This morning my roommate Trisha came into my room with a plate of delicious pancakes and a bottle of syrup and made me the happiest girl in the world! I am so grateful for her and for all of my wonderful roommates--they make me happy every day; and for good friends; and family; and so many blessings I couldn't count them even if I tried as hard as I probably should. I do not deserve all the goodness I have been given.
When I thanked my roommate she chimed back to me a quote I love: "Never suppress a generous thought" (Sister Parkin in a devotional at BYU a few years ago). How great is that? I've always been amazed at the simple truth of those few words. We can do so much good to those around us if we just do what we naturally want to do. If we feel inclined to make a phone call or bring someone brownies or do someone's dishes or give a friend a ride or write a little note or just spend time listening to what another person has to say, why not just do it? That is something I really want to work on in my life and I am so grateful to have such incredible examples around me! Thanks Trisha! And thank you to everyone who serves me and brings me joy and makes me laugh and listens to my stories and tolerates my craziness! I love you--you are my light in every dark day.
12 January 2010
09 January 2010
08 January 2010
It's a Record!
I have successfully completed the most pathetic first week of school EVER! I made it to the first three days... then I skipped the next two.
Blame it on the virus. Or maybe thank it.
Blame it on the virus. Or maybe thank it.
Locomotion
Yesterday my body decided to play a nasty trick on me. I woke up feeling sick-ish. But I've been worse and I figured I'd go ahead and go to work. Well, about 10 minutes of that sent me straight back home and into bed feeling nauseated, head and throat-achy and a bit feverish. Then I started feeling dizzy and strange and I thought I might get sick, so I got out of bed and then it started. All of the sudden my hands and feet and face started feeling tingly and strange and the muscles started contracting uncontrollably. It's happened to me before, especially when I get migraines on occasion. But this time it was out of control. I lay on my bed and started to sob with panic as my body became increasingly paralyzed and contorted. By the time one of my roommates heard me, I was quite a mess. I was bawling, my entire body was in pain, I couldn't move the majority of my limbs and I was FREAKING OUT! Luckily, my roommate Holly is a pro and she knew just what to do. She got me breathing normally, got some Tylenol and fluids into me (which I pathetically had to drink through a straw while she held the bottle up to my face since I couldn't MOVE), and then started stretching and messaging all of my limbs. Before long I was practically back to normal. And except for some very sore muscles and a bit of residual flu-ishness, I'm doing much better now!
Thank heavens for good roommates...and drugs!
Thank heavens for good roommates...and drugs!
06 January 2010
Brain Freeze
I'm at work. I'm sitting in the Sociology lab trying so hard to write a draft of the challenges we have identified for evaluations of small NGOs (non-governmental organizations). But every time I start to look at the page my brain suddenly diverts to some other topic. To someone I want to talk to or something I need to do or to worries about how I'm going to survive what promises to be a quite busy semester or random questions about random things or I'll realize that I've just been staring into space for the past ten minutes without thinking anything at all that I can recall. And the paper I'm writing isn't even particularly difficult or boring.
I think I'm lazy. Actually, I'm fairly sure of it. I could sit around for hours and do nothing. Or perhaps not literally nothing, but things that are unrelated to work and school and other productive endeavors. As Robert Louis Stevenson reminds us,
“Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularities of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself”
I could spend all day listening to podcasts on iTunes and playing around on the guitar (I can't really call what I do real playing) or painting my nails or reading books that aren't for school or checking my emails and facebook and the weather and my blog and my class schedule and anything else I can think of about fifty times an hour, even when nothing new has happened. And I can walk down to the kitchen and up to my room back and forth trying to decide if I'm really hungry. And I can try six different things with my hair (and still hate how it looks). And I can take naps and read and re-read my class syllabi and call my mom on the phone and make lists about all the productive things I could and should be doing.
Maybe that is even my favorite waste of time. I think, actually, that is why I own a planner. Don't get me wrong, I am certainly forgetful and it would be very helpful to have things orderly and written our for me to remember, but I don't usually do that. And when I do I forget to look in my planner and forget anyway. But that's another story. What I like to do is write out schedules for my time...
Today, January 6, 2010:
7am wake up
8am eat breakfast
9am class
etc.
of course, I inevitably wake up at 7:45, skip breakfast, have to do some last minute homework and run to campus to get the computer lab and end up being late for class with half our assignment done. And then there are other lists. Like lists for the grocery store, which never work and I either forget them at home or somehow manage to forget at least one item I wrote down and purchase several that I wasn't planning on. Or lists of things to accomplish during the day: 2 hours of work, reading for English, reading for EDLF, paper for Capstone course. And I love to cross them out, but usually I end up crossing them off half way through the day when I realize that I'm only going to get to one of the ten planned activities and even then I will probably not get all the way done. And sometimes I start to wonder where all this time is going to. If I'm not working or doing homework or socializing or eating or sleeping, what do I do?
