It’s been a while, guys.

Hey, guys!  I know, it’s been a long time.  I’ve written maybe three things in the past six months, and that’s pretty not cool.  But if you were wondering how I’ve been doing, I feel that this picture pretty much sums it up:

Basically, I have traded in my blood for coffee.

This past semester has been the most difficult that I’ve had yet, and I find myself missing the relatively light workload that I had my freshman and sophomore years.  Junior year is tough!  I basically haven’t been sleeping, and I’ve completely lost motivation to actually get work done and study.  Because of this, I definitely am seeing lower grades than normal.  Granted, low grades for me means that I’m getting more Bs than As, but it’s still two more Bs than normal in a semester.

I’ve just felt like I’ve been rushing with no breaks.  The moment one exam or paper or print is finished, I’m starting another because I’m already behind.  Plus, all of my classes have been more labour intensive than usual, which adds an extra element that I hadn’t really been expecting.

I also moved off of campus for this semester, so I’ve been adjusting to living in a house with Noah and Jess.  Not that it’s a major adjustment, though.  We get along marvellously, I love having a room to myself to decorate and be introverted in, and I’ve enjoyed doing my own cooking.  Sure, I miss the conveniences of living on campus, but all-in-all, I’m satisfied with the change.

This is where I spend the majority of my time not sleeping and instead studying, reading, and wasting my life on tumblr.

Meanwhile, I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping level-headed and maintaining my weight since August.  I’ve been under a lot of stress because of complications with getting my fake tooth, where everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and it put me into a mini depression that ended up rearing its ugly head once course work got rolling.  I spent a lot of August, September, and October absolutely hating myself, and it only started to get better last month.  With every wrong move I’d make, a little voice in my head would just whisper I hate myself. or I hate everything.  I’ve never been the type of person to put myself down in this kind of way.  Sure, I’m hard on myself, but I’ve never felt such a hatred for myself.  It was getting absolutely unbearable, and I’d begin to beat myself for beating myself up.

In the end, I probably needed some sleep.  I needed time to find a sense of self that was healthy.  I needed Thanksgiving break.  Things improved over that time.  I didn’t get ahead on coursework, and I didn’t get a long list done that I needed to in Saint Charles.  But I did get my tooth (finally!), and I picked up a few more articles of clothing that would fit me better, and I finally had time to just sleep and day-dream.  It was such a relief.

I’m feeling a lot better now, but, coming back for the end of the semester is still difficult.  Last week contained most of my finals and papers/projects due, and there were some nights where I literally didn’t go to bed and had to squeeze in an hour around midnight so that I could work during the early morning hours when I feel most mentally awake.

Sunday night: 4 hours
Monday night:  3 hours
Tuesday night:  6 hours
Wednesday night: 2.5 hours
Thursday night: 1 hour

It’s been a bit rough, but I’ve found that I can get a lot done even on very little, if no, sleep.  I know that it’s not healthy.  I know, I know, I know.  It’s just how I operate as a procrastinator and some-what perfectionist.  They go hand in hand, really.  You procrastinate because of the fear that you won’t reach perfection.  But when you don’t have enough time to reach perfection, you self-handicap and say that it’s all right that you didn’t reach the point you had wanted.  After all, you’d had so little sleep last night, how could you have gotten higher than a B on that exam?  (Oh, poor baby.  Bleh.)

I mentioned earlier that I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping my weight at a stable level.  For the entirety of my life, this would mean that I’ve gained a bunch of weight and am feeling all self-conscious about it… until now.  I don’t know how, but I’ve lost twenty pounds in only three months.  I went from being near 160 to 142.  Everyone I’ve told gives me some type of congratulation as though I’ve been working so hard or something, but I just stand there thinking, But this is not what I wanted!  I haven’t tried to lose weight.  I don’t like that I can’t fit into any of my clothing; I figured I’d be a size twelve for years, so I’d started buying my clothes to last and cost more.  Suddenly, I don’t fit into any of my skirts or pants or bras.  My shirts aren’t tugging in the same ways (hell, I can now wear shirts that I haven’t been able to fit into since I was fourteen).  I look at photos of my face from earlier this year, and I literally can’t recognise myself (okay, this may be because of the prosopagnosia, but disregard that) because I’ve lost so much weight from my face.  My arms look different, my collar bones show more, my cheek bones seem a bit  higher, my legs more defined, my stomach flat.

I am beautiful.  And I am completely frightened.

I can’t stop losing weight, and I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know if I believe the people who have told me that it’s from walking more with living off campus or because I’m cold all of the time and using more energy to keep warm.  I feel bad every time I look in the mirror and think I look good, because this can’t be healthy.  And then I argue with myself because I shouldn’t feel bad about being happy with the way I look.  It’s just an odd situation that I’ve never been in before, and I don’t know how to deal with it.

I don’t really know how to deal with anything, actually.  But… that’s okay.  It’s been okay for about a week now.  Between panicking and extreme euphoria and an excessive amount of work, this past week has been interesting, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.  I wish I could tell you more at this point, but I’m still trying to find my footing.  Just suffice it to say that something is going really, really well, and I can’t remember the last time that I was this happy.

