If you find yourself in an existential quandary filled with loathing and self-doubt...

    Less than three weeks, my friends.  It's getting close...

    Yeah right.  I wish.  Three frickin' weeks left.  I just want to go back now.  I mean, I love summer, and not having a specific schedule to follow (except for work) and I'm going to Six Flags next week, and maybe Chicago this Saturday, and summer's great...but I just want it to be over now.  It's dragging on, and I have to say goodbye to all my friends, watching them leave for school and leaving me behind...I'm getting pretty stir crazy and depressed.  The only thing keeping me afloat at the minute is my book that I'm rewriting.  I already bought most of my furnishings, I know which dorm is mine, I know my schedule...I just want to get it over with and get there already.  Seriously, this is getting ridiculous.

    One of my best friends left last night for Carnegie Mellon.  She told me last week that she was leaving soon, but I completely forgot, so it hit me kind of hard that I didn't say goodbye.  Her birthday is on Saturday, too, and I got her a present and everything (I'm not really good at that) but now I have to mail it to her, and it's just not the same.  

    My ex-boyfriend leaves at the end of next week, and as strained as that relationship is, I still can't help feeling that, because I am now hyper-aware of the departure dates of my friends, I should find someway to see him and say goodbye.  

    My best friend leaves next Saturday...and that just hurts the soul. 

    I feel like I'm being left behind.  I'm not leaving until two weeks after my high school starts classes.  That's just weird to me.  I have to say goodbye to all of my friends there, too.  If I had left earlier, it would have been easier: they would be saying good bye to me, getting it all over in one shot.  This way just sucks.

    Not only that, but my high school's Marching Band Camp started this week, and it reminded me of all the things I'm desperately going to miss about high school.  No, nothing involving a flute or a disgusting equivalent.  But, call me a nerd, band was probably the best part of my life for the past four years: all the friends I made, all the fun music we played, all the great bus rides to and from crazy competitions...I get slightly choked up just thinking about not having any of that anymore.  Calvin doesn't have a marching band (they don't even have a football team) so even if I wanted to do it again in college, I couldn't.  

    But not just Band.  Just watching all my old high school friends bashing around in the parking lot with their music and their crazy director made me think of all the teachers I'm going to miss, like my friend Mr. Hays who comes back this year after a year in China, and all the good times I had, like decorating my disgruntled-Santa-elf of a friend's locker every day before winter break.  All the memories are just that, memories.  I'll never really relive any of that ever again.  It's just kind of getting me down right now.  I know I'll have great times in college and beyond, and I'll eventually get over this sadness, but all the stupid reminders are kind of obnoxious.

    Plus I was just looking at my roommate's facebook: she's way prettier than me.  And now I'm starting to freak out about whether or not we'll get along.  I'm hard to live with, quite literally.  I'm something of a weirdo, in case you haven't noticed.

    Anyway, I'm having a minor anxiety attack...I'm sure it'll pass, but I didn't want to talk to anyone about it, because I am mostly still just excited about going, and I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea.

So thanks for being there...if you're there.

<3 spadeALLcross

48 x 7.75 = I love my job

    Man.  Crazy week.  Let me tell you.

    Of course I'm going to tell you.  What else would I do on a blog?

    Since I didn't work the last 1.5 pay periods, my boss scheduled me eight hours a day, six days this week.  Not that I don't desperately nee the funds, as I am soon going to be unemployed and sorely tempted, monetarily speaking.  However, it makes for excruciatingly long days.

    

    I was worried when I first took this job that, since every day is pretty much a cookie-cutter copy of the last, I would become easily bored and disgruntled, and dread going to work, which is one of my worst fears in life.  When I nannied last summer for these two kids, there was a month-long period where they were children of the corn and I would have sawed off my own leg to not have to go, even if I did get paid $8 an hour. 

    But soon into my employment as a sandwich artist, I discovered that, though there is a definite routine to the days, each day is still much different than the others.  I'll spare you the details (refilling the cambros, teriyaki-ing the chicken, and de-paper-ifying the cheeses, though exciting to any Subway employee, can dull even the sharpest minds of outsiders) except to say that it's really the people I work with that make the hours worthwhile.

    For instance, this week.  Six days in a row, same resources needing to be restocked every morning, 1000 songs on a "Subway Radio" playlist...not necessarily an endless supply of joy, laughter, and entertainment for all.  But I have thus far been pleasantly (and...er...sometimes not so pleasantly) surprised by how varied this week has felt--keeping me on my toes and giving me at least some little thing to look forward to everyday besides the tuna aromatherapy and my minimum wage.  

    Basically, what I'm saying is, I'm very happy with my job currently, and though I'll be excited to get new sneakers that don't smell like cucumbers and oven cleaner and be able to sleep in past six and eat my lunch without bread being involved, I am going to miss Subway while I'm at school this year.  

