Pulled.

So here's a rant. Not a big rant... just a little rant. A little bitty one. K. Here I go.

I love friends. I love family. I love relationships. I love the fact that God gave us the ability to find comfort and solace in the presence of others and that we, as human beings, are capable of a a much deeper connection to someone else than that of our furry little friends. I love the fact that there are people in this world that, with one word, can make my day go from lonely and gray to bright and sunny. I love all of these things.

However, there are lots of things I don't love, and one of these things is jealousy. Jealousy is the corruption of a beautiful connection that one has with someone else. In 1st(?) Corinthians... maybe 2nd... I don't remember right now and am not going to look it up, it says "[love] is never jealous" and yet here I am... being torn in about 5 different pieces. I think a lot of it is my fault. I have a really hard time balancing my time between those who are important to me, but the fact remains that those people are still very important to me despite my lack of responsibility and it hurts when it all becomes a battle of who gets what time and who doesn't.

So part of the responsibility is on me, learning to make each person who is important to me feel like they are indeed important. I need to learn how to love each person effectively enough so that they may feel that love. That is totally on my shoulders alone. Yet it's not all about me. So here is what I ask: I'm not sure what has to happen yet, but something needs to change because I can feel myself pulling further and further away from the situation. Love one another. I'm going to need patience as I figure out how best to handle the issues that have recently presented themselves but I ask that everyone have patience with each other as well. This is not something that only my friends and myself struggle with but a common problem among friends. Love one another and realize that as relationships shift and change, that in no way diminishes the importance of each relationship individually.

K. Good. Kind of cryptic, kind of not... but I feel better. Prayers and love.

God bless
Jen

It's Been Awhile... Let's Chat

Hello everyone

So here's the deal... everything is moving way too fast. At any point I'm sure time is going to notice that it's going way too fast for any normal person to keep up with it, but until then I'll just chase after it. Literally, I feel like I hiccuped and everything turned on its head. Now I'm sitting on the ceiling wondering how this all happened. It's always nice to look at things from a different perspective but this is kind of ridiculous.

I'll try and fit everything in without boring you to pieces but it'll be tough:

Signed up for last semester of undergraduate school. All of which are English classes... next semester is going to kill me. By the end though I will be a philosophy and catholic studies double minor and an English major. I should have been able to finish my Spanish minor as well but sometimes laziness gets the best of you :) After that... I'm done with college! Talk about the fastest four years of my life and things don't look they are slowing up after I'm done either. Help.

January is coming up soon and it's going to be ridiculous. Amy is leaving for Hawaii in January, she'll be gone for a month and so I'm just going to be hanging out at the apartment by myself... well probably not by myself but I'm going to miss my roommate. Of course I went to Italy for 4 months and so nobody is sympathetic. Before that I was gone all summer doing youthworks which makes people even less sympathetic. That's legit I think. Adam is also leaving in January. The 12th is going to sneak up on all of us and suddenly it'll be +poof+ he'll be gone. Not just gone, but gone on a boat for 2 years. I've never experienced anyone just leaving like that so it's going to be hard, it's already started to become a difficult fact to face. I'm fully supportive though... I just keep telling myself that. Fully supportive.

Other than that there have been a lot of new developments in my personal life that I'm going to keep very close to the belt for awhile. Things are just so good right now that I don't want to ruin things by making it all public for people to take and run away with. Everything's really simple and uncomplicated and it's been a long time since this type of simplicity has been the ruling order of the day. All the chaos and mayhem from the summer is still very present in the veins of everyone but I've really been blessed to have a truly wonderful close group of people who I care about and who genuinely care about my well-being.

So there it is. All neatly wrapped in a little package for you to enjoy at work, at home or perhaps I've aided in procrastinating homework for yet another 20 minutes. Either way, I hope all of you have a fantastic Thanksgiving holiday, I probably won't write again until after that. Cheers kids!

Happy Halloween!

Have a fantastic evening friends!!

"So Kiss Me, Like You Mean It"

I have an unhealthy fascination with Miss Demi Lovato at the moment and that song is permanently lodged into my mind. Yea for modern tween singers! It's just a really upbeat song and it's really easy to dance to (which from pictures on Facebook you can probably figure out Amy and I love to dance) and it's extremely loud. It's got potential.

My week has been insane and half so I'm not really sure to start. Saturday was work, work, work all day and then I head up to St. Johns for the Luna Negra dance performance on campus there. It was phenomenal. I'm writing a paper on it for Issues in English Studies so maybe I'll post that and you can get an idea of what the performance was about. It was done in three segments and each segment felt so different from the next and yet they were all very interesting aesthetically and choreographically. Loved it. It made me want to dance again, which Amy and I might actually start taking a beginners dance class which could be so entertaining. I think it would be a hoot and a half.

