This Isn't A Very Good Pep Talk, But Then Again...

My four biggest worries:
-That I won't do well on my history and math finals and will lose the grade I've earned all semester in a few short, silent hours next week.
-That I will run out of money in the next two weeks.
-That I won't be able to stop binging on Jew cakes (Leibniz bisuits) now that I've been eating sugar all week for my birthday.
-That I'm wasting the precious time God has given me on too much fun and too little research.

My four happiest memories from this year:
-A Whole Foods run with Shelby late one night when she was sick and I got free pizza. We laughed so hard.
-My first week of school in January; how new & scary & exhilarating
-Noshville at lunch with Becca weeks in a row
-Dinner with Cameron at Cha Cha's on Belmont

It's funny how the happiest moments of my year had something to do with sharing food with someone else. It's funny that my biggest worries all revolve around self-discipline.

I've been sitting around for hours this afternoon, putting off my gym time and my study time just because. Because I'm tired of hard work and tired of fearing that I'll blow it all if I'm not careful.

Sometimes I just need to stop and remind myself that it's no big deal. My life. My death. My hard work. My weakness. My eating. My running. My studying. My grade point. My getting a good job. My relationships with men. My family dynamics. My worn out skin and the lotion that I have to constantly buy to keep my skin from becoming a cakey, Mohave desert shell around me.

It's no big deal, girl.
Even if it all crumbles away, which it never does--but even if it does, nothing can separate you from the love of Christ. Nothing is so devastating that He's not there when you wake up in the morning, giving you a moment of respite from the worry or the guilt or the despair.

It's no big deal.






Now go do what you need to do and stop wasting time, you lazy bum. You think this life is going to live itself? You're just going to sit around and somehow you'll magically know everything and have a better running time and the house will be clean?

Get over feeling bored and tired and stressed. Jump in with both...hearts. The one you use to love sitting around and doing nothing, and the one that loves all the things in life that are yet to be. You'll need both of them to finish the job.

Brrrr, It's Cold in Here

I was making conversation with a friend by email a moment ago and was so pleased with the discovery of a little Machiavellian heart in my chest that I must post here my response for your amusement.

We were talking about getting over those you've loved.

I think if you have a beautiful and pure heart, then you are faced with the Jane Austen unbending love problem. That love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. It's a terrible predicament when we must choose to lose our ideals concerning how we love or face annihilation of our souls for nurturing an undying, unrequited sympathy.

Be Machiavellian, I say--gratefully fling love aside as soon as possible. Heck, don't let yourself ever get there

---------

I would add that I wouldn't be willing to love someone unless they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Put your money where your mouth is, I say. I've got plenty of men around if I'm just looking for someone to talk to.

It Really Is Too Bad

Everything = Bad

The whiny Alanis Morrisette song that just played, the "Your love is like bad medicine" that played before that, and the terrible Christmas shopping advertisements that are now playing too loud on the coffee shop radio while I figure out my study schedule = Bad.

The food I ate for lunch being gone = Bad.

The teeth sensitivity mixed with cold weather = Bad.

The three finals in a row scheduled for next Tuesday, starting at 8 AM = Bad.

Basically:
Everything = Bad

Even good things somehow = Bad right now, which means that there is another variable being surrepticiously added to my life equations and outweighing all the good.

If Bad = Bad,
And Good = Good,
Then Good + (something) = Bad

First, that (something) has to take away all the Good. Then, it has to add a whole Bad. Wow. So:

(something)=-Good + Bad

A (- Good) = Bad.
So (something) = Bad+Bad

Man, that's 2 Bad. Something is 2 Bad in my life, that's for sure...
Get it?

Aaaaanyways...
That means that 2Bad is surrepticiously being added to my life equation, in effect, wiping out the Good feelings and leaving me with a Bad feeling.

And during Christmas, to boot. Geeze.

I'm no fool. This comes right at a time when I'm learning how to step away from the comforts and conveniences of a pleasurable existence (minus last night's birthday pizza and cupcakes). Of course I feel like everything = bad. Of course the world itself, like a mule, has turned and gone the other way. Spiteful turn of events.

