Three Things: Small Mercies

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I have had a rough couple of weeks. You may know this from my last post. I also mentioned how I felt as though God has been teaching me things through allowing me experience hard things. I wrote about some of the challenges of the past few weeks. Today I want to pay attention to three of the ways that I feel God has helped me through this week. Each day I have sensed that although it has been very wearisome and hard God has given me small merciful gifts to help keep me sane. In this post I want to focus on three of those things. Some of them are quite small, but gave me a lot of encouragement. 

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1. Tiny Gestures of Kindness From Friends: 

I have a very sweet support system of friends and family. My roommate Hannah made me an egg one morning. That blew my socks off, even though she didn't realise at the time how much it meant to me. I meant so much, because it just gave me an extra few minutes to get ready for the day and help me to feel prepared for everything. Other gestures included Sheldon coming to make me dinner, Leya working out with me, another friend Lisa sending me a tiny package in the mail for my birthday. All of the things contributed to make me feel loved and supported. 

2. The Stormy Fall Weather: 

"I just wish the weather wasn't like this. I hate it. I want the sun to come out."

"Hmm. Well, I love it."

This was a brief exchange I had with a gentleman from my math class. I got defensive about the weather because I feel so good when the air is crisp and blustering. I love grey and stormy skies with bright leaves. I think I am not the only artistic person out there who feels like this. Fall weather, especially rainy fall weather, makes me feel creative and brooding. I love to feel melancholic. Are you worried that in my already dark frame of mind I am revelling too much in this? Perhaps, but I believe that rather than feeding my sad mood it is actually helping alleviate some of my anxiety. 

3. My Shakespeare Books Came in the Mail: 

My grandparents gave me a gift for my birthday, which I used to buy the entire Yale Edition Shakespeare collection. I have long coveted these small blue cloth bound books. I first encountered them when an elderly family friend passed away. Their possessions were being packed into boxes and I found the blue books in one of them. I borrowed one while we stayed with the friends and returned it to the box at the end of our stay. Since then I have borrowed them from the library on numerous occasions only to be sad to part with them in the end. There are few books which I feel a strong desire to own. I enjoy having access to books, but I am usually fine with that access being through the library. But I wanted these books to be mine. They came a few days ago, but I have been so hurried and busy that I have not been able to pick them up at the post. This evening I finally had a spare moment. It was the perfect time for them to come, because it was right after a very hard day at work. I loved unpacking book after book until all 40 stood on my table like a blue tower. 

I hope you are well, People. I hope that you have been able to find some good things throughout the days that are difficult. That is kind of one of the inspirations for this series--I wanted a time during my week when I could reflect on small joys. 

Love,

Lucy Rose 

Having a Hard Week

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This past week has been a real hard one. I have felt like almost every insecurity and major life issue of mine has been challenged in the past five days. I don't want this post to turn into Lucy Rose's Lengthy Catalogue of Woes. I will be careful. Don't worry. 

I drew these pictures onto some napkins from the school dining hall. Napkins are an under-explored surface for art making. I like how the dull tone of the paper is suited to my mood this week: Dull. The structure of the paper is cool, because is looks like an expensive, heavy drawing paper. I think the pen also looks good. I expected it to bleed a lot, but my fine-tipped Sharpie was great--precise, clean lines. 

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So I felt like during my week the following Big Areas of my life were challenged:

1. My Job Security: I need to look for a new job instead of my old babysitting one. The circumstances of my termination at this job were frustrating, because they felt to be beyond my control. This event is so fresh that I cannot yet write about it without great pain so I need to keep it brief and be vague, but it really triggered feelings of insecurity about money and finding a new part-time job. It also gave me great insecurity about being a competent and trustworthy caretaker. 

2. My Relationships: Because of the stress of losing my job, I found myself especially sensitive and liable to lash out at Sheldon this week. He bore this so graciously and kept in mind that much of what I said was influenced by my sorrow at losing my job. I also had some communications with friends that made me feel vulnerable and brought up old Lucy Rose Problems. 

