Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I never get as excited for it as I do for Christmas. It always sneaks up on me. I think that might be why it's my favorite. There's a lot less pressure to have it be the perfect day...therefore a lot less disappointment. It's just a day to spend with family and eat. It is more about the being together. It's not clouded by gifts and materialism. Plus, it's a secular holiday that everyone can benefit from. What a great idea: "Let's set aside a day where we reflect on how thankful we are for everything good in our life."  

I'm thankful for a lot in my life... the usual stuff: food and a place to live. Two things I'm especially thankful for today are the people in my life and the opportunity to be educated. I know everyone should be thankful for these things--I hope it's implied that I am always thankful for these things--but I want to be especially mindful of them today.

Last night, I went to dinner with the gang from the South Dakota trips. I don't see these people often. The last time we had been together as a whole was last Thanksgiving. Yet, we have this amazingly intense connection. It's such a beautiful love and respect for one another. Being with them made me so thankful for everyone who loves me in my life. It's easy for me to forget just how many people are on my side when I get caught up in feeling alone. I have amazing friends, though. I have several very different, close groups of friends. They are all so unique and special to me that I can't compare them at all because my life would be so different with out any one group of them. I recently heard a writer speak. He said he worried about how he would divide his love between his kids when the second kid was born, because he loved the first child with everything he had. He said he eventually realized love doesn't work like that. He said, instead, his love just multiplied, and there was plenty of it to go around. My friends make me realize that love works like that. I don't love any of my old friends who I don't see as much any less than I ever did, and I still love my new friends just as much as my old friends. I also used to worry about new friends replacing old friends, but love doesn't work like that. I'm very thankful for the way love just grows and multiplies. I am also thankful for my family. I have to admire the way so many people with lots of differences try to be together, even if it's not always easy. We've all hurt each other at some point (most of us multiple times), yet we just keep showing up to be together. Thank you to all of my friends and family. I love all of you. You make me feel loved.

Now, I feel the need to explain how thankful I am for my education, because school has been driving me insane--to the point of me saying I hate it lately--It's really just the stress, though. I can't take the stress sometimes. However, I am so thankful that I have the opportunity to enhance my quality of life by learning about such a variety of things on a daily basis. I don't ever want to stop learning. I don't think I will, but there will come a time when I am no longer in classes. I won't be able to hear experts in a variety of fields speak regularly. I won't be able to ask them questions. I know when that day comes, I will miss these days.

I can't help but think of Frederick Douglas. We just read his slave narrative for my American Lit. course. His life was totally changed by the fact that he learned to read. Knowledge really is power, and his story reminded me how thankful I am to be able to read and write...not just in a merely functional way, but in a life-enhancing-sort-of-way. My life is truly better because I can read books of all sorts, and I know how to express myself clearly with words. Life just wouldn't be the same with out this gift. I don't ever want to forget how fortunate I am for experiencing equal education despite the fact I am female and went to public schools. I wish everyone could say that, but I'm aware that it is a gift that is more rare than it should be. I appreciate it nonetheless.

Complaining

If you don't like complaining, don't read this. Everything hurts. My head, my body, my spirit. I think I'm sick. It doesn't help that I was already worn down and burnt out. 

I've been laying in bed a lot. It's hard to go to class. I also haven't felt like eating (but I make myself do it anyway). This scares me, because it's classic textbook depression symptoms, but I have to believe Im just physically sick. I've been working so hard to keep my mental health in check. I've been doing such a good job at staying in control. I find it hard to believe I could just randomly fail without some tragedy coming along. There has been no major tragedy, nothing to set this episode off. I might just be sick. I'm going to keep resting and taking vitamin C. We'll see what happens. I have awesome friends and family, though, who keep checking on my progress. I'm probably just sick.

I wish I could use this non-productive time to write and free my mind and spirit. Instead I just lay in bed. I'm tired and everything hurts. 

Coffee Shop Reflections

I'm writing in a coffee shop. Stereotypical, I know. I should be doing homework, preparing for an exam this week. It's hard for me to work on stuff that doesn't matter to me when I need to write. I just don't get to write like I need to anymore. I am beginning to accept that I need to make time to write, even if that means stressing out about homework later. It's more important that I feel mentally healthy, and writing is essential to me for that. 

I'm so sick of school these days. I have trouble caring enough to put in the required effort, but I keep working to the best of my ability. Somedays my best is less than acceptable, though. I like college much better than high school, but my number one complaint about college classes is that there is never a day where I feel like I have no homework. I could always be doing more. It's just a matter of what needs to be done. It makes me feel lazy sometimes, but somehow my GPA turns out okay. I hate that I never know what my GPA will look like all semester. I worry about it all of the time and feel guilty for not working hard enough, but then I get my grades, and I somehow do okay.

I miss writing prose so much. I've been working on some tonight, but it's much different because my use of language has changed from working on poetry so much. I can't wait until Christmas break. I hope to write a lot. I guess, I didn't have much to say. I just have gotten bad about keeping my blog up, so I thought I would reflect a bit while I had a minute.

