PT Bruiser

-Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Hemingway wrote this about catching a fish, but I think it's probably about loving my wife.

T.H. White

*Strictly speaking, it was on my 19th birthday that I turned 18 years old, since on my first birthday I was a newborn of zero years old. Fighting this semantic crusade has never seemed worthwhile enough to alter my own speech and composition, but it's my 24th birthday dangit and I'm going to point it out.

The King is coming.

A year ago she said, "WHAT?!? YES!"

Grandma was a great giver of advice, and meritoriously so, as an eventual nonagenarian. She was a great giver of many things (see, for example, my aforementioned birthday speechlessness), but telling stories and giving advice were her first and favorite ways to show you love. In out final face-to-face conversation, I know we talked at length about love, marriage, and family. I don’t remember everything she said: that weekend is a blur of good memories. But I remember the last thing she said, and I remember talking with Katie about it at Grandma’s funeral three weeks later. “Be good to each other,” she told me. I trust we have. She was always so good to us.

Even though I didn't listen to as many 2012 albums as I normally would, I still listened to a lot of music in 2012. These are 25 songs, in roughly chronological order, that meant a lot to me this year.

[An aside: over a quarter of the books I read in 2012 were about love, relationships, and friendship, so there's that.] Shortly before the fall semester began, I was journaling about how tired I was of wrestling with God over my singleness. I wrote out the lyrics to "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah." I wanted to trust God's timing and provision, to not be disconsolate by the three rejections I'd received in the past year or so, to not desire, like the Israelites had, for the "melons of Egypt" that God had taken away from me to give me something better. After my brother's rehearsal dinner, I had been taken by a sudden and powerful sorrow over a relationship that by then nine months cold. I didn't understand why something that I was "over," that I had long since put to rest in my brain, that no longer had a grip on my heart, could still overwhelm me with a self-pitying grief, and why I seemed incapable of living without nursing a crush for some girl or other. It was not a month later that we were singing "Guide Me, Oh Thou Great Jehovah" in my church back at Tulsa that I realized that the past two nights I had journaled to God about how free I felt in my singleness, how grateful I was for it, how much I understood why it was good for me right then and there. I was floored and happy. And then, of course, my eyes lighted upon another girl. The summer weather lasted forever. I wore shorts and sandals a lot. I ran barefoot around campus multiple times a week. I found the "homework zone" in my new SA President office. I liked all three of my classes, and I put off my senior project until the last month of school, and it somehow all worked out anyway. I wanted more adventure. We slept out under the stars on "The U" three times; it was magical. We took a road trip to Ames to see TU lose its first football game to Iowa State. We drove to Fayetteville to see TU lose another game to Arkansas. We drove to Houston to see TU curb-stomp its old rival. We drove to Edmond to see a high school band concert and The Hobbit. We sang and danced in the car a lot. I wound up giving a paper at a Philosophy of Education conference at Columbia. I was younger than everyone and my paper was a lot more concrete and I felt out of place but I got to see Newsies on Broadway and eat well with my sister and brothers, so it was yet another adventure. The semester's motto was "Work hard, play hard." It was hard. I felt a lot of stress and by the end of the semester I was just desperately trying to finish everything and not mess up or let anyone (myself included) down. But I head-banged at the Mountain Goats concert and danced for hours at the cheesy, poorly-attended "Magical Winter's Eve" ball and at the best Jay-Z's birthday party thrown by someone other than Jay-Z. I found out I was accepted to the Teach For America (Oklahoma Corps) about an hour before our CMA Awards watch party (we like parties dedicated to odd themes). My sweet friends had bought champagne. All my summertime dreams of moving to Denver had been scrapped in favor of a desire to stay in Tulsa. Little Rock felt less like home than ever, even though I still loved to see my parents and climb Pinnacle Mountain. TU won the conference championship in football (which Tim and I painted ourselves completely blue for, and made the paper), so a gang of us made the trip to the Liberty Bowl and cheered like crazy for the revenge we dealt to Iowa State. For the first time in nine years, I didn't host a new year's eve party. There were only a few high school friends that it was still important for me to see, so I stayed in Memphis with college friends and rang in the new year on Beale's Street in the rain and cold. I didn't pay a single thought to resolutions, and I was mostly surprised that 2013 had stolen in so quickly. For the first time in five years I didn't publish a "Top Ten Albums of 20XX" list, either. I hadn't listened to enough new music. I got exhausted just thinking about trying to keep up with music this year. I still enjoyed a lot of music, though, so don't worry about that. Over the course of 2012, I learned what I would spend the next two years doing, and I got over some heartaches, and I kept struggling with legalism and perfectionism. I felt very loved by my friends and family. I went on a lot of road trips. I went for a lot of runs. I danced more than I had expected to. My plans were no match for God's sovereign surprises. I was caught off guard by new friendships, by adventures that presented themselves suddenly, by a very quick answer to the question, "What am I doing after I graduate?" I still don't think I'm doing enough as SA President. I have a stack of unread books that I'm meaning to get to. I don't feel ready to teach at an inner-city school. What I need to remember is how much God took care of me in 2012—with that as my witness, the prescription for 2013 should be more trust, and not more scheming. It was a good year.

