Because Church Is Not a Dating Service

Sometimes I still have trouble deciding who I am when relating to other people.

I think it’s the fatal flaw of a terribly individualistic person. I feel most comfortable when everyone is at arms length. I can define myself without having to worry too much about how other people view me. Its when I get close to others that the inner dialogue starts. Well… what am I? Am I really the professional working girl with a great, salary paying job? Or am I the fun-lover who goes out on the town Saturday night and stays out til close? Am I a homebody, cooking experimental chicken dishes using ginger and red pepper? Am I a nurturer, taking care of people *ahem* and potty training my 10 week old puppy? Am I a church goer, all devout and straight laced? Am I a wild child, buying Caguama and watching Jersey Shore until it borders on the grotesque?

To me, I am all those things. But I know other people don't see that. They see a couple things and then make their assumptions. The wild child drinking Caguama couldn't possibly be the devout church goer. The fun-lover couldn't possibly be the professional working girl. Am I wrong for being inconsistent? Or am I not inconsistent, and I'm just a strong, well rounded, free thinking individual who can't be contained by a single labeled box for my life?

"Hi!"

I couldn't believe he had remembered my name. It had been months, literally months, since I had last walked into the church. I was embarassed, really, that it had been that long. But what was I going to do, let it keep me from coming back? I climbed the steps to the second floor Bible classroom with the rest of the twenty-somethings. Andy included.

"You look like you just came from work. Do you work late?" I asked him this because he was wearing a suit and tie. Several other guys were wearing suits and ties as well, and it make them all look like some sort of religious fraternity together. Oddly, I found it attractive. I'm sure that's the reaction they were probably going for, too.

"No, its more like I just never went home. I went and ate, and then to Starbucks to read. Then I came here."

"That sounds nice." Bells were going off in my head. It seemed cliché for him to say that he had come from Starbucks. That's where we had met, originally. He had gone out of his way to introduce himself to me, and tell me that he recognized me from the Twenty-somethings group at church. I had made a mental note of it, and when he introduced himself a second time a couple weeks later after church assembly, I made a second mental note. I always felt like he was trying to say more to me, but couldn't quite find the circumstances under which to stray beyond small talk.

"I always have to go home and change clothes. I guess its because I'm a girl. We wear heels at work and stuff." Despite my attempt at coolness, I was kicking myself for leaving the house wearing a red t-shirt and jeans. I was also wearing cork platform flip flops, and that made me feel even more like a sloppy loser. But I reminded myself quickly that I wore that because I didn't care. I don't care. I told myself. I don’t care because I’m stronger than these frou frou girls, and church is NOT a dating service. I still wished I had looked a tad lovelier.

We entered the classroom and stood there for a moment. People filtered in around us.

"Would you like to join us?" he asked. I kept looking at the back row, full of people I should probably say Hi to. "By us I mean me."
What a cute admission, I thought, and smiled. "Sure."

It was really the same situation we had always been in. His friend on the other side of him introduced himself to me. Then immediately Napoleon Dynamite, whom I hadn't seen in months either, popped up and started asking question after question and rambling about how he was doing. Andy sat there next to me, and I could feel the tension. He was quite obviously trying to talk to me while Napoleon went on and on. Furthermore a girl in the row in front of us was trying to talk to Andy. She made some joke when he asked her for gum (which he said he desperately needed, again I took note) that he would always be indebted to her now, and would have to sit by her for life. Her eyes flicked over to me for just a second and I couldn't help it, mine darkened. I enjoy competition, even when theres really no prize.

Or was there.

We still didn't say much to each other. The class started just as we were able to talk. Halfway through it, I caught him looking at his watch. And then again. And again. Five minutes before the hour, which was not when class would end judging by the looks of it, he pulled a business card out of his back pocket and held it in his lap. Right at 8 he nudged me.

"I have to go." He was whispering loudly. "I wanted to give you my card, though. See ya!"

And then he stood up and pushed in his chair.

I blushed redder than my shirt. It surprised me that he would give me his card. How odd, I thought. But then again, he had gotten it out 5 minutes before he stood up. He had been thinking about giving it to me, probably the whole time, things being time sensitive. I was surprised. I sat there smirking to myself and telling myself that I was just too awesome not to notice.

But it also confused me a bit. Why was he so forward about things? Why was he sure he even wanted to talk to me? Was it because of the way I looked? It must be, I told myself, because he literally hadn't said very much to me at all. He MIGHT have heard me talk in class. I used to talk my head off in class. Making off the wall, out-of-the-box comments that usually made total sense. Usually.

