Patches

The first few days back at school are always about re-finding a groove and getting used to new schedules.  Often I feel like I’m ripped from one world and placed in another, often attempting to sew myself once more into the quilt, trying to become comfortable.  I’m patches of a bunch of things now.  I’m some of Seattle, some Colorado, some little-girl, and some grownup.

I’m different than I used to be.  Anyone who goes to college is going to come out different on the other side and I’ve already had my fair share of change.  It all has to happen sometime.  Once I pushed to spread my wings and escape from the nest, and now I sometimes miss the safety of it.

On break I realized how little my world was in high school.  I picked my brother up from play practice one afternoon and went to say hello to some of the people I was in choir with my senior year of high school.  It was great to see them and I felt an overwhelming sense of a bubble.  Some people say we have an SPU bubble, which we totally do, but it was not nearly as protective as the one I had in high school. 

The brick walls and tiled hallways greeted me with, I’ll hold your hand all the way.

Now I’m in college and most of the time no one is around to hold my hand.  I’ve slowly figured it out on my own.  I’ve discovered that no matter where I go I’ll always miss someone, I’ve learned that I have a lot of questions, and I’ve learned that I’m always going to have to make money and there will be no end to expenses.  And I don’t think I’ve come close to fully learning that quite yet.    

(At the moment I feel like I’m writing a reflection paper of sorts that would be required in a class, which probably isn’t the most entertaining thing to read.  For that I am sorry.  I’m also sorry that I haven’t written in so long.  Many of you told me you’ve missed reading on a daily basis.  Honestly, I have missed writing and I guess time just got away from me.) 

While I am learning, I am growing.  Know what?  Growing hurts.  I feel like I’m a tree, stretching and producing new bark while shedding the old.  The growth of the tree branches is causing growing pains, much like it is hurting my heart to grow so much.  I’ve discovered the saying what you know can’t hurt you happens to be very true. 

There’s a lot of stuff in the world that hurts.  Life isn’t fair, it really isn’t. 

I’ve being doing my best to lean on God and trust him, but I need to do better.  I need to figure out where I should start because it just so happens I’m terrible at reading my Bible. 

I've discovered that, if I stitch God into the quilt I feel like I have become, I won’t ever fall apart.  And that’s the beauty of it.  He alone has the power to hold me together. 

Just pray that I’ll remember that.    

Once Upon a Time I Feared the Wind

I’ve been a terrible blogger lately.  Basically, I took last week off entirely.  Every once in a while I need a break, especially when finals hit.  I was busy writing a paper, and studying for Biology and Psychology tests.  I was finished by Wednesday afternoon, and by that time all I wanted to do was lounge around and do absolutely nothing.

I can’t even remember what I did during those last few days.  I watched a couple movies, cleaned up my room a bit, and packed a carry on for spring break that consisted of 3 pairs of jeans, 10 t-shirts, a jacket and some toiletries.  I was rather impressed that I managed to take hardly anything home with me.  I guess I’ve learned to pack light since I have to travel back and fourth so much.

The Colorado weather was absolutely gorgeous the first days I was back and I was able to wear shorts, a tank top, and flip flops to my brother’s baseball game on Saturday.  Yesterday, a mere three days later, it was somewhere in the 30s temperature wise and I kept my younger brother on my lap for warmth.

Colorado is incredibly fickle, not to mention extremely brown compared to Seattle.  I’ve decided I love both places for different things, but it’s also really hard to be switching all the time.  The first few days home were rough, but now that I’ve settled in I’m quite happy to be here.

I’ve already been to a choir concert for my brother, a few high school baseball games, and answered a billion college questions to whoever happens to ask about it, which is pretty much everyone who hasn’t seen me since winter break.

But that is merely an update.  There is one thing I want to write about specifically.  It happens to be the wind.  You might thing I’m joking, but it has been more than blustery lately, especially at night. Just a couple nights ago it was incredibly windy and my sister was begging me to allow her to open the window because our room was “stuffy”.  I felt absolutely fine, and I insisted that she shouldn’t open the window.  Please, please don’t open it, it’s windy.  I caught myself then and wondered, did I ever get over it? 

When I was younger I was terrified of the wind.  I was dreadfully frightened of it until 5^th or 6^th grade.  When it was too windy at night I would walk across the hall to my parents room and crawl into bed with them until I felt safe enough to return to my own bed. 

I was convinced the house would blow over, or that a tornado would sweep everything away.  I have reason to believe this fear developed when I first saw The Wizard of Oz at a young age.  It instilled a fear in me that could not be merely removed.  When I was in 1^st grade I told my teacher that a tornado was coming—I was frightened because of how windy it was outside.  She offered no sympathy.  She told me she was sure a tornado was not coming, and sent me trembling back to my desk.  Occasionally, tornados would turn my dreams at night into dreadful nightmares.  

There came a point when I tried once more to crawl in bed with my parents and they answered with a resounding No.  After that I took to hiding from the wind by burying myself in covers, clinging to my stuffed animals (of which there were several) and sleeping with my head under the pillow.

I’m not sure when my fear ended.  I don’t know if it ever did.  Maybe I just learned how to deal with it.  Occasionally I still wake up at night when it gets windy outside.  A huge boom of thunder won’t wake me, but a blustery windstorm somehow will.  I remember when I started to read books about weather.  I knew everything about the clouds, and precipitation, and I read a lot about tornados.  There were a few pages in my book specifically dedicated to them, and I must have read them dozens of times. 

The biggest fear is always the unknown, and once I learned about how tornados formed, where they occurred most often, and how much danger I was in, (practically none) I was able to relax.  It didn’t mean I was done being afraid, but it meant that I could move on instead of constantly being paralyzed.

