when the tea gets strong and bitter at the end of the cup

I’ve been having complicated thoughts about people lately. (Let’s see if I can try to explain them without tying myself up in knots.) Preface: I don’t have any exclusive friends. Basically, everyone I know is friends with all of my other friends. This means I know about three hundred people who can be called “mutual friends.” Fuzzy Explanation: Because of this defining quality of my relationships, everyone likes to talk about everyone else. What’s been so strange for me lately is to notice the conflicting viewpoints you get from people on the same issue. For example*: A and B are both kind of frustrated with each other. A calls me up and says that B is simply being awkward and overly sensitive about everything and practically ruining a once perfect relationship. I talk to B a few days later about the same issue, and B insists that A is immature and too emotionally dependent. Or then there’s X and Y. X is really excited about hanging out some more with Y, but Y has told me that X actually gets on its nerves. Conclusion, at last: It’s fascinating how dishonest we have to be to function, to actually get along. What would our relationships look like if we really told each other what we thought? We probably wouldn’t have relationships, come to think of it…

(*Mutual friends, hear me! These are all purely hypothetical examples. I promise. So don’t get all huffy and go start grouching to X and B that I outed you. Because I didn’t.)

Kelsey and I have to work tonight at the bookstore for the greatly anticipated Harry Potter release. The store is having a party and we get to hand out “bubbling punch” and give Potter tattoos to the little Rowling rats. We have to be there at 10:30p and won’t leave until probably 1:00a. It’s not that I really mind; I love being in the bookstore and I like children. It’s just… I feel slightly traitorous because I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books. I confessed this to one of the customers yesterday, and I thought the woman was going to slap me in the face. She flushed and sputtered and stammered, “Wh… what's... what’s WRONG with you?” As if I had recently acquired a third nostril or something. I just never got into Potter. I think if he had come earlier, I would have. By the time the first book came out, though, I had moved on from fantasy books to Edith Wharton and J.D. Salinger and Charles Dickens. Pretentious homeschooler.

Listening to Third Eye Blind is such a great throwback to my childhood. I had no idea what they were singing about (I probably didn’t find out what illegal drugs were until I was fourteen), but I liked them anyway. Old music is fun to relive. As Paul would say, “God, why did you have end the 90’s?”

Today’s passage for The Gospel:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Peter 1:3-5)