Someone's Dreams

On Mondays, I race home after work with a specific agenda in mind: to change change out of my stuffy workwear into recess clothes, eat a semi-decent meal and perhaps have a smidgen of conversation with one of my roommates before I race off to my six o’clock class. I don’t have the dough to fork over for a campus parking pass, so each week I park in the visitor lot where I’m charged two dollars if I arrive before 5:45. If I arrive at 5:46, I am charged only one dollar. My professor has a bad habit of starting class at 5:55, so it is crucial that I enter the parking lot, find a space, and get to class within the slim window of 5:46-5:53.
One particualr Monday, I was thinking to myself that I was developing quite the knack for timing all these things, and smushing what could take some people an hour and a half into just a half an hour. I felt pretty good while dressing up my day old baked potato with all the fixin’s (because really, what reason is there to eat a baked potato if not for the fixin's?). Then I looked at the clock. I had a mere three minutes to eat my dinner.
I looked at my baked potato, all hot and steamy and melty with butter and sour cream. I looked at my diet coke, refreshingly fizzy after just popping the can open. I sighed and looked at the clock again. I would have to multi-task. So I did what any single person would do, I decided just to take my potato and my diet coke in the car with me. This meal was not exactly what one would consider a to-go food, but it was delicious and surprisingly easy to manage on the freeway.

I love being alone in my car with the radio at high volume. I am that girl who you make fun of at stoplights as she sings and dances, forgetting that a large portion of the material the makes up her car is glass and that she is really not alone at all. As I neared campus a particularly enjoyable song came on the radio frequency 100.7 FM (the music that makes you feel good). This surprises most people, but I have a deep fondness for pop music and bad hip hop. It’s a passion I can typically only indulge in alone in my automobile. Singing along to a certain Nelly song, through diet coke belches (I don’t know why, but soda from a can makes me burp something fierce) and mouthfuls of mashed potatoes I joyfully crooned the words “It’s getting hot in here, so take of all your clothes.” A surprisingly pungent burp punctuated the end of the song and the most hilarious thought popped into my head.

“I am girl of someone’s dreams.”

I laughed out loud. I couldn’t stop laughing at this absurdity and was still grinning to myself at 5:52 when I walked into my comparative politics class.

I like any honest single woman will admit that I spend a decent portion of my time thinking about the man I’m going to marry. I have a list, it’s true. There are obvious characteristics on that list, and there are secret characteristics on that list that I've never told anyone, never even written down, lest the significance of those qualities be marred by their publication. But I’ve also fully surrendered my life to Christ and I know that God has a PERFECT man, exclusively for me.
Logically, if there is a perfect man out there for me, than I am the perfect woman for some man out there. For some reason, until that day, that thought had never occured to me. And well, it made me feel alot better about myself. I don’t genuinely believe that there is a wonderful godly man daydreaming about a girl who knows all the words to Gangsta’s Paradise and joyfully sings them through a mouthful of day old potatoes. I don’t think that specific characteristic is on any particular gentleman’s list. But perhaps it is, maybe it's only number six or numbers seven on the list ... whoever God has designed to be my other half is going to be a pretty kooky fellow indeed.

Vee Day

My crazy old roommate Lindsay Hand sent me what could quite possibly the best Valentine's Day card ever.

But there's a long story. Years ago, in high school I used to hang out with her, and her brother, and we had this joke ... I'd sit on the couch with her brother Josh on one side and Lindsay on the other and call it a "Hand Sandwich." Adolescent humor is truly the best kind of all.

One time, and I don't remember when, I was very sick and our other friend Terri came to visit me because of the said mind-fogging sickness and she brought with her a homemade card from the Hand children. Lindsay was always artistic and actually now makes her living off of her paintings, so the card she created was pretty neat-o. On the back she had drawn a square and inside of the square written the word "cheese," with this caption: "I looked in the fridge to find a piece of cheese, but there was no cheese. 'No cheese!' I cried."

They were trying to send me a Hand Sandwich!

Recently, while moving my stuff out of storage, I made the fatal moving error of "sorting through so old letters, so you know, I can throw them away." Nope, that never happens. But I did find my Hand Sandwhich card, so there sitting on the cold cement floor of my friend's basement, crying over my letters , I called my crazy old roommate Lindsay. She never actually answers her phone, so I left her a terribly long message recapping that entire moment in time. I never heard back from her, which was really no surprise.

Until today. On of my co-workers delivered my mail, which today included along with medical records and Social Sercurity releases a grease-stained envelope with a queen of hearts and one of those red doily hearts you use in elementary school to make valentine's for your mom glued to the envelope. I thought perhaps my dog had been kidnapped and this was the ransom letter. Nope. It was a card from Lindsay saying how much she appreciated my message that day and how much she loves me.

Wanna know where the grease stain came from? An individually wrapped cheese slice. When I opened the envelope I said, "Oh my God. It's cheese."