One month today

Here I am posting again for the first time since Friday and I have to say that my mood, feelings, emotions, and a lot of my thoughts have changed. If you guys have read Ann's blog then you'd see that we had a great time on the Sabbath during the fast and afterwards by eating at Applebee's and watching "Fever Pitch" in the movie theater. The fascinating part about it is that as a diehard Yankee fan I forsook my anti-Red Sox feelings because Ann was in the mood to watch a romantic comedy and you can't say no to that :) (I love you Ann :)) It was a good movie, it made me laugh quite a bit except at the end when they showed highlights of the "Greatest Choke Job in the History of Sports" courtesy of the Yankees last year in the 2004 ALCS. Oh well, I just put my head on Ann's shoulder and she consoled me during those scenes. I told her how I had planned to raise my own kids teaching them about the "Curse of the Bambino" and how the Yankees always, ALWAYS had the Red Sox's number and they were going to continue breaking Boston fans' hearts year after year. Thanks to the Yankees last year that is no longer the case but there are more important things to talk about.

It is one month today. It is one month since the Milwaukee shootings occurred today and I haven't been able to think about anything else. One month since most of our lives were changed because Satan decided to declare outfront war on the Church of God. It hasn't been the easiest time since that black Sabbath with so many emotions, so many different thoughts, and so many feelings swirling inside of me as I have tried to cope with it. You all probably know the story if you've read Annette's blog or if I've talked to you about it because certain things in our lives changed in order for a great friend and person like Jon to be protected. I know it because all the plans, ideas, and thoughts that I had at the end of January 2005 were changed, put away, destroyed (insert any word you'd like) leading to a very emotional rollercoaster for the ensuing months (not all bad, not all good either). I was planning on giving a very big commitment to the girl I was dating (our one-year anniversary was about to happen on my birthday February 8th) with a nice asortment of gifts. Jewelry was included, along with the dozen roses, the card, the whole deal because it was important to me and she was important to me. Well those plans went out the window for reasons I don't want to put up in here and because I could type it for hours and it just brings pain to my heart. For some reason something I worked on for a year didn't work out and I couldn't understand then why it happened but after March 12th I found a rational explanation. Since the plans didn't pan I actually started committing a bit more to school (I started off with A's in all my classes), but more importantly I started talking to more of my friends that I hadn't kept up with all that well during the previous year because I was dating. I talked longer and more often with Jon, Jeremy, and I started talking to my good friend Annette who I hadn't talked to for about a year. You could say she was counseling me throughout the post-breakup period and it was great to "regain" a friend again. For the ensuing weeks I talked a whole lot more to all my friends and Annette came up with the brilliant idea of doing a spring break road trip up to Canada. I had never been up north and I had nothing going on for spring break other than starving all week so I talked to Ann and Jon and they were up for it as long as long as Ann could take a couple of days off from school (our spring break wasn't the same week) and Jon needed to be able to get off from work those days. Basically everything happened at the last minute because Ann took charge of the whole trip with planning and Jon's boss rearranged the entire schedule so that he could be able to take those days off. Even Adam was able to come last minute and be there in Canada with us. Then...the world changed and what I thought was incomprehensible now made sense. The only reason I can think of as to why something didn't work out for me was the fact that it meant that God was using all of our lives for something greater than we can think of. Then the time in Milwaukee served as a time of healing because of all the people there that I hadn't seen in a long time and it just served as proof that the Church is a close-knit family that will support each other during these times. I think 1 Corinthians 12:26 put it perfectly, "And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it."

That's a little synopsis of an endless list of events from the past couple of months and how I guess I'm affected. The weekend was awesome up to the point where I was driving back to my dorm Saturday night and made the mistake of answering my phone. It seemed like the weekend of hades and if I was feeling emotionally, physically, emotionally, and even spiritually drained before even more so now. It's as if for some reason some people just don't want to understand exactly what I've always felt and what type of person I am. I know I am not a saint, not by any means because I know my closet is full of skeletons and I'm still paying the consequences of my decisions to this day but I try and continue to try to improve. I was reading Summer's blog from today and I have to agree that the Bible Study area is probably the one area of my life where I need to emphasize more on. School, personal problems, and the skeletons take up so much time and drain my emotions to the point where I feel I can't deal with all of it. I'm known to shun myself from the world at times like these and I'm trying my hardest not to. There's a reason why my blog is titled the way it is. That Green Day song is basically the story of my life and it basically summarizes what my life has been about and what it is right now. School's about to finish in about 3 weeks and I intend to exile myself in Florida this summer and regroup. It's obviously not working out for me in the Midwest, too much drama, too much stuff I can't control. I've only got one more year of school left and I hope to "get 'er dunnnnn" as soon as I can. I'm planning on doing L4T and LYC, hopefully by road trippin' with Jon to get there by flying in to Chicago. Let's see how that works out though, because it would provide the most fun and best way to spend 3 weeks of my summer. We all need to heal some way and I just don't think that spending my summer in D.C. was the way to go after all this.

Nice to see that I just went on a tangent that probably makes no sense. I always have the belief that somehow writing what my feelings are would help. I've yet to discover if that actually works after 4 years of trying.