And my friends, it remains a mystery. It's as if there are little parasites sucking my time, like so many mosquitoes, thirsting for minutes and hours rather than blood. Sometimes I look at the clock one minute and the next an entire hour has just slipped away. And the older I get the more quickly all this time seems to just disappear out from under me. One year, two, nearly five since I started college. And sometimes I find myself stunned with this realization, half feeling like the same girl who spent hours of her days creating different lists intended to make the selection of a university simpler, wondering how I managed to get into a new decade and a new apartment and a new state, somehow. Sometimes I can't believe that I've lived for over two decades. It feels like I'm being shoved into some sort of time warp and as hard as I try I can't seem to keep time still for even just one moment so I can at least make sense of what is going on around me. Instead life flashes before me in great gobs--semesters and summers and trips and holidays and they slip past and become part of the every growing blur I'm leaving behind. I have horrible visions of myself waking up one morning age 52 and wondering where the past 30 years went. Where have I been? What have I done? How have I changed? And why is time playing these awful tricks on me? Why won't it just leave me be and allow me to enjoy my youth?
And now another twenty minutes have passed, or some such thing, and I have accomplished nothing really. I still haven't written a word of my paper or figured out what happens in the great lapses of missing time in my life. But I have grown a bit closer to age 52 and to 62 and 82 and eventually the end of this life. And I can't deny that it will be gone in a flash and I will be left baffled and confused, just as I am now. What a fickle friend this time!
I think I'm lazy. Actually, I'm fairly sure of it. I could sit around for hours and do nothing. Or perhaps not literally nothing, but things that are unrelated to work and school and other productive endeavors. As Robert Louis Stevenson reminds us,
“Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularities of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself”
I could spend all day listening to podcasts on iTunes and playing around on the guitar (I can't really call what I do real playing) or painting my nails or reading books that aren't for school or checking my emails and facebook and the weather and my blog and my class schedule and anything else I can think of about fifty times an hour, even when nothing new has happened. And I can walk down to the kitchen and up to my room back and forth trying to decide if I'm really hungry. And I can try six different things with my hair (and still hate how it looks). And I can take naps and read and re-read my class syllabi and call my mom on the phone and make lists about all the productive things I could and should be doing.
Maybe that is even my favorite waste of time. I think, actually, that is why I own a planner. Don't get me wrong, I am certainly forgetful and it would be very helpful to have things orderly and written our for me to remember, but I don't usually do that. And when I do I forget to look in my planner and forget anyway. But that's another story. What I like to do is write out schedules for my time...
Today, January 6, 2010:
7am wake up
8am eat breakfast
9am class
etc.
of course, I inevitably wake up at 7:45, skip breakfast, have to do some last minute homework and run to campus to get the computer lab and end up being late for class with half our assignment done. And then there are other lists. Like lists for the grocery store, which never work and I either forget them at home or somehow manage to forget at least one item I wrote down and purchase several that I wasn't planning on. Or lists of things to accomplish during the day: 2 hours of work, reading for English, reading for EDLF, paper for Capstone course. And I love to cross them out, but usually I end up crossing them off half way through the day when I realize that I'm only going to get to one of the ten planned activities and even then I will probably not get all the way done. And sometimes I start to wonder where all this time is going to. If I'm not working or doing homework or socializing or eating or sleeping, what do I do?
And my friends, it remains a mystery. It's as if there are little parasites sucking my time, like so many mosquitoes, thirsting for minutes and hours rather than blood. Sometimes I look at the clock one minute and the next an entire hour has just slipped away. And the older I get the more quickly all this time seems to just disappear out from under me. One year, two, nearly five since I started college. And sometimes I find myself stunned with this realization, half feeling like the same girl who spent hours of her days creating different lists intended to make the selection of a university simpler, wondering how I managed to get into a new decade and a new apartment and a new state, somehow. Sometimes I can't believe that I've lived for over two decades. It feels like I'm being shoved into some sort of time warp and as hard as I try I can't seem to keep time still for even just one moment so I can at least make sense of what is going on around me. Instead life flashes before me in great gobs--semesters and summers and trips and holidays and they slip past and become part of the every growing blur I'm leaving behind. I have horrible visions of myself waking up one morning age 52 and wondering where the past 30 years went. Where have I been? What have I done? How have I changed? And why is time playing these awful tricks on me? Why won't it just leave me be and allow me to enjoy my youth?
And now another twenty minutes have passed, or some such thing, and I have accomplished nothing really. I still haven't written a word of my paper or figured out what happens in the great lapses of missing time in my life. But I have grown a bit closer to age 52 and to 62 and 82 and eventually the end of this life. And I can't deny that it will be gone in a flash and I will be left baffled and confused, just as I am now. What a fickle friend this time!
