rainy days

i just read that the mayor of st george declared a state of emergency for southern utah; water levels are expected to exceed water levels in the flooding of 2005. and the rain keeps coming!

a rainy christmas isn't quite the romantic ideal, but it is some form of precipitation, so i suppose it's better than nothing. not quite winter wonderland, not quite california christmas: we sit somewhere in the middle.

i've had a rocky relationship with rain. in the past, i've found it hard to look at rain without thinking gloomy, depressed, and tears. it could be because rain isn't too common in the southern utah desert that i grew up in, and i've always preferred sunny skies. but the places i've lived outside of southern utah have taught me one or two things about rain. in provo, rain comes more frequently than in st george and i've learned the art of the umbrella. i also learned that it's helpful to wear a skirt on rainy days, because my pants {usually too long, because of my shortness} usually drag in the wetness and stay wet all day long. wearing a skirt in the rain wasn't a problem in uruguay, because i already wore one every day! in uruguay, i learned that rain in southern utah {or provo, for that matter} is nothing. i learned what it really means to be raining cats and dogs {and cows, and pigs, and sheep}. when it rains there, it rains with all its heart and soul. in london, i learned how truly lovely rain can be, and that despite soggy days, london is still beautiful.

so i've learned that rain can be good. there is something deliciously melancholy about a rainy day, and something refreshing about the feeling of the earth being washed and scrubbed clean. and there is no better smell than rain in southern utah {it's the sagebrush}.

nevertheless, when the sun finally makes an appearance again, i will welcome it.

a few words

done {with this semester} {and my undergraduate degree}

home {finally} {for christmas}

as you can tell, being DONE and HOME leaves me {mostly} speechless!

Merry Christmas!

¡Feliz Navidad!

no rest for the [insert word here]

i could say no rest for the weary, but that's cliche, so i'll say no rest for the person who has been slacking off on her grad school application and gre preparation for the entire semester and now is pretty much freaking out.

good news: today was the last day of classes. what does this mean for me? it means that i just finished the very last classes of my undergraduate career. BOOM, BABY. i wish i could say i felt elated, but i'm not there quite yet. i have finals looming (although i'm not too worried.... less worried than i should be, perhaps) and grad school applications that i've procrastinated until now. shame, shame, shame. that gives me more stress than anything at this point. i realize that so much of this semester has been spent doing things that are immediately important (homework, for example) that the things that will be important for my future have fallen by the wayside. i pray that i can spend some good quality time this coming couple of weeks doing grad school application, and that i don't completely shame myself taking the gre.

i know i shouldn't rely on the "if it works out, it's meant to be" logic too heavily. i mean, i believe it's true, that if i do as much as i can the rest will sort itself out. i just need to get busy doing as much as i can. i'll get right on that.

ask me how i feel

go ahead, ask me.

how do i feel? thank you for asking.

i feel FANTASTIC/ECSTATIC/GROOVY/PEACHY/SWELL/ PHENOMENAL!!!!

why?

i just compiled my final countdown list. this list includes all the homework i have to do and finals i have to take before the end of the semester (in other words.... all the homework i have to do and finals i have to take before i can call myself a byu GRADUATE!) it's a pretty good sized list, but the fact that in less than two weeks i will have completed my undergraduate career (and what a long road it has been) makes me more than thrilled. it is enough to pull me through the stress of the last two weeks of school. hallelujah!

tonight i went with jessi, sabrina, and annalisa to the first presidency christmas devotional at the conference center. what a wonderful way to kick off the christmas season! being in the same room with the prophet and apostles is always thrilling, and tonight was no exception. here are some highlights of the evening:

*when president uchtdorf quoted "the grinch who stole christmas"

*mormon tabernacle choir (and orchestra)'s rendition of "oh come all ye faithful"

*the foggy evening that made the temple and the lights at temple square all misty and ethereal.

*when someone said MERRY CHRISTMAS to me! first time of the season!

ps: i watched casablanca for the first time this weekend. humphrey bogart, you are one fine man. and ingrid bergman is dazzlingly beautiful. and it's an incredible movie. if you haven't seen it, repent! so good. sooooo good :)

deep sigh

ahhhhh, the weekend. i can take a deep breath, even if it's just a short one. this morning i came to a realization: if you still haven't unpacked from thanksgiving break, your week has been WAY way too busy. yes, half of my clothes from thanksgiving break are still sitting in my suitcase. pathetic! ridiculous! unacceptable! that's like a metaphor for my life right now - i'm a little behind in everything, but at least i still have clothes, right? and a seafoam green suitcase, and a blue polka dot carry-on bag from the cath kidston store in london! don't forget those. if you're going to have your clothes packed for a week after a trip, make sure you have fantastic luggage to look at/trip over. because stubbing your toe on seafoam green is less painful than boring black.

