Done

This year I may actually end up ruining Christmas. I hate everything right now and can't seem to get a hold of my emotions. Ever feel like you're spiraling out of control and will snap at any moment at some poor innocent bystander who really has nothing to do with the reasons behind your angst, anger, and insanity?

Sometimes I just want to go screaming through the streets, or resort to some of my earlier dysfunctional behaviors - maybe then people would actually believe that I really am "having a hard time". What do I have to do to prove that I'm crazy, that it would be better for everyone around me, (not to mention safer), if I could just go away for a while until I figure this stupid life out? And why is it that people never seem to notice or care that anything's wrong until you do something drastic or crazy? I know, it's because everyone else is too busy living their actual lives. And I'm probably just jealous that I can't seem to do that, or anything else for that matter. But in all actuality, I don't know what good it would do for people to worry and crap because that's all it would be - wasted energy worrying when there is nothing that can really be done.

I'm clearly not cut out for this. I don't know what I was thinking when I agreed to this. Can't I please just be done now? Why didn't that stupid horse do me in this summer? If I can't figure out how to change and if this is the way it's going to be forever then what good am I? I don't have any hope left, I just want to be done, but I'm too spineless to finish anything.

It's bad when I start imagining scenarios because I have a terrible imagination and I'm the least creative person anyone has ever met. But tonight I had to lock my car door as we were driving on the highway because I didn't trust that my hands wouldn't try to open the car door, and I didn't trust my body to stay in the seat.

Forgiveness

The other day my sister told me a quote about forgiveness. It went something like this: Forgiveness is giving up hope for a better past.

Two things struck me as I thought about what that meant. The first thing was that I wanted to CRY when I heard it, and I wanted to scream because I couldn't get past the giving up hope part. The second thought was that, as difficult as it was to accept and believe, I knew it was a true statement.

So why does it feel so impossible to actually do? Why do I feel so hopeless and angry about it? And why can't I let it all go and FREAKING move on with MY life????

Quick Wish List

Digital picture frame

External hard drive

New shoes - actually this is not a wish, it is a must before I go back to school since I have absolutely ZERO pairs of shoes that I can wear when I'm actually at school.

Digital camera that actually works

What is the Answer?

I am so annoyed right now, and I realize I probably shouldn't even be writing right now because I am so annoyed, but gosh darn it, I'm going to spew about it and by all means feel free to skip this entry because I can guarantee it's not going to make much sense, nor will it be very pleasant to read. It's more for me than anyone, so consider yourselves warned.

I don't know what the answer is right now and I hate not having an answer. I hate not being able to figure out an answer. I hate feeling like whatever I decide to do is going to be wrong, like whatever I decide to do is going to be a decision I'm going to regret making at some point in the future. And the really annoying thing is that, in all honesty, I could talk it all out, talk it to death, talk about it til I was blue in the face going round and round in circles, and I still would be no closer to a viable solution that I would be totally, completely 100% happy with. Ok, that is extremely unrealistic. I don't think I've ever in my life been totally or 100% happy with any decision I've made, so scratch that. What I mean to say is that I still would be no closer to a viable solution that I could live with and entirely accept. I know, I know, life is tough, right? Filled with hard decisions. I just need to learn to deal. Making a decision wouldn't be so hard for me if I could just stop being a fence sitter for five minutes and figure out what the crap it is that I want.

And I'm sure I am probably also reading too much into it, thinking about the whole incident in terms of it being a sign or a push in a certain direction rather than just something that happened, another event in life, one more thing to chalk up to experience, an additional trial to work through. But I don't know how to work through it. It doesn't feel like a trial. It feels like a skyscraper I can't see the top of or begin to scale because I don't have the resources to climb over it, or even to just make it to the top.

Oh wait, hello. Skyscraper = Trial
I must have hit my head harder than I thought last week. I'm losing my ability to reason intelligently. Or maybe I'm just realizing that I never had that ability.

