Addiction

How can you tell you're addicted to something? It drives you absolutely crazy when you are without it.

What am I addicted to? Facebook

Man, I confess it is easier than it could have been. But I have 12 days left without it, and I'm starting to go absolutely insane. This is the crucial part of the addiction breaking isn't it? The part where you think you're going to just DIE if you don't have it NOW. Giving in at this point would only strengthen the hold it has on me. But, if I hold out, the wanting-it-so-bad-I'm-going-to-pull-my-hair-out-curl-in-a-ball-and-convulse feelings will subside and the addiction will be broken. And I will be the better for it.

Some people have told me I'm just going to relapse after Easter, maybe, we'll see. I know I'll still spend a lot of time on it, but perhaps going without it for a little while won't be nearly as difficult as it has been. And in 12 days I can say "I gave up facebook for over 6 weeks!"

You better believe though that I'm going to spend all of Easter break posting pictures and catching up on my stalking. The world wouldn't be right if Lindsey gave up facebook stalking.

Nine Thousand Words

A few pictures from the all hall, Missions Conference, and the double date with Amy and Dave.

Enjoying some funkalicious drinks at the
all hall.

Silly candids :)

The Parade of Nations in the opening session.

George Verwer holding up the world.

Donna and Valencia having some doggie bonding time in the back of Dave's car.

On the Hermosa Beach pier

Dave, Amy, and Donna

The day before they got engaged :)

The Lord is Gracious and Merciful

...slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

And he gave me another wonderful week with my wonderful boyfriend. As predicted, Spanish on Tues was painfully slow, it did however eventually end. Raeleen took me to the airport and a slightly amusing story ensued.

When we got there, Tad was still waiting for his bag, so Raeleen suggested I go in and find him and surprise him. Great idea, except that neither of us had noticed we were at the drop off section, not pick up. I was greeted with ticket counters upon entering the terminal. I called Tad and was told "ok, do us a favor, stay right where you are, I'm coming to find you." I did as I was told and several minutes later received a phone call "Are you upstairs, or down?" "Down" "No, you're upstairs." "what? no I'm not, I can see escalators going up-" At this moment I was glomped behind by a very attractive young man. Long story short, I was a level above where he was. Luckily he was smart enough to figure that out.

We had dinner in the caf with a large group of Hart people and then hung out in the lower lobby with Justine for a couple hours. Then it was time for our funk-tastic all hall. Seriously, Hart is amazing. People were dressed up like out of the 70's and it was a totally lower campus all hall. Dancing, drinking, an gambling...kinda, haha. Mel and Beardo were our fabulous "bar tenders." Shirley Temples, Sprite with margarita mix, and Sprite with rainbow sherbet. It was basically a casino night: bingo, craps, black jack, and poker (with chips, not money). And the dancing...well, some of it was choreographed, no comment on the rest. ;)

Highlights from the evening include Tad getting "drunk" off a Shirley Temple, Justine teaching me how to par-ty, "hey, stop spooning me in the lobby!", and Ryan Low singing play that funky music white boy.

Wednesday brought the opening session for Missions Conference. "Fragrance of a New Covenant" was the theme for this year. Tad, Becky, and I sat in the gym for the opening session with the parade of nations and George Verwer (our graduation speaker this year) pouring a bottle of water over his head, frying a mic. I absolutely love Missions. We switched to Crowell for the afternoon session with Marilyn Laszlo (amazing!) and checked out the mission organization booths. After dinner Tad and I took advantage of there being open hours; he napped and I worked on homework. We finished off the evening by raiding the International House of Drinks and hanging out in Eagles.

Thursday we went to a really cool seminar on missions at home in America and enjoyed the ethnic lunch on Metzger. We timed it just right to get through global awareness. This year's rooms were Uganda, Honduras, Iran, China, and Burma. Poor Valencia got very frightened in Burma because of the army kidnapping people.

The afternoon speaker was Grant Porter, an Aussie who has been working on the field in the Middle East. I slipped out a little early from the ession to get ready and go to my interview at Chapman. It went really well, and I'm rather excited to hear back from them now. The sad part was that they were running 45 minutes behind schedule, so I missed Marylin's second session. I also missed the capand gown buying time in the bookstore, but Tad was amazing enough to get mine for me, before I called to ask him to do that.

