ch ch changes...eventually.

I hope one of these days I will have the drive to finish my work in a timely manner.
Scratch that. I actually did have my work done, but things changed. I had planned on using the end of this past weekend to study and do take-home essays for my finals. Plans changed when professors got serious at the last minute (try Friday afternoon) and announced that the finals were going to be more complicated than I would have ever guessed. And it didn't help when another professor told me on Saturday that my thesis for my final paper was horrible. So I was up all last night finishing it. I hope I can at least get a C on it...I think it's good for me, what I am capable of writing, but it's not going to be as good as some other people in my class. The ones who are preparing to be lawyers and politicians. The ones who actually care about Alexis de Tocqueville and can use their extensive vocabulary to at least pretend to be knowledgeable about political science. Me, I just sit in class because I have to. Even if I wasn't a political science minor, I would have still taken the class because I would need the credit for an elective.
So now that I have finished my paper, I guess I'll go guzzle some more coffee to help me stay awake (I can type super fast, on the plus side. Faster than usual. Which is pretty fast). And perhaps take a nap when I come home, then get to work on studying for my two most difficult finals. Well...if I study they won't be difficult. I do have two take home essays to do, and a book to read. It's just that these tests are the ones which require the most memorization of facts. By the way, I have a bone to pick with whoever decided that Ethics should be a required course at my school. How many times can we talk about Plato? Or Hobbes? Or Aristotle or Aquinas? I'm only a sophomore and I have had four or five classes in which we have discussed these deceased thinkers. That's 25% if my classes.
I suppose I should go get ready to leave. I don't think it would be wise to go to school in my pajamas, wrapped in my lovely fluffy blanket that I swear has to be made out of marshmallows or some other lovely substance.
I promise that eventually I will have something more interesting to say than whining about school.

Which way did he go, George? Which way did he go?

My other best friend on Home Shopping

Did he say drinkable?

Excitement!

My friend Rachel gave birth to her first child, Averi Noel, last night (apparently. God bless facebook. Sometimes it's the only way I keep up)! It's very exciting. Congratulations to the new mommy and daddy, and if you think about it, say a little prayer for them, too!

"I feel the earth move under my feet"..or I would have if I had been out of bed.

I think I have had several things to say over the past few days, but for reasons that are still unknown, I was unable to log into my blogger account. So here I am, and now the only thing I have to say is that we had an earthquake last night. It is the first one I have ever experienced. It apparently only lasted less than a minute, and I was awake for most of it, but I wasn't really sure what was going on. It sounded either like there was a large truck picking things up and slamming them in the ground outside, or someone was stomping and moving things around in the house. It still didn't sound quite right, though, because of the way the walls were moving...like *boom*....*boom*....*boom boom*...It was so weird! I figured someone in the house must have been doing something, though, because the birds were fluttering around and my dog only seemed mildly interested in what was going on. So that was my excitement for the week. Not that I want another earthquake to happen, but it would have been more interesting if I was fully awake and aware when it happened. Things like that don't happen too often in Kentucky. I don't think we've had one as long as I've been alive, actually.

When will it ever end?

Paper countdown:
*3 pgs on Karl Marx
*3 pgs on John Locke (sadly, not the same Locke that's on Lost)
*8-10 pgs on Alexis du Toqueville (again, at this point, I don't care if I spelled it right)
*8-10 pgs on women reporters in World War II

That's it! Plus finals. Think I can pull it off?
If you remember to, pray for me. I really need to keep my grades high enough to keep my scholarship. Unless I just totally bomb half these papers and the finals, I shouldn't have much trouble. But it's always nice to have someone praying for you when you're going to be doing something difficult, anyway.

We need a chicken mcnugget dispenser.

A friend of mine is planning her wedding. She apparently went to try on dresses this past week. I am so jealous! To do too much planning at this point seems pretty foolish to me (I am counting on magically dropping a substantial amount of weight. Note how I said "magically"- because it's so not going to happen. *curses nonexistent metabolism*). She's getting married only three short months before me! But she has always been skinny. And she doesn't change her mind nearly as often as I do.
It would be nice if I could be finished with school and also have the money to purchase a house and go ahead and get married. Really nice. And also go to Disney World (only my favorite place in the whole entire world, the place I insist on going for my honeymoon. Seriously. I will have a Wal-Mart cake and a dress from Target before I give up my trip to Disney World with Brandon. No offense if you had/have/are having either of those).

Brotha!

Must. Find. Robitussin...

Might I just throw out there that I am very, incredibly happy to have my computer back? Now I can actually listen to my music. On the downside, instead of working on a paper, I've been playing Sims...but hey! I made all the little people from Lost. That's accomplishing something, right? *cough*.
Inventory is over and I am still very tired even though I didn't hardly do anything. I was supposed to work Friday night, and then all afternoon into the night on Saturday, giving me a nice little additional paycheck to help bail me out of the financial hole I, as a college student with poor spending habits (or shall we say, *saving* habits) am constantly digging for myself. I was sick Friday- rather, I'm still sick- so I came in on Saturday and I even left before most at 10pm. Interestingly, I spent more at Lifeway than I think I will make from working there. This is especially interesting because I never thought I would be compelled to buy much of anything there. Yet, I got two CDs (and received two free samplers as a result), a necklace, and a Bible. When I got home, I felt compelled to read said Bible (something I'm not prone to do, I'm sad to admit). For no real reason at all, I read the first four chapters of Genesis and the entirety of 1st Corinthians. I then realized that something didn't feel right- literally. Part of the stitching on the front of my new pretty leather Bible had been ripped up and there was a little wiggly thread poking out. So now mom has to take it back for me and get another one. I put it back in its box so I wouldn't mess up any of the pages or anything. I hope she takes it back soon. And maybe gets me a "sorry-you-had-to-bring-your-Bible-back-here's-an-extra-five-or-twenty-bucks" discount. That would be neat. I don't think it's going to happen, though.
So now, perhaps I shall return to merely thinking about writing my 12 page paper comparing the thoughts of John Stuart Mill and St. Thomas Aquinas, in addition to my 10 page research paper on female war correspondents of World War II, my 4 page test on Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto vs. the American public's conception of him and communism, my 8 pg paper having something to do with Alexis d'Toqueville (don't even ask. I haven't bothered to find out what I'm supposed to be writing about yet) and the re-write I have to do for the half-hearted test I turned in on John Locke and American government. Blech.

