The blowing of my mind.

So, earlier tonight I determined to spend some face time with God before bed (something I've been neglecting lately):  a little worship and prayer and Bible reading.  Historically I've been really bad at sticking to a reading plan, so I was mainly flipping idly around in the Old Testament.  I have no idea why I landed in the middle of Joshua 22, but I started reading from the middle of the chapter and almost immediately saw this verse:

"If the land you possess is defiled, come over to the LORD's land, where the LORD's tabernacle stands, and share the land with us."  (Joshua 22:19) 

Even without the context (Most of the tribes of Israel are speaking to a couple fo the other tribes, who were allotted land on the other side of the Jordan River outside Canaan and built an altar where they weren't supposed to), this verse really struck me.  This very thing that the people of Israel are doing is what we as believers and Christ-followers are supposed to do.  We're supposed to call people out of the "defiled land" where they live, and invite them to share int he Kingdom of God and His glory and His presence.  SO CRAZY.  As in, so incredible, and fantastic, and a bit frightening (I mean, shoot, that's a pretty prestigious responsibility).  We're supposed to tell people how good we've got it as citizens of the Kingdom, and invite them to share in that.  It makes me want to pray my face off.

This was encouraging to me for the reason that, basically, I generally don't care a whole lot for Bible reading.  I don't hate it, but it's awfully rare for me to get excited about it, either.  I've read everything in the Bible before, some of it dozens and dozens of times.  And it's hard not to go into it with that mindset.  I so often can read it and praise God for who He is, but I virtually never feel like I get anything new out of it or feel like I've learned something.  I don't have fresh eyes for the Bible.  This encounter was interesting because, for one, I honestly don't really recall this story, so it was sort of new in that way, but mainly because if I had read that chapter straight through and read that verse in all its context, I would probably never have taken particular note of it.  I would never have taken ten minutes to be totally floored by God and what it means to be a Christian.  I feel like God was sort of saying, "Even though your heart is only half in this, since you're deliberately seeking Me and even sacrificing some sleep to do it, I am going to give you a totally new experience and have fun watching you have fun getting your mind blown."

God is so good, and holy, and brain-boggling.

And that's one verse out of context!  How much more could you find in this whole passage by reading it normally? My mind's now doubly blown, because even though i've been told countless times that God;s word is multilayered, I never really give that much thought or ask or seek to experience that.  i wish I always felt as excited and curious about the Bible as I do now.  (Don't think I haven't prayed about that.)  It would be so much harder to get disillusioned so quickly.  The Bible is amazing—why don't I experience it like it is more often?

a stuff sack of my life in recent weeks.

In keeping with the title, this will be a rather random jumble of things all tossed together into one paragraph—I hope I don't hate myself for this later.  I've been catching up on some reading and writing and Doctor Who the last few weeks, since getting out of winter classes.  It's fantastic.  I've been going to the library an average of twice a week.  The only thing is that I have gotten far too used to writing papers and now have to check myself every time I write because otherwise I will not put contractions in anything.  I also dinked around with Wordpress.com, and I vow to never complain about Blogger's stupid html code again.  Wordpress literally reduced me to tears.  In all fairness, it was two in the morning and I was already feeling a bit emotional, but still.  It's absurd.  Right now I'm taking Interpersonal Communications.  We just had to turn in an assignment where we had to go talk to a random stranger as if we knew them, and write a paper on it.  I struck up a very affable conversation with the gruff bus driver about books and The Lord of the Rings and the pros and cons of making movies out of famous fiction (turns out he's a lot less purist than I, which probably makes for a more enjoyable moviewatching experience).  It was pretty neat, but it took me days to psych myself up for it.  I saw HPA's Annie Get Your Gun last weekend, which was fantastic, as HPA plays are by definition.  I saw the new Jane Eyre movie last night, with Mom and Rachel and the Demskes.  It was quite good.  There was some really neat cinematography, and the music was composed by the same guy who did the Pride & Prejudice soundtrack.  There were also lots of famous BBC actors, which is always a ball. The oddest thing was seeing Judi Dench play a nice, motherly, lower-class character, haha. I also took Rachel to Goodwill and Barnes & Noble, although since we spent all our money at Goodwill we could only "window-shop" for books. it was pretty fun, and I feel like I barely see Rachel any more, so it was fun just hanging out for a few hours.  I finally spent some of my Amazon gift cards from Christmas and my birthday *shakes head and rolls eyes*.  I ordered a copy of The Passion of the Christ soundtrack (ah-MA-zing) and a copy of The Legend of Sigurd and Gúdrun, by Tolkien.  (Yay!)  Shipping costs are murder—I managed to get both the CD and the book for $2.84, and they charge me a whopping $7 in shipping.  It completely deflates the balloon of awesomeness that swelled in me when I got such a nice deal on the actual items.  Ha.

