Caution: Bad Life Driver Ahead

I don't know if it's still the whole post-mission adjustment or what, but I feel like my life is spinning out of control and I'm not quite sure how to steer it right again. Life should not be that complicated! I'm only juggling school and work right now, and I'm already grasping at the straws of insanity. I swear this wasn't how I've lived the previous years of college life. I remember LIKING classes and homework sometimes, and having sufficient time to work and play. Now I don't have enough time for anything. Lame. I don't even have time to sit on blogspot and muse on what unintelligent themes I can expand for the world to consider. Double lame. And did I mention I like to try and watch my rearview mirror and wonder whether or not I should've passed some of those stops back there? Triple lame. Maybe someday normal life will come into focus again. Until then, I guess I'm stuck with my hands taped to the wheel while my vision goes fuzzy.

Going Nowhere Fast

Guess what? I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I have officially been home from my mission for a month now, and I think I've digressed. I finally decided I'm tired of being the perpetual student and changed my major to graduate in August. What I didn't think about when I did that was that I'm going to have to be a grown up and make some bigger decisions now. I will now soon join the ranks of all those college grads who are a nuisance to society as they have no jobs and frequently move back home. However, that is one ultimatum I will not stoop to...moving back home. My sanity would be in jeopardy. Ok let's not get ahead of ourselves. I don't really know that I'll graduate without a job just yet. There's still plenty of un-snooped network connections to hit up first. But I just feel lame when I say I'm graduating and then people ask me what I'm going to do after....can you hear the crickets? Nothing. I've got nothing. Maybe I should just go to China. No really, that's been an option before. Or pick up everything and move to a new state? Apply to grad school? Try and get a corporate job editing or something? I don't know!!! It hurts my poor head. All I know is...I'm going nowhere fast.

The Great Contradiction

Soooo, life. I know, how very...wow...I can't even think of the word. Eloquent? No. Dang. I think the mission made me stupider. I have never felt so incapable of carrying on an intelligible conversation in my life. All of the wonderfully descriptive and poignant words I've a college career learning seem to have been erased in order to make room for a new language in my head. And now I'm only making it worse as I decided it was a good idea to go ahead and learn French while I was at it. Goodbye vocabulary.

Anyways, not the point. Already deviating. Pathetic. The point is, I decided I wanted to write about the great contradiction that comes from being a returned missionary. Weird. I never thought I'd be referring to myself as that. Ever. Oh well, it is what it is. So let's get on with it then. First, I loved being a missionary. It was the hardest, craziest, saddest, and happiest year and a half of my life. Only someone who's been there actually knows what I'm talking about. You can't describe it, just live it. Well, I have to tell you a secret about being a returned missionary. I was dreading the life even before I left for the mission. I'd heard so many awful stories about people who came home and just didn't know how to live real life again. I imagined that would be my fate. But when I got home...life was pretty much the same. I went back to the same crazy family, same house, same friends, same university classes, and the same dull library job. It's like the world hardly skipped a beat and that year and a half of my life just fell into some abstract oblivion. Sometimes I find myself thinking it really didn't happen. So now I'm stuck somewhere in between I guess. I feel so different than I was before, but no one really understands. Coming back to the "real world" was way too easy and now I feel like I'm going to wake up any day now on my paper thin wiry mattress in the sweaty tropics of the DR with bachata music ringing in my ears. How do you fit yourself back into the mold of an old life that you've outgrown?

How to Hide a Hicky

I have to admit, as soon as this experience happened I thought to myself, "That's a blog post waiting to happen!" Haha. So yesterday my roommate and I decided to go visit a guy friend. Seeing as we were already driving around and he needed a lift home, we decided to help him out. So we go to pick him up and he's got a scarf on. Now I just have to interject here that I've always judged men in scarfs. Scarfs are a girl thing. Call me sexist or old fashioned or whatever. But straight men in scarfs is super unmanly. Well I pretty much told our friend as much as he hopped in the car. He used the lame-o excuse that it was cold outside (which it was), and I decided to put my judgmental thoughts away for the moment. So once we took him home we decided to go in and visit for awhile. Bad news for him. His scarf loosened in transit and as we arrived I saw a rather purplish mark on his neck. Without pretense, I ripped the scarf off and said pointedly "What is THAT?!?!" Then of course he proceeded to turn five shades of red. Hahaha. We laughed about it and cracked hicky jokes for the next 2 hours. It was pretty much the best moment of my life since coming home from the mission. So I've decided to give all you hicky hiders out there some advice: just say no to the scarf. Find some seriously potent cover-up next time. Or...just don't get hickies!

Special People...

Sorry I've just got to vent a little right now. What on earth is wrong with people who have to talk like 10 decimals higher than the average person while they're having a phone conversation? Do you not understand the function of a cell phone? It's so they can hear you like you're RIGHT THERE! No, I actually have NO interest in hearing about your ridiculous life. So please tone it down or buy a hearing aid!