I have to say all this out loud, in front of people, from memory, in less than seventeen hours from now.

Je ferai un voyage au Suisse avec mon amie Léa.  Avant notre départ, nous téléphonerons à l'hôtel à l'avance pour réserver une chambre.  Nous achèterons nos passeport et nos billets, et informerons avec des sites Web et des guides touristiques.  Nous demanderons à nos familles de donner à manger à la chats et mon chien.  En Suisse, nous ferons du ski en les alpes, et goûterons la cuisine bien.
La Suisse est très célèbre pour ses montes (c'est les Alpes), sa chocolat, et sa neutralité politique.  Les langues officiel sont le française, l'allemand, et l'italien.  Vingt-deux pour-cent de le population de sept-point-sept million n'est pas suisse; il y a beaucoup d'étrangers, surtout enfants.  Les Suisses aiment lire et jouer du sport.  Aussi, ils font beaucoup de travail volontaire.  L'environnement est très important à les Suisses.
Suisse a commencé au un-mille-deux-cent-quatre-vingt-et-onze, comme le confédération.  Pendant La Reforme au la seizième siècle, les Catholiques et les Protestants ont divisé le pays.  Suisse a lutté avec Napoléon pendant le révolution française, le seul temps ils n'étaient pas neutre.  Suisse est devenu le pays moderne au un-mille-huit-cent-quarante-huit.
Si vous visitez la Suisse, il vaut mieux que vous fassiez votre valise avec des vêtements pour le temps froid.  Il est bon, mais n'est nécessaire pas, que vous sachiez le langue.  Il mauvais que vous oubliez votre argent.  Écrivez les cartes postales chez soi!  ne te perdez pas à la grande ville, et amusez-vous!
(La fin.)



…I'm kind of freaking out.

(I apologize.  You must be sick of hearing about my collegiate stress every other blog post…but I feel like it's consuming my life.) (Yet not enough of it to make me quit procrastinating.)

Main content of my Facebook newsfeed ticker:  a highly emotionally charged metaphysical debate via status and following comments.
Decision:  follow urge to (as non-judgmentally as possible) argue my beliefs or follow much smaller urge to figuratively run far away at a high rate of speed?

*bangs head on wall*

Sometimes, wanting to stand up for the right thing makes actually doing so far more complicated than it seems like it should be.

Sometimes…people really surprise me
(in that way that makes me weirdly optimistic about the state of the universe)
.

☮

See, Kiersten?  You did it.  Now all you can do is wait.  So stop being so stressed about tomorrow, because tonight darn well has enough stress of its own.  (To very loosely paraphrase Matthew 6:34, in the hopes of hammering it into my brain and my slightly nerves-nauseated stomach.)  Pax vobiscum, Kiersten.

Remarkably, I feel great right now.

      "Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We're Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he's already a friend with you.
      How? you ask. In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God."

(2 Corinthians 5:17-21, The Message)

Right now, I'm really frustrated at myself for:

     a) accidentally emailing the only professor of the University of Michigan's MEMS 350 course who teaches a Tuesday/Thursday section instead of a Friday section.
     b) wanting to go to a prestigious university that happens to be a hundred miles away from Kalamazoo, so that visiting it on a Tuesday or Thursday guarantees missing three of my regular classes.

*headdesk*
It's times like this when I wonder…why am I an honors student again?  (i.e., "is free tuition really worth all the stress the requirements for this scholarship puts me through?!")
(…Aaaand the answer to that is probably a rhetorical "yes."  Augh.)

Finally getting around to that one particular bit in Acts 2:38…

Yes,

I'M GETTING BAPTIZED TOMORROW

and I'm

ÜBER–EXCEEDINGLY–TREMENDOUSLY–FANTASTICALLY EXCITED ABOUT IT.

It has taken me way too long to get here.

The homestretch of the TV/movie/books fast is the most frustrating bit yet.  All day my brain has been weeping in a corner— "Feed me mindless entertainment!  Just half an hour! I don't care what!  Feed me mindless entertainment!"  And I have to be all like, "Shut up, brain.  Jesus is way more awesome than mindless entertainment."  And my brain's like, "Yeah, but all the homework isn't."  And I have to sigh and agree and then we're both moping in a corner.

limbo word count and some obsessiveness with new music

NaNoWriMo day four, except that it's the middle of the night, so it's sort of a limbo between days 3 and 4.  I'm currently about 230 words ahead of my day 4 quota, and dawn hasn't even risen on day 4 yet.  I am going to be a little computer monster on Friday, hunched over my laptop, dividing my brain ignobly between the passionate fit of novel-writing mania and all the mound of ever-present schoolwork that is my bulwark against social anxiety.  (Pardon me if some of my sentences don't make sense; I would offer to translate them, but I may not be any more able to than you once I've gone to bed and come back.)  Also, I listened to the indie singer-songwriter genre station on Pandora for an hour or so and discovered this and this — I wish I could remember our iTunes password.

Happy November! (Or, Na na na na na...I feel like there's an xkcd comic that matches this)

It's the first of November! Excitement. I've decided not to do NaBloPoMo (blogging every day for a month) this year, as I'm already committing to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), meaning that—one way or another—I am going to write one cohesive, comlete story of at least 50,000 words in thirty days. IT'S MADNESS. But I have a (dare I admit it?) plot outline (I'm going to do a loose retelling of this old, incidentally rather tragic Celtic legend). I think with a) a deadline and b) a flexible yet complete plot framework, I can actually do it. I'mso jazzed. I probably won't be able to make much of a start until tonight, since I'm in classes noon to seven, but it's going to happen. Jesus, bless this endeavor. Because I'm also kind of shocked at the prospect that this is even possible for me, since I have literally thousands of pages of very unfinished stories on my computer and a couple of composition books.
INSANITY!

I actually considered combining the two Na'Mo's and blogging what I'd written each day for my novel, but considering my tendency (when writing anything) to skip around and edit/re-edit with a meticulousness that is probably my habit that closest approaches clinical OCD, I thought perhaps not. I will give periodic updates, I'm sure, and anyone who may be interested in reading the draft when I'm done will be welcome to it. Oh man. I feel like I'm going skydiving. Even though I've been trying to write novels for years, this feels so gollydern massive.


Anyway, happy November! I think I might have one friend who's doing NaNoWriMo with me. Are Hannah and Emily doing NaBloPoMo this year? It would be fabulous.

{Also, the xkcd comic referenced in the title, which actually has nothing to do with this post.}