People Who Inspire Me

So lately I've been thinking about my role models. Or rather, I've been looking at pictures/watching movies/reading articles/listening to music and thinking, "I want to be like that person when I grow up." So here's the list:

1. Pocahontas (the cartoon one, not the real one) - from the first time I saw the movie I wanted a. long, straight, black hair b. a nice tan complimented by a pretty little arm tattoo c. a pet raccoon, and d. John Smith
2. C. S. Lewis - I can't get over this man. I always seem to fall in love with a book if it was written by him. I want to write like he did. And even if that never happens, I'll be content reading his stuff.
3. Florence Welch - this woman has changed my life. I love her music. I love her hair. She's different from everyone else.
4. This woman's hair - I'm definitely going to be borrowing her hairstyle in the near future.



5. Dear Abby - Recently (as in yesterday) I decided that I want to be like this woman. Imagine being iconized because you gave such amazing advice...
6. Sarah McLachlan/Sara Bareilles - collectively called the Sara(h)s, I feel like they complete my life (music-wise, that is). No matter what mood I'm in, one or both of them has a song that fits it.
7. The little brother from "A Christmas Story" - as a fellow picky kid, this scene makes me feel good about myself.

It's all about me. That's all I have to say.

So I've been thinking a lot about selfishness lately...it seems like it's kind of taken over a lot of my relationships lately, and that kind of makes me feel sick. And of course, I managed to find a Florence song to fit the occasion. (Once again, sorry for the scantily cladness...)

Let's face it, being selfish feels good. We wouldn't be selfish if it didn't. I like how it feels when I can kick back and focus on myself and the things that I need and the things that I want. In fact, I like that feeling so much that I find myself craving it. I JUST WANT THINGS TO BE ABOUT ME!

But they're not.

And honestly, at the end of one of those days when I've given into my selfishness and made everything about myself, I feel pretty crappy. Part of that comes from feeling guilty that I did something wrong, and part of it comes from shame over how I've basically sucked the life out of the people I love that day, and the rest of it comes from disatisfaction because no matter how hard I try, gratifying myself doesn't fulfill me.

I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to suck the life out of people to make myself feel good. I don't want to be so focused on myself that I'm blind to the needs of the people I love. I want to be selfless...which is one of the first things I've wanted in a while that isn't selfish.

A Grievance With the English Language

Being an English major, I spend a lot of time thinking about the English language (duh). And over the course of my pursuit of perfect grammar, I've had several encounters with little quirks in the system that, quite frankly, drive me insane.

A good example of this is the words, protein, caffeine, either, and neither, which don't follow any of the rules. You know the i before e except after c unless it says a as in neighbor and weigh thing? Yeah, that doesn't apply here. Jerks. If it did, then we would spell those words as, protien, caffiene, iether, and niether. Or we would say then protane, caffane, aether, and naether. However, both of those solutions sound stupid and would be difficult to implement so we keep things the way they are.

However, I thought of one this morning that bothers me even more: describing how something smells.

Quick grammar lesson: when you describe how something is, you use an adverb instead of an adjective. Adjectives describe what things are like, while adverbs describe how things are. So when someone asks how you are, you really should say well instead of good, because well is an adverb and good is an adjective and you're describing how you are, not what you are. Usually adverbs end in -ly (deliciously, beautifully, horribly, etc.), but some (like well), don't.

So anyways, you're not supposed to use adjectives to describe how something smells, but if you don't, it sounds incredibly strange. You don't tell someone that the smell well, or terribly, you tell them they smell good or bad. It just flows better. It bothers me that if I followed the actual rules on speaking properly on this one, that I would end up sounding moronic.

To Sing a Lie...

A. W. Tozer said, "Christians don't tell lies they just go to church and sing them."

I heard this quote almost a year ago and the truth of it has constantly struck my heart since then. It had never occurred to me that when I just mindlessly sing along in church, or even when I sing a song to the LORD that contains things that I should believe, but don't, I make myself a liar and I mock GOD.

After I heard this, honestly I stopped singing during worship services for a few months because I felt like I needed to seriously consider why I bothered to sing if I wasn't going to focus on the LORD and seek to magnify Him through worship. This time was good for me because it taught me that it's really okay not to put on a show of worship if you're really not going to bother to worship...in fact, I think it's better to be honest and not pretend to be doing something you're not. On the flip side of that it also taught me a lesson in humility because I'm sure some people thought I was pretty strange just standing there with my mouth shut amidst a crowd of singing people.

