Sometimes emotions can really mess you up. They alter your view on what's really actually happening in reality and take you into some sensical world where how you feel is the most important thing. I get like this every once in a while, and i've found myself in this altered reality the last couple of days. I'm going to blame it on the vast amount of marijuana smoke i probably breathed in at the Dave Matthews concert, but seeing as how i used to be like this all the time, makes me think that marijuana isn't my problem. solution maybe? just kidding. So why am I babbling? I don't know.

One thing I've learned from church is that worship can't be based on emotions, and I've been striving to really take hold of that the last couple of months/years. The whole idea of worship is an issue that i'm really passionate about and is something that leads a lot of people to not like me so much. We've been raised in a worship "scene" the last few years that makes it so hard to separate the worship from the emotion of worship. I admit, I was bad about this in my walk. It was all about how i felt and how much i perceived that i was getting out of these times in "worship". Actually, all i was doing was acting like i was "in worship" but really just allowing my emotions to take over for a little while and let me enter a world where everything is extreme. When you're emotional, everything is either really really good, or really really bad. There's no in between. You either really really felt like God was with you, or you really really didn't get anything out of it. It's been a hard lesson to learn. I've stumbled on it and fallen a whole lot. Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that worship does not need any emotion attached to it for it to be holy. You don't have to have had a great day or a bad day or good times or troubles. Some of the best "worship" times I've experienced are the days that I walked in to church or a friends' house or whatever and i wasn't feeling anything. I wasn't overly happy or sad, but i was just ok.

I've been trying to keep myself centered on this whole idea recently, and it's been nice. It's been great to not be to extreme one way or another. I'd like to act like the reason I strayed from these beliefs of centered-ness because of something besides a girl. I'd like to say it was not a girl i just met. I'd like to say it was not because of a girl i just met two days ago after a concert. I'd like to say she wasn't Bryan Vaughn's friend and I'd like to say I didn't drive her car all the way back to Lubbock after the concert. But, I'm guessing that you've picked up on the fact that I'm really saying all these things. About two minutes into our 5-hour conversation on the way home, I was excited. I like meeting new people, especially new people that i feel as though i shouldn't have met. At a concert with 15,000 people, I shouldn't have run into a friend from Jr High school. We shouldn't have driven all night (which is weird because I'm full of stupid ideas like that, but I was the only one who didn't want to do it for safety's sake). I shouldn't have left my friends and jumped in a car with two girls whom i've never met, nor know anything about.... I did though.

Girls have always gotten the best of me. I just can't fight it. I especially can't fight people who breathe a breath of excitement into my life. So here I am, driving 85mph out of Albuquerque with two girls i don't know, in a car that's not mine, at 1AM in the morning. The first few minutes of our conversation, everything just clicked. I'm a weird guy, I say a lot of weird things, I think weird things... so it's hard to find people that enjoy talking to me (a lot of people listen to me, but don't talk to me). Throughout the super long conversation I couldn't help but feel like i was talking to myself. It was crazy how much we had in common. We talked about music for what seemed like two hours and every band i mentioned, she knew and liked and could tell me her fav song from their respective albums. There aren't many out there who know who Ralph Wigam is, much less that he's my favorite Simpsons character... so when she recited several lines of his, I was blown away. This continued all night. I felt like there was just a deep instant connection between us and I didn't know what to do. There aren't a whole lot of things in life that make me nervous anymore. People are just not one of 'em. I've learned how to talk to people i don't know and how to make people like me initially. So when I meet someone who makes me nervous and elicits a need for the night to never be over, I get excited. Honestly, she rocked my world and I didn't know what to do. So the first time her hand touched mine (probably to hit me), I couldn't think of anywhere better to be. It felt like a minute, although I know it was only a second.

So I'm rambling now. But my point was to write down what i was feeling at this moment. I hadn't really intended to talk about her, or church, or really anything. I just wanted to talk about how once you get emotional, you lose sense of reality and centered-ness. I'm currently there. I don't know how to feel. We talked about exchanging phone numbers so we could text message each other this weekend while she was in Austin, but i got jittery at the end of the night and never got it done. So I'm bummed. I don't really believe that anything would ever really come of this. Honestly, she could do way better than me. I'm just emotion-driven at the moment depending on what song is playing or what's on TV. happy-sad-bummed-happy-excited-nervous... and it goes on and on.