3.4

3/4/16
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Sometimes when you've reached the bottom, all you can do is look up through the blue. You can wonder at this new perspective, how your view has changed, how you have changed since settling here on the sand. You can think of the work it will take to get back up to where there's air. You can be just a little afraid, a little wary, that you might run out of the air you have.

But you are there and you have to have all synapses firing and focus given to the tasks at hand amid the wonder and the shifting and the work and the fear.

And then you (albeit slowly) rise.

___

Sort of Distracted

1-14-11

In scuba diving, getting distracted can get you dead. Our instructor gave us plenty of crazy stories about people wandering off and getting stuck or eaten or running out of air and just plain ending up dead. I believe his stories, though I'm sure he made sure to tell us the scary stories so we'd do what we were supposed to.

Anyway, I'm sort of distracted right now. And it's not even dangerous stuff that's distracting me--it's good, I'm growing sort of stuff. And it's not super bad. I mean, I still pay attention in class, I'm still doing homework and getting all the stuff I need done done. But in those spare moments, the moments between class and work and homework, the moments where I'm half-awake and half-asleep, I get distracted. I think it's the most distracted I've ever been in my life.

What frustrates me is that 1) I'm getting distracted and 2) what happens with the stuff I'm distracted by is not under my control. (So I suppose it's a little scary, too. But so was scuba diving after all those stories Hidao told.) I'm in control of whether I'm distracted or not, and, most of the time, it's not a big deal. I choose to focus, and all is well.

But it's those unbidden moments of distraction that frustrate me, and all that my best human friend tells me is "Choose not to be distracted." (Some days I don't know if he gets that I have difficulty just switching off like that. Anyway.)

So, even though it's mostly good things that are distracting me, I don't want to lose my head. I don't want to get narked, to use scuba diving parlance. I don't want to wander off and end up (metaphorically) dead. I want my head and my feelings to work together, not against each other.

Because who knew how fascinating fish were?

Student Missions Emphasis Week, Busyness, and Dive Boots

11-10-09

Last week was incredibly busy. I'm a Student Missions Club officer, and so I was involved in much of the preparation and execution of Student Missions Emphasis Week, which took place last week. I spent a portion of Sunday borrowing cell phones and making calls in order to get people to hand out hot drinks of the Promenade for last Monday morning. Blessedly, we got enough people. Although the setup of the drinks left me a little breathless (I ran from the Student Center to Brock in order to get to my first class), the day went smoothly. My friend Kevin helped me gather all the leftover supplies together, and I suppose someone put them away while I was at work. Anyway, then we handed out candy and invitations in the dorms on Tuesday evening. It took me an hour and a half to cover the third and fourth floors of Thatcher South, but I think it was well worth it. One person even told me, "This is the third time someone's told me about the Expo." And my reply? "Good." Wednesday we wore cultural dress, and on Thursday we wore our white flag shirts (and my flag shirt has unfortunately had a washing machine accident and I hope I can get the pink out; I washed the load in cold, and somehow a jacket bled onto my bath towel, a sock, and part of my flag shirt. I am not pleased.). On Friday we had set-up for the Expo, and then we had vespers. Vespers went smoothly, and the Expo did, too. Three people signed up as interested in Ebeye, and that, of course, excites me. But all the booths had at least one person sign as interested, and that excites me even more.

I am very busy, as my last post noted. Homework, of course, but I'm also working on the next issue of Roots and on several homework-y projects that are due within a few weeks (like a research paper for Cross-Cultural Experience or my paper for American Literature over The Grapes of Wrath; I need to buckle down and do those papers). I recently finished reading Moby Dick, and I'm not entirely sure why it's still read today (especially since I'm a fast reader and this book took me a year to read). Seriously, it was thin on plot and thick on encyclopedia. I would have preferred to read a short story about the whalers who all die but Ishmael because of a crazy hunt of Moby Dick, the White Whale, instead of having to wade through all the detailed descriptions of the different types of whales and Melville's rambly rants about everything. Also, I don't think I actually care about what the stupid whale symbolizes. I have some guesses, but you know what? I don't care. Perhaps that goes against everything an English major stands for, but, also, not much on the caring. I still need to finish Paradise Lost, which is also taking me a long time, but that's not because I don't enjoy it. That's because I have to be "in the mood" for epic poetry and have time to digest it properly. I haven't had time for that since I was subbing for Amanda during a week of Junior camp and got to swing in her hammock. Plus, I've been adding exercise, because it makes me sleep like a rock. In two days, I've walked four miles and biked four miles. Me likey.

Also, for randomness' sake, I wore my dive boots this evening, because it was raining and I figured that if my feet were going to get wet, they might as well get warm from the fact that the shoes are insulated. The only downside was that it doesn't have good arch support, but that's about it. They're comfortable, oddly enough.

More later.