So, while I leave you on a note of mystery, I hope it was positive.  Because I’m feeling positive, even with all of the stress that I’ve carried for the past few months.  Sometimes, life is pretty good, and there are blue skies, and you can’t help but smile.

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Everyone is a potential lunatic.

Including me.  Or so Natalie Tran has taught me.

Jess, Noah, and I have been looking around town lately for houses.

Wait, I just started this blog out bluntly.  Let’s start again:

Two weeks ago, it dawned on me that leases for houses and apartments are signed around October, and I suddenly found myself in panic mode to start looking for off campus housing for next year.  Cue crazy plans and drama and hours of searching and falling from plan A to B to A again to C to D.

Now, before you ask me why I’d want to live off campus even though I absolutely love it here in 1 North, I’ll tell you.  First, it’s cheaper.  About four thousand dollars per year cheaper.  Second, I will no longer have to take out student loans, which means I could possibly graduate with only 12,000 dollars of debt.  Freaking spectacular, really.  Third, ResLife really messed around with my dorm house over this summer, switching rooms, suddenly adding room mates, turning our dorms into offices and then placing us in the Romance Language house (when literally 90% of the house is in German), et cetera.  So, all of us in 1 North have been looking into moving out for the next school year.

After a lot of my plans fell through, it ended up being Jess, Noah, and me looking for an apartment or house together, and Jess ended up getting in touch with this really nice guy who rents out houses three blocks from campus.  We found out that he had three three-bedroom houses for rent next school year, and next thing we know, a group of nine of us from 1 North was on its way to tour through these houses.  And you know what?  They were nice.

Sure, not the greatest houses in the history of mankind, but definitely nice.  The price, around 700 dollars per month (then split three ways) is a good place to start, the landlord is incredibly nice and quick to fix any problems (we talked to the tenants about this), and the house has lots of perks.  A brand new washer and dryer, the option to paint any room whichever colour you’d like, a basement with plenty of storage space, two bathrooms, a kitchen with stove and fridge, dining room, living room, and hard-wood floors!  We even have parking in the back of the house so that we won’t have to parallel park on the street, though admittedly, I’ve gotten pretty boss at parallel parking over the past year.

But we all three really liked it both times that we toured one of the houses, and after some talking with parents…

We’re ready to sign the lease!!

That’s right, kids.  I very may be signing a lease soon (if no one beats me to it) for my very first house!  It’s beyond exciting, and Jess, Noah, and I have already started talking about furnishings and paint colours.  I’m fairly sure that I want to paint my room this pumpkin/rust/brown colour that I found on Apartment Therapy.  It looks so rich and beautiful, which will be great with my all brown, violet, rust, and green décor.  Noah’s room has wood panelling that he would end up covering with posters, and Jess is perusing the different colours of purples to decide what she wants.

But we’re extremely excited, and I thought I’d share some of the fun news.  I’ll keep all of you posted as new developments come our way!

“Come away with me in the night,

Come away with me

And I will write you a song.”

–Norah Jones, Come Away With Me

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Settled back in.

It’s storming.  One of those off and on rains where thunder rumbles in a lower pitch than normal, far out, warning you that the drizzle could pick back up at any moment and then thrash at your windows, knock you down.  The sky, now dark, was the orange of sunset through storm clouds that makes you wonder if there will be a tornado, but you just want to sleep or stare at it instead.  It’s one of those evenings.

Life has settled back down for me at uni.  Classes have picked up, and I’m facing an exam in every class within one week of each other, and now it’s the mad game of reading every chapter that I had put off.  I joined Ceilidh (pronounced Kayleigh) club, which is Irish dancing, and that’s been enjoyable.  Difficult, of course–muscle memory doesn’t just come on it’s own–but enjoyable none the less.  And I rearranged my furniture yesterday to deloft my bed and get a more comfortable layout (yes, there will eventually be pictures).

Today was one of those big visit days on campus where all of the high school seniors come in to tour campus and think about applying, which means that I spent nearly an hour and a half giving tours to families.  It’s one of my favourite activities on campus, and I want to apply to give full campus tours next year (hey, I’m technically a professional tour-guide because of my work–they’ll have to hire me!).  What’s really cool about Truman is that there will be people at each dorm to give a personalised tour of said dorm with just one family at a time; it’s a major improvement over the schools that will take twenty people in a group to see a couple places.  The tours were so much fun, too.  I had great groups of people, including a group of two best-friends who had forgone bringing their parents along for the visit.  They saw my Skittles machine and freaked out, so I let them put in coins to get candy, and when the tour was going to be over, they asked if it had to be over because they were enjoying the tour so much.  So, I just ended up showing them all kind of other places in MO hall, including the room of some people none of us knew but who invited us to see their awesomely artsy room.  All-in-all, a great day of tours (and some people who now for sure want to live in Missouri Hall.  Booyah).

Not much else to say; I’ll finish up with a musical quote that I like and some dorm photos:

“Hundreds of years in the future,
It could be computers
Looking for life on Earth.”

-Coldplay, Twisted Logic

(PS: IT’S TOTALLY STORMING NOW!)

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