"You know, modern women wouldn't be unhappy with their Biblical roles if men would perform theirs. You know? Don't reprimand me for asking for respect because I do your job and mine, espeically when you're the one making me do it. You be a man so I can be a woman."

Yeah I'm sure that made me reeeaaaal popular with the guys of the group.

Still, regardless of whether he had heard me talk in class, he really didn't know me at all. And that scared me. It scared me because I'm different from every other girl in that church group. I've lived a different life than them. I absolutely hated Lavery. And there they are still living it. I've lived a different lifestyle in the past. I've experienced different things. I just feel… different. And in a way I would feel really terrible if someone called me out on it and said that different really meant WRONG. Even though I know that's not right. Even though I know it makes me so much more. I just don't want to have to deal with someone who thinks it makes me second rate.

So am I really experiencing cognitive dissonance regarding my behavioral inconsistencies? Are they really inconsistencies at all? Do I need to change them? Align them? Would that keep me from thinking I'm second rate? Am I supposed to call or email Andy?

What do you think?

Connecting the Dots That Slap You in the Face

He was standing on the back of a truck outside the Lowes Vanderbilt Hotel.

It was a big moving truck, unlabeled, and there were two other guys pushing heavy black rectangular boxes with brass buckles onto the truck.

"Evan Solomon!" my memory shouted at me. Memories always seem to shout at me and slap me in the face. I had dated Evan Solomon seven years before, in college. Presently, he, like the other two guys, was wearing a loose button down shirt and jeans with work boots. He had his hair pulled back into a pony tail, and his glasses, the same small round ones I remembered from when I was nineteen, were perched too high up on the bridge of his nose. He looked dirty. When I saw him I kept walking. Evan Solomon? As I passed the truck, questioning whether or not it had been him, I saw a little plackard next to the door of the truck that said, in scrawled handwriting, as this was obviously a truck that had been rented, "Separation Music Group."

And that’s when I laughed. I knew I shouldn't, but the corners of my mouth shot up as high as my eyebrows did, because it started to hit me that that had to be him. It had to be him because Evan Solomon had been a Recording Industry major when he was in college with me. It was a running joke that RIM majors never really made anything of themselves, and that they all ended up drowning in overexposure with the rest of the would-be bands and singers and mixers and djs and audio production engineers. If you saw someone older out at a bar somewhere wearing inappropriately youthful looking clothes, you might stifle a laugh because you just knew that they were another casualty of the campus RIM program. Only a quarter of students coming for that program ever made it into upper level classes, and those that didn't, or who made it all the way out and then flatlined, seemed doomed to wallow in what-could-have-beens and drink away their sorrows, still insisting they were the next big thing.

I remembered Evan playing his guitar, with his oddly spaced teeth, in his oddly furnished dorm room. I remembered us meeting in the hallway of a boys dorm under blue-white flourescent lights. I remember being set off by the creamy complexion of his skin, and the way he looked at me and grinned with that gap between his teeth. I remember him growing his hair out later, long after we had stopped seeing each other, and him showing me one day the pills that supposedly kept him from "freaking out." I had laughed then, on the inside, thinking he was going no where. In his mother's house. His best friend smoking pot in the basement. Petting a dog with three legs. Everything seemed broken.

Passing him on the street, seven years later, seeing him load a truck with audio equipment he once thought he'd be paid to operate made me chuckle a little bit. His hair, looking similarly long and greasy, the gap in his teeth now making him look creepy, the color of his skin taking a grayish tint. Was it the weather, a coincidence, or was it really the smoking catching up to him? He didn't see me. He didn't even blink. I probably bled into all the other suit and skirt clad office workers strolling up and down the sidewalk on our ways to lunch.

It seems so surreal to connect the dots of past and present and finally see it all. Long ago, neither of us could have ever predicted our futures. We tried to, but the cards always seem to fall where they may. Who knows what any of it means.

All I know is that I wish I could have seen myself then as I do now. Not that I wouldn't have talked to Evan at all, but that I would have been more conscious of who I really was, and what I really deserved, and what that meant. They always tell us in school that we can be whatever we want to be, and do anything we want to do. But could the crack in this magical statement be the part where we percieve who we are? And what we percieve we can do?

I passed him again on my way back from picking up my lunch. He and the two other drivers were trying to put the truck in gear. Yeah. It really was him. I kept walking toward my shiny building and took the elevator up ten floors to my desk.

The Longest Game of Word Feud

"How are you? … Happy Friday!"

I got messages like these every week from a person I don't know who lived in Arizona. He worked at the University of Phoenix. Not the online school. Though they may be related.

