Me

Turns out, I'm generally an optimist and a bleeding heart.

On the way to work, my car was rumbling ominously, so I dropped the speed.  Which was of the good because pretty soon my tire blew and I pulled off the road to the gut-churning smell of burned rubber.  Movies are brain-dumbing, because when I got out to check, I had to forcibly keep myself from backing away, because WHO KNOWS? the car might fireball from...you know...a blown tire.

But mostly it was exciting!  I got to call into work and say I would be late.  An old guy stopped and asked if he could help.  I forced my mom out of her sickbed to drive me to work, and my dad took it into the shop for the new set of tires it so desperately needs.

I know that I'm weird in that I tend to get excited about horrible (or boring) things.  Blown tire?  Adventure!  Unanticipated hair cut?  Reinvention!  Stains on your shirt?  A story!  Overblown blood vessels in my eyeball?  Drama!

I like this about myself.  Better to greet the mundane and the annoying with a smile than a frown, I say.

What gets me pessimistic (and angry!) is people being stupid.  I hate me some people who pick on others.  I did not know that this was a hot button of mine, but lately people have been picking on or subtly criticizing people that I don't even particularly care about, and I RAGE LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED.  Mostly to my mom, but still.  Sometimes I tell people to stopit.

Know thyself--I'm getting there, Socrates.

List of Good Things

1.  I gave up TV from post-Senegal to January, as a kind of "I love You more than TV" sort of thing.  And of course, on January 1st, I watched five episodes.  Luckily! I talked to Stephanie, and we agreed to keep each other accountable to only two episodes per day, so we will not waste our lives as couch potatoes.

2.  Also Stephanie and I are memorizing James!  Which is great, because James is great.  Steph has a butt load of it memorized already, so I need to get my game on.

3.  David showed me a commercial with Brett Erlich, and then in Bible study I said something and both Daniel and Troy said I sounded like him.  Life is complete.

4.  Bible study was awesome!  We went through the whole book of Joel (we're powering through the Minor Prophets because when we went slowly people got bored), and it was actually really awesome to do the whole book at once.  Makes it more cohesive and understandable.  I want to do more reading whole books at a time.

And anyway, I love teaching the Minor Prophets, because it makes me study them and read extra resources, and I get a whole lot more out of it than I would if I just read them through on my own time.

And plus!  I just do so much love my church friends.  Next week's service project is really coming together, and even though there are still some arguments about the college kids' exact place in the church, hopefully all that is dying down.  It is so encouraging to be surrounded by people who are passionate about helping people in need.  I love that our idea of hanging out can totally be passing out clothes or visiting nursing homes.

5.  I love the junior high Sunday School girls.  Now that we've divided up girls/boys, the girls are really opening up and talking.  It's weird, because we never talked about sex when I was in junior high, but we totally did today.  So much of the world has changed in just ten short years.  Best part:

Junior High Girl:  If I got pregnant at 16, I would be so mad at God.
Me:  Um, that would be entirely your fault, because you had sex with a boy.
Junior High Girl:  But that's gross!
Me:  ...That's how you have babies.
Junior High Girl:  But that's gross!
Me:  Then don't do it.

It's almost eerie how much I notice myself acting like Wendy.  I can only hope that I will have as positive and as big of an impact on their lives as she did on me.

6.  I really need to stop being pissy about living in Peoria.  I used to worry that I wouldn't be able to live a life of missions in Peoria, because no one else wanted to, and blah blah pity party etc.  BUT.  God has given me a chance to talk to kids about missionaries.  He's given me two classes to teach, where I can lead discussions about God and life.  And He's given me a group of friends who are missions minded in Peoria, which is exactly what I wanted but never expected.

What I'm saying is, I'm glad I'm in Peoria.  This might be the most I've served God yet, including when I lived in Senegal.  Yay for glorifying God anywhere, anytime.

2010 In Review

2010 was my first taste of life as an adult.  I moved to another continent, became way more confident, traveled around the US on my return, went to two weddings in which four of my friends really really became adults, and got my first official job.

Looking back, 2010 was undoubtedly the year of Senegal.  Lived there five months.  Returned for two weeks.  Solidified my desire to live overseas.

As much as 2010 saw me making steps towards some kind of maturity, what with teaching and mentoring and traveling, well, I also seem to have made a 360 with my life.  Because I'm back living at home with my parents in the city I grew up.

Here's hoping 2011 moves me further forward.

Can't Get You Out of my Head

I've been absolutely loving my added responsibility at work:  ordering YA, Middle Grade, and Easy books.  Okay, so mostly I've loved ordering the YA books, because THEY FEED MY SOUL.  And as part of my research into what I should buy, I get to check out book blogs, which are pretty much the coolest (and nerdiest) things in the interwebs.  Naturally, the way I know if I'll like a book blog is to scope out their opinion on the Hunger Games series.

Team Gale?  Oh my word they must be idiots.  Didn't like the finale?  IDIOTS.  (My insults are not very well-formed.)  So then today I came across someone with a Team Peeta banner in the margin of their site, and on their list of books that had personally impacted them, this was written:

"I don't know what it was about this book {Mockingjay}, but it really and truly blew me away. It was, in my mind, the perfect ending to the Hunger Games trilogy, but more than that it was just really, really amazing. It broke my brain. It gave me a reading hangover. It showed me how powerful a book can be. I don't know how to explain it except to say that it had been years since I had read something that - through sheer force of story - made me feel so much."

YES EXACTLY.  Must re-read the entire series whenever my stack of to-read books lessens even slightly.

Stories

We made purses out of duct tape at the library today, and Wendy and Abby (by which I mean David, who was her fill-in) came!  I love to show off my place of business to people I love.

