Feels like snow in the air

(Feels like Joy – Micah Taylor)

This isn’t necessarily the lyric I originally was planning on for this post…but…then last night I decided since I am most comfortable in a t-shirt and shorts I was going to wear that outside even though it is no longer the right temperature for that, particularly in the evenings…and this happened:

“Why is it already winter? I didn’t want it to be winter yet.”

Me…in late december

          

So yeah, that made me think of this song even though there was not snow in the air…and then the further into singing that song to myself I got I was like yes, it does feel like joy. I heard a really good sermon last week about joy. It isn’t the same as happiness. As a Christian I can feel joy even when objectively the overall situation in my life would not be judged by an outside observer as awesome…but honestly there are also a lot of really awesome things in life over the past few months that I do not feel like writing about beyond to just say that love always arrives unbroken. I have never entered a new location and found myself without close friends…even back in school when I was painfully shy (the kind we might consider calling social anxiety or selective mutism) and spent 5 weeks in Rapid City, South Dakota. By the time I left I had a pretty decent number of close friends that were hard to say goodbye to, one of whom I still communicate with on and off even 5 years later. I mean, I had goodbye dinners with three different groups of people I met during my time there if that gives you an indication of how quickly and deeply I can grow relationships in a new place…and so I am so incredibly thankful for the wonderful people I was able to meet over the past 6 months. I mean, I had been in my new apartment in a new city less than 4 days when I reached out to the church I had attended after being in town barely 12 hours to say help, my movers didn’t show up and I’m having trouble unloading my u-haul, and people came and not only helped get everything to my apartment, but helped put furniture together and made sure I had everything I needed…on an extremely hot summer evening…these were people I had never even met, but the people I had met were willing to connect me and these people were willing to just come and help. Those same people and so many other people have really just proved the words in Stephanie Pauline’s song unbroken “you might crack a mirror you might bust a chair, but with every new front door you open, love arrives unbroken.” Every move I make something or multiple somethings get destroyed (which is a great way to decrease how much stuff you own if you, like me, have a problem with accumulating too many things and then growing emotional attachments to them so that you can’t lose them until they are broken). This is going to sound super weird, but it almost is like a game trying to guess what is going to get broken or lost in the next move and whether it is something I’ll need to replace or something that can just get chucked in the trash and life goes on…plan A was that game happening one more time in my life as a transition from apartment living to home ownership, but life decided that there is pretty much definitely going to be at least one more apartment pit stop before that point…and now I’ve learned the importance of not skipping that step, because selling a house when you’re not sure when or where you plan on moving next is most likely more challenging to figure out than being able to tell your apartment people by the way I have no idea when I am leaving but I know it is almost definitely happening before my lease ends…

Also, I read a news article this morning about a guy flying from Fort Lauderdale…or, more accurately, desiring to fly from Fort Lauderdale…who wanted to make a statement and so decided to wear women’s underwear on his face instead of a mask…IDK if he read that post from like April 2020 when it went around that you should treat your mask like your underwear and was just like aha, underwear, that is what I should put on my face or what his thought process was, but I was like, yep, that is Florida for you…the last time I flew out of Fort Lauderdale I had to laugh because like every 15 minutes there is an announcement that per the federal aviation administration regulations everyone must wear a mask at all times within the airport unless they are eating or drinking or else they will be removed from the airport and not allowed to fly. That announcement isn’t the funny part. The funny part is that probably only about 60% of people in the airport were wearing a mask at all, and of those only about half were wearing it correctly and a not fully intersecting half were wearing a mask that actually met FAA guidelines for masking. And no one was getting in trouble for not wearing a mask, for wearing a non-compliant mask, or for wearing a mask incorrectly such as only hanging it from an ear or only covering nose OR mouth vs both…so I mean, from that perspective, kudos to that guy for having *something* on his nose and mouth…also, speaking of flying, the announcements at the beginning of a flight really set the tone for what those in authority think the average American can understand…the new announcements include that if you are blowing up your life vest instead of pulling the string to inflate that you’ll need to take your mask off first. Which y’know, suggests that someone thought that without that piece of vital information the average American would be in the water drowning wondering why their vest isn’t blowing up while they put their soggy masked mouth over the tube and nothing happens…so there’s that…

