recalculating

I just got out of a really complicated relationship. I mean, the communication was terrible. I don't even know if we were leading each other in the right direction. It's like, even if we had the same destination, we were taking such different paths. Even though we said we had the same end goals, I couldn't see how our short-term steps were getting us there. Her name is Gloria. She is my mother's GPS machine. :) Like so much of our time together, she and I are now recalculating our routes.

Last week I went on a trip to Cleveland with my mom for my (great) aunt's birthday and to see family. I got to walk through a tropical forest of butterflies in a greenhouse, recount favorite pokemon with my younger cousins and watch Evan Almighty with my mom, as well as play a LOT of guitar. But I also got to drive in rain and lightning, where I couldn't even see the road lines on the freeway, through six-way intersections of death, and with two and sometimes three different voices telling me two and sometimes three different directions to drive. Bwah!

I cried. Several times. Much like a little girl :) I was already stressed out by other navigations I was making with, you know, my life. Job searches and heart searches. Rejections. Recalculations. If I take professional rejection this hard, then I shudder to think about personal rejection!!!

Anyway, Gloria and I really do have a complicated, love-hate relationship of our own. I could only get her to show me the immediately next direction, and not the one after that. And it freaked me out, because I wanted to know more, to be prepared for the next turn, to get in the right lane. It was too much like my life! I don't really know how to prepare for the next turn, cuz I don't know what it will be yet.

Well, every time I went the wrong direction, Gloria would say "Recalculating route." Insert choice words of frustration. That's right. I called her a poopie head. Gasp! Anyway, as much as I hated that, I kind of learned a lesson from it, too. Sometimes, I heard her say recalculating with a certain kind of annoyance, like "wow, the wrong direction again?" but other times it was more of a cheerful, bemused "wow, what a trip!" Obviously, Gloria is a machine, with a pre-recorded voice, so neither is true. Unless there's a vast conspiracy. But barring that possibility, I just read my own emotions into her voice. Regardless of that, she kept recalculating.

And I kind of want to be like her. I hate recalculating, because it implies you went the wrong way. But sometimes actually we were going a different way, that one of our relatives had told us to go, and it had to recalculate accordingly. Of course, most of the time we did go the wrong way. Either way, as much as she annoyed me, it was comforting to know she'd always be able to recalculate and find a new way to get to the destination. And she'd never just give up. How inspiring.

So, maybe I only get to know one direction ahead at a time for now. Or maybe not even really that. I just know the general direction I should drive in. God's more of a compass-type than step-by-step kind of guy. Yeah? Maybe. Either way, I have a lot of recalculating to look forward to. If you do, too, sucks for us :) But not really. Only if we let it. Either way. Anyway.

As a random side note, apparently anyways is a colloquialism and not a real word. While anyway, despite how horrendously weird it looks, is a real word. Yucky. Just look at the y's, on yucky, too. How weird. Gross. Gross.