old lady

last night i was summing up the last 2 or 3 years of my life to an old friend that i haven't talked to in several years. it was weird summing it up in a paragraph. ha... i feel like i've lived a full life already. so much has happened in the last several years. now i'm about to head on another adventure. i'm going to Asia for the first time!!! i've never been before and i'm stoked because i'll be snowboarding.

it's been raining all morning, and i've been listening to it on the window above my bed. nothin like waking up to a rainy day. reminds me of memphis rainy days.

a friend asked me if i've written any more songs recently. nope. i feel constipated. i've decided since last night that i've got emotions boiling inside but no words for any of this. thus, the lack of blog postings.

i also realized last night that i know foreign cities by the view out the coffee shop window. ha... i'm ready to find some amazing new coffee and warm coffee shops to chill in this christmas. pa! for now!

thai, cold, partay, birthdays & definitely some incense burning

last night was fun. it was sarah's bday. i met her and erin at a thai/cantonese/japonese/sushi restaurant. i fully expected to have canned corn in whatever i ordered but to my surprise... this was actually authentic. the sign on the door did not lie. it was really thai food. i had chicken peanut curry. AMAZING! it burned the heck out of my lips but made me warm and cozy inside.

before supper, i had gone early into the city to actually buy the eyebrow ring because the store had been closed the day before. closed on a monday... that's normal... just like java cabana. i got it surprisingly quickly and then had nothing to do for about 1.5hrs in the cold. so i just walked. and walked. and walked some more. found a cool park. wandered down streets i'd never seen before and past people i'd never seen before. then realized i was going in the wrong direction. jumped a tram in the right direction. jumped another tram to get to the restaurant and went inside early to wait in the warmth instead of in the cold.

my fingers were freezing because i'd been carrying sarah's present in a bag. it was biscotti that i'd baked and i put it in a small bag i found in the office. the bag had a pretty picture on the front. i definitely carried this bag that said, "a happy world is a clean one" all around the great city of krakow.

krakow is a difficult place. every time i go into a shop or a store and i try to explain what i need in polish, the people just stare at me with a blank look. there's no attempting to understand what i might be trying to say--they just stare at me with no response. so i flop around like a fish out of water until i've tried all the phrases i know and then finally ask if they speak english. and of course they do. duh... what was i thinking? however, this doesn't really help me. sometimes when they respond to me in polish, i need them to repeat it. however, when they see that i'm not understanding, they change to english and my hopes of practicing my language skilz or lack there of are lost. needless to say, i wish for language learning purposes, that this wasn't a tourist town and that they would stop speaking to me in english.

brazil and tatoo parlors

so i had to take my eyebrow ring out the other day. and when it was time to put it back in, i knew (from experience) i'd probably drop it a few times before successfully screwing the little tiny ball back onto it. so i closed the sink drain and shut the toilet cover. and all was ready... sure enough, the little ball fell right out of my fingers and bounced once in the sink and then... NOTHING! i bounced perfectly toward the sidewall of the sink into the open hole for the extra sink drain.

yesterday i went to the mall to look for a new one. to no avail, i wandered through 3 floors of stores and found nothing. finally i was about to give up when i saw a couple of girls getting their jackets on to go outside. one of the girls had a really cool eyebrow ring in. i kept walking and then said, "screw it" and i turned back around and said, "excuse me. do you speak english?" she did so i explained my problem. so my surprise she offered to take me to the rynek to go find a tatoo shop that would sell that kind of thing. it was really cool.

i was really thankful that i sucked it up and actually asked for help.

i've been thinking about getting a small tatoo for a while, but i haven't known what to get. now i'm thinking of getting a tattoo in polish that says, "i want to live the way". or something like that. who knows.

today i went swimming!!! that was exciting!!!

yesterday i got my butt handed to me by some teenage boys at kids klub. i honestly feel like i'm in middle school when these 2 girls used to call me Michael Jackson (they were making fun of my hair cut for like a year straight) and laugh their heads off non stop. I'm just defenseless against these kids. All I can do it sit there and take their crap and try not to react. Most humilitating experience ever.

tonight is thai food!!! i'm not getting my hopes up though... it'll probably still have canned corn mixed in it with ketchup somewhere.

