Back?

Howdy folks!

So I decided that I should at least try to get back in the game of blogging--why, I'm not sure. I like blogging just fine, but it's just another thing to take time out to do--time I'm finding increasingly hard to pull out of thin air. :) But like I said, I do enjoy it, so here I am! Plus I felt bad for all my friends who blog and get nothing from me in return. :) It must be admitted though, that I definitely did my fair share of blogging during my trip--just not on this particular blog. Besides the point though.

So this is going to be super boring, and basically end right now, but I just wanted to officially put it out there that the blog is back in my thoughts again, and next time I think of something interesting (actually, that's always up for debate I suppose, haha) and am not drowning in schoolwork (a fie upon you and your boring books, Henry Fielding...), I will try and blog a bit! Until then, friends.

Just a quick note to you guys...

I am sorry that I haven't written more in the last...couple of months, ipes. Things have been so busy with school, and Romania, and now I'm in Romania, and oh man. I've just had such an overload of thoughts, and emotions, and ugh, everything, that I haven't been able to bring myself to write anywhere else than a couple of emails, the odd Facebook message, and the trip blog I'm writing for everyone. I'm not even writing in my own personal journal right now. There's just so much writing to do already, I can't bear to spend an extra five minutes on the computer as it is. So this leave of absence will mostly continue. :) Sorry! Enjoy whatever's going on in your lives, and happy holidays! Sarbatori fericite!

The tongue no man can tame!

Oh stars. Don't you just love when Today's Life Lesson With Love From the Lord is so clear? I do.

"You have got to stop talking!" I heard those exact words from multiple people today. As harsh as they may sound (maybe they don't sound harsh--maybe you've had to listen to me a time or two haha), it was all in the name of being considerate and helpful, since my voice decided to take a vacation this morning. A weekend full of chilly air, road-trip karaoke, hayrides, campfires, and hymn sings took its toll by Lord's Day morning, and my voice had checked out. I, however, being the talker that I am, just couldn't hack the lack of communication, so I spent all day trying to squeak out as much as I could, and lots of people spent all day rebuking me for the abuse I was laying on my vocal cords. However, in their rebuke, I felt a Stiller, Smaller rebuke. You know the voice.

It's something I've been feeling a little poked about for quite a while now. I say lots of words to lots of people. Some people talk a lot, but do it quietly. Some people don't talk much, but when they do, you hear it. I happen to have the "best" of both worlds. I am a rambling queen, and I do it at a decibel level that some people equate more with yelling.

I think part of my poked-ness is a little about self-consciousness--it bothers me how loud I am. I honestly can't hear it most of the time. If someone points it out to me, I can tell, but I am usually blissfully unaware of the loudness left to my own devices. I can't count the number of times I've felt like I was just speaking normally and seen my listener grab their ears in agony. It's embarrassing actually. I always used to get really discouraged when I read the verses about having a meek and quiet spirit, because there is nothing quiet about the real me (my I-don't-know-anyone self can be pretty silent, but she doesn't get out much). I eventually realized when I was a little older that a quiet spirit is different than a quiet mouth.

But I've also been realizing that a quiet mouth has got a value of its own. In the interest of scaring people less often, I've been trying to take the noise down a notch in the actual-amount-of-noise-you-hear sense. But I feel like the Lord's been working with me a little bit to take the noise down as in the amount of ridiculous and unnecessary words that I speak. And having my voice all of a sudden vacate my premises was kind of like a little "Know that I'm not joking about this," from the Lord.

It's just that I spend so much time talking about nothing. Either I'm talking frivolous and trivial things, or I'm complaining, or I'm talking about myself, the list goes on and on. I'd be afraid to calculate what percentage of my audible speech is actually about the Lord, or how much of it is in the interest of those walls we're building up for Him. So much of my breath is wasted in talk of worldly things, in complaint, in passive boasting--I won't mince words, I am sometimes boastful and proud even if I try and hide it in the way I word things--and it makes me scared to think of being at the Seat, watching the Me slideshow with my Lord, and seeing how little of my time, my activity, my voice was really truly devoted to Him.

