2010

Every year, I do a New Year’s 100 Resolutions list for things to live by that I try to accomplish within the year.

This year, I lost my sheet.

Whoops

But it's okay, I still made some awesome memories.

With that being said, here are a few memories I have acquired the past year:

Þ Having God discussions while watching the sunrise on the beach

Þ Moonlit skinny-dipping

Þ Sleeping in the middle of Alumni Park in a tent

Þ Roadtrips to Kentucky, South Carolina, New York and Pennslyvania with awesome people

Þ Potlucks, my favorite thing ever

Þ Seeing old friends, and realizing that we're still friends after all this time

Þ Drinking tea and pondering life with good friends

Þ Sleepovers...with lots of giggling involved

Þ Canoeing down the Duck River and pretending to be in Lord of the Rings

Þ Camping out in downtown Chattanooga in a Box City

Þ Watching thunderstorms

Þ Hiking

Þ Bonding with my roommates in God’s country, Gatlinburg, TN

Þ Sleeping out under the stars

Þ Seeing beautiful people get married

P.s. I didn't take this picture but this fantastic lady did!

Þ Laughing so hard I cried

Þ Crying for the first time since God knows when

Þ Crying more than once in a year

Þ Being part of a suicide hotline and talking to great people

Þ Creating beautiful art

Friends, let's make more memories next year, shall we?

"No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" --Donald Miller

Merry Christmas!

As you lay around your couch, stuffed after eating ridiculous amounts of food and not having gotten out of your jammies yet (and it's after 12), feel free to check out this retelling of Christmas:

I'm Done With Finals...Now What Do I Do?

The other day I finished everything...papers, projects, exams, those errands I've been meaning to do since October, and I even balanced my checkbook.

And so, once I had finished all those pressing matters that have been constantly bearing down on me, I found myself sitting on my couch, with nothing to do.

I would check my phone every few minutes, nothing. No movies I felt like I've been desiring to watch. No places I could go. Nothing I could really do in that span of time.

It was the strangest feeling, the feeling of being bored. An old acquaintance that came into my living room and settled in, and I wasn't really sure how to start the conversation. The feeling of boredom was the awkward pause when both members of the party's eyes are shifting, trying to find some sort of common ground and aren't quite sure what to do with their hands.

So I went to bed. At 9:30 pm.

A favourite life motto of mine is: When in doubt, sleep it out

It helps with all of life's problems. Except perhaps insomnia in which case I recommend watching Bob Ross or listening to the Bible in Spanish.

Anyways, once I woke up and started to find things to do, here is what I found:

• Pray by Justin Bieber. The song got stuck in my head and I honestly have to say that it's his best yet. I'm impressed Bieber, job well done.
• Make an origami elephant out of a dollar bill. Don't feel bad about leaving waiters crummy tips anymore--just leaving them a beautifully folded pachyderm.
• I just want you guys to know that I just spelled pachyderm correctly the first time without consulting a second source. Definitely one of my greatest accomplishments of 2010

• "I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly."

  Madeline L'Engle: Fascinating lady, brilliant writer. I've been going down to the public library and spending my days reading books. Like actually enjoying reading instead of rushing through a book to write a paper on it. Anyways, I just read A Wrinkle in Time the other day and loved it.
• Calvin and Hobbes. Also picked this up from the library. I hope my offspring end up being that awesome

• The Introvert's Corner: An interesting blog with articles about introversion. Being on the extreme introverted side (I'm an INFP), this was like connecting with folks who finally understand

Enjoy!

Night Stroll

The lights go off.

He wakes, shakes his mane, and stalks off as the night air is crisp and the stars are twinkling from high above. The lion nudges the window open and heads into the darkness. It's silent outside and no one is around, just the way he prefers it. He saunters down the street, stretching his legs from sitting all day and swishing his tail, slicing the cool air. He stops at a house and watches as an innocent child sleeps and growls at the nightmares, chasing them away. He keeps going, stopping every once in a while to nose through an empty Taco Bell wrapper. The lion strolls alongside a river until finally he finds a field.

Then he really comes alive

The magnificent beast begins to run, chasing after fireflies, leaping from park bench to park bench, madly on the chase as the lightening bugs taunt him as they flicker for a second then quickly disappear. As other nocturnal creatures come out of their homes, the lion playfully stalks them, pretending each one is a wildebeest out on the savannah. He pounces but never attacks them--he has no need to eat them.

