Dear God.

Hi, God. I have slept little this past week. I am hungry, and once again I cannot sleep. It is like all I think about is culture, and New Zillund, and what makes everything the way it is. I plan university timetables and analyse the sexual politics of strangers at 3am. I read North and South and get progressively worse at empathy. This last week I have slid down hills in the dark, watched a boat in the middle of the ocean and thought it looked very much like a house. I have drunk cocktails from teapots and ran so fast I felt like I couldn't breathe, just to avoid paying a ten dollar door charge. I have even been abrupt to strangers! Well, one stranger. And he was drunk. But I normally find it very hard to be abrupt to strangers.


God, it is not that I am sick of thinking about the world. It is that I have been analysing how this thinking is sometimes detrimental to my interactions. My thinking is going so fast that my mouth cannot keep up with it. It has been suggested I talk so fast that it is clear I do not actually want people to understand me, and I have been told, repeatedly, that that is a very rude thing to do, young lady. I think so fast that my pen cannot keep up. In turn, my handwriting is so bad that even high school boys scorn it, and teachers have suggested I would fail because of it. I think so fast and so much that I cannot sleep. This is why I am on here. I also think fast and find everything so interesting that I have a bad attention span and get easily distracted. Focus is an issue. I am not saying any of this thinking is overly brilliant (there's my kiwi disclaimer, I don't want to be a tall poppy, now) but that it is just a consequence of a continually ticking brain. A lot of my thinking is menial, so very very practical, things to do and orders to do them in, but more so it is thinking about a lot of stuff to do with the identity and culture of New Zealand. I especially think a lot about how I want to speak better, to talk properly, but I am not quite sure how, as I am so entrenched in my own culture.


It frustrates me that I am so obsessed with my own country, God. It does because it means I could do the same to anywhere else. It frustrates me, a little, that I have not really left it, yet, and while I am the master of my own soul, external factors have also contributed to me not having really experienced the wider world, just yet. There will be a time. I just feel like it needs to be soon in order to not lose perspective. I fear doing a degree that is inherently Kiwi because I am so interested in it, when really I am just as fascinated with American culture, but it is slightly more far away. I am intrigued with everything, and my world, but my reality is very New Zealand which means I tend to pursue it relentlessly.


If I were honest, and I try to be, I would admit that I think a lot about myself. New Zealand is a part of myseld, and by understanding New Zealand, I understand how I am, well, me. I am constantly seeking to understand. I want to know! Everything! But I am so fascinated with identity and culture that it becomes self-obsessed. What makes us human? What makes me a New Zealander? What is cool? Elysia and I had an amazing chat about the concept of cool the other day. But my constant thinking, the daily grind of the mind doing this can be self-destructive, even self-obsessed. That is an embarrassing thing to admit on the internet.


You see, God, I am ashamed of myself this year. Especially when talking to you. Because, at the start of the year, I feel, I think, that my eyes were re-opened and re-reminded about others, others, others, poor, love, disenfranchised, marginalised, alongsiding, others, others, others. That stuff was deep in my heart, I cried! I cried in that lecture. And the next one. Now it sits in the back of my head, my 'back brain' as Marty liked to call it, the subconscious. Instead of being so pressing, pressing, pressing, like I feel it was to Jesus, it just is this good knowledge I have about what I ought to do. I could reason for hours, to myself, that I have little opportunity for it, at the moment, due to a million different factors. Perhaps that is true. Perhaps it is not true. Either way, it is an excuse.


God, I feel like this all will be okay if next year I apply this theology proper. Right now I am studying applying theology. Is real life when I apply it? I feel like this is not real life. But I cannot rest with the promise of next year. Next, next, later. Shakespeare said: 'I do not know why yet, I live to say, this things to do, since I have cause, and will, and strength, and means to do it.' That quote lives in my head. I do worry a lot. But it is always about myself. My own future, my own money issues, housing issues, job issues. How pathetic. 


I do not like this post because I have not come to any conclusions. One of the things I loved about exams was the buzz of speed-writing that conclusion, going, HECK YES I NAILED THAT ESSAY and that conclusion is so true because it has been argued. Conclusions conclusions.


I am ashamed to post this but I will anyway.
Going to Hawke's Bay is good for me because its not about me, at all. It is all about the family unit, and the church unit, and the town and the society unit and the pack mentality. The talk is of the Hawke's Bay unit. There is no space for thinking about myself. I don't remember thinking about myself much until this year. I can hear my grandfather saying 'the devil finds work for idle hands.' Yeah, idle hands leads to busy brains. Whatever. 


God, why was there an earthquake? Why did I not talk to the sad-faced man sitting on the fence with a trolley and a sleeping bag? Oh yes, God, I smiled at him, and he smiled back. I gave him a really big smile with teeth and crinkly eyes: I wanted to make him happy! But God, why did I just walk home and not talk to him? Have I succumbed to the 'there's nothing you can do' bullshit? Maybe I have. Sorry, God. Tomorrow is a new day. God, they say you speak in the stillness. So God, I'm going to have to ask you to turn off my brain. God, why do you keep providing me with finances? God, I would like to go to college in America. Not funny, Sonya. God, I'm sorry for not trusting You. But I have such a part to play.


I'm so selfish. Bye God. I'll see you tomorrow? I think we need a proper date. Let's just pretend we're a daily couple going through the daily grind and getting a bit self-centred. No, not you of course! You probably don't even have a word for self, in whatever your language is. Do you have a language? But say we were a couple, and that a date is what we need to remind each other (Read: me) of the beauty of the OTHER. I know this is a terrible analogy, cheesy, incorrect on a theological level and horrible. But I am human, God. And I'm sick of thinking.


Okay, God, I'm out. I'm sorry for being selfish. It's all about you, and others, eh. Oh I can write those words so easily.