The two semesters of 2012 bookended my third—and probably final—summer working at New Life Ranch. My mom worked at NLR in the 1970s. Most of my siblings and I went as campers, my sister worked there, and I felt called to be a counselor in 2010 as early as March of 2009. It's always been a special place for me, and God protected me from the temptation of internships and "real" jobs to keep me right where I needed to be each summer: playing in the sun, teaching kids about Jesus, growing close to fellow Christians, learning about leadership and passion and my identity. I was an SAL—a Summer Activity Leader—this summer, meaning that Abbie and I supervised the whole Jr. Camp (3rd-6th graders), and along with Jessica and David, emceed and organized all the other all-camp activities. I had wanted to do this job since I started working at camp. It meant that I got to write skits for the Morning Camp Party. It meant that I got to use my role as an organizer to tweak little things that had bothered me as a staffer. It meant that I got to take care of things behind the scenes and run things in front of the scenes. I was fond of the homesick and irascible campers that got taken to me to help. There were easily a dozen times when I was doing my job—running an errand on the Gator or something—and the feeling "I have the best job on earth" whelmed up inside me unbidden. I got up early for the Summer Solstice and went for a walk with a friend and saw the sunrise. I'd be a sun-worshipping pagan if I didn't believe that Jesus created the sun and was greater than it. There was one night—after the stress of Family Camp, after a fun Small Group date that had fallen apart in its final hours, with a huge group of campers arriving the following afternoon—that I finally didn't want to be in charge of things anymore. My nature tends to leadership; I feel comfortable with authority (having authority, that is—not the concept of authority in general). But I just didn't want things to fail and didn't want everything relying on me all the time and resented God for getting the credit ("glory") when things went well while I took all the blame when my sinfulness ruined things. I thought that the whole world depended on me, but it doesn't. I thought that God was a harsh taskmaster, but he isn't. My small group (Team X) prayed for me and encouraged me. I started to feel better. My grandma got a feeding tube put in and I cried bitterly. My brother got married and I cried joyfully. I sat around a few nights and mourned unrequited love with a girl friend whose crush was as insensible to her affections as my crush was to mine. We were sad, but it was good for me to extend and receive compassion that wasn't just trying to fix things. Impotent sympathy is not my instinct, I'd rather root out the problem, but this was pure and powerless commiseration. Tim worked at camp for the first time, and I don't know how I ever worked there without him. Late one night I learned—sort of—how to drive stick shift on the housekeepers' cart. I drank a lot of milkshakes. I started shaving with a safety razor. I danced my heart out to "Take A Walk" and went for a weekly run in the blazing hot afternoon with "Love Lifted Me" turning my exhausted suffering into an unlikely quiet time and refreshment. Summer wound up and on the last day of camp we had "The Reckoning" (my idea) and used up all our water balloons and shaving cream attacking the campers at the waterfront. I drove back to Little Rock in silence—no music, no podcasts—after the SAL end-of-summer retreat. I thanked God for how much he used New Life Ranch to bless me and teach me things and cause me to grow. I thought about what this summer had meant to me, and how sad I was that it was over, but how fittingly it was done, how fully it had run its course.