Cold and Fugue Season

I am ill. And I hate it.
One thing about people with anxiety is they often think things are dramatically worse than they actually are when it comes to being sick. For instance, if I have some slight abdominal discomfort, I may end up convincing myself that I have some horrid condition that is going to cause me to be violently ill. I panic, and end up really making myself sick.
This time around, I can't breathe. Mom thinks I have bronchitis. I don't know what it is but it's pretty lame. Fortunately, thus far I have yet to have any issues with panic attacks or what have you because of this whole not-breathing thing. And for that, I am very grateful.
Hopefully this won't have too great an impact on the 50-something total pages of papers I have left to write in the next three weeks or so. Perhaps if I catch a second wind, as a friend of mine likes to say, I will be compelled to pick up all the shredded Kleenexes on my floor that my dog has been kind enough to pick out of the trash and partially devour for me. *_*

First one.

I am concerned. This concern is part of the reason I started this blog. I had a blog before but I gave up on it because I tried to write witty, insightful things and I became frustrated. This time I'm just going to try to speak my mind.
My concern is for some people I used to go to school with. I am in college now, and have very little contact with the people I graduated with, other than a select few. This is in part because I have never enjoyed having a large circle of friends. And it's also due to the fact that out of the 32 people I graduated with, I can honestly say I only got along- truly connected with- about half a dozen. Anyway, recently it has come to my attention that some people I used to know- a few of whom I considered friends while I was in school- have adopted the rebellious lifestyle of so many disillusioned youth who attended private Christian school against their will. Despite being intelligent enough to know that this sort of behavior is not only often improper and foolish, it's also detrimental to one's health, these people have apparently taken up smoking, drinking, wild partying, lounging around with provocatively clothed prostitutes (well...that's what they look like to me, anyway!) and some drug use. All of these people are between the ages of 19 and 20. Most of them appear to have completely rejected the faith that their parents tried to raise them in. Most of them have either dropped out or flunked out of college (I only know a few that made it past freshman year). Pictures of them online almost always include at least eight cans of beer (empty, of course), and someone's usually shirtless and doing something stupid. Most of them don't even have a job. They spend what money they do have on cheap beer and endless supplies of cigarettes, and then tell me they don't have the money to buy gas. They sleep on friends' couches and eventually come crawling back to their parents, begging for cash, before they are once again kicked out of the house.
I am disturbed by this for several reasons. One obvious one being concern for the safety and well-being of my so-called "friends". Another is concern for their spiritual well-being. And another, the fact that they graduated from the same school that my brother now attends. What is different about them that he won't fall into the same situation? After all, these people were raised the same way I was, and I have never been inclined to touch a cigarette, much less spend my weekends in a drunken, smoky haze, unaware of my surroundings. I don't sleep around (ew) and I have a job. I haven't even lost any of my scholarships. Yet. What makes me special? I don't get it! I don't mean to make myself sound better than my fellow alumni, I really don't. I actually care a lot for some of the people involved in these sorts of situations. We used to be pretty close. Then graduation rolled around, and invitations to graduation parties were suspiciously absent from my mailbox. I have since found out that I wasn't invited, or even kept in the loop with these people, because of the alternative lifestyle I lead- the lifestyle of valuing my lungs and liver and possessing some moral fortitude, I guess. Did they think I was going to narc on them?
Maybe. Maybe I would have. Notice that none of these people is 21 yet. That's the legal drinking age. I remember being in the car with a young man I used to be particularly close to, on a night long ago that we had tried to revive our once wonderful friendship. We were at Taco Bell and he started talking about all the exploits he had had since his graduation a few months before. I became increasingly upset, disgusted, and disturbed, and asked to be taken home. On the way we picked up two of his classmates (18 at the time) and they immediately began counting their change and figuring out how many Coronas they could afford and who could "score" the beer for them.
I don't know why I felt the need to share this. I really am bothered by things I have found out in the last few days. I have one "friend" whose Facebook account is in danger of being deleted because he depicts drug use in his profile picture, one "friend" who is relishing in her newfound lesbianism, and another "friend" who recently gave an inflammatory (by my standards) speech recently to her class about the so-called dangers of raising children in a religious home. The text of this speech was followed by incindiary comments from both this "friend" and her colleagues, slandering evangelical Christianity and its followers. Apparently she forgot that this particular brand of faith is what many of her former classmates (and people she still calls close friends) subscribe to.
If you think about it, pray for the people I know (who shall remain nameless). I am seriously surprised that I haven't heard of one of them dying in some alcohol related car wreck yet.