Friday morning Tad wasn't feeling well, so I went with Justine to Marilyn's final session. I really enjoyed her. I bought her book and had her sign it for me. I ended up collecting 4 books over the course of the week. After George Verwer's first session I bought "Amazing Faith" which tells little bios about a lot of different people, including George Verwer. Tad and I got "Revolution in World Missions" free from the Mission for Asia table in the missions booths. They gave out free copies of "The Skeptic's Guide to the World AIDS Crisis." And of course Marilyn's book "Mission Possible" about her work with the people in Papua New Guinea.

After lunch Tad and I got ready and met up with my friend Dave and went to meet his girlfriend (now fiance) Amy at the CSUN technology conference at the Marriott in LA. Us two couples went our separate ways to check out the exhibit halls. I found a couple of things I was veyr interested in: a *good* portable CCTV and a portable zoomtext-like program on a flashdrive. I shall look into both of these things further. The exhibits closed at 5, and at that time we went to Amy's room at the Marriott to feed our doggies. Amy has a yellow lab guide dog named Donna. Donna and Valencia were overjoyed to get to have some play time.

Once the pups had eaten, it was time for the people to. Dave drove us to Hermosa Beach where we walked the pier. It was overcast, but still beautiful. I will never get over how amazingly gorgeous the ocean is. One of Dave's friends from back home in Wisconsin, A.J. met us for dinner at a seafood place called "Sangria." Amy and I discovered that the couples had ordered the same things. Amy and I both got shrimp scampi and Tad and Dave both got chicken picante.

Anyway, so Dave's friend A.J. does a comedy magic sketch at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach (the club where Jay Leno presents his weekly sketches) and offered to get us in for free to the show that night. We certainly couldn't have said no to that! We had a little while to wait after dinner and move our group to get gelato. It was very tasty! The show was really enjoyable. I was very happy that all but one of the comedians had very clean routine's. After the show we got our picture taken with Larry Miller, the headliner, dropped Amy off at her hotel, and returned to Biola.

Saturday and Sunday were a little dull, as they were spent catching up on all the homework I hadn't been doing. Sunday we did get to church at Redeemer and had lunch at Panera with Kathleen. And (to my inevitable sadness) Tad flew home yesterday.

So yes, a very, very fun week. I'll post pictures in another entry, as this one is plenty long enough already :o)

Top o' the Morning to Ya!

Happy St Patrick's Day! A day originally to celebrate St. Patrick chasing the snakes out of Ireland, now a day for Americans to celebrate *something*, wear green, and in secular culture, go drink at a pub. Gotta love Americans :)

I am very excited about my plans for today (no, they do not include a pub, thank you very much). Tad is currently in Seattle waiting to catch his plane to LAX. Knowing this will make it very difficult to sit through Spanish Literature this afternoon. Raeleen agreed to take me to pick him up. He's flying in just in time for our "St. Patrick's Day Funkship Cruise" All Hall. Have I ever mentioned that I love Hart?

Tad will be here until next Monday. He really enjoyed Missions Conference two years ago when he came, so we thought we'd bring him for it again. Other plans for this week include an interview at Chapman (hopefully on Thursday, that's been a little bit of craziness) and hanging out with Amy, Donna (the yellow lab) and Dave at the beach on Friday. I still have a lot of homework looming over my head, but I can take a couple days off to not think about it.

Anyway, I'm off to enjoy corn beef and cabbage or "Luck of the Irish Green Mac & Cheese" in the caf. God bless

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Last Friday and Saturday was our spring floor retreat. There were about 15 of us who went, which in my opinion is a good number for a "large" group. We went to Shanelle's house in Valencia, so I was quite happy to take Valencia somewhere that bears her name. Charlotte had made CDs for each car to listen to on the drive up, gotta love random 90s CCM and Disney songs, haha.

There was a surprising lack of Friday evening traffic on the 5, so we made it in pretty good time. Shanelle's house is really nice and her family was very welcoming to us. Upon arrival we took some time to relax with chips and salsa and a few teen magazines. I should mention that our theme was "sleepover" in case that might clarify a few things. We made personal pizzas for dinner. It's amazing to me the variety the caf has for pack out meals. Anyway, we enjoyed pizzas and just hanging out.

After dinner we played a couple rounds of Truth or Dare Jenga (always interesting, espeically with Biola people) and several rounds of Twister in our pajamas. There were definitely some fun photo moments in there. :)

Let's recap, random 90s music, chips and salsa, pizza, truth or dare, twister, teen magazines...what are missing? More junk food and a movie! We made some pretty amazing icecream sundaes and watched "Made of Honor" Interesting movie, good for a sleepover, enjoyable enough, but I don't know if I'd necessarily opt to watch it again. After the movie some people wanted to watch another one, but about half of us (who had the "sleep deprived college student" mode kick in) opted to go to bed. I was very glad I did the next morning when I heard they had watched Edward Scissorhands, I hate that movie, but that's for another discussion.