So, going back to making fun of myself because that is really a better thing to do than to make fun of other people even if those people are strangers I will likely never see again…I highly recommend waiting until you are stopped to try putting flavor in your water bottle. It is really a bummer when you were about to pull into a gas station to fill up your gas tank and then you take the cap off your water bottle and proceed to spill it on your lap…and then you’re like well it looks like I am not getting out of my car any time soon ‘cause now it looks like I had an accident…and I am way too old to have potty accidents…so that happened…my car also desperately needs to be vacuumed because not naming names or anything but someone without awesome motor skills may have accidentally knocked over a container of caramel popcorn in the process of trying to get the package open…

Lol, the where are you from question is hard when your brain is like well the passenger seat of my car is currently doubling as my portable kitchen(‘cause sometimes you know you’re gonna need a snack but don’t know if you’ll want a sandwich, cheddar bunnies, popcorn, Ritz bits, teddy grahams, cookies, pudding, or fruit), and I was born in X, grew up in state Y, I went to school in state Z, I have a lease in state A, I most recently worked in B, and I most recently slept in C…so like basically I am from America…and that is not what people want to know…sometimes I just want to answer well I am alive and currently in ________ so I mean for the past (period of time) I have been living in ______ and let people draw conclusions from there…

Side thought…you know your attention span has run out prior to your energy when the radio is playing one song, you’re singing another song, and you’re deciding whether to pull up a third musical outlet on your phone…hashtag don’t call me in those moments unless you really want to know what song is currently my favorite…right now it is the granny rap from the Plane Truth Christmas musical…

Okay, just one more random thought before I post this because it already is getting crazy long and honestly is feeling like one of those I didn’t have anything of value to say so I wrote everything papers I wrote in elementary school…which is what my brain needed today, but prob not something anyone wants to read…

Driving on the freeway makes me think of the song 70×7 which I think is from the musical Truth Works although I could be wrong about that. (Then Jesus answered him, with a simple equation it wasn’t higher math, just multiplication. How many times should I forgive seventy times seven…don’t use a calculator to figure it out, forgive as God has forgiven you. That’s what it’s all about). It drives me bonkers when there is not a lot of traffic on the road but the speed limit is 70 and the people are going 60 (‘cause like Flyleaf says in Breathe Today, you can only move as fast as who’s in front of you)…but God wants me to forgive the people not going 70mph seven times…okay, fine, that is definitely not what the song was about…but it does pop into my head every time someone is not going 70mph and I want them to be going 70mph…but also I remember driving in winter storm Decima in 2016 and on top of the ice I couldn’t really see because my wiper system froze up and so I was only really able to follow the line on the side of the road…people were annoyed at how slow I was going…so yeah, you never know what is going on in someone else’s vehicle causing them to not drive the speed you think they should, so it is always good to give them a little extra grace…I do not apply that on the other hand to people who shine their brights at me. That really really bothers me and I wish cars didn’t have those, because I’ve never come up with an appropriate time to use them…

The end…

I understand why you feel that way

(Princes and Frogs – Superchick)

 

Sometimes I really don’t even know how I feel.

 

Like for example, today I absolutely loved having physical touch with another real live person…but at the same time I really really didn’t like someone coming up behind me and touching my head – it felt like encroaching on my body autonomy. Like I know humans need touch and it really was good, but being surprised by someone touching me felt vulnerable…like no question about it I would have been thrilled if I had seen the touch coming…but I didn’t and it wasn’t someone I know well enough for a surprise to feel loving.

 

I feel like I am doing so much better the past couple days because *each* of the past two nights I’ve gotten more sleep than the like 5 or so nights before that combined. I’m not crying as much or feel as much like I am being crushed. I’m doing a better job using my words to communicate…but…I also feel like I am making no progress…Yesterday I cried because I was just so incredibly lonely. And I’m still exhausted. And right now I want to drive back to both the hospitals I was at today and make sure everything looks okay because I feel like what if I accidentally ran over someone and didn’t notice. (Yep, OCD changes over time…around 80% of people with OCD will at some point have a contamination issue AND almost everyone will have their OCD change over time). I’m not going to do it and I’m not going to look for news stories about a hit and run…but oh man, I’ve had this thought before (in more like a neurotypical way), but never at a level like this where it definitely is no longer neurotypical…so yeah…maybe that means I am doing a good job…IDK…

 

Today I got my finger stuck in my car door. I feel blessed because I got it free without bleeding and it isn’t even really visibly bruised and is definitely not broken. Very thankful for that. I’m a klutz but I don’t need everyone to see that…

 

Y’know, after feeling like I didn’t know how to end this post because I really had no idea where I was even going with it…I finally figured it out.

