I'll be the first one to admit it:  I'm high-strung.  I'm a redhead – what do you expect?

And right now, I'm restless.  Like, jump-out-of-my-skin-and-bounce-around-like-a-Mexican-jumping-bean restless.

I was cutting up raw chicken breast tonight while listening to some new music on my iPod.  I don't know if it was the song or the act, but suddenly my knife started moving more forcefully.  I was slicing away at my inadequacies.  Splicing my insecurities.  Tearing apart any semblance of patience I might be feigning.  I'm good at that, because it fools people into thinking I'm content.  I'm never content, but it makes other people feel more comfortable if I act like I am.

Basically, it all bottom lines into the fact that I need to be doing more.

I've never been one to sit down and shut up.  My biggest pet peeve is when people tell me to calm down.  They do it a lot.  Consequently, I'm annoyed a lot.  I can't.

But now, more than ever before, I want to put this rapidly boiling, almost torturous energy to good use.  What I'm doing now isn't enough anymore.  I don't want my greatest accomplishment for the week to be leading worship with Ginger in church or drawing out that one timing problem in the latest play I'm directing.  I want those things to just be par for the course.  (Interestingly, at 25 years old, I just now realized that saying is probably a golf analogy.  Huh!)  I've never been an isolationist, Emily Dickinson-like writer, and now that, in essence, Spring Is Back and So Am I, I yearn to be doing so much more than just sitting by the lake at my apartment or with a chai at Starbucks scribbling random, usually incoherent musings into my tablet (like this one).  It's fun and all, but who does it really benefit?  Who does it entertain?  Who does it bring back to life?  I want everything I write to fill everyone who hears or reads it with the warm reassurance and hope that only laughter can.  (Wow, suddenly I feel very trite.  Hopefully it's just the inadequacy at usual.  Par for the course, even!)

My friends often preach at me that being a Christian means that I should be content.  Settled.  Placated.  Happy, even, in the status quo.  I say that's rubbish.  For me, contentment usually breeds complacency as a prepubescent teenager, and complacency is worse than death in my eyes.  I don't think I'll ever be content, because, let's face it, another second is coming up right now, and I need to be doing something with it!

I actually disagree strongly that being a Christian means being content.  They're not mutually exclusive, of course, but they certainly don't go hand-in-hand.  Peace? Sure.  Assurance?  Absolutely.  Personally, I mostly like the fact that I have a Permanent Best Friend and also Someone Who Really Knows Better Than I Do (and Who will let me in on the secret if I ask!).  But I don't know how anyone can call themselves a Christian and be content – complacent, I really mean –about the status quo.  Maybe it's a recipe for all kinds of exhaustion, but I don't care.  I need to be doing more.  Writing more.  Reaching more.  Ministering to more.

Anyway, like I was saying:  I'm high-strung.  Always have been.  (And, apparently, easily distracted.  Big surprise.)  You probably wouldn't know it to look at me, though, because I'm also painfully shy when I first meet someone new.  (Remember that whole "inadequacy" thing?  Yeah.  It's a bugger.)  I'm the sneaky kind of high-strung – yes, there is such a thing!  I'll get to know someone new for several months, during which time they'll quite happily deduce that I am quiet, demure, and even occasionally (haha) sweet.  Oh yeah, the fact that I'm tiny doesn't help this much.  Then, suddenly, just when they start feeling that smugness of I Figured Her Out, BAM!  My brain switches into "Okay, I Trust You Enough" mode and they find out the Awful Truth:  I'm higher-strung than most kites.  It's actually kind of fun sometimes – for me, anyway.

And no, I don't use lame metaphors like that very often, so put your furrowed brows away, please.

I'm definitely the Black Sheep of my family.  My mother hates it when I say that, but it's true.  My mother, incidentally, is one of the people who most often tells me to "calm down!"  I'm too intense for her – WAY too excitable and with far too much energy.  It overwhelms her.  She says I should channel it into something productive.  But what fun would that be?!

Actually, it probably wouldn't be too bad at this point.  Don't know if I could channel it all into once place, though.  Definitely not.  Maybe the majority of it – if that place were a tv show, perhaps.  But, c'mon, I still have friends who (I hope) would be significantly more bored if I weren't around!

Yeah, right.  I'm not stupid.  I know they mainly just put up with me in the vain hope that I'll tire myself out eventually and go home.  But hey, I take what I can get.

My brain just never stops.  Literally – never ever.  From the time my eyes open in the morning until the time they ever-so-reluctantly close to let me sleep at night (usually after great protestations of "But what if I miss something?!"), I'm thinking.  Moving.  Racing, even.  I had to stop cooking the chicken just to write this.  If I hadn't, I'd have moved on to the next thing in two minutes and forgotten all this.  ("If only!" I hear you gasp in dismay.)

I've learned to accept it.  Embrace it.  Even sometimes use it to my advantage!  I'm quite content with going down in history as the Little Hyper Chick with Curly Hair.  Like most young people who fall to the left side of normal, I spent years fighting with myself about this until I realized it wasn't going anywhere and, alas, this is How God Made Me, so I might as well get used to it.  Things have been leveling out (well, as much as they can, with me) ever since.

Ironically, I am getting a toy poodle puppy next week.  As Craig Ferguson would say, remind you of anyone?