the wild savage in me struck

This afternoon/evening, Prof. Bill Owen hosted a bbq at his crib (haha...I just said "crib") for the choirs he directs. I went with some girls from our floor, and it was uber fun. Dude, any time that I can get off campus and get mostly homemade food, I'm so there!

Well, at Bill's house, there's a communal green for the development behind his yard, which is surrounded by houses and tall trees. In one of these tall trees hangs a rope to which is attached a large stick so that people--namely college students--can swing wildly on it.

At first, I wasn't going to try it, but then I did and it was tons of fun. We were all taking turns, getting pushed, swinging about wildly. I guess I went one too many times because the last time I swung, my arms decided to give out at the peak of my swing and I fell. (But please spread it around that I "jumped." *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*)

Once I hit the ground, I realized that I was fine--at least in one piece. Everyone thought that I'd jumped because a bunch of the guys had been--go figure ;) --but I confessed to having fallen. I have some minor scrapes on my hands from the wood on the swing, but the painful injury is my right thumb, which is swelling up and hurts to move.

How can I type, you might be thinking. I think the ice pack has something to do with it. I can't grip with my thumb, but I can pound it on a keyboard with the most determined of the bloggers.

Anyway, it was really fun to be outside, running around in the light rain, barefoot and carefree. And then I came back to school where internet still doesn't work in my room, and the reality of end of term finals came back to me. So onward to revising my genres pieces with an ax. Muahahahahaha!!!!!

(crossposted from myspace...)

I got dem end time blues

My apologies for caricaturistic language in the subject line. If it offends you, well, I don't care. I'm past giving a shrew's toenail about pretty much everything. Moving on.

You know it's the end of the semester when:

1. Your head has not stopped spinning from exhaustion in the past week and a half. (This is different from being dizzy.)

2. People need to repeat themselves constantly because you "didn't quite catch it" the first, second, or third time around. (This is a problem when part of your job involves answering phones and dealing with customers.)

3. You have four shots of coffee before 9:45am and you still feel below your normal functioning level. (Typically, four shots would have me bouncing off the walls in hyperproductivity.)

4. You suffer from insomnia and rearrange your collection of Christmas song lyrics, misreading "O Holy Night" as "O Holy Shit." (I must attribute this to another unfortunate soul--but it's a fantastic example of how the end of the semester attacks your brain!)

5. You arrange a meeting with the dean of the school of ministry in hopes to do something about that one professor's class. (A perk from making the appointment: hugs from both Luanne and Steve Chandler. Yay for pseudo parents!)

6. You have a perpetual headache clinging to the nerves around your eyes and your left eye has a perpetual twitch from a lack of sleep. (Note: I feel like microscopic gnomes have taken jackhammers to my optical nerves.)

7. Your spinning head develops into a case of dizziness as you type out this blog. (I know that I am stationary, but I feel like my head is turning in circles. Perhaps I should take that nap now...?)

8. You put in two full hours at work and then call it a day because you're so tired that you can hardly move. (Best thing about working in the bookstore, my managers understand about the end of the semester and give me grace on job time commitments.)

9. Everything, and I mean everything, induces hysterical laughter accompanied by tears. I didn't think that the end of last semester would repeat itself, but here I am, Fall '06 take two!

10. A horrible cold is hovering in the wings, waiting to pounce when I least expect it. This will most likely occur once I finish with the semester and have time to sleep again.


And now: to bed.

changes

God knows me quite well, I will admit. (Go figure, He made me...He ought to know!) He's been changing my plans right and left for a few months now, but one thing I just realized was that He made a gradual shift in the plans. I'm guessing that's because if He'd done it all at once, I would have gone bonkers and turned away from Him--at least temporarily--refusing to trust Him. As is, I'm gradually trusting Him as the plans change.

Also, I just realized that there's no need for me to worry about the future. In fact, I haven't been making any plans for awhile now. I just had a thought about, "Well, what about next year while I'm in school and working...where will that be?" And then it dawned on me that I don't need to worry about the future, if I'll be able to continue working at the bookstore while being an RA or not. God knows the future, and He's in control. If that's the case, why should I worry?

I get so easily distracted from the here and now when I worry. I end up thinking about everything but what's going on all around me at this moment, and when my attention is divided, I'm not very effective where I'm at. Since my desire is to be used of God for His purposes, I need to be present where I'm at and not in twenty billion different places and times.

This is also teaching me about contentment vs. complacency. Hmm. Now there's a topic I can sink my sharp little eye teeth into...but not at this time. No, that's something I need to reflect and understand better first.

*awkward turtle*

Hypothetically speaking: when your brother-in-law ends a phone conversation with "I love you, goodbye," how should you take it? Normal brothers-in-law do that, right? It's not just a thing that an ex-boyfriend/now brother-in-law would do?

Also, again, hypothetically speaking, should you get suspicious of any unnecessary attention paid to you by said brother-in-law with whom you have an unfortunate past? AND, should you feel weirded out that he tends to disappear from inside the house right around the time you go to your bedroom and close the door, but you can hear him walking around outside, close to your window?

Am I just paranoid?!