Once he has finished startling his prey, he heads for a grassy knoll, high above the rest of the park. There, he looks up at the great stars above him, watching as stars shoot across the sky, too far away for him to catch. He sits and ponders his life and waits for an adventure to arise. There isn't one tonight but he'll always try again tomorrow.

The world around him starts getting brighter and it's time to head back. The glorious creature takes one last careless swipe at a noisy cricket and leaves. Although some people are already starting their day, the lion ambles down the city streets. He isn't afraid of them spotting him, they are too concerned with punctuality and traffic to notice a lion meandering down the sidewalk. At last, he climbs back through the window and plops back onto bed and Aslan Judah Mufasa settles down to sleep.

After all, lions do sleep nineteen hours a day.

Second Place

Seven times my intramural team has come in second place

To come so close, yet to never win the limelight

To have to watch the winning team win shirts, get pictures, and gain respect

To have to get condolences, a "maybe next year", to quietly pack up your things and go home

Many more times than seven, I've come in second place in other things in life

To watch others receive the recognition, to wonder what it must feel like

One day

__________________________________________________________

Tonight, I sulk. I think about the things I could have done better. I tell myself how disappointed I am in myself

Then, I shower off the feelings of defeat and regret. I put on warm pajamas and I go to bed.

Tomorrow, I try again.

I go back to work. I build upon my strengths and locate my weaknesses. I continue the journey

Because tomorrow brings hope.

And I pray that the hope never runs out

A Day In The Life Of A College Student---Writing A Paper Edition

Type. Type. Type. Stare at wall and zone out. Type. Type. Hit a mental block. Go on sporcle.com and try to name all the Disney movies by character. Repeat this step 3x. Realize that you haven't eaten in a few hours. Find food. Eat food while surfing Facebook. Food break goes on longer than normal due to Facebook stalking boys/people you haven't seen since high school and never talked to while there. Realize that it's getting late. Research some more for paper. Scourge internet for scientific sounding article. Remember a youtube video that a friend mentioned. Watch video. Laugh. Post on friend's wall that you watched said video and loved it. Share it with another friend on Facebook. Go back to the article with big terminology. Decide it's too confusing and go to Wikipedia for a clearer explanation. Type. Type. Check out Pandora stations. Find the most obscure one possible. Type. Type. Type. Need change of environment. Go to a serene place like library or reading room. Check Facebook to see if any friends are in library/reading room. Type. Zone out. Realize that you've been staring at the person across the room and they caught you. Frantically start typing again. Double space paper. Realize that it's not long enough. Write a few obscure sentences. Still not long enough. Resort to making the periods a bigger size. Still not long enough. Make the commas bigger too. Hope that professor counts half page as a full page. Save paper under something like "Stupid Research Paper for Satan's Class".

Print.

Go eat some ice cream. It's been a productive day.

Hoping That Greater Things Are Yet To Come

The flu. Group projects. Sleepless nights. Unfortunately those are the things that reign my life at the moment.

I wish I could go on about other, more beautiful things that are going on but I can't.

English grammar is demanding my attention for my exam at 7:45.

But here's a quick glimpse of beautiful things happening in my life:

-"Falling In Love In A Coffee Shop" by Landon Pigg: this could be the most beautiful song I've ever heard

-The girl I've been tutoring this past semester told me she loved me. It was a particularly rough day so just hearing those words brightened my day

-I am the Messenger by Marcus Zusak: Fantastic, brilliant, original, written by an Australian so that you'll want to infuse "bloke" "mate" and "sheila" into every sentence

-For possibly the first time since entering college, I've really wanted to go home. And it was in that moment that I've realized that although being independent is grand and life changing, one of the greatest feelings is to be taken care of.

-This quote:

“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.”

--Edward Everett Hale

-Laying down in bed and saying, "Thanks God. Today was especially awesome."

Books

I'm supposed to be studying right now, but I just wanted to update the world on one of the most beautiful places ever:

It's a certain Reading Room and it has become one of my favorite places on earth. It's quiet, eerily quiet, as in I just dropped a pen and it echoed across the room, quiet. But it's also got that cozy feeling, like drinking a mug of hot chocolate or finally having gone over to a friend's house so many times that it's as if you live there.

That great feeling.

I just love libraries, they possess such an adventurous, yet grand aura. The fact that they can hold so many worlds and it's up to you to decide. The greatness of people who have left their legacies in an object that weighs merely a pound (unless it happens to be War and Peace, in which case, it weighs 2.8 pounds).