3. My Phone: My phone cracked. This is not a big deal, because it still works fine. And I realise that this last area of my life is kind of unusual to be insecure about. I started to realise how reliant I am on my phone. I love my phone. It is my calculator, my contact to other people, my camera, my period calculator, games, internet access etc. I am addicted to it. I was trying to figure out if has become too much of an addiction that it has been cutting off my ability to pray and  be quiet in the mornings when I usually like to devote time to reading the Bible. That was why breaking it felt like a confirmation of the fact that it has become too important to me. It felt like cracking my phone was an opportunity for me to loosen my love of my phone. 

These were some of the things that were challenged for me this week. I told several people who asked about how my week was going that it felt as though God was using a pokey implement to jab me in between the chinks in my various forms of armour--as though my job and my relationships and even my technologies are forms of security. By exposing the weak points of all of these areas He made me more helpless than usual. I am a pretty competent young woman who doesn't like to ask for help. This week I needed to pray more often and ask for help from God and friends and family. I suspect that that could be one reason the Lord let all those things happen this week--He wants me to be reliant upon Him. 

Here are some back-issue posts for you to peruse, in case this napkin post was too depressing and you need something cheerier after it:

- A day full of hands

- Babysitting my littlest brother

- Finding lost things

- Middle-school flashbacks

- My literary crushes

Photos From My Rainy Weekend

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It is a rainy day. I woke up to drizzles and greyness. I felt cozy and glad about the weather and the fact that it was a Saturday. Saturday mornings are my absolute favourite. I stretched like a cat and rolled out of bed. I opened up a cool book of art that one of my professor's lent me and made espresso with my birthday moka pot form my parents. After that I Skyped with my parents for a while and then watched a movie called the The Virgin Suicides. It is a beautiful film about what it is like to be a young girl. (WARNING: it is not suitable for young audiences.) The shots were gorgeous and simple. The cinematography reminded me of another film I love: American Beauty. 

By looking the two films up on IMDb I discovered that they were both made in 1999. That makes me wonder what was going on at that time that two prominent films were made which both felt the need to address teen, female sexuality and repression in suburbia. Hmm...Well, in each film I am drawn to the cinematography, because it takes the bareness and uniformity of suburban environments and captures them in a way that makes them look lush and lovely like paintings by Edward Hooper.  

After watching the film I felt like taking photos of everything. So here are my phone photos from this rainy day. I hope you enjoy them. 

 Love, 

LR

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Three Things: Benefits of Curly Hair

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My past two posts were about coming to terms with having curly hair. Today I want to focus on the good aspects, instead of being a downer. Because, however depressed I have been about it in my lifetime there are things that are genuinely 
good about having curly hair. 

Let me touch on three of them.

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1. It is always voluminous. 

My hair can get out of control. I have days when there are wiry frizzles a mile high above my head. I have days when I can't see out of my hair, because there is so much of it. But while this is a frequent issue, especially on particularly humid days, I never have to deal with the reverse problem: limp hair.

2. Up-dos stay in well. 

I love to create intricate hairdos for myself and for other people. When I do them for people who have the type of sleek, smooth hair I have envied, then it can actually be very difficult to get thier hair to stay put. The tiny braid and whorls fall slip out of the bobby pins immediately. But when I do my own hair it moulds into whatever shape I want it to have. I can sometimes get away with very few pins, because my curly hair is naturally malleable.

3. It is beautiful. 

This statement feels hard to say for two reasons. The first is because it has the potential to make me sound self-centred and vain. The second reason is because of how long it has taken me to believe this. I still have days when I don't. But I am growing to be more confident about it. I am healing from some of the hurtful things that were unintentionally spoken to me about my hair. You guys have helped. I have had several people speak encouraging words to me about my hair. Thank you to those who have done that. 

