WHY

Why am I always the only roommate who ever takes out the trash or cleans the kitchen counters or cleans the stove top/microwave or wipes down the bathroom counter? Seriously though.  Do people not realize that they leave crumbs on the kitchen table EVERY SINGLE DAY or do they just not care? Do they not notice how quickly the bathroom sinks and counters get all gross and grimy or are they just too careless to do anything about it? 

I've lived with four different sets of apartment roommates (woah, that's a lot) and to some extent, this has always been the case.  Except for the Brittany/Katelyn/Maureen apartment set up.  We did a good job of having everyone clean up after themselves.  Here's the problem though.  I always think to myself Okay Kristen, DO NOT take out the trash for the sixth time in a row.  Wait it out. Force someone else to do it.  But then I always break down and do it anyways.  I can't help it.  

There are worse things I suppose, but it's just annoying.  Me being super non-confrontational, would never bring it up to any of them.  I just feel like people are so oblivious sometimes.  Once when I went to take the recycling to the bin I found a can of soup with a bunch of soup still left in the bottom.  Isn't it common sense to rinse out a can before putting it in the recycling bin? I guess not.  That same week I got leftover chili on my arm from someone not rinsing out that can either.  

I really do wonder if its being oblivious to it or just simply not caring enough to do anything about it.  I guess I will never know.  

Death

I don't understand it.  I don't want to acknowledge it.  I don't want to worry about it.  I don't want to think about it.  I don't want anything to do with it because, in reality, is there anything positive or happy or uplifting or pleasant about it?

My Papa died today.  Some would say he "passed away" or that he "is in a better place now." But no, he died. He is the opposite of alive.  What does the verb passing have to do with the word dying?  Nothing. 

I am experiencing a very similar grieving experience as when my Grandma passed away several years ago.  I feel so...honestly, I can't even put it into words but I'll try.  I feel empty and hollow and almost (I absolutely hate to say this) but emotionless.  I just don't want to confirm in my mind that it's real.  That I'll never see him again.  That he is literally gone forever. 

Oh my god, I hate this.  I hate thinking about that concept, which is why I don't.  As I was searching for a quote for this blog post, the song "I'll Follow You Into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie came on.  Well, that is when I started to get really emotional.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME. I get teary eyed and emotional when I listen to really amazing songs or really sad songs, yet I can't even feel the the same deep and profound emotions with the death of my own grandfather.  THAT is what makes me want to cry. 

I'm more confused than sad, which is terrible and making me sad but not about death and now I don't even know what I'm saying or feeling.  This is a vicious cycle.  Ayuda.   

People Wait...

This Quote. Wow. It's scary how true it is.  And how sad it is at the same time.  We are always waiting impatiently and anxiously for Fridays.  What we really need to be doing is enjoying each and every day of the week.  I'm always thinking how I just want it to be the weekend until I really stop and think about it.  Actually, sometime I prefer the weekdays.  I like the routine and seeing my classmates and being out and about on campus with a reason and a purpose.  We wait all year for summer break and then find ourselves bored and hot and wishing it was cool again.  The only one that I would disagree with is the last one.  Happiness has so many degrees and so many levels that I don't believe that we really wait around for it.  I mean, some people might but I don't.  Seriously though, I am going to try really hard to not wait around for Fridays or for Summer or for anything.  I am going to try to embrace and love each and every day, each and every season, each and every moment (whether it's a good one or not). It's a lot to attempt, but all I can do is try right? 

Trapped in the Midwest?

I was going to write about something a bit more deep and profound, but my brain is feeling a bit fried at the moment so that will have to wait.  

These past few days have been feeling more cool and fall-like.  However, whenever the weather changes and it starts to get cold outside, I am reminded of how cold and depressing and long winter is.  Uhg, I hate being cold.  In winter I'm always cold.  If the weather is like is was last year, we will pretty much just skip over fall and go right from summer weather to winter hats/coats/gloves/scarfs weather.  It's dark at like 4:00, which makes me want to hibernate in my apartment and never leave.  Sure, celebrating Halloween makes a reappearance in college, which is fun. But it's not the same at all as when you are a kid.  

Okay, enough negative things about the cold.  There are some things that I LOVE about fall and winter.  I love wearing hoodies and sweats.  I love the spirit of the holidays.  I love that Thanksgiving and Christmas break are coming up. I love pumpkins flavored things and apple flavored things.  I love the look of the changing leaves and the look of snow covering the ground.   

Most of the typical fall activities (carving pumpkins, hayrides, apple pickings, etc.)  I probably won't even get the opportunity to do.  I want to go apple picking! 

