Merry Christmas?

Have you ever had a Christmas where it just doesn't feel like Christmas?  The tree's all decorated, the lights are up, the presents are wrapped, the cards are signed, the Christmas story's been read, etc., etc.  Yet even with all that, there's just no joy, no excitement, nothing.  That's how my Christmas started out.  When I was woken up by one of my dogs licking my face, it felt like any other day.  I knew it wasn't, but that's what it felt like.  It made me think of those Christmases when I was little kid that I would wake up at the crack of dawn and run into my parents room and jump on their bed till they woke up and we would go open presents.  I miss those days of simplicity and of belief in Santa.  Things really were easier in some ways.

When I finally hauled myself out of bed and got out of my room and wished a Merry Christmas to the rest of my family, my grandmother responded with, "Doesn't feel very merry does it?"  I knew exactly what she meant, but saying it out loud just added to the depression I already felt.  It was hard not to dwell on the fact that Grandpa wasn't going to be there.  Thanksgiving hadn't been nearly this hard, probably because about half the family wasn't able to make it anyway.  For Christmas though, the entire family was showing up, including my grandmother on my mom's side who suffers from dementia.  Eleven people, a permanent odd number for the first time in twenty years.

I Chose This

(Brief warning: This is my kind of defying the world speech, just so you know.)

More and more I'm discovering that the career I've chosen is probably one of the toughest out there.  Not necessarily physically or mentally or anything like that, but emotionally.  When you work so hard to try to get that part in that play or movie that you really want and you feel like you've done a good job and then you find that it was all for nothing, it's crushing.  You feel like a failure.  Or, at least I do.  But what if that's what you love, if that's your passion?  You keep going.  You cry those tears and then you pick yourself up and keep going, keep trying, hoping that in the end all your hard work will eventually pay off.  I've known that this was going to be a hard road, filled with a lot of disappointment and pain.  I've always considered myself to be a fairly strong person, able to push back the pain, the tears and put that smile on my face even when I felt like I was falling to pieces.  My choice of career is going to test that.  Am I going to be strong enough to suffer disappointment after disappointment and still be able to pick myself up and keep going?  Is my determination enough to get me through?  And with that, do I have the strength and will to finally begin the seemingly impossible task of losing all the weight I have to lose to try to fit in to the skinny world of Hollywood.  I've had people tell me that I'm choosing the easy career, that it doesn't really take any kind of effort to act.  But it does.  It's already tested me in so many ways.  So many people don't understand what it's like to get inside the head of a character, to become someone you're not.  I can do this and I will.  I'm going to prove to the world that I am strong enough to do this.  I can become one of those skinny Hollywood girls and I will.  Just watch me!

This post was originally published on Sunday, December 11, 2011.

What The Devil Knows

What happens when school, extracurricular activities, and work all combine?  Well, for me, it means that I don't spend time reading my Bible and I make excuses not to go to church which means that my relationship with God seems to kind of flat-line.  Granted, the majority of the stress and work that keeps from reading my Bible comes from me procrastinating, but lately, it's been more a matter of I really do just have a ton of stuff going on and when I have a few moments that I don't have to be doing schoolwork or work or something else, I'm ashamed to say that reading my Bible is the last thing I want to do.  I want to pick up the book I just bought and start reading it, or watch the movie that I got ages ago, but haven't had the time to watch, or listen to some new music I found online, or, well, you get the idea.  And when it comes to church?  Most Sunday's there's so much other stuff I need to get done that it's just not practical for me to make the thirty plus minute drive out to Edgewood.  But on the other hand, I'm not exactly a fan of the church my parents are now attending.  Now, don't get me wrong, it's a great church.  I like the music, the pastor's good, the people are generally friendly, at least the few people who happen to notice me, but it's not home.  I don't know almost every single person there and love them like they're part of my immediate family almost.  I haven't been to almost all of their houses at some point or another.  They don't know anything about me and I don't know anything about them.  And for me, that unfamiliarity, is frightening.  I'm not good at meeting new people and I'm generally too shy to be able to say anything more than hi.

The Prestige

"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called 'The Pledge'. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called 'The Turn'. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call 'The Prestige'."

Complete Only In Him

Update:  Rereading this has made me think that I really need to be more active about trying to find a Bible Study I can regularly attend because I haven't thought about any of this in a very long time.  On a semi-plus side though, I have gotten to the point where I don't look at every Christian guy about my age as a potential boyfriend.  The way I've gotten to that point isn't so great since the main reason is that since moving and having to leave my church where I was surround by very godly young men, I've discovered that there are many young men who say they are Christian and don't act at all like that and can in fact be just as mean and cruel as any non-Christian guy.  As I mentioned in my post the other day, I've gotten to be very wary of men which means that I'm not going to be jumping into a relationship with anyone until I know them pretty well.  That doesn't mean that I don't occasionally look at a nice guy that I've met and have a passing thought of, maybe he's the one.  What I don't do is see a guy, have a conversation with him where he's nice to me and everything, and basically fall head over heels and analyze his every word and movement and consider whether it means he might like me too.  Yes, I used to do that.  The biggest disappointment to me is that with not being involved in a church, I have done zero mission or service work other than occasionally volunteering.  That is something I would definitely like to work on.

