I learned about girl math today.
I find it both mind-boggling, ridiculous, and honestly kind of brilliant. The logic behind it is actually pretty structured. It makes sense… inside girl world.
For the sake of this reflection we’re going to drop the political correctness and the disclaimers about sweeping generalizations. I know all of that. I spent over a decade teaching people about things like the pyramid of hate and how stereotypes work. This is a Lenten post, not a DEI TED Talk.
Think of this as suspension of disbelief.
Jesus liked teaching through parables. This is one.
Girl math basically works like this: if you return something, use store credit, or shift money from one place to another, then technically the new thing you bought is free. And cash is not real, so whatever you buy with it is technically free. 🤷♂️
It’s borrowing from Paul to pay Peter.
Everyone involved knows the math isn’t real. But it feels real enough to justify the decision.
And that got me thinking about something much bigger.
Humans do this kind of math with their lives all the time.
We tell ourselves stories that are just close enough to the truth to make us comfortable.
Racism can’t really be happening because I’m not a racist.
Systemic oppression must not exist because it hasn’t personally affected me.
The people in charge can’t really be incompetent because we elected them.
If things are working for me, then the system must be working.
That’s not truth.
That’s moral girl math.
It reminded me of a quote from John Steinbeck in East of Eden:
“Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility… She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure.”
Cathy didn’t tell obvious lies. She stayed close enough to the truth that people couldn’t quite prove she was lying.
That’s the most effective kind of lie there is.
Not completely false.
Just comfortable enough to the truth to believe.
Steinbeck’s novel is built around the story of Cain and Abel. The idea that people are not born purely good or purely evil. They are constantly choosing. And jealousy has been twisting that choice since the beginning.
I heard a TikTok creator say something recently that stuck with me.
She said, “Run as fast as you can from people who are jealous or envious of you, because they will unalive you.” She didn’t necessarily mean that literally. She did and she didn’t. What she meant was that people who envy you will eventually try to knock you down. Because your existence forces them to confront something uncomfortable about themselves. And people really hate that.
Jealousy and envy is the oldest human problems there are.
It’s the entire story of Cain and Abel. One brother looks at the other and instead of asking how he can grow or change, he decides the easier solution is to destroy what he envies.
Envy twists the truth.
It tells us stories about why someone else’s success must be illegitimate, or why their happiness must not be real. It convinces us that if we knock someone down a notch, the world will somehow feel fair again.
We lie because the truth is ugly. The lie makes things beautiful.
And if we’re honest, sometimes the person we lie to most is ourselves.
I once dated a woman who used to say things like, “Why does everyone want to hang out with you and not me? We have the same group of friends.” At the time I remember thinking, because I’m more fun than you.
Which in hindsight was probably the first clue that something wasn’t working.
She would also say, “Babies, why don’t you do the things you do with your friends with me?” And I remember telling her, “You’re my girlfriend. You get girlfriend privileges my friends don’t get. Do you want to be my friend or my girlfriend?”
But that relationship had a pattern. About once a month she would break up with me. And somehow, every time, I was the problem.
When you hear something often enough, you start to believe it.
Years later she said something to me that confirmed what my therapist already told me.
“I didn’t know how to be in a healthy relationship, Vangie. And you were healthy.” Until I wasn’t. Because when someone keeps telling you that you’re the problem, eventually you start to question your own sanity.
Looking back now, the lie wasn’t just hers. The lie was the story I told myself to make the relationship make sense.
I was in love with her, so she couldn’t possibly be a horrible person.
Because if she was a horrible person and I loved her… what would that say about me?
So instead of accepting the truth, I kept adjusting the story until it felt less ugly.
My best friend Kimi Serrano says the most dangerous sentence that ever comes out of my mouth is, “I can make it work.” She hears that and immediately knows disaster is probably right around the corner.
We do that a lot.
We romanticize what broke us. We glorify intensity and call it passion. We confuse chaos with chemistry and co-dependency with love.
Sometimes we aren’t grieving the person.
We’re grieving the idea of them.
The potential we thought was there.
But romanticizing an unhealthy relationship doesn’t make it love.
And letting someone have access to your body when they don’t care for your heart is a lie we sometimes tell ourselves just to avoid being alone.
Buddhist philosophy teaches that suffering begins when we refuse to see reality clearly. We cling to the stories we want instead of the truth that’s right in front of us.
Which brings us back to Lent.
Lent isn’t about smoothing the hard edges of life.
It’s about looking directly at the uncomfortable truths we’ve been avoiding. The lies we tell ourselves to make things feel less painful.
Because the moment we stop lying to ourselves is usually the moment things can finally start to change.
Girl math might help you justify a new pair of shoes you don’t need. But it won’t help you understand yourself.
Eventually you have to stop adjusting the formula just to make the answer feel better. You have to look at the numbers honestly.