 

I can’t say much because patient confidentiality, but today was an emotionally draining day where I felt like I really wanted to reach out but didn’t know what to say…and I don’t really know if I made the right pharmaceutical choices because I was so wrapped up in the emotional aspect of this particular patient. So yeah. That I think is what is really going on. Today was a mish mash of weird situations but overall it was just emotionally draining…and seeing how it was impacting the nurses and providers on rounds it also really made me at the same time a teeny bit thankful about something else that I really can’t share online because I think it will give too much of a hint about what was going on with this particular patient. So yeah, I’m going to have to leave it at that…but it does help to figure out why everything seems so jumbled up today.

I’m Not Impressed

(Fakin’ Lecrae)

A lot of people look forward to summer. I like the lack of snow, but summer itself can bring its own problems.

Summer is a hard time of year. A lot of the dependable things that happen during the school year get put on hold during the summer. Youth group stopped meeting halfway through May. The Tuesday morning church activity ended in May…and things that aren’t cancelled officially tend to become more sporadic, and when you also have an erratic schedule the chances of your schedule aligning with the weeks the activity isn’t cancelled is marginal… 

For someone who thrives on routine and struggles to figure out how to have community outside of a scheduled activity, summer is hard…but I was thinking today about how for kids it can be even harder. I still have my job, but kids also leave behind school when the school year ends. Yes, they might have day camps or other organized activities, but that isn’t always enough, especially since there is often not a lot of consistency unless they are still young enough to be in daycare. And at least in the district I used to work for, things like swim lessons where you had a class that usually lasted 4 weeks during the school year became 1-2 week sessions instead during the summer…

Just something on my mind today.

Do I have to bleed for you to see me?

(Scream-ZoeGirl)

 

These lyrics are where I have come to rest right now in my journey with God. It feels like he abandons me until I am hurt and then is like oh yeah, now I’ll help you. I feel so frustrated. I’m tired of working as hard as I can just to be crushed. I don’t understand why God won’t write a good story with my life.

 

I can see God working in the details now, but where was God when I wanted a position in the Scramble? I was even willing to take an unpaid position in Hawaii. I just wanted *something* besides pain to show for my effort. Where was God in phase II when I applied to 20 programs and worked twelve hour days to fit in the few interviews I did get? Where was God when I applied in phase I and went to midyear and worked nearly every weekend in December and January and used a ton of PTO to have interview time in February? Where was God last year when I didn’t even get a position at the hospital at which I currently work in phase II? God was there letting me get the best rejection letter I’ve ever gotten in my life, but I wanted the position, not the letter. Where was God in phase I, II, and Scramble the year before that? In the past three years I’ve applied about 100 times and all I’ve got to show for it is pain in my life and $7000 less in my bank account. Even before the residency, where was God when I was being abused? Easter is a celebration that the God who was silent on Saturday is alive. It sure seems like there is more than my fair share of Saturday in my life.

Come and See What God Has Done

(Noel – Lauren Daigle)

So yesterday I figured I should try to figure out what the weather is going to be at midyear, because I figured California is probably hot and sunny, but it is December…so I googled weather in California…because how else was I going to find out? I’m a kid who grew up with Type to Learn as part of the elementary school curriculum…although I didn’t really learn to type correctly until probably late high school or early college, because they let us start from where we left off from one lesson to the next throughout the year, but at the end of every school year all that progress was wiped away and we had to start back at a a a a aa aa aa aa…et cetera again…and to combat that my parents tried buying a typing game, but I just wasn’t that interested…and hey tried buying the home version of Type to Learn (way back when stuff like that was pretty spendy…thank you and sorry mom and dad) but the home version wouldn’t let you skip levels, and I got frustrated and quit…Yep, I am the girl my mom thought wouldn’t read – until she realized I was just bored out of my mind learning and shut down when she found me with a book a couple levels up from the nice sequential books in the Sing Spell Read and Write series…lol, as opposed to my brother who could read the books if he *wanted* to, but if told he could stop in a certain amount of time had no reservations about stopping even in the middle of a word.

