Honesty is an interesting word. It holds its origins in the word “honor” and in archaic uses had more to do with reference to its namesake than what we use it for today. I think people forget that. I think people have lost sense of what it means to “defend one’s honor”. I think people would rather honesty be just a little bit restrained, and I am no exception.

A decade ago I made the mistake of not telling the truth to anyone. I lived lies, I told lies, I wrote lies in my own journal. I behaved the way a liar behaves. I took the train I owned and set it upon false rails. Guess what happened? I ended up in a ditch where I found the true meaning of honesty: honor. I live with some of the remaining consequences and I have diligently cleaned up the aftermath because it is the price I will pay to forevermore defend the honor of myself and my actions and words.

A month or two ago my boss’ brother called me a “bitch” because I was honest with him. I told the truth, I spoke my piece, I said what I said and I meant it. A man who does the same thing is called a “real straight-shooter,” but I do it? Well, I guess I am a bitch then. I guess I will live with the added stress of avoiding his evil eye and ignoring the comments he mutters under his breath at work. It is the price I will pay to defend the honor of what I believe.

A day or two ago I made the decision to defend the honor of my heart. I told the truth, I allowed myself to live the truth, I spoke my piece, I said what I said and I meant it. It looks as though I have destroyed something that is very important to me but after a night of rumination, relentless feeling, and remembering what life felt like when I didn’t speak up about my own fears and emotions I have come to the conclusion that I did the right thing for me. I defended my own honor, I was honest. If that is the straw, then that is the straw. It is the price I will pay for not becoming bitter and distrusting of someone I love and the price I will pay for defending my role in the relationships I hold dear.

I can’t regret honesty. I can only regret that trust and honesty are two mutually exclusive facets of any relationship and that I was inexcusably naive to this concept. Still, I will absolutely hold to honesty and trust as the values that allow me to live, because not living in the cool, calm shade of honesty and trust is a dishonorable life to live.

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.”

I don’t think it comes as much surprise to the people around me that I, not only consider myself to be a square peg, but I am completely comfortable not fitting into many of the world’s holes. It has been pointed out, and I have lived my own life long enough to know that my general inability to function on a plane that is even in the same universe as most people poses some issues for my life. I also recognize and have become quite comfortable knowing that I am the cause of some of these stumbling blocks and speed bumps as a direct result of some of the personality traits I have been blessed with. And yes, I consider myself to be completely and utterly blessed to be adorned with a personality that will never be anything that anyone understands, including me.

And Jesus, does it ever keep things exciting.

So tonight, when the walls felt like they were bowing in under the weight of the heavy rain-filled sky, I called my Home. My father’s gentle wisdom, once again I was seeking. And what wisdom he has. I don’t know if it is that he is a square peg so much as it is that he raised one, but he said it with plainness and sincerity to a degree that surpasses insight to me. And what he said, I know to be true, but by experience.

“Any relationship you have will have rough edges, but I am one to believe that nothing moves forward without rough edges.”

The resonance is deafening. Everything he said, all that he knows about me and life and the world and what I will be like in this life and this world. I am an incomplete project, no denial about that, but I am a project that will remain with rough edges because I want to move forward. I am designed to move forward, and like a square peg on a table top, a little push is always necessary to get me rolling.

Love is never, ever a liar.

It feels really good to be missed. It feels really good to see people I miss. It feels even better to spend time laughing with them and (almost) crying with them and laughing so hard that I cry with them.

It feels really good to miss someone who misses me. It feels even better to find out through a happenstance meeting and a hug that feels all too unforced and then later a song.

It feels really good to find my streets again. It feels even better to feel like these streets wanted me to be here all along and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

It feels really good. Something in my heart feels really good. Really, really, really good.

My Ginger, while helping me move large furniture out of my current living space, was bequeathed a broken propane powered grill. Why he wanted it, I couldn’t understand. It had sat in my backyard for seven years or more without use for so much as a coaster during my many backyard “sun dates”. But we took it anyways, walking it down the busiest street in Lawrence in the middle of the hottest day of the year thus far.