I do believe I realized this love when I was but a wee youngling, watching Beauty and the Beast and the scene where the Beast gives Belle the library came on and I realized that that could be the best gift someone could ever give me.

Coolest thing ever.

Yes, I've come to terms with being a dork. In fact, I'm listening to the Lord of the Rings and Narnia soundtracks as I'm typing this.

Anyways, I could spend hours in here.

But, as no one has updated Facebook in a while and I'm done searching for movie tickets for the midnight premiere of Harry Potter 7, I'll leave you a list of some of my favorite books:

1. Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis): Without a shout of a doubt, my favorite books ever since I was little. Out of the seven, I'd say The Last Battle is my favorite.

And while I'm at it, let's just claim C.S. Lewis as my favorite author. The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity are my favorite "Christian" books.

2. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card): I love its originality and just the fact that it's plain awesome. If you read this, be sure to read the sequels

3. The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins): Freakin' awesome is the only way I can describe said book. It explores what would happen if war and reality TV become one.

4. Give a Boy a Gun (Todd Strasser): Written in a series of interviews done after a school shooting, this book changed my perspective about people and outsiders

5. Anything ever written by Lemony Snicket: The man is just hilarious. Whenever I read anything by him, I end up wishing I was as funny as this guy. If you want to get into the holiday spirit, check out his Holiday-themed children's books, The Baby in the Manger, The Lump of Coal, and The Latke Who Wouldn't Stop Screaming.

6. Redwall (Brian Jacques): Fighting mice and peaceful woodland creatures that live in an Abbey. This book made me believe that animals could talk and I desperately wish that I could be a character in one of his books because they live such fantastic lives. Also, each species of animal speaks a different dialect from the UK

7. Missing Piece Meets the Big O (Shel Silverstein): I love this book. It's truth is so clear yet simple. It's a beautiful masterpiece. Read it here.

8. Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson) and Perks of Being A Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky): I didn't read these books until this semester but they look at teenagers' lives in an interesting way

9. Under the Overpass (Mike Yankoski), A Million Miles in A Thousand Years (Donald Miller), Drops Like Stars (Rob Bell) & Unlikely Disciple (Kevin Roose): I included these together because they're all in the Christian non-fiction category.

**Under the Overpass is about two college guys who decide to become homeless for a few months in major cities. Their book is about life on the streets and how people treated them.

**A Million Miles is interesting as it's somewhat of a sequel on Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz. After Miller wrote Blue Like Jazz, he hit a slump in life and started to realize how to actually live a life that's worth living. I like it because it doesn't have answers, it just tells of how one man found something to live for.

**Drop Like Stars is actually a picture book. I'm not a Rob Bell fan, but this book is a different side of him. It's about suffering, pain and grief. It doesn't try to explain why God does things, it just shows that we are all humans who are all broken.

**Unlikely Disciple is just straight-up amazing. Kevin Roose, an "unsaved" student at the very secular Brown University, goes undercover at Liberty University, one of the most conservative Christian universities in America. Going to a conservative Christian university myself, this book was entertaining on how the Christian scene is seen by an outsider.

10. Classic Books: Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), books by Mark Twain, The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkein) and Candide (Voltaire):

**Little Women--a book every female must read. A rollercoaster of emotions--I threw the book across the room and was truly upset when Beth died--but incredibly joyous nevertheless.

**Mark Twain--I just love the way the man writes down southern dialects perfectly. Like Lemony Snicket, every time I read one of his books, I wish I was as hilarious as that man. **Although I'm really not a fan of the LOTR books, I absolutely loved The Hobbit, unlike the LOTR, it's actually quite amusing.

**Candide is a different book, you will probably not understand what's going on some of the time---neither did I, but I think his irony is fantastic.

**Later add-in: Little Billy's Letters (Bill Geerhart): I can't do justice in describing the real life hilariousness of this book, but the main gist of it is, in the 1990s, Bill Geerhart was an unemployed screenwriter in his 30s. While he was looking for work, he kept himself amused by pretending to be a young, ten year-old boy and wrote letters to famous actors, political figures and even criminals and composed the responses from them in this hilarious book. Check out some of his letters here

Tears

Once upon a time, a young girl suffered much grief and pain.

As a result of the pain, the tears inside of the little girl merely dried up.

And although the girl saw much hurt and despair, she was unable to cry.

It simply didn't happen.

She never pushed away the tears in an effort to be strong, or to seem in control,

The tears would simply never come.

People started noticing. Started whispering and wondering how cold-hearted she could be

To never grieve, to never simply do what other teenage girls did on a regular basis.