 

So anyway, back to googling California’s weather, I learned two things. First, California is a big place with a wide range of weathers so I need to be a little more specific, and second, there is fire in California still? again? Not sure, but pretty sure I heard something about fire like a year ago…and, umm, my internet crashed and I lost all but the first real paragraph of this post and the first sentence of this paragraph and I was super annoyed that I now have to retype what I wanted to share, because  I had a really good story to share…

 

So in terms of weather, it would be a solid 70ish the entire week, but because of the smoke cover, the temp will dip down to about 50 some mornings and evenings…and the air quality is okay right now, but expected to worsen and be at least in the yellow zone within the next week…problem solved, wear short sleeves as much as possible but be prepared for not constant sun…but then I got to thinking that perhaps the fires might be a problem so I better look up where the fires are. There are currently two main areas. Neither seems to be burning in the zipcode of the airport nor the zipcode of the conference at the moment and Disneyland doesn’t have any announcements on their home page so theoretically they are not expecting the fire to come their way soon, because if California Disney is anything like Florida Disney, it would be virtually impossible to evacuate and Disney would get insanely negative press for “doing nothing” when in reality nothing was all they could do in that situation, so I assume that if there was much of a margin of possibility that park would be notifying people to stay away…but the conference is a week and a half-ish away, so there is a lot of time for things to change…And so I learned that the fire area closest to the conference is supposedly like 90% or so contained and expected to be fully contained by the end of the month, though it might not yet be out in that time. The other is only about 50% contained and only time will tell what will happen, but it seems like on the map anyway that it is plenty far enough away that it probably won’t spread…anyway, my need to know personality, well, needed to know if there were any hospitals in the fire’s wake. There apparently was at least one hospital, but the story I found when I searched “California fire hospital” wasn’t about the hospital, but about a home. A home in a neighborhood in Paradise. (Lol, just a little ironic that a place called Paradise is the host to this story). Anyway, this home was vacated by its owners without even packing because they knew if they didn’t get out right then and there they might not get out alive.

 

But then this home became a beacon of hope. An ambulance transporting patients from a hospital at risk broke down and began to melt. It was blocking the road so the other vehicles transporting patients away from danger were now trapped in the city without time to get to a safe way out. They turned around and got to the home that had been vacated earlier in the day. It was locked, but a paramedic was able to climb in through a doggie door and open the garage to get people inside quickly to shelter in place…and if it was a tornado they’d probably have been kissing their butts goodbye like they teach you in elementary school (that and be quiet so the tornado doesn’t hear you and come for you)…God orchestrated the fire chief to be the driver of one of the cars trapped on that road behind the ambulance and the fire chief knew what to do. He had medical personnel save lives by clearing leaves and pine needles from around the house and dousing it with as much water as they could. Because of their efforts to save their patients, that home was the only one on the block that was not burnt down…and because the house was not burnt down, those patients all were able to make it to safety once the fire was out around them. How incredible is that?!

 

I also saw a few seconds of a video clip before my computer decided I should get back to doing something more productive of how they are searching for the missing people, of which there are thousands, although the missing persons data isn’t very good and they are realizing large numbers of people were added to the list who were never missing in the first place…but anyway, it is heartbreaking. They are not really looking for people (dead or alive) so much as they are doing cursory once overs of remains of buildings and cars to enable them to allow people outside of these teams back into the areas without the first thing they see being a charred human body…and in some cases are using survivors to tell them which areas can for sure be skipped because they know people evacuated…although that makes me nervous because of the story above…who is to say there weren’t new inhabitants seeking shelter after the area was previously evacuated?

 

So yeah…that happened…

 

I am going to wait and post this tomorrow after I can get a picture added here, because I just thought of something else that totally shows how I am somewhere in between a tech adopter and a tech native…

(Imagine a picture here, because my phone didn’t want to cooperate).

Yep, I couldn’t find a pen and paper when I needed to write down some directions and I was getting frustrated because I meant to leave like at least 10 minutes ago and I couldn’t seem to just memorize the directions because there were too many and I was already a little bit stressed because I was going somewhere that didn’t seem to have a menu online and I honestly very close to never go to any restaurant without having studied the menu beforehand to determine exactly what I am getting…sure, I may still play the “deciding” game and flip pages or look around like I am deciding, but 99% of the time that is a mimicking behavior to make my social coping mechanism fit in rather than me *actually* considering alternatives…so anyway, the realization came to me that I could do this with high-tech directions…so I took a picture of the google maps directions on my computer screen with my cell phone…yep, I do have the maps app installed and have a GPS enabled phone…but when I need directions somewhere, my instinct isn’t (and obviously wasn’t) let me put that in my phone, but rather let me write that down…and well, taking a picture instead of writing it seemed perfectly logical to me…would have been even better if it had occurred to me that even though I had a picture of my computer screen that didn’t mean I could see the other open tab that had directions back home…luckily that I was able to do by driving until things looked at least vaguely familiar then hope things hadn’t changed *too* much from what I kind sorta remembered being there…I worked though…so there’s that.

