count it all joy

i'm still trying to envision a world in which i will ever get tired of arcade fire's "funeral" album.

other truths that remain:

*i still don't have a cell phone.
*i still haven't hooked up an answering machine to my landline (although i have bought one).
*my hair continues to get more and more ridiculous, but i still don't think i'm going to bother doing anything to it for the next month or so.
*i still love lloyd dobler. (and corey flood, when it comes right down to it.)
*i am still refusing to get sick, regardless of my body's feelings on the matter.
*why does lloyd have two L's? what if someone needed that extra L? that's just greedy.
*i still love to go the gym and run on the treadmill and feel strong, even though i haven't been there for almost a week. tonite i think i'll have just enough time.
*i still want to learn to play guitar just enough to be annoying to people who can actually play guitar. and maybe to be able to collaborate on a musical someday, in the vein of i-want-a-song-that-has-this-basic-chord-progression-but-sounds-a-lot-more-like-a-song.
*i still am incredibly grateful that my small group/party circuit friends are slowly melding into one big, sometimes-happy family.

easter weekend was nice and holy. as is the case with most holy weekends, i had a slight headache/hangover on friday and monday mornings, and a slight spiritual hangover on saturday. thursday was a celebration of the last supper, friday was the ass-kicking good friday service (where i was convicted over and over again of mentally trying to treat the whole thing like a theatre production instead of an opportunity to Love), saturday was cartoons and thrift stores and the cafe and katie's porch and spending way too much money on comic books because i guess that's what being a hipster looks like in your mid-to-late twenties and it's like i couldn't even stop myself, and sunday was five hours of church because of multiple kids' services and then a nap and talking to my mom and then hours upon hours at donovan and laurie's, eating and drinking and being glad at all the moments when i wasn't being antagonistic or antagonised.

at the end of the weekend, i felt sort of overly full, like too much had happened, too many things required processing from too many different parts of me. it was event-heavy, love-and-death-heavy, spiritually and emotionally heavy, and although it's not the kind of heaviness that weighs on you, it is the kind of heaviness that clutters you up a bit, and at the end of it all, you think, man, i need the kind of nap that goes all the way through... the kind of nap where you don't dream, don't stir, don't metabolize, don't consider. the kind of nap where you sleep until you're refreshed, until everything's had a chance to sort of settle down inside of you, sift into a sediment at the bottom of your soul. and then, you figure, you'll be able to do more than drink coffee and dream troubling dreams, watch movies and go to meetings. you'll be able to think more than five steps ahead of you again, and you won't feel like you've missed something, that there's something you must not have gone over and gotten the most out of, because too many things have happened.

it was a holy weekend. it was a good friday. but holiness and goodness don't live alone in this world. you can't isolate them. and together they seem to magnify everything else, give it height and depth that it lacks on its own, and so there is no traveling through it all... there is no reaching the top or the bottom. there is no making it all the way through.

i think we live in a world where we have to be okay with that. we access the most that we can, but some things will be out of our reach for as long as we all shall live. you can't let it make you crazy. you have to keep moving forward, as best you can, knowing that as you do, there will be more new things, more ideas that outstretch our tiny souls... and that for what small portion we can take in, we must give thanks.

therefore, let us keep the feast. allelu, alleluia.