Tower of Babel

I suppose it is a play to my own version of the classic “mid-twenties existential crisis” that I have been listening almost exclusively  to Leonard Cohen this week. It might be the slow eternal sadness of his voice or the perpetual searching in his words, but somehow each song sits like a brick on the path I seem to be traveling on. Or maybe, each song sits like bricks stacked crooked upon all the other crooked bricks and the other songs that reach this part of me, on a shakey upward stretch with a goal to have its top reach the heavens.

Most of it, is the private construction of a place to hide. It is funny, to me, the things I keep private. The reasons I keep them private. Everyone thinks I have this strength that requires no outside help. Even the ones that help me think it is just a passing phase… a seasonal sadness… a stumble in a confident stride. Temporary. “She will be fine,” they say, “She’s Ashley Tippin. She’s always fine.” And then further, “She’s better off.” And though it is true the things that cause trip-ups and skinned knees do pass, and I may be better off, and I am still Ashley Tippin, and I will always be fine, the strength is all in the walls of my private, internal Tower of Babel.

And when I send out the S.O.S. to the people who have seen my tower, know that I exist in it, I wish they would stop thinking I was this strong. Because sometimes I’m not.

Now I dance on the stairwells inside this Tower of Babel I have made and the walls grow ever weaker. It, by God’s grace and wrath, or the sheer force of my thundering feet, will soon crumbled to the ground. All the common people and this common language we share will be disjointed and spread to the ends of the earth.

I just pray that I will always have these songs. I pray that I will always have the thick, syrupy affections of these songs. I pray that this, the only language I can understand in the rubble of a broken building, will remain one when the tower crumbles at the pit of my stomach.

“When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.”

Take it Easy on Me Just for a Little While

Curtis and I split a bottle of wine at the Bourgeois Pig last night. We sat at the end of the bar on bolted down stools positioned just a little too close together. I swung slowly like a pendulum between bumping shoulders with him, and bumping shoulders with the woman in her late 40’s drinking vodka gimlets next to me. I only apologized to her for it.

He jokes about me being his “perpetually single” friend and how my presence in a room is not one of a five-foot-zero-inch-hundred-and-ten-pound-twenty-five-year-old but rather that of a person 5′8” and not a day over thirty. He casually mentions mid-sentence that it “smells like summer sausage in here” and wraps his giant calloused hands around the delicate crystal glass. He has hands that look like they should be wrapped in a blue collar or waiting for a few nickles outside a Depression era coal mine. We each take a sip while still smiling. He is wonderful. I bump shoulders with the woman. She ignores my fifth apology.

I tell him that I want to be “normal”. He mistakes “normal” for mediocrity and we argue about this periodically for the next couple of hours.

“Robert says I will only be able to date men who are so laid back that they don’t care about anything or someone who is weirder than I am and if I even try to date someone ‘normal’ I will only find that they don’t like me.” I say over ‘Crimson and Clover’ (over and over).

“But why would you want someone mediocre anyways?”

I don’t correct him. He doesn’t understand. He talks about his ex-wife, the brief marriage he had when he was 21 and she was 19. Jenifer with one N. It lasted under a year. I tell him about my ex, Kenn, with two N’s. I tell him I am changing my name to “something with three N’s, just to be different.”

He laughs and says, “This is why you can’t date someone ‘normal’.”  I silently take note of his use of ‘normal’ as opposed to mediocre. I think he gets it now. We spend the next 45 minutes in meaningless chatter about the bartender’s music selection on this particular evening. I begin to crave silence. The kind of silence that makes you wonder if you have suddenly lost the ability to hear. Curtis hugs me goodbye after plans for coffee and further exploration of mediocrity are made for the following afternoon. I sit, still, in the numerous blurry bar conversations, none of which catches my attention. I put my jacket on, double wrap my scarf and walk out into the well-lit street.

Two steps on the sidewalk and it starts to snow. Big, fluffy, coagulated masses of snow. I head toward my car and walk past it when I realize that the only sound I hear is the muffled click and slide of my boots on the sidewalk that is quickly gathering a thick, wet, white carpeting. I left my car parked there on the street and walked home. It was almost the silence that I was craving. It was so silent in fact, that I could almost hear the whispering voice of Harry Nilsson, who slipped into my brain without warning. Without invitation. Without making a sound until the sound was already made.

