On my mind

There are a few things on my mind. Time for bullet points, folks!

• Those captcha thingies. Good grief, do they  have to make the letters quite so distorted? And the photographs of numbers. Many times they are so blurry I can't make them out. It makes me feel old. 
• For breakfast, a recent favorite is frozen blueberries in Greek style yogurt. It's all kinds of healthy and shit. Plain non-fat yogurt, the Greek stuff with extra smooth texture and a bunch more protein than ordinary yogurt. I put frozen blueberries in it, stir it up, then let it sit for 5 or 10 minutes. The yogurt directly around the blueberries freezes just a bit as the blueberries begin to soften. It's so good! 
• Most of my friends live far away. Many of them I've never met in person. Sometimes this doesn't bother me, but other times it does. I feel as though I should have  more local friends, that I am somehow deficient for not making friends. However, I'll get to meet more of my long distance friends in a week and a half when Superman and I go to the Bloggerpalooza meeting in Delaware. We are both looking forward to that. 
• I have a niggling fear that we might not be able to go to Delaware because of some trouble with Diva and/or Sproing. We really need to get away. I hope hope hope everything works out for us to go. 
• I'm supposed to be hemming Diva's dress for the Ball on Friday. I don't want to because I'm petty and she's an ungrateful bitch. 
• Why is great spelled with the vowels "ea" beside each other, but grateful has the "a" and "e" separated by the "t"? I don't expect an answer to this question. 
• I like elephants. Ron posted about "the elephant in the room" concerning an upcoming medical procedure. I'm concerned about him, and wish him all the best. But he got my mind wandering toward elephants, and I just have to say, elephants are wonderful. It's kinda like "squirrel" for someone with ADD (which I have) but today the squirrel is an elephant. I recently bought a book about elephants, it's right over there in the bookshelf, but I haven't read it yet. 
• I spent the morning checking the blogs of everyone who's signed up for the blogger meet-up. Some of these folks I've been following for years, some I've recently discovered, and a couple are completely new to me. This morning I read at least the latest post from everyone except Spo, for whom this meeting was originally conceived. I read his blog yesterday. He'll have to forgive me. As I understand it, Spo gets around. He's done lots of traveling and has met many blog buddies, but hadn't been to the east coast to meet anyone on this end of the continent. He lives in Phoenix, AZ where it is way too hot and sunny for me to visit. So he and a few other east coast bloggers devised this trip in order to meet and spend time having fun with each other. If I'm mistaken, someone please correct me in the comments. 
• Winter is pretty much over in South Carolina now. We might have a few more nights were the temps get to freezing or below, but not far and not many. I really like winter. I really don't like summer. Summer in South Carolina is entirely too long and too hot. 
• Smucker's natural peanut butter mixed with grape jam, preferably, or strawberry preserves as an acceptable substitute tastes good when used as a dip with corn chips. This has been a favorite lunch or snack for years, since I was a teenager. I used to use Fritos Corn Chips, but recently discovered that tortilla chips are at least as good. Fritos are too greasy. My desire for this treat comes and goes. I'll go years without eating peanut butter and jelly dip with chips, then have it once or twice a week for a month or more. It was my lunch yesterday. 
• I don't like my house. Never have, actually. It's a brick ranch in a subdivision. Now I like brick alright. It's a good sturdy building material, good to have as facade, low maintenance. The ranch style architecture wears on my soul. And we aren't subdivision people. And there are too many things in my house. Too many people, too, but that's a story for another post. I myself have too much stuff that belongs to me. I should get rid of it. But where to start? When? How? What to do with it all? I'd like to try to make some money from this excess stuff. We could do a yard sale, I suppose. I don't like hosting yard sales, but sometimes it needs to be done. I don't know how to set things up to prepare for one, though. What goes and what stays? Where do I put it until the day of? How do I price things? Just how early do I need to get up on a Saturday morning for this kind of foolishness? These are too many questions for my poor ADD-addled brain (ADDled?) to work through. 
• Alice Nelson. I want her to come live with us. You know Alice as the housekeeper for the Brady family of "Brady Bunch" fame. I need me an Alice. You may also be familiar with Hazel Burke from her self titled show that ran for a few years before "The Brady Bunch" hit the scene. I don't want Hazel. She brings too much drama. I want a housekeeper like Alice who lets me have the drama while she is a supporting character who helps clean up after me. 
• Jason Mraz. I've been listening to his album "Love Is a Four Letter Word" a lot. I may have blogged about this recently. The thing I like about his music is that it's so positive. His lyrics (and tunes, for that matter) are upbeat, positive, happy without being sappy. There is a hell of a lot of negativity in my life right now (I want my children to move out of my house, dammit!!!) and listening to Jason Mraz croon positive messages at me truly helps. It doesn't overpower the darkness, but it helps. 
• This is a lot of bullet points. Probably too many. I'm going to stop this foolishness and get on with the important things of my day, like taking a nap. The garbage guys just drove down the street. Our garbage is now in their truck. This satisfies a small yet important need of mine. 

A brief history of my last 20 years book five

How we got here

Why we got here

What we're doing here

Book five

Now then, where were we? We had settled fairly well into the new ugly house in the conveniently located yet stifling neighborhood. By now both of the older kids are at the high school, Twitch a freshman and Light a junior. The young whipper-snappers were in 2^nd grade and not doing too well, but I don't want to talk about that.