So having my voice gone, even for just this short amount of time (maybe it was more of a staycation--it kind of comes and goes a little bit) has just been like the Lord's showing me how ugly my mouth can be, and yet the potential it has for good. Just, when there's only so much you can get across, you don't want to waste your energy on words that don't matter. You want to spend your time conveying to people important messages.

I don't want my mouth to open up and spout a bunch of icky stuff with a little bit of His sweetness mixed in. I want Psalm 51:15--"O Lord, open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall shew forth Thy praise." I don't want Him to open my lips only to hear a bunch of garbage spill out. So instead of letting me empty my cotton-candy-and-garbage filled mouth (to avoid confusion, I mean cotton candy as unsubstantial and empty, completely separate from the "sweetness" reference earlier haha), He's shutting it temporarily, I think so I can see what's going on in there, and what's going on in my heart, to produce such garbage, since we all know that out of the abundance of the heart man--or wo-man--speaketh.

So for the next day or two, my mouth will be a little less flappy than usual, and will hopefully get on a path to staying that way. No man can tame my tongue, but the Lord is no mere man. He's Almighty God, and He's up for the challenge if I let Him.

What good even IS a shower then?

This blog must be super boring to basically anyone who lays eyes on it. I feel like I'm no fun anymore! I am slowly making the switch to responsible adult, and that scares me, because I haven't learned yet how to walk the line between "responsible" (read, boring) adult and hooligan kid. It seems I'm always either one or the other. I'm either getting busted breaking curfew, or asleep before ten, before the legitimate old people quiet down.

I know I'm not a boring person by nature, at least I hope, but I need to learn to do fun stuff, without it being super childly. Like, I was just realizing today, I stopped singing in the shower! Like a long time ago! How sad is that?! It's really sad, for all of you who don't do that. You should start. I'm going to.

I don't need any help being immature--I feel like I've basically written the book--but I do sometimes need to loosen up about things, and relax. I've been reading a bunch on mylifeisaverage.com, and it's been depressing me, because I used to have oodles of stories that were worthy! But most of them were not mine, and I can't think of very many past high school, and I can think of none recently. I miss magical life! This kind of hearkens back to my "This is the day" post a while back.

Just, the Lord has made so many great things, and there are so many little ways to find a little bubble of--laughter, joy, magic, whatever--in life all the time! That's probably the cheesiest thing I've ever said, but it's true! So tomorrow, I'm maybe going to play in the leaves with my dog. Or maybe leave a "Pick me!" note in a favorite book for some future reader in the library. Or maybe just sing in the shower? Oooh, I have to pick a song! :) I miss being excited about little things...

Writing?! I feel old...

So writing in general does not make me feel old. It makes me feel good, and sparkly, and smart. I thoroughly enjoy writing. I find what makes me feel old is reading writing I wrote in days of yore. Yuck.

So I just googled my old-slash-junk email address to see what came up, and one of the three or four results was...(dun, dun, DUN) my old xanga. Ugh. It pains me even to type the word xanga. It seems like such an emo-kid thing looking back at it. I know normal people had-slash-have xangas, but for me, I got it during a period where I was like, into Christian rock (not K-love-contemporary stuff, but like legit rock), and legitimately emo. I didn't even know I ever was! One of my sundry and divers bffs (aren't I glamorously popular) is reading all her old journals, and we're finding out she was legitimately emo too. I thought I was a pretty chill teenager, like I'm a pretty chill adult right now. I don't stress too much, I try not to whine a lot, and I would consider myself a super happy person, relative to most of the world.

But wow, was I ever wrong about my old-timey self. I kept the xanga for basically my junior year of high school. As 21 year old me remembers, junior year was like my fave teenage year. I had the most fun at school--senior year would've been more fun if my school bff didn't die in the middle of it, buuuuuut...she did, so not as much fun as it could've been. I promise, I'm not trying to be emo right now. :) I've healthily worked through that deal, seriously. But so in my memory, junior year was for serious good times, albeit busy ones. But reading that xanga, wow. I WAS EMO. It makes me want to cry. And privatize all the posts. Which I've since done. I'm keeping them so maybe one day if the Lord leaves us and gives me teenagers--my own kid form, or cool aunt-niece-nephew type--I can prove to them that I really do know what it's like to be emo and teenagerly.

