dreamcatcher1203's Xanga

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:58:33 GMT

Joy.

“The unshakeable assurance that God is in control of all the details in my life. It is the quiet confidence that ultimately everything will be alright; and the determined purpose to praise God in all things.”

-Kay Warren.

Oh madness...

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:26:17 GMT

It has been two weeks since I've been an RA and its been a roller coaster of a ride already. Jenny and I have a full floor -- 34 girls from all over the place. It's strange because in retrospect when I try to come up with a word or a phrase to describe the whole thing, I come up with --- nothing.

There has been connection when someone's story has been all to familiar to me, laughter when half the dorm gets together to prank someone, slap happiness when an entire floor is outside in their hallway talking and working on homework at 1 in the morning, regret when I've messed up or done something I shouldn't have, anticipation for the little events that we've planned as a floor or a dorm, comfort when the girls have banded together to help someone through a difficult time, awe as I've watched girls reach out to other girls, dismay at some of the more boy crazy ones, relaxation with long conversations about everything and nothing, frustration at some difficult situations, confusion because of lack of sleep....... and I'm sure there's a lot more that I've failed to mention.

One thing different this year is that as the Ohio Hall RAs we've become close friends with the Wilson Hall RAs. I know I speak for all the girls when I say that those guys have made this experience so much more fun. Whether it's been the boys reenacting the battle of Jericho (I think there were 67 boys involved in this prank) at 2 AM in the morning -- yes they even ran around once silently -- with everything ranging from French horns, saxophones and trombones to microwaves, loose change and baking soda or spending over two hours hanging out and talking in the middle of the pavement between our two dorms after our girls got them back with tons and tons of cheap perfume and all sorts of smelly stuff you wouldn't imagine 2 minutes before open dorm ended. Because of them I've watched some movies I probably never would have otherwise. Tropic Thunder was funny mainly because of the company, as was Rambo. I think it's time for Sisterhood of the traveling pants part 2, what do you think?? They are quality guys, those 6 crazy friends of ours.

Oh -- and the next person to play a prank apparently gets 50 work hours. I think that decides how things stand, wouldn't you say? I'm not sure I want 50 work hours, and I wouldn't be happy with someone peeing on my dorm either.

Here's the crazy part. It's only been two weeks.

Right now, I'm looking forward to the rest of it, knowing that in a year from now I'm going to know that it all went by too too fast.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:34:10 GMT

One random act makes the world go round and round and round and round.

It's nice.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:10:10 GMT

It's impossible not to adore the characters in the Twilight series.

Whether you think vampires are evil or not
Whether you read young adult fiction or not
Whether you think high school is drama or not
Whether cute love stories make you gag or not

Monday, July 28, 2008

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:12:55 GMT

I'm turning into an insomniac.

I can't sleep.

I want to, but I can't.

Until much later than I want to.

I go to bed at 1 and toss and turn till like 4 or 5.

It's happened for a few nights in a row now

Maybe if I go early to work tomorrow I might be able to break this cycle.

Hopefully that will work

If you've been having one of those days, use bubble wrap ------->

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:57:01 GMT

I'm tired.

In my head.

I need ----- something ------- and I don't know what it is.

I need ----- time to myself ------- and I don't know why.

It's almost like my mind is preparing itself for the year ahead and my body is trying to catch up. It's summer for heaven's sake. It's not like I've been in school. I don't get it.

Granted I work full time over the summer.

That's eight hours. Sometimes more.

I sleep enough.

That's another eight hours. Sometimes more.

I do other things. That's the rest of the eight hours. Sometimes less.

Why then, do I feel like I need ---- something? I want to say "a break" but I'm unable to define what "break" means when the only thing I can think of is away from all this.

I don't need more sleep.
I certainly don't need more work.
I don't need more "other things"

I've been a little more irritable this week and weekend. Not even at big things. All little things. Maybe they ganged up on me collectively.

I need some extra grace.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:36:08 GMT

I changed up my playlist today, some new tunes. A little less random, hopefully!

My mother and wildlife

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:54:58 GMT

Animals do not last long in my house. They never have.......... and it's all my mother's fault

When my parents got married, my dad had a dog. Apparantly he had trained it and it was a really good, well trained dog. I don't know what happened to it. Someone stole it, I think, if I remember right. And ever since then my mother has claimed to be allergic to dogs. When my mother was younger she had a squirrel. Yep, a squirrel. One of those squirrel rescuing nuts she is, *sigh* lol. One day, it jumped from her shoulder and into a pot of boiling water on the stove.... Yeah, it didn't live long after.

When I was about seven, my mother brought home a dove. She had been visiting a friend, and a baby dove somehow ended up in their house and wouldn't leave. She caught it in a towel and brought it home. We didn't want to put it in a cage and so ended up putting it in a cardboard box with holes in it. Someone named it Peep. I think it was because of the noise it made. Weird. For the first few days it pooped all over the house. Or all over the room it was in. So my mom got sick of it and put it outside the house. And then it wouldn't leave. And if it did, it would always come back. We'd feed it, it would stick around for a few days and then it would leave again and come back. When it rained it would sit on the porch or cling to the mesh of the screen door. One day it brought a friend. A slightly smaller friend. We figured it was a girlfriend. And then the visits grew less and less often and then it stopped coming. It's probably dead by now.

A few months after that, my mother brought home a pair of parrots. These were wild mean vicious things. They bit anything that had the misfortune of being stuck between the bars of their cage. I was terrified of them. One escaped out of the house one day. I was really sick for a couple of weeks, and one night the second parrot slipped into my room. I screamed which brought everyone else running. In the process of chasing the parrot out, it escaped.