And I got through this day

(Courage – Superchick)

A couple months ago I brought another big bag of stuff from my parents house to my apartment. To be honest, although I didn’t really want to, by the time I went through most of it I ended up throwing a lot of stuff away, because while it was really special to me, living in an apartment rather than a house, I just don’t have many places to put things.

I could probably make more space – through the entire winter I don’t think there were ever more than 3 pairs of jeans in the wash and I probably only wore 3 long sleeve shirts for the entirety of the winter…but since those actually have monetary value and will eventually have a distinct important purpose since clothes do eventually wear out, it seemed better to throw away papers than the clothes.

Anyway, that is a long intro to say, that one of the things in that pile was an envelope of the things I saved when  I moved out of my last apartment. It was also insane how many “necessities that I couldn’t possibly live without” suddenly became trash worthy  when faced with packing up. I probably threw out more bags of trash in the last month in that  apartment than I had the previous three years I’d lived there. Although, to be fair, I didn’t generate *that* much trash and because the M-stress exacerbated the OCD, especially the first year I lived there I found ways to minimize what needed to be thrown out while home because I was terrified of taking out the trash…

This is the contents of the envelope:

A paper about volunteering at KH (I blanked out my friend’s phone number at the bottom for her privacy). KH was the best part of my school years. I wish I could still be there. I don’t know exactly what I was thinking when I kept this page, but I noticed that I never met the requirements, so I am so incredibly thankful that they accepted me anyway and let me do what I could do and gave me the responsibilities that I needed to thrive. Everyone there was so nice and really cared about me (okay fine, with the exception of one intern who kinda got on my nerves. He never did anything wrong in regards to me, but there was one particular family he always complained about and that really irked me. He thought the kids were annoying, when they were just being kids). I wish I could live there.

Also in the pile, a paper that says “Our City NEEDS YOU” because it makes me feel like I matter. A pretty paper with a verse about taking care of the downtrodden, because I guess it makes me feel like no matter what I deserve care even though I was told so long that I didn’t. A paper about finding joy in serving…because serving is where I feel good. I can’t remember if I was actually seriously considering trying to get more involved, but I am fairly certain that I really wanted to and just didn’t think I could. Some barcode stickers because I for some reason have always liked the idea of having barcode stickers even though I haven’t got a clue what I could use them for. A stamp out stigma pledge and a paper that came in the mail for no apparent reason that says a lot of things about supporting people like “some people just need someone to listen.” Those things are things that I was trying to champion, but I think I also hung on to them, because I really wanted people to be thinking those things about me. A quick note from Kati Morton because it felt really good that she took the time to send that out to everyone with her signature actually written on and the address hand written on the envelope. The M-crisis made me wary of *every* person related to mental health until they had proven themselves to be safe. Very few people were grandfathered in. Kati Morton was one of the few, and I think maybe subconsciously it was important for me to have that reminder of her being good to hold out a lifeline that people in the mental health field were not all horrible people out to take advantage of people who might already be disadvantaged. And some pictures that I cut out of advertisements because they were super cute…

I wish there was more because college feels a lot like a black hole and I wish there were more to represent the time I spent there, but at the same time, there was not a lot of positive there, and what I do have is a good representation of the positive things. I kind of wish I hadn’t thrown away every prayer card from my community group in a rage/cleaning session a while back, but I can’t get those back. I get why I did it though – community group was good, but it also brought with it some memories of the pain in college – the M-stress and resulting exacerbated OCD, the fact that it didn’t really seem like people really understood what I was going through the next year or maybe didn’t even care.

People act like college is like the bestest time of your life…yeah no. There are a few people at school who did what they could to help me survive, but mostly there is very little of college itself that was positive. I adored the counseling center at which I volunteered and I loved serving at church, but there wasn’t much about school itself that lends itself well to good memories. There were some sparks in the dark, but for the most part that section of life is probably better off just not existing and letting me move on with my life.

But it is really hard to move on. Let’s be honest, I am a control girl. I struggle when my life feels completely out of control, and that is where I have been living for a long time. I don’t feel like it is possible for me to ever grasp onto the steering wheel of my life again. I feel stuck. I feel like I am spinning my wheels just getting stuck deeper and deeper into the mud.