At some point I gradually felt more comfortable worshipping in public as the LORD gave me the strength to focus on Him and be genuine in my praise of Him. I still have some Sundays where I don't sing though, because I would be a liar if I did. It's really hard to sing, "Tis' So Sweet to Trust in Jesus" when I (falsely) believe that trusting Him is stupid and scary. How can I sing, "He Has Made Me Glad" when I come to church with a bad and bitter attitude that I refuse to let go of?

Today was one of those Sundays for me. I'm really struggling with trusting the LORD right now and I just didn't really feel like singing, "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus."

But then we sang this song:

I sang along with this one...and I felt a little better afterwards...and GOD gave me a lot more strength to trust Him afterwards too.

I cried over the story about Jesus feeding the four thousand.

Lately I've been noticing something about myself: I mess up at the same things over and over again. As I look back over my (almost!) 19 years of life, there's a definite pattern to my failings and shortcomings. I do the same stupid stuff time after time after time after time after time...And honestly, this makes me angry. Not just at myself, but at GOD too. I don't understand how He could allow me to struggle with the same things all the time. I want Him to take away all of the temptations that surround me and make my life easy. Or at least allow me to struggle with different things throughout my life so that I can look back over my life and point to a sin and say, "There. That one was a huge problem for me once, but now I've grown up and now I've conquered it and now I don't struggle with it anymore."

These were my disheartening thoughts as I lay in bed and read Mark last night. Mark 8, to be specific. And this was one of the first things I read: "I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way." (vs. 2-3) The story then goes on to describe how Jesus fed the crowd with seven loaves and a few small fish and then there were leftovers.

Honestly, I've heard this story so many times it's ridiculous. And at some point in my life I stopped being impressed and instead I rolled my eyes and thought, "Whoopee...fish and bread...I like bread...I wonder what's for lunch."

But last night was different. This time, something else caught my attention: Jesus' words before He fed the crowd. He spoke of wanting to feed them because He had compassion on them.

And as I sat there reading, I heard Him speak to me, "I have compassion on you. I understand your struggles and your desire for sin. I know how it feels to want to do the wrong thing. And if I could miraculously provide food for all of those people, don't you think I can provide spiritual food for you? Don't you trust me to sustain you through your struggles?"

You've Got the Love

I have a confession...my creativity is at a serious minimum right now. However, I feel like this song sums up my thoughts and feeling right now. The LORD is so good, and no matter what He's holding me and caring for me. PS sorry for the semi-scantily clad woman in this video.

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air
I know I can count on you
Sometimes I feel like saying "Lord I just don't care"
But you've got the love I need to see me through

Sometimes it seems that the going is just too rough
And things go wrong no matter what I do
Now and then it seems that life is just too much
But you've got the love I need to see me through

When food is gone you are my daily need
When friends are gone I know my saviour's love is real
Your love is real

You got the love
You got the love
You got the love
You got the love
You got the love
You got the love

Time after time I think "Oh Lord what's the use?"
Time after time I think it's just no good
Sooner or later in life, the things you love you lose.

Cursed Fish

So there's nothing exciting going on in my life right now. No interesting thoughts or revelations or any of that jazz. No crazy adventures worth writing about...other than my trip to the land of cutting my own bangs on Friday, but you don't really want to read about that. So this led me to the decision to write a post that I've been thinking about for a good six months now.

A couple years ago my brother received a goldfish as a prize at some sort of carnival thing. He was so excited. We hadn't gotten Puppy yet, so this was our first pet. Or rather, it was Josh's first pet. I wanted nothing to do with that nasty fish. So of course, I nicknamed it Fishstick and I teased Josh that it was going to die. Then it died two days after he got it. Guess who felt like a jerk...

So of course, out of guilt and a desire not to have wasted money on a fish tank, my mother caved and bought him two more fish. The jerk feeling had worn off by the time these two came around, so they were lovingly christened Number 10 (which at the time, was the number of the fish sandwich at McDonald's) and Muerto (which means, 'death' in Spanish).  These fish were a bit luckier than little Fishstick though - they lasted four days.

The Dog Days Are Over!

So I've recently discovered that you can embed videos on here rather than just posting links...this makes things more convenient.

I also recently discovered this video. SHE DOES NOT LOOK LIKE THAT ALL THE TIME. This was the first video of hers that I watched and I almost didn't bother with the others because of how strangly she looked and acted in it. However, I liked the song enough to listen to everything else. And now I have a new favorite artist.





So I feel like this song could have been written about me. If you've been following my posts, then you know that I've been kind of in a funk lately. In this post I talked about how I felt like I'd turned into one of those people who need reasons for being happy. I didn't like that about myself at all.

