a few amazing things

• The Oxford Project (pictures from a small town taken of the same people 20 years apart)

• friends who make you a braver person

• “Fireflies” by Bishop Allen (downloadable via Sweet Juniper)

• small moments when everything boils down to the fact that I am stupendously and ridiculously blessed

• new recipes that make you so excited about fall cooking

• spotting the first bits of red on the grapevines lining the back fence

• Shouting Men (oh you haven’t seen this yet, go look!)

• the way the moon looks over the buildings outside of the train windows coming back from class

conversation about crushes

I have to admit that I have spent much of this past week living inside my own head.  Sure I got up, had some form of breakfast conversation, drove to work, went to class, attended meetings, etc, etc, but most of the time my brain has been turning and turning over the same events, doubts, fears and questions.  Unfortunately much of this huge outpouring of thinking and pondering revolves around a boy.  Which always frustrates me because, well I hate falling into the stereotype of a woman whose life (or in this case brain) revolves around a man.  You see, me and crushes don’t really get along and we never really had.  Maybe its because I have had so few experiences with crushes actually leading to relationships, or maybe its because I just find them annoying.  Either way spending my precious brain time and emotional energy, trying to analyze the big question of “What does this boy think of me?” wears me out.  Plus in this type of situation I tend to have rather circular rounds of conversation with myself.  So in order to let you all in on a little bit of the crazy that has been my mental process this past week, here is a little peak at my thought process.

Fluffy pink brain: Oooh, look he is talking to you, let’s go do cartwheels in the park!

Voice of doubt/reason: Hmmm, I don’t think talking to you equates wanting to runaway with you and have lots of babies.

Fluffy pink brain: But look he is wearing a sweater and has such nice eyes, we should totally get married.

Voice of doubt/reason: You are being completely ridiculous, enough of this.  There is no way he is interested, so you should completely forget about it.

Fluffy pink brain: Whatever Ms. Negative, he definitely likes spending time with me and that has to mean something!

Voice of doubt/reason: Hey do you really want to get rejected?  You want to risk that?  Cause he probably just likes hanging out with you, as he does lots of girls, so you are definitely not anything special.

Fluffy pink brain: [hangs head] Really, you don’t think there is even a chance he might want to date or something?

Voice of doubt/reason: Well I guess there is a small chance that he might, but is it really worth talking to him and being so vulnerable and risky just to find out that there is yet another guy who isn’t interested in dating you?

Fluffy pink brain: Hey now, that’s mean, stop being so negative or you will totally end up a bitter old 25 year old, just because other guys haven’t been interested in the past doesn’t mean he won’t.  And if you keep acting so mean, I am totally gonna make you watch a chick flick!

Voice of doubt/reason: [grumbling] Fine, fine go ahead ahead and be all vulnerable and risky, just don’t make me watch the Notebook, or I am totally gonna organize a Lord of the Rings marathon!

Blog Anniversary #4!

I wasn’t even thinking about the whole anniversary thing today until I looked down at my little desk calender thing (one of those flippy things with a page for every day) and saw September 17.  And I thought, “you know I think that is the date of when I started my blog,” so I checked it out and yes indeed my first ever post dates back 4 years exactly.

In order the capture this anniversary of this odd little blog, here are some odd little facts/statistics:

Prior Blog Anniversaries completely missed: 3 (2005 is my favorite because even though I actually posted on the exact anniversary, I didn’t notice.  This may have something to do with the fact that I was living in China at the time and kinda busy with other more important parts of life)

Number of blogging programs used: 2 (I started on Blogger back in the dark ages before it was owned by Google, and then in October 2006 switched to WordPress)

Number of blogs I currently subscribe to via Bloglines: 71 (and that doesn’t include my gigantic Retired or Old Blog sub folders)

My relatives who blogged when I first started blogging: 1

My relatives who blog now: 7 and probably more

Number of visitors since October 2006: 29,665 29,671(but probably half of those are people searching for pictures of Bonnie Hunt or information regarding SeaQuest DSV)

Number of times I have been surprised who reads my blog: countless times (even though I know that people I know in real life read this, finding this out is always a bit of shock)

Just in case

you aren’t reading my older brother Tim’s blog at the Mennonite, go do that now! In his most recent piece Tim talks about the role of light and shadow in photography and showcases just a few of the absolutely amazing pictures he has taken over the last few years.  Plus if you want the whole set go check it out on flickr and then prepare to spend the next half an hour favoriting every single one.  Among many things Tim’s pictures are proof that big fancy cameras are not needed to take great pictures.  Tim’s camera (the slightly newer version of my old camera that broke) fits in his wallet and yet is able to capture beautiful images.  While I do love my SLR, I do find myself wishing at times that it was just a little smaller, both for ease of transportation and for a less obvious method of photographing events.

Anyways here are two of my favorites from Tim’s great collection!

Morning light across the table, originally uploaded by mennonot.

Waiting at Cumberland station, originally uploaded by mennonot.

Morning droplets, originally uploaded by mennonot.

