Forrest

Prepare yourself for a crazy story.

This morning when I woke up, I looked at my phone and the first thing I thought when I saw the date was, "Today is Forrest MacSparran's birthday." In 3rd grade, I had a major crush on this boy. The only problem was that all the other girls were in love with him too, since he was hands down the cutest boy around, so my chances didn't look so great. Within a few months, however, he shyly admitted that he had a crush on me and then threw himself down the playground slide to hide from my reaction. Well, with that information, we started exchanging love notes. They went something like this:

Dear Robyn/Forrest,
Hi. How are you? I hope you are having a good day at school today.
Love,
Forrest/Robyn
p.s. I love you! :)

Now that is some pretty exciting information right there. I was sure that love meant playing kickball together at recess, writing these substantial love letters, and making all the other girls jealous. I was also pretty certain it was true love because our birthdays were so close together. Third grade was a good year.
Forrest moved halfway through our fourth grade year, and I haven't seen him or heard from him since, but sometimes on October 18th I think about those memories with fondness. Today I decided to look him up on Facebook, just for kicks, but nothing came up. I was certain I'd spelled his name right (even in third grade, who can misspell their true love's name?). I googled his name and the first thing that came up was a link to his obituary.

Whoa. What else is there to say? Death seems like something to worry about when youth has long since slipped away, not when you're 15 or 21. Life is fragile.

Today is a beautiful day!

Just look outside (if you're in Utah Valley, anyway). It's gorgeous! My happiness was also bolstered because I was chowing down on two BYU mint brownies without nuts that I got for half price at Sugar & Spice. I love the days when summer decides to resurface and give me a false sense of security that winter will never happen.
On a side note, here's a funny picture that a friend posted, captioned "Why pumpkins don't drink:"

Maybe I don't want to be a teacher...

The past couple of days I've been "fellowing" for 13 students in a Family Adaptation and Resiliency class. The basic process is that I read their papers, make comments, and then write them each a one page response letter. It doesn't sound bad, but that's a lot of reading, thinking, analyzing, and writing (and here I am doing some more, haha). Sometimes I get some sort of inspiration--what types of improvements would help their paper--but more often I just sit there staring at the paper trying to figure out what they're saying and how to approach everything. It's hard.
I guess if I'm a teacher, I'll design the assignments and know exactly what I'm looking for, but still. All those papers in a time crunch (I have to finish them tomorrow, since the students need the feedback by their 8:00 class on Monday). My classes, homework and studying are currently on the backburner.

"Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace"

I've been thinking today about St. Francis of Assisi's poem, "Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace," maybe because I read Diane's blog. The prayer became a sort of theme for me when I discovered it in 8th grade:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

I want this to be the theme for the rest of my life. I was considering sharing some thoughts about the poem, but I think it definitely stands alone--I can't improve it.

Quick to Forget

It's so interesting how a simple lesson, which I've already learned many times in my life, can make all the difference when I actually remember it. As I listened to Elder Bednar's talk this afternoon, I started contemplating my blessings and the reasons I should be grateful right now for my experiences and situation and life in general. There are many. I noticed that my heart felt better, some heaviness was lifted, and hope came shining through.
At the end of my last post, part of me wanted to apologize for being negative, but I stubbornly insisted that it's okay to be sad sometimes. On the flip side, it's important to appreciate the good at least sometimes--but more often than wallowing in self-pity. Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, especially 4 and 11.
Maybe I've heard all the basic lessons and learned all the basic gospel principles in my life already, but that doesn't mean much since I'm so prone to forget. The point isn't to know everything, but rather to remember the covenants and promises throughout life's experiences. Those change, and the challenge is to consistently remember truth and apply it no matter the circumstance.

Shifting Paradigms

This phrase became my motto exactly a year ago. I like it, and it sounds and looks cool, but I wish it weren't so relevant and salient again. It's frighteningly eerie that I'm suddenly in the same situation at the same time of year I found myself in last October. Good thing I'm not superstitious... maybe I should be? Anyway, it's Groundhog Year for me--at least as far as the stage of life I'm at now, since the past year definitely hasn't been a waste or a dream. But. I feel like I'm repeating last October, and for someone who likes progression, it's a little disheartening. It's happening all over again. And I hope the redundancy of this paragraph is giving you an inkling of how I feel.

I think we all get the chance to shift paradigms several times in life. Things don't always turn out the way we plan. And I'm okay with that... but it's hard and frustrating and exhausting and draining to come screeching to a halt, only to feel like now I have to turn around, go back and start over in some aspects.

It's like getting to the end of a sewing project and realizing that your seam is just a tiny bit off, and so you have to unpick for hours before you can start over and then try again to finish. It takes triple the time, if not more, and when it's happened to me, I've kicked myself for rushing or making a mistake. That's how I feel now, only this time everything went smoothly until the end, where I was taken by surprise. I don't feel like I was rushing or that I made a mistake somewhere along the way, so what went wrong? Where do I place the blame? I wish I could chalk it up to my own faults, or someone else's, or something. Was it even the machine's fault?

It doesn't really matter anyway; I have to start over despite the whys. Starting over is hard. Finding new purpose and direction is hard. But I should probably get used to it, because that's how the ball rolls. Or that's how the needle sews. Once I get through with the unpicking it's not so bad, and I have faith that my future is bright, but this is definitely the least enjoyable part.

Maybe I'll Blog More Often in October

I'm one for one, anyway. :) I've been trying to write a coherent paper this morning, and when the coherent part didn't happen, I figured I'd break my own rule of homework first and write whatever I felt like writing instead.

• Puffy eyes made it to my bottom 15 today.
  
• I have some homework to do but I'd rather not do it.
• I'm glad Diane is my roommate.
• I think it's funny how much I'm like my dad--I like getting away from home, but once I'm away, I think about how great it will be to return. I wonder how that will affect me in the future.
• This morning I wished I had the gumption to skip my 8:00 Spanish class, even though we had an oral test. It would've been nice to be a slugabed (and that link will only make sense if you check it today).
  
• What am I going to do with my life? How many times have I asked myself this exact same question? Sometimes I feel like that will be the question I'll never have a good answer to until my life's over.
• I hope that one of my new favorite satirical blogs will have a post today. I need to laugh.