Writing has given me a much needed outlet for stress relief and it has meant so much to me that all of you are reading this! When you're busy preparing to be a foster parent, you get tired from jumping through the government's hoops all day long.
We just had what we thought was to be our final inspection last week, and we were basically told that our house is unsafe for children. Let me tell you a few of the reasons why they came to this conclusion:
1. Our garden hose was not rolled up.
2. We have a small gate that leads to the courtyard and they said this is a choking hazard.
3. We have too many cords in our home studio (we do music, video, photography). They told us our option is to install a door to that room which I have no problem with, but they said in addition to the door with the lock we also need to install an interior doorbell. That way just in case anyone gets into the room, we'll know.
I totally get that the Department of Social Services needs to watch their backs and ours; no one wants a lawsuit or a tragedy. The thing that is just killing me though is that these Social Workers have such a tainted outlook on life that they can no longer distinguish between good and bad people-we're all bad to them. It is also becoming painfully obvious to me why more decent people in the world don't become foster parents: because the government makes it too damned hard. Sorry but there's just no other way to say it.
That is enough for my morning rant. Now, onto the the final chapters of the story...
The End of the Beginning:
Casey Townsend started to think he might be falling for Casey Townsend.
He kept the wax-sealed letter in his nightstand drawer for safe-keeping and I kept his letter to me (though it was very short and just explained what the check was for).
We continued to write over Myspace. There was never even a mention of talking over the phone. Somehow we both knew that that would ruin it. Here's a sample of our very lighthearted correspondence:
From Me to Him:
Date: Oct 5, 2006 3:09 PM
SUBJECT: Metamorphic Rocks
Okay, I tried to send you a message AGAIN from home, but myspace was being silly, so I'm attempting again to write to you....
I'm at school, a dreadful place, in the computer lab where I should be working on a paper that is due tomorrow that I have yet to begin. Oh well.
Pressing questions that I must ask again, as I've been anxiously awaiting your answers (in vain):
Would you rather (this is actually a book)...
Be really good with computers but have an incredibly moist wet foot?
OR
Be known as the greatest diorama maker of all time, but have a friendly midget permanently attached to you, papoose style (I assume this means on your hip??)?
My other questions were:
1. Do you drink coffee (as in real coffee, not frappuccinos or cappuccinos that you can get from the automated machines at the gas stations:)?
2. Do you like onions?
and, most importantly:
3. Do you have a southern accent? I was thinking about this the other day, and if you do, that would be sooo awesome! If you don't, it doesn't affect how cool I think you are:)
I don't know what all I wrote about in the other long email, but I do think that I remember writing that it was the quite possibly the LONGEST email that I'd ever written, but I'm not mad (I guess I meant not mad that I'd lost the previous email?).
I think that I was telling you about my crazy weekend "barrelin'", and also confirming that your mental image of riding down Niagra Falls while eating at Cracker Barrel is a very accurate description of what it's actually like working there.
I worked a lot this weekend, 4-cl on Friday and 9am-10pm on Saturday, and then woke up at 5am on Sunday to help my manager with some hair-brained idea that he had of volunteering in the canoe-event of a triathalon. I was more sore after that than I have ever been in my whole life! No exaggerations! It was fun though:)
From Him to Me:
RE: Metaphoric Rocks
When I first read the subject line, for some weird reason, I thought it said "Metophoric Rocks" and that your letter was going to be about poetry or something. But that's because I can't read. :) MetoMORPHic rocks makes more sense anyway.
Okay, so let's see. Even though I think Dioramas are really cool and I've always wanted my very own midget to carry around, I think I'd rather be good at computers because that can make you a lot of money and I think I'd be okay with having to dry out my foot every now and then. :) Plus, a moist foot would be no problem at a water park or the beach!
Coffee: I absolutely LOVE the smell, but I've tried to drink it many times (I don't know why, but I feel like drinking coffee makes you special or something and I wanted to drink it too) but I just don't really care for it. I'm more of a soda guy. Or do you say 'pop' in Ohio? ;) But I have been known to drink a sweet coffee drink like a capucino every now and then. How about you? Do you grace the lines of Starbucks every day? (there is more but I shortened it)
CT
***
As you can see if you've read the other blogs, we had started writing in April or May and this letter you read above is from October, so we had been writing for a good while...
I was still at Wright State and was getting ready to go back to Kenya to find an orphan boy that I had been supporting, Moses is his name. Please stay tuned for next week's blog for a video clip of him that I took the first time I was there and also for some exclusive footage from my days at Cracker Barrel (you DON'T want to miss it)
He wasn't affiliated with any organization which is why I had to "find" him. With no internet and extremely unpredictable mail, you never know where a Kenyan can be at any given time.
Mbita is the village that I fell in love with, seated on Lake Victoria...
Teaching Worship Songs @ a local school 2004-05
The Lake Flies 2004-05
Crazy Boat Trips from 2004-05
Mbita is the bush-bush. It's a 10-hour drive from Nairobi that must be broken up into a two-day period because of the terrible road system (potholes galore). The second day also includes a 1 or 2 hour ride on a ferry.
Sending money for school was such a risk that I wanted to be able to do it in person. I was helping him get his high school education.
I think I wanted to go back also because I felt like something was there for me, which it actually wasn't. I think though that God had to show me that there was nothing there for me so that I would know that there was nothing there for me...you know?
