YES.  THANK YOU, SIR.

Anyway, 2009 = great.  I give it an…A-.  Which, if you’re a solid B/B- student (moi), you’ll find that to be quite satisfactory indeed.

But alas, on to 2010.  Which sounds so futuristic, right? I feel like a Jetson already.  Where’s my jet pack?

Today, I want to share a Christmas story with you.  It’s a bad Christmas story.  No Santa, no quiet meditations on Luke 2 by a crackling fire.  This is the story of how it took us 32 hours to drive from Amarillo to Birmingham.

Now, it normally take about 14 hours (give or take, depending on whether you’re driving with a certified lunatic [my father] who will not allow passengers to use the restroom, or an infant) to make this drive.  We made it in about 15 on the way there.  And friends, 15 hours in the car is no small potatoes.  It’s very large potatoes.  It’s a large helping of potato salad.  But, dear Lord, if we only knew what waited for us on the other end of our trip.

Christmas Eve, 7pm: We finished loading up the Kia Rondo (that’s right, we rented) with the truly absurd amount of things we accumulated on our trip and said a teary farewell to my family.  Well, I did anyway.  We started driving down Hwy 287.  We usually through Oklahoma, but Oklahoma was closed.  The whole state.  Because of the Great Snowpocalypse of 2009.  So, we thought we’d be clever and go around it.

Don’t get clever with Mother Nature.  She’s not interested in your cleverness.

Christmas Eve, 10:30pm: Childress, TX.  We stop to use el bano and I suggest we “just top off the tank.”  This move solidifies my awesomeness for years to come.

Christmas Eve, 11pm: Traffic stops.

Let me pause here and mention that it is icy.  And it snowed the day before.  But there is no reason for alarm.

Christmas Day, 12:01am: We decide to scour Twitter to see if we can find like-minded individuals who might be further along in traffic that can give us a heads-up about what MUST be a wreck or something.  Here is what we find:

“@TxDOT we have been onHWY287 4 over 8hrs.  PLs send help,food,water ASAP.”

“Stuck on HWY 287 outside WFalls. We’re never getting out of here.”

“Can any1 see what’s going on with HWY 287?”

Despair.  Despair.  Despair.

We tweet with some people that are further up in traffic.  They have apparently been sitting in the EXACT same position for going on 8 hours already.  WHAT?  At this point, we raise our fists to the heavens and curse Doppler Dave for COMPLETELY NEGLECTING to inform ANYONE that HWY 287 is apparently closed for business.

Christmas Day, 2am: Not much has changed, except our spirits aren’t great.  We silently consider eating one another.

Christmas Day, 4am: We keep cranking the car, warming it up and then shutting her down again to conserve gas.

Christmas Day, 6am: We have to pee.  We are in the part of Texas where it’s flat.  If you pee, everyone around you is gonna get a show.

Christmas Day, 8am: We move!  Oh Sweet LORD!  We are movi-ok.  That’s it.  That’s all we moved.

Christmas Day, 10am: The infant we are traveling with (did you forget about the 4 month old newborn in the

backseat?) decides she’s angry.  And she’s had enough.  I envy her ability to throw a tantrum.  And to wear a diaper and pee at will.

Christmas Day, 2pm: We are moving.  We move.  Oh, I’m so happy.  We still have to pee.  So much.  Aaaaaand we stop.  About the length of a football field.  I now have the understanding that I will certainly die on this road that God forgot.

Christmas Day, 3pm: Ben gives in and trespasses on someone’s property to pee.  He returns as Moses would.

Christmas Day, 4pm: The family in front of us finds a dead mouse in the snow.  They play with it.  We contemplate eating them.

Christmas Day, 5pm: Great day in the morning.  We finally move.  There are so many cars abandoned on the road.  So many jack-knifed semis.  All Ben can say is: “It’s like the apocalypse.”   We learn around now that we were a part of a 50 mile long string of traffic.  We also learn that many people went crazy and took golf clubs to their side mirrors.  Again, I envy these people who operate with complete emotional abandon.

