Kaleidoscope

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 Have you ever noticed that other people's lives are a lot easier to live than your own? By that I mean that everything is so much clearer to you when it's someone else's problem. As a general rule of thumb. You can tell yourself all kinds of things, things you'd say to your friends if they came to you and asked you for advice, but they're not very motivating or clarifying when you tell them to yourself.

I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but I think that happens to me because I get locked into a feedback loop of overthinking the situation. Something seems like a great solution until you're lying awake in bed at night, staring at the ceiling or the wall, with all the variables (real or perceived) running through your head on repeat. For me, it feels kind of like a kaleidoscope looks - the same basic pieces, tumbling over and around each other, morphing into a thousand different patterns as they twirl around at the end of a tube. Every time you look at it it's different, but somehow it's still the same.

Monday, Monday

The plan for today involved getting the job hunt started in earnest. After sleeping in, of course.

Instead, what happened was a knock on my door shortly before eight this morning. It was my grandma, asking me to take her to the ER. Now, I admit that I was a little bit "Oh, stop being such a baby" about the whole thing, especially since my grandma is just a bit of a hypochondriac. But she told me that she'd called our neighbor (who's a retired doctor) and asked him what she should do, and he told her to go to the ER. So we got into the car and drove to the ER on this dreary, cold, rainy Monday morning after finals.

It turns out that my grandma has some sort of gall bladder problem, which has given her gall stones (and a lot of pain and nausea) and caused pancreatitis. Since she can't eat lest she aggravate her pancreas, she'll have to stay in the hospital for a few days until she stabilizes enough to do the surgery to remove her gall bladder. On an unrelated tangent, it amazes me how quickly news spreads. Already half my grandma's friends and people from church have called asking for an update on her condition; two people had brought her flowers by the time I got back to the hospital after I ran home to check on my grandpa and eat some food.

I'm so grateful that this didn't happen last Monday. Or the Monday before that, even. That would have probably ended me. I would have croaked from the stress of too many things going on in my life. I think now I've finally managed to process - on an initial level - that my grandpa is really gone. I've gotten all my final papers in and that stress out of the way. If this had come on top of those two, I don't know if I'd have made it. I might have just curled up in a ball and stayed catatonic for a while until it all went away. Too bad that doesn't actually solve any problems. Now I need to tackle finding a job for the summer, finding a way to get to that job, and finding a place to live this autumn. And finding out what the heck I'm going to do with my life after next May.

Summer Goals

My Goals for the Summer

make a baby quilt with my grandma

take up rock climbing

learn to longboard

pass the Korean language aptitude test

do a lot of family history

make new friends

 run a 5k

get lots and lots of sleep

Stream of Conciousness

I did it. Remember those two 10+-page papers I had to write in just three days? I did it. I blows my mind just a little bit. With the first paper, the paper I wrote for my Intro to Islam class (fascinating, by the way) on comparing and contrasting the concept of God in Islam and in my religion, I felt such a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when I turned it in Friday night. I spent half of Saturday at my grandfather's memorial and with my family; the other half I spent cramming all I could about Sino-North Korean relations since 1949 into my head. I don't do homework on Sundays. Believe me, I was anxious about that. I mean, that left me with just one day to write (and finish researching) a whole paper on a massive topic. But I woke up at five am on Monday and wrote the first 3.5 pages in under four hours -- which is a miracle for me. Then I went to take the one final I had. I came back and wrote a little more, but I couldn't concentrate. I took a break from just after three pm to about six-thirty pm. Watched Bones, checked my Facebook, went and had dinner at a friend's place. I came back, said a little prayer that I could stay focused, and knocked out the rest of the paper. It was in before ten pm, two hours before it was due. The whole experience was completely anti-climatic. There wasn't any sense of accomplishment or relief. Mostly I just felt like I'd written a crap paper. I woke up Tuesday morning and checked Blackboard and there it was: a 19.5/20. Maybe I was too hard on myself. Maybe my teacher wasn't holding me to the standard I thought she was. Maybe she just read it late at night and wanted to just get it out of the way. Maybe she read it after someone's paper that was actually crap. I don't know. I still don't know what I made on my other paper. And I've got one more left. This one's about the Korean War, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Not the current war in Afghanistan. The one with the Soviets. And I have to find a job. A car. A place to live. A purpose for the rest of my life.

I said before that I've been listening to Mutemath a lot recently. This is from their song "Clipping".

Feeling overload
Carrying bottled skies around
I've been drowning all along
Wearing out in a faltered sea
And I give up

Common sense failed again
Meddling in a foreign scene
Foreign dream
Oh, Time won't spare another sun
Daring me with another choice, another choice

Anymore, I don't know who to fight anymore
I don't know what is right anymore, anymore