I started 2012 at the eighth annual Lepine new year's eve party with my old high school chums. As per tradition, we went down the park in our neighborhood to drink sparkling grape juice and pray and talk. It was not long after that I joined my new camp chums at a farm in Green Country, OK to chop wood and think about the future and pray and talk. I was still very sad about my girlfriend breaking up with me in October, but I was talking about it less and with fewer people; I had used up all the sympathy I thought was fitting for such a short relationship that had ended many months ago. I went back to school early to spend time with other camp chums. I hosted a dinner party. I got more excited for summer. Spring 2012 was not the most academically inspiring. I cut class at an all-time high. There was one Education class—a night class taught by my favorite professor—that I enjoyed and did most of the reading for. My two economics classes were unchallenging and dull and repetitive and scattered, their only saving grace that I was taking them with good friends. My Geology class was easy and I was above the curve by almost always managing to stay awake in it. My calculus class was laborious and uninteresting, a timesuck not necessary for my degree. A book told me once to Do Hard Things, but in this case the hard thing that I had to do was let myself put a W on my transcript and give my time to things I cared about more. The night I closed my calculus textbook for good is pictured my dictionary next to "relief."  I traveled a fair bit. I went to Texas with some acquaintances to awkwardly lead a small group for high schoolers at a Presbyterian youth conference. There was a Team X reunion, an SAL training weekend for camp, and roadtrip to Auburn, AL for the Austrian Scholars Conference that I had wanted to attend for years. There was the camp work weekend, immediately followed by an RUF strategic retreat that I slipped away from early to cheer my brother on in his last high school play. There was also the spring break, which was spent in Little Rock, and most memorably at a little TV-tray desk that I set up in the garage so I could sit shirtless in the sunshine and read and write a term paper. It was there that I processed the sudden and unexpected healing from the long winter of the broken heart. I realized how desperately I had been trying to control everything in my last relationship, how much I was blaming God, or Emily, or my own failure to do everything exactly right for my great disappointment, how unbearable my perfectionism must have been to someone dating me. It was perhaps the most liberating realization I ever had. People qua people became more important to me. I took a long lunch twice a week with economics friends that I hadn't prioritized for a long time. I didn't try to convert or re-convert any of them, I just tried to love them. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to convert anyone, but I figured that that shouldn't be my motive for hanging out with them because they would smell a rat. I watched Hamlet with Lindsay and spent a lot of the last half of semester being in love with and very worried about and considerate to "Amie." The love affair with country music only got worse. I danced to "Your Love Has Lifted Me Higher" by Otis Redding as an Easter song. I clung to "Two Hands" by Townes Van Zandt when I was sad over Amie. Tim & I left our apartment for "The Hostel," a townhouse on campus that has been functioning as a tiny, tiny frat house since 2008. The semester ended and I stayed in town for the Board of Trustees meeting (because oh yeah I was elected SA President—without opposition), but Housing did not acknowledge my request for an extension on spring residency, so I hid in my townhouse without a key and with the doors unlocked, hoping desperately that the Gestapo wouldn't come inspect and find me squatting and kick me out. I threw out duplicate tupperware and foodstuffs that expired in 2009. That was the first third of 2012.

I started keeping track of what books I read, what movies I watched, and what performances (concerts, plays, &c.) I attended when I turned 18. In 2010, I did the 52 in 52 challenge with my sisters. I read 52 books that year; I only watched 31 films. In 2011, I picked another reading challenge that I called 4 in 4: four books of over 1,000 pages in four seasons. I did not actually read a book per season—I studied abroad in the spring semester and read three of my four books in Europe. The last one I devoured over Thanksgiving break to finish the challenge up. All told, I read fewer books and watched fewer movies that year, 26 and 29 respectively. I might have actually read more pages that year than in 2010, but I didn't start tracking pages counts until 2011, so I can't compare the numbers. In 2012, I tried to do a 12 in 12 challenge, but I didn't finish a single book in January. It was a small failure of a legalistic, defeating winter. I read just 19 books over the course of the whole year (and watched a record 39! movies), and I realized in December that aside from three Batman anthologies, they were entirely non-fiction. Now, I like non-fiction, be it exposition or narrative, but I don't like the idea of completely eschewing fiction, so I borrowed David's copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and gobbled it up in about 25 hours. I wonder if the lack of a reading challenge let me get away from fiction, and so I only could justify to myself spending time on reading non-fiction. I also didn't have any campers to read stories to in 2012, and C.S. Lewis was a big help in completing 52 in 52 the summer that I had a lot of younger cabins. I'm currently munching on The Fountainhead (and reading it as a filter, not a sponge, just like Charlie's teacher tells him in Perks), trying to get in some more fiction before the scholarly reading of the semester begins again. I don't think I'll do a reading challenge this year. I'm not against them; I don't think they make me read legalistically, even though goal-setting can sometimes turn me into a rule-worshipping, performance-driven machine. But I'm glad that I've started keeping Google Docs of my reading and movie-watching habits. They help me remember what the year was like. They alert me to imbalances like my accidental fiction fast in 2012. They encourage me to not leave books half-finished. If I have any readings goals for 2012, they are these: Don't stop reading. Read different kinds of books about different kinds of subjects. Read the assigned texts for my last college classes; get the reading done before class. Read the Bible more. Read joyfully and not guiltily.