TREAT YO'SELF! (2012)

One of my favorite things about August is that I get a little card in the mail for my birthday from Anthropologie. Call me ridiculous, but it's true. It's only 15% off, but with Anthro, I'll take what I can get.

This year I purchased this nifty little journal:

It is a five year journal, so you will get to see how your answers change through the years. I am excited to look back through it in a couple years and see all the crazy things that have happened.  A lot can change in five years! Five years ago I was still living in Norman and my dad had started the process of applying for his job at Kirtland AFB. I could never have guessed what that would lead to and where I would be now! 

Check it out here.

 It is now on my 'currently reading' shelf in my room, right up there with "The Valley of Vision," "Peter Pan," "A Gospel Primer," "If," a collection of Hemingway works, "Christ Formed In You," as well as "The Lord of the Rings," and "The Weight of Glory," which were both absent from the picture as they were hangin' out in my purse. So far I have been fairly consistent in pulling it down every day to answer the question of the day. 

Here are a few of the questions and my answers:

September 1st: Teacher or student? 

"Student at the New Mexico Bartending Academy. This will be my second week. I need to be a more faithful student of music and art. 

September 3rd: Where have you found evidence of a higher power? 

"In the grace that is daily given. In the Word. In the blessings I do not deserve. In God's beautiful creation. In the Gospel and Christ who I am saved in."

September 4th: Where do you see yourself in five years?

"Gah. In five years I will be 28. I would like to have seen more of the world by then. Have gone on short term and perhaps longer term mission trips, live somewhere in Europe?, find "the one," get married, have at least one kid." 

Only the Lord knows if any of those things will happen. 

September 5th: Today you learned _________.

"How to say awkward drink names without too much shame or immaturity. Oh bartending school..." Then I proceeded to list them, but to put them on here would look like "awkward sexual term," "variation on previous term," "additional variation on same term," and "adios @%*!^%%$#%@^." Soooooo yeah. 

September 6th: What was the last online video clip you watched?

annnnnd I'm just going to post them because they are hilarious.

September 8th: Who are you jealous of?

"Chris Thile's girlfriend. That is all."

Not in a creepy way... I mean, who isn't?

In other news, I finished bartending school and got my alcohol serving licence yesterday, so I am starting the job hunt tomorrow! 

That's all for now!

Pardon my unacceptable excuses

I realize that I have majorly dropped the ball with the blogging thing. I have appreciated the people who have told me that they are waiting for more pictures and stories from Kayla's and my trip, because it makes me excited that people have read and care. In my free time in the last half of our time in Belgium I slept or just didn't have the umph to blog about everything, and the two weeks of travel were a whirlwind. So...

As of five days ago we have been back for a month, which is just crazy. I never thought re-acclimating would be very difficult, but really, everything else in my life has not gone as expected, so I don't know why I wasn't expecting the diving back into reality process to be more difficult. Silly me. 

In the midst of sleeping, TV bingeing, family time, friend time, decompressing, and just getting used to the reality that is the U.S.A., I have been slowly working through the 1,000+ photos that I have taken over the past four-ish months. I am so close, but other things have come to the forefront, like moving, and birthdays, and weddings, and, and, and... 

This week we have been trying to move everything out of the house Kayla and I had been living in to my parent's house, which has made my parent's house a mess. Today we have to finish the last of it, clean up my parents house, and get ready to leave to visit family in Oklahoma on Wednesday, and celebrate my brother's birthday between there somewhere. 

Guess what? Life keeps happening while you are gone for three and a half months, and when you come back it does not slow down for you to adjust to it. Or to blog about it. Though really, if I sat down to catalog my time over the past month, I have definitely had time to finish my pictures and blog, but I just haven't been ready to process everything all at once. I have been processing my time there in little snippets of shared stories with friends, family, and a church staff meeting. But other than those moments I haven't really sat down by myself to work on writing stories and lessons. It is just so vast and overwhelming at times. If I think about all of that time, sometimes I feel overwhelmingly blessed by everything that I went through and everything I learned, and sometimes I am bowled over by the hardships and things that I just had to brush off and not deal with at the moment. 

