd medium; half personal story, half detached monologue. Even if it's a powerful story, and personal, it would be strange to perform it with the level of emotion it requires each time. Somewhere along the way, it becomes very scripted. But I would like to write more poetry; for the past few years, I only go that route when I'm in the midst of extreme emotional turmoil, and the words just come naturally. Forcing it feels weird. Then again, I don't particularly want to experience any more extreme emotional turmoil.

Our house is quite a musical house; two or three of them play guitar, and two of them sing, and I play piano. I would like to try writing songs with the guitar players. Again, I can do the word thing. Useful. Maybe.

Anyway. Long post. Again. I'll try to write more often, and less lengthily.
Love always,
molly