A song about British bowler hats and yellow snow and lack of organs and dance parties and recurring bipolarity.

I made an amazing playlist for New Years and am throwing a one-person dance party in my newly clean room.  (The linked version is missing a couple of songs, one by Glowfriends and two by Charlie.)

The Demskes are AWESOME.  My family is also AWESOME.  And putting them together makes a SUPERFABULOUSGREATUNFORGETTABLESPARKLYEPICDOUBLYAWESOME bonanza for New Year's!  YAY!  Movies and food and goofy camera moments and arguments over board games and food and movies and Nerf gun wars and food (including snowman-shaped marshmallows and chocolate cream cheese balls), and even sleep.  ILOVEIT.
Ordinarily, I would be one to write a very lengthy and nostalgic and idealistically futuristic post, but I have too much energy to at the moment.  Also, I did a lot of that in my Christmas post.  Suffice it to say that 2011 is going to (what rhymes with eleven?  Besides the number seven, and a couple of proper names, and heaven, which I can't use without saying something ridiculous and/or presumptuous.) be…purposeful (at least, as purposeful as Kiersten can get), with the help of my Ultimate Accomplishments of Awesome list, which I really need to write up somewhere.  And I hope to enjoy school and better my friendships and go crazy for Jesus and get in shape and do some thinking about the future and have lots of dance parties, one-person or otherwise.

I'm now, because I wrote this post three hours ago and my computer wouldn't let me post it, watching Miyazaki movies on YouTube.  Yay!

…One more addition to my Accomplishments of Awesome list:
74a. Get down to business to defeat the Huns.
74b. (Possibly with a wonderfully choreographed musical number.)

Celebrate the Day

It's Christmas again!  It's a tiptoeing holiday; I never remember it until it's here.  Though this year, I literally completely forgot about it until about three days ago.  I'm kind of ludicrously excited and yet, at the same time, feeling disappointed-in-advance, like a niggling wormhole of paranoia that Christmas isn't going to be all that i'm hoping for.

This is my traditional Christmas Eve song.* (This year, instead of just listening to it, I actually found a chordsheet and played it on the piano.)  It always gets my brain in the right place right around now.  It sort of oddly imparts a sense of peace, a sense of closeness, a sense of relief that i'm not the only one who arrives at Christmas Day realizing I've barely given "the Reason for the season" five minutes of thought, let alone personal attention.  I can take some time to reflect, and talk, and go to bed truly feeling that there's really a bigger reason for this grandiose, astonishing holiday besides merely me.

One of the lines in that song I linked to says "And here is where you're finding me in the exact same place as New Year's Eve"…I feel like that every year.  My resolve to spend more time with Jesus never quite makes it past a wobbly trial run.  But even though I still lacked effort in doing devotions or whatnot this year, I feel like God did a lot in me.  I'm more confident, I've started feeling a compassion for people I've certainly never had before, I've experienced freedom from a couple of really chronic issues I was dealing with, and I've discovered that being thankful for lots of little arbitrary things is actually a really enjoyable pastime.  My prayer life, at least, has seen some improvement.  I've discovered that Jesus is much better at cheering me up than wallowing in self-pity is.  And today's his birthday!    Whatever does or doesn't happen, I want to feel him smiling at me.  It makes me giddy just thinking about that.  Even if falling in love with a fellow human being ends up being absent on the roster of my life events for the next year, I really hope that truly falling in love with Jesus finally is.

Look at that, two "deep" posts in under twelve hours.  Lucky you, blogosphere.  I send concisely-wrapped wishes your way for an uber happy, joyous, jolly, convivial, cheery, very-merry Christmas.

  * [This is my "serious" Christmas Eve song.  My traditional goofy Facebook-status-material Christmas Eve song, also by Relient K, can be found here. ]

A few disparate oddities...