I think my hair is beautiful. It is brown with copper and gold tones that come out in the sunlight. It forms naturally into thick curls and waves. I think that it is one of my most vivid and appealing physical features. I wish I hadn't let it get me down for this long so that I could have been enjoying it this whole time! 

Bonus: It boings. 

My roommate Sara encouraged me to add this to the list. She tells me that this is one of my hair's crowning abilities. It reminds me of one of my favourite books from childhood Ramona the Pest, in which the heroine has an addiction to "boing-ing" another little girl's corkscrew curls, because she cannot resist the pure pleasure of watching it spring back into place. The little girl gets in big trouble for this and it is a recurring theme throughout the series. 

Being Happy With Your Hair: Part II

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Watching Princess Diaries with Sheldon yesterday got me thinking about my lifelong hair issues. If you read my post yesterday then you know that people have often compared me to Anne Hathaway's character before her makeover. I know that when they do this they are referring to the fact that my hair is very voluminous and curly, similar to the character. They intend it as a compliment. In fact many people compliment me on my hair. Yet I have never been happy with it. I have always been frustrated with my fair for its unruliness, for its sheer volume, for its colour, texture, length...anything. I will find any number of reasons to be at war with my hair. Well, I finally want to address this. Maybe blogging about it will help me figure out where all of this angst is coming from. Welcome to my hair problems, Friends. 

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When Did the Hair-Angst Begin? 

I remember a few very early hair-related incidents. I vividly remember my other sitting me down on a nearly daily basis to fix my hair. I would sit on a stool wedged between her knees while she sat on the closed toilet seat or a kitchen chair. She would use a brush and try to detangle my hair or put hair clips in it. It was excruciatingly painful. I would squirm and make noises of discomfort. My mother's knees pretty much acted as a brace to keep me from darting away. It was rough for both of us.

I also remember how older ladies would comment on my hair as though I couldn't hear them. One day I was getting out of the car for school with my daddy and one female teacher said something along the lines of, "Just look at her curls. Her mother wraps her finger around them and it just stays like that. How precious." I remember feeling very self-conscious about those kind of comments. They alway made me feel uncomfortable that someone was talking about me and not to me. I was also not at all interested in hair, so I felt surprised that people were interested in me for that reason.

When Did I Start Getting Jealous of Straight Hair?

I don't think that it occurred to me to be jealous of girls with straight hair until I was a little older, maybe seven or eight years old. I was more interested in drawing pictures and playing outside. But later I remember being mesmerised by other girl's hair. I loved how they could have pony tails that swished when they moved their heads fast. I liked how their hair lay flat and how they could look good in pigtails. Whenever I tried to wear pigtails they looked like big floofy masses of hair on either side of my face. 

The knowledge that my hair did not do the same things that other girls hair did, was always somewhat clear to me, although I didn't spend a lot of active brain time thinking about it. Like I said, i was more focused on other things. It was a latent knowledge of being different. I had other reasons for being different that were not all hair-related. My parents were different from my friends parents. My mom didn't cook the foods my friend's moms did. She made Indian food and Pakistani food and Korean food. We did not have a television. My hair being different was just another thing which separated me from the other kids. 

Now those differences actually are very special to me. They help to define my childhood and they shaped who I am as an adult who loves Korean food and spits on televisions. Just kidding. My family and I watch a lot of shows, even though we still don't own an actual TV. I also know that I am not the only one who felt different as a kid. What were those things for you? What did you think was really weird back then, but you now appreciate?

Being Happy with Your Hair: Part I

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"I have never watched two movies in one sitting before." This is what Sheldon said yesterday after we watched two movies in one sitting. We have Monday off from work and school and so we decided to go nuts in the film-watching department. Sheldon and I are always going around saying, "Someday we should watch Tree of Life together" or "Someday we should watch Monsters together" or "Someday we should read all seven Harry Potter books out loud and then watch all eight films together." As you can imagine, we never get around to it. 

