quick update on rose hips? and music.

It took too much effort to cut them in half and scoop out the hair and seeds, so I got about four or five done before giving up and trying to dry them whole.
I left them in an oven I assumed was around 150 F for about four hours, and there wasn't much of a visible difference (except the skin gets dark? did I accidentally burn them?) but the skin starts to feel different. I put them in a different oven for about an hour, just so make sure, and now they're sitting on my kitchen table. I haven't touched them since Friday.
So!
Maybe I will go see what's happening over there now.


Until then,
enjoy this song.

Good story-
One of my student workers in the cafeteria told me that the guys in Twenty One Pilots went to Worthington Christian, and one or more of them were there the same time he was. He told me that at their concerts, a large portion of the crowd are their old schoolmates coming out to support them and rock along. Also he mentioned this "remix" where somebody ends up standing on the piano? I am unclear on the details. Anyway, it sounds cool! Six degrees of separation and whatnot.


EDIT: 
Well, this is interesting...
I seem to have lost my first blog post about this entire rose hips tea thing, with all the information on it. Which is a bummer, because I put all of that information in one place to make life easy and now I will probably have to go find it again. I just don't understand how it disappeared- that's what bugs me the most! Did I accidentally delete it? But I don't think I've been on since I made this update post thing. Is my memory that bad? Etc etc etc.
Anyways!
Life goes on.

SO

For the sake of keeping up with this online journal- life is good! Life is pretty swell. Most of the time. I mean, all lives have that up and down, and I'm incredible lucky because life is mostly at this steady plateau of "not too shabby!" but there are always going to be downs and a lot of my friends are having a hard time and that makes me feel sad because I want to help them but I have no idea how! So there's that. There's also the "I miss people" feeling, but that's going to be a constant thing so it's barely worth mentioning, kind of like how your eyes adjust, you know?
But good things! Besides the fact that I have a job with free room and board, I finally got my apartment this week (last week?) ! I got it early on this week/last week, but I haven't had time to really unpack/clean/organize until today and now I feel super accomplished because I have about 1/4 of it done! Huzzah!
Other than that...
Yep.
Not much!
Work work work.
Yay for having a job in hard economic times!

hormones are dumb, the end.

HORMONES.
Wow hormones suck a whole bunch.
Hormones can suck it.

(wow that was incredibly fast)

Just wow!
So, remember how my only concrete plans were going to school part time and figuring out how to move out & get a job?

BOOM.
DONE.

Literally the day after I wrote all that, Lance texted me saying that they needed a taskforce cafeteria worker at our alma mater (is it our alma mater if it's high school?), which is fine by me because I was taskforce dean at Thunderbird and I'm pretty sure I'll be working less hours at MVA than I was at TAA and be getting paid aproximately the same! And still have room & board, yeah! Also I will endeavor to be not be a preachy old fogey, which shouldn't be terribly difficult but I have developed this nasty habit of mothering people which may be just as bad, we'll see.

So basically I spent this entire week jumping from incredibly happy to incredibly guilt-ridden and semi-sad, because my friend's dad/ my boss has been having a ridiculously awful week/month and so have his wife and his older daughter, and they've just been struggling with so much and it's really wearing them down and he's just so sad and tired! And it's all stuff that you can't really fix, so there's nothing I can do to help and it's just horrible! I baked him cookies, which is my go-to comfort method for just about anything, except I've never made gingersnaps before and I don't think they came out properly... ugh!


So, I'm going to move on from that because it is pointless to stress about things that cannot be solved! The most we can do is offer what comfort we can, and I've done that, so!!

On a completely unrelated note.

Does anyone else (who reads this blog...) think in music sometimes?
Like I read somewhere that people on the autism spectrum think in pictures, whereas most regular people think by hearing their thoughts?
Which is interesting, because I mostly hear my thoughts but they're also accompanied by sort of video clips sometimes, and I think part of that is dyslexia because I read someplace about something like that??? I can't remember.
But as I was saying!
I'll just be spacing out, not really thinking about anything, and then-!

Let's use some examples.
Yesterday I was really happy, and feeling good about life and how God answered my prayers, and "Joyful, Joyful" started playing in my head.
Okay.
Another example.
One Christmas, I was woken especially rudely, so I was in an especially foul mood! I walked down the stairs and the first thing I saw was our bright and sparkly Christmas tree. The first line of "Your Heart Is An Empty Room" started playing- "Burn it down, til the embers smoke on the ground,"
And another!
This one was kind of awful because it was entirely by accident.
My mother asked me to make her a new mix CD for her car, and it was only after the songs were playing that I realized I had put "Far Away" by Ingrid Michaelson right next to "You Don't Know Me" by Ben Folds & Regina Spektor. WELL THEN! Subliminally passive-aggressive much?