And I would not have wanted to be friends with my old self. It seemed like I spent the whole time posturing, saying stuff that, looking back, was obviously an attempt to coolify myself or something, and listening to music that I pretended was all top-forty-deviant, and mature for me to have picked...I was...I don't even know. not such good times.

Like I've read bloggish things, and like myspaceish stuff of different teenagers, and I'm always struck with a do-you-think-life-is-really-like-this type reaction, and think like, get over it, teenage life is not that crazy. It was scary though, because I got the same exact feeling reading my own blog from being seventeen. I'm just glad that nearly five years are now separating me from my 17 year old self. I went through an old journal the other day, where I said something about being embarrassed to read some of it "five years from now," when I realized that it had legitimately already been five years since I wrote it.

I've consciously felt like a separate entity from my thirteen and fourteen year old journal self, but this is the first time I've ever realized how much I've changed since even my older high school years. Like last time I re-read my xanga stuff, which, granted, was like 2 years ago or something, I remember being kind of proud of how funny it was. So I was excited to find it again, but once I started reading, I was like, how could I ever have liked that I wrote this?! It was just as embarrassing to read 17-year-old-me's journal at 21 as it was to read 13-yr-old-me's journal at 17. Makes me feel kind of old, that I can't connect to my teenage self anymore.

And I just want to say right now, if I ever start blogging like an emo, teenagerly little girl, please slap me well upside my head. I don't even know. And my new prayer is that I've somehow become a better writer than what I apparently used to think was good. Yuck. We'll see how like, 30 year old me looks at this blog. Ipes. Time is so weird...

Romania: Reexamined

Sometimes, I astound myself. It is 1:23 am as I'm beginning this. I have oodles of school to do, an alarm set for quarter to six, and about a million hours of work to do tomorrow. And yet, here am I, cleaning my nails of wedding polish (can you say ew?) and...blogging. BUT! I promised. About the blogging, not the polish removal. Though I wish someone would hold me accountable for that too sometimes...another story.

So mostly-non-existent readership, permit me to do some more Romania talk. Would you believe it--since I last wrote, I have become the proud owner of transatlantic plane tickets with British Airways to--would you believe this too--Bucharest. I'm here not to defend my plans exactly--no one is being accusatory or anything--but rather to explain some more I guess?

The truth is, I don't really know what I'm doing anymore than anyone else can see. To a lot of people, this probably looks like either a) a crazy, ill-planned adventure for a stir-crazy fool, or b) an ill-planned ploy to--and it pains me to even acknowledge this really--catch a husband. I'll go with a) first.

This does seem crazy. I spent two weeks some place, and all of a sudden it's everything, and I go out of my way to spend a bunch of money and time getting back. To everyone, and even to most of me, that seems ridiculous, and foolish, and crazy. But the other part of me, and probably no one else, knows that this is supposed to be happening. The Lord has been very, very clear with me about this. I am meant to get on that plane, and go see those people. I don't mean to sound all extra in tune spiritually, but the Lord and I are friends. Why shouldn't He tell me stuff? And one thing He has told me is to go back to Romania.

I left Romania thinking dually, 1. I need to get back to that place! and 2. everyone says that, and much less than everyone actually follows through. This is not to say boo on everyone who has only been once--not at all. Going at all is a great sacrifice, and a wonderful service. And I fully understand that there are reasons people can't always return. And maybe the Lord wouldn't have them to! He tells us all different stuff--duh. But coming home, I felt Him very clearly telling me, it doesn't have to be like that. You don't have to go, and make connections, and be touched by people, and then never see them again until you're together in glory. You don't have to ignore what you feel for them. You can take that love, and live it, in this case, by making a crazy-looking, out of the blue trip just to visit. I mean, I don't expect to be any great, huge help, and I don't flatter myself thinking that I'm going to be some wondrous encouragement. But I do know this: that it means a lot to them to have visitors, and it means a lot to me to be with them.

