Fun with Photobooth

This is how I wasted some time today. Beware, some of these are pretty ugly =)

One year

Today-ish marks my one year anniversary of being clean and sober =) Yay!

Excerpt from "The Secret"

"The principle which gives the thought the dynamic power to correlate with its object, and therefore to master every adverse human experience, is the law of attraction, which is another name for love. This is an eternal and fundamental principle inherent in all things, in every Religion and in every Science. There is no getting away from the law of love. It is the feeling that imparts vitality to thought. Feeling is desire and desire is love. Thought impregnated with love becomes invincible."

Oh my goodness. Go read this book now!

Finally...

I think I'm finally in a relationship that may have some staying power. My new love is reliable, neat, and committed. Unlike my previous relationships, I'm finally seeing what it's like to have my needs put first. I know that I can depend that my new love will always be there for me. I won't be expected to nurse them back to health in case of illness, because they never get sick. Day or night, I can call upon this new joy in my life. There's so much we can do together and so many interests we have in common. I can tell that many memories will be shared. They are ready and willing to help me in my studies and to succeed in my academia, And I find myself never having to compromise my standards or what I want to do to please them. Okay, this has gone on long enough.

It's my new Macbook

We were made for each other. I look forward to a wonderful future, filled with the pitter-patter of little laptop keys.

(This entire post, I was holding back from making some sort of "performance" joke that would've sounded a little to risque to be funny)

Control

The worry bug has bitten me again. It's strange, because most of the time I wouldn't consider myself a big worrier. Compared to most people, I think I worry significantly less about most of the typical topics people worry about.

For example, there's school. I've known tons of people who worry a lot about school. The people who study their tails off but still are so worried and stressed before a test. That doesn't happen to me. In fact, I don't get the slightest bit more anxious about going to exams than I do about going to lectures. In fact, I'm usually somewhat happy about the fact that all I have to take to class is a pencil and a scantron and I can leave my backpack at home. Once I leave a test, it never really crosses my mind ever again. I figure that no amount of thinking about a test will change how I performed on it, and whatever grade I get is the direct result of how much studying I did, good or bad. Essentially, I can own whatever grade I earned. I guess I never thought of a grade as what someone gave me, but what I earned.

I don't really worry about work or money either. This is possibly because not a whole lot of money is expected from me right now. This worry might kick in a few years from now when I have to pay for important stuff. Work's always been an okay topic for me because I haven't really had a job where I felt like I had to struggle too much or work too hard to do what was required of me. I didn't stress out if I got sick (possibly because the money wasn't crucial to my survival) because I figure it's just less hours on my own paycheck. Who will that hurt? Just me, but it's my fault anyway.

So, when the worry bug bites me, what is on my mind? I think I figured it out yesterday. I worry about any situation in which my happiness, my ability to succeed, or my general well-being is in someone's hands other than my own. In any other situation, I can own anything that goes wrong and not feel too bad about it because it was my own decision or action that caused it. But when I can't say that the way I feel is the result of my own actions, or that someone else may very soon have a great effect on how I feel, it scares the daylights out of me. It's difficult because everyone has their own agency, and I think I just really don't trust other people to use theirs in a way that won't hurt me. I hate being at the mercy of other people's actions, particularly when I think their actions are mistakes. I never really thought I was a control freak, but I guess the truth is that the situations that scare me the most are those in which I don't have full control of the outcome. And those are the situations that I dwell on and worry about, which is silly because, clearly, my worrying won't help make sure that anyone else makes the choices that are in my best interest. Is there really any good way to learn to trust other people with their agency? If there is a way, should we trust other people with their agency? It seems like the only alternative is to keep worrying and distrusting people, trying to be less vulnerable and less affected by other people. I don't know if I can do that, though.

I try to be pretty careful with my own choices. There are some choices that I don't take too seriously and probably should put more time and thought into, but I'm pretty careful about my choices that affect other people. I pray a lot, especially when asking what I should do. I figure that if anyone knows which decision will be the best for everyone, it's the Big Guy. I try my hardest to do what I feel I'm supposed to, even though right now I'm really trying to work on isolating my prayers from my own desires and the answers I want to hear. And while I feel pretty good about my own decisions, I think it worries me that other people probably aren't doing the same thing as I am. So while I may be praying to find out what will be the best thing for everyone, they may be making decisions based on selfishness and their own well-being. Boo.

This is all just a mess of thoughts, really.

Oh, hi!

So here's a few things going on with me:

Tomorrow I register for spring quarter classes. If all goes according to plan, I will be taking the following:

Human Development: Cognitive Development
Writing in Elementary and Secondary Education
Human Development: Research Methods
Psychology: Human Learning and Cognition

What is cooler than the classes I'm taking, you might ask? Well, probably quite a few things, but chew on this: If all goes the way I want it to, I will only have class Tuesday-Thursday. 4-day weekends, every weekend. In the spring, no less. Yippee!

Valentine's day is in a week. I don't really know how I feel about this yet. Ask me later.

In a little over a week, I'll be hearing back on this volunteer position I applied for as a peer counselor on campus. If I get it, I'll be doing training for that this spring, and starting as a counselor this fall. I feel like my interviews went well, so keep your fingers crossed for me. I figure that between this and Kaplan, I'll really get a chance to figure out whether I want to go into teaching or into therapy (not as in if I'll go in to teaching or I'll go crazy and need therapy, I mean me counseling others).

Before training this week, I was worried that I wasn't doing well with Kaplan. I thought I wasn't prepared enough, or at least wasn't being super-duper great like I would hope to be. But I guess I did pretty well, because when we met with our training-man individually he said he thought I was doing well and that I'll make a great teacher, so yippee!!

Oh, and I just found out I did pretty darn well on the tests I took last week. Look at me kicking butt at life. I think my humility might be my favorite thing about myself.

"I used to be too cocky, but now I'm perfect"

teehee (totally joking)

Oopsie!

So, I just finished my first paper for this quarter. It's for my Infancy and Early Childhood development class, and the topic is "the effect of center-based childcare on child development". I wrote it pretty quickly and feel pretty good about it, except for this one small problem...


... I am an idiot.


As I closed the document, right after I finished printing it, that little box came up and asked if I wanted to save the changes I made to the document, which, at that point, included me writing my entire paper from what started as a 5-bullet outline. I didn't read the little box, I just clicked "no" without a thought in my head. So, now I just need everyone to cross their fingers that I won't have to print this bad boy again. Of course, I could just retype it from what I have printed out, but I do not have time for such shenanigans. Pshhhhhhh...

Gahhhhh!!!

Just when I think I'm doing pretty well, someone tells me some bit of news that freaks me out and gets me all stressed. Boooooooooo