I let the memory of my favorite exboyfriend, the one who loved me the most and the best, the one who was weirder than I, the one who sent me the first Harry Nilsson record in my collection, the one who stayed up late on the phone with me and sang “The Moonbeam Song”, walk me home from the bar in the snow. I was somehow comforted by the mere existence of him, even if it just a little intangible now. I was somehow comforted by the lack of mediocrity the whole thing stank of. He made me feel “normal”. I smiled and hummed along:

In the wintertime keep your feet warm
But keep your clothes on and don’t forget me
Keep the memories
But keep your powder dry too

Don’t forget me – don’t forget me
Take it easy on me just for a little while
You know I think about you
Let me know you think about me too

Assigned for the Third Time

I just amazon.com’ed In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by the ever psychedelic Iron Butterfly. According to Amazon.com, people who bought this record also bought: The Very Best of Deep Purple, The Very Best of Cream, Steppenwolf Greatest Hits, and (big surprise here, kids) Vanilla Fudge by Vanilla Fudge. And gee… it could be mine on compact disc for only $10.98!!!!!!

In other news, my roommate, Adam D gave me a writing assignment today. I expressed a certain amount of writer’s block/dry spell at the tips of my fingers in the past couple of weeks and he promised he could remedy this for me. The catch being, I would have to drag up some not-so-fun stuff from the brain at the pit of my stomach. Since he is quite a favored writing teacher here at the University of Kansas, and having accomplished everything I could hope to do with writing and more (including an O.Henry award for short fiction) I decided to finally take him up on this challenge. He gave me six prompts and what follows is the only one I could stomach today.  A rough draft, the beginnings of something, who knows. The assignment was “The moment you knew that you and Justin weren’t going to work out” and I can say in all honesty that this was the last time I knew that Justin and I weren’t going to work out, certainly not the first. But sometimes women hang on to hope more than we should.

 

     He stayed just a day too long and in doing so ruined the five previous years of their relationship. He was visiting her in Kansas for the third time that year and for a rare moment her house was quiet, and he was serious. She was doing all the talking.
     “Would we have our own kids first? Or would we adopt and then have our own?” She never wanted kids of her own. The thought of pregnancy and giving birth turned her stomach much like the way bad sushi would, but he wanted to be what he called “a real dad” and so she gave him that much.
     “Our own first. And then, when they are grown maybe we can adopt.” They had talked about their would-be wedding before but never had it gotten past the music at the reception and the possible facial hair of the groomsmen. This conversation had started as lighthearted, but he had stayed too long and the house was too quiet, and they were too alone and so it slipped into the heaviness she always knew was looming and he never knew he feared.
     “Not when they’re grown. That isn’t at all how it works…”
     “Well, what kind of sacrifices are you making?”
     The arrogance in his voice when he muttered the question coupled with the previous ‘maybe’ made her ears feel as hot as burning embers but it was a different kind of anger than she was used to. This kind of anger felt more like a dump truck had been parked on her chest.
     “Childbirth.” She said it with a kind of laugh that was meant as a shield, but came out as a scoff.
     They wouldn’t speak again until the next morning when he loaded his guitar and duffel bag into the trunk of his car and kissed her goodbye as if the conversation hadn’t happened. They would spend the next two months pretending the plans would go forward while on the phone with one another, but each secretly knowing the ground had given way beneath them. Each was waiting for the courage to let the thing die.

 

Hulk Hogan aint got shit on Genesis 32:22-31

Yes, I did just use the word “shit” in conjunction with a bible verse.

 

I have been wrestling with God for some days now. Ok, let’s just be honest and say that I’ve been wrestling with God for some months now. The constant struggle began almost a year ago when the relationship I was banking on lasting forever ended. The thing went down in a smoldering charred mess of metal and flesh. It hurt. It still hurts. So God and I began wrestling. He put his elbow down on the table and I put mine across from him. I knew from the minute He grasped my hand that I was in for it, and there was no way I could pull a Sylvester Stalone “Over the Top” move. We went on like this for a couple of months until he finally jumped across the table turning over chairs and laying me out completely with the death of Melody’s mom, Susie. The death of a woman who took me under her wing as her surrogate daughter. Never replacing my own mom, but taking great care of me while I am away from my mom’s physical proximity. Even still, I wasn’t going to give up that easy on this wrestling match.

Last night God finally made me Jacob and touched my hip so that it would be pulled from the socket as I wrestled with him. But God, don’t you know, that I will not let go before daylight? Don’t you know that I won’t let go until you Bless me?