I shouldn't be thinking about it this late at night because it just makes my head hurt even more and it just seems like the solution is even farther than I already imagine. My perspective is often skewed and screwed up during the day, and it's that much worse late at night. But here's the thing I also worry about to no end: I don't want to participate in or be a part of these patterns of self-sabotage that have been so popular with at least one member of my family. I don't want to continue that negative trend in my life just for the sake of being "right". The truth is that a part of me (and I'd be lying if I said it was a small part) was against this from the beginning because it just plain didn't make sense to me and I didn't feel ready for it. And while I'm being completely honest, in some ways, it still doesn't and I still feel so ill-prepared. I couldn't understand their thought processes when it came to this whole free horse thing way back when. And now part of me wonders if one of the main reasons I so desperately and almost too readily want to throw in the towel and give up on this whole thing (which at times seems like a ridiculous situation to begin with and yet sometimes feels like the right thing to do) is so that I will be able to prove myself right and prove them wrong, so that I'll have self-fulfilled my earlier "prophecy" of it being ridiculous for me to have a horse right now.

Okay, HF, what do you want me to learn from this? What am I supposed to do about this? I just hope I can learn whatever I need to learn from this experience quickly. I hope my learning curve isn't as slow as it seems to be because I don't know how much longer I can agonize over this. So maybe I should just stop agonizing over it. What a novel idea. And for the record, I do realize how badly it could have ended on Thursday, and I am grateful that I'm still alive, and pretty much unscathed considering.

And in actuality and while I'm having this brief moment of clarity, the answer probably is that I just need to have more faith and not worry about finding "the answer" right now. I need to learn to just step into the darkness, take the plunge, and I need to learn to have the hope that it will all end up working out for the best, no matter what I decide.

Random

A few random thoughts for the evening...

How much of a watermelon is actually composed of water?

I desperately need a haircut, but haven't gotten one because A) I don't know what I want or how to describe what I want to a hairdresser B) I can't get what I want right now because my layers are all weird

A while ago I saw an infomercial for this hair tool thing that looked awesome; it was a straightener, but it could curl sections of hair as well and give it body, etc, but I can't remember WHAT it was called or which channel I saw it on!! I really want it, or I at least think I want it at the moment.

I should probably get some kind of hoof supplement for my horse because her hooves are cracking like crazy, but there are sooo many I don't know which one to get, which one will be the best? I feel paralyzed by my indecision...

I'm supposed to go to Busch Gardens with a friend a week from Saturday but I don't really want to, mostly because I just looked up the price and found out it's pretty much ridiculous. Especially when I am trying to save money, which isn't really working due to the fact that I have a horse to take care of now.

A few days ago my horse lost her halter somewhere in the field. I went looking for it today which was hilarious because my horse followed me as I was scouring the field to find it. I kept telling her, "Where's your halter? Go find your halter" and a minute or two later she walked ahead of me a few feet and as if on cue, stopped and smelled her halter which was on the ground. I would've found it sooner or later, but I definitely appreciated the fact that she pointed it out to me.

My Horse Secretly Loves Me

So I rode my horse for the first time since we brought her back from the trainer's last Thursday. And what does she do like 10 minutes into it? She tries to buck me off, of course. And not just once but on two separate occasions. That being said, the key word there is tried. Luckily, I thought fast and got after her and was able to stop her without falling off. I didn't even panic like I have in the past when she acts like a brat like that. And I didn't give up or quit riding, I even made her do what I was asking her to do again, and she did and she actually behaved. Hallelujah. Thank goodness for the little successes, right?

Even though she still has the same personality traits and is stubborn and lazy and a brat (and probably always will be), at least now I have a better idea of how to handle it and how to anticipate and correct those things before they happen. This is definitely going to be an interesting journey with this horse, that is for sure. And even though she occasionally tries to kill me, my horse secretly loves me...I'll keep telling myself that anyway :o)

Pizza and this week's goal

My friend Liz and her fiance came over Saturday night and we made pizza from scratch. It was pretty good if I do say so myself. And even though it wasn't restaurant quality, as my older brother so readily pointed out to us after he tried some, it was still good, and we had fun making it. And now we can all say we made pizza from scratch. Go us!