i'm thankful that this week is over, and that i was able to get everything turned in, and thankful for forgiving professors who hopefully won't dock me toooooo much for late research papers {4 research papers in 2 weeks is too much. really}. and i'm thankful that today when i was driving home from my 8 o'clock class, i passed brant on his way to class.

and oddly enough, i am thankful for all the homework i have. i started to complain about the amount of work we are given at this university, but then i stopped an had an epiphany {like a light bulb! haha that reminds me of rudolph the red-nosed reindeer}. if professors expected less from us or gave us less to do, we would inevitably learn less. i realized that one of the reasons i am at this school is because i like to be pushed. we humans have a tendency to stay where it is comfortable, so it's nice when someone says "no, i think you can do more."

so this post is dedicated to my professors. yes, sometimes i curse the amount of work you make me do, and the sleep i lose in order to complete it, and the amount of time it takes away from people that i love. but at the end of the day, i'm thankful to have learned about american literature, or writing, or families, or life in general.

gracias!

words, words, small talk

words keep me alive. they fascinate me with their ability to mean everything and nothing, to drive right to the heart of a point or skirt around an issue, to horrify and electrify and surprise.

there are words that satisfy me, like succulent and befuddle, and others that amuse me, like fiddlesticks, poppycock, and mollycoddle (where do those words come from, anyway?). there are words that sound better spoken with a british accent, like rubbish and darling.

i can't live without words. to speak is to be ALIVE. maybe this is one of the reasons why small talk annoys me so much. small talk is a crime of words. small talk is nothing but robotic, and certainly never includes words like succulent.

hi, how are you?

well, thank you. you?

good. how was your day?

good. yours?

okay.

sometimes you can try to break up the cycle by giving a five minute spiel in response to how are you? but that can backfire on you, because instead of starting a real conversation you could reveal that the other person has no desire to know how you are, but simply wanted to ask for formality's sake. then it gets awkward, and usually ends like this: well, good luck with that! which sounds about as sincere as barbie.

small talk can lead to a real conversation, yes. and i do like people to ask me how i'm doing, rather than not. but sometimes i feel starved of real conversations, feeling lost in the sea of superficiality, where people put up brick walls and don't really want to know how i'm really doing and don't want to tell me how they're really doing.

today, i lack intellectual interchange. but maybe i'm just too tired to make the effort, and it's really me who is at fault, not other people.

so, how are you today?

broken record

i posted a couple (few?) weeks ago about how the upcoming week was going to be the "week of reckoning" that would make or break me this semester... well, funny thing is, i think every week since then has been the same way. only getting 2.5 hours of sleep - like i did last night - is not my favorite way to start out a week!

however, if all i write about is how crazy my life is, i'll probably lose all my blog followers. or, as jessi would say, i would loose all my followers.

so today i'm going to write about something completely unrelated to school: singing in the shower.

this is partially inspired by a brief essay/sketch i read by jesús colón from "a puerto rican in new york,"which delighted me and gave me pause to reflect on my thoughts about the subject. my thoughts went something like this:

i used to sing in the shower when i was a young girl, but one incident ended my shower-singing days. here are the facts: there was a big gathering of extended family at my home, and i don't remember exactly how old i was, but i think i was about 10. anyway, i had recently seen the lion king, and that particular morning i was doing a musical review of the lion king in the shower {at the top of my lungs}. when i got out of the shower, one of my aunts quipped hey, nice singing. now i was a quietish child, a little prone to shyness, so when i realized that not only my aunt but possibly my whole extended family heard me belt the lion king, i was completely and utterly horrified. and to my recollection, i have never sung in the shower since that day.

i think much can be said about my personality from that story. well, maybe not much, but something. i have found myself, many times, unwilling or unable to do something {like sing in the shower} because i was afraid of what other people would think. it's silly, really, to be overly concerned about what other people think, but at times in my life it has been a reality.

on one hand, i find this idea very attractive - acting completely uninfluenced by what other people think. on the other hand, i can recognize the shortcomings of this mindset. first of all, acting completely without regard to others' feelings sounds awfully egocentric. people who always say the first thing that comes to mind regardless of other people's feelings around them, it can be disastrous. for example, i was relating a story to my roommates last year about how my old boss was ranting about the chinese army coming to destroy us, and i yelled "the chinese are coming!!" completely forgetting that our {chinese} roommate was just in the other room. it is always good to have tact. tact is my friend.

yet, i would like to find a balance between sensible tact and unrestrained liberty of action and speech. such a balance should exist, don't you think?