And this just goes on almost constantly. Now, whenever a song pops into my head unbidden, I stop to examine it. What is the name of this song? The lyrics? The general mood? How does that apply to me?
It's really helpful, actually, because a lot of the time I won't know what emotion it is that I'm feeling until the song makes me confront it. I have a hard time in general figuring out complex and/or subtle emotions, so I guess this is my brain's method of helping me out!

It's just really interesting, and I was wondering if any of you guys experience this?

sorry in advance.

I should just make that thumbs up motivational thing my blog header... I really feel as if I need the self-encouragement!

Quite a few of my friends are going into their senior/junior year of college this year, or have already graduated (those would be the friends that are older than I am, but still!) and I've been feeling increasingly like an aimless freeloader with no real plans for life!

Which is mostly true.
And it's killing me!

I've been trying to figure out what I want to do, and there are SO MANY OPTIONS it is legitimately terrifying. I'm like a deer in the headlights, with the headlights metaphorically being the huge amount of advice that I've been receiving. It's been great advice! If I had written all of that advice down, I probably could have made a really great book or pamphlet or something that would have been extremely helpful to other people in similar situations! Wow I'm pretty dumb for not doing that.
The thing is, though, a lot of this advice has been conflicting.

"You'd be a great teacher!"
"The teacher's environment outside of the classroom can be caustic. Have you thought about counseling or social work?"
"Pffft, don't be a school counselor! Let me tell you what I think of MY school's counselor! [unkind things]"
"Look at this! You have incredible talent! Have you thought about going into art?"
"Don't go into the art field, you won't find any jobs!"
"People who say that there are no jobs in the art field don't know what they're talking about! You just have to know where to look."
"If you're going into art, pair it with something marketable, like something relating to technology! If you can code and have art skills, you're golden."
"Go into the medical field! You can do whatever you want as a hobby, and be well paid in the mean time!"
"Medical students have incredible amounts of debt, work odd hours, and have to pay ridiculous insurance just to cover their butts. Maybe you should rethink that."
"How about business?"


It just goes ON and ON, my head is spinning and I have even less of a clue than I did before!

This is just getting ridiculous.

Most of my friends seem to know what they want to do and where they're going in life, and here I am on the sidelines kicking my heels around the country. One of my friends mentioned a long time ago that I travel to escape my problems, and at the time I thought that he was totally out of line in saying that but now I think that he may have a point and I'm beginning to doubt everything!

So.

What's the solution here?

The only thing that comes to mind is "JUST KEEP SWIMMING."

All I can think to do is just work through all of this. I've signed up for part-time classes at my community college this coming winter, I'm going to find a job, I'm going to move out of my parents' house, I'm going to just slowly figure things out from there. Baby steps.
In 2010 I ended the year knowing for a fact that I wanted to be a teacher- things have changed so drastically since then! I've learned so much. I'm continuing to learn! Hopefully, the learning never stops, and ideally I'll figure out what I want to do with my life and where on earth I want to do it.

Until then...
I'm just gonna...
sit in the sun for a bit.

Yeah, that sounds nice.

[[later- it was nice for about five minutes and then I realized that it was much too hot and muggy and I have relocated back to my spot in a nice air-conditioned patch of sunlight.]]

BELIEVE IN THE ME THAT BELIEVES IN YOU!

(anime references aside...)

(I'm just gonna bring this back...)

SO
I woke up at 7:30 am cursing my coherence, and after a long argument with myself I eventually succeeded in FINALLY getting out of bed with the intention of GOING ON A WALK! YEAH! up a hill.
That turned out pretty well, actually.
We have this hill with a bunch of steps and from the top you have this gorgeous view of the Mississippi river, and it was a nice cool morning and the birds were chirping and I passed this really beautiful garden that looked really difficult to maintain, and generally I just felt great about the world!
So I ate breakfast and went back to my room and putzed around a bit, until I thought, "Hey, you know what would be great? If I followed up that walk with a WORKOUT SESSION, YEAH!"

Things were going well until I got to the ab excercises.
Wow.
Okay, I need to workout more often because that was just sad!


In other news, have some Janelle Monae because she is STILL really great.

tick tick tick tick

My work area is slowly starting to fill up with origami cranes, because I've forgotten how to make anything else and I like to be busy with something.
I'll just choose an album on my album and putter onward.
Before I left I got a bunch of artists that I hadn't listened to often enough, and I'm in love with Marina & the Diamonds and Laura Marling. I have a weakness for female singers...

(PS when this song first started playing my first thought was, "TARDIS WHOOSHING?!?" and it would have been funnier if I hadn't been so excited.)

(on a totally unrelated note, I keep thinking about this dream I had where there was this disease spreading, it was new and fatal and there was no cure. vines. vines would sprout on you somewhere, and then you'd know that your time is coming soon because they were in your body and slowly eating you alive, they'd spread inside and outside your body- it looked beautiful except people were dying. I remember staring at my palms and up to this point in the dream I'd been trying to help find a cure and to ease peoples' passing, and there were these tiny shoots coming out of the center of my palms and I showed them to the other council members and they started crying. my palms itch just thinking about it.)