I used the "Independent Study" excuse to get myself back there. It would earn me my LAST credit needed to get my Bachelor's Degree, which later proved useless to me as I had previously suspected. Not that the degree itself is useless, just to me it is useless.
Meanwhile, time went on and we did not pursue romance. I, in fact, had my eyes on a couple of other "candidates". I had even come to the conclusion that the dancing with gardenias thing was a lost cause and decided that, in an effort to prove to myself that I was over it, told the story to a guy who I was convinced wasn't the right one anyway.
The other guy I was interested in, I must admit to you, was already in a relationship. I knew he was thinking of breaking up with her and this made me very hopeful that I would have a chance. He had confided in me that he was interested in me too but couldn't bring himself to leave his girlfriend. I definitely did not want to be a "home-wrecker" so we decided it was territory we didn't want to enter and never talked about it again. It was true that it would have been "tainted" if we would have ended up together. The whole situation crushed me despite sound judgment and that made me want to run off to Kenya even more.
I was still consumed with the eating disorder. Whenever stressful situations like this hit, it was in full-swing: binging and purging. Blood sugars sky-rocketing, making me too out-of-it to go to class so my grades were suffering. I had totally isolated myself from any friends I had left. I guess I should mention also that I have Juvenile Type 1 Diabetes and have since I was 13, to explain the blood sugar comment.
This was the lull that was the next couple of months until I left for Kenya in the beginning of December. It was only a 3-week trip, and I was already dreading the reality that I'd have to go back to Ohio and was hoping desperately that maybe I wouldn't have to.
But one day the tides turned...
I got a Myspace message from Casey Samuel (not Stephen) Townsend giving me some very important news...
To preface, I would call his family "tight-knit". I'm going to go ahead and stereotype and say that it's because his mom, Cindy, is from Virgina. It could just be that a southern accent makes someone sound nicer than they really are, or Southern people actually are more friendly and have somehow maintained a stronger family value than the majority of "Yankee's". There's probably a study out there or something but that's for another time.
Anyway, Casey Samuel's mom, Cindy, has two sisters named Janet & Allison. Allison just to happens to live in Ohio, which I think we had discussed but never discussed the location of where she lived. By September, she had heard Casey Samuel talk of my emails and she had even read a few and later told me that she was very impressed with my grammar skills. :)
It was in September that Cindy decided to meddle in our platonic Myspace relationship. She did a googlemaps search for my house to see how close it was to her sister, Allison's house...
My address was in Fairborn at the time, which not many people have heard of, and Beavercreek is right next to that. It turned out that Allison lived in Beavercreek, and her children (CS' cousins)went to the same high school as me and graduated just a few years after I had!
She lived only 8 miles from my apartment.
This news gave us the excuse to meet in person without causing any awkwardness, or at least it gave us a shot at trying to avoid it...
Which we didn't, but instead we made it more awkward than ever which will be explained in just a moment. :)
Casey Samuel made plans to come to Ohio to "visit his cousins" after Christmas in 2006. We made a "fail-safe" plan to meet at El Toro (my regular Mexican eatery) on December 28th and decided the best thing to do would be to bring our families too. This included his Aunt, Uncle, Mom, 3 cousins, my Mom, Nanny, and Paw-Paw. We figured (though neither of us said this at the time) that having our families there would decrease awkwardness so if either one of us was really creepy to the other, we could bail out more easily.
I will explain later why this was a big mistake.
...
Sidenote:
At this point I find that it's very important for me to mention who I'm calling, "The Background Guy". You know what I'm talking about. When you're young (which I still am but humor me) you date around (at least most of us), and for a lot of us ladies while we are dating around there is one complicated relationship, be it from your early teen years, your "first love" whatever, and he is looming in the background. You always go back to him in your thoughts, wondering if maybe he'll show his face again and if things will work out. Since all of my other love attempts had failed miserably, he was coming to mind and I was wondering if he would confess his undying love to me soon...
But we will come back to him later as well.
September, October, and November flew by as I finished up Fall Quarter and prepared for my trip. I think I even worked on Thanksgiving because the tips were are always so bountiful. People flock to Cracker Barrel on Thanksgiving to order a "true" Thanksgiving meal which includes all the trimmings of a typical Thanksgiving meal plus your choice of a few different pies.
It was the beginning of December, and I had prayed that God would make it snow before I left because I just love snow. It wasn't like a "sign" sort of thing, I just wanted to see the snow before I left.
And surely enough, the night before I left, He really did make it snow, and it was beautiful! In my state of pure happiness over this simple pleasure, I decided to call "The Background Guy".
I dialed. His phone rang. He answered. I squealed with delight as I told him about the snow and how I was leaving in the morning. He humored me and acted happy for me, but I could tell that he didn't really care and he was wondering why I was calling him. He did his obligatory, churchy, pray-for-me thing and then we hung up. I was disappointed as usual but not surprised by his demeanor and decided I wouldn't call him when I got back.
He was the master of fickle, the master of the elusive and non-committal text messaging. He was the kind of guy that would text a girl to tell her that a certain movie reminded him of her, and then if she responded, he would act like she was reading into it all wrong.
I went to sleep feeling really stupid for calling him. The next morning, I left for the airport and pretended like I was leaving everything behind even though it was only for 3 weeks.
...
