I hope you are tucked in nice and cozy as this may be a long ramble, folks. 

No sooner did I type that first line, then my mind went completely blank and I no longer knew what it is I was I was all geared up to say.  It must be spring finally hitting me, making me all daydreaming and absent minded. 

I have been emailing my cousins since my aunt passed away and I am thinking that this is going to fall by the wayside here pretty soon.  I have only met each of them twice.  Once when I was child, and once when I was an adult.  We have never made any kind of connection.

I feel intimidated by them sometimes – both are successful professionals and I doubt that were there not a blood bond between us, that I am anyone either of them would be interested in knowing. 

I lack direction.  That is the polite way of putting it.  I dropped out of college twice.  I have no desire or passion to be anything other than myself.  There are hundreds of things I think would be ‘fun’ to do, but not one of them strikes a cord in me.  I have never had a deep burning passion to ‘do’ anything. 

I like to write, have to write a lot of the time, but when I have been approached about turning it into a career, asked to sit down and take some of my short pieces and flesh them out and try to write a book – I can only shrug. 

I write because of some strange need within myself to put words on paper.  If the Internet did not exist, I would still be writing.  Having a place to throw them up online and let others read them and allow me to remain anonymous has been fun, but I don’t want it to be…work.  Yuck. 

I like getting tattooed which is something I think both of them would take a dim view of. That is something that further underlines the differences between us. While it has become wildly popular, I am awaiting the backlash that should follow and will allow it to go back to the way I grew up – where tattooing was not done at the mall between lattes and a mani/pedi. 

My cousins want to stay in touch but they want to do so in that polite surface way where we send Christmas cards with a couple of lines scribbled on the bottom and vague emails that give updates as to progress in work weeks and other yawningly general information.

I don’t do surface well.  I don’t do it with people who want to know me in real life so I have no desire to do it with family.  I refuse to try to dig to find out who my cousins are, what they like, what they want.  These are the things that interest me. 

I am mortified at the idea of anyone ‘knowing’ me but I am fascinated by others. 

I have been thinking a lot about grace.   About living in a state of grace, or at least of trying to attain what I believe to be grace.  My mom, who is a Quaker minister, is someone who really can ‘let go and let God’. 

She was not always a minister.  I did not grow up in the church.  She became a minister about 10 years ago. When I was growing up, we did not discuss religion or spirituality.  I attended Sunday school briefly.  Enjoying vacation bible school not for the message but for the crafts we would make and because we got to play “Red Rover, Red Rover” during our breaks.

I decided at about 7 or 8 I was an atheist and stopped attending.  I was not quite sure what that meant; I just knew I liked the look on the people’s faces when I said I was one.  I have sought my own path spiritually ever since and do not subscribe, prescribe or in any other way attach or align myself with any form of organized religion.  I look up on organized religion as a torturous continuation of the junior high school caste system. 

My mom, who had already read the bible several times already, began reading it daily after my brother died.  She would get up early and I would find her as the sun rose, a cup of coffee steaming in one hand the bible in the other. 

To my great relief, she is not a holy roller.  That would be near impossible in the Quaker faith, and I am not saying this because she is my mother, but she is no different as a minister as she was my mom.

I envy her the level faith she has achieved.  I have spoken about it before, I will probably write about it again, but I cannot surrender.  I cannot, no matter how much I believe that whatever happens I will be okay; I will still struggle and try to control the situations.

I have always been this way.  My mom has given me plaques, magnets, bookmarks and whatever else she found with the serenity prayer on it.  12 steppers have nothing on me where that is concerned.  I read it, I say it, and then I worry, plan, plot and bargain. 

I have been beating myself up for the financial pickle I got myself into by helping someone out.  I was an idiot in a long line of idiots and let myself get suckered and I will be paying for it for some time to come. 

This is one of the more inane things that I cannot just let go of.  The others being death and grief, but I think that is a little more understandable.  My mom keeps telling me it will be okay and then trying to reassure me that no matter what, no matter how my life may feel as though it spirals out of control from time to time and all of the other whiney bullshit that I could type but why bother, that they are proud of me, love me as I am.

To which I responded, wait till I get more tattoos.  My dad is appalled by the two he is aware of and when he mentioned the one on my ankle today, I told him it was just fine and that I had more now.  His first response is always the best – “You big dummy!”

I think he will need to take some of my mom’s advice to accept the things he cannot change.  Ink is forever.