Christmas Day, 5:30pm: We reach a rest stop.  So has the rest of the world.  It’s a one bathroom.  The girl in front of me fights down her gag reflex.  I sacrifice dignity, hygiene, and self-respect and use what could loosely be referred to as a “restroom.”  There is freedom in an empty bladder.  I vow never to drink water or any liquid ever again.

Christmas Day, 6pm: We stop at some chicken place to eat.  We’re so hungry, yet dazed.  Are we still in Texas?  It’s been almost 24 hours and we’re not even out of Texas.  We eat chicken.  Holland gets pouty.

The Day After Christmas, 3am: We arrive home.  We stumble inside.  The baby is completely dazed.  She has no idea what’s become of her life.  We share her sentiment.

It’s a funny story now.  All told, it took us about 32 hours to make it all the way home.  And we really did not get the worst of it, as friends of ours traveled the same road the next day and flipped their car three times.  Awful.

The great part about this is that we can look back at Holland’s First Christmas and know with great certainty that she can’t possibly ever have a worse Christmas than her first.  There’s nowhere to go but up.

Knock on wood.

“Confession: Half the time, if not more than half, I am full of bullshit. I share what will make me look good. If I am vulnerable, I share just enough vulnerability to be perceived as vulnerable, rather than to actually humiliate myself so that others can talk more openly about their own insecurities. I also leak in my accomplishments, and I’ve become a master at it. I don’t even know I am doing it half the time, and the other half I strategically list my accomplishments so that they come off as dismissive or “in passing.”

Gah, if that didn’t cut me to the bone, I don’t know what could.  First of all, it’s incredibly refreshing to hear someone say that they are, in fact, full of BS.  Because, let’s be frank with one another, we all are.  Especially as believers.  I am so worried about coming off as (insert postmodern adjective here), that I’ve missed, oh, the whole point.  And hearing Don Miller, best-selling author who loves Jesus and whom I happen to admire both as a writer and a person, say that HE is full of BS is freeing to me.  Oh, he’s full of it, too? Huh.  How about that? Even when I am trying not be full of BS and be real, I’m only being real for the sake of hoping people will look at me and think, wow, Erin is so real. And now I’m sure you’re all thinking, yeah, dummy, no kidding.  You aren’t fooling anyone.

Either way, I wonder if you can even get past this.  Can you ever be real because you are real and not because you want people to think you are?  Can you ever be vulnerable because you want to help others and not because you want to show everyone how vulnerable you are?  Maybe it’s just me, but I wonder if I can.  I don’t think I can.  It’s like this one time at the Robinson’s house, we told the stories of the Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done.  And I told this story about how I joined in with a group of my peers in elementary school and tricked a retarded boy into sitting on a brownie.  And if you can believe it, that’s not actually the worst thing I’ve ever done (hard to swallow, but it’s true).  I’m sitting here, right now, thinking of the actual worst thing I’ve ever done and there’s NO WAY I’d share that on this blog or on the Robinson’s back deck or want to relive it in my head.  So now I’m even BS-ing myself.

So I had this conversation with my friend Jon today.  Jon and I are basically the same person in two different genders.  He is, undoubtedly, one of the coolest people I know, an excellent writer, and my only regret is that I didn’t meet him earlier so we could be better friends when we lived in the same town. Anyway, I feel God calling me to work with people who have AIDS.  Or something.  I have NO idea what that even looks like.  Does that mean I take meals to people who can’t because they have AIDS?  Does that mean Ben and I adopt an AIDS orphan?  Does that mean I need to clean bathrooms at Birmingham AIDS Outreach so someone else can be equipped to love?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  But either way, I feel this call to do something with people who are dying or have been affected by the AIDS epidemic.  Anyway, Jon was asking me about that, because, incidentally, he’s sort of been approached by some people to get involved in that way as well (because we are the same person).  And I started thinking about why I feel God’s called me to this.  Why don’t I care about old people?  Or people with diabetes?  I need to be doing something with a cause that is socially relevant so I can be compassionately hip?  Is it because I’m bored?  Because I feel like I NEED to do something or Jesus won’t love me?  What is my motive?  Are they even in the same country as “pure”?  And should I even been THINKING about this crap, because people just need to be loved and cared for and my motives should be secondary to someone getting sponsored by Compassion or getting a meal because their son just had brain surgery.  Shouldn’t it?  Wasn’t it Paul that said I don’t care what your motives are for preaching the gospel, I’m just glad the gospel getting preached (I’m clearly paraphrasing)?