Jesus told parables because people are very good at hearing a story and recognizing everyone else in it.
Lent asks us to do something harder.
To recognize ourselves.
To look at the stories we’ve been telling about our lives and ask whether they’re actually true.
Not the comfortable pretty lie.
The honest ugly truth.
That’s the lesson.
And that’s the work.
Lenten Reflection
“Nothing is concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs.” ― Luke 12:2–3
Lent has never been about pretending we’re perfect people.
It’s about honesty.
Jesus warns that the things we hide eventually come into the light. Most of the time we assume that means secrets we keep from others.
But the harder truth is that the things we hide from ourselves eventually come to the surface too.
The stories we tell ourselves to justify staying somewhere we shouldn’t.
The explanations we invent to make unhealthy situations feel normal.
The moral math we use so we don’t have to face uncomfortable truths about our lives.
Truth has a way of surfacing whether we’re ready for it or not.
Lent invites us to do something different.
Instead of waiting for the truth to expose itself, we choose to face it willingly.
Not to punish ourselves.
But because truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, is the first step towards freedom.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
As I’ve said before, I mostly do things for the plot and character development. But the other part is understanding and participating in the human experience.
Every risk I’ve ever taken in life has somehow been calculated and weighed. And after some questionable life choices, I usually ask myself one simple question, “But… did you die?”
So far, the answer has been no. Which means the story continues.
I was recently retelling a story about an ex from my early twenties who took me to Hawaii… as friends. At the time she was my boss. It wasn’t some crazy age-gap situation. She was just a couple years older than me and she happened to have the money to fly herself and a “friend” to a romantic island getaway.
Now I know what you’re thinking.
“Oh come on, Vangie. Were you really that dense?”
Back then? Yes. Absolutely.
I believed what people told me because… why wouldn’t I? I wasn't always naturally suspicious. Some people walk into conversations with good intent, others with vigilance. I tend to approach things with neutrality. I observe. I assess the data. Then I respond to what the person is actually asking of me in that moment.
Which is probably why growing up I identified with characters like Spock or Data from Star Trek.
Spock was always balancing logic and humanity.
Data was an android trying to learn how to be human.
That’s pretty much what growing up felt like for me.
Which is probably part of my problem when it comes to women.
Because I can genuinely like someone and still not assume they like me back. That part of my brain that never believed I was the prize, the desirable one, still lingers.
Even though history has shown me repeatedly.
Yes, Vangie. You are the prize.
But that realization came late.
And it came slowly.
The bigger issue is that I struggle with subtext. If a woman is flirting with me, there’s a very real chance I will miss it unless she makes it painfully obvious. Otherwise my brain just assumes it was a pleasant interaction. I'm not hitting on every woman I speak to, either. I am a naturally curious person and engage with people easily. It could just be my decades of experience in customer service, community organizing, and years of facilitation training.
Because somewhere deep in my operating system I’m still the weird awkward kid.
The funny friend.
The smart friend.
The athletic tomboy.
But not the one people had crushes on.
I wasn’t the homecoming queen. I wasn’t the cheerleader. I was the big tomboy just living life as it came at me.
The closest comparison I can think of is the Asian kid from The Goonies. Like… when exactly did that guy become the romantic lead? Answer: when he was in his fifties in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Which honestly feels about right.
When I was younger I used to wonder if I was normal.
After fifty-one years of living I can confidently say, "absolutely not."
And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just mean my brain works differently than most people’s.
There’s a psychological concept called the Dunning–Kruger effect. It basically says that people who are highly incompetent often believe they are far more capable than they actually are.
Meanwhile, people who are highly competent tend to assume everyone else knows what they know, which makes them doubt themselves.
You see this all the time in law school.
The students who have actually read the cases and worked through the rules will say something like, “I think the answer is this… but I could be totally wrong.” Then everyone starts comparing reasoning. How did you get there? What rule did you apply? What facts mattered?
It’s collaborative problem solving.
Which reminds me a lot of math.
When I was younger I loved math because you could approach a problem from different directions, use different formulas, plug in the same information, and still arrive at the same answer.
Humans are not like that.
People are messy.
They ignore variables. They change the rules. They throw emotions into the equation and suddenly the algorithm stops working.
I once told my friend Jeffrey that I hate when people bring feelings into decision-making. You make terrible decisions that way. I want data. Information. Facts. Not feelings. Feelings have never gotten me into anything good.
And he literally poked me in the face.
I asked him why he did that.
He said, “I just wanted to make sure you were real and not a robot.”
To be fair… he wasn’t entirely wrong.
Sometimes it takes me a while to process my emotions. To understand subtext. To realize that people don’t always mean exactly what they say.
So part of my brain has spent years trying to build a formula for interacting with humans.
