The Eye-Booger people

7am this morning I stare at myself in the mirror. Tired eyes. Mussed hair. Slightly Frankensteinesque expression. What is on my face? Aoohh, mascara. Wow that looks bad. Good thing I caught that before anybody saw me.

Have you ever noticed that there's two techniques people generally use to say something about a flaw in your physical appearance? There's the gal who will reach out and take that hideous eye-booger out for you, and then there's the gal who says "you have something in your eye" and stares with flared nostrils right at the booger until you remove it. Or how about the guy who congenially corrects you by sneaking in the correct answer/word vs. the guy who loudly exposes your mistake to everyone and their mother?

Grandmotherly vs. Stupid head meany butt-face

or

Considerate vs. Rude

My all-time favorite situation is when my pants zipper is unzipped and the person I'm talking with (inevitably either someone I wish to impress or someone who finds great joy in making our interactions feel like taser training) glances down to my crotch zipper as I'm walking up to him/her; face, crotch, face, crotch. Face.... crotch-face.

"Uhh.... Do you know that your barn door is wide open?"

"What?" My barn door?

"Your barn door. Since lunch your zipper has been down."

*Glance at crotch. DANG it! Awkward dig for zipper.... Continues... I got it. Wait, shoot! no I don't. Come on you stupid, stupid thing. I hate you, I HATE YOU, come ON! Zzzzziiip. My WORD, finally!*

"Thanks! Whew, good thing you caught that!"

 "Yeah, it has been like that since lunch."

Why didn't you tell me that, you poop head?!

"Well thanks for letting me know!"

"Yeah, no problem. Any time."

Yeah, I'm sure...

Those moments age people. They are so crisp - so ripe with fear of ridicule - that you can practically taste the acidity of your pain.

And that is why I like the eye-booger-plucking people. Because they are quick, painless, and efficient. They see the problem, understand the social embarrassment potential, and do what they must to remedy the issue with minimal amounts of drama. None of that snide comment stuff.

Back at the mirror I finish my thoughts, scratch behind me ear, hitch up my Ranger pants and swear to myself that if it's the last thing I do I will be an eye-booger person.

Good Monday to you, my friends.

A Good Butt Kicking By a Good Friend

If you look up "friendship quotes" on Google you'll find a whole lot of quotes that talk about friends being there for each other. Sayings like, "I've got your back", "I'll be the shoulder you cry on" and "Friends are there for one another" are some of the most common.

"Friendship isn't about whom you have known the longest... It's about who came, and never left your side..." - Unknown

"A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be. " ~Douglas Pagels

In short:

Friends are there; thick - thin.

Friends show up when no one else does.

Friends tell the truth.

Friends don't avoid their friends.

... Unfortunately, I'm guilty of being one of those crappy friends. No, really.

I'm not always there through thick and thin; sometimes I run, and run fast.

I don't always show up; sometimes I'm tired, and that's my excuse.

I don't always tell the truth; sometimes, even when I don't outright lie, I just stay silent and let my friends talk without any input, even if an alarm is going off in my head saying "this is wrong, speak up, say something".

And sometimes I just plain avoid my friends. When my life feels like hell (or I rig it up to feel that way) the first thing I do is put my friendships on pause and tell them to shut up, hold on, and wait until I'm in a more secure spot personally to deal with them.

Which means I'm a sucky friend. A really sucky friend.

So why? Why the avoidance? Why the running? Why the place-on-hold shizzle?

I've been asking myself that over, and over, and over, and over. And this is what I've come up with:

When I drop my friends off into the time-out corner, I'm allowing myself to step back from the emotion that stems from caring about them, their lives and their decisions, to solely focus on my own. This is not always a bad thing. It's probably not healthy to always be depressed, sad, excited, anxious, etc, etc, for all of my friends all the time, but I sure as heck should stick by them when they are going through those things.

I'm never going to be in a perfectly stable spot personally. I'll never have everything figured out. There will always be something that comes up which could get in the way if I let it. But that's life and that's just the way things work. That doesn't mean I can check out and expect to check back in to find the status of those friendships exactly how I left them.