Advent Conspiracy

Hey so this is a pretty cool video...

empty apts

so it seems that we all change and the world keeps moving without you. however, sometimes i wish it would wait. i wish i could be in a million places at once. but it's all sectioned off only to be revisited by nostalgic moments. i'm thankful for the experiences. reminds me of the book The Giver. i keep remembering those sunny days during the cold nights in the snow. all these experiences make memories. it's like a cache of all the good and the bad. some things stay and others fade away. it seems that faces are the first to go. only parts at a time come back to memory. and it's a hope that through all of this i might be getting smarter. maybe a little wiser. but for now, it's all flying by. with the sun in my eyes and the visor just over the light going by the next hill on my way home from kyser's.

Pumpkin Day

ok... who has it? charlie brown pumpkin movie thing? gotta see it. about to make pies!

so i had to wait at the bus stop in the cold for about 40min last night on my way home from class. i had patty griffin in my ears and car tires screeching in front of me. my breathe was like smoke coming from my nose. and i had a really strong urge to pray for a family. i didn't know what to pray for them because there was so much that i could pray for. it was like, where do i start? i didn't want to just ramble to God something impersonal that i always hear others praying for. i didn't want to ramble about some mysteries that i didn't understand but pretended to understand. i kept hashing away at my thoughts and i finally got to the bottom of it.

hope... i longed for hope for them.

i longed that they would find love. i longed that they would find peace. i longed that they would find hope.

as a christian there's a sunday school answer for these things... jesus. but if you tried to argue a theological point with me i'd be like... whatever. i'd write you off as being naive and opinionated (i am postmodern after all). but at the same time, i recognize that at the end of the day, what little hope for anything that i have, i put it in God and Jesus--these two figures of the Christian faith. i don't understand it. i don't perceive it. i don't fully know their ways, but i still put my hope in them each day because i have a little faith that dares to trust that Jesus is truth. Jesus is hope. Jesus is love. and Jesus is peace.

back to my friends... maybe they won't be healed. maybe they won't be told again. maybe i have too little faith. who knows. but i long that they would find love. i long that they would find peace. i long that they would find hope because if they do, then i know they've found the one thing they've always been looking for.

conversation topics

topic 1: big people decisions
putting size to the side, i don't like making big people decisions. i'm so not decisive. i find that i still have to run my decision making process through my dad. he hasn't really made decisions for me for several years now, but his affirmation of a decision or his encouragement to think a different way are still huge factors in the decisions i make. bizarre.

for example, i need a new guitar. there's option 1 and there's option 2. both are equally good decisions, but i can't decide which one. so i had to email my dad about both of the options to get his feedback. he liked option 2 which has caused me to consider option 3. go figure. makes sense to me.

it's like i don't have the self-confidence to make my own decisions.

ok... next topic... snow, clouds, music that makes me feel at home, and a big jar of hot coffee on a cold morning.

i found this radio station on itunes that i'm listening to. all my itunes music is on my external hard drive that was soaked (my ears are tired of the ipod and headphones). i'm too afraid to turn it on. i'm waiting to buy a new external hard drive, but in order to buy replacement things i have to submit proof of replacement value. i was going to get it all from the electronic store website that's all in polish which was taking forever when i finally realized that the site doesn't actually like the prices on the stupid items! grr... so i'm thinking of borrowing a camera to take to the store and take pics of the prices and items. we'll see.

topic 3
table center pieces... coffee mixed with creamer and sugar... etc... that's all i gots.

so funny story

Thursday my apartment flooded. Ok actually flooded is not exact enough description. It was more like... imagine a rainy day and you have your umbrella. It's not a down pour, but it's a steady rain with a few puddles in the streets. Yes, you there in the rain with me?

That was my apartment Thursday evening when i got back from language school.

Apparently a water pipe burst in the upstairs apt and the peeps were out of town. During the 5hrs I was gone Thursday, it started leaking into my apt. There was enough water leaking into my apt that it leaked through my CONCRETE floor down to the next apt. Those people called the owners of my apt because they thought it was me. My landlord came immediately.

This all happened while I was gone. When I got home at 7:30p, my door was cracked open and there were lights on in my apt. I pushed the door open and saw my landlord in my entry way with soaked pants, bending over to ring out a towel into a bucket. However, it was still raining. By Friday morning there were still a couple of drips here and there. This was the whole apartment--not just a little corner of a room.

So right now I'm sitting in megan's room among my dry stuff. My electronics are on a table drying out. My computer... it was in my backpack that I carried all afternoon all over krakow on thursday! My guitar... ha ha ha... well I'll be guitar shopping. Thankfully the wonderful peeps who employed me gave me insurance. So my guitar will be replaced. I picked it up off the floor and looked in the hole and there was a puddle in it.