If they say this… they probably mean that.
If they act like this… it probably means that.
Which is funny because the moment you think you’ve cracked the code, a human will immediately do something that breaks the entire system.
And yet somehow I’m still pretty good at navigating people.
I adjust to different environments. Different groups. Different personalities.
Most of the time I get included automatically because people sense that I’m curious, safe, and also interesting. However, I’m quietly observing the room while participating in it. I think more than anything I keep people honest.
Am I what I say I am?
Yes.
Because I genuinely don’t know how to be anything other than myself.
When I first started dating I treated it like anything else I take on in life. I did my homework. I studied.
When I was nineteen my gay friend Raymond said something that sounded simple but ended up being identity-shifting.
“Vangie, you can be with anyone you want. You just have to be the thing they want.”
Which sounds logical.
Be the thing women want.
Simple, right?
But here’s the problem with that theory.
Have you ever tried dating women?
A friend from law school once complimented me on how good I was at handling sensitive situations and difficult conversations.
I told her two things.
First, thank you.
Second, it used to literally be my job.
And it’s practice.
Most people avoid hard conversations. They avoid situations where emotions are messy and complicated. I got good at navigating those things because I had to.
It was the only way I knew how to survive in a world that often didn’t make sense to me.
How people could say they love children and then turn around and exploit them.
How people could preach morality and then act with cruelty.
I never understood the hypocrisy.
To me, it always seemed easier to just be honest.
People are nothing like me.
But the truth is, I’ve never thought I was anything special.
I just think.
I’m Vangie.
Doing my best. Living life. Trying to leave the world a little better than I found it.
That’s all I do.
In all the things I have control over.
Which isn't much.
When you ask me what I do? I say, "My best!"
Lenten Reflection
There’s a moment in Jesus Christ Superstar during the song "Gethsemane" where Jesus reaches the end of arguing with God.
"God, thy will be done
Destroy your only son
I will drink your cup of poison
Nail me to your cross and break me
Bleed me, beat me, kill me, take me
Now, before I change my mind
Now, before I change my mind." — Andrew Lloyd Weber, Jesus Christ Superstar
He’s exhausted. He’s afraid. He knows exactly what the path ahead of him will cost. For most of the song he’s questioning everything, asking why it has to happen this way.
And then something shifts.
He stops trying to understand the entire plan and simply accepts the part he’s meant to play in it.
Not because it suddenly makes sense.
Not because the pain disappears.
But because he decides to move forward anyway.
Because humans are messy and some of us are sacrificed for the betterment of humanity. And, that moment always reminds me that faith isn’t about having a perfect algorithm for life.
Sometimes it’s about showing up, doing your best with the information you have, and trusting that the story will keep unfolding.
Even when you don’t fully understand your place in the algorithm.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
I was speaking to a very lovely human tonight who told me something funny her son said: The idea of living for eternity seems like the worst idea ever (I'm paraphrasing).
Honestly, he might be onto something.
I mean, imagine having to listen to church music for eternity. That sounds awful. It's like having to listen to Christmas music all year long at the Circle K. Which is why I sometimes joke with my co-workers that hell is probably just people working at a gas station forever.
Let’s marinate on this for a bit.
What if when you die and go to heaven, you still have to pick a job to do for eternity?
Honestly, what a drag that would be.
You spend your whole material life working in one form of drudgery or another, and then you finally make it to the afterlife only to discover there’s Archangel Gabriel waiting for you with a clipboard ready to give you your work assignment.
Welcome to eternity. Please select your department.
Gas station attendant in the sky.
Heavenly attorney arguing whether someone should or shouldn’t get reincarnated. A full Defend Your Life situation.
Processing quality control paperwork for miracles.
In the show "Dead Like Me," the main character dies when a piece of space station toilet falls from orbit and hits her. Space poo.
That’s how she goes out.
And then she wakes up and discovers her new job in the afterlife is being a Grim Reaper. Honestly… that’s kind of hilarious. But it also got me thinking about how often stories about the afterlife still involve work.
One of my toxic or productive traits, depending on who you ask, is that when something is bothering me, I fixate on things. I pick a thing and obsess over it until my brain works through whatever problem it’s trying to solve in the background.
Sometimes it’s books or audiobooks.
Sometimes it’s going to the driving range and hitting hundreds of golf balls.
Sometimes it's aquariums.
Sometimes it’s reorganizing everything I own.
During the pandemic the thing I fixated on was K-dramas.
So many K-dramas.
An unreasonable amount of K-dramas.
And when I look back now, I’m pretty sure my brain was trying to work something out while I was watching them. It does that sometimes. Picks something harmless to stare at while the real issue sorts itself out, constantly rattling around in my brain.
At the time, what I was probably working through was my grief.