I started watching The Prestige on Friday because I hadn't seen it for a while and it just sounded good, and then I was trying to remember how the book differs from the movie so I decided I needed to reread the book. I read it a few years ago and I'm such a slow reader that by the time I had finished it I had pretty much forgotten most of the beginning and middle, which was very inconvenient because The Prestige is not one of those books where you can forget the middle or beginning and still have it make sense. It's a pretty involved plot and it's difficult to keep everything straight. So now I'm trying to reread it faster and hopefully remember more of the details. That's my goal for this week. And I want to finish reading Seabiscuit (which I started reading at least two years ago, got a third of the way through, and stopped), because I'm feeling overzealous and a tad bit unrealistic right now. I need a goal for the week to keep me busy while I'm not working very much and since I probably won't be able to go riding because I need to get everyone to sign that paper and that may end up taking longer than I'd like.

Yesterday would have been such an excellent day to ride too. Oh well, we worked on the shed and made some progress there so that's good.

Feeling Accomplished

I am so proud of myself, I just had to blog about it. I read a book today. An entire book in ONE day! That might not sound like anything to be proud of, but anyone who knows me knows that is like the biggest accomplishment of my LIFE because it usually takes me WEEKS, to finish a book, if not longer! And today I read one (only 200 pages, but still) in only 2 hours. Do you realize what this means? This means that if I work really hard I could be reading several books a day. That would be nice, and definitely a good way to spend my time considering that I don't have that much going on in my life right now. Plus I could knock a few books off of my To Read list in not very much time at all. Woo hoo! I'm feeling very accomplished right now, so I'm going to ignore all the factors about the book I read that might make my feat seem less successful (i.e. the fact that it was a teen novel with easy words, and that I had read it back in high school). But hey, I'm still proud of myself despite that fact. Yay for reading fast!

I had forgotten how much I love that book too. And I still remembered the main plot and even some of the details without having to read every single word to myself in my head, like I normally do. I always thought reading fast made you miss out on the details or the important stuff in books, I'm so glad I was wrong.

The Bucket List

Just for fun...and because I'm bored:

The Bucket List. Place an X by all the things you've done

Things you have done during your lifetime:
( ) Gone on a blind date
(X) Skipped school
( ) Watched someone die
(X) Been to Canada
(X) Been to Mexico
( ) Been to Florida (I think I've been in a FL airport, but that probably doesn't really count)
( ) Been to Hawaii
(X) Been on a plane
( ) Been on a helicopter
( ) Been lost
(X) Gone to Washington, DC
(X ) Swam in the ocean
(X) Cried yourself to sleep
( ) Played cops and robbers
(X) Recently colored with crayons
(X) Sang Karaoke
( ) Paid for a meal with coins only
( ) Been to the top of the St. Louis Arch
(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't
( ) Made prank phone calls
( ) Been down Bourbon Street in New Orleans
( ) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose & elsewhere
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) Danced in the rain-naked
(X) Written a letter to Santa Claus
( ) Been kissed under the mistletoe
( ) Watched the sunrise with someone
(X) Blown bubbles
(X) Gone ice-skating
(X) Gone to the movies
( ) Been deep sea fishing
(X ) Driven across the United States
( ) Been in a hot air balloon
( ) Been sky diving
( ) Gone snowmobiling
(X) Lived in more than one country
(X) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets
( ) Seen a falling star and made a wish
(X) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser
( ) Been in the Statue of Liberty (If I have it was a looong time ago and I don't remember, but I have seen it and stood next to it on several occasions)
( ) Gone to the top of Seattle Space Needle
( ) Been on a cruise
(X) Traveled by train
( ) Traveled by motorcycle
(X) Been horse back riding
( ) Ridden on a San Francisco CABLE CAR
( ) Been to Disney World (where is Disney World, again?)
(X) Truly believe in the power of prayer
( ) Been in a rain forest
( ) Seen whales in the ocean
( ) Been to Niagara Falls (Not having been to Niagara Falls is so un-American, but it's not as bad as not having been to Mt. Rushmore)
( ) Ridden on an elephant
( ) Swam with dolphins
( ) Been to the Olympics
( ) Walked on the Great Wall of China
( ) Saw and heard a glacier calf
( ) Been spinnaker flying (what the heck is a spinnaker?)
( ) Been water-skiing
( ) Been snow-skiing
( ) Been to Westminster Abbey
( ) Been to the Louvre
(X) Swam in the Mediterranean
( ) Been to a Major League Baseball game
(X) Been to a National Football League game

