I'M RICH!!!

well alright, so i haven't won the lottery, or discovered oil while digging my back yard, or invented the next necessary household appliance, or sold my parents howard county house--- but LORD have I got things so much better than all of that impersonal gain. This weekend, I lived the LIFE. And it was sort of just given to me, after I took one big step, the rest fell into place, and while trying to give someone else the best gift I could, I was given back so much from the most unexpected places. sounds like a movie or something, right? i can't believe how great this weekend has been.

it all starts with Rachael Maddox's BIRTHDAY which happened to fall on a friday this year, making it possible to for me to show up and spend the weekend together with the purchase of a plane ticket. but not any usual person hops on a plane across the country to visit home for a couple of days, i mean.. there are plenty of reasons NOT to go home on a weekend to surprise your best friend for her birthday-- but i just couldn't think of any! or atleast not any that actually were more important to me. so purchase the plane ticket i did (with the encouragement of jen lemen), bank account took a little $220 hit, and for three weeks i had to keep my mouth shut about this trip i knew i was going to take, to insure the sucess of the surprise.

--skip ahead three weeks-- 3:30 AM thursday morning my alarm goes off for the start of a long trip home. 4am my cab arrives to pick me up with guitar and suitcase in hand and the cab driver loves that i play guitar. in a 15 minute drive i tell him my story as a musician and he tells me his, which ends with a divorce and him running away from his old life by being a cab driver (he stopped playing music when he got married), and so i was inspired by his honesty and gave him a cd, and told him to start playing music again if its what he loves... and he only charged me 10 bucks for the cab ride. pretty awesome start to the day. then kathleen and i talked while i rode the max to the airport about how excited we were to surprise rachael and hang out at home together. steph beach picked me up from the airport and her parents cooked me a steak! soo delicious, i hadn't eaten much that day so it was especially delicious. sleeping at kathleen's was wonderful as usual, i discovered the best tea for sore throats -- throat coat, it was made for me, definitely hit the spot.

FRIDAY, rachael's birthday! i'm wanting so bad to just call and say HAPPY BIRTHDAY but i can't because i'm waiting til her class gets out at 2:45pm to surprise her in her dorm room that day. that was the plan... it almost got ruined when we arrived a bit early with decorations in hand to marylands campus... i was in disguise (brians zip-up generic green hoody), and kathleen and brian were walking with me-- all the sudden, kathleen spots RACHAEL! red alert! i saw her out of the corner of my eye and i turned around and walked away, pretending to be some random umd student. by some miracle, it worked, she didn't see me and she stopped to talk to kathleen and brian. i didn't turn around until i went behind some building (had no clue where i was), and called mike to come find me. then i watched jake do improv which was incredible! kathleen and brian caught up with me and then we went to set up rach's room... and while she knew a decorated room was coming, she had no idea i was behind the door... the surprise was fantastic, though a little scary because she basically went into shock and was about to fall over! hanging out in her room was the best.. lounging, talking, listening, playing songs and dancing. then out to dinner with her family, they paid for a bunch of us to eat at one of my favorite restaurants in little italy (amicci's) which was so sweet!

this is getting lengthy... friday night- slept at rach's, played the song i wrote for her, gave her laura's beautiful necklace, we both cried, or maybe just rach cried, it took me til saturday night to cry. it was nice to sit and talk and be close.

saturday-- house concert day! emailing people, buying groceries... kathleen comes over with more tea for me and punch for the party, and cheese and crackers and snacks! couldn't be happier, she even got firewood! rachael brings a salad over as i'm taking her birthday cake out of the oven. with kathleen rach and brian's help we transformed my living room and kitchen into a cozy concert venue with fire, and a kitchen/dance floor. everything was ready, so what if i said it would be ready at 7pm, and it took til about 8pm-- i'm the one that set it up, so there was no one above me to get upset that it didn't start "on time." the beauty of stress-free. food was delicious, i must say. and so was the birthday cake with icecream. i especially enjoyed jake adding green food coloring to his white mint chocolate chip icecream! he insisted. I had my guitar case open at the front and rach made a beautiful sign requesting that people leave $5 in the case.

i sang for hours and hours, and people sat and listened-- i was amazed the entire time that such a night was possible, but just kept singing through all the shock and gratitude. we had a few sing-a-longs and by the end of the night we were laying around talking as people slowly filed out. brett kathleen rach and i sat at the dinner table and talked about our lives, i'm so thankful for those people. and i counted the money... 138 dollars. when i added that to the $40 brian so generously gave, the $20 kathleen's mom pitched in because she couldn't make the show, and the $30 i got from CD sales at pepperjacks-- the grand total was $228 (remember the plane ticket cost $220) -- what a miracle!

then i got to stay up til 6 30 am talking, crying, and laughing til my stomach hurt with my two best girl friends in the world.

so when i say i'm rich... i really do feel rich! the experience of my life literally paid back, or paid off, or whatever the saying is. i have this gift of myself, and my music and my ears and my conversation (and in the case of this weekend: my cooking, my friends company, my friends' jewelry, my house...) i have these gifts to give wherever it is that i go, and i learned that starting with that bit of positivity and potential, giving what i do have, it just multiplies and feeds off itself and grows and reaches other people and creates community. so be RICH in your life by giving what you have. give it a shot! i'm so glad i did.

not so changed

i think before i came to college i had this notion that everything about me would change. i'd discover who i really was and it would freak me out and i'd go with it into the dark corners of my thoughts and desires and hopes and fears and sort it all out. like where i grew up didn't count because i wasn't on my own, or because my dad was a pastor so i grew up going to church... that ever since growing up i was sort of the effect of this environment around me, so once i go so far across the country, by myself, without anyone who knows me, all that stuff that brought me here would slowly vanish and be replaced with new thoughts, new beliefs, a new Jodi McLaren.

I'm sitting here doing some research about buddhism for a potential paper topic about freedom as defined in buddhism (and christianity, if i can fit both). it's a philosophy class so we're trying look at how different situations/groups define freedom. i found it interesting in the book sidhartha that he gets frustrated with this whole doctrine of escaping from yourself, and rejecting yourself in order to obtain this higher knowledge that is above you and your desires. this whole idea of escapism and getting away from yourself is really interesting, why would we be teaching this in our religions? why do we want to escape from ourselves? doesn't who we are count for anything?

i was in poetry class today and we read through this cheesy poem my teacher found on the internet using the metaphor of a merry-go-round being like life. and how everything is spinning around and life is so busy, but when you pray to God, you feel relief and thing's are still the same way as they were but you feel better... and then we read another poem by Tilke titled merry-go-round that described this carousel scene and just tried to illuminate it's nature... and one thing my teacher said that hit me was a word of advice: "let the object be itself first" before you develop some type of symbolism. I guess the feeling was that the first poem sort of USED this merry-go-round to convey an already developed message. whereas the other poem was able to have a message through it's description of the object itself.

i mean... if you think about your impressions of other people as your own personal poetry, it's interesting then too, to let people be themselves before you try to develop a message. there seems to already be a message somewhere in the complexities of our world.

i'm still the same person out here. i still get stuck thinking about these big ideas and i still struggle, and i still think struggling is so important. and i still love to laugh, and i still love to write music. and i'm really thankful for my upbringing, i wouldn't change a thing. how could i dare hope to change my past when this present moment holds so much fullness? it doesn't really make sense to me to want anything to go differently than it already has. it's nice to read a lot and listen a lot right now, i'm just taking it all in.


with love to those of you who thought to check back at this abandoned blog,

jo