It seems like kids are afraid of clowns, snakes, spiders, and the dark.  But, on the other hand, I was the only one I knew of to be afraid of the wind.  I know the wind makes some people uncomfortable, but not to the point when they can’t think of anything else. 

On the surface level I know I’ve gotten over it, but deep down it must be hidden.  I think I’m rather determined to keep it that way though.  Hiding from the wind at college would be rather embarrassing, so I don’t want to be doing that anytime soon.

I know I probably never will, but it’s interesting how that one event a couple nights ago caused me to remember a series of events I hadn’t thought of in years.

It makes me realize how far I’ve come.  I’m being totally serious.

From a tiny kid afraid of the wind, to a college kid willing to step into the world by writing her heart out every day. 

I’m done hiding under the covers.  

Beauty Through Pain: The Story of a Small Inconvenience on Valentine's Day

The last time I had a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day he didn’t answer my phone calls or texts.  This time I was quite happy to know that Will had planned something for us and was willing to skip class to take me out.

I was pretty excited, and I spent time planning what I would wear and how I would do my hair… the typical thing any girl would do if they were going on a date. 

I had one tiny dilemma.  I didn’t have a curling iron and I wanted to curl some hair to frame my face and then put the rest of my hair in a chignon (for any guys that might be reading this, chignon is just a fancy word for a cute side bun.)  I knew exactly how I was going to do it and what I wanted it to look like.

I set off down the hall in a mission to find a curling iron and one of the girls lent me hers after she had finished her own hair.  It was a different kind of curling iron than I was used to because the hair had to be wrapped around it by hand instead of the usual way where the hair clips in and then gets wound around the iron.  I guess it’s supposed to create more of a wavy beach look.  There’s a specific name for it that I can’t remember. 

I adjusted to the new technique fairly quickly and before I knew it I had wonderful curls that framed my face just how I wanted.  Then I looked at my bangs and decided it would be cool if I could curl them a bit too.

I started with the right bangs and I was about to wind my hair around the iron when I felt a burning sensation on my forehead.

Slightly obvious, I'd say.

I quickly pulled the curling iron away from my skin and set it on my dresser, then turned around and grabbed an aluminum can of apple juice out of the fridge to hold against my forehead.  I knew I had burned myself badly and I took time to hold the cold can on the fresh burn before I lowered my hand to inspect the damage.

When I did, an oval mark the size of a large kidney bean was just beginning to appear on my forehead above my right eye. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was right where my bangs parted and, therefore, in plain view.  Dang it.  I figured by then that I had curled my hair enough and continued to get ready.  There was only so much I could do about it and I was just going to have to live with it. 

Will said that he probably wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t told him (a smart move on his part) and Sarah said, “At least it’s in a cute shape,” which provided a bit of a silver lining. 

If the saying beauty comes through pain ever meant anything to me, it was probably right then.  (And when I had braces of course, because that was just miserable.)

The rest of my night turned out to be absolutely wonderful and full of good food… 

I was a happy girl regardless of a silly burn.  

Art Final = Done

Tonight I had my art final.

Once it was finished a huge weight lifted off my shoulders and I felt like skipping all the way back to my dorm.

Let’s just say I didn’t leave my room today except to eat lunch because I was drawing.  All day.  I started with 63 sketches and ended with 100. 

If I take another drawing class in the future I will definitely approach it a little differently.  I’ll try to work on sketches every day instead of saving a third of the sketches for the day they are due. 

Time definitely got away from me. 

I think I ended up having some pretty decent sketches so I've decided to share some of my favorites.

The Power of Baking Soda

It just so happens I rely heavily on my scent of smell and, as of late, I haven’t been able to smell anything because of a terrible cold I have.

This is both good and bad.

Bad because there are things I would love to smell such as fresh baked cookies, or the morning air.  I would also like to be able to smell whether or not I need to wash certain shirts or not.  When I do my laundry I always smell everything first, just to make sure I actually have to wash all of it.

I can’t do that right now.

However, it is good I lost my sense of smell for one reason especially.

This reason would be called the fridge in my dorm room that I hate opening because it smells so bad.

I should point out that this unfortunate smell is due entirely to my negligence and no one else’s. 

Earlier this quarter I bought a carton of eggs, and a carton of milk.  For a while I used them as much as I should have and then I forgot that they existed.  Which means that there were at least a dozen rotten eggs in the fridge, and expired milk. 

It turns out that I’m not very good at knowing how to take care of food.  Back home my Mom was the one who made sure the fridge was cleaned out and, to be honest, I had no idea how long eggs actually lasted in the fridge.  We always kept extra cartons in our fridge in the basement, and then used them when we ran out of eggs in the upstairs fridge.  However, there were seven of us in the house and I’m sure we went through a dozen eggs in 2 days.

 I left a carton of eggs in my dorm room fridge for at least 2 weeks (maybe more).  Thank goodness my roommate is extremely tolerant and loving, because it’s not even my fridge… it’s hers.     

I’ve offered to drag it outside and hose it down, or at least clean it out somehow, but neither of us really have the time or the means to do it well.  So as I did a Safeway run yesterday to pick up some medicine for my cold, I also grabbed a box of baking soda.

(I must say, I have no idea what I would do if I couldn’t Google things like “how to fix a stinky fridge”.) 

Believe it or not, some genius decided to make a box specifically for the purpose of sitting in a fridge.  So I bought it, dutifully carried it back to my dorm, and placed it in the mini box that keeps our food fresh. 

I am hoping it will help fix the problem.

I currently have no idea how it’s working.

As I said, I can’t smell a thing.