To Be Taken Entirely Seriously, in an Slightly Overly Dramatic Fashion

Can I say that I'm miserable? And it's entirely my own fault. Do you people spent this much time in self-reflection? I am an unmotivated failure who has spent too much time trying to remove the stress in her life to actually be stressed, up until the time when I can no longer keep myself calm. Maybe I should have picked something that was more within my reach, something that I actually have a skill and talent for, but that would have seemed like quitting, like I wasn't good enough to finish the major I'm in. Which I'm not. I don't care enough to devote my every waking moment to it and I'm not smart enough to breeze by without really working and reworking and then working a couple more times the practice problems so I can gain the skill set that is applying physical principles to physics problems. I am not a critical thinker. You tell me to do something, I do it, this is my life. I am the eternal lab tech of life: I run test after test with instructions that were given to me without the thought that one day I might think up an experiment of my own. And it's my fault because I'm lazy. And then I whine because I'm lazy and horrid and apathetic and pathetic and too prideful to admit any of these things to anyone but myself including God who knew them in the first place.

And let's just talk about God for a second. I swear, He let me pick this absurd choice in life just so I would know that I can make sadly low grades and still breathe, that I can fail and fail and fail again and so I would know what it was like to be unable and unprepared to do something that I set out to do but never put my mind to. Don't get me wrong- somewhere deep in the recesses of my exhausted and pained brain, I do like physics, a little. Not enough to date, you understand, but just enough to have the occasional vaguely pleasant conversation so I'd remember why we weren't spending the rest of our lives together. I really think that this is one of the ways we can get to know more about the Person who put all this together and the ways we mess it up. I love it when people talk about atoms and subatomic particles and quarks and quantum fluctuations in the fabric of space-time in the inflationary epoch which might have lead to the large scale structure we see in the universe today. I love thinking about the way particles communicate with each other, never having to open tiny mouths and say words that might confuse others in order to change the temperature of a system or the concentration of a solution or the density of a gas cloud that may collapse in order to put new pinpricks of light in our night sky far in our future or deep in their past. It's epic, how it was all built up, so skillfully, so perfectly, so that we can look out and wonder.

And ignore.

How wretched I am! I was walking down Franklin the other day and I saw a homeless man in his wheelchair and I was looking so intensely at the ground that he said, "Look up, girl, it's going to be all right." And I smiled and said thanks and walked by and bought my Christmas presents and walked back by and never said another word. Cold callous heart. But I don't know that it would help. I don't know what to do to help and so I just shut down, I just bow my head and shut off and never do anything to help anyone. And then I sit in church on Sunday and I can't think of anything to say to my Lord because I ignored Him before so why should He listen to me now? What right do I have to stand before Him, to sit sadly on a white wooden pew and pretend like this is the most important thing to me? He may have been beating down my pride this semester, but other things took its place and they weren't His and then there's no point. It's like cleaning out a fridge, getting rid of the milk that's going to go bad and the salsa that's been bad, only to shove a pizza box and embezzled cheese back inside. Man, good thing I had to defrost my fridge, otherwise I'd been stuck with that stuff.

Well, I say good thing. Me and my roommate complained about it for weeks and didn't want to do it and waited until the last possible second to get rid of everything. Then I sat down with the Clorox wipes and set to wiping everything out, but because it's been so cold, the skin on my fingers is all cracked and bleeding and it wasn't exactly pleasant to rid the fridge and freezer of its grossness. It's never a pleasant job anyway but this turned it into a slightly painful unpleasant job. Funny thing, though, we didn't change anything on the outside- the Cinderella magnets, campus health magnet, football (arg) magnet and NASA magnet all stayed in place. Even Galileo and his tiny stuffed telescope could keep their home while a major overhaul occurred on the inside. But it'll smell a lot better in there and now it's open to better keep more desirable things safe from ruination by the outside world.

We were also talking about how we should probably clean out the fridge more often, like every time we vacuumed or something like that, just so it never got this bad again. How true. If we'd go through more often and make sure that old pieces of cake, outdated containers of yogurt or moldy macaroni and cheese (of which there was none in my fridge, I'm happy to say) got thrown out before they started stinking up the place and if we wiped down the inside every once in a while, it'd never be this bad. It's just when you ignore it and put other things in the way [like exams, you know, things that in no way determine your future life despite their detrimental effects on an already ailing grade point average (3.5 math and physics GPA to write an honors thesis, no wonder there's only been one in the past ten years -insert hysterical giggle here-)] that life gets messy.

And I'm trying to decide how sad it is that the perfect metaphor for my spiritual life (and my real world life, let's be honest) is a mini-fridge.

Happy snow day, all. May we remember, amidst the exciting potential of the first white Christmas of my life and all the craziness that we put upon ourselves this time of year, that the little baby whose birth we celebrate came to fix His world which we broke. Thank God He comes every year.