Light was developing some good friendships and was excelling in school. This is what she's like, though. It comes easier for her than for my other kids. Everybody likes Light. She was involved with a few clubs at school and in the youth group at the large Baptist church just up the road from the high school.

One of her friends was a young man named C. Yup, that's our gay… I mean guy! He was very active at the church. He was a senior, as were most of Light's friends that year. For a while she had a bit of a crush on him.

Light and I have a very close relationship. We communicate well. Although we've had our share of differences and aggravations with one another, we share a lot of stuff with each other. I've always respected her opinions and most of her boundaries. I hold her trust, and she mine. If she tells me something in confidence, it goes no further.

She is like that, too. She listens well to others and doesn't betray a confidence. However, the lives of teenagers are a lot more complicated sometimes than a teenager is mature enough to handle. She had friends who were going through some tough stuff who would talk to her about it. If she felt like she needed a sympathetic but more mature perspective on something, she'd talk about it to me, yet without revealing the identity of the friend in need.

In late autumn she began to talk to me a little bit about "a friend" who was dealing with "a difficult situation." Mainly she was asking me to pray for this friend. I think also she wanted to express the concern just to have someone to share the burden with. She didn't tell me anything about the problem or who was struggling. But she brought it up every week or so. I sympathized, which was about all I could do of course.

There were a few of her friends who were dealing with various struggles. These are 15-19 year olds. It's a hard time in their lives. I knew, or suspected, who some of the kids might be. But there was one in particular she was especially concerned about. She finally told me that it was C, although she didn't say what the issue was, and swore me to secrecy. Not a problem. I didn't know him at the time. She had pointed him out to me in a crowd of kids at the church once, but I wouldn't have recognized him if he came up and punched me in the nose.

Over Christmas break, a few days before New Years Day, C came over to the house so he and Light could dye their hair. This was the first time I'd spoken to the boy. Superman and I were sitting on the sofa in the living room and the kids walked by on the way to the bathroom with their boxes of hair dye. C was giggling like a school girl. I turned to Superman and jokingly said "I wonder if he knows he's gay?"

Sure enough he was struggling with coming out. He had come out to Light I think before Christmas, and after school resumed he came out to more of the kids, expanding his confession to a wider circle of acquaintances. As many of you know, once the news gets out to so many people it takes on a life of its own. Pretty soon anyone who gave a damn knew that C thought he was gay. (That's the way most people perceived it, I think: he thought he was gay.) He got a lot of flack from most of the kids in the youth group and a big dump of grief from the youth group leader. Many of the kids at school only spoke to him to condemn him. There was a core group who stuck by him, Light of course being one of them.

And by this time I knew all about it. I sympathized with his grief but still held the view I'd learned in church about homosexuality. I thought it was a bad idea. Wrong, even. Though I didn't understand it very well, I wasn't willing to hate him for being gay. I still hardly knew him. We'd never talked, just the two of us. But Light had spoken so lovingly about him and his trials that I couldn't help but feel sympathy.

Meanwhile, back on the bus, I'd been taken off of the special needs route that I'd substituted on for most of the year. Another one of the drivers was going out on maternity leave and the boss needed me to take over her route. It was a regular route, and a rough one. Not the worst, but far from the best. I'm much better with the special needs students. This crowd was primarily from the old mill villages in town. The mills are almost all closed now, so the villages are populated with a wide variety of people. The houses are small and most of them were built in the first quarter of the 20^th century. In other words, cheap housing. A few of the areas are known for drug activity and other violence. These kids had a tough life, and they expressed it in their behavior.

One of the students on my bus was a very attractive, tall but slight boy with long hair and penetrating green eyes. His name was S. He usually sat directly behind my seat, mostly away from the tougher kids in the back of the bus. He talked to some of the girls but rarely to any other boys. I had my suspicions. J One day as the senior prom was approaching I heard him tell the girl in the next seat that he wanted to wear a dress to the prom; a green one that would set off his eyes. I listened intently. This guy was the source of some very interesting conversation!

The thing about S: he's pretty much never been in any closet. He's not flamboyantly obvious, but he speaks his mind and has a few telling affectations. He speaks with no shame about who or what he is. At 16 years old this was impressive. He had a toughness about it, though. A chip on the shoulder attitude as a defense against the bullies. He also had a big mouth without much control over what came out of it. He had been in some trouble and was now one of "the usual suspects" with the administration at school. I thought he was adorable.

C's trials were increasing, as one might expect. One day he got a call at home from another boy who called to ask him out. C wasn't a bit interested in this guy, so of course said "no." His mom asked who called, and C told her it was a guy from school who wanted to get together with him. Innocuous enough, right? Well, not surprisingly, C didn't have a large number of friends and didn't do a lot of socializing. His mom innocently suggested it might be nice to get together with a friend. Can you recognize this golden opportunity to come out to Mom? He was out to most everyone else, he knew his mom would find out soon from someone at church, so he took a deep breath and shook up his mama's world.

What happens next? What is him mom's reaction? When do I get to talk to him? How do he and S meet? Stay tuned.