So when I heard this song it was kind of like that last little push I needed toward letting myself be happy for no reason at all. Especially the part where Florence sings, "Leave all your love and your longing behind, you can't carry them with you if you want to survive." I feel like that's so true. A big part of happiness is letting go of our desires for things we don't have and being content with what we do have.





And This Makes One Hundred...

99 posts, 4,069 blog hits, approximately 1,000 cups of coffee, 34 novels, 5 seasons of The Office, 3 attempts at quitting coffee, countless template/font/format revisions, and 8 months and 3 days ago, I wrote my first blog post ever.

If you read that post, you know...it was rough. Not my best work ever. I had no clue what to say and I wasn't even sure if I would really be able to maintain a blog. It's funny to think back on how unsure I was about something as non-committal as having a blog. Also it didn't help that what made me want to start it was the movie 'Julie and Julia' and being a college student, I couldn't just cook stuff and write about it...I had to actually think of things to write about on my own.

Honestly, I wasn't really sure about it until this post. For some reason, after I wrote that one, things just fell into place and I was a lot more comfortable with the whole shin-dig.

Throughout this whole blog process, there's been a lot of self-discovery on my part. There have been times where I spent hours on a post, only to end up archiving it on my desktop instead of online because by the end of it I had realized something about myself that I didn't really want to share with my readers. There have been a lot of ups and downs for me post-wise (and life-wise). It's been an interesting past few months, and a lot of that has been reflected in my writing.

By far, this is my favorite post. When I wrote it, I had no idea just how much more the lessons I had learned from it would become ingrained in my life.

Needless to say, this one has been the favorite of all my readers. Or at least, it's been the most read.

So anyways, I just wanted to commemorate my hundredth post, because considering the fact that I wasn't all that sure if I would make it to ten, I think one hundred is pretty cool. Each post is a little, teensy piece of my heart (for good or bad!), and if you've stuck with me this far, you must have a strong consitution and the amazing ability to understand my dry sense of humor.

Definitely didn't plan on that happening...

It's been quite a day for me. For the past few weeks I've been busy/I haven't felt all that great, so I kind of let my room slip into disaster zone territory. This morning I woke up and couldn't take it anymore, which led to me deciding to drag myself out of bed, pull on an old pair of jeans, and pull my hair out of my face in preparation for a day of cleaning. And of course, I also decided to drag everything out of my closet and re-arrange all of its contents while I was at it...what is it with me and making things more complicated than necessary?

But now that I'm done, twelve hours later, I feel better. There's just something about laying in my bed with a cup of coffee with the knowledge that everything is where it's supposed to be...so, that's what I had been doing for the past few minutes, when it led me to another thought...I was not always this way. At all.

I used to be messy. There, I said it. So much so, that one year for my birthday my aunt made me a card that said, "Happy Birthday, to the Queen of Clean...Hey, it's your birthday, we can pretend!" I'm amazed that my messiness didn't drive my father to the point of insanity. At one point he put all of my stuff in trash bags and would only let me have one trash bag full of stuff at a time, and I had to sort through that one before I could have another. We used to have quite the standoffs over my room...

It's funny, because people who knew me when I was messy don't really believe that I'm clean now. And people who know me now are probably really shocked if they're reading this. Ironically enough, I never, ever in a million years thought I would be as uptight about being clean as I've turned out to be.

This got me thinking about some other things about myself that I never thought would change that have.

A big one has been facebook. I didn't get a facebook until I was a senior in high school. I spent years swearing up and down that I would never get one because "They are a waste of time. " "There are much better things to do with my time than sit around online all the time." and my favorite, "They don't glorify GOD." Oh how arrogant I was...guess what my main mode of communication (other than real live, in person communication) happens to be now...

I also never thought I would like reading poetry. I used to dread poetry units in my English classes. World Lit. with Dr. Tappmeyer changed that for forever.

Last week I was in a weird mood so I put yogurt in my smoothie. And then I drank it. Granted, I couldn't taste it and I had to make myself not think about it being there, but I consumed the whole thing. And I liked it. Big step for a former yogurt hater.

There have been some not so fun changes too...I've watched a lot of my friendships change as I've changed. I've had some of my biggest dreams hacked to shreds because they weren't in line with the LORD's will. I've had my perspective on pretty much everything severely altered for the same reason. A year ago, I wrote my friend Sam a note (on facebook, ironically enough), and in it, I talked a little bit about change. I don't even remember the situation now, but what I said fits how I feel now, "Everyone changes. It's just hard when someone else is changing and you are not." At the time, I was the one who wasn't changing. I was the one struggling with watching someone I care about become something totally unfamiliar to me. Now I'm on the opposite end. And I'm realizing that it's just as hard to be the one changing while everyone else stays the same.