So uncomfortably close.

I am pulling into a parking lot in front of a dorm and of course there is a car blocking me, which is to say there are students sitting and diddling on their phones and laughing and looking around, like, What? This is a parking lot and we're parked. Except you are totally blocking me from pulling around so I have to back up like a garbage truck in a straight line. I can feel myself so close to angry about this, genuinely irritated and even dangerously close to doing something productive like banging my steering wheel because, dumb dumb dumb people in cars.

[showmyads]

In the trunk of my car are two bags of clothes for a student who has none. This student comes from a place with a different climate than here. There are no warm clothes in this student's wardrobe nor is their support from parents to pay their tuition or to help the student in anyway. I crowdsourced some clothes and a sweet mama friend of mine gifted two garbage bags brimming with perfectly lovely threads. In a matter of a day, I am able to bring this student some warmth.

Here I am out in the car with my bags of goodwill, getting hopping mad at people I don't know, because they are unwittingly Getting in the Way of my Trying to do Good Here, People.

This is the staggeringly sobering thing about being human. How close we are at any given moment from doing the right thing and doing the totally evil thing. How thin is this ice upon which I skate gracefully or break through, plummeting into freezing darkness.

Lately the love for my children is making me swollen. Like my skin can't actually contain my love for being with them. And yet sometimes we are just driving home from getting the car washed where we watched and marveled at how the soapy spray of jet-suds cloaked our car and washed us clean, and one starts to bicker with the other in the backseat and heaven forbid the other lets it go and suddenly my head is ready to spin Exorcist-style and stuff is just gonna get real right now, y'all. Words are going to be expressed and not ignored.

How was Peter one day begging for the Savior not to leave him and the next totally stunned into denial of even knowing the man? How do I eat like a clean foods advocate and run like a maniac on the treadmill and then stand on the scale and feel total ill will toward my body?

We hover, we ride fences, we flirt with the lines of goodness and malice and we know how powerful and also how powerless we are from moment to moment to keep ourselves from our very selves.

Vows not seen in the NYT

The only way to read the Sunday NYT is to dart right for the Sunday Styles section. Otherwise you are dead inside or you are illiterate, or possibly both. Maybe you take a quick scan of whether or not you know anyone in the "Vows" pages. (I never do.)(I was born in the Midwest.)(I think these parenthetical facts are related.) Maybe you snicker at the brazen journalist who capped off the profile on one couple-to-be-wed, "The groom's previous two marriages ended in divorce." What would the hashtag for that one be? #bestwishes #threesacharm These little profiles are always so unapologetically namedroppy and vomitus. Yet they are also a rare celebration of union, against the wails of the thousands who have lost loved ones in the Phillippines this week, against the din of celebrity break-ups of the hour.

But what if they told the real story, gave us the real scoop. Here's how ours would read:

Kendra Stanton, the daughter of a redheaded mother and a silver-haired father, was married on Sunday to John Lee, the son of Mija and Jae. None of the parents have amassed great fortunes due to their Ivy league educations, though if filing taxes on time made one a rock star, these people would be a bunch of Mick Jaggers. In fairness, Kendra's father is a lawyer but prefers to reference his glory days working the steampress at Schoolbells school uniform suppliers, when he was 18.

Ms. Stanton, 24, is a serial jobhopper who is not living up to her potential and is accruing credit card debt rapidly, probably because she keeps reinvesting her profits from her part-time retail job into her wardrobe since her full-time job working with at-risk youth is making her depressed about the state of humanity. It's better than eating her feelings, because, hello, wedding dress fitting in two days! She graduated magna cum laude from a small liberal arts college on a hill that is highly obscure. She no longer remembers her major. Her parents are no longer married. They have never taken her to Europe. She doesn't know it yet but she will not be taken off the waitlist at her top law school, so she won't go after all.

Mr. Lee, 26, is an anomaly: a male, Canadian-born Korean social worker who likes fashion, frisbee and football and loves Jesus. He might actually be the only one. Like, on earth. He earned his MSW from a college that happens to be all-women for undergraduate, which was not as much of a problem as one would imagine. In his own undergraduate years, he was not the most stunning student. He did swim all four years and has the wristwatch to prove it. His parents own a dental lab, which is a useful thing for a variety of reasons, particularly for making free mouthguards for future daughters-in-law who develop TMJ for unknown reasons.

5 Magnificent Mistakes I made in my Twenties #definingdecade

My students are all reading The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Nowmostly because it is an assigned text for a psych course, but also because maybe the twenties are the new Freakonomics, the new Malcolm Gladwell, the new Rachael Ray all wrapped up in bacon and birthday cake. I don't know. The twenties are trending, though, am I right? I haven't read The Defining Decade and I'm probably missing out on a TED talk that summarizes it, but something tells me it won't be groundbreaking for me. Because I spend much of my day with people on the fringes or well entrenched in their twenties. Because I have experienced the twenties, the whole decade of them, and I've lived to tell about them, which makes me an expert, obviiiiousssslyyyyy.

If Dr. Meg Jay is right and the decisions made and relationships forged in the twenties are clutch and will dictate the failures and successes of the future, then let us ponder the magnificent mistakes by yours truly in her twenties?

1. I made the magnificent mistake of having good health insurance.

Oh yeah. That non-profit I worked at right out of college? It took away my soul and good nature but boy was that health insurance top rate. So good, in fact, that when I did the responsible thing of going to the dentist, they took one look at my loaded dental plan and prescribed me 11 fillings for the cavities I didn't have. They were just the beginnings of cavities, so future dentists have told me. Nevermind that I'd never had a cavity before. Nevermind that I didn't know what it was to "get a second opinion." I always wanted to know what having my skull drilled was like....

2. I married my college sweetheart.

And because we never broke up prior to getting married, I never had a chance to figure out if I was just psychotic *with him* or if it was just a part of my general charms and abilities that would emerge in any romantic relationship.

3. I believed all the nice things people said about me in college.

I had emerged from undergraduate actually buying that I had unique skills that companies would be falling over themselves to bring aboard to finally, finally complete their puzzle and achieve sustainable success, if only for my winning and unmatched copyediting abilities! Then I entered a world of Working People at Real Jobs that sort of frowned upon the notion of a siesta. I forgot that life wasn't grading on the A-F scale, but rather the Hired-or-Fired scale. I somehow missed the memo that I still had crazy copious volumes to learn about maturity and comporting self and doing a solid job.

4. I cried on my 26th birthday because it seemed too old to not have started my family yet.

Because who does that?

5. I spent six months studying to be a financial advisor and an insurance salesperson.

I failed. Really magnificently, I failed. I learned tons about self sabotage and blocking out every reasonable voice that tells you gently that maybe they saw you more doing something in the humanities? I threw away hundreds if not thousands of dollars and felt worthless and directionless and angry. And because of my spiritual and emotional poverty, I was able to hear the voice of God more clearly, calling me home. Which is why I'm so grateful for the twenties. The defining decade. The very definition of how faith broke down the doors to my heart and set me sailing on a sea of redemption. The magnificently mistaken twenties. Thank you, Lord, for them. Amen.