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[Announcement] A beginning.

….how my desk looked once.

Now’s as good a time as any to announce publicly that my days at the desk to your left – second row, second from left in the Port Richey newsroom of the Tampa Bay Times – are numbered.

After working for five years and three months as a staff writer for the Tampa Bay Times, formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times, I am resigning.

And I definitely bawled when I broke the news to my editor.

But this is not an end, as much as it’s a beginning.

The beginning of a new phase of my relationship with the Times, for which I wrote freelance for three and a half years before I joined the staff in 2007, and for which I’ll write freelance again.

It’s also the beginning of professionally doing the other half of what I do. I’ll work my regular schedule at the Times through Fri., Nov. 9 and beginning Nov. 13, I’ll work full time as a counselor.

I’ll also write still.

And study for comps (the exam I’ll have to pass in order to graduate).

….how my desk usually looks.

Write some more.

Finish a book proposal.

Write more still.

And cherish the memories I made while working at three different Times desks (one in Tampa, one in Wesley Chapel and one in Port Richey) in five years.

Memories I’ll share in another post sometime next week. Stay tuned. 🙂

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[“Guest” Post Series] Relationship Tips: #4 – It isn’t your job to entertain your significant other.

Today’s “guest” blogger is me. ‘Cause I ran outta guests.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand next to my bed. Happy to hear from him, I answered. But not feeling so well, I was mellow and not much in the mood for talking.

“I’m really sorry I’m so boring tonight,” I told him.

He – then the guy in my life – paused thoughtfully. When he spoke, he said something I didn’t expect:

“I didn’t know it was your job to entertain me. …I just want to talk to you.”

When he said it, I realized a meaningful relationship isn’t based on how entertained you are by the person, or how happy the person makes you. I also realized in a relationship worth your time, you won’t be judged or dumped because you’re “boring” sometimes, or because you can’t make the other person happy.

Why?

Because in a good relationship, it is not your job to entertain your significant other.

If it were, your relationship would be based on a “friendship of utility,” in which “the affection is based on the benefit or use the friends derive from the relationship.”

It is not your job to make him or her happy.

If it were, your relationship would be based on a “pleasant friendship,” in which “the basis of affection is the pleasure one gets out of the relationship.”

There is another kind of friendship on which a relationship might be based – one that is deeper. It doesn’t require your relationship to end if one of you gets boring. It doesn’t require you to be responsible for the other person’s feelings. It’s a “virtuous friendship,” in which “the two friends are united not in self-interest but in the pursuit of a common goal: the good life, moral life that is found in virtue.”

A virtuous friendship is the kind that takes the pressure off. The kind that makes a marriage.

“The problem with useful and pleasant friendships is that the emphasis is on what I get out of the relationship. However, in the virtuous friendship the two friends are committed to pursuing something outside themselves, something that goes beyond each of their own self interests. And it is this higher good that united them in friendship.”

It is this higher good for which we all ought to aim.

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Quoted material above comes from Men, Women and the Mystery of Love by Edward Sri. The three kinds of friendship come from the philosophy of Aristotle.

Relationship Tips is a series of guest posts (except for this one, lol). Click here to read all the posts in the series.

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Why I love Halloween (a repost).

One Halloween, my dad dumped a giant bag of fun size candy bars into a giant bowl. I peered out the window.

“I wonder when trick-or-treaters will get here,” I thought out loud, watching my neighbor – a space alien that night – decorate a tent in her driveway across the street. “I wonder how many we’ll get!”

When the kids finally came, clad in costumes like Spongebob and ninja and princess, I reached into the bowl of candy and tossed some of it into their plastic pumpkins and pillow cases. They thanked me, mostly, and their parents waved. And between each ring of the doorbell, I really couldn’t contain my excitement.

I love Halloween. I always have. As an an adult, I have figured out why.

As a kid, I didn’t care much for the candy (Twix was a rare exception.), but the experience made me glow. I’d dress up like a gypsy, a witch or a cowgirl and traipse around suburbia knocking on doors, trick-or-treating. Something in the sometimes crisp Florida fall air and the rubbing elbows in the streets with kids and parents I’d otherwise never meet made me giddy. For a night – just one – we’d all let down our guard.

As a trick-or-treater, I’d wave at people I’d never met. I’d skip across streets and when cars came by, their drivers would smile and stop until we’d crossed. As an adult, I watch my quiet neighborhood come to life. I embrace the one night suburbia welcomes the stranger.

That’s why I love Halloween.

In a neighborhood of folks who are separated from nameless neighbors by fences and closed garage doors, everything changes for a night. We don’t get suspicious when someone we don’t recognize walks past our houses. We don’t yell at them if they cross the grass. We invite them to our homes. And then we give them things.

Imagine a world where every day felt like that.

One where we wouldn’t require strangers to wear masks before we welcome them.

One where it doesn’t take candy to get them to come.

