defining life: September 2011

Friday, September 30, 2011

ATTENTION!

ATTENTION EVERYONE!
KELLIE COVAL IS COMING TO DES MOINES NEXT FRIDAY FOR THE WEEKEND!!!!!!
I AM SO EXCITED IM GONNA DIEEEE!!!!!!!

i really really really love you :)

I can't believe September is almost over. It honestly feels like recruitment was just last weekend because everything has been flying by so quickly. Recruitment, Parents Weekend, Taylor Swift. And before I even know it, Fall Break will be here, which is just crazy. I feel like time is flying by so quickly, and that's the exact opposite of what I want. I'm busy again this semester (obvi) with school and DG and JPAN and Young Life and applying to pharmacy school and trying to join other organizations that relate to pharmacy. I really just wish I had more time to hang out and be friends with my roommates, hang out with my sisters, go to Zumba at the Bell Center, and just have some time to relax. I need to somehow learn to make time for those things. I can tell that my friendships have suffered over this past month and I hate that. I want to be able to write letters and skype and talk on the phone for an hour and go out for dinner and go shopping. I need to work on time management to allow for these kind of things because I want my life to be about those things. All of those friendships that have suffered are important to me, and I want them to be a part of my life definition.

This is why I want to write

Virginia Woolf had her own term for such "shocks" of memory. She calls them "moments of being," and they become essential to our sense of self. They're the times when we get jolted out of our everyday complacency to really see the world and all that it contains. This "shock-receiving capacity" is essentially for the writer's disposition: "I hazard the explanation," she writes, "that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it... I make it real by putting it into words." Woolf's early "moments of being," the vivid first memories from childhood, are the smallest, most ordinary things: the pattern of her mother's dress, for example, or the pull-cord of the window blind skittering across the floor of their beach house.

The memories that can have the most emotional impact for the writer are those we don't really understand, the images that rise up before us quite without our volition: the flash of our mother's face as she sips from a cooled cup of coffee, for example, her eyes betraying some private grief we've never seen before, or the smell of grapefruit ripening on a tree outside the bedroom window. Perhaps the touch of a stranger...

These are the "river teeth," the "moments of being," the ones that take your breath away. What repository of memory do you hold in your heart rather than in your head? What are the pictures that rise up to the surface without your bidding? Take these as your cue. Pick up your pen, your net, your magnet, whatever it takes. Be on alert. This is where you begin.

Friday, September 23, 2011

listing.

10 important things i've learned in life so far
1. be third
2. be joyful
3. today is just as important as tomorrow or yesterday
4. relationships/friendships are a lot of work, but always yield the best rewards
5. be passionate. about something. it doesn't matter what
6. the little things you can do for people are the best
7. i have a really hard time focusing.
8. you can still be friends with someone you don't see everyday
9. someone you see everyday still may not be your friend
10. speak your mind. nobody else can do it for you

10 things on my bucket list
1. feel like a good Young Life leader
2. visit Australia and do something really Australian like see a kangaroo
3. live with my sister
4. have a husband and a family
5. have a stage in my life where i can be completely spontaneous. writing letters all day, driving to see friends anytime, having a relaxed schedule
6. have a job i love to go to (almost) every single day (gotta be realistic...)
7. make a difference
8. blog everyday for a month
9. become a runner
10. do a wilderness-esque trip. like hike a mountain or do something sweet like that

10 scenes from my daily life