~*~

Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to attend a camp called Regeneration in Glorieta, New Mexico.  I'd heard of the camp before, but it was the first time that my youth group had decided to go.  All I can say, is wow!  Everything about that week was amazing.  The preaching, the games, the preaching, the people, the preaching, the worship, the preaching...  Okay, you get the picture.

Don't Be Bitter, Be Better

Update:  In the three years since writing this my relationship with my grandmother has not improved.  I'm no longer bitter towards her because of the reasons listed below, but I'm no loner the adoring granddaughter who thought her grandmother could do no wrong.  People always talk about that when you live with someone you get to see everything about them, the good and the bad.  That was certainly the case here, though what became apparent was more bad than good.  The longer we lived together, the more I discovered that I really did not know my grandmother at all and there was a side to her that I did not like at all that drove wedge in our relationship.  The one good thing that came from it all was that it brought my mother and I together.  We'd always had a bit of a rocky relationship, but through the issues that came up with my grandmother we began to talk more and develop a better relationship.  At this point we've become quite close and I'm thankful for that even if it did come at the cost of my relationship with my grandmother.   I still don't like Albuquerque thought I've gotten used to it..  I really am a country girl and anytime I'm able to drive out more into the country whether its back out into the mountains or in more recent times out in Rio Rancho, I'm happy.  I still hate the fact that my dogs are cooped up in their pen and that our cats have never really seemed to adjust to the new house.  I also ended up driving by our home in Edgewood about a year and a half ago and discovered that people who bought our house had gotten rid of my chickens and my rooster which left me in tears.  Despite my love for wide open spaces and a more secluded home, living in Albuquerque isn't completely unbearable and I'm happy with it for now.  I don't plan on living here forever and I still dream of finding some quiet little spot I can call my own.

~*~

Recently I've been struggling with some bitterness towards the last person I ever thought I would be bitter towards:  my grandmother.  Isn't it funny how things can change so fast?  The cause can be directly traced back to my family's move back into Albuquerque.  Now to most people that probably doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but for me, it's been pretty huge.  I'm a country girl at heart, not a city girl.

Considering Thoughts

The other night as I stepped outside of where I work to take out some trash, what greeted me was a thick haze that at first I thought was fog until the overpowering smell of smoke hit me.  My first reaction was panic.  Oh my gosh!!!!  There's a fire in Albuquerque!!!  My second reaction was to calm myself down because if there was a fire in Albuquerque of that magnitude, I would likely be hearing sirens or something.

It turns out the smoke was coming from a fire somewhere in Arizona near the border.  So while my first reaction was to freak out, my second reaction was to look down at my work clothes and realize that they were going to smell like smoke the next time I wore them.  Since I had just washed them, I was not happy.  I voiced my complaints to my dad as I called to let him know that I was heading for home a while later.  But as I drove, another thought came to me.  Here I was complaining about the fact that I was going to have rewash my clothes before work the next day when people in Arizona might not have a home to wash their clothes in anymore or even clothes to wash because of that fire.  Just thinking about that made me realize how selfish I had been.  There were people who had potentially lost their homes or who knows what else in that fire.  Surely that was more important than the state of my clothes!

I realized that I really needed to consider my thoughts and what I'm thinking.  I can choose to complain or I can choose to be selfless and take a moment to pray.  Granted that's not always easy.  We are creatures of sin by nature, and we are selfish by nature.  It can take a concerted effort to get rid of those selfish thoughts and replace them with selfless ones.  Still, it's well worth the effort to do so.  It makes us feel good and it honors God.  Two for the price of one, you can't beat that!

This post was originally published on Sunday, June 5, 2011.

Chivalry Is Not Dead

Years ago, before my family moved and when I was still going to church on a regular basis, I had several guy friends that I would hang out with on a regular basis with some of my other friends.  Whether we were at church or out somewhere, they would always insist on holding the doors open for the girls.  It was one of those simple little things that I just got kind of used to.  A good guy will hold open the door for the girls to go in first.  That was probably at least three years ago.  Since then I've fallen out of contact with most of them.  The only guy I see on a regular basis is my best friend who's like a younger brother to me and the group of friends that we hang out with doesn't generally actually go out anywhere, though if we do, he grabs the door for us young women.  Being the only guy in our little group, he has to act the gentleman which he does perfectly.  But aside from him, the only guys I see are at work and unless you're some really gorgeous girl or an older woman, you get the doors slammed in your face.

Sometimes Being Practical Is No Fun

Do you ever have those moments when you have a choice between two things you want where one is fun but practical and the other is just fun?  Yeah, me too.  I hate decisions like that, but its a part of growing up, something else I'm not a huge fan of.  Can I please just go back to being a little girl playing in the mud not worried about how I looked or what I was going to do with my life?  Nope, stuck being an adult.  Ah, well.  In any case, I recently struggled with one of those choices.  Since its unlikely that I'm going to be able to take any classes at CNM this semester, my parents mentioned that I should check and see if UNM Continuing Education had any cooking classes I could take in the meantime.  So I went and checked and sure enough they had quite a few one night cooking classes.  There were also a lot of other classes with arts and crafts, music, writing, exercise, etc.  As I set about exploring the various classes I could take, the music ones caught my eye.  One of them was for the University Chorus, a choir that you didn't have to audition for that was going to be working towards a performance of a The Defiant Requiem, part of Verdi's Requiem, a beautiful piece of music.  I immediately decided I wanted to take this class not just because of the piece being sung, but because it culminated in a performance in Popejoy Hall.