Yes or no?

Rules:
1. You can ONLY answer Yes or No!
2. You are NOT ALLOWED to explain ANYTHING unless someone messages or comments you and Asks!

Now, here's what you're supposed to do... And please do not spoil the Fun. Copy and paste this into your notes, delete my answers, type in your answers and tag as many of your friends as you'd like to. Then see what happens.

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Kissed any one of your Facebook friends? Yes

Been arrested? No

Kissed someone you didn't like? Yes

Fell in love with one of your facebook friends? Yes

Kissed in the rain? Yes

Fallen asleep at work/school? Yes

Has someone borrowed money from you and not paid it back? Yes

Ran a red light? No

Been suspended from school? Yes

Totaled your car/motorbike in an accident? No

Been fired from a job? Yes

Done something you told yourself you wouldn't? Yes

Been in a near fatal accident? No

Laughed until something you were drinking came out your nose? Yes

Sang in the shower? Yes

Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes? Yes

Broken a bone? Yes

Working your dream job? No

Blacked out from drinking? Yes

Played a prank on someone? Yes

Felt like killing someone? No

Made your girlfriend/boyfriend cry? Yes

Shot a gun? No

Donated Blood? Yes

Eaten Shrimp? Yes

Eaten cheesecake? Yes

Still in love with someone from your past? No

Think about the future? Yes

Believe in love? Yes

Sleep on a certain side of the bed? Yes

Talk in your sleep? No

Laughed until you peed your pants? Yes

Play/Played a musical instrument? Yes

Lived outside of the country? Yes

Gone Sky Diving? No

Gone Para sailing? No

Been skinny dipping? Yes

Lived in 3 or more states? Yes

Afraid of heights? Yes

Dated someone longer than you should have? Yes

Pierced a body part? Yes

Relationships, trust, and forgiveness

(Ed. Note: Bear with me here, since this is shaping up to be an oddly academic discussion of personal matters. Feel free to read between the lines as necessary.)

Over the course of my life, I've heard countless people say that the cornerstone of a good relationship is trust. As a corollary of that rule, it should follow that a lack of trust means that a relationship is not good. That seems like pure, mathematical, Socratic logic, right?

What does it mean, then, if it's not a question of trusting the other person -- you just don't really care what he or she does? Or, maybe more precisely, you only care what he or she does to the extent that it directly affects you? My current hypothesis is that, under those circumstances, it's not precisely a bad relationship -- it's more likely that it's not really a relationship at all.

And then, there's the whole interplay between trust and forgiveness. If you think you have forgiven someone for hurting you in the past, but you don't know if you can trust them not to hurt you again, have you really forgiven them? Based on the above, again my hypothesis is no -- it's not really forgiveness as much as it's acceptance. But maybe that's too fine a line to draw. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.

Playground Swing

Lately, everything in my life is so fraught with meaning, and everywhere I look, I encounter so many responsibilities and commitments and obligations. It's enough to make me want to crawl into bed, pull the blanket up over my head, and not come out for a week.

When I was in Florida a couple of weeks ago, I took a break from my sister and the baby and spent a beautiful afternoon in the park with my friends and their kids. Somehow, I found myself sitting in a playground swing for the first time in years, possibly decades. I slowly started swinging. The higher the swing climbed, the more exhiliratingly free I felt. My worries and the tasks of the day seemed to fade into the distance as I swung back and forth, and the only things remaining in my consciousness were these bits and pieces of a poem from my childhood -- something about going up in a swing, up in the air so blue. For a moment, I was no longer the adult me -- instead I had returned to childhood -- innocence, freedom, and endless possibilities.

Sadly, there came a time when I had to come back to earth, literally and figuratively. But I'm still trying to somehow keep my grasp on that feeling.

Love

I've been spending this week looking into my new nephew's giant navy blue eyes and welcoming him into the world. He's only a week old, and already I love this little boy so much. Not just because he's part my sister and part her boyfriend -- or part my mom and my dad and my grandparents -- but because he's his own brand new little person, unique from everyone who has been here before or will be here afterwards.

I told him yesterday that I couldn't love him more if he had come from my own body -- which is completely true. I could have dozens of my own children, hundreds of nieces and nephews and cousins, and my friends could have thousands of babies, and I would still find it easy to love each of them limitlessly. That's because love itself is limitless.

But love is also timeless -- a hard truth that I learned because of my mom's death. On the plane, I was re-reading one of my favorite books from my childhood -- A Wrinkle in Time -- and I was struck by that very concept. For those who know the plot of the book, you know the basics. But one of the characters says "[T]he things that are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal." I've thought about that quote, and I'm sure that it can be interpreted in a thousand ways, with religious and philosophical and god-knows-what-other-kind-of overtones -- but to me, it means that love is infinite, plain and simple.