Then my mother brought a fish. No, wait, she didn't bring it. My uncle caught it and my mother put it in a bowl. That night when we were all asleep, the fish jumped out of the bowl. The next morning, we woke up and there lay a stone cold dead fish on the table with an empty glass bowl.

After that my mother found a baby bird. It was a small baby bird that couldn't fly. It was getting dark so we feared that something would eat it. My mother took the bird inside and stuck it in the parrot cage. The darn thing wouldn't shut up. It chirped all everning long. We finally stuck a towel over the cage and it went to sleep. The next day my mom let it out and after chilling there for a few hours, it flew away. I guess its wings must have grown out.

Then there was the time she cornered a large frog. And when I say large I mean large. She stuck it in a huge glass jar, poked holes in it and gave it to me. I decided that the frog needed some water... so I opened the jar to put water in it and out jumps the frog. I didn't dare touch it so I let it hop away.

So much for animals. At my house, it doesn't work.

Memory is a strange mistress

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:52:20 GMT

It's raining outside. I've always loved storms. No, I don't love endless days of dreary rain, or a day where it rains from the crack of dawn till inky black. But I love the excitement of an unexpected storm. I love the thunder and lightning that mark the beginning of it, the ominous dark clouds that collide,trees swaying in strong wind, the spatter of thick droplets, the sounds of a storm. I love being outside at the beginning of one.

I was born in a March storm. Maybe that's why I've always loved them.

My earliest memories of life are from when I was almost 3. I remember evenings playing with the neighbor kids. I remember their names. I remember having a big brown bear. I remember that we gave him away when we moved houses in 5th grade. I remember my 3rd birthday. I remember singing a song at my party. I remember that our neighbor then had a weird toenail cause she got stepped on by a cow (and no I'm not making this up, althought it sounds too weird to be true) I remember balancing on the bricks that lined the sidewalk of the hospital when my sister was born. I remember the 3 little boys that lived next door. One of them had a weird rat tail. I named them after the 3 little pigs in some children's book.

Weird, the things that we remember.

What I've realized I forget easily is what people look like. When I dream, I can never see people's faces. I know who they are, I can see what they are wearing.... but never their faces. When I haven't seen people for a long while, I forget what they look like. Some features of their faces slowly come to my mind, but it's like digging into the features of a person on a blurry photograph. Other times, their faces come to my mind so vividly, it's almost like I saw them just yesterday.

It's still raining outside. Hopefully it will stop by tomorrow morning. Good night

Back to the beginnings

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:21:06 GMT

Somewhere in the sweet oblivion that lies between wakefulness and dreamless sleep, in one of my more lucid moments, I wondered whether my life began in medias res.

What is in medias res anyway? It is latin for "in the middle of things", a term learnt in my Archetypes of Western Lit class. Funny that I should remember something like a vocab term from that class.

I always thought of my birth as a beginning, but perhaps it was in fact in medias res - in the middle of things. My birth at 4:45 am on some random day in March 1986 was in the middle of my parents life. Early in their marriage, yes, (considering that I was born in the 6th year of their 28 year marriage) but when I look at their lives and the lives of their parents and take into consideration everything that constitutes my ancestry I was definitely not the beginning.

Let's recap a little more. AP and RT were married in 1980. AP had 7 siblings while RT had 2. Their first child, a son, born 3 years after their marriage lived less than 6 months. You see, he was what was known as a blue baby, with a hole in his septum so that all the good oxygen-rich blood mixed with all the bad carbondioxide-rich blood. Not only that, he was one of the few people whose heart was in the right side of the body. I was their second child, born 3 years after the death of their son, a girl who was both a middle and first child to her parents. I was born healthy. Their third child, a daughter, was born three years later in May 1989. She too, like her brother, had a hole in her heart. The only difference is that where he died, she survived.

Whether it was because it hurt too much or because they wanted to protect us my parents didn't tell us about this brother of ours. His name meant "happiness" and they were indeed happy to get a child, that too a boy. I will always remember how I found out that I wasn't the oldest child. I was flipping through a book of pictures at my grandma's place and found a few pictures of a gravestone with the name of a boy. The people around looked familiar. I asked her who it was. She told me that it was my parents' son. I informed her that my parents in fact did not have a son and that she must be mistaken. She looked concerned and said to me "No, that is your brother. He died." Died wasn't a word that I was used to. I knew that it meant people went away but I didn't know exactly where they went. I was 8, you see. I knew that it was a sad thing because you never saw them again. I cried for a while, and then forgot about it.

So I guess in that way too, I was born in medias res - in the middle of two others, the middle child. Love comes between Happiness and Beauty. Did I mention that my sister's name means "beautiful" and that mine means "love."

Going back a little further, on my maternal side, my mother's father is a figment of someone's imagination. I think perhaps he's the skeleton in the closet. Either something happened to him, or he left rather soon after my mom's youngest sister's birth. I wonder how that affected my mother. Wait, I know. She doesn't trust most men. She's a little sensitive to mention of him. No matter how many times I ask I never get a clear answer. It never makes sense. I guess it's the family secret to which I am not privy. My maternal grandmother is one half of a set of identical twins. I think of all the grandparents I am closest to her. On my father's side, my grandfather is still alive. I haven't seen him in 10 years. I think I am just a name to him. He's pretty old. My grandmother died a few years ago. I wasn't too close to her, so it didn't bother me too much.

I don't know too much about family before that. I have oodles of cousins. I'm not close to any of them except one. My mother's younger sister's son. Jason. He's a brat, but I'm rather fond of him. My younger sister and he are as thick as thieves.

Anyway, that was my beginning. In the middle of life that has probably existed for many many many years. In medias res.