I went to church last Sunday and while I was away he cleaned and fixed the dilapidated piece of rusted out crap until it looked as though we had used it at least twice since it’s death in my old backyard. It only took him an hour to coax the metal junk box from it’s coffin and back into a living, breathing, meat heating machine. The first light, after some jimmying of the starter, must have looked a bit like something of man first discovering fire on his face.

Then he made the greatest kebabs I have ever tasted on said grill with from-scratch potato salad to play side dish. It was terrifyingly good.

I told my mom about it a few days later. She offers unsolicited advice with complete sincerity dripping like marinade onto hot coals in her voice:

“Can you try to not piss this one off?”

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

As a student of psychology it has been steam-rolled and tempered into my head “Correlation does not mean causation.” Because two variables coexist and move up and down a scale in precisely the same directions at the exact same level means…. only that.

On Monday evening my Research Methods in Psychology teacher, Dr. Cheese as I call him (It is a less-than-endearing epithet I came up with while describing his combination “Youth Pastor” and “Overly-excited Grad Student” teaching style and should be noted that he is NOT actually a doctor), tempted the Psychological Research gods and their only commandment. Class begins at 7:10 p.m. in a small room with stadium seating that curves around the projector screen that usually displays a power point presentation with far too many exclamation marks!!!!! as if to say that the reason you find this lecture to be the most mind-numbing experiment in teaching is only because you are too stupid (or cool) to get it!!!!!!! This night’s lecture: FUN with Cause and Effect!!! See Cause. See Cause run. See Effect act like it is a direct result of cause.

Dr. Cheese and his nervous fast motions and speed talking, roll into the room at 7:08 decked out in a North Face fleece over a sweater tucked into his wide leg jeans carrying a paper bag bearing the mark of the devil. I’m not lying. There across the top of the sack was written “Chipotle” which I think in most languages translates to “666″. He sets the bag down on the desk in the center of the room and says nervously, “Sorry kids. I haven’t eaten any thing today and things are about to get CRAZY IN HERE IF I DON”T!!!!” He makes fast waving motions with his hands up by his head. And throws in his catch phrase for good nonsensical measure “…and so on and so forth…”  I roll my eyes and reach for my phone. This is a good time to start texting Aunt Jolene. He pulls out of the sack, with the same delicate lifting motion a mother would impose on lifting her baby out of a bassinet, a giant, infant-sized, foil-wrapped burrito. I’m thinking I have a good ten minutes to digitally humiliate this man to my extended family before he begins the lecture. Wrong.

He flips on the computer, loads up the power point, takes a big bite, swallows partially and begins talking. The room fills with the putrid smell of guacamole and corn salsa and not a pen nor a pencil move on paper. I think we are all shocked that he is teaching, much less talking with his mouthful. Isn’t that as ingrained as “Correlation does not mean causation”?????? Time for my very own repetitive punctuation. But he continues and we all reluctantly begin listening through the mush of beans and chicken mole squishing around in his mouth with the words. A text back from Jolene “Sick!!!!” and I find her use of the multiple exclamation mark incredibly appropriate.

Ten minutes later the burrito consumption has ended with a sigh of relief, his being the only one of which that is audible but the sentiment is resounding. He picks up his now liquid-less soda cup, pops the top off and shakes a cube or two of ice into his open mouth. “So… (crunch crunch crunch) cause and effect (crunch crunch) is the kind of relationship where (crunch crunch crunch) we can see a correlation (crunch) but that,” More ice dumping, “doesn’t mean (crunch crunch crunch) that the cause is (crunch crunch crunch) necessarily the only reason for the effect.” And so on and so forth. My head starts to hurt when I realize I’ve been clenching my jaw in utter irritation for close to 20 minutes.

A couple hours of lecture pass with uneventful ease. And then it happens. The unholiest of unholy burrito eating behavior right there in front of a 30 person class. In the absolute middle of a long, contemplative pause, the walls close in and the air becomes too thin. I am in the front row.

“Pvvvvvrrrrrt”

A pencil rolling down the desk? No, no pencil in sight. A chair moving on the lenolium floor? No, they are carpeted. Was that….? Could it be….? DID ANYONE ELSE HEAR THAT?!?!?!?!

