Oh, Boy(s).

It’s interesting being a single gal these days. Seriously. I’m in a very peculiar place.

It would be very easy for a girl like me to get discouraged about my relationship status. After all, I’m 28. Not getting any younger. The biological clock is ticking and all that. And there are times when it is a struggle not to feel lonely, overlooked, or impatient. Like at weddings. Or on Valentine’s Day. When someone has a baby. Or when you find yourself surrounded by couples. After a Chick Flick binge.

But the truth is, I’m in no hurry. You know how at the beginning of the movie “Hitch,” the dating guru tells us that no woman wakes up in the morning hoping to NOT get swept off her feet? That’s true. But some of us have a lot of other things going on in our lives. Some of us don’t want to try eHarmony or be fixed up on blind dates. We want to find Love, sure. But in the meantime, until it finds us, we’re going to keep getting on with our lives.

One fun distraction I’ve given in to from time to time is TV crushes. My first love was MacGyver—seriously. Ever since then, I’ve had a slew of TV characters whom I’ve made regular dates with. More recently, I was digging Peter Petrelli of Heroes. But oohh, I just liked him so much better with the emo-bangs. Then I also fell surprisingly hard for Chuck. That’s the nerd-love side of me, I guess. Right now, I’m logging a lot of hours watching reruns of Psych. That Shawn Spencer is hilarious.

The thing is, real guys are sooooo much more complicated. Although I am blessed to have some good guys in my life again. It’s nice, because all of my guy friends from college either got married and/or live ridiculously far away. So, now I’ve developed a new circle of friends out here, which includes guys. Several of them are married or otherwise taken, but a few are single. And there’s just a different dynamic in a friendship when both parties are single. Usually. Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to be a little more guarded around “taken” guys, though it helps if I’m close to both halves of the couple. Anyway you split it, friendships with guys are complicated—but I wouldn’t give them up.

What’s nice about it is, it satisfies what I believe is a fundamental human need for interaction with the opposite sex. I was talking about this with one friend, whom I’ll call Clive. (I’m changing the names of the guys so that if by some chance they read this, they won’t feel so exposed. Or something.) Anyway, I was telling Clive that as important as I think it is for guys to have guy time, and girls to have girl time, it’s also really important to have that guy-girl time, too. It doesn’t have to be romantic. It’s just good to get that other perspective. Both man and woman were made in God’s image—both of them representing something different about the nature of God (as John Eldredge discusses in Wild at Heart and Captivating). I’ve learned to appreciate this other element, this masculine component, in ways I never used to. Of Course, I still get baffled and sometimes frustrated with the way guys think and act.

Like my one friend, Theophilus. Theo is this great guy—intelligent, funny in a snarky way, a real servant. Easy going, low key, multifaceted. But he’s got this way of keeping things to himself, not offering anything deep. And then he masks things with sarcasm, and a self-effacing humor. It’s perplexing. What’s he really thinking? I haven’t a clue—and I can tell he wants it that way. Unlike Clive, who has been remarkably open and honest about his struggles and his “walk.”

Not that I have a problem with quiet guys. My first (real, live) crush was on a very shy guy. And right now, I’m also friends with Duncan. It took me a long time to really start to get to know him because he’s just a very unobtrusive person. He’s polite and an all-around Nice Guy. And then, out of nowhere, he’ll say something that makes you laugh. It took me by surprise at first.

I love a good laugh, and I have such a broad sense of humor that it doesn’t take a whole lot to get me going. But my one friend Jason just has this knack for saying the funniest things. I wish things like that rubbed off on people. He is seriously one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and he makes it look just effortless. I wish I could think that fast and that witty, but I’m left just laughing hysterically in his wake.

And it’s a blessing to have developed such an interesting circle of friends. Like I said, it can sometimes be daunting to a Single Woman to look at her life. The New Year makes us reflect on the past and look ahead to the future, and I find myself still in that process. This past week has really made me reflect on my guy friends, as I’ve spent time with them each in different ways and settings.

While I might sometimes wish for romance to be closer around the corner than it is, I appreciate the fact that I once again have guy friends that I can be myself around, talk to, grab a drink with, and laugh with. (It’s nice when I feel appreciated, too!) So here’s to all the pub nights, jam sessions, Bible study, TV shows, games, inside jokes, wii sports, guitar hero challenges, worship times, and impromptu, spontaneous hanging out in this coming year. Yay for guys! The world would be a much less interesting place without them.

Blah!

Okay, honestly, I've had a lot more going on in my head these past few weeks than you would guess. I kept meaning to get it out, post it here, but I just haven't. I don't even have a really good excuse!!

Even now, though, I don't really have time to spill stuff that's been rattling around in my brain. Just know that I've been wrestling with things like:

• Vulnerability
• Love
• Honesty
• Patience
• Friendship
• Personality Types and Temperaments (try my quiz!)
  