Okay, so I probably should have brought up the contents of the second paragraph over Christmas break--and again over spring break--but I didn't want to read into anything and just wrote it off as "the guy of the house" checking around outside to make sure that the females inside would be safe. But in light of recent creepy-esque events--see paragraph 1--I'm going back to the idea of "is my brother-in-law a voyeur?" Sick...but I wouldn't put it past him.

A friend of mine here at school knows him as well, and knows him to be the manipulative, self-seeking, arrogant shmuck that he is, which is funny because I'd almost forgotten that he was passing himself off as a cancer victim for awhile. (Tell me again, why the heck did I date the jerk?! Was I THAT desparate?! I would like to write it off as naivete...and at least I got out of it when I realized how much of a flake he was. [unlike my sister who eloped with him a few months later, but I'm NOT going in to that now])

So yeah, I'm officially weirded out by my brother-in-law, the pathological liar. I am just glad that he lives in California now, and I only see him when I'm down there.


Other awkwardness: I think I have an "admirer" on campus. (Again, could be paranoid suspicion.) I hope that I'm wrong, because the last thing I want to deal with this semester is a guy crushing on me. Actually, I might have two...but hopefully I'm mistaken there as well. (God, please let it not be so!)


Any insight? PLEASE comment!

venture into art

Controversial British graffiti artist Banksy uses his art to make a point about society. Some of his favored themes addressed include world poverty, anti-war, non-conformity, and human rights. In his exhibits, he tends to use live animals. (See the "elephant in the room" exhibit that was intended to draw attention to world poverty.)

On his website, Banksy includes cuttings from papers and magazines that reference his work. One such article discusses how an animal rights activist chained herself to an exhibit in which he used live farm animals. She is quoted as saying:

It is disgusting that these animals are being used as a blank canvas. This is one of the worst cases of exploitation that I have ever come across. They are being kept in cramped conditions just for the purposes of entertainment--it's disgraceful.

I wonder what this activist has to say about human trafficking.

Freud

I have a confession to make, and I'm a little uncomfortable admitting it out loud. It might take me awhile to get to it. Okay, I think I'm ready.

*breathes*
*exhales*


I do not have penis envy.


I know. It's really shocking. Please, take a moment and collect yourself. I need a moment myself to recover from such an unheard of fact that an English major at a liberal arts college just might not follow the great psychoanalist himself and blindly agree with every theory Freud ever created, especially when it concerns literature.

Point 1: today in world masterpieces, we discussed a satire by Rokeya Hossein called "Sultana's Dream" in which Hossein proposes a reversal of the purdah system. (i.e. the men are secluded, not the women in this Islamic society)

Point 2: the piece was written and published in 1905, well after Freud began his quacked out methods and at a time in which he was very much in vogue

Point 3: at one point in the story, Hossein mentions that in "Ladyland"--where the dream takes place--the women took away the guns and swords that the men used to fight with, saying that they preferred to fight with the power of their minds instead of brute force


So, being in a class half full of English majors, someone felt the need to point out that guns and swords are phallic symbols (Point 3). I had the nerve--gasp!--to question the intentionality of inserting Freudian imagery into a piece written by a woman in Bangladesh. Oh my.

One of my fellow majorific friends decided to jump on the opposing bandwagon and cite Point 2 in a highly argumentative tone in which her cheeks flushed in indignation, saying that it was highly likely that Hossein would have at least been exposed to Freud--or psychoanalytic writings--by the time she wrote this piece.

As I dislike heated debate in classes with overzealous argumentative folks, I chose not to continue the argument, but then pointed out non-phallic Freudian symbolism of the women harnessing the power of the sun--sun=male, moon=female--to conquer the invading hordes. Yeah, so we read into that and then the class wound down.

My focus of this blog is that I'm so sick of Freud. Yes, I embraced Freudian analysis last semester in literary criticism because--why?--he is SO EASY to use. You can read Freudian imagery into bloody everything. For crying out loud, let's just read into the patriarchal society in the Bible and say that Moses' staff was used as a symbol of God's power. (Hm. That's actually an interesting conclusion...but not the point.)

The point being that there are hundreds of ways to interpret any number of literary works--we had a whole semester of learning about them, and we couldn't cover more than about six or eight--so why must we always return to Freud like a dog to its own vomit? Why can't we use our brains--granted the class is at 8am--and approach a piece from a different perspective?

Next time we discuss something in class, I'm putting in extra work and finding a more fitting method of interpretation that does NOT use Freud and his stupid sexual fixations. (Yes, that was purposeful inclusion of Freudian terminology.)

oh wow...

It's like the Blue Man group...only better! :)

ninjelephant

This makes me happy :)

I like pie

The meaning to the lyrics of the song 'American Pie.' (Funny, I thought the lyricist was just on LSD...)

crock pot

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, there is a much quoted line spoken by Polonius. "This above all to thine own self be true." Of course, Polonius is an inconsistent flake. But even an idiot can stumble on something true. (And let's face it, Shakespeare liked him some irony!)

