Truth scares me. Sometimes.

As much as I feel Ive been ranting here lately (and I dont like it much), I feel the need to post this.

On Sunday I got sick and since Ive gotten better (it was just a small cold) but am dealing with another bout of small sickness and my worst enemy: insomnia.

I mean. Ive dealt with insomnia a lot over the years and trust me, I know the steps to get rid of it. Im totally not that person who follows the rules to stay away from it.
(Someone even twittered me the steps to get rid of it the other night. WHAT.)

Anyways. As gross as insomnia is, it always leads to some kind of inspiration or some kind nugget of truth.

So I wrote in my journal and I felt I should share part of what I wrote. So here we go.
(I just realized if you dont talk to me much you may not know why my journal entry lead to this but I trust you're all smart and will figure it out.)

Leaving scares me. And my parents dont want me to but...there is a knowing need that I need to.
I want to more and more everyday.

God Im growing up.
It freaks me out so much.

Id like nothing more than to crawl back not a hole and revert back to another age, but Ive learned and know better.
I cant just hide. I have to grow and move and learn.

Reasons 24, 400, and 395...

...why I like Switchfoot.

1. New podcast. So. Much. Fun.

2. They announced their new single: The Sound. Great fun fantastic song. (If you havent heard it-go listen to it here. Buy it here.)

3. Jon is writing genius. He just wrote this article for the Huffington Post. 9He's wirtten 2 or 3 others before).

"Maybe truth is not something that I can possess. Maybe truth is something which possesses me."

I look at the words now scrawled on the back of my hand. I think it over and look away. The clouds are turning colors, blue, grey, green, purple. The sun is setting off somewhere behind me. It's my favorite time of day. I look back at my hand and read the idea again.

"Maybe truth is something which possesses me."

To be possessed by truth rather than the other way round is a thought that goes against much of what I have been taught. In fact, most of my education has been presented as a growing accumulation of truth. Throughout public school, I was graded on my comprehension of the facts. The higher grades were awarded to those who really owned the material.

Great stuff. Read it.

Anyways. Thats all today kiddies. Love you much.

I like to read.

Bold the ones you’ve read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you’ve read part of, and no cheating. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn’t count. Abridged versions don’t count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you’ve read 7 of these, you are above the average.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Im still...in the middle of it. Someday I'll finish it)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Many many times)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (See LOTR)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville a paper on this one, too.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Ah. So many that I want to read. Someday. Before I die.

Im actually currently reading Tartuffe (funny play! Im only done with Act 1 so far) and...the drivers handbook.

I will be licensed before summer is here! I will be!

Im reading other books too, but those are top 2 biggest important ones you need to know about. :D

Seriously? It has to be scheauled like that?

Warning: this post contains rantings about school. So don't be offended. or offend me. hehe :P
But seriously.

DDDDUUUUDDDDEEEEE.

I was on schedule and now I'm behind on homework again.

Im making a Google doc with the list of homework and tests and such for the rest of the semester so i stay better on track. (So if you want me to email it to you so you can see it and help me stay on track, let me know your email!)

I mean, okay, some little things are me not getting stuff done on time but really?!?!?

Like-why the crap are teachers making the midterm test the class after spring week???

I don't want to study on spring week! Ugh. *whine whine whine*

Well at least there's no real Midterm or Final for my Art and Drama classes.

My math class I can handle. Just need to finish an assignment or two in the next couple weeks and I'll let myself breath about it again.
(Why the Midterm is worth more than my final I really dont get. And tis annoying to do A LOT of homework when its only worth like 10%. Whatever)

But my health class??
I like that teacher, I really do.
But man is she packing it on with papers and projects and huge midterm and huge final. UGH UGH UGH.

Oh. And then I'm not only trying to do all this but also move up my finals for a trip at the end of May.
(Seriously praying for those two teachers to email me soon and let me move those finals around.)

Oy Vey.

If I wasn't already crazy, I'll be clinically insane soon.

*sigh* Alright. Rant over.

A good grade feels more like relief these days.

Currently: supposed to be doing homework. But my brain is haywire and cannot focus.

Im doing good in school.
I had my reservations about this semester. About how Im taking more than I did last semester, and in subjects that were almost completely new to me.

Im pretty sure I freaked out the first month when I saw the syllabus's and all the papers and projects.

But in the last 24 hours I've felt better.

Last Tuesday I spent like 4 hours writing a paper for my Art class on this art show I had to go to. (I'd estimate around 1 hour of actually looking at the peices and taking notes on them.)
Got it back last night.
A. Got an A. My teacher left nice notes.

And we had a test last week. Got an 85% on the first test.
Got a 99% on the second test. EEE.

Its nice to know that all the time and work paid off but also made me realize-if I really want grades like that all the time in all my classes-I have to be working crazy hard like I did last week like..all the time.

Ugh.
I mean its good, but its just a lot.
I really do feel like a college kid.

But like a good grade is just like...a sigh of relief. To know I did and did it to extent im more or less "supposed to" do. I dunno.
Things Ive been doing have felt sub-pare or only half-done lately so its nice to know my teachers see that im working hard at all this.

Also-spent so much of last week working on a PowerPoint for Theater class. Was finally graded today-got my full 200 points for it.
Whew.