• and the Themes embedded in the Harry Potter stories. (Did you see the latest movie? Wow! There was some powerful stuff going on there. That's all I'm saying for now.)
  

But see, my second favorite thing (well, possibly tied for first, even) to do with these issues, besides writing about them, is talking about them with other people. I love to hear what other people think about this kind of stuff.

So, if you have any thoughts, post 'em! No joke! I wanna know--we all wanna know--what you've been thinking about.

Trials and a New Toy

So, I got a new phone last week. It’s pretty cool. It’s one of those ones you’ve seen on Verizon commercials, where they play music for someone. Yes. It plays music. It is very cool. I do not have any kind of MP3 player yet, so I’m enjoying the three songs I’ve downloaded. I’ve spent the better part of my free time this week just exploring the coolness of my new phone.

I love when I get something new, and the newness is part of its appeal, and I spend many hours admiring my new thing—whatever it may be: a haircut, a pair of shoes, a CD…. I am also not one of those people who see in evil in new technology. Take the internet, for example. The internet has become something of a tragedy, at least morally, because of i-porn. Yet the ease of communicating with people all over the world, and the amount of knowledge contained on virtually any and every subject, makes it a worthwhile tool.

Technology is like anything else man-made: it has the potential to be used for good, and an equal (perhaps some would argue greater) potential to be used for evil. Telephones—and cell phones—allow us to talk to people all over the world. But they also interrupt our lives with sales calls, and keep us occupied when we ought to be focusing on the world in front of us instead of the person on the other end of the line (*ahem! Drivers! ahem!*). Still, I know that I would have been pretty lost these last few years if I hadn’t been able to communicate—by cell phone—with my best friends from college. Who all live several states away.

Even though I have been pretty occupied with my new “toy,” and enjoying it very much (my default ringtone is the chorus of David Crowder’s “Turkish Delight”!!!) I still have had other things on my mind this week.

One is, I recently had the most challenging day of Lent so far. I was at my Pregnancy Care Centers job, working, I might add, on a major database transfer, because we are switching programs, when we decided to take a tiny break and go take a peek at the yard sale that was going on just around the corner and up a flight of stairs from our office (which you may remember is located in the same church building where my dad works). I was looking around at all the stuff—typical yard sale stuff: stuffed animals, old happy meal toys, mismatched glasses and plates, etc. Then I saw the table of—you guessed it—books. I was immediately drawn to it, thinking surely it couldn’t hurt to look and see what they had. I hadn’t brought any money up with me, so I didn’t get anything—then.

But there was a book called “Colourful England” with pictures of old buildings (my boss showed it to me) that I wanted to come back for. She offered to spot me the money to get it, anmd I should have let her, because when I came back to get it, I ended up with an armful of books. Fourteen, to be exact. (But I got them all for $3.00!!) And as I’d stood there, pawing through the bins, glancing at the titles and occiasonlly the back blurbs, I suddenly got a sense of what it was I’d committed to for the Lenten season.

I bought a boxful of books that I cannot read, not for another twenty-eight days. I thought for the first couple of weeks that this would be no big deal, because even if I was giving up books, there were still movies to be watched. And there were always things to read in magazines, and in articles online; I hadn’t given those up. But being at that yard sale was a challenge: it was like making dinner for everyone, and tasting a tiny bit to make sure it was okay, but not eating any yourself.

I was challenged again, later that night, at the Chinese Church. It was, of course, St. Patrick’s Day, and I brought a little book to help them understand who he really was and why we have a day to celebrate him. I consulted with God on the way there if it would be okay to read it to them. But once there, I asked if anyone else would be willing to read it to the class. Several of my students took turns. (This was very hard for me because I love reading books like that to kids, and you know how children read.) When I had to help Stephen pronounce an Irish word (“shillelagh”) a couple of my kids reminded me that I was not supposed to be reading books.

Just before Lent started, I had been reading “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” to the PCC kids. They were a little dismayed when I told them of my vow to give up reading books for the next forty-seven days. So that later, on the same night I’ve been describing, I asked if anyone else would like to read a chapter to the class. No one did. I asked them if they still wanted to hear some of it. They did. I asked them if they thought it would be okay for me to read a few pages to them. They did. So I read a chapter. I’m not sure if I ought to feel terrible about this; after all, it was only a chapter, and it wasn’t for me, it was for the kids.

But reading is so…part of me. I had to remind myself this morning of why it was that I gave it up in the first place. I’m not going to exaggerate and tell you that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done; it’s not. Even though I am surrounded by books that I would normally have no qualms about snatching up and reading for several hours, it’s been nearly no trouble at all finding other ways to fill up my time. I have a sneaking suspicion that quitting the TV would be much harder, and that worries me just a little.

Well, this post is long enough for now, even despite the fact that it’s been a while since I’ve written. If you happen to see someone reading, perhaps you could offer up a quick prayer for me, that I’m learning what I’m supposed to be learning through this time. Thanks!