I am a people pleaser at heart. I don't like conflict. I don't like dissension among the ranks. I'm a peace keeper--but not very good at being a peace maker. (BIG difference) I am very much a hippy, a treehugger, a free spirit, a "everywhere love" kind of person. I like my rose-tinted glasses, even though in the past few years they've slipped a bit. (I'm trying to push them back up on my nose in a healthy, balanced way.)

Now to the topic of this summer. (Ugh.) It's been weighing on my mind for a long time. What to do? I dunno! I keep pleading with God to give me more direction, and as of last night, I felt like I was still stumbling blindly into a blizzard sandstorm with options swirling around me, but no clear idea of where to go.

I had been planning on getting a job up in Alaska and staying with Tyler's family over the summer, which I still think would be great, and I love his family and know that they want me to come stay with them. (I haven't heard back from any of those applications yet...) Over spring break, my family in California jumped on the idea of me working down there for the summer. I think that would be great too. In either of those situations, I'd have great housing with people I know, a vehicle at my disposal, and a fun location to explore. (Very different details, but similar characteristics.)

Now if you will take a moment to read the setup: a group of people on one end who would love to have me spend the summer with them, and a group of people on the other end who would love to have me spend the summer with them. As I mentioned before, I'm a people pleaser and I feel very torn right now. What do I do? Who do I please? Who would be more upset if I don't end up with them? Who do I have more allegiance to? GAH!!!!

*pulls hair out in clumps*

So take that scenario and set it aside for a moment. Let me rabbit trail for awhile, but I promise I'll get back to this. (Cross my heart!)

The past week has been somewhat insane. (What's new?) I'm not going into the details, because that's not the point. Conclusion: crazy week, very emotional. One day would be a roller coaster, then the next great, then roller coaster, then great, etc.

Last night, I let everything come to a head and was freaking out. I was crying and feeling oppressed and suppressed and depressed, and...pressure! Pressure was there. But again, you don't need all the details--it was just bad.

I was half-texting a friend and I mentioned that I was stressed about the summer. She mentioned this Christian summer camp that she's applied to--and several of my other friends have applied as well. When the topic of that camp came up last week, I was vaguely interested, and mentioned that then. But after awhile, I wasn't very interested at all. So I stopped pursuing it after a brief overview of the camps.

I stopped texting and remained in high anxiety mode for awhile. Then I texted my other friend who had an application on hand for the camp. I told her that I was still interested in applying--if possible. She replied that she'd bring me the application right away, which I thought was odd since it was late last night--12:15 or so.

It's funny how as soon as this mini conversation happened, I felt utter peace. One minute, I felt so overwhelmed that I'd begun to cut again--I only mention this to show the contrast--and the next minute, the tears were gone, and I couldn't conjure up a single negative emotion. I met with Shoshana in the lounge then, and we talked for a little while, then I went back to bed and lay there, soaking in the peace that was there.

I woke up this morning with the same peace, but talking with God, I said, "Okay, right now I'm fine, but in a little while, I'm getting out of bed and out of my room, and I have to face all that crap that beat me over the head yesterday." But the peace lasted, praise the Lord! (I was cranky for awhile due to low blood sugar, however.)

This blog is getting long, and I apologize, but there's still more to say on this topic, so if you've read this far, kudos, my faithful reader!

I want to expand on the possibility of working at this camp this summer. It is a Christian camp, for one, so it would be a positive spiritual environment. There would be NATURE all around me the entire time there--yay!--and it would be tons of fun. Plus, I'd get to work with kids and teenagers again, and get paid to do it. (Dude, that rocks in my opinion!) I don't foresee it stressing me out, either. And ministry. HELLO! I'd be actively ministering to kids and youth who are so desperately seeking.

Another thing is that it isn't for the entire summer, only part of it. This way, I'd be able to live here at NU for part of the summer, keep working at the bookstore and keep making some cash. That would be ideal because then I wouldn't have to stress about where to put my junk all summer. I could move over to summer housing at the end of the semester, and then gradually store things as I needed to. (As is, I don't have the time to get stuff packed up and in storage before potentially heading off to wherever after grad.)

Furthermore, I'd be more centrally located and would be able to work on floor things for next year, like decorations. This doesn't seem like a big thing, but I was seriously stressing about that since I'm going to have two days between RA training and new student orientation in the fall to move in to my room and decorate the floor. So in that respect, I can chill a bit more and work on that during the summer without needing to transport pre-made decorations from another state. *whew*

At this point, I can't think of anymore reasons, but I keep going back to the peace that I have about that possibility, and I'm praying that God will continue to open/close doors as necessary for this summer. Oh wait, another big reason why I like the idea of the camp...if I was still here this summer, I could still go to counseling for at least part of it, which I still need every now and then.

[lengthy period of going to choir, then talking with a mentor]

Okay, after bouncing all this off my sounding board downstairs and coming back to it all with fresh eyes, I still feel a lot of peace about this decision. Good. Moving on!

Oh, and in case the introductory paragraphs of this blog don't seem to tie in: I realized that I couldn't please everyone else about what I did with my life this summer. I need to do what I feel God is telling me to do. (And that is being true to myself.)