If only every day could be more like Halloween.

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[Q&A – Dating] What does it really mean when she (or he) says “we should just be friends?”

The Q: From a guy, about a girl: “At first she seemed very interested. Then somehow, she got scared or had second thoughts or something. I must have come on too strong. … If she says she wants to be ‘just friends’ right now, does that mean I have to not talk to her any more?” -Michael*

The A: There are two versions of my answer to this question. First, the long one: One of my favorite quotes, from George Bernard Shaw, says “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

My hunch is that’s what’s happened here.

This reminds me of the time I let a guy take me out twice and after date two, I knew: I couldn’t be more than his friend. Afraid to hurt his feelings, I dropped a gentle hint or two, intending to imply the following:

I definitely don’t want to date you.

He didn’t pick up what I tried to put down. And that I expected him to is absurd, because people can’t read minds. But the point is this: explicit communication is key. We can’t assume somebody knows exactly what we mean if we haven’t told them exactly what we mean.

And this is not to say Michael’s girl doesn’t want to date him. It’s to say that as far as Michael’s concerned, she hasn’t told him exactly what she means.

And since I’m not her, I can’t say for sure whether “I want to be ‘just friends’ right now” means she doesn’t want to hear from him. Which is why this is my short answer:

Ask her the same question.

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Q&A is an occasional feature. If you have a Q, I can come up with an A (and if I don’t have an A, I’ll find somebody who does). To submit a question, email me at arleenwrites@gmail.com or leave it in the comments. No topic is taboo (although I can’t promise I will answer every question).

*Real person, fake name.

Click here to read all the posts in this series.

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[Guest Post Series] Relationship Tips: #3 – Imitate Christ: Love requires us to take blows.

Guest blogger Edmund and his family.

There is an old Jewish story of a rabbi who married the naggiest of women. Day after day she tormented him with her sharp tongue. After many years, his neighbors knew his saintly patience well.

One day a woman asked, “How can you be so patient with such a wicked wife?”

“It must be God’s will,” replied the old rabbi.

“Nonsense!” gasped the woman, “How could God have willed that a holy man like you be plagued by such a scoundrel?”

“Common sense tells me so. What if my wife had married an impatient man instead? He certainly would have divorced her and ruined her life! So you can see God’s wisdom in giving her to me, who can tolerate her nagging.”

As Christ loves the Church

In Ephesians, St. Paul admonishes married men to “love your wives, even as Christ loves the Church and handed himself over for her” and asks wives to “be subordinate to your husbands” (Ephesians 5:25).

In long lasting relationships, you certainly become intimately familiar with your significant other’s imperfections, putting you on the receiving end of those imperfections. In long lasting relationships, you certainly become intimately familiar with your significant other’s faults. But if to be a husband is to love as Christ loved the Church, then love requires a martyrdom for the good of the beloved.

The Princess, the Knight and the Dragon

People in love, listen up: this isn’t your normal fairy tale. The knight needs to slay the dragon, but so does the princess. We all have dragons – impatience, laziness, selfishness – these are our faults and weaknesses. The dragon does not live outside the castle walls, but within. And Satan feeds the dragons. We do not battle flesh and blood, but the dark powers of this world (Ephesians 6:12) who have bastions within our minds screaming “MY will be done.”

The only sword heavy enough to slay the dragon is the same sword Jesus used to defeat the soldiers that scourged him – total selfless love. Just as selfless love led Jesus to the pillar he was scourged on to defeat sin, and the cross on which he trampled death. In this sign, you too shall conquer.

Scourged in Relationship

To lay down your life would be easy enough. To take a bullet or blow from an aggressor would be over in a flash. But marriage is the long haul of selfless-love. Want to lay down your life? What about taking the tearing of sarcasm? What about suffering the calm agitation of laziness or the whips of impatience? What about lovingly enduring ingratitude and lack of appreciation?

Learn from Christ. The fallen imperfections of your lover are the saving scourges of your marriage. Only by enduring them with charity, humility, and patience will you win your bride, and at the same time yourself, from the clutches of the enemy. Defeat your lover’s dragons, so you can present him/her “without spot or wrinkle…that she might be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:27)

The mystery of it all is that by winning your spouse you are winning yourself – for he who loves his wife loves himself. (Ephesians 5:28) Conquer your dragons.

About the blogger: Edmund Mitchell is a Catholic youth minister with a passion for Jesus, evangelization, and rugby – especially when all three go together. For now he enjoys being a Catholic hipster, until too many people start enjoying it with him, then he’ll probably go mainstream. Edmund works in ministry with his pregnant wife (Danielle) and 5 month old (Ignatius) in Toledo, Ohio. Edmund and Danielle have been married for one year and five months. He blogs over at CatholicYouthMinister.wordpress.com and tweets at https://twitter.com/EdmundMitchell.

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Relationship Tips is a series of guest posts. Click here to read all the posts in the series.