I am in Panera on Gull Road, waiting for the bus, so I can go to school and give a presentation for my final class of the semester.  I desperately wish I could sit down and take a two-hour exam instead of standing up and talking for fifteen minutes; however...no such luck.  I'm starting to stress out and thusly feel rather ill.  Something has gone wrong every time I've had to do one of these things, and this professor is really stringent.  I brought it up at C&C yesterday, though, and everyone prayed, quite fervently.  Aaron M. even threw in a bit of prophetic awesomeness.  and this super nice, very extroverted girl named Kimmee (only other one there my age, actually) hugged me about eight times and gave me her phone number with strict instructions to text her and tell her how it went.  It was amazing; Jesus rocks.  I've been praying like mad.

They had no asiago cheese bagels today—alas and alack.  And I had to wait eight minutes for my caramel latte, so my bagel got cold and didn't melt the butter.  I should have splurged on some cream cheese.  In other weirdness, I am almost positive I stood in line behind Sam Patrie and Lonnie Saunders about an hour and a half ago; however, since I have only met either of them in person twice, and it's been seven months since I saw Lonnie and three years since I saw Sam, I'm not positive.  I'll have to Facebook Sam and ask, because my curiosity is quite piqued.  (I'm not brave enough to stand up and walk the twenty-five feet to where they're sitting and ask who they are. Haha.  And...now they've just gotten up and left.  Ah well.  Yay for the handiness of social networking; otherwise I'd never know.)

On to more carefree things—such as (hopefully!) ice skating on Thursday when Hannah is back in Kalamazoo!  And the Frentheways are coming; the Frentheways are coming!  Yay!  Now that it's starting to sink that that school is [almost, five and a half hours from now] done, I'm starting to get all aflutter for Christmas.  I haven't even thought about the fact that it's in five days.  I rather need to think about shopping.  I also need to stock up on library books; I've only got ONE out right now (The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins; unfortunately it took too long to get really interesting, and now I won't get to finish it) and it's due back today, so I won't have any books to sustain the introverted part of my life over my three weeks' break.  I wonder if I can check out books from the KVCC library even though it's the end of the semester?

Aah, no more time to write now...

Bending Space and Time To Bring You a Tale of Marvelous Holiday Spirit:

Once, on the twenty-fifth day of the penultimate month of the last year of the first decade of the second millennium, there was a national holiday.  There was a girl who slept late and got up just in time to eat giant cinnamon rolls with her family and watch the Macy's parade.  She wore jeans that smelled like salt and a very purple sweater with a cowl, kindly knitted for her by her grandmother.  She helped make the sweet potato casserole for dinner, and set the table, and played video games with two of her younger brothers.  They turned on the invincibility cheat codes and shot down a few hectomabobs of droids who were trying to invade the Galactic Republic.  She got the Tarzan soundtrack stuck in her head and listened to Enya on her iPod, and explained what a glottal stop was to her family, who don't like Regina Spektor's music.  Then she ate one plate of scrumptious edibles, plus an extra serving of yams and marshmallows.  Her father, oldest younger brother, and she had an in-depth discourse on the fall of historical Prussia, and an argument about past-perfect verb tense.  She and her sister watched the National Dog Show.  She pined after the wire terrier and the Irish setter and the blue-eyed Akita husky.  After sitting around and thinking for a while, she did a tad bit of writing (felicitously, not homework).  She grossly flouted American rules of punctuation in favor of the British rules.  Then she watched the season 2 finale of Doctor Who, glared daggers at her brother for what was probably a good reason, if she could only recall what it was five minutes afterwards, and fain read her friends' NaBloPoMo updates.  The day after that very long-windedly-titled day is called Tomorrow, also known as Friday, and is bound by the laws of the universe to arrive in about nine minutes.  

The girl wrote a story.  

The very long-windedly-titled day was temporarily nicknamed Today, and a pretty first-class day it was, in the unsnowy mitten-shaped land where the girl lived.  
(Especially the sweet potatoes.)

The girl was very thankful for a long list of things, and she spent some time shutting her eyes and clenching her fists and hoping very hard that she will remember to be just as thankful tomorrow, and maybe for the rest of her life.