    Anyway, that's all I had to say.  I know it was extraordinarily interesting for you =D

<3 spadeALLcross

Engel!: Es waere ein Platz, den wir nicht wissen...

    I got home last night, after a fourteen-hour drive from Idalia, from a week of camping with my family in the Colorado Rockies.  Aside from last year's lake trip to Roosevelt Lake in Washington state, it has been the best family vacation I've ever been on.

    Sadly, it was plagued with the pain of mockery as all of my cousins spent most of their time poking fun at my recreational habits, which, on this trip, were comprised mostly with reading.  I will admit, I read more copiously than usual (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, The Other Boleyn Girl, and Barefoot were some of those that I at least started, and let me tell you, more than one of those is rather thick) and, at least for the first two days, when I was reading pretty much nonstop, I was being a bit "anti-social."  

    But this post is not about my cousins and their negativity.  This post is not about literacy and the role it plays in the lives of people around the world.  This post is not about the obviously Romance-Centered reading list I inadvertently made for myself, and it is certainly not about the perks of being a wallflower.  No, this post is about Henry DeTamble and how he brought me closer to God.

    For almost a year now, I have openly declared The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (coincidentally, the wife of Jonathan Safran Foer) as my favorite book.  Now, I am an incredibly loyal person, especially (and sadly) when it comes to inanimate objects--I used to keep pencils too short for the sharpener because I didn't want to hurt their feelings--so for me to say here what I am about to say is a big deal:

    The History of Love is now only my second favorite book in the world.

    I cannot express in words how much I love that book, how much it is everything I aspire to as a writer, and how proud I am to have recommended it to a dear, old friend of mine, (who, to my delight, left a receipt for a CitySights NY bus fare between pages 80 and 81; I'm still trying to decipher the special meaning those pages have, because I'm sure there is one, whether he knew it or not).  I still love that book and I will still tell all my close literary friends about it in hopes that they, too, can love it.  But it has finally been overshadowed by another book.

    The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is now my favorite book in the world.

    I won't tell you any of the details about the plot or anything, except that Henry DeTamble, the main character (and looks more like this than like this, by the way.  What were they thinking?) is a "chrono-displaced person" who cannot control whether or not he stays in the present moment, and instead often finds himself elsewhen, naked, and alone.  

    I can't really explain why this book suddenly means so much to me.  I didn't even buy it with a purpose; I was second-hand shopping with my mother and aunt a couple weeks ago and, while they were perusing skirts and blouses, I found this on the racks, forced uncomfortably between the likes of The Dragon Prince and Dare to Love like some poor, emotionally scarred book wedged in the jaws of life of an overly erotic thigh-master.  I rescued it from its hot and heavy Hell, just out of my general respect for fiction and hardcovers, planning only to relocate it on the shelf after reading the prologue, which I assumed would be disappointing, only because the title was much too promising to actually lead to anything.  But I was pleasantly surprised, and it was only five dollars (quite a steal for the condition in which I found it) so I indulged myself and bought the book before checking it out at the library, something I rarely do.

     Books I like best are the books that change my life or perspective in some positive and daring way.  The aforementioned Twilight Saga (of which I just bought the fourth book) I like, but only for entertainment, not really for deep, intellectual introspection or anything like that.  Books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet, Metamorphosis, No Exit, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Welcome to the Monkey House, Catcher in the Rye, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, To Kill a Mockingbird, 10 Things to do Before I Die and The History of Love all did that for me, and I probably can't properly try to describe the ways in which they did, mostly because I read them a long time ago, and whatever change they wrought is now so much a part of me I can't remember what bought it.  Sometimes, it's not that the book is exceptionally written or that the plot is invariably unique; it's just that they were in the right place at the right time.

    With TTTW, I'm sure it was a little bit of both.  Throughout the past seven or so days of me reading and immersing myself in the world of fiction, I've realized that (SAP ALERT) the main gift God has given me is my imagination.  Once I start reading a book, if it is good, I can ignore everything around me and just read.  And then, once I've finished reading a book, I spend the next several days thinking about it, reveling in it, reliving it, engraving its essence into my brain.  I used to think this made me crazy, made me kind of a freak (because at times, like after I saw National Treasure for the first time, for instance, I was actually a veritable oddball) but now I realize it's just how I am and that God made me this way for a reason.  I'm glad that I'm not a freak, but I'm even more glad that there is a way for me to put this quality of mine to use.  

    I just have to figure out what that use is now.  Shouldn't be too hard, right?

    Anyway, read TTTW post haste.  Don't let me get your hopes up too high, though; I hate it when people do that to me.  It may not mean to you what it means to me, and you may not like it.  It could just be something that speaks to me because I'm me and not you.

    Forgive my strange verbage today: it's been a long 48 hours.

<3 spadeALLcross