I wanted to sleep last night forever. I went to bed at 11. I slept like a rock. Like a rock that someone had kicked down a steep and never-ending hill. A rock that rolled over and over and over and over and never stopped moving and never came to a resting place. A rock that hit every other rock and stick and tree stump on it’s way down. I was wrestling with the pillows, wrestling with the blankets, wrestling with my racing mind and the panic of my looming abnormal psychology final, wrestling with my broken heart, and wrestling the night through with God. (It should be said that I was also wrestling the leftover sushi I ate at 10 pm. Some things should never come home boxed up, and some things should never ever be eaten as leftovers, sushi being the most obvious of these things…) Then, I ”woke up” after hours of restlessness at 8 not knowing what to do with my fuzzy head. Most Christians would, at this time, engage in what they refer to as “quiet time” with God. This experience takes form with me in a different way and this morning like every morning, was not the obvious solution. I read my bible, yes, but not daily. I pray a lot, but not necessarily daily. When I wake up in the morning I almost never think of God (I’m sorry but it is true). I think of my aching neck, how badly I have to pee, where are my pants? Can you see through this shirt, cause I really have to pee…, I can’t wait to use my Sonicare toothbrush again today… But not God. Not at least until I’ve had my coffee. But today I woke up and after a little while of contemplating my mood and the feeling in the pit of my stomach I rolled over turned on my computer to the NPR station out of LA that the new guy I am kind of dating is playing on live today. News. Earthquake in China. Oh Lord. More panic. I opened my silly “Everyday Light” book which I have never found to be much help in the past, looking for just a little bit of motivation to pray and feel God. I had no idea that God was pulling on the spandex and entering the ring. The title set for today’s reading “The Unshakeable Kingdom”. WHAT?!?!?! Ok, seriously. Reading on….. and before I had time to think about what I was doing my bible was in my hand and opened to Hebrews.  ”Those things that cannot be shaken will remain. Since we are receiving a Kingdom that is unshakable, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe. For our God is a consuming fire.” (12:27b-29) I’m pretty sure that in the professional wrestling world this move that God pulled out is called a “pile drive”.

Here I felt so shaken that I felt the tremors in my gut. Here I felt so shaken by the numerous losses of life and friendship and love over the past year. Here I felt so shaken by the seeming lack of God’s voice in my ears. Here I felt so shaken by the fear of the countless opportunities to screw up or be screwed up by this upcoming trip to China. Most recently, here I felt so shaken by the mere existence of this new man in my life. Here I felt so selfishly shaken and the urgent need to throw the chance of liking him to the wind because I was so NOT shaken by him three weeks ago. Here I felt so shaken by this stupid boy and what it was doing to my psyche and how it hurt my feelings in the pit of my stomach with every false move he makes. Here I felt so shaken by the fact that I so stupidly entertained the thought of letting him in where I promised no one would ever go again (still holding out on that one…). And here I felt like I was losing my footing on the slippery slope of “the race marked out for us” (*note this comes from a verse I will explain a little later). But there it was, staring back at me in tiny black letters on paper too thin and too white. The things that cannot be shaken will remain. Here I am, feeling shaken, but not shaken at all. The things that cannot be shaken remain. I remain, therefore I must not be shaken. I will not be shaken. And certainly no man, no Justin Greenhouse, no Kevin Slanderman, no Kenn Jankowski and no Abnormal Psychology course will shake me.

But what about that empty-pit-of-the-stomach pain I was feeling? “Our God is a consuming fire.” I am left as a burned out skeleton, and I am glad that it is the all consuming fire that God is, burning out the crap and leaving what He wants in smoldering ashes. I told Melody I thought God should light all this crap on fire in a brown paper bag outside someone’s doorstep. That would be funny. Of course, God would light it on my doorstep and I would be the one stomping out my own flaming poo. That is even funnier. Good one, God.

What happened next, I’m not sure anyone will understand, or appreciate more than Melody and I do. I opened up a window on my computer and looked up Hebrews 12:28 so that I could read multiple translations. What came up was the entire chapter 12 beginning with: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance *the race marked out for us*. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. ” (vs. 1-3)

Yesterday on Mother’s day, Melody, her dad and I visited her mom’s grave. We decided on dinner at her favorite restaurant and later a movie to get our minds off things. As Melody and I drove to the restaurant we talked about how nice it was to visit her grave, leave her flowers and laugh together there. Melody said, “I really believe that whole ’we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses’ thing, and I know that mom saw that and loved that we were laughing there…” Now, it is no secret that my bible verse knowledge is not my strongest point. In fact, it is pathetically lacking and weak. I don’t think I had ever before heard that phrase, “Cloud of witnesses”. Then, this morning, it comes to me, as the beginning to the end that was God blessing me and ending this wrestling match. It was that cloud of witnesses that went to God on my behalf, knowing that I couldn’t pray, that I didn’t know what to pray for, that I was so far gone and out that I couldn’t see what the hell was happening.