I would never (in a million years) reveal my flaws unless they were going to make you like me more.  WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT I’M DOING NOW.  IT CAN’T BE STOPPED.  Because what would you think of me?  Did I reveal too much?  Was I inappropriate?  More than likely, yes.  Which would cause you to feel uncomfortable around me and dislike me.  And I so desperately need you to like me.

This is all really convoluted and I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say, other than I identify with Mr. Miller in that I’m full of BS.  And I don’t want to be.  It’s sort of like your wedding day.  I have pictures of my wedding up all over my house.  And I look awesome in them.  A real makeup artist did my makeup.  Friends that know their way around a straightening iron did my hair.  It’s shockingly not in a ponytail.  I’m about 45 pounds lighter and am wearing some gravity-defying undergarments.  I’m wearing high heels, for crying out loud.  But that’s not what I look like.  That was the best version of myself.   And I even had a little moment of “Oh, Erin.  She keeps it real” when I took OFF my high heels and put on my flip-flops during the reception.  What a kook!  I spent the day BS-ing.  Actually, I spent about 6 hours BS-ing.  By the time Ben and I got to the hotel room, I’d already spilled sweet potatoes on my wedding dress.  Just goes to show you can’t keep BS-ing for that long.

I guess the moral is that just like I have an amazing husband who can somehow connect the dots from the day we got married to the nightmare that he awakens to every morning, I am also surrounded by people and a Savior who can look through my BS and still see me, crappy me, that is incredibly insecure about…oh…everything, and care about me and love me in spite of myself.  And there is grace for me, even in my incredibly selfish inner turmoil-ish monologue about how stupid and ridiculous I am.  I know there are people out there who are not BS-ers (I know a few of them) and I salute you.

Now tell me your secret.

Some people (I won’t say who) might think (are fixated on the fact) that Holls looks more like Ben (they are obviously wrong).  And some people might know that she looks like me.  And I can’t help it that they are right.

I have no idea why I get incredibly offended when people say she looks like Ben.  Clearly, she is half of him, so it stands to reason that she might look at least a little bit like him.  But it irks me.  There is no current research being done on my craziness.

But anyway, deciphering who a baby looks more like is not mere guesswork.  Through the miracle of technology, you can see our own baby pictures and decide for yourself.  And I’m provided you with just that opportunity.  Lucky you.

So, here’s the deal.  Below are two pictures (Picture A and Picture B).  One picture is of Ben, and one is of me; I won’t tell you which (although you will obviously choose me).  Your job is to choose which picture looks more like Holls (Picture C).  Leave a comment with your now highly formed opinion and we’ll see who wins.  I’ll even randomly choose a comment-or and write a post about how awesome they are.  I swear.  Even if they vote against me (which they will obviously not do, since it flies in the face of logic and common sense).

So…what do you think?

This is Picture A. ↑

This is Picture B.  ↑

And here is Picture C.  ↑

And here’s another pic of Holls, closer to the time the other pics were taken (Picture D), just to be sure.  ↑

Ok.  Vote away.

Anyway, he also writes for his place of business, the McWane Science Center, where he manages space and technology. He’s posted his most recent musing on his personal blog, and it’s great. Check it out.

Leave a comment, and together, maybe we can encourage him to blarg more! Because I need to know more about robots and NASA. And you do too!