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Yesterday we finally knocked two of our film options off the list: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Princess Diaries. Both of these were off of my Must Watch With Sheldon list, meaning I had seen them both and wanted Sheldon to enjoy them too. It was a successful venture. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a movie about spying duirng the Cold War. It is based off a novel by John LeCarré. My mother, who is obsessed with the history of espionage, loves his books about spying during the Cold War. The film stars lots of prominent British, male actors like Benedict Cumberbatch, Cirian Hinds, Toby Jones and Tom Hardy. 

I have now seen it three or four times, but last night was the first time I actually understood the plot. One reason I never quite understood it is because it is very confusing. Although the film is set during the Cold War, in which the fighting was being done in smoke filled rooms by men in suits, rather than in tanks in a field, it is very confusing to understand all the things that are going on. The second reason I have never really understood the plot is because I usually fall asleep in the middle. It is a very quiet, slow film. I loved it even though I didn't fully understand it and even though I fell asleep. 

I love this movie because of the film quality. It is grainy and the colours are dull and murky. The characters smoke constantly and you can almost feel the cigarette smoke on your clothes after watching it, like when you go to a smoke filled pub in the Czech Republic and come home with your clothes still smelling like the pub. I was reading a piece about the cinematography in the film and it said that the goal of Hoyte van Hoytema, the cinematographer, was: “We really wanted the picture to be smelly. If you can achieve that with images, it would be a beautiful thing." Quote found here.

Sheldon and I considered this film to be the meat and vegetables of our cinema feast and Princess Diaries to be our dessert. He had never seen it before, because when it came out he was a fourth grader he thought anything that his sisters were watching and enjoying must be dumb. What a guy. Anyway, I have always loved this film, even though people insist on telling me this: "Lucy Rose, you know who you remind me of? Anne Hathaway in Princess Diaries before the makeover!" Thanks. Thanks a lot. 

Come to think of it, that is an interesting aspect of the movie. It really became clear to me when I was watching it yesterday through the fresh eyes of Sheldon. The premise of the movie is that a young girl who is awkward and has huge, bushy, curly hair finds out that she is a princess. When she finds this out she has a makeover and gets her hair permanently straightened. This is the point in the movie when everyone around her notices for the first time that she is actually beautiful and has been the whole time. They just couldn't see it because of all the hair. I never realised that as a girl with unruly curls and bushy eyebrows, I was inadvertently receiving this message from the film: You can be pretty...if you straighten your hair and pluck your eyebrows. 

I think that this is not what the film intended, but I have always really struggled with being curly-haired in a world where straight hair is more common and more often seen in films and media. Silky smooth hair, like Mia Thermopolis post-makeover is what is celebrated most often. Since a very young age I was always aware that my hair was radically different than that of my friends. It bothered me. When I got to be a teen a friend laboriously straightened my hair for the first time. I loved it. It was just like post-makeover Mia. It was silky and smooth and I could swish it around me head instead of having it bob around and fly all over the place like into people's food. 

People complimented me on it. They were so surprised. Some people said things like, "Wow, Lucy Rose you actually look really pretty." This made me feel so good at the time, but later I realised, "Wait a sec. You had to wait until I straightened my hair and put on contact lenses to realise I was pretty?" I wish I could say that this made me resilient and defiant. I wish I had been like, "Well, your opinions are not the ones that shall be directing my life, thank you very much." 

But instead I told myself this: "Lucy Rose, we have learned an important lesson here. Take notes. When you straighten your hair and take off your glasses, people will notice you and think you are pretty. Otherwise not." Did I start straightening my hair all the time? No. I didn't have a straightener and I didn't have the patience to spend an hour on it every day. But I knew that I was never actually pretty unless it was straight. 

Wow. I don't think I expected this blog post to go in this direction. This whole curly-hair thing has actually been a big part of my life and growing to accept the way that the Lord has made me to be. Sheldon helps with this a lot by telling me how much he adores my hair. Even though I get better each year, I am still not quite at a place where I can accept my hair the way it is. 