I think the difference between the friend I am now and the friend I should be is in the way I am a friend - what kind of friend I am.

You see, you can't always be the friend who's shoulder people set their sobbing head on - sometimes you gotta be the friend that verbally kicks the crap out of their bad ideas. Sometimes you've got the be the bad guy (ultimately the good guy in a disguise, who tells the truth and nothing but the truth so help you God). Sometimes you've got to step out of the whirl of emotions your friend is spewing forth and say, "Buck up, dude. You've got some s**t to work out." (Not that I say s**t - ever. Cause I don't. Hence the asterisks.)

All this to say, I'm renewing the way I approach friendships. No more immersing my weak little heart in everyone's emotional tornados. A little more objectivity. A little more butt kicking. A little more faithfulness. A little less running.

That's the kind of friend I want. So that's the kind of friend I'm going to be.

Downtrodden

What they say about mornings is true: everything is new.

Yesterday was one of those days when I could have sworn the world had forgotten about me. I was distressed, distraught, down, and any other "d" word that explains that awful sad, heavy feeling that holds your optimism down like a ball and chain.

But for some strange and marvelous reason, I woke up this morning feeling revived.
Today, God lifted my chin, pointed my head in Crater Lake's direction and said,

"Ellie, look at me. I am here; I will never leave you, nor forsake you. I love you, and I will keep loving you. Don't forget me."

Dispatch Games

So here in Dispatch at Crater Lake National Park there's a little game we like to play. Called "Ellie's Question of the Day", the game consists of me (Ellie) having nothing else to do with my time but lean back in my puffy black chair and ask random questions that nothing but pure silence and boredom can produce.

There is one rule: am only allowed one question per day. So the questions must be weeded through, evaluated for quality-of-answer-potential, and tested out on Google search before the final question is verbalized to my Comm mates.

"Does a healed broken nose ache when you go up in altitude?"
"What's the 'lime' part of limelight?"
"Do any of you guys know where the phrase "gung-ho" come from?"
etc, etc, etc...

I think my co-workers hate this game.

However, one of them chimed in with her own question the other day:

"Hey Ellie, how do you say teeth plural?"

Anyone can play the game.

WARNING: once you start, there is no going back. You've opened a can of worms. You are forever doomed to think up random questions that can only be answered by obscure, slightly-questionable blogs found on Google. So don't say I didn't warn you.

Nat Geo

There's something addicting about National Geographic's website.

Take, for example, their "Photo of the Day" page. One photo, one day: hooked.
Don't believe me?

Now you do.

Nomad

Finals are wrapped up (tightly and in 'A' form, I do hope), and the next few things to plan for are my au pair trip to France and the Music Therapy audition next spring.

Yes. You heard me right. A trip to France. After discovering that I wasn't going to be able to start my Music Therapy program this upcoming fall (bummer, I know, but that's a different, long and discouraging story) I started surfing the internet for alternative ways to spend my year. The options: working, traveling, or doing nothing.

I pondered over my three options:

I could work - probably SHOULD work - but that's no fun and besides, that's what I'll be doing for the rest of my life, so why join the permanent job ranks so early?

Doing nothing could be fun. Laze around. Eat fruit. Watch other students slave over their homework.

And then there's traveling... Which could still involve lots of fruit and slothery (that's a word), but also include some type of volunteer work, or paid work, or struggling-to-understand-that-roadsign work.

So travel it was - and is.

Shortly after deciding I wanted to travel I came across the term "au pair". I was not aquainted with this term and started researching. Turns out au pairing is essentially nannying for a family in a foreign country. The perks are that you get free room and board and the family is somewhat obligated to show you their culture and teach you their language.

It didn't take more than a couple of days before I had myself a profile on an au pair website and had contacted several host families from Australia and France.

Now, I am currently in contact from a little family in France and planning on flying over mid-September and staying until late December. And yes, I am dang excited.