Today is alright :)

Today's horoscope (courtesy of Yahoo) seems to be right on. I love it when that happens. I could elaborate on all of the ways that it has proved to be true today, but I want to work on a poem. I need to be studying for my quiz at 5. Too bad, I'm working on this poem since I haven't felt creative in far too long :(

Quickie
The big changes coming into your life are going to take their time -- be patient!
Overview
Your communication style is always a bit poetic and today it's even more so. You may have a harder time speaking with people who are too literal-minded, but fortunately there aren't many of them.

Honestly?

Today was one of those days where I keep telling myself I'm fine, but things keep going down hill. It seems the last week or so has been like that. It's not any one big thing, but instead a bunch of little things.

I got back my midterm from that week where I had an 8-page paper due, a quiz, and three exams. I got a C. It started the morning on a sour note. Then it just continued to be a bunch of little things...like a firedrill at work during my all too short 45 minute lunch. Oh and did I say one fire drill? I meant two. TWO.

I've been under a lot of scrutiny for my project lately. I'm getting e-mails (yes, plural) that are asking me questions I can't answer. I don't know if I can keep working on it. It's draining.

I don't want to complain about all of the little things bogging me down, but I'm trying to communicate the feeling of drowning. I am involved in too many things so that I cannot excel at any of them. I'm constantly flaking out. I'm not writing. It makes me angry.

Speaking of anger, I've never allowed myself to feel anger in a healthy way. A part of my therapy is to pay closer attention to my feelings. I've been feeling angry about sexism a lot. I never realized how much it is a part of everyday life. It's starting to jump out at me. For example, I notice the way I am passive and constantly let men interrupt me, etc... It's not worth getting angry about when I can 't evaluate all of the feelings more, but it doesn't just go away either.

This is a pointless blog. More for clearing my head than anything else. It's going to be a long week. I'm supposed to camp out at midnight tonight in cardboard boxes and freeze for WPI. Good times.

VOTE

I am voting for my first time tomorrow. It would be so much easier if Tuesdays weren't my busiest days of the week. I wish one of my professors would have cancelled class to allow us time to vote. Oh well, my dinner break will just have to be a little bit shorter. I'll survive.

It feels good to be back

I haven’t allowed myself to freewrite on here in so long. I didn’t even now how to start, so I thought I would acknowledge my uncertainty. I wanted to take a break from poetry to write prose. It used to feel so natural, but I’ve gotten used to carefully analyzing every word. My job also affects my writing. I’ve spent so much time with academic writing, rewording, and precision. It’s good for my writing overall, but it’s forcing me to change and grow so much that it just doesn’t feel natural to me.

My poetry professor said that I’m improving rapidly. I felt like I was getting worse. He said that’s normal, because improving is like working up hill. It requires getting used to new techniques, and you might wake up sore from your effort the next day. He talked about improving up hill, having intervals of plateaus where you rest and feel comfortable until someone forces you to dig deeper and start climbing toward the next. I’m climbing pretty aggressively, and I like it overall. I’m still not very confident about it all, though. It doesn’t help my poems were rejected by this lit. journal on campus again. It happens—a lot for writers—it still is annoying, though. I’m glad my professor is so encouraging, because now I don’t necessarily think that my poems are rejected because they aren’t good enough. I think my style is unique and doesn’t mesh well with a lot of the poetry scene folks up here.

I dressed up like Cleopatra last night. I spray dyed my hair black for the evening. Two showers later: I’m mostly free of black dye, but our shower is stained, and there is black all over the sink and walls. Black even came out when I blew my nose this morning.

I’m at a coffee shop with intentions of writing. I guess this is a prewriting warm-up. I’m going to have to dig a lot deeper than this to get some real writing. I don’t even know where to start. I had a crazy busy week. It ran me to the ground. I handled it better than I expected, but I don’t want to write about that. I’m sick of letting business define my life. I had a literature professor comment on a profound story. He said something along the lines of, “We are busy are whole lives, and doing what? Nothing when you think about it.”

Last weekend I felt happy on the camping trip. I’m trying to be more observant of my feelings, especially happy ones. I felt happy watching my friend, Nik, hike with a walking stick while wearing mismatched clothes and a circular piece of birch tree bark on her head as a hat. Nik is one of those rare individuals who is just so full of life. My friend Adam is like that. I have similar feelings of happiness when people I love are full of joy. I’m reminded of how happy I feel on the day where we take the kids to the water park at work in the summer, or how happy I felt when I saw my dad child-like excited when we walked into the Piston’s game last winter. I guess, maybe I feel most alive when in the presence of joy. Adam and Nik are joyful people. It seems like the rare individuals I know who possess so much life, have all experienced some sort of emotional death at some point. It leads me to believe that one has to truly know the depths of despair to feel the greatest level of pure joy.

I don’t know what else I want to reflect on, but I think I’m ready to post this as a blog, then really start writing.