I think that I need to talk more about this issue. Do you guys think that is a good idea? I think that there must be other curly girls reading this, or girls with other insecurities. How about it? A series on Hair Insecurity! I shall call it Lucy Rose's Curly Haired Journey: From Darkness to Light. Nah. That's a bad title. Also it makes it sound like a hair dyeing journey from when I started out brown haired and turned blonde. Ok, how about this: Being Curly: One Girl's Journey to Hair Acceptance. Well...We'll see. Goodbye for now, My Dear Reading Public! 

How to Thrift for a Guy

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Sheldon always has incredible visual appeal to me, but right now it is overpowering. His is, in the words of Zoolander, "really, really, really ridiculously good looking". Why? Because I chose his outfit for him at Salvation Army.

I need to be blunt. I really care about clothing and grooming on my man. I like to feel maximum attraction to him and if he is wearing well-fitting clothing in flattering colours then it automatically ups his attractiveness levels by several degrees. Is this making sense or is it sounding incredibly vain and shallow? Sometimes I make the defence of being an artist who values aesthetics. I am not saying that there aren't days when I don't bum around in sweatpants and an old T-shirt or when Sheldon needs to wear work clothes to his lawn care job. And sometimes I just need to give it a rest and let Sheldon wear whatever he wants. 

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But lately I have vetoed so many of Sheldon has been in need of new clothes. There are a number of reasons for this:

- I have forbidden him to wear a lot of them. 

- He wears them out fast at his new job, which is physically demanding and dirty. 

- He has a really hard time finding pants and shirts that fit both his extremely long limbs and extremely slender body. 

We had been planning to go to a thrift store together to hunt for clothing for a long time. But I am always busy with school and he with work. Finally I am on Fall Break and I got to help him out. We ended up finding a couple of wool blazers that I liked and approximately two shirts, but ultimately it was really hard to find good things for him. I never realised that buying clothes for another person, especially a guy, could be so hard. I am so used to buying thrifted garments for myself. I know what I like, I know what looks good within a few seconds and I have a pretty good idea of what will fit me even if I only see it on the hanger. With Sheldon it was a whole new ball game. I had to tell Sheldon that I was sorry for ever being frustrated at his inability to find clothes before. 

Reasons it is harder for a guy to find clothes:

1. There are fewer options of styles. Guys are pretty much confined to pants, shirts and outer garments. So there are not a whole lot of combinations available to them. 

2. Guys tend to buy fewer clothes. The clothing industry purposefully makes women's clothing both less durable and trendier. That means that more women get rid of clothing than men, because they need to keep up with styles and because of minor flaws. That makes women's thrifting better, because there are higher quality things and more of them to choose from. 

3. It is hard to find the right pants size. Sheldon's pants size of a 31 waist and 32 leg length is extremely rare. The people who do wear this size don't hardly ever get rid of their pants and give them to Salvation Army, because they know how hard it is to find ones that fit! 

4. Guys wear tend to wear their clothes out more. They are more hard on their clothing and hold on to them for longer, so the ones that you can find in thrift stores tend to be baggy or saggy. They have pills on them if they are sweaters and other general wear and tear. Not always, but often. 

I want to share some of the tactics that I used with Sheldon today. Granted, we were not entirely successful, because the main thing we needed was pants and the only ones we found that remotely fit were light orange and sagged int he bottom region. But I still have plenty of tricks up my sleeve that helped us to get our job done in about an hour and fifteen minutes. There were no tears, no snapping and no headaches from lack of food. 

Here are some tips for successful thrifting from my wealth of thrifting experience: 

1. Have loose goals. I have found that when you set out to shop for something ultra specific you end up becoming highly frustrated and discouraged because it is nigh impossible to find a thing that perfectly matches a your vision. Hold your goals loosely rather than tightly. This will help you to keep an open mind while thrifting and come out of it feeling less rotten if you heven't found the exact item you were hoping for. Being willing to change your "goal" half way through the trip is also an asset. With Sheldon this meant that while we really wanted pants, we decided to be excited about finding nice blazers instead. In fact, we found that when he was wearing a nice shirt and blazer, his old pants didn't look as ragged. So it helped a lot anyway!

