The Deeds and Misdeeds of One Nance

watching Pan's Labyrinth, mooting, impressing prospective employers, attending Death by Chocolate parties, aging, awaiting the return of Kim, writing a paper on legal rights of unborn children, watching all the Oscar-nominated films, writing letters, learning to knit, enduring the cold, reading hundreds and hundreds of pages, loving the Supreme Court of Canada, hating the Supreme Court of Canada, reading E.E. Cummings, making chocolate sauce and Mexican soup, listening to Neko Case, loving Finnigan, laying in the warm kitchen floor, eating peanut butter Kisses, forgetting French, waiting for summer, riding the bus, visiting Dee, conserving resources, going to class, jigging along, doing what's good for me, hoping against hope

Flood

Life is just a wee bit overwhelming right now. Not bad, just overwhelming. I always think I've got things under control on Monday and Tuesday, and because stuff is okay, I hang out with people instead of working ahead. Then by the time Wednesday comes I know I'm in trouble and by Thursday I'm completely sunk. On Friday by the time I'm done my classes I'm just a ball of "I'm 200 pages behind!" stress. It's too bad because I actually really like my classes this semester and I'm really happy with the relationships I'm building, but keeping up with both school and friends is a bit of a challenge. I find that it really it stresses me out lately when people are late, because I spend that half hour or whatever sitting around waiting and thinking about the extra 10 pages I could have read or the reading response I could have finished up. I hate it, but I can't help it.

Nevertheless, God is good. And like I said, it's not that the work is bad or the people are bad - both are great. It's just difficult keeping them both up. I wish sometimes that I had one of those eight hour jobs where you go to work and work hard, but when you go home you completely forget about your work and just enjoy your time off. While I'm a student I can never shake the feeling that I should be reading or writing or working ahead (if only I could catch up where I'm behind).

Summer is going to be epic.

Restart

My new computer is humming loudly as I attempt to listen to Sufjan Stevens. I'm not irate, but I'm certainly disturbed. I'll have to get someone slightly more aware than myself to look at it. Maybe if I restart it everything will fall into place. The computer ignoramus's all-fix solution: restart. Restart. Restart again. Maybe it will fix itself. It's like life. Instead of actually looking into the problem, I shut it down and hope that it will fix itself. Sadly, it rarely happens like that. Praise God for friends who know a little more about computers and life than I.

We're none of us as open as we seem.

...like patience on a monument...

I've spent my whole life waiting. Waiting to graduate, waiting to get to that new school, waiting for a relationship, waiting to find out if it works, waiting to settle, waiting to move on, waiting for God's guidance, waiting to find time to listen, waiting for love, waiting for friends, waiting for a job, waiting to be independent, waiting for something new, waiting to run away, waiting to learn, waiting to act, waiting to change, waiting for morning, waiting for night, waiting to dream, waiting for it to come true, waiting to grow up, waiting to go home.

God, teach me to live in the present.

I'm Back!

Hey there! Me and my new laptop are now online. Hooray, hooray, hooray! The internet is quick, the screen is bright and cheery, and the audio system is significantly better than my last laptop. Apparently things change quite a bit over four years.

I had a great Christmas. Home is just wonderful. Coming back was a little stressful, but life seems to have settled in here and it's manageable. Not perfect, but manageable. I'm taking some heavy classes and I've got to make some quick decisions about where I want to be and what I want to be doing in the next couple of years, but I'm trying to look on it all as an adventure and not just a big lump of stress.

As a side note, when I was at home I talked to an older gentleman contemplating heart surgery who wisely observed that stress is just another word for fear. Since we're told that we're to live in a spirit not of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind, I'm making an effort to recognize stress for what it is in my life - that is, fear - and deal with it on that level instead of pretending that it's just a biological reaction over which I have no control. We'll see how it goes.

Speaking of stress/fear, I got my marks back this week and was not so much disappointed as confused. I got a very poor mark in a class on which I worked really hard, and an astonishingly good mark in the class in which I was still 500 pages behind by the time I wrote the final exam. Wierd. Happily, I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter as my marks don't limit God's ability to make good use of my life. Hallelujah!

So that's me now.