And now..right now Im attempting to work on homework before winter camp this weekend.
I'm really excited for it and have this feeling it'll change me some. I dont know.
But I essentially have the next...45 or so hours till I leave to work on things.
I dont expect much sleep until spring break in 3 more weeks.

But. ahem. my homework load is a little more than I thought. So if I start to not blog or be online or something.
No, I did not fall off the face of the planet, Im just trying to not only pass my classes this semester but really get honest great grades like I used to and raise up my GPA.

And then finally-just thanks to anyways who's wished me luck, prayed for me, helped with anything.
I really really appreciate it.
Im just in that kind of season of my life at the moment.

All right. I have 20 minutes left at the library and then Im headed off to Chick-Fil-A or somewhere else with wireless to do more homework.
(Net at home is just yeck so ive been lugging the laptop all over town)

Just because we cant see the silver lining-doesnt mean it isnt there.

Im sure we've all heard that phrase.
"The silver lining". Heck, I've got Relient K songs stuck in my head with that phrase.

As busy as my life is lately, my heart stills feels for Chelsea King and Amber Dubois.

Because here's the thing-it was a terrible terrible thing that happened to Chelsea. I dont think anybody could see the good in it.
Shortly after they found her body my mom mentioned that in the past year-because of Amber, that other girls that looked like her had been found.
Silver Lining: Others ARE being found.

And then there was a small silver lining after Chelsea's death. Amber's case got attention again.
People came with tips and leads that they'd never told.
There was hope again.

They found Amber's remains.
She died-probably the same way Chelsea did.

It made me sad.
But at the same time-at least her family can rest now and peace knowing what happened.
Yes, there will be mourning for a while-but isnt it better to know?

My mom agreed with me-it was sad that the only way her case got attention was through another girls death.
It took another girls disappearance and death to find a girl who had disappeared and died over a year ago.

Is that really a silver lining?
Is this really what God intended?

I doubt it.
I remember this thought that all the bad in this world doesn't happen because of God-its because of us.
We are the sinners, not him.
Bad is merely the absence of good.

But there's a bigger thing - we dont always see God's plan.
Sometimes a disaster-such as a fire or earthquake is needed to bring people together.

I am a believer in the silver lining-there has to be hope in everything.
There has to be some good come out of it.

And so, when my mom opened my door last night and told me Amber's body was found-my mind jumped to a conclusion.
There has to be other girls that are being found that we dont know about.

We cannot see the silver lining all the time.
It could be others being found.
It could tougher laws being made and passed.
There has to be something.

Its not as easy as seeing the sun break through the clouds when its been raining all day.

It was raining all day yesterday and I saw this cloud. You can see the full darkness on one side, the heaviness of the rain.
But It wasnt just that, its the lightness and reflection of the sun on the other side is what caught me.

There is hope all the midst of the worlds recent tragedy.
How could we believe otherwise?

Hurt.

I wrote in my last post about things that were heavy on my mind and heart.

How it hurt me.

It still hurts.

It hurts that, not only locally where I life have there been so many girls, girls in such prime, to just go vanishing, but all over the country.
All over the world. My friend Job wrote about how there are so many more Chelsea King's out there and its insane how little attention they got, how much she got.

Did it really have to happen this many times on such a level to get our attention?

To not only have them vanish but to find them, find dead bodies..and find signs of rape and molestation and just know they went through this horrible thing before passing for...what?
A killers self-delusions? Selfish wants?

It frightens and scares me.

Im not just talking about the rape, which is a fear, but to go through that kind of horror and not be able to send some kind of message out after...to not be able let your family have peace right away.

It hurts them.
It hurts all of us.

Maybe its cause I wear my heart on my sleeve, but knowing these people hurt, it hurts me.

I sympathize. I find small ways to empathize.

And then to think, thats not the only wrong in our world.
There's these natural disasters that break your heart to see how much help is needed, and how little we give.

Haiti was ONLY a month ago.
Hurricane Katrina was over a couple years ago-there are STILL people recovering from that.
I live in area where there are fires almost every fall. People have to recover from lost things every. single. year.

Why are we forgetting about Haiti so quickly?

They NEED help.
I read this blog by Anne Jackson and she went down there two weeks ago.

Not only did she go help, but she's going back.

It's the same with Chile and the recent tsunami warnings and every other natural disaster- We freak out, try to help how we can, hope and pray, and then...forget?

Shouldnt these be things on our mind??

My friend Lee wrote this:

R.I.P. Chelsea King

I didn't even know her, but my heart breaks for her. No one should have to go like that. NO ONE. It just makes me so sick. She had everything going for her. She was beautiful. She was talented. She was loved. But one selfish man took all of that away from her. I can't even express how angry this makes me. This world is jacked up. Rapists deserve the death penalty.

Then again, so do I.

All this hurt, all this stuff in the world does come back to us.
We all sin.

We all hurt.

We mess up.

Its hard for me to see the light somedays and with all this hurt, its been hard.

But then I read this today.

I hope you’re not holding a boomerang right now. I hope there’s not a boomerang that’s swallowed your life whole in it’s awfulness, but if there is, know this, you’ve got a God who loves you. A God who can’t wait to be gracious. A God who forgives boomerangs.

Our sin comes back to us.
Natural disasters dont go away for good.

BUT GOD STILL LOVES US DESPITE THAT.

And that..that is all I can ask for, and more then I deserve.