I definitely got way more sleep that night that I had in quite some time. In the morning we had our caf pack out breakfast and slowly got ourselves ready to head back to school. We stopped at a mall foodcourt for lunch and then trekked back to homework land.

Really fun relaxing weekend, I needed that. In the meantime, I'm feeling fairly alright with my wschoolwork load. I read about 200 pages this weekend, but enjoyed all of it. I highly recommend reading "When God Weeps" by Joni Earackson Tada, it's amazing, a little intense, but amazing. The news for the week is that I'm on the waitlist for acceptance into San Diego State. I'm #4 out of 28 on the list, so I'm really hoping and praying that means I'll get in.

Enjoy a few pictures from the weekend :)


Discovering that Twister is a little difficult with six college students at a time

Normal

Over the last 3 days I have come to the conscious conclusion that I am normal. Of course, it has been forming in my subconscious for the last month, but only this week I am fully realizing how not messed up I am.

This is what group is so helpful for: coming to an understanding that I am not alone in anything I struggle with. A little bit of personality type reading has also helped to perpetuate this epiphany. I shared the Myers-Briggs test with a friend, who became very excited about it. She came up as an INFJ, which happens to be the same as Tad. I am an ISFJ. Anyway, she was sending me snippits of her personality profile, so I decided to look mine up again.

Well what should I find in my profile, but the following:

"One ISFJ trait that is easily misunderstood by those who haven't known them long is that they are often unable to either hide or articulate any distress they may be feeling. An adult ISFJ may drive a (later ashamed) friend or SO into a fit of temper over the ISFJ's unexplained moodiness, only afterwards to explain about a death in the family they 'didn't want to burden anyone with.'"

Is that not what I started going to counseling for? I read that and thought to myself "This is a part of my personality, it's *normal*" Now, is it good? No, it isn't healthy for anyone to keep things to themselves. But there are a TON of human tendencies that are unhealthy and need to be overcome. For right now it is enough, and an immense relief to realize that I'm no more messed up than anyone else on this planet.

Therapeutic Ranting

we'll see if it actually is therapeutic or not. in any case, it won't be anything particularly enjoyable to read

I'm so flipping frustrated right now. I'm mad, frustrated, discouraged, and tired. I have a presentation in Spanish in about an hour and a half, and my presentation sucks. I was all excited about my topic, which I had talked to the prof about, and then someone else wanted to do the same one. He suggested one of us do a different part of the book we were interested in. Wanting to be nice, I said I'd do the other part, only to find that there is NO INFORMATION on it, ANYWHER

I don't understand why a professor would suggest a topic that he SHOULD know there isn't information on. Where am I supposed to get this from, pull it out of a hat???? So thanks to lame-o presentation topic i have a lame-o presentation which I'm not excited about. I'm also not excited about anything else today, tomorrow, this week, or in life right now. I just don't care. I'm so done with homework. All I do anymore is homework, EVER

I want to crawl somewhere and not come out. But I can't, I have to go give a lame Spanish presentation.

Suckiness

Don't Be Sorry

A common response to "I'm sorry". Generally I shrug it off as an almost rote response, but when a friend said it tonight, I stopped to think about it. This is in part thanks to group last week. One of the members was sharing about something traumatic, at least from most perspectives, in his past. The counselors asked how the rest of us felt hearing about it. I communicated (in a very emotional sounding voice, I was getting a little too close for comfort to tears) how sad I was for him, and how I couldn't imagine being in that situation.

The counselor noticed the emotion in my voice and commented on it. I mentioned that I have always been very good at empathizing with people. This was interpreted to mean that I related to the other group member's story, but I don't. I mean, as was pointed out, we all experience loss, but I haven't experienced anything anywhere near what he has.

I just always imagine what I think it would feel like to be in someone else's situation. Sometimes it makes me happy, other times angry or frustrated, and still others it makes me incredibly sad. I feel other's pain deeply, which is a big part of why I can't have too many people at once confiding in me; it becomes overwhelming.

So when a friend told me something that they felt sad about, and I responded "I'm sorry" and I was beginning to feel that sadness myself, "don't be sorry" caught my attention. I thought about it; I don't have to feel the same thing the person oes to be supportive. I don't need to subject myself to pain to relate to people. There's enough pain in life without creating more for myself.

Goal: Keep more of my own composure so I can be encouraging and helpful to people who are hurting.