"If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. " – James 1:5

Oh my gosh.  I have been thinking/writing in Sentences In Which Every ("Important") Word Begins With a Capital Letter all day (well, all day Saturday, which was 19 minutes ago).  And trying to generalize everything into a Category With a Catchy Name.  This is bad.  I've only been on it three times, but TvTropes is going to ruin my life.

Just like this guy.  And he's two-dimensional; he hasn't even got an actual brain to fry on the Internet.

Essentially, I am undergoing failure of relatively semi-epic proportions on two levels.

Firstly, letter-writing.  I apologize to those of you with whom I did (or may not explicitly have) agree to do this.  I have basically completely failed.  I have resolved on numerous occasions to (begin) write(ing) letters consistently/have drafted (parts of) several/have mailed exactly one (sometime last September, I think).   At this point I'm definitely not going to even promise to try to write letters.  But I will tag that with a disclaimer that the idea is still outright awesome and that I would (still) very much like to.

Secondly, life groups.  I think I signed up for three of these, with it being understood upfront that one would be a part-time commitment by most of the people who signed up for it, and the other two as "maybe"s.  (I'm not counting Dwell in this appraisal, since it's permanent, year-round, and more an extension of the church and not a life group, per se.)  I have subsequently missed every single meeting of every single life group for which I signed up, due to lack of a ride/conflicting meeting times/ homework/being hijacked for a surprise birthday party, et cetera.  While those are all valid and not all negative reasons, the fact remains that missing all of the meetings for the last month was exceedingly depressing.   And more pressingly, is really not facilitating my resolve to overcome my "I am totally unreliable and undependable" mindset.  

Boo.  I need to do homework.  And…get some sleep.  
Summer, hasten up, will you?

immolation to imagination, ex nihilo

Isn't it astonishing how you can make tiny choices that turn out to be incredibly, irretrievably stupid?  You can make the same choice half a dozen times a day and choose the same answer every time, and it's  normal, innocuous choice; and then you face it at just the wrong moment and it ruins you for a night.  You suddenly go spiraling into a event horizon of collapsing sanity, a helix of half-dreamt psychosis, and you wonder what you could conceivably have been thinking, and how you're going to fix this the following morning, all the while knowing that you likely won't.  One moment the workings of your mind are mundane and innocuous, and the next you find yourself on a train in tangent, and it pins you down and smothers you until you stave it off with a journal entry, wrathfully vague blog post, and some subpar poetry.  Sometimes, I do not like choices.  Sometimes, I do not like imagination.  Sometimes, the word "wistful" and all it entails is the bane of my existence.  I want to set something on fire and jump into it.  Burn me away, just for a moment.  Just for one hour.  Let me sleep away time itself, and lose all I feel like I'm losing, even though I know I am losing nothing but time.

{This is keeping me sane, which vaguely astonishes me, considering my natural daylight propensities towards the banjo.}

So, I tried to change just my background picture on this blog, and the title font, and it changed the entire color scheme. I tried to change it back.  I didn't get it all right.  This frustrates me excessively.  Color schemes are astonishingly difficult for me, which strikes me as very odd.  I'm inclined not to think colors are quite my natural artistic forte.  I hope you all enjoy reading this blog, because I do from time to time wonder if all the technical difficulties through which it puts me (and they have been many and varied, believe you me) are worth it.  Eh.