Now that I am past most of the HOLY CRAP moments of adjusting to life here and dealing with life there, I feel like I am ready to dive into processing and regurgitating mode. So I am being optimistic that you will begin seeing more posts about Belgium and beyond once we get back from the Oklahoma family extravaganza. Stay tuned.

New Mexico!!!

Happy to be back in this loveliness.

Writing about writing

The problem with the blank page is not that I have a blank mind and empty thoughts, but that I have so many thoughts that I do not know where to begin. The drive to write something worthwhile and personal and maybe something relatively profound has filled my mind for the past week at least. So instead of picking one of the many subjects that have been running around in my mind like (insert clever simile here), I am once again writing about writing.

I suppose if I analyze my entire writing process for you, unnamed and perhaps non-existent reader, it would be telling and personal enough for now. Plus, I suppose that a deeper relationship where one shares their secrets and pains sometimes take time, so I will let my relationship with this blogging world develop slowly and share with you a bit of surface drivel with just a peek into the pool of my psyche for now.

As I have already said, I think and rethink before I ever put anything onto the page, testing words and sentences, seeing what works well and what I should discard, and then I lose all of it because I never write it down. There is this fear in me I think, that if I put my thoughts to paper, make them physical and real, then I will suddenly find myself out. It is so human to want to "find yourself," to want to know who you are really, beneath the person you think yourself as, and find if you are something more or are just as fearful and weak as you think you are, or worse, that you are more terrible than you have ever thought up to the particular point of self discovery.

I am discovering that this is exactly what happens when I write or draw or really work on learning guitar. I see myself in the mirror of my work (or complete non-work aka laziness) and am a bit afraid of what I see there. The truth be told, I really am more boring, terrible, and weak than I think I am and am still discovering how much so.

I am afraid of doing what I long to do because I am afraid of failure AND success. I am afraid of never being able to do something I love well and am afraid that I can do and be and succeed. Why is this I wonder? But for whatever reason, there lies the deeper question of "why in the world am I so afraid that my success or my failure hinges on me?" Whatever fears and insecurities I have and no matter how little I think of myself, I am still thinking myself great to put the weight of my future accomplishments all on me. If I really determine to be disciplined in writing, disciplined in art, and disciplined in music there is not an immediate log & cliff formed in the distance for me to trip over and then fall headlong into the chasm of the death of all my hopes and dreams.

I need to determine to be faithful with the gifts and talents that I have been given and know that if the Father wills to use them for His glory and my good they will flourish or fade as He desires.

Ha, in my second attempt at public writing I have put words to feelings I have had for years by intending to start with "surface drivel." Ha. God knew this would be good for me.

Also telling is my constant editing as I write. If you ask any experienced writer how to write well the great majority of them would tell you to write whatever comes to mind, to let every thought you have flow to your fingers and onto the page, unhindered by any condemning thought from yourself or thought of what others might think. I like to think that I am independent, that I don't need the approval of others, that I could (if I wished) live exactly how I want and say, "screw the world" if they disagree with my liberated life. Well, I have a more confidant view of myself than is actually true. As I write things that are revealing my thoughts and fears I am simultaneously fearing what others will think of these personal revelations of mine.

So, to finish with a flourish... The beginning and end of anything is the hardest for me. This is where drawing a blank usually comes in, in my writing. I remember in both my English Comp. 1 & 2 classes I would be writing furiously to finish my paper an hour before class was to start only to be stuck in the last fifteen minutes with my concluding paragraph. I would sit there tapping on the table, chewing my nail, and typing gibberish before I would finally get a mental breakthrough in the last eight minutes and then frantically type to the finish not having time to stop to proofread. All that reminiscing said, I still have not come up with a way to finish.

This is where I usually give myself a mental pep talk or change the music I am listening to, to give me more inspiration. If that doesn't work I start freaking out a little and begin to think in incomplete sentences. "I could say... What about... Dang it, why can't I..." on and on and on. Then comes the mental cursing if I am really frustrated... ok just mental cursing if I am the least bit frustrated.

This is where I give way to the lame, half-hearted sentences that I am not really fond of just so I can be done, even if it won't end the writing as gloriously as I would have liked.

Writing is a learning process and I am finding that the more I do it, the better I like it and hopefully I will improve as well.