They hold me, still.

(Your Hands – JJ Heller)

Like I’ve probably mentioned before, when I was a third year, multiple students from my class died. And my counselor told me I wasn’t grieving. Years later, now that I have realized that she was emotionally abusive and have some distance from that time, the sentiment has become almost like an encouraging mantra when things are going wrong. Don’t worry, at least you’re not grieving! You can do it! I mean, yeah, how messed up is that…it is a bit nonsensical and not overly true when I’m saying it. But just like an animal used to its cage will stay inside even once the door is unlocked preferring the known of the cage over the very alluring and probably so much more awesome freedom waiting outside the door, sometimes I am still so used to being marginalized and put down that it just feels more comfortable to do it to myself…and it probably sorta became a coping mechanism to start putting myself down so it didn’t hurt so much when she did…not sayin’ just sayin’. So I tell myself I am not grieving and don’t deserve any sympathy or support for anything in my life, because that is the response I learned.

 

And you’re probably wondering where the h**k I am going with this. Well, I kinda wonder where I am going with this too…but I at least have the background knowledge to understand why I am writing even if I have no idea where the writing is going. So I’ll share the why so that we’re on a level playing field. One of my cousins died Friday night. There isn’t a lot we know about exactly what happened. We know where he was. We know he tried calling his sisters before it happened, but was so drunk he was incoherent. We know there were 911 calls regarding someone acting strangely on the side of the interstate. We don’t know exactly the sequencing of events or how at fault he was for his demise. My mom left on Friday to go on vacation for the weekend. Some vacation she got finding out Saturday morning about the death and spending all day Saturday on the phone trying to figure out travel arrangements to the funeral and then back home – complicated when she is completely across the country from home and also very far away from the site of the funeral in a smallish town also very far from home and no one willing to help her safely get to a major airport.

 

So I’m going to completely change the topic because I’ve really thought all the possible thoughts and thinking them again isn’t going to change anything anyway…I’ve got a lot of blog post ideas written on scraps of paper or in word documents or whatever all over the place and since my mind is bouncing all around anyway, it’s probably a good time to waste a bunch of them by using them in a lot shorter version…and besides, realistically I don’t really blog *that* often anymore, so there’ll probably be a million other things to write about by the time I’m ready to write again anyway.

 

Lol, and lets be honest…I struggle on a good day to focus for very long, and so yeah, I definitely was just on a facebook and youtube (simultaneously) break and found that more details have been released. Still no one knows exactly what happened and very possibly we never will, but at least a little more of a story line emerged. And I listened to a great youtube video and scanned the facebook…and it’s time for bed.

Cook the Turkey and the Ham the Pumpkin Pie and Candied Yams

(It’s Christmas Time – The Plane Truth)

 

Goodbye summer

 

 

Hello Fall

 

 

It is not super different because I am someone who values consistency and predictability, but yes, I re-decorated to better match the season…and because I have way too many decorations tucked away in my closet – I’ve been decorating both an apartment and a room at my parents house with enough stuff for rotation both places for a long time and now it’s all in one place. I window shopped online and at Target for some variety in bedding, but I haven’t found anything that met all four rights: color/design, price, size, comfort…well, that and my linen closet is full…I had a super cute pillow case I wanted to use for the post-Christmas winter, but it got lost at some point…but considering I have two copies of the bedding currently on my bed (except for the comforter), it is pretty safe to say that I really like it. A couple years ago I almost bought the same bedding in red and orange (which would have been awesome for fall), but it was only available in store, and I was the kind of person who never ventured as far as target. My apartment a mile or so away from school and church less than three miles from school were the boundaries defining where I tended to roam. Well, that and on rare occasions wherever my bike took me…and that one time when I tried to go to the princess library…

 

I was at Target like a week or two ago and found some towels I almost had to have. They were on a really awesome sale, so it would have been a good time to buy, but like I said, my linen closet is full and I really only use like one towel and then I put it in the washer and dryer and use it again and I have probably at least eight full size towels. Most of them don’t match (partly because as a swimmer occasionally I’d have matching towels and one would get stolen – super frustrating when you just got brand new towels but not nearly as frustrating as when your brand new (expensive) swimsuit that you adore gets stolen), but when you only use one towel they don’t really have to match. But these towels at the store were red. I don’t have any red towels. I told myself if I could come up with one reason to buy the towels without using the phrase “because they are red” I could buy as many as my heart desired, but obviously I couldn’t come up with any reason I needed new towels so I didn’t.