Let's not be stoopid

Ok, so I'm going back to school in September after I took a semester off and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared to go back. Ok, I'm petrified. Terrified. Scared you-know-what-less. Sometimes I wonder why I'm going back at all. I'm so close to being done (theoretically, at least) that it really would be foolish and stupid not to finish. And I'm thinking I've been far too foolish in my life so far and made too many mistakes to knowingly make another one. I'd really rather not throw one more log of foolishness onto the fire thanks very much. But it's so hard to want to go back, to see a need to go back when I really don't feel like I have any career goals. I don't know what I want to do with my life, I can't even decide on a minor. (At least I've finally picked a major I'm at least kind of excited about graduating with, and THAT's progress for me, let me tell ya). It's just soo frustrating sometimes! And at the same time I know that in all liklihood it doesn't really matter what I decide to minor in, what matters is that I finish and get a degree (any degree!), and get out. Move on with my life. I'll worry about a career and internship and all that when I have to.

Plus, this is the first year I've been able to get financial aid and I would be stupid, STOO-PID not to go back now. That makes it sound like I'm complaining or ungrateful. I'm really not, I promise! I am sooo lucky and grateful that my tuition this semester will basically be paid for and that I don't have to take out any more loans. There were far more college students that needed financial help much worse that I ever did in previous years, but I am extremely grateful that I was able to receive financial aid for this semester since the whole reason I deferred last semester was financial. Getting this aid makes me want to decide on a career goal even more. I'll figure it out, it just might take a while. And that's ok, I gotta keep reminding myself of that.

So I know I'm scared to go back to school, so I've been trying to figure out ways to prepare myself, things I can do to make it easier for myself when I am back in college mode. What's that scripture again? "If ye are prepared ye shall not fear" This is why I need to read scriptures more, then I might actually find ways to make life easier for myself. Anyway, so I've been stressing out about taking this english class that I have signed up for twice now if previous semesters and ended up dropping it last minute because I am a wimp and the idea of writing a 10-15 page research paper totally freaks me out. Well, I signed up for it this semester because I just really need to get it over with and out of the way, and I need to break this pattern of signing up for it and psyching myself out and then dropping it.

So to keep an already long story from getting any longer unnecessarily, I am trying to teach myself how to speed read as well as trying to figure out a few good topic ideas for a research paper that I could actually write about. I just started practicing some speed reading today. It's proving to be more difficult that I thought. It's definitely not as easy as it sounds, or as easy as I thought. People always make it look so easy. My sister can read novels in 30 min to an hour. It takes me weeks to finish reading a novel. But anyway, I am excited to devote more time to this and even though I wasn't impressed with my practice today (and I'm not sure how much of what I read I actually understood or retained), I did increase my reading speed. And that's something to be proud of.

The BBC's Big Read

I need something to blog about. Thanks to the BBC's Big Read

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Star the ones you loved.*
3) Italicize those you plan on reading.
4) Underline those you have partially read (series) or gave the OCT (Old College Try)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
6 The Bible
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
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (pretty sure I have read this, though I couldn't tell you much about it)
19 The Time Traveller’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. 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 (I REALLY want to read this one!)
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 - I hated this book with a passion
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-time - 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
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 (A good friend of mine calls this book Madame Ovary)
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
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (I'm pretty sure I've read this, but not 100% positive)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Toole
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I really should read this book and I really want to)

Hey, I did better than I thought. I've read 16 of those. Pretty sad, but still, I'm just glad I made it over 10. Looks like I've got a lot of reading to do.

My blog?

Well, I've been threatening to start a blog but haven't done it before now because
A) I have this deep-seeded belief that blogs are...(dare I say?) pointless
B) I never know what to write and
C) I didn't know what to call it

At any rate, looks like I've joined the ranks of the world of bloggers. I am officially freaked out now.