A Music Moment (in Haste)

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I'm currently trying to cram writing two papers of 10+ pages each (on vastly different topics, I might add) into just three days. This song, "Better" by the Blue Shoes, I discovered on Bones, on the episode "Mayhem on a Cross" (4x21), and it's currently playing on repeat. I do love a show with a good music director. Just one more reason Bones is amazingly awesome. I'd try to be a little more descriptive than that, but my powers of good writing are being channeled in another direction at the moment.

And why would you not watch Bones, especially this amazing episode, when STEPHEN FRY makes a guest starring appearance as a psychiatrist who used to be a glam rocker in six-inch platforms? You don't want to miss it. It's on Netflix InstantPlay with no commercials!

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MUTEMATH

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I've been going through a MuteMath phase recently, listening to their albums all day long. They seem to fit my mood recently. Check out some of my favorite tracks: 

One of my favorites, Lost Year, I can't seem to find on playlist.com, but I would recommend going to YouTube to check it out. It goes along quite nicely with my last post about love and choices.

Life and Love and Choices

On the walk back to my car this afternoon (which was lovely, by the way - the weather has cycled out of the constant rain-snow-sleet-and-gloomy-clouds phase into blue-skies-and-fluffy-clouds phase; we'll see how long it lasts), I was thinking about love and relationships, all kinds of them. I was thinking about how people get divorced citing "irreconcilable differences", about how people say they "fall out of love" or just "stop loving" someone else. And it reoccured to me that really all that is is laziness and shifting the blame onto to Fate or the Cosmos or whatever. Love is a matter of choice. Attraction is another matter, but love really is about choices, just like life is. The fact of the matter is that God has given all the priceless gift of agency. No one, not ever, can force you to do something. Your ability to choose exists outside of and independent from anyone else's influence, even God's. What you do is your choice, no matter what anyone else may be doing, to you or around you.

Now, there are mitigating circumstances, of course, but in general the principle applies to everyone. Your choice to smoke pot is still your choice, no matter how many people are pressuring you to do it. It was your choice to be in a place where someone would pressure you to smoke pot, in the first place. Your choice to divorce your spouse because you can't agree about how the money should be spent is a choice that means one or both of you have decided that money or the things it buys is more important than the person you've promised to spend the rest of life (and maybe eternity) with, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health - in short, through everything. It's your choice. No one else can make it for you, and no one else will have to live with the consequences of that choice. You will. If someone threatens you with a gun to your head and tells you to rob a bank or jump off a cliff, you still have a choice. If someone has something on you and threatens to reveal everything if you don't pay them off or do them a "favor", you still have a choice. There is always a choice. To say otherwise is to attempt to pass the responsibility to someone or something else. In the end, you're going to be the one held accountable for your choices. And it strikes me that, unlike most mortal judges and juries, God might not be persuaded that "it wasn't my fault" by pleas of "but I had no choice!"

Which is why I'd better stop procrastinating and get to work on writing these papers.

Maybe

Maybe it's the fatigue of the end-of-the-semester rush to write all my final papers (no final tests, thank goodness). Maybe it's that I'm not too terribly patient and I've found one too many dirty spoons in the clean plate cupboard. (Or maybe it's one too many empty yogurt containers in the fridge.) Maybe it's that my room never really gets any sunlight. Maybe it's that after four months here at a new school I still don't have any friends. (Okay, I have one or two, I exaggerate.) Maybe it's the location change, from one side of the US to the other. Maybe it's that many of my friends are getting engaged, married, or pregnant. Maybe it's the recent upheavals in my family. Maybe it's because I'm spending too much time watching old Angel episodes (mmmmmm, David Boreanaz! ^_^).

Or maybe it's because I just like to wallow. I like a good wallow just as much as the next person.

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Finals Are a Fun Time for All

I know I've been absent in the blogosphere for a while now. Along with all the craziness inherent in the last few weeks of the semester, some personal and family things have cropped up, as well. I have three final (and long) papers to write this week, a job to find, and I need to start researching what in the world I want to do next summer after graduation. And what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.

Where Do I Go From Here?

I've become increasing more anxious over the last month or so, as I've been thinking about the future. I always thought I knew what I wanted to do, but I'm finding out as I'm studying at USU that I'm less and less sure. I've been so focused on just graduating from college for the last six years that I'd never really worried about what would happen after. Or I just assumed I'd be married by the time I graduated so I'd transition naturally into what I really want to do with my life: being a mother. Well, graduation is getting closer and my marital prospects are still in the "extremely slim to nonexistent" category, and I find myself faced with having to do something after graduation. The problem is, now I'm not so sure what that is.

Should I go to graduate school? If so, which one? And for what? And what's my end goal, that I'd go to graduate school to become or accomplish? Should I take a year off and work? Where? Should I go to Korea and teach English and gain more cultural and language experience while paying off my school loans? Should I go to Korea for graduate school? And how do I avoid becoming too focused on my career in the interim before I get married and start a family, while at the same time working hard and providing for myself and my family's future?

All of this makes me just the teensiest bit anxious. Or more than a teensy bit.

Baby Don't Cry

Daesung is my favorite member of Big Bang. G-Dragon and TOP are too flashy and their music is too much like its raunchy American counterpart to be appealing to me, and Seungri and Taeyang just irritate me and come off as arrogant (in my opinion). But Dae-sung is both adorable, funny, and unassuming, all while have an amazing, smooth, warm voice. And so I'm linking to his single off of Big Bang's SPECIAL EDITION album, Baby Don't Cry.