 

Speaking of the season, today I had my first pumpkin spice of the season. I had a pumpkin pie bagel from Panera. To be honest, it wasn’t that awesome. I realized that I like pumpkin flavored baked goods because they usually have a smooth consistency, but the bagel was kinda dry. And it wasn’t so much as pumpkin flavored as it was pumpkin colored. I probably should have gone with chocolate chip…but it was still good. Because of the issue of caffeine it is hard to get behind the PSL trend, but pumpkin oatmeal is AWESOME (and pumpkin and cinnamon doesn’t really flavor brownies but does make them smell AMAZING).

 

A few years ago when I did an ambulance ride along (which I primarily remember as an opportunity to get to go to like an hour or so of PALS (pediatric advanced life support) because there really wasn’t any excitement), they were talking about how you should eat when you can, pee when you can, and sleep when you can, because you never know when something will happen that will interfere with doing those things. I have been thinking recently about that advice and how useful it is in my current situation. I am actively trying to regain weight because I lost so much of it unhealthily this spring and haven’t yet regained my goal weight. Like I read somewhere, grief doesn’t really ever go away. Instead, it fades and becomes less all-encompassing but it is always there. At this point the grief is still very real, but it is SO much better than it was. I now can have times I am super excited though…but at the same time, it definitely isn’t totally gone. I can still go from having a really good day to about to cry quickly. So knowing that sometimes things are hard, I have started shoving food in my face whenever I have any interest at all in eating, because you never know when you’re going to struggle to eat your next meal.

 

So I made a new friend this week. Which was really awesome at first, but less awesome when this person wanted to know if I could hang out every day. I don’t know how I attract this kind of person…actually I do. I love people and am lousy at saying no and won’t write off the people everyone else ignored so people who haven’t made friends with anyone else become my friends and sometimes it is great, but other times I just wish I could figure out how to make them some other friends because it quickly gets exhausting being their sole source of entertainment and keeps me from having as much of an opportunity to make friends with people who might in the end be better friends for me anyway. Maybe God is giving me an opportunity to learn to say no…that is word that isn’t really in my vocabulary. I am not Minnesota passive aggressive, but I am most definitely Minnesota passive…and I wasn’t even born in Minnesota so I can’t say I was born this way…

Do the angels fill the air? Do you reach out and touch them?

(Dreaming Jacob’s Dream—Michael Card)

 

Lol, so I think this is from the Christmas musical The Plane Truth when I think it is Joseph who says “scare me any worse and I’d be with the Lord!” Umm, yeah, that was me on the way home from church this evening. God definitely was watching out for me so that I didn’t meet the angels this evening.

 

So for this story to make sense, you need to know that I didn’t have much sleep most of last week and have been sleeping like 11 hours at night the past two nights and sneaking in a few minutes of eyes closed time here and there as I find an opportunity in between doing homework…okay fine, in between staring at my homework but being too tired to actually do anything. Keeping my eyes open has been a chore.

 

So anyway, I was driving home from church, and I almost fell asleep…not like my usual way overtired kinda napping against the window at the stoplight or anything, but like I was driving down the freeway and suddenly my head was in my lap. Luckily, as I drifted to sleep my foot came off the gas and the slowing of the car I think is probably what kept me from falling all the way asleep, but that was terrifying. I am so fortunate and blessed that I woke up in time that I stayed in my lane and didn’t run into anything, but it was really scary…

 

I think perhaps I may have learned my lesson about driving half asleep…’cause I definitely do not want that to happen again, because next time I might not be so lucky. I love seeing my friends, but I also like being alive…actually, sometimes I’m not so sure about being alive, but I do like Monkey, my car, and crashing Monkey would be a horrible waste of resources, because Monkey was expensive and still has a lot of usable life left. And dying in a car crash would probably not be a good way to go.

