my eye's on more juice than a San Francisco Giant

I may not be Barry Bonds, but I am using steroids at the moment. Well... sort of. After two days of a dry, itchy, swollen, red eye, I finally decided to go to the eye doctor. He quickly diagnosed me with an eye infection, so I now get to put a drop of antibiotic and steroid in my eye every two hours. It's not bad, though... my eye is already noticably better, so that's a good thing.

I'm starting to get excited about Mexico... I think. I'm still sort of scared, but it has not been the predominant feeling over the last few days. Instead, I've been anxious to get out of this rut that I've been in this summer and get back to LIFE. It is so hard to stay in this 9-5 job (well, 8:30 to 5 job) in which I'm not going to accomplish anything really significant (a cure for diabetes, or something). It's even harder as I have the same conversations with the same coworkers in the same chairs at the same times every day. I see the world going on around me - a world of fun, joy, pain, excitement - I'm just too locked into the daily schedule to take part in it. I'm ready to get back to LIVING. I'm ready to see as many people as possible who mean something to me in Atlanta next week. I'm ready to be challenged, scared, and excited. I'm ready to LIVE.

...Or so I say for now. Who knows, a week from today, I'll probably be terrified that it's my last night in Kansas for four and a half months. But for now, I'm excited.

Part of my desire to life a life of feeling, even with the pain, comes from recent conversations with someone important to me. The discussion (before and after tragedy, incidentally) about what it means to FEEL has reminded me just how important that is. I consider the tears shed on the phone with a friend a reminder of the wide range of emotions with which God has blessed us, as humans. It's rough at times, but I think it also makes us more human. I read a passage in a book today that sums it up. This book is probably another reason for this newfound (or newly re-awakened, I guess) desire to feel. Not surprisingly (as this is the summer of Madeleine), it's another L'Engle book: The Summer of the Great-grandmother. It's about one summer in which four generations of family was gathered at her house, and her mother's descent into dementia. It feels like such an intimate look at not only her life, but her thoughts, and it really has hit home for the last couple of days. Today, I read something that seemed to be L'Engle's addition to a conversation I had this weekend:

"A house, like a human being, reflects its experiences. And I do not think that a house can be a happy house if no one has cried in it, if no one has died in it. If this seems contradictory, I can't help it. I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death's inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive."

Maybe feelings things is hard sometime. But I agree with the author: if a life never knows pain, I also believe it never truly knows joy. The friends with whom I shared the pain of my grandfather's death are the same ones with who I share an amazing ability to laugh. The day a friend showed up at my front door to help me grieve the death of a schoolmate was the day I realized that I had a best friend, a friend like none I had ever had before.

Mexico will be scary, undoubtedly. But at the moment... I'm ready.