So she pretended. To cry.

And because she never cried, she felt ashamed.

Because she believed them when they called her heartless.

For six years, she cried only three times

Even though loved ones had passed away, life would hit unexpected turns, fights would break out, and exhaustion would set in

The girl never cried.

She would pray that tears could fall out of her eyes, wish that tears could stream down her cheeks, she would try and make herself squeeze out one measly teardrop.

They never came.

And the fact that she could never cry became her deepest secret. Because she was so ashamed of being inhuman.

_____________________________________

Yet, something happened this summer.

Life hit an all-time low.

Her body couldn't take anymore pain.

And her soul couldn't take anymore hurts

And in that beautiful moment, she learned to cry.

Not just once every two years like in previous years

But sometimes twice a week.

A few times, she even cried multiple times in one day.

And although she was tired, frustrated, and sad, there was an inexplicable joy.

One that came from knowing she was human.

__________________________________

Tonight I cried.

It wasn't a sobbing, simply a few teardrops.

The reason wasn't a hard reason, I was simply overwhelmed by the goodness of God.

But I cried.

And I may never accomplish anything of importance in college,

I may never even remember college,

But years down the road I want to be able to look back & see that my greatest accomplishment

Was that I was able to overcome what I saw as my greatest flaw

And shed a tear.

So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them. --The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Well, For The Record, I Was Wearing A Backpack

Scene: Sitting in a waiting room at the hospital waiting to get some blood drawn

Enter: A small boy around 3-4 years old

(He starts looking around and under the chair I'm sitting in.)

Boy: Oooots? Oooots?

Me: umm....

Enter: Boy's mother

Mother: "No honey, boots isn't here." (Picks up boy and walks back to her chair)

Moment of realization: He's looking for Boots the monkey and thinks that I'm Dora the Explorer.

Welcome to my life.

Remember Who You Wanted To Be...

"Remember Who You Wanted To Be"

It came from a bumper sticker that one of my professors saw while driving to work. In the midst of all the politician-bashing, religion-slandering, and honor roll bragging, this bumper sticker takes us back to nostalgia, back to Neverland where we could be pirates and Indians and Captain Hook would never win as long as Peter Pan was around.

I remember believing I could talk to animals.

I remember waiting anxiously for the day my superhero powers would come in.

I remember wanting to be a zookeeper, a CIA agent and Robin Hood combined when I grew up.

What did you want to be when you were little?

If you could do anything in the world, regardless of schooling and income, what would you do today?

Today

Today there is hope

Hope for young girls as we spoke of what makes us angry, resolving to end sex trafficking.

Today there is love

Love for what was once a hostile enemy is now becoming an accomplice

Today there is joy

Joy as friends laughed with each other and enjoyed being together, no matter how awkward the situation.

Today there is peace

Peace as I read a marvelous book in my favorite place at school, the Reading Room in the School of Religion for over two hours

Today was fantastic.

But tomorrow I shall change the world

Seriously though, next week I get an awesome opportunity to camp out for the night in downtown Chattanooga to bring awareness to the homeless situation by building a box city. I have never been so excited to freeze my buns off!

And I thought yesterday was awesome for doing Justin Bieber quizzes with 5th grade girls.

Greatness

Usually, I'm not that big of a fan when it comes to technology, my phone is always strewn somewhere in my room, left alone for hours before I realize it's gone and Facebook is only necessary for stalking everyone under the sun or distracting myself from homework.

And then Prezi came along.

I learned about Prezi today in teacher class and had to make an example of one today (see masterpiece below)

It's like a powerpoint presentation but with greatness attached into it, like a coloring book painted by Davinci, gum that involves a five-course dinner.

If you don't know what Prezi is, I've made one explaining my thoughts and my week. Feel free to enjoy (sorry if it's a bit long...I got carried away)

For best results, hit autoplay on this sucker, or use the back and forth arrows like on a powerpoint:

Things On My Mind on Prezi

I am Tired

I am tired of the needles

I am tired of the headaches

I am tired of medication

I am tired of having to constantly be cautious

I am tired of never eating green vegetables, getting cuts, having to always carry first aid kits, having to say no to fun things because I'm not allowed for medical conditions, going to doctors, getting weird muscle spasms, not being able to fully use my lungs, not being able to run, having to tell people that I'm fine but I'm still sick, being told no all the time, having to explain the whole situation to people I meet, bruises from everything, living in the fear of the "what ifs", and praying that I don't get hurt while I'm out with my friends.

4.5 months left of this