"I'm cool. I'm hungry, though. I may have to eat lunch before 12 today!" I punched the buttons quickly and returned to my boring work computer screen.

I had been working for a Financing company for over six months on a permanent basis. Sometimes it was really interesting, figuring out how the numbers fit together, making sure the customers got the funds. Its never dull when someone wants something from you that their business depends upon. Then again, there were also whole days sometimes where I was scraping up the filing and scanning and copying and dragging it to the copy room along with my cell phone. If I was going to be that bored, I may as well be connected to the world.

Jaime777 played HE for 13 points

And the world of Word Feud was the best place to waste time.

"How long have we been playing this game? I mean, all games considered," I threw a couple files on top of the filing cabinet, and waited for his response.

Just over a year I think. You were working at a bank when we started."

"Holy cow! I think we deserve an award or something!"

Jaime777, whose name I didn't really know, was 29 year old with two kids, a suicidal ex-wife, and was himself a former marine. He was half Mexican, spoke fluent Spanish, and appeared to have a lovely complexion.

JLEdna played PERSONAE for 97 points

He sucked at Word Feud.

I suck at Word Feud."

I laughed, while copying my fifth set of documents.

"They should give you an award for longest losing streak."I knew I shouldn't be counting, but there was nothing to count. Jaime777 had not won a single game against me. I literally aways won.

In fact, being literal had always been something I was good at. I had pet peves when it came to grammar, both spoken and written. Reading poorly spelled posts on social media cracked me up to no end. I had been known to laugh until I cried at the ebonics I found on the profiles of wayward friends of friends. Spelling, grammar, and phonetics were an ingrained rulebook for me and I couldn't understand why no one else seemed to have it. It made me a good student. It made me a terrible teacher. And sometimes I think it made me a bitch.

I don't really keep any other games going anymore." I was almost finished scanning. Then would come the hole punching.

I always have more than one game going, but I guess I've been playing with you the longest." I pictured him at a big desk, meeting with prospective students and their parents. I pictured him hiding the phone under his desk, it buzzing with every obscure word I played. The copier hummed beside me and then jammed, disrupting my day dream.

I can't stand it when people spell things wrong. I can't stand it when they do it consistently. When they do something that blatantly wrong over and over, it makes those of us who realize the wrong-ness cock our heads and wonder… is this person all there? They must not know they're wrong… how sad. And then you politely don't say anything about it. But somewhere in the back of your head you're thinking "They aren't very smart, if they think that." That, of course, is how lots of opinions are formed.

The last person I dated had a horrible habit of cutting off the adverbial form of "serious" when describing things. As in, "I didn't take that inverview very serious." Which he didn't, of course, since he didn't have a job the entire time we were together. He continually replaced the word "moocher," as in someone who begs or scrounges, with the word "smoocher," which I KEPT TELLING HIM meant a person who kisses or cuddles amorously. In fact, on Valentines Day, I woke up to a lovely handwritten note underwhich were some print ads where I saw he had been practicing various word spellings, trying to figure out which was right before he wrote them in the card.

This unnerved me. I just couldn't date someone, much less marry someone, who couldn't spell the word "THEIR" without practicing on a scrap of newsprint. And what the hell was I doing with someone that STUPID anyway? Someone who didn't have a job. Someone who was 26, my same age! Someone who asked me for gas money. Someone who thought corporate America was "a bunch of BS," or "really bad," because they didn't know any other adjectives to express how they felt.

I balked. In the last year or so, while playing Word Feud with Jaime777, I had won EVERY SINGLE GAME. I had never lost. I had won by margins of hundreds of points. And you know something weird? My dating life had the exact same win-loss record. I was just SO MUCH BETTER than that, and yet I was willfully letting myself be put into ridiculous situations with someone who would never even be considered at my place of work. I mean, honestly, didn't I have two pets? A chihuahua and a boyfriend? I had always been better, even when I thought I wasn't good enough. Even back when we had started going out, and he had his parents money, and went out to clubs literally every single weekend. I was holed up in my apartment, saving my money, going to work every Monday through Friday, paying my bills and my rent, cooking my own food, WINNING the longest game of Word Feud.

Jaime777 played MICE for 9 points.

I guess it's just fun to play against someone you know can't win. Its fun to win easily sometimes. Maybe it’s the predictability of it all. Like I know what will happen if I play this game, so I'll play it because there'll be no surprises.

But I was changing. I was getting older. I couldn't play the same games anymore. I needed a challenge. I needed stimulation.

JLEdna played FASTING for 76 points.

I needed someone on my level.