So today i'm going to go pack up some more stuff from my apt. Maybe do some laundry of the stuff that was wet. Monday i'll be apt shopping. get excited. ha.

all i can do it laugh. seriously... my life was never this dramatic. ha.

getting political

OK... i hate talking politics but i'm still fuming.

Last night I sat in a van and listened to a political talk about Obama as the new president...
At one point, Obama was being compared to Hitler. The next moment it was being said that abortion was wrong. However, the next subject discussed was how terrible it will be with Obama because he won't be as decisive when it comes to war. "It will make America weaker." And I'm thinking... so it's ok to shoot people with guns and bombs (not even talking about soldiers shooting soldiers... what about the civilians who get caught in the middle?) but it's not ok to kill babies. It's ok to kill in some situation but not in another. War brings more war--not peace. War teaches that we solve problems by shooting and forcing other people to do things our way.

Concerning the suposed moral decline that will now come due to Obama being pres...
In case anyone was wondering... America... The United States of America is NOT and will never be Israel. This country was never founded on Christian beliefs. It is NOT a Christian nation. It has been chugging away as a nonChristian nation for a couple of centuries now. And moral decline has been a state of being since we left the garden.

Regardless of who the president of the united states of america is, I'm not going to put my hope in him to save me or anyone else from this world.

ok ok ok... i'm done ranting now... I did really well in the van last night... i didn't say anything. I kept my mouth shut in an effort to spare the polish translator guy having to listen.

comments?!

whoa... light much?

my couch

my new bedspread

the some peeps i met at the airport... so special.

ha... what is this new fangled thing called a comment? i just now caught up on mine. sorry peeps... i'm bad about blogging these days. hey but i'll post some pics to make everyone happier. ok ok ok... so i'm still working on the whole photograph thing. bare with me... it's a work in progress...

logos... something practical makes me feel good

hey so i'm online now and mobile and creating.
which you think is more stellar?
these are 2 logo ideas i finished tonight.
i think i'm more partial to the 1st one.
however... it might be too edgy for some.
it's a kinda sucky cut of the fork... i apologize, but i was being lazy.

quiet

i've been quiet for the most part since i've been home. ya for some that probably seems to be impossible for me, and for others of you, you probably know me as a shy little vagabond. people ask how i'm doing (i.e. high/low lady) and i guess the best answer is that i'm inbetween--not really here and not really there.

some inbetween truths i've learned:
1. life always goes on.
2. people somehow make it without me there.
3. i'm always surprised that people don't need me to carry on with their lives.
4. cooking for myself sucks.
5. considering myself to be homeless is a lot more comforting than thinking of leaving home.
6. married people get to take their homes with them.
7. if i held all of my friends to the "lets keep in touch" rule, i wouldn't have any left.
8. moving costs are always overwhelming.
9. a different place has a different taste and my staple food changes with the seasons.
10. i'd rather sit in my room than meet new people.

goodbyes and little cries

so it's that time again. it's funny to me that i was always the worst transitioner growing up. i hated change. now, change seems to be the rhythm of my life. letting go of people, places, things and dreams in pursuit of following...

...that wind.

that wind. the one that blows where it chooses. no one knows where it comes from or where it goes. yet, the world keeps moving. we're all changing. and that wind... it keeps us dependin on every breathe, every word, every hope that it's left.

yankee tipping

so this whole blogging thing used to be really easy, but i can't seem to make time to do it these days. i guess i'll have more time to do it when i get to poland.

i think that this time in VA has been an interested change for me. i'm really excited to not be here and can't wait to be somewhere else. but for the first time ever, i think that i've been satisfied with being here for these past 2 months. i've always been bad about looking at the past and wishing for the future. but for the last couple of months i've honestly been just here.

on a lighter note... i think i'm getting old because the thought of a last second road trip kinda doen't sound as adventurous and fun as it used to. man i'm old. so we're going to be going east coast hoping. DC-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York and back. go big apple!

wanderer

i am a wanderer
find people who make me smile
cause deep inside i cry

i am a wanderer
condemned by my own hands
calloused like sand

so i'm going to try blogging again.
we'll see if this sticks.
but this is all i got tonight.
i'm tired.
it's like this steady tiredness going on.
holla.