One of the shows I watched during that time I really loved was "Hotel Del Luna." The cinematography is stunning and the fashion is beautiful. The premise is simple but kind of brilliant.
There’s a hotel that only spirits can see. The guests are people who have died but can’t move on yet because they still have unfinished business from their lives. Grudges. Regrets. Apologies that were never made.
The woman who runs the hotel has been stuck doing that job for almost a thousand years as punishment for a massive sin she committed long ago.
So she spends centuries helping dead people resolve the things they couldn’t let go of.
But here’s the important part. She can’t run the hotel alone. She needs a human manager. Someone who is still alive to help deal with the parts of unfinished business that still involve the living.
Because sometimes the only way someone can move on is if something gets resolved back in the world they left behind.
Each episode is another story about someone trying to settle something that was left unfinished.
A grudge.
A betrayal.
A love that was never expressed.
An apology that never happened.
And the more I watched it, the more that idea gnawed at me.
The idea that people can’t move on until they deal with the things they left unresolved.
If you've been following this series I had mentioned my ex-fiancé who's a pastor.
When we broke up it wasn’t some dramatic betrayal. It was just unfortunate. One of those breakups where things are awkward but manageable at first, and then something happens that makes it difficult to ever speak again. Eventually, one of us decided the cleanest solution was no contact. It was her.
So we didn’t talk.
For eight years.
A lot can happen in eight years.
In that time she went through a divorce and lost her mother. I had also lost my mother by then.
When I heard what had happened in her life, something in me said it might be time to reach out.
Not because I expected anything to restart.
Just because there was unfinished business that I needed to address.
So I reached out. But she had to decide whether she wanted to reach the rest of the way.
And she did.
At first it was a little clunky. Two people trying to figure out how to talk again after almost a decade of silence. But eventually we found a rhythm. Not just re-friending each other on social media, but actually becoming friends again in real life.
Somewhere in those conversations I told her something that took me almost a decade to finally figure out.
I didn’t know how to grieve.
Instead of going to therapy like a normal human being and dealing with that grief, I convinced myself the reason I was so unhappy must be the relationship.
So I ended it.
Years later I finally said the thing I should have said back then.
I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to mourn. It wasn't you. It was me.
She told me something that was reminiscent of what she said to me when we were together.
“I didn’t think you were taking it very hard. You seemed fine.”
That’s the thing about grief.
Sometimes it doesn’t look like grief at all.
Sometimes it looks like someone is quietly blowing up one of the most meaningful relationships in their life because they don’t understand what’s happening inside them.
For years, I carried that with me.
What I like to call the compound interest of grief.
My father died. Then my best friend died not long after. And I didn’t know how to process any of it.
But eventually, life gives you another chance to finish the conversation.
And when it does, the work is simple.
Tell the truth.
Make the apology.
Let the other person decide what they want to do with it.
Did I think about restarting the relationship? Sure. I thought about it. But she wasn’t having any of that. And honestly, that’s fair. She had already moved on and started dating someone else. Someone, she’s still perfectly happy with.
And that’s the thing about moving on.
Sometimes crossing over into the next part of life doesn’t mean going back. Sometimes it just means finishing the unfinished business so both people can move forward.
In Hotel Del Luna, the spirits can’t move on until they settle the things tethering them to the past.
Jang Man-wol, who runs the hotel, is finally able to move on after a thousand years. Not because the betrayal that destroyed her life suddenly became okay, but because through the patience of the living dude, Gu Chan-seong, who helps run the hotel with her, she learns how to feel love again. Eventually she lets the grudge go, not because the past changed, but because it was finally time to stop carrying the pain.
Maybe that idea isn’t just about ghosts.
Maybe it’s about the work we’re supposed to do while we’re still alive.
Making amends.
Settling grudges.
Finishing the conversations we were too stubborn or too scared to have when we had the chance.
Because if you do that work now, maybe when you finally show up in heaven you won’t get assigned toilet-cleaning duty for eternity.
And honestly?
If I had to pick a job in the afterlife, helping people deal with their unfinished business doesn’t sound so bad.
At least it would keep eternity interesting.
Lenten Reflection
“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.” — Matthew 5:23–24
Lent is often described as a season of repentance, but repentance is not just about feeling sorry for things we’ve done.
It’s about repair.
Jesus makes something very clear in this passage: spiritual life is not separate from our relationships with other people. If something between us and another person is unresolved, the work of faith is not to ignore it or bury it under prayer or ritual.
The work is to go back.
To tell the truth.
To make the apology.
To finish the conversation that never happened.
Not every relationship can be restored. Sometimes people have already moved on, and that is their right. But the act of reaching out, of taking responsibility for our part, of attempting reconciliation, those things free something inside us.
Maybe that’s what moving on really is.
Not escaping the past, but finally settling the unfinished business that keeps us tied to it.
As above.
So below.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