So as wild and nonsensical as it seems, I'm just trying to be obedient. It's not hard when I'm loving the idea. :) And oh boy, the second one's a doozy. The (dun, dun, DUN) marriage one. Ipes. This is the thing people who don't even bother to consider the crazy part. They just see girls going to a place where there are boys, and it equals someone wants to marry (I say marry, because dating is basically a non-anything for my kind of Romanians)

Okay, first of all, I am not even 22. There is no reason to pull out the stops and be a husband hunter right now. 22 is not supposed to be an age of desperation, and I refuse to treat it as such. Not every move I make is made as the means to a marital end. But that is a whole other blog post, my friends.

And as much as I understand the curiousity--I'd probably say the same thing if I weren't me--I almost a little bit resent the implication. Part of what drew me to the trip was the fact that in the past, so many of the Romanian-returns have been because of romantical possibilities. They were I think all on the d-l, but very few have returned to Romania without some ulterior motive involving, ahem, marital bliss, if even on a superly distant horizon. And maybe this is silly, but to me, realizing that was like a punch in the gut somehow.

How is it that only romantic prospects have been able to draw any number of people back to Romania? Like I don't want it to sound like I'm trying to be all heroic, and exemplary because I shelled out for a plane ticket even without a possible husband lying in wait. But one of the reasons I was so happy to plan to go back is I wanted to say, Look Romanians! You're enough! Even you minus the engagement ring! (except my kind of Romanians don't wear engagement rings, but you get the picture) I just kind of wanted somebody to break the mold and be able to go just for the sake of friendship and brotherhood in Christ. And also, to show future Romania travelers, or even past ones, that it doesn't have to be a "once-in-a-lifetime adventure!" (ugh, it bothers me a lot when people refer to it as such--there are people there, and Romania is their home and reality, not just our virtuous-summer-vacation hotspot), and that you really can go back! There's no rule that says you can only visit Romania if you're scoping out spousal applicants. It's not as if I'm the first one ("we," my traveling friend included), but it's just something I feel strongly about.

That having been said, I have to say something too, in order to fulfill my original obligation. This post was to put at ease the mind of friends, a specific one in particular. I already said this, at least to this friend :), but I have no plans to move to Romania. I have no plans to move anywhere. But I will be honest and say, if something came up and there were an opportunity or reason to move to Romania, I would absolutely pray seriously about it, and have no problem saying yes if I felt like it was the Lord's mind. But at the same time, I would say the exact same thing if the place in question was, say, California. Or Pennsylvania. Or Rockford for pity's sake.

Like I said, I have no plans to move to Romania. and I would be extremely surprised if that's what the Lord had for me. But the reality of the situation is, if it won't be Romania, it'll be someplace else. I have no delusions that I will somehow end up living in this area--the very likely truth is that I will live somewhere that isn't here, and probably somewhere at least vaguely far from here. That said, I have no plans to move away from here at all, not yet. Who knows what He has in the future, but for now, I am firmly planted. And even if I had to be firmly planted across oceans, or just across state lines, I would still be me, and my friends, you would still be you, and I would still love you and talk to you and what not. Our faces would just be farther away, that's all. :)

I'm not sure what all else there is to be said in the way of reassurance, but what I do know is that I have to get up in about 4 hours to take my g-ma to the airport. Goody. My sincere apologies for such a boring, self-centered, self-righteous, not funny blogpost. I hate blogs that aren't funny. Blech. Anyhow, I hate four hours of sleep even more, so I'm going to try and make it slightly over. Good night to allllll....

România frumos...

I just wanted to quick post a picture, number 1 to see if I could, and number 2 to have a picture of my beloved on my blog. : ) I am obsessed, I wasn't lying. : )

Te iubesc, România...