I duck my head and stare intently at the misshapen “g” that I have included in one of the words of hasty note-taking. I will reform it. I will reform every letter of every word of the notes from that last slide, in fact, as I bite my tongue and shamelessly attempt to quell the rising laughter that is literally boiling in my gut. I don’t dare look up for fear of meeting eyes with him, or them (they who are as immature as I, also attempting to extinguish the possible outburst of humiliatingly loud laughter). I suddenly realize that I have to physically calm myself down, so as to not contort my face in a way that would lead the others to blame ME for the public fart. I put on some chapstick. Too much chapstick, really but if I let it go from my lips I’ll laugh. I can’t help but wonder if the cause is the bean burrito, and the effect is public gas explusion. Duh, everyone knows that. This is one instance where correlation is in fact, causation. I look at my phone. No! Don’t text Jolene, she will break your levee. The time on the digital face reads “9:47″ and I quickly do the simple math… I have 13 minutes to keep this inside. 13 long and suffer-heavy minutes. I pinch the soft spot of webbing between my thumb and my pointer finger and think about it again…

13 impossible minutes…. And then I realize… that must have been what he was thinking right before he let it go.

 In case anyone (mom) was wondering, Kippy forgave me for being gone for three weeks. After ignoring me for one day, scratching me on the third day, and barfing twice in between (unrelated angst), she finally came around and we laid on the couch for two hours purring, and watching On Demand episodes of Intervention.

At least one of us has gotten over our extended existential crisis pattern.

In other home-front news, I’ve been doing my damndest to “nest” as of late. I realized over Christmas break that it is a little unnecessary for a girl of *ahem* almost twenty-five to be living much like a frat boy would live: laundry on the floor or piled up in the back of the closet, wet towels hanging off the doorknob, dirty dishes in the sink, curtains that don’t match (and not in a cute eclectic kistch kind of way…)  Melody and I talk about it constantly, the innate desire for women to “nest”. When all the world is a little bit of a mess the only thing we can do is shop or nest. And since I recently called myself a Lawrence local in a conversation with some other “locals” I decided it was time for me to do a little home-building of my own. Things are insanely messy right now, but it is coming together nicely, I think. I hung two pictures, framed another, and finally hung up all my laundry.

My curtains still don’t match, but at least the shower is clean and the cats love me again.

Many know of my proclivity towards facial hair. I am the self-proclaimed biggest appreciator of the moustache this side of the 1970’s. It is this afficionadoship and card-carrying membership (and founder) of Lawrence’s anual “March Moustache Madness” celebration, that has coined me the nickname “Moustashley”.

Allow me to indulge myself in the greats that have won me over to the Moustache side:

Stevie Wonder

Brewer and Shipley

Crosby Stills and Nash

Mid-career George Harrison

CCR

Norman Greenbaum

Cat Stevens (aka Yusef Islam)

John Lennon

Eric Clapton

Flying Burrito Brothers

Abe Lincoln (not a musician)

Jesus Christ (also not a musician)

I have been advocating the beard from the months of Septembeard through Decembeard and into Janu-hairy for years now. It wasn’t until 2008 that my prayers were answered in the form of the new rock n’ roll beard.  Behold friends, beards, moustaches and appreciators the Year of the BEARD in music:

Band of Horses:

Fleet Foxes:

Wilco:

My Morning Jacket:

Iron and Wine:

Ray Lamontagne:

And some videos for you to experience from such artists as the 2008 New Hair bands:

Band of Horses:

Fleet Foxes:

Wilco:

My Morning Jacket:

Iron and Wine: (not really a video but a live recording that is worth listening to)

Ray Lamontagne: (please please please I beg of you, watch this video)

And just for good measure….. (This one goes out to you Jesus Christ, with that glorious beard beyond comparison…)

I got a message in the inbox of my liberal university electronic mail system this morning:

Sender: The University of Kansas
Subject: One New Notification
Body:

Student ****364, Ashley R Tippin, you are eligible for a Grad Check. Please email your adviser for more information concerning what you need to do to prepare for graduation.

Now, kids, let’s not get too excited. We’re still a little ways out from the actual EVENT, but for crying out loud it feels so damn good to feel like these means are actually in the works for an end. AN END (hear that DAD? AN E-N-D END!!!!!!!!)