Sadly, college has instilled in me a deep, dark, hatred (okay hate is a little strong) a dislike of winter.  Having to ride my bike in freezing cold to class every day is not fun.  One solution would be to try to get a teaching job in a warmer state so that I don't have to deal with winter weather.  I really can't see myself leaving the Midwest though.  I'll be student teaching back home in the Chicago suburbs.  After student teaching, I will most likely apply for jobs in that area.  I don't want to move far away from my parents.  I like Illinois.  I like the flat, dry, corn fields.  I don't need to be by the mountains or by the ocean or by the city.  I think that the ordinariness of Illinois fits me and my personality.  Therefore, I think I will always be "trapped" in the Midwest.  But that is okay with me.

   

Past, Present, and Future

My blog is finally functioning correctly again. Hurrah!

I am finally able to run daily again and I can't even explain how happy I am about it. I am trying to be careful though, since I am not 100% healed just yet, and keep my runs relatively short for the time being. It's really crazy just how easy it is to forget how blessed we are for everything that we have. My new goal is to make a constant effort to take time to appreciate all that I have and all that I am able to do. I also think that it's really important to not simply overcome the struggles and hardships that we encounter and then move on and forget them. Sure, they are often situations that we would rather pretend never happened, but we shouldn't and here is why...

Well for starters, there are about 69378 quotes about learning from the past. Here are some excellent examples:

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”
- Mother Teresa

"You must understand and learn from your past to live your best now and be able to plan for your future."

-Jerry Bruckner

"The past can hurt, but the way I see it, you can either run from it or you can learn from it."

-The Lion King

And now I'm going to get a little more personal.  The other day I was doing the "backwards photo test" on my Facebook pictures.  In case you don't know what this is, it is when you go to someone's most recent Facebook picture, and instead of going to the right, you go left and see the oldest pictures that they have.  It's usually pretty funny because you come across their high school prom and homecoming pictures and embarrassing stuff like that.  When I did this on my own Facebook, I came across some pictures from high school cross country.  It was gross.  My body was so terribly thin.  I looked sickly.  

I am happy to report that I've gained about about 14 pounds since I was at my all time low in highs school.  You might not know this about me, but I lost an extreme amount of weight in high school to the point where it was dangerously low.  I know that this might be hard to believe considering I'm still on the rather thin side, but it's the truth.  I stepped on the scale at the rec. a week ago, and I am FINALLY in the healthy weight/BMI range.  Gaining weight isn't as easy as it may seem.  It is a long, slow, and painful process.

I am/was an interesting case because I was not in denial that I was too thin.  I knew that I needed to gain weight, but when you run as much as I do and eat as healthy as I do, it's not exactly easy.  Today, I decided that I would put on jeans for the first time in...hmm maybe a month, or more?  One of the pairs of jeans that I have was waaay too tight.  I couldn't get them over my hips.  Victory! It's little instances like this one that let me know that I CAN do this.  I can maintain a healthy weight and be completely okay with what goes along with it.  

This is really unlike me and I feel sort of awkward about posting this, but I think that it really emphasized just how far I have come.  

I don't want to forget those hellish years of my life, when I was skin and bones and felt helpless, depresses and lost.  Instead, I want to use that experience as something that I can both learn from and move on from.  Everyday is a new day.  Florence Welsh says it beautiful in one of my favorite songs of hers, "It's always darkest before the dawn." 

Wait, there's a school here?

My blog STILL isn't working correctly so again, sorry about the lack of spacing. On Friday I observed at a catholic school in Normal called Epiphany. I actually took my parents to the church for Easter mass last year. I had no idea there was a school there too! It's an elementary school and a junior high school. The teacher that I am observing teaches 5th grade in the morning and junior high language arts in the afternoon. Their baseball team made it to state and apparently the entire junior high got to go and watch it, so I couldn't observe them in the afternoon. There were a few pretty comical instances though that I want to mention. The first thing that the students were assigned to do was create a MISSING poster about the missing princess in the book that they have been reading. One of the students asked "Is it sort of like a WANTED poster?" The teacher responded that it sort of was except that the princess was not wanted, she was missing. As the students worked on their posters, another student asked "Instead of writing WANTED, can we put MISSING?" The teacher responded "She's NOT wanted, she's missing!" hahaha. As I was looking through the students' language notebooks, they had a page called "the memory hand." On this page they traced their hand and then had each find be an emotion, such as excited, upset, angry, and nervous. The emotion was written on each finger along with a memory that corresponded with that emotion. One student had written for his anger memory "angry-when I chocked on a grape." There were some other pretty funny things written in their notebooks, such as one girls "I love..." heart that included bunnies, 5th grade, Justin Bieber, Miley, and apples. I also followed the students to their half hour Spanish lesson with a different teacher. These 5th grade students were probably better at Spanish than most of the Bartlett High School Level one Spanish students are. I hope that they offer Spanish in my middle school now because when I was there we had French in our rotation classes, which means that we took it for a few weeks and that was it. Personally, I think that everyone should learn a foreign language. I mean, if we are required to take subjects like science and math and social studies in high school, why shouldn't we also be required to take a foreign language class too??