2. Try everything. A lot of people see things on the rack and say, "I could never wear that." Then they just put it back. But the truth is, sometimes the best things are ones that look rotten on the rack but actually work when they are on your body. You have to give everything a shot. Does this mean you end up trying on a bunch of terrible things in order to find three good ones? Yes. I would say that I purchase about 5-10% of the things I try on. If its a good day then I buy 20%. Sometimes I buy things that I am on the fence about. If I don't end up wearing them very often, then I am not too disappointed, because I only paid a few dollars for them and I can put them right back in the donations box. With Sheldon this meant that he tried on 10 blazers and bought two. 

3. Be quick. If you are too slow about choosing, then you will get tired and cranky. Then you will hate your time at the thrift store. With Sheldon we got a system working in which He would pull on a blazer and while he was doing that I would be putting the previous one back on the hanger and onto the rack. We got quite quick at this. Another time-saving device we used was in searching for pants of the right size. We would each grab one end of a rack of pants (they are not organised by size at Salvation Army) and flip through glancing at the sizes. Then we would meet in the middle after combing the entire thing. Together it only took us a minute to search an entire rack.

4. You can pull anything off. People often ask the question, "Do you think I can pull this off?" I have a friend that had a very good response to this question. She said, "You can pull anything off if you have enough confidence. If you chose it and you chose to be confident wearing it, then you can pull it off." I agree with this. I think that there are definitely some thins that no one should be wearing, but I also think that with confidence people could "pull off" a great many more things than they think they can. For instance I found a blazer that was made of a shiny, blue fabric. I liked how it fit Sheldon and I even liked the blue on him. I thought that he could make it work if paired with the right things. But he did not think it matched his aesthetic. That was OK, but I thought he could totally rock it if he so desired. 

5. Buy the things that you love. This one seems very obvious. But I have often found myself buying things because I think I need them, not because they genuinely make me glad to look at and wear on my body. It is the things that you love that you will end up actually wearing later. It is quite rare that I ever wear the things I don't love but think I need. These tend to be things like, "Oh, I need a plain T-shirt. I guess I should buy this blue one, even though it does not inspire joy." One of my favourite fashion gurus, Angie from the website You Look Fab, says something like, "Does it spark joy?" I love that as a guiding thrift principle. Sheldon and I found a forest-green blazer that looked lovely on him, but the sleeves were too short, as usual. But we decided that it sparked enough joy in both of us that for 6$ we thought it might be worth spending 20$ for tailoring form a friend of mine. 

I hope these have been helpful. I enjoyed including Sheldon in one of my favourite pastimes today. I think he also enjoyed it although I was a little apprehensive about shopping for clothes together for the first time. The two of us have been dating for two years, but we have never once been clothing shopping together! 

Sheldon, I think you will read this eventually, so I have a message for you: I love you to pieces. If you only wore the same things for the rest of your life I would still love you to pieces. If you wore your horrible "adventure" cargo pants for the rest of your life I would still love you to pieces. 

Love,

Lucy Rose

Three Things: Czech Violin Music

Photo by Peter Miranda 

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I don't get to practice my Czech very often, but a few days a go I got a very exciting opportunity to show off my skills. My roommate's violin teacher at the Wheaton College Conservatory was preparing to do a concert of Czech violin music. She connected him with me, because she knows that I am always on the lookout for opportunities to practice and engage with Czech culture. So he asked me to read the Lord's Prayer in Czech as well as answer a few questions and read some things before the concert and in explanation of some of the pieces he was performing. 

