Fleeting Fancies

I'm sitting in my laboratory.  I know that sounds either cooler or more maniacal than it really is.  I'm unable to move forward with my experiment because the lab is too crowded.  To put these in perpective, it is now 10PM on a Thursday night and my lab is too crowded?  I maintain these awful off-hour schedules in the lab in an attempt to avoid this during the day and yet it still happens.  I will be here until my morning class or til I screw something up and cannot complete the experiment.

But at least this down time gives me time to think.  I think, therefore I blog.  I think it's funny that the author of a book sitting next to me is Heavens.  I wonder if a book titled Optical Properties of Thin Films could really come from Heaven?  I must have close to a million of these fleeting, irrelevant thoughts per day.  Thoughts that I seldom dwell on for more than seconds and will likely never think again.

I believe I'm trying to draw a correlation to this behavior and a very common attitude I have towards girls.  We have all had a few big crushes, or at least I hope so for the sake of this argument.  By contrast to those thought-consuming, emotional hurricanes of the heart, we have also all probably had passing affections for a girl that come and go with no real foothold.  I am now proposing that there is a compromise of the two conditions of the mind and heart.

Disclaimer: the account I am about to share technically occurs after an unmentioned relationship.  I technically had a second girlfriend in 8th grade that I always forget about.  In fact I think it's okay to discount her.  The synopsis is brief and uninteresting.  Some other kid wrote her a note, pretending to be me and asking her out.  She said yes but I was unaware I was now allegedly dating her.  In any case, we "broke up" shortly after but it feels necessary to mention it at least once in my epic Chronicles of Romance.

At the end of my 8th grade year and nearing the beginning of my 9th grade year, I have distinct memories of liking a girl now and then.  My feelings were never strong enough to motivate me into action but I thought about it repeatedly in an on-again-off-again manner.  She was a very pretty girl, perhaps the prettiest I'd ever liked until college.  I think that's why I never fell hard for her though.  I could never get past how pretty she was in order to find out anything else about her.  I was not even sure she knew my name for a long time.  I knew hers though.  She had a name like a season and I remember my sister Casey asking me about my "this season" one day and I freaked out in embarrassment, mistaking her question to be a prodding one over the girl I liked.  However, despite liking her for her beauty for over two years.  I never thought seriously of dating her.  So therefore, the end of 8th, the entirety of 9th, and the first half of 10th grade were without any pursuits and hence without much drama.

I think it's odd how many times I liked a girl without ever wanting to pursue anything.  Or at least I didn't want it enough to risk rejection.  But what's the point?  Why did I waste my time if I knew all along nothing would happen.  It's no different than a celebrity crush, I guess.  You may really admire someone like a fan, but if you are never going to do anything about it then it is really just a distraction.  This collection of hours and hours of fleeting daydreams about girls I've never really known makes me feel unaccomplished and empty. 

I've given something called a "Need" talk in Young Life and this entry is starting to share some characteristics with one of those types of talks.  When I occupy my thoughts with fanciful imaginings of me and nonexistent dream girls I feel strangely let down in the end.  When I devote my thoughts to Jesus, I don't always come out of them feeling warm and fuzzy but at least I know they mean something.  It just goes to show, even as a Christian struggling to be in constant worship of Jesus Christ, I preoccupy myself too much on things that just don't matter...like girls.