Snow

I'm watching it snow.

I'm watching the small white flakes fall in flurries around the lampposts that make the quad look more and more like Narnia (which, from what I hear, is the place to be these days) under the White Witch before the Spring.

I'm watching it coat the ground with its new frozen blanket, something that three exams and a service had prevented me from seeing more than a month ago. The ground's been waiting on this all day, as a hush has fallen over the thickening sky, waiting for the time when it could spread delight in the form of soft crystals drifting from the sky.

I'm watching it slightly jealously as I think about how white it is. It's not fair, how the clean snow naturally falls from the sky to bless the earth in small portions. I watch it stay pure in places, covering up mulch and tree branches, and wonder why in so many little things I'm no longer white and why in so many big things I stand more silent than the snow, a greater sin than mixing with mud or being erased by frigid rain.

I'm watching it to avoid diving into reading and typing and working. Ah, snow, if you had come but one day sooner, I would have completed my assignments fully and not have had to face the sad yet guiltily encouraging fact that I can do a minimum amount of work and remain mediocre. Now you leave me to remember that mediocre is a large plain and that no one was created to remain mediocre forever.

I'm watching the rare flakes as the pseudo-storm lightens up and people stop running in happiness in the snow and begin running in agitation from the cold. I'm watching the friends bustled together outside the dorm across the quad and the lonely soul sitting by the lamppost, waiting. I'm watching the tracks they make in the snow, purposefully leaving their fleeting mark on this rarest of weather phenomena and suddenly I don't feel so bad. Sometimes a snowflake is just a snowflake.

And now I'm far away from it, looking at the fake snowflakes on my window and thinking about the things I should be doing. You know, one time, maybe it was Wednesday night, I was working on something and I looked at my prayer notebook and I wanted God. Not just to write something because I can do that any time. I wanted to talk, to tell Him about my world and to listen as He rebuilt it in the way that only He can. Is your heart supposed to hurt? What am I missing? I'm so tired, I want to sleep and I'm so broken, I want to live.

And it's not that I'm not happy and it's not that I don't have a wonderful, ridiculously blessed life. It's not that I can't see the snow falling anymore, it's just that I have to look to the light to see it illuminated and my eyes are tired. I forget that life is not a vast snow covered tundra where we are punished for making a dent in the whiteness. The best thing about snow is that you can play in it. How else are you going to make angels?

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.

Two Points

Welcome to basketball season.

Can I tell you what a miserable day it is outside today? It's rainy and cold but not cold enough to deliver the promised snow. I haven't seen the sun since yesterday and the trees shake bony fingers at me as I watch the wind push their bare branches around. It's miserable, borderline depressing. Any day that makes you grateful for artificial lighting and an allergy-inducing heating system has to be miserable.

Now Tuesday, that was a fine night. The moon was full and high in the sky with a lovely ring decorating it as we walked out of the Smith Center, warmed by friends and a pretty great game. It was still cold, but it wasn't miserable. And of course, it helped that we won.

But you know, I'm not as upset about today's game as I could be. I mean, we're a young team and Kentucky's in the top 5 for a reason. Excuses aside (because we're not as bad as we played in the first half, as Roy said), I'm glad because it was just a 2-point loss. I'm glad because they fought back and they worked and even if they didn't get all the way there, they tried. The effort wasn't the best in the first half, but they came back from that. We didn't lose by 19. And that's my point.

Just in case you thought I was only going to talk about basketball, I'll throw in a little bit of a life lesson at the end, just to prove that I can tear myself away from our boys on the hardwood. Life can be compared to a lot of things, but my recent life was like that basketball game: it started out decent, fell completely to pieces while somebody beat me at my own game, and came back together towards the end. And, like my poor Heels, I just can't seem to win this game. No matter how I try, the attempts aren't falling the way they should and I walk away slightly dejected. But only slightly. Because I tried and because I learned. Because I fight and because I come back and because I'm not going to let this get me down forever. That makes the difference between losing and being a loser.

So, in a couple of games, if they still haven't figured out the whole turnover thing and the whole let's-make-a-gosh-durn-free-throw thing, I'm going to point back to what Roy said after the game: "This is North Carolina. We're supposed to come back. There are no moral victories in this." And there's not. But there's the chance to be better and there's the knowledge that they can come back. It's not a hopeless cause. And as everything reminds me that exams are around the corner, I need to know that life, even beyond exams, isn't a hopeless cause.

Because My Blog was Feeling Lonely

I'm a terribly inconsistent blogger. If it makes you feel any better, you're mentioned in the novel I wrote this past month. I spoke to my dear readers quite often when I couldn't for the life of me think of anything else to say. You served to be my outlet of literary analysis. Unfortunately, I feel like all my intelligence went into writing this thing (which is hardly worth reading, much less printing, though if you want a laugh bad writing and a nonsensical story line you're welcome to it- I'll fix it up one day) and so my everyday thoughts were much stupider. Some of my favorites:

Where is my notebook?

I should really give up Facebook. Right about now. Nope, not happening.

I wonder if I could give up basketball for Lent. Hahahaha.

Why do I do my best writing between 11-2 at night/morning?

Why is my best writing so terrible?

No, seriously, where is my notebook? Ahhhhhhh....

Why do I consistently fail at English?

Why is occasionally so hard to spell?

Haha. Lettuce. Haha.

But seriously, lettuce? It doesn't even look like...

Notebook? Notebook notebook notebook?

Screw physics. I'm going to drop out of college and... well, drop out of college at any rate.

Also, screw boys. They're jerks.

PS- Love of my life, you're not a jerk. You're just very confusing. Please don't walk out of my life again. Love, Addie Jo.

I hate football. And bowl games. I hate the football team. Eff eff eff. Gee.. eye...

How do you say H phonetically? ache? ... incorrect.

Maybe I left my notebook in Phillips? In Hill? At the Planetarium?

How have I never seen a complete Bond movie?

Sometimes I think people just cut their hair for attention. But mine bounces now!

Taking apart your TV is fun!

Studying for exams is not!

I always feel so productive when I write out my schedule.

And now I don't, because I haven't done a thing on it.

Blogging isn't on my schedule. Maybe I should write that down.

How does your building not have a lost and found? I need my notebook!!!!

Also, snow? Haha snow. Snow and lettuce and icicles. And two cool points for those people who are laughing right now. And two innocent points for those of you not.

And, sadly, I probs won't be blogging much until... well, when life gets less busy. So we're shooting for late April. Don't hate me. I'll probably procrastinate, so that's four posts in the next two weeks alone. Bon courage, mes amis! The time is at hand! Happy Advent, kids!


A random sign from my first group of kids over the summer. Enjoy the random.