I loved doing this not only because I love Czech so much, but also because I go to be The Czech Expert. Do you know that feeling, when all of a sudden a skill that has lain dormant in you for a while suddenly becomes useful and you are The Expert? You spend eleven years of your life learning an obscure Slavic language, thinking that you will never use it outside of the single tiny country in which it is spoken, but then all of a sudden someone needs you. You are the only one who can save the day. You are the Czech-Speaking Superhero! 

Well, that is what I felt like. I told Dr. Lee Joiner, the violinist, that it really was no trouble at all for me to spend four hours of my Tuesday devoting to his concert. I said, "Don't thank me. I will take any opportunity to be the sole expert in a given field. It makes me feel extremely powerful."

So my Three Things series for today are my three favourite Czech violin pieces that I heard Dr. Joiner play on Tuesday. 

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1. Jan Hanuš, Chuť Žít "A Zest for Life" for solo violin, Op. 127 (2000): I liked this piece, which opened Dr. Joiner's concert, because I felt like I could feel the scraping and clawing after life that the title evokes. It seems as if the whole time the music is dangling off a cliff and scrambling to hold on for dear life. Unfortunately I could not find this one on YouTube. Darn. Sorry, Peeps. 

2. Antonín Dvořák, Romance in F Minor, Op. 11 (1873-77): This piece was just gorgeous. I don't think that I envisioned any sort of epic tale as I listened to this dreamy piece of music. But I did close my eyes in order to let the sounds wash through my ears. It was pure beauty. I think Sheldon thought I was falling asleep, because he nudged me a few times. But I wasn't. I was just enjoying. 

3. Leoš Janáček, Sonata (1914-15): I do not remember why I liked this one. I probably liked it because it is classical music and you are supposed to like classical music. Ahem. You are supposed to appreciate classical music and make intelligent inferences about it and the musician's delivery of it.

What Are Your Daily Rituals?

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Brushing your teeth first thing in the morning. Going to sleep listening to a Wilkie Collins novel on audio and then having your roommate turn it off when she goes to bed an hour after you. Always taking three napkins at the restaurant and putting one in your pocket for future nose-blowing. These are the tiny rituals that we weave unconsciously into our daily lives. What are yours? What are mine? What are they good for? Today I want to talk about a couple of my own. I would love if your guys could leave some of yours in the comments below. I wan tto know what strnage ahbits you guys have!

LR

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Morning Ritual

Breakfast. This seems ovious. It is kind of like, "Duh, Lucy Rose. Breakfast is not a unique or exciting ritual, because it is a meal that everyone eats." But I think that we all know that is not true. I am looking at you, High School Babies. You guys especially don't eat breakfast. No, this is not meant to be a sermon about why you should. For me breakfast is important because I often get low-blood-sugar. This means that if I don't eat for a while I start to get shaky and headache-y. So I like to take my time with breakfast. I always have one source of protein and either tea or coffee. If I oversleep I take a jar of peanut butter from the cupboard and a spoon and eat a few spoonfuls during class. Things do not tend to go very well if I do not get protein in the morning.

Afternoon Ritual

Coffee after babysitting. I babysit for about two hours everyday for three brothers ages high-school freshman to third grader. After I say goodbye to them I usually like to bike or walk down to my favourite coffee shop. I have a cup of coffee and a scone (sometimes just coffee, if I am feeling poor). I usually try to do homework, but I tend to just end up blogging, like right now. I am sitting there right now, actually. Haha. I already ate my scone in about five bites. Anyway, I like this ritual, because it gives me caffeine for the rest of the evening. In college life one's work day tends to wind down at around 12 PM so I can always use the boost. I also like that I can get off campus for a few hours, because in my little suburban-situated school one can start to feel a little trapped.

Evening Ritual
I love to go to bed listening to an audiobook. I have been working my way through The woman in White audiobook over the past two months. I listen to it as I go to sleep and then when my roommate comes to bed she kindly turns it off so that it doesn't continue to play all night long. It is a 25 hour audiobook. Wow. But it is a great romp full of romance, evil baddies and detective work. I think I started to listen to things when I was going to sleep when I got my first CD player and tape player when I was 12. I would play a 25 minute Adventures in Odyssey episode as I was getting into bed and the sounds would lull me to sleep.