“Consider Him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” I had grown weary, there is no question. I was on the verge of losing heart. It’s funny because if that verse was worded any other way, I wouldn’t have been struck with the intensity of what it means to me to “lose heart”. What it means to lose heart, in my deeply emotional world, is to lose faith in love and loving. To lose passion, compassion, and reverence for that which drives me: love and loving. And because God is love, it is to lose God as my driving force, God as my passion, God as the only way I can understand compassion, and reverence for all that He is and all that He has done for me. But now, considering Him once more I am not feeling weary. I won’t lose heart.

The bottom line is this: God called me back into His reality today. Praise Jesus, ’cause my reality sucks. “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” (Gen. 32:30) I went 11 rounds with God in the ring and I am proud to say, I finally lost. I’ll be limping, like Jacob, but shit… it feels so good.

 

Hello world!

If all the world is a stage, then I have spent the better part of my life enjoying my cheap seat up in the balcony. Some would disagree wholeheartedly with that statement, as I have always been the loud one in any given group in any given way. And yes, I have given performances of melodramatic proportions that would give Katharine Hepburn a run for her Oscars. But the times I have felt the most right with myself have been the years I sat quietly (well, as quietly as my big mouth allowed) watching it all unfold and keeping private notes.

 For as long as I have existed I have always been two things:

First, a writer.
Not necessarily a profound writer, nor ever a prodigy of the English language, but I was one who wrote. Diaries, journals, letters, poems, stories. The first time I can remember sitting down to write was in a small pink diary given to me by someone (with prophetic abilities?) at a birthday party where I was turning an age where I still had birthday parties and still appreciated the color pink. I sat down at my desk and wrote an entry about my desire to have a good education. I sat at that desk with my dull pencil for the better part of an hour painstakingly forming the letters I had only recently learned to form and carefully “sounding out” my way through “education” (which came out more like “ejukashun”). I wrote it down and it suddenly felt real. It was the first glimpse of what I would come to understand as ”writing to survive.” A year or two later Jean and Lou, my parent’s long-time friends, bought Brooke and I matching unicorn journals for Christmas. Jean had written in the front cover of mine, ”Ashley, Now you have somewhere to write all those terrible things about your parents…” My mom, upon reading this line aloud to me, stopped to half scoff, half laugh a little. I didn’t understand why that would make her pause, perhaps because I was already privately thinking “But, I already have something to write those terrible things in…” These would not be my last two journals. I have kept one continuously since then and have come quite far from writing “terrible” things about my parents, though I must admit my education continues to claim more than it’s fair share of pages.

The second thing I have always been is unapollogetically me. I have always been transparent, emotional, passionate, and conflicted. At times I am irreverent. More often than not I am outspoken and argumentative. I am opinionated. I am stubborn. I am selfish. I have crafted a sleeve out of the heart that refuses to reside anywhere else. I am human, to an unfortunate degree. I make mistakes more than I make corrections. I am a 24 year old with a blankie, and a running joke about it being the maid of honor at my future wedding (Can you imagine the look on my sister’s face upon learning that she would take a back seat to a dirty old pillowcase in my wedding? Or how about the bouquet toss that can only end in tears and shreds of blue fabric?). The most important aspect of my personality, I think, is that I simply refuse to be someone who hides. I am who I am because I posess each afformentioned personality trait (and then some) and never will I ever deny them because it is my honor to learn from them. I am, in no way, proud of everything I’ve done. I, in no way, believe in having “no regrets”. I am, however, proud of who I am becoming and that I can use those regrets to boost me up a rung on the ladder. This is my journey.

In tandem these two aspects of Ashley Rosalie Tippin result in what can only be described as an introspective word web of life as I know it. Now, I’ve moved from the plush red velvet balcony seat of observation to the unforgiving directors chair (and still, no one to fetch me coffee). I am going public with my affair with the pen and paper. Expect honesty. Expect it to be raw. Expect it to be real. Expect no apologies. I’m going to show you everything I know about being gigantic.