 

On a moderately less serious note, I was thinking recently about answers to interview questions…lol…so I was wondering if being able to pretend that I am having a good time counts as a strength…’cause I hate conferences/retreats, they really really really are not my thing, but see me at a conference/retreat and the closest I’ll get to telling the truth is to say it’s okay…most of the time I keep smiling and telling everyone what they expect and want to hear, that this is great. Everyone tells me it is awesome, so most of the time I feel like I can’t tell them how much I am not enjoying it. People don’t seem to believe that someone might not be having a good time, as if I am making things up or exaggerating when I say that I don’t really want to be there, but I can assure you that after a fall retreat for two different churches, a few leadership retreats for college, and now Midyear, I am very much sure that I do not like it Sam I am. I do not like it in a box, I do not like it with a fox. I do not like it in my hair. I do not like it anywhere. Everyone tells me going into it that I have to go because of how amazing it is, and afterwards everyone tells me I should be glad I went because of how much fun I had, but in reality, I didn’t have fun. Sure, given enough time in one place, I am sure to have a fun moment or two while I am there, but the overall vibe is not fun. The overall vibe is how many more minutes until this is over…but you’d never know that aside from reading it here, because in real life I have learned not to be a negative Nancy about these things because I will essentially be told that I am wrong, and when I already am unhappy about having just spent the time at the event in question, I am very much not in the mood to be told how much fun I had, so I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut. I keep an open mind and go into new experiences giving them the chance to be good even though all my prior experience tells me that it probably won’t, so I don’t condemn the experience before having it, but I feel like at this point in my life I have tried enough things to know what I like and don’t like, and conferences/retreats fall firmly in the category of I’ll go if it feels like the right thing to do, but there is a very good chance that I will not like it. (Although I will say the first fall retreat I went on actually was almost a good time. Those kind of things aren’t really designed with a person like me in mind, but being surrounded by people who knew me pretty well actually wasn’t half bad…that one fell pretty darn close to the category of good. Not good enough to ever go again, but good enough to have positive memories. Let’s just say that at the other church’s retreat (which was actually if I remember correctly in the winter) I spent a lot of my time in my room, alone, crying. I was left out as usual and once they successfully got me to agree to come, no one really cared that I was there anymore). I am very happy to live vicariously through pictures of events so I can be happy with you about your time at the conference, but actually being there myself just isn’t my thing.

(For Recap of my time at Midyear, see the previous four-ish posts…)

Stones inside your hand might be small

(Giants Fall–Francesca Battistelli)

Y’all, my brain is spinning with the list of things I need to do in the next day/week or so…so it seemed like a good time to take a break…before I actually started anything…umm…someone (me) didn’t think this through very well…

So this is going to be a series of short thoughts about a variety of things so that I don’t spend too long writing on any one thing since I don’t have time for that.

Sometimes in hindsight I can recognize that I didn’t make the best choice. A few days ago, I saw a bag of capsules in the parking lot as I walked to my car. I was in a hurry. I pretended I didn’t see them and kept walking. They were in an unlabeled Ziploc bag. They were pretty non-descript. I didn’t know to whom I would bring them. I was afraid if I picked them up they might be an illicit substance and then it would be in my possession and I would be in trouble. I walked away. In retrospect, I should have brought someone’s attention to it. Someone might have been looking for them and by the time they found them perhaps they had already been destroyed by being run over. Or maybe they were illicit but if I’d brought attention to it I could have prevented someone from obtaining illicit substances. I know that ignoring it is almost definitely the wrong choice.

I think I have now seen like everything. A couple days ago I saw a man walking along the sidewalk pushing a stroller. The stroller contained a…watermelon. Strapped into the 5-point harness as if it were a child. I did a double-take and then laughed my head off (jk…I did laugh, but my head remained firmly attached to my neck).

I was sad on Tuesday when I found out that there was no Cru, but it ended up not being a bad night. I didn’t do the homework I was planning on doing, but I did spend some time with someone who needed a friend to hang out with, and I wasn’t up nearly as late as I would have been had I stayed for Cru. Also I learned what mochi (sp?) is, and it is good.

Also today I had a lot of adventures. First this morning I stopped at a gas station and it took forever to figure out how to get out of the parking lot when I was done. I don’t think I have ever seen a parking lot with so many one way signs. Then about a block down the road I saw another gas station that would have been easier to get in and out of and was 10 cents less per gallon. Fail. Well, kinda, because I also really did need to stop ASAP because I was getting really low and didn’t want to be a hypermiling jerk. Then on the way to school it was a Very Good Thing that I got to leave way earlier than I asked. Because in about half an hour or so I went about a mile on the freeway. I could have missed my turn and taken a different road and gotten to school in half the time or I could have walked and gotten down the road faster. So that was unfortunate and frustrating. But on the positive side, I did arrive at school on time.

Also, I found out today I am presenting tomorrow, so that should be interesting with exactly zero preparation so far.

I love life. I love rotations. I love me, and I love you 🙂