So, basically I didn't sleep at all, all night, which was probably not good.  I've been working on this awful term paper for almost fourteen hours straight, with a couple of TV breaks last evening between eight and ten (lasting about an hour total), a break to blog about it at 1:30 a.m., a break to work on my urban design paper at around 3 a.m., and a coffee break about 20 minutes ago.  What have I accomplished in that elevenish hours that have been dedicated to the term paper?  About five hundred words…out of the thousand I needed to write….  What's really hysterical is I'm not even angry or frustrated or depressed or feeling an urge to burst into tears, which is normally the reaction this would have induced from me about three hours ago.  I am still completely determined to slog through and finish the blasted thing.  Even though I don't know what I'm going to put in the two pages I have to fill up before I have to leave the house in two and a half hours.  I have absolutely no idea at all.  Maybe I'm still sort of emotionally stable because I know that for once this is not all my fault for being a moron and procrastinating.  It isn't my fault, so logically/fairly speaking, I can't suffer consequences for my bad judgment.  Hm.  I have no idea if that's true (it probably isn't) but that's probably how my subconscious is keeping me alive and focused on this right now.  I am really, really going to regret having stayed up to finish this vitally important paper by the time I hit humanities class at two this afternoon.  I might have to go on a caffeine marathon all day, which I've never even done.  I am really grateful my exam is poli-sci 101 and not 201 today.  I'm working very hard not to be pessimistic about it.  My goodness, I wonder how much of this post is even relatively sane.  College is not my friend right now.  I hope too much of this post isn't redundant with the post I wrote five and a half hours ago when it was quiet and gloomy and I was wondering if I could get away with running the espresso maker at whatever-wee-hour-of-the-morning 15 feet away from my parents' bedroom door.  (I decided not to try.  I was feeling astonishingly lucid all night, considering how exhausted I have every right to be.)

Dear coherency: it was nice knowing you. Farewell. Do come again.

It is one in the morning.  Surprisingly, I feel somewhat less awful than I typically do in this same situation—especially considering that this situation is worse than most situations of the sort.  And more infuriating, because it's not all my fault this time.  It is one in the morning.  Before nine this morning, I have to write another 800 words, minimum, on my term paper, and I don't have enough source material.  (This is just " the draft".  It's a good thing, because it is going to be a disorganized shambles.)  My thesis is that, despite being rooted in theological controversy, the Great Schism of 1054 had significant political and cultural effects on Byzantine Constantinople.  (When I said last fall in some blog post that I would love to research Byzantine history, I really meant it.  Ha.)  True, I put off starting this paper about two weeks later than I really should have, but I have done much worse (e.g., last semester, when I did my entire term project—topic, research, and writing (for the same professor, no less)—in three days).  And I have been hard at work researching and outlining it for the past two weeks.  Yet, it's still incredibly in disarray.  I might just end up churning out 2500 words of relative claptrap, thereby at least snagging most of the 30% of my grade this is worth, and completely rehauling it for the final draft, which I will have three weeks to prepare.

I also have to write a 600-word paper on principles of "livability" and "mobility" in urban design *gag reflex* as a response to a 40-page reading assignment of which I have yet to read 10 pages.  I worked on this reading assignment last Thursday night and Sunday, as well as yesterday and today.  I have no idea how I managed not to get the writing even started.  

Correction—I DO know how this happened!  I was asked out on a date on Friday by a guy who could actually make a semi-plausible boyfriend (for once; he's the third guy to ask me out and the first two were Majorly Creepy Old Guys).  I will most likely blog more about him 'n' stuff later.  Suffice it to say that I freaked out over this completely unexpected (and possibly unwanted) development in my life and got absolutely nothing done on Friday, and very little done on Saturday—the only free days I have in a week.  Thus, I have been scrambling to catch up in the free hours of my church- and class- and nap-filled days ever since, and I have been alternating between miserable and rather proud of myself, since I have managed to overcome my procrastination habits pretty consistently all week, which may be a first for me.  It's like crunch time, except that instead of lasting one or two or three days, crunch time has been lasting for a week and counting.  

On a high note, l spent more than an hour doing devotions this morning, which was gloriously rejuvenating.  I need to do this more often.  (Even on a smaller scale.  Someone hold me to this, please.)

I really hope I'm not too fatigued tomorrow morning to do well on the government exam I've barely had the chance to study for…