Okay I lied, my favorite three.

melancholy chai with rain

It has finally stopped raining, which obviously means very little until you take into account the fact that it has been raining continually since Friday evening.  While obviously many other parts of the country are baring a much larger brunt of the Ike’s weight, here in Chicago we had the rainiest day in recorded Chicago history on Saturday.  And it was also such a strange rain, no thunderstorms, not incredibly hard, just thorough, constant and very very wet.  So now that it actually isn’t raining any more my ears are kind of confused and everything seems so quiet.

This past week has been a very long one in that I had both my evening classes, an extra hour of meeting on Tuesday night and I attended my very first high school football game on Friday night.  So far the load isn’t too heavy, but I do feel very cautious of adding anything else to my schedule at the moment.  Which is rather sad because there are other things I would like to be doing right now, such as getting involved with the church, helping get the church library going again, spending time with friends both new and old.  I have to admit the idea of going full time to school next year is awfully appealing and yet it is also hard to think of all the loans that I would have to take out to make that possible.

So overall this week was busy, good, but also rather deflating.  Like many people I occasionally find myself in those moods where it is hard to feel good about many of the details of ones life.  In these moods; “everyone is vaguely disappointed in me”, “I am too lazy”, “I can never find clothes that look good on me”, “I am too materialistic”, and of course the best one, “my life will never change”.  It is always these moods that make me want to do something different, even if it is only as radical as cutting my hair.  I have yet to find any good solutions to these moods, although I will recommend reading books that aren’t about tragic random murders.*  But I have to admit my current plan this afternoon which included successfully finishing my paper due tomorrow, making myself some chai and eating a homemade cookie is definitely helping.

*Despite In Cold Blood by Truman Capote being an incredible book that I highly recommend, reading it this past week or so has definitely not made me feel better about humanity.  Capote writes In Cold Blood as a novel length journalistic view of the 1959 killing of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas.  In the book, two damaged individuals for somewhat random reasons end up shooting the family in the middle of the night, leaving two older married daughters as the sole survivors of their family.  So while it is an amazing book, I wouldn’t exactly call it an upper.

a big almost

This afternoon has been a bit of a whirlwind because in the last hour I have seen a car accident happen, called 911 (just for the police, fortunately no one was injured), been a witness to the police and generally been under a bit of stress.  I find it interesting how very frequently I tend to remain very calm in times of crisis (either emotional or physical) and only after the fact react and realize how all my muscles are tense and my breathing shallow.

Now as for the accident itself, I was heading out to pick Erini up from the airport using Becca’s car that was parked in front of the old apartment.  I had checked my mirrors and was pulling out when a car came from behind me at quite a good clip, swerved around me and crashed into a parked car across the street.  The next little while was a bit of blur, but Jess came down right away because she had heard the noise and another friend from church came over because he too had heard the crash.  The driver of car who had swerved appeared shaken, but okay in general.  After a little bit of wondering what to do in this instance, I called 911 and after a long while the police arrived and got the story from all of us.  Fortunately because my car had been far enough out in the road to be “in traffic” it was written up as the other driver’s fault.  Plus he recieved a citation because of the speed he was going.  Which now as I am looking back, I am realized how blessed I was in several ways.  First if I hadn’t been as pulled out as I had been, I could have been found liable for the accident.  Second considering how fast the driver was going and the damage done to the parked car, I could easily be in the hospital right now if he hadn’t swerved.

Basically it is a case of a wrong thing going as good as it could possibly go.  Despite the adrenaline withdraw I have right now, I have to admit that I am feeling rather blessed at the moment.  Plus thanks to what I think is a great example of mother radar, my Mom called me just a little while after the whole thing happened (although she called to talk about something entirely different) and it was really great to have someone to talk too.  And then of course Tim called a little later in the afternoon giving me another chance to talk to someone about the whole thing.  So yes indeed I am a blessed person right now.

so many words

It has been raining all day.   I don’t mean intermittent little showers, but plain ole all day soak the earth till it can’t drink no more rain kind of pouring.  If I was my dad right now I would probably provide you with a link to some weather page which would inform you that this is evidence of Gustav or whatever tropical storm is blowing off steam.  But I am me, so I will instead tell you that it was kinda nice to have the rain around today.  Usually I am more of a partly cloudy, mostly sunny kinda girl, but today the rain was good.  And it is making a rather perfect accompaniment to the Bon Iver music that I am listening too.

I don’t think tomorrow should be friday, it should be saturday.  But because I can’t make it so, I will instead be grateful for this little half an hour of time in which it is too early to be thinking about homework for next week, too early to be going to sleep, too late to be making plans with friends, too dark and rainy for going on a walk, so really perfect for cuddling up with my little laptop and blogging.

I could write about classes (they are going fine, thanks for your kind wishes) or work (also going fine, better now than a week ago), but instead I will just say that today at work there was duck walking around on the roof outside the library windows.  He quacked rather persistently while walking amid the puddles and I don’t know if he was looking for someone or just boasting about his great feat of landing maneuvers.  So at least in all of the rain and transition that is making me rather wordy and melancholy today, I got to watch a quacking roof duck.