The family lives about 15 minutes by train outside of Paris, France. They have three children - a 6 yr old boy, 3 year old girl, and 3 month old baby girl - and they want me to come help them learn to speak English. Things are getting underway.

I've skyped with them, during which they told me one of their favorite parts of my profile was the line, "I will encourage the children to be out in the sunshine; to play in the water and feel the grass beneath their feet", which I seriously thought about taking out because it reeked of sappiness. Next on the agenda is applying for a visa and preparing all the documents.

Pretty exciting, no?

So as if that's not enough excitement, I'm also considering backpacking through either Europe or the States (can't decided which; to go where where they speak English, or not to go where they speak English - that is the question) after I get done au pairing.

A lot is up in the air, but better something up in the air than nothing at all.

As for this summer, Crater Lake, weddings and reunions will have me booked and smiling.

2012 has got "incredible" written all over it.

Oh THAT girl!

After an extremely long day of work, Audrey and I talk about the YCC trail crew kids at Crater Lake this year.
Mid-discussion:

Me: "... And the other girl and boy I don't know who they are."
Audrey: "Is the girl pretty?"
Me: "Yeah. She's blonde, about your age. She had a sweatshirt."

*I fall to the ground in exhausted giggles*

Faithful ol' TED

Came upon this talk today as I surfed the TED website. Schools kill creativity; an interesting idea and one that I find resonates with my own feelings about the education system.

Questions I came out with:

As a college student how do I challenge the system that declares "mistakes" to be wrong when I am (quite literally) buying into it?

Is there something about the structure of schools--a physical structure element; spending all day in a small room, seated at a desk, inside a cement building--that stifles our creativity? Would taking our learning somewhere else change the type of results?

The Story Without a Middle or an End

Vervanna was a very peculiar sort of girl. The kind that opened closet doors and stood with her head against the narrow edge and said she could hear the wood whispering dark secrets into her ear. The kind that only drank her milk after it had been frozen completely through and thawed out again. The kind that liked to pet fawns, and geese, and small, warty toads. The kind whom children loved and adults thought, well... rather odd. But odd or even Vervanna was Vervanna, and not one rolling eye or stuck-up nose would change that. Not one until today.

Lavender Blue Dilly Dilly

When Dreaming Ends

This is a story about a girl. No, I guess she's a woman now (much as she'd like to not be yet); this is a story about a woman.

This woman often lives in a make-believe world. And this world is beautiful. In it reside all of the most vivid emotions, colors, characters, and stories that could ever be (or have ever been) imagined.

The woman visits this world often. Some days it is all this woman can do to keep from spending the long hours lost in the world. One blink of the eye and she is easily there. One deep breath and her clothes are transformed, another era has taken over, people exist who have never existed.

In her night-time dreams the woman can see this world, it shimmers and flashes vividly, but when she wakes she finds herself lying in her bed, face up, staring at a moon-lit map on her ceiling.

On long summer days the woman walks among the forests near her home and imagines herself into a new landscape. She dances and twirls among different faces, along long corridors that only exist in the deep pool of her imagination.

But one day, far far in the passage of Time, the woman rocks alone in her chair on her porch. She is old and white; wrinkly and wizened. Back and forth she rocks, singing tuneless melodies to an empty sky. Alone with her dreams, she rocks.

And when a small boy comes down the lane and pauses at her front gate, her eyes flicker to her bare hands spotted with age. She shrugs him away. And she turns her ear to listen to his whistle as he continues down the road, fading into the dust one step at a time.

Saturday Morning

Day Zero.

So this is actually kind of cool:

A website that helps you come up with 101 goals/plans to complete (or attempt to complete) in 1001 days. (I'll help you: that's about 2 1/2 years.) It's called Day Zero.

I have already started coming up with my goals, but it's much harder than it sounds. 101 is a lot. Not to mention the goals have to be semi-feasible. A good resolution, though, right?

I thought so too.

This term is going to be a good one, I think. Full of activities and good cheer.