You know you live in residence when...

• you can sleep through ANYTHING
• your daydreams in class consist of you sitting at your kitchen table at home with your mother serving you home cooked food
• you are highly skilled in the art of floor organization because you have no shelves left to fill
• you have no sense of what-not-to-wear-in-public. Noone cares when you walk around residence in your pajamas/boxers...why should anyone outside?
• you have spent days/weeks without actually leaving campus
• you do your cooking on the days imediately preceeding cleaning lady visits because the kitchen actually looks like a kitchen then

You know you're a college/university student when...

• your heart jumps everytime you see a pdf version of something on Google. (It means you can actually use it as a valid source of information for a paper.)
• you can quote on demand at least 5 ways to make spaghetti taste good.
• you have two calendars on your wall; one for assignment due dates, and one for social things
• the assignment calendar on your wall has more on it than the social calendar
• you read ALL the time, but can't remember when the last time you read a novel was
• you can quote the entire APA citation system

'Katrina's wings'

I do not recall which day that God created love. But Sister Bickle had told me more than once that He demonstrated it and gave man the ability to exercise it, which tells me that God's never-changing character embodies this ethereal nature called love. Always has. He owns it. He is love. And everything He touched left traces of it all over the earth, an elixir that smelled good to girls and caused boys to lose their ever-loving minds.

It made me believe that if God had handed each person - say Adam and Eve, for starters - a little box and said, "Now here's your portion of love. Don't spend it all in one place," man would have taken his box. But instead of handing it over to his mate, he would have poured it out all over his puny, quivering, naked body as he danced in paradise and shouted to Eve, "Look at me, I'm in love, I'm in love," while Eve just shook her head and said, "You certainly are, Adam. Have a good time without me."

But God allowed little potent traces of love to inhabit us in places where we could not extract it and use it for our own selfish purposes. We could only give it away. Therein lies the essence of heartache - the pain of what ensues thereafter.

And that is what robbed me of sleep.

Things that I miss...or that I just really enjoy

• having an entire day with no plans and choosing to waste it away by reading a really good book
• driving around Kelowna in the dark
• going to karate workshops, spending 8 hours a day for 3-4 days straight working my butt off before going back to the condo/hotel in pain and complete fatigue, and loving every second of it
• going on walks and having a hand just 'there' for you to hold
• being at my grandma's old house
• spending an entire day out on the lake in a sailboat or a Hobie cat
• standing on the dock at camp during the thursday night taper services and watching the sun go down
• living with anywhere from 2 to 4 other girls in a crowded one room cabin
• having 'mother-daughter' chat time
• watching a movie with someone special and having absolutely no idea what's actually going on because you spend all of your energy watching the person rather than the TV
• sitting in a hot tub late at night looking at the stars

Fear

I was looking underneath my bed the other day and found a box of random things I had brought to Nanaimo from Kelowna that I conveniently forgot to unpack. In the box was an old journal full of quotes, excerpts from books, and song lyrics that I have liked. Here is an excerpt from a book called 'The life of Pi' by Yann Martel.

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.

It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble.

You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You find yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an oppossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees start to shake as though they were dancing. Your head strains too much while your sphincter relaxes too much. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart.

Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear. Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it.

So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

Feminists...ugh

If there is one thing that I find extremely irritating, it has to be feminists. I just don't understand them.

I do realize that back in the day women were viewed as less than men. I understand that that wasn't entirely fair. But I don't understand how in this day and age, that can be used as an argument. "Women should have more rights than men because of how our great-great-great-great-grandmothers were treated." Get over it. Women nowadays, at least in Canada, have amazing opportunities. We can wear whatever we want, get any job or education we want, etc. Sure there are men around who discriminate against women, but there are also women around who discriminate against men.

What are feminists anyways? They're some sort of hybrid species...a cross between a guy and a girl. Sure they look female, but their aggressive, masculine attitudes indicate differently. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that girls should be submissive, quiet, and unobstrusive. I just think that a healthy balance is required. And I don't believe that feminists have that.

I feel sorry for guys out there. They try and be nice by opening the door for a woman, and they get shunned for being 'old-fashioned' and for 'treating women differently'. Yet if they don't open the door they are seen as being jerks who don't know how to treat a woman right. Where is the common sense in that?!

I understand that I am a bit old fashioned in my views. I don't see anything wrong with that. I believe that there is a difference in the roles that God intended men and women to play. I believe that God intended men to be the leaders, and women to be their support. I don't mean that women should be bathmats to the men in their lives. Women should still have a backbone. Scripture says that men and women are both equal in God's sight, but if they both try and be the leader then no one wins. God made women to be the supporters, He called them to serve their husbands in everything they do. I think one of the reasons that relationships are so confused nowadays is because of this. Women have shunned their God given duties and attributes.

I bet if you went to a college or university and anonymously surveyed women there you would find that many women have the dream of marrying and having a family. Yet the world shuns this dream. Women who want to settle down into a marraige and children are viewed as old fashioned and not goal oriented. Women are urged to get out, get an education, and join the working force. Women are told they should be independant. "We don't need a man to make us complete." I believe that this is wrong. Sure, we don't need men to complete us, but by choosing to believe that men are not needed in a women's life, we are in fact turning men away from the path God has chosen for them to take.

Just as the world has turned women into dominant and controlling figures, it has also turned men into submissive figures. Men don't have to do anything in order to get women anymore. They just fall into their laps. Men have let go of their God-given inclinations to become doormats. They don't fight for anything anymore. They have been beaten down by our feministic culture, criticized for being too masculine, too protective, too manly. Men are being made to be 'nice'. I can tell you one thing, I don't want a 'nice' man. I want a man who will fight for me, a man who is masculine and has accepted and is working towards the the man that God wants him to be.

What the world needs are men who are willing to work hard in order to obtain things. It needs women who are willing to stand behind the man in their life and support them through everything they do. It needs men who will pursue the woman in their life with all their heart and soul. It needs women who will sit back and wait to be pursued rather than impulsively taking the reins in a relationship.

What the world really needs are men and women who will choose to follow the roles that God has set for them in everything they do.