Well, Friends, those are some of mine. What are yours?

Love,
LR

How to Clean Your College Apartment

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Today one of my three roommates, Leya, texted that she has been unable to function well in the mess of our apartment. She asked if we could pitch in to do some clean up today. When I got home I started right in with the help of another roommate, Hannah. Hannah and I are highly verbal and creative people. We do not excel in the realm of organisation and tidiness. Our cleaning process would appear to the naked eye like a messy-ing process. 

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I started on the bathroom and emptied out the trash and swept all the crud off the floor and into the kitchen, where Hannah was busy tidying our plant collection and sweeping leaves from the window sill to the floor. I paused my sweeping in order to help Hannah with the plants and ended up spilling dirt all over the stove and floor. This got us laughing about how good it was that Leya was not there to witness our "cleaning" efforts. 

LR: If Leya saw all the dirt on the stove, she might not ever want to use it again.

Hannah: Well, that wouldn't be a problem, because you know what that would mean, right?

LR: What?

Hannah: More stove-time for us.

LR: Oh wow. Imagine what we could accomplish with all of that extra stove time.

Hannah: Can you imagine a mother taking away her rebellious teen's 'stove time'?

LR: Haha, yeah. 'Sorry, Angela I am going to have to restrict your stove-time. No more sautéing for you!

Such hilarity you can only imagine. That was the kind of fun that happened this afternoon. I actually did end up cleaning the bathroom and floors. I also swept the dirt off the stove. Leya will never know.  But in all seriousness, she is a very chill lady. So if she did know about the mud on the stove she would probably not care. 

Worried Martha Stewart

Dear Friends,

I messed up. I disappeared from my blog. I even missed an episode of the much-beloved Three Things Series. I feel terrible.

I have received several letters regarding my disappearance from the interwebs. People have been genuinely concerned. I felt touched by these attempts to reach out to me. Thank you for all the kind letters and the gifts of cookies and American Girl dolls that you sent. A blogger loves to know that she is missed. One of the letters said this:

Oct. 6th 2015

Maine

Dear Lucy Rose,

Are you OK? You haven't posted for so long. Not only is it hard for me to get 

through my week without reading your charming blog posts, 

but I am also worried about your health. Please check in to let us know your good. 

If you are sick check my website for how to make a cozy throat warmer from egg cartons. 

Love,

Martha Stewart

I must say that it was a true joy to discover that Ms. Stewart is one of my biggest fans. But it was also nice to know that you all care.

Just kidding. None of you care. None of you asked where I went. None. Of. You. I have taken this to mean that you do not care about me. Fine. I get it. I betrayed your trust. I did not post when you thought that I would.

Alright! Enough of the dripping sarcasm. This is what happened: I got swamped with midterms and paper writing. It was one of those things where I felt like I had to choose between doing my schoolwork well or doing my blog well or doing both poorly. So I chose to not worry about blogging for a week and just focus on surviving school. I think that some of you who read this are fellow-students and so I think you all get where I am coming from.

In my hiatus from blogging I did some thinking about ways to prevent this from happening again. I feel like it is reasonable for me to be able to blog and do school at the same time and I have an idea of how to structure it so that it works.

I am going to try a blog schedule in which I only post on specific days. I will now post on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I chose these days because I have the least amount of homework and commitments on those days. I also chose Saturday rather than Sunday because I like to try to have as few responsibilities on Sunday as possible in order to fully rest for the coming week.

So, Friends (yes, we are still friends even after I left you for so long), I hope that this will help me be a better blogger.

I hope you guys have a great weekend. My plan is to finish one more midterm essay and be with Sheldon, whom I haven't seen all week! We decided to severely limit our time together this week in order for me to concentrate. It has been hard, but it has helped. What are your plans?

I will see you Monday!

LR