After the performance I was able to visit a bunch of people on campus. I think I even bought some jewelry that a friend of mine apparently makes. They were really beautiful pieces and I'm always about supporting local business ;) . So that was really entertaining. I think I finally went to bed around 3...ish, maybe 4...ish. I didn't actually fall asleep when I finally crawled into bed so I'm not sure what time it was when my eyes finally decided to give way to their tiredness. Either way, Saturday was fantastic.

Sunday I woke up and Jake took me for a little teeny tour around St. Bens. It's what he does. I was fortunate enough to have breakfast in their little caf area and it made me so thankful that I no longer have a meal plan at St. Thomas. Not that the food was bad.... but the food was kind of bad. We hung out for a little bit before he left to go train for his job and I drove home to get my Sunday priorities done.

When I got home, Nick and I went out for lunch, to Target and then we went puppy shopping. Little smoochies :) . I love dogs. They're just so much fun. Snickers is at my apartment right now and I'm trying to decide if it's a good idea to invest in a dog of my own. We'll see, I'm not sure if I have enough time to devote to an animal right now and no matter where you buy a dog, they're always expensive. So right now I'm settling for Snickers. She's fantastic though and Sunday we're going to PetSmart for grooming. She smells bad, her ears are gross, her nails need to be clipped and I need to buy a brush for her so she stops shedding all over the place. I figure while that happening I'll wash her bed so that'll be clean too. Today we went on a walk and I'm actually really surprised at how having a dog makes you immediately the star of the neighborhood.

Anyway, back to Sunday. After Nick and my little endeavour. Eric, Joe and Zach all came over to hang out for awhile. The shelf almost got put up... but no dice on that one. Eventually they all left and Amy and I were left to finish homework (which is what she did) or go to sleep (which was mode of action).

Monday started and life continues as normal. Cheers!

A Sadness of Souls

I feel like the theme since I've been home is... everyone is angry. It literally started as soon as I stepped off the plane, the claws all came out. And maybe it was jealousy, maybe it was misunderstanding, but all in all it really doesn't matter because so many people's feelings got hurt, and now some friendships will never be the same... but not in a good Babysitters Club kind of way. What I can't figure out is, and this seems to be a theme now as my blogs continue, how can "friends" be so vicious to on another? Quarrels are one thing, fights are another, but all out selfish cruelty is something more and more prominent as the calendar days keeping tearing away... and what's worse is that it's between so-called close friends.

Now I am speaking from a female mind, in reference to mostly female relationships. Guys seem to be able to punch and forgive. It's a very easy, controlled way of dealing with issues and it works for them. Women, well everyone knows we don't use physical blows to solve things. But what I want to know is why women, in general, feel the need to cut someone else down in order to justify anger towards someone. Don't get me wrong, I do it too, but that doesn't make it any better of an idea and it still hurts. What's worse though is that I have seen women do this to each other without even being outwardly angry at the other person. They do it because... well because they can.

All of you have heard it. It's as simple as calling each other sluts, whore and the like (even if it's in jest) or it's as complicated as taking out any anger and frustration you're experiencing on the closest girlfriend of yours you can find. You're "sick"... it's not her fault. You failed a test, not her fault. You got fired, not her fault. Friendship is a delicate and blessed relationship but it easily torn if we don't treat with the utmost care and it should always be treated that way. A friendship that has been built on years and years of trust and memories can be ripped to shreds in the course of 5 minutes. Taking advantage of the people we love is hurtful and quickly diminishes their desire to be there for you because they always feel used and like they're nothing other than a tank of gas and a spare set of your house keys.

So what is it in women that drives them to be so cruel? What about our make-up and design creates this similar quality of cattiness and hypocrisy? How is it that one friend is never late, while the other is always late, and the moment the first friend is late it's over like the crack of a shotgun? How is it that the one friend never cancels, the other always does, but the moment the first friend does, all hell breaks loose and there's no talking to the second? There's the give and take rule... but nobody ever seems to want to give. Ever.

I think that most of it has to do with a woman's natural softness of heart. It's been written that women are, by nature, the nurturer of the two genders. Our make-up is simply more socially tied than that of our male counter-parts. Because of this, I think many women invest their heart, soul and mind in friendships and relationships and they become such enormous parts of them that they can't function without constant human contact. They are so encompassed in their relationships that they're not comfortable unless they know what's going on with everyone... always. Then there are those that never felt like they were worthy in the first place and so every plan broken, every date canceled is a personal strike against them. Every unanswered phone call is a new friend they worry about losing, and due to this mindset, they are constantly on edge and easily driven to anger and self pity. Everything is about them. Everything is everyone else's fault, and yet they're broken inside. I think it's heartbreaking to observe these trends in so many women in today's culture.

I worry that nowadays there is no room for women to be fragile. They must be strong, motivated, ambitious in order to be the woman of today. But women should also possess what is most natural to them, softness. In a time when this isn't "social acceptable" many women our slowly floundering with no ability to go up for air.