GRE

i just registered to take the GRE. goodbye, $160. hello, preparation manuals and anticipatory dread.

i should have started studying for this test much, much earlier. i really should have taken it months ago... now i'm not going to have any time to retake it if i bomb. pray for me. now that i've committed myself to taking it, there's no backing out, unless i want to kiss that $160 goodbye for no reason at all (which i don't want to do).

yes, i am afraid. math and i are not friends. we're barely brief acquaintances. no one is really going to care that much if i'm math challenged, because i'm applying to an mfa program in creative writing, not mathematical theory or whatever. still, i don't want to shame myself. math tutor needed.

also, i need to start reading the dictionary.

falling, but not stars

I wrote this mini essay today for my creative nonfiction class. que lo disfruten!

Shooting stars are not really stars at all. That’s probably pretty close to common knowledge, but it’s still a bit disillusioning to me. I mean, when you see a shooting star, it’s rather romantic to think that you’re actually witnessing the death of a star, whose last dying breath left a fiery flash on your corneas. A falling star is just a meteor, and a meteor is just a flash of light visible against the dark canvas of night when a meteoroid enters Earth’s atmosphere. Meteoroids in space aren’t nearly as exciting; they are simply floating rocks kicking around, idly orbiting the sun. We only become interested in them when they cross into our realm—and because they usually create an opportunity to make a wish, we delight in them and check the internet to see when the next meteor shower will occur. Well, at least I do. When meteoroids cross the threshold into our atmosphere, frictional heat causes the visible trail of fire, and the meteoroid is usually burned up on the way down. Sometimes meteoroids survive the trip, and the ones that actually hit the ground are called meteorites, which are rare enough to be something of a phenomenon when they occur.

I’m pretty sure I saw a meteorite survivor once. A few years back, my friend Allison and I were lying on the trampoline in my parents’ backyard, watching a meteor shower. My two younger sisters, who were also with us, had fallen asleep awhile ago, and Allison and I were chatting and watching the sky, our conversation interrupted occasionally with an exclamation of look!! There’s one! Or wow! Did you see that one? We didn’t often see the same falling meteoroids, because we were typically looking at opposite sides of the sky. The meteor shower eventually died down and we began to drift off, still talking, until a bright falling star—the brightest one I’ve ever seen—shot across the sky close to the western horizon. We both saw that one and it killed our conversation midsentence as we both exclaimed WHOOOAAAA!!!! Usually falling stars burn out in less than a second, but this one seemed to linger for several seconds, and it left us speechless and wondering if somewhere a large chunk of rock was hurled like a curveball into the waiting ground. It’s like God was playing baseball, and this was the foul ball, the one that got away.

Humans are so small. I close my eyes and think of everything outside Earth’s atmosphere, how Earth is like a tiny speck of sand in the Sahara, how God directs the planets and solar systems and galaxies together like one unfathomably gigantic orchestra. We barely notice the things that go on outside our own little allotment of space, and it takes something falling to earth, a bright flash and a fiery tale, to capture our attention. Still, these bright flashes spark curiosity, and humans send up satellites and space stations and try to photograph and record and find out something about what lies beyond. But how little we know.

Yes, it makes me feel small, but there’s a small part of me that still feels important. God cared enough about us, tiny atoms inside the speck of sand in the Sahara, to create this world for us. He allows us to experience the births and marriages and deaths, events so monumental to us and yet microscopic to him. We sit and watch falling stars, that are not really stars at all, and every once in a while, something hits home. And we wonder how our lives can be both microscopic and paramount, if and how God really knows us, and how we fit into the vast multitude of organized space. And the meteors fall.

week of reckoning

for some reason, this week feels like the week of reckoning. like this is the week that will make or break my grades for the entire semester. it could be true.

but i'm learning to take things one step at a time. i'm learning that instead of giving 150% of my time to homework, i need to prioritize my time to make sure the other important things in my life don't fall by the wayside (like faith, and family, and food. and brant. and sleep. and friends [in no particular order]). prioritizing has never been my forte; i can be a bit of an obsessive student, so i have always needed to work on paying attention to things in my life more than just schoolwork.

still, my grades are important. i want to say that i did my best, and i want to get into grad school. so my battle with priorities will continue, continue, continue