freshman Mary.

"Freshman Mary" has been coming up pretty frequently in conversations lately. I miss Freshman Mary. She was fun, adventurous, and took risks. Present Mary doesn't feel like that at all. There are no older people around to convince me to do fun things at weird hours of the night or push me to act in ways I would've been terrified to attempt in high school. Now I'm that older person trying to do the same things but it's exhausting. Like seriously exhausting.

But anyway, in the theme of Freshman Mary making a comeback in my day-to-day thoughts and evaluations of Present Mary, I completely randomly ran across this super old post from my freshman year:

Saturday, December 18, 2010

lure of the unknown [and unallowed]

Doesn't it suck that what we want most is what we can't have? And the things we don't know about (or can't know about) are what we want to find out more about? I've been finding this increasingly irritating in my life. It was spurned most recently by a random Amelia Earhart article on my Yahoo homepage, but it goes deeper than that.* I could probably branch off into my own selfishness from here and how it often overtakes me, but I don't feel like wallowing in self-pity tonight, at least not in words. And then developing that branch into how you build character through denying yourself every want but that'll be saved for another night, as well.

Anyway, I guess it all works in faith, too - having an unseen God makes us pursue Him even more. We want to learn more about Him and know as much as we can.

And maybe this isn't the same for every one. I like knowing (and having) stuff I guess.
But I don't know, I think it kind of blows.**



*obviously. I don't think I'd devote an entire blog post to Amelia Earhart (no offense, Amelia).
**at least right now, while I'm in this "life blows sometimes" mood

Man, Freshman Mary was so cool and wise. I hope I'm still this cool and wise sometimes.

rollerblades.

I'm pretty much done with my semester, which means I'm watching a lot of Christmas and "Christmas" movies. Like a lot. And some of them multiple times because AMC and ABC Family like to replay a lot of the movies they show. I was watching Home Alone 2 the other night and was strangely inspired by Macaulay Culkin from back before he turned into a scary man-boy:

Bird Lady: The man I loved fell out of love with me. That broke my heart. When the chance to be loved came along again, I ran away from it. I stopped trusting people.
Kevin McCallister: No offense, but that seems like sort of a dumb thing to do.
Bird Lady: I was afraid of getting my heart broken again. Sometimes you can trust a person, and then, when things are down, they forget about you.
Kevin McCallister: Maybe they're just too busy. Maybe they don't forget about you, but they forget to remember you. People don't mean to forget. My grandfather says if my head wasn't screwed on, I'd leave it on the school bus.
Bird Lady: I'm just afraid if I do trust someone, I'll get my heart broken.
Kevin McCallister: I understand. I had a nice pair of rollerblades. I was afraid to wreck them, so I kept them in a box. Do you know what happened? I outgrew them. I never wore them outside. Only in my room a few times.
Bird Lady: A person's heart and feelings are very different than skates.
Kevin McCallister: They're kind of the same thing. If you won't use your heart, who cares if it gets broken? If you just keep it to yourself, maybe it'll be like my rollerblades. When you do decide to try it, it won't be any good. You should take a chance. Got nothing to lose.
Bird Lady: Little truth in there somewhere.
Kevin McCallister: I think so. Your heart might still be broken, but it isn't gone.

Who knew Home Alone 2 could be so profound?

stress.

I hate the person I become when I'm stressed. I'm controlling, I'm overbearing, I make lists (not the fun kind), I get anxious, I try to plan every second of every day. I hate it.

Spending a year not taking any classes really revealed to me the person I am when I'm actually healthy and my life is in balance. In fact, you can tell I was so calm and in balance because of the lack of activity on this blog for so long - I tend to only update this blog when I feel like there's no other outlet for everything that's been piling up in my head for the past days/weeks/months. Sure there were bumps in the road last year, but the difference was the amount of the sleep I was getting, the amount of time I spent reading my Bible every day, the amount of meals I actually had time to prepare for myself, and the amount of times I was able to bake some cookies just because I damn felt like it.