I'm just complaining here, take no notice. But please, someone turn off this crappy radio station before I plunge my used and dirty spoon into my own heart.

Imitation of Christ, Another Quote

“I would rather experience repentance in my soul than know how to define it.”
Thomas a Kempis

Turning Over

It's not me.
Bent down low and washed up.
A torn, discarded coffee cup.
Used shoes and broken laces.
Fallen friends with false faces.

It's not me.

Time for climbing different trees.
Sinking into darkened soil.
Nesting down deep.
Shuffling through colored leaves.

And this is me.
The mellow waltzing of silky birds.
A breeze across the winter air.
A lifted, lilting, tingled feeling.
Dancing through the shaded woods.

This is me.
The sound of laundry turning.
The cement firm under each step.
A fiery, crackling, ember burning.
The warmth of spring's distant welcome.

To Know God

The old man stopped by last night.

He told me to relax.
He told me to sleep.

"Everything will be easier in the morning," he told me.

But I slept through my alarm.

I can still hear his voice, telling me that what I desire isn't different than anyone else I know. "You only want what all others have. What could be so bad about that?"

But the voice sounds like a dark murmur today--the old man wants to be the new me, but I know better.

What is wanting?
What is having?
What is living?

To know God.
To know God.
To know God.

Shoulda Been Writing

I'm in the holiday spirit.
Trying to make the season bright.

I've got an essay due in about 17 hours and I'm going to go for a run before I get involved in it.

If I were smart, I would skip working out today and focus on my school work. But I get so lazy and sloppy and tired if I don't work out, and I have no idea where or how that would hit me...or when. So I'm going for a simple three or four mile run. What I hate about my work ethic this semester is that I can't find it. It's like that thing I packed up in a box last January and moved all the way to Bowling Green and never unpacked. Those things. {I actually have a stack of about ten boxes full of miscellaneous items that were only of use to me in my past life as an office robot}

I've got my birthday party tomorrow night & I couldn't be happier. Happy friends and maybe happy music and definitely happy sweets like cookies and cupcakes. All those things add up into one sweet happy me, hopefully.

There's a lot to be said for rounding the corner on another birthday. A lot of things I haven't figured out yet. But, like mildew on a toilet, there's a lot that's been growing undercover over time that I totally forget about. I ran into a girl at school who practically rained down the joy of Christ on me today while I ate my lunch. She says that she doesn't necessarily always make a perfect "disciple," but her enthusiasm was totally contagious and gave me a good reminder that I need to keep my heart focused on loving God.

I could sit here and kill time until my 17 hours turns into 2 or 3 {which is how I handled the last essay}. I'm going to play this one smart and go away from this den of sin {read: house of sleep & TV temptation}, and I already made sure that I had finished season one of my latest TV show fetish before the paper would be due so that I wouldn't be tempted to throw in the essay towel and sit on my recliner watching TV. Yeah, that's what I was doing all last week instead of my homework...I was preparing myself to be emotionally and TValistically free to do my paper tonight. Some might call it procrastination or distraction, but we both know it was preparation. One man's procrastination today is another man's preparation for hard work tomorrow.

There's a verse in the New Testament that says "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts." Sometimes you've got to tie your own hands behind your back if you're too weak to do what you need to do. If I stay at home to do my essay, I'll do everything except my essay. {I thought I was past this type of negligent, weak-willed, undisciplined crap, too, don't worry}. So if I plan to stay at home anyway, knowing that this place distracts me, I'm basically planning on not doing my essay. And as much as I'd like to mess up my grades in the last two weeks of school....yeah. Nope.

If I could do anything tonight, and not have to do what I have to do, I would get dressed up in a black dress that I don't even own with a good pair of heels and a lot of hairspray and perfume and I would be out at dinner at some cute little restaurant. Then I would go back to some house that looks a bit like the interior of Restoration Hardware and crash in my UGG boots and lots of layers on a giant, deep couch to watch romantic comedies.

Do you see what's happening to me lately? I'm locked in a glass case of fantasy.
Don't get me out, though.
At least not until the semester is over.