David and I worked at a table together, and it was lovely to discuss epic light saber duels and how apparently everyone has always called me a tall turtle, but I realized something.  I suck at telling stories.  David went off on how his great-uncle killed a snake, and it was suspenseful and hilarious.  So I thought of my own holiday recollection, and no kidding, it went like this.

"Oh!  So at Christmas, my grandpa said something, but it wasn't exactly true, so he said, 'And that's almost the truth!'  It was so funny!  So we kept saying it the rest of the day, and he didn't even know that he had started it.  HAHAHAHAHA."

David didn't even respond (though later I called him on lying and he smirked, "That's almost the truth"). 

I am not pleased with my suckage.  This is exactly why I write and do not speak.  Unless, of course, I am similarly deluded as to my skill in writing.  Which would be tragic, because then I would have no means of communication left to me!

Also I write because in person I look like this:

Me:  Hey Wendy, can I use some of your duct tape?  I ran--
Wendy:  Oh my gosh!  Tricia, what's wrong with your eye!?
Me:  ...Thank you for drawing attention to my deformity.

Five days now.  It was good this morning until I put in contacts, and now it hurts even with them out.  Probably I will have to see a doctor or something.  I like my eyeball!  I would prefer to keep it!  However, wearing an eyepatch for a while would only be awesome.

Levels of Friendship

Random:  one of my eyes is crazy red.  It creeps me out, and it's been like that for three days now.  Whenever I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I think of Natalie Portman in the preview for Black Swan, and I want to die a little.  It was fun for a day, now I am tired of it.

So.  I get lonely in Peoria, which has frustrated me before, because why?  I have way more friends here than Jackson.  All the families at Woodland that are dear and close, and I can be stupid and myself with them.  But it just isn't enough, I guess, and I finally figured out why.

I miss having best friends.  Stephanie, Jennie, Erin.  I could tell them anything--my struggles, my anger, my pride.  I could be sad around them, and mopey, and I could ignore them, and they would still like me the next day.

I don't have friends in Peoria that I can be depressed with.  I don't see anyone often enough to let myself express my depression (whenever it hits) because I don't want to waste any time.  So I plaster on a smile, and really, it ends up being great, but as soon as I leave all those bad feelings come back.

Probably I could have close friends again.  Lindsay and I have had some nice talks, but our work schedules are obnoxious, so we can't hang out often.  (Which is why I selfishly am Team Lindsay Gets A New Job.)  Sometimes I share more of myself with Wendy, but the fact that I am friends with her children will always add a layer of awkwardness to certain conversations.  Emily and I talk a lot, when she's here.  But that's not often.

Anyway, all that to say I get lonely here.  On Christmas Eve I was feeling it hard core, and it was just really an awful night.  But Christmas morning I saw a facebook message from Stephanie that positively made my week.

She wants to come to Mongolia with me!  I wanted someone to come with me, but I wanted it to be a God thing, not a me-coercing-someone thing.  And it's STEPHANIE.  We will have so much fun.  That is two to three weeks when I can hang out with my best friend in a new country serving God.  PERFECT.

And she asked if we could memorize Scripture together, which is lovely because I can't do that with David anymore, because it feels too intimate.  And she is coming to visit in January.  And I am already thinking of all the videos we can make, and all the conversations we can have, and all the places I can take her, and all the people I want her to meet.

I miss my best friend.  I'm so glad she is still my best friend.  We have known each other two years, and we have lived in different states (or countries) longer than we've lived in the same.  Which, to me, means our friendship is pretty awesome, because we are both aware of our (normally) horrible ability to keep in touch long distance.

So this is happy.  I love my Peoria friends.  I wish I had deeper friendships here.  But I'm so glad God brought back/reminded me that just because my best friends don't live here, doesn't mean they can't have a huge part of my life.

Up with the happy.

So It Continues!

I might be going to Mongolia this summer!

So when I got my job at the library, it felt very much like it was handed to me from God, which got me thinking: what is God teaching me through this?  Especially since it was directly contradicting my own plans of never working with kids or teaching them.  And on my way to Memphis for Erin and Tim's wedding, I thought, maybe I should work in an orphanage.

That is very easily found out, so I decided to look for a short term mission trip to an orphanage, so I could experience it and see what happened.  In September, I became friends with Gany, who is from Mongolia, and whose pastor started an orphanage there.

A month ago I emailed her and asked if I could come and work there for awhile, but she didn't write back.  I had given up on the idea, and I was starting to look into InnerChange.  But I felt like God was telling me to wait on that until January, which isn't so far away, so I agreed.

Then yesterday Gany replied (she'd been home on vacation without internet) and said they would love to have me!  I talked to my boss, and she said I could have up to three weeks off!

I'm so excited to be back on the mission track.  This patience thing is really hard, and I tend to get stuck in whatever rut I find myself.  Even though my plan last summer was "short term mission trip in August, long term sometime after," I was starting to think nothing would happen, which is stupid, because look!  My plan (God's plan?) is coming true!

And it's so comforting that I had that doubt, and wanted to move on to another option, but God stopped me.  It's so nice to know He is behind this, in some way.

Though it is kind of scary to plan a trip by myself!  I don't know how to do that, but I imagine I will just buy a plane ticket and show up.  Done.  I love adventure.

Oh my word, it is so encouraging just to have the hope of a real mission trip in my future.  I didn't quite realize how necessary that is to my happiness.  (But at the same time, I'm glad this is only short term, because I'm not sure I'm ready to give up Peoria long term yet....selfishness or God's timing or both, I don't know.)