04 January 2010
The Wheels on the Bus
Back to school. Back to work. Back to, well, life I guess. It's a strange thing to go home to the house where I grew up, where my parents live still, and to see my family, my sister, my friends and to realize that as much as I love them all and as amazing it is that we are still in contact and can still fall into our old relationships as though no time has passed (after five years of separation), I don't really have a life there. It is more like an escape into the past; a world where I can postpone my responsibilities and the decisions that haunt me at every turn; a place where I can sleep in until noon if I want and where I can sit around and put together puzzles or laugh with my mom and my sister at stupid things and play with our pets or go shopping in the middle of the week with my friends and all the time without feeling the constant pull at the back of my mind reminding me that there are things to be done and appointments to get to and people to please. It's a magical thing. And a strange one too. It leaves me unsettled and confused. If I don't belong at home, where do I belong?
While I was in Tucson for two weeks for Christmas and New Years I kept having this strange feeling like I needed to go back to Utah. Like that was my home now. But the truth is, it isn't my home either. At least not in any lasting, comforting way. It's a temporary life I lead here. A transitory existence, shifting between different apartments, storing my things in stranger's sheds while I travel for months at a time, and living with new people every few months. And ever in the back of my mind is the truth that this was never meant to be forever. But I don't know what is. There is no such thing as going home anymore, and in less than a year when I receive a diploma and an invitation to enter the working world and real "adult life" I feel like I will suddenly be homeless in a very real way. Not only will my contract expire, but I will no longer have a reason to live in Provo. I will no longer fit in at my parents home. I will be, I feel, that ever so cliché leaf tossed with the wind, and who knows where I'll land.
It certainly isn't something particular to me, and I realize that, of course. Yet, it feels so solitary. There's a song I like by Taylor Swift in which she sings, "I don't know what I want, so don't ask me, cuz I'm still trying to figure it out . . . I'm alone, on my own, and that's all I know." Me too, sista! Me too. It's a strange feeling. It's as though I'm walking along this path of my life and all the way it's painted out so clearly, the light shining through beautiful trees lining the road, even the bumps and hills I've traveled are there, solid and real, but then suddenly everything becomes blackness. I see my graduation and then...nothing. A blank. An absence. And I'm headed straight for it full speed and without any breaks. It's terrifying really. And yet, I'm kind of excited. I'm just hoping that hidden behind that curtain of uncertainty is a beautiful landscape awaiting exploration. And it may not be what I expect or what I know, but there's got to be something there. My life hasn't ended yet (though that is a scary thought!). And, you know, sometimes we need a little mystery. At least that's what I'm telling myself these days. So please, if you know differently, just don't burst my bubble!
While I was in Tucson for two weeks for Christmas and New Years I kept having this strange feeling like I needed to go back to Utah. Like that was my home now. But the truth is, it isn't my home either. At least not in any lasting, comforting way. It's a temporary life I lead here. A transitory existence, shifting between different apartments, storing my things in stranger's sheds while I travel for months at a time, and living with new people every few months. And ever in the back of my mind is the truth that this was never meant to be forever. But I don't know what is. There is no such thing as going home anymore, and in less than a year when I receive a diploma and an invitation to enter the working world and real "adult life" I feel like I will suddenly be homeless in a very real way. Not only will my contract expire, but I will no longer have a reason to live in Provo. I will no longer fit in at my parents home. I will be, I feel, that ever so cliché leaf tossed with the wind, and who knows where I'll land.
It certainly isn't something particular to me, and I realize that, of course. Yet, it feels so solitary. There's a song I like by Taylor Swift in which she sings, "I don't know what I want, so don't ask me, cuz I'm still trying to figure it out . . . I'm alone, on my own, and that's all I know." Me too, sista! Me too. It's a strange feeling. It's as though I'm walking along this path of my life and all the way it's painted out so clearly, the light shining through beautiful trees lining the road, even the bumps and hills I've traveled are there, solid and real, but then suddenly everything becomes blackness. I see my graduation and then...nothing. A blank. An absence. And I'm headed straight for it full speed and without any breaks. It's terrifying really. And yet, I'm kind of excited. I'm just hoping that hidden behind that curtain of uncertainty is a beautiful landscape awaiting exploration. And it may not be what I expect or what I know, but there's got to be something there. My life hasn't ended yet (though that is a scary thought!). And, you know, sometimes we need a little mystery. At least that's what I'm telling myself these days. So please, if you know differently, just don't burst my bubble!
01 January 2010
The Newness
I have made a decision: 2010 is my year!
It sounds like a good year doesn't it? This year I will graduate from college (finally) and after that I guess the whole world opens up and I can do whatever I want...or maybe whatever I can get a job doing. For a while I was worried that when the walls that contained me suddenly fell away (metaphorically speaking of course... and perhaps optimistically speaking as well) I would be swallowed up by so much possibility; so much uncertainty; so much of the great unknown world out there, beckoning to me and terrifying me all at once. But right now I feel pretty good. I've decided that I don't have to jump out and consume the world in one great gulp. I can just take a nibble, small bite at a time. I can step out into that vastness before me and see where the road leads without trying to run it all at once. Sure, I'm scared. But I'm excited too. So far I haven't gone too far astray. And if I do, well, maybe that could be interesting too!
Here I come World... you'd better get ready!
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