Today, though, I have papers, presentations, 2-hour commutes to and from Albany every week, clueless "professionals" at Albany to deal with, health problems in the family, and my body's newfound hypersensitivity to gluten that makes me feel like I have double pink eye every time I'm compromised.

I know people are sick of myers-briggs and all that personality type stuff, but I think it's interesting that there's a distinct difference between "healthy" and "unhealthy" types. For me, my healthy type is who I was last year: getting enough sleep, taking care of the people around me the way I wanted to take care of them, not constantly worrying about what my plans for that night were, even getting to read a book every now and then. Now, in my unhealthy type, I find myself trying to control every day - planning out every detail so I can have something to look forward to. It's exhausting. I hate the way it makes me feel. Desperate. Overbearing. Obsessed with the future. That's not me. But I guess I'm just trying to control things in my life that I can since I can't hold any power over the things I can't, like my classes and the idiotic professors at Albany that I'm forced to regularly interact with, or my dad's heart problems, or the constant pressure to make sure you're showering each and every one of your friends with enough attention so they don't think you don't care about them anymore.

Unrelated (but obviously completed related), can girls not be girls and boys not be boys anymore? Girls need to stop reading too much into things and creating drama for no reason, and boys need to communicate better and learn how to start acting like men. I know that's too much to ask and all, but man life could be better.

And now I will continue with my work, feeling slightly better after getting these things off my chest, though also incredibly frustrated with the ways my emotions have taken over my life at a stressful point yet again. Is voluntary hibernation a thing? Or short term comas? Maybe if I just disappear for a few days everything will be better when I come back.

(Yeah, I know it won't actually work like that, don't worry.)

why I always fail at lent.

Today is Ash Wednesday, aka the day I recover from eating too many carbs the day before, aka the day everyone asks me what I'm giving up for Lent and I either (a) answer sarcastically with the gym or salads, or (b) say "I don't know."

It's not that I'm against giving anything up for forty days. In fact, I'm one of those kinds of people who actually likes putting new restrictions/rules on their lives because it's like a game or challenge to accomplish. (Does anyone else like that actually exist? It's okay, don't tell me. I'd rather be ignorant of my weirdness.)

But Lent is a funny time of year for me. I start to get excited because depriving yourself of something usually unhealthy for you for forty days is a great way to kickstart a healthier (more permanent) lifestyle. But when I think of Lent, the only person I see benefiting from the many different ideas I've had of what to give up is me. Everything I think of has absolutely no tie to deepening my reliance on God.

Sure I could give up TV and vow to read more books, but there's always some other vice to fill that void. No TV privileges when I get home from work? That's okay, I'll just busy myself with Flappy Bird, Spotify, and baking unnecessarily. Give up chocolate for forty days? That's okay, ice cream with do just fine. No social media? That's okay, I'll just catch up on Buzzfeed and NYT in my spare time, instead.

And to be honest, if I did take on any of these challenges, I'd only end up praising myself by the end. Wow, Mary, look how many more books you've read because you gave up TV for Lent! Wow, Mary, look how equally unhealthy you are because you gave up chocolate for Lent! Wow, Mary, look how well-versed you are on current events and politics because you gave up social media for Lent!

And so Lent is not a season of the year I'm ambivalent towards or jaded about. It's not a time I resent or roll my eyes at dedicated practitioners. It's definitely not a time I stop eating gluten just because I'll probably drop a few pounds if I do. All of my proposed intentions are insincere. I'm not unwilling, more misguided. Man, fasting altogether would probably be a great challenge with meaningful results, but I have a feeling a lot of people in my life would not approve. Darn extremist personality. All or nothing in everything I do, and this is just another Lent of nothing.

If anyone has some non-starvation ideas for Lent, I'm open to hearing them! I mean, we're only fourteen and a half hours in at this point, so as long as I'm still allowed to drive, go to work, and play Flappy Bird in the bathroom, I should be good to go.