psalm_onethirtyone: (This is My Way out of This)
Going home in half an hour for Easter break -- technically we only get Friday off, but I turned in all my work early so I could be home during Holy Week. I'm very excited. Holy Week is my favourite liturgical holiday and I always spend it with my family, so I'm really glad that that's worked out this year as well.

Did the Sunday of the Passion of the Palms[1] last Sunday at the Catholic services in my dormitory basement. I have come to the conclusion that I might have been meant to be a Catholic priest instead of an Episcopalian pastor: Catholics get to dress up pretty, swing around censors at stuff, the homily is only five minutes, and half the service is sung for no good reason. Also, Latin. Sadly, I am still a woman, and the Catholic church is still headed by jerks, so it's not going to happen.

The Catholic priest who does the services is really good, though. He has a good rapport with the students, he knows how to make the homilies thoughtful and relevant, and he's just a very nice guy. I almost don't mind that he won't let me receive communion. :P

--Aaaand I just got a sweary phone call from Maria. Apparently Daddy misdirected her to the Poconos by way of Jim Thorpe instead of getting her home, so she's going to be a few hours late. D: That should make for a nice, tense dinner. Eesh. I am too sleepy to be super upset, not gonna lie.

[1] The priest insisted on making sure we were aware that the correct name for the day is not Palm Sunday, but Sunday of the Passion of the Palms. This is fair; I have also heard it called Passion Sunday.
psalm_onethirtyone: (Grow a Little Good)
There was a labyrinth up in one of the boardrooms on Von Liebig to-day. I walked it by myself and took as long as I wanted. First I took off my watch and my room keys and all of my things that belong to school and busyness and all that, and just walked. It was really, really nice.

However, I am still tired and fairly depressed, so I will be meeting the psych next week to talk about a med change/adjustment.

Also, I have approximately fifty-million meetings to-morrow (in actuality: four, although Dani is trying to coerce me into a fifth one, and I am going to try to dig my heels in). Ughhhh I hate everything and I want to sleep in the labyrinth.
psalm_onethirtyone: (Disappointed)
Feeling very weird for the time being, not necessarily good.

Wisdom teeth coming out in two weeks, not looking forward to it, will be laid up a bit; on the other hand, I'll be put to sleep for it, and I've always wanted to experience being under anesthesia from a kind of existential perspective (what is it like to lose time? Not through sleeping, because when I sleep I can always tell that time has passed, but I understand that under anesthesia you can't tell that, and time actually gets lost).

The family reunion is to-morrow, and I really don't like Daddy's family, but I'm going to hide in my room--the good thing about it being at our house means that I can take refuge in my room if I get too overwhelmed--and Rebecca and Natalie are coming and that is a good thing. All the stressful things that are happening are just short-term, and I will be okay.
psalm_onethirtyone: (Little Breezes Dusk and Shiver)
I really miss my school friends right now. It has to do at least partly with this unholy terror I have that if I'm away from people for too long they'll just forget about me, or they won't want me any more--it's not really logical, it's just one of my biggest anxieties, and it's completely paralysing. Maria's friends are all visiting her over the summer--Lydia's coming next month, as is Elena, and Emily may come after that, and she had Will last week, and later on in the summer she'll visit Will and Elena and Monica.

I got to go see [livejournal.com profile] mhari in May, which was wonderful, but otherwise I'm going to be spending summer alone. Like always. Which, when I was still in high school and didn't really have any friends in the state, wasn't a really big deal, because it was par for the course, I never had any friends that I saw on a daily basis for a whole eight years. But now that I've spent two years of my friends being available almost all the time, I feel really, really emotionally cut off.

It's also wrapped up in the fact that I really like to be able to touch people, or else I feel distanced from them; I like to hold hands, or cuddle, or just be physically close to people, it makes me feel safer. So I don't have anybody for that (Maria is not a touchy-feely person at all), and also I'm just so scared that I'll get back to school and all my friends there will be all 'whatever, who are you, why did we even like you?'

and for some reason I'm having a depressive episode, and I haven't had one of those in about three weeks, so I'm disappointed. And there are some things going wrong with my plans for the summer; I wasn't able to get hired by any of the places I applied, so my summer job is doing odd jobs for a man at church once a week, I've had writer's block since before I came home and my poetry won't come out, so my MS is still at forty-eight pages and I'll never hit the fifty I want before I try to start sending it to publishers, and I'm only going to get rejection letters anyway, and I never have time to go to Selinsgrove to get the things I need to finish my Big Damn Art Project. And then the priest of our church [Daphne] told Mama she would give me an internship so at least I could get something official out of the summer, but she kind of reneged on that. She's giving me the connexions to meet some people, but nothing really official, and she refuses to believe I'm serious about wanting to go into the priesthood; she keeps referring to it as "[Soujin]'s discernment process" where I decide "whether she really does want to go into religion or not". I know that I want to do this. I really hate talking about it in these terms, because it feels all faux-spiritual and pretentious, but I really do feel called to do this. It feels like I'm finally making the right decision. And even if it's true that kids my age usually change their minds about their career plans and whatnot, it's still at least polite to pretend to believe me when I say this is what I want to do. It really upsets me.

And I feel like Mama's disappointed in me for not being proactive enough, but any time I have to interact with Daphne I just end up feeling so disappointed and depressed that I don't really want her help. I wish so much that I had a spiritual counsellor who didn't make me upset. I'm meeting with her husband Ed to-morrow, who was a spiritual counsellor (and is a retired priest) at Penn State for years and years, and hoping that since he's an actual human being and not an alien ambassador from planet Daphne we will possibly be able to communicate in a way that does not make me miserable, cross my fingers. I just. I want to learn how to organise a fundraiser and run a vacation bible school and pick out the week's hymns and connect the readings together with the season and current events into a big thick woven sermon. I want to learn from someone who loves God and loves the earthly church, too, someone who visits sick people and helps make prayer shawls and runs the book club and teaches Sunday school because that person wants to, but whenever I talk to Daphne she talks like it's all a huge burden that God's placed upon her and she's only doing it because she knows it's the right thing to do. I don't want to learn from someone who feels that way. I want to learn from someone who loves it.

And I want the sink to start working again and the smell of turpentine to go away and for my heart to stop hurting, and I wouldn't mind if only one of those things happened. It just feels like too much of a buildup.

Also, I have to drive to Duncannon to-morrow morning to see the doctor for my physical for my visa for Greece, and that just reminds me how scared I am to go to Greece and how maybe it's not such a good idea and I won't know anyone and my depression will come back and I won't have anyone to reach out to, and my friends will definitely forget me and I won't be able to connect to people because I'm a stranger and the wrong nationality and I'll fail all my classes or I won't be able to get the classes I need to graduate and it's going to be expensive and maybe I should just stay home-- and then I start to have a panic attack. I want to go, but I'm scared.

And really, really lonely. >_<

tl;dr Soujin is a whiny emo kid with hell of anxiety disorder, hi.
psalm_onethirtyone: (Try Again To-morrow)
I remembered about an hour ago that I hadn't done any of the reading for to-morrow's class. Aghhhh. So right now I am reading a thirty-seven page article on how WITCHES ARE OUT TO GET YOUR PENISES, GUYS, SO STAY ALERT. Oh, middle ages. You so crazy.

Also, I finally looked at the scrip Dr. Crazypants wrote me, and it is totally useless. She basically wrote it in such a way that it will cost me over $100 to fill. So I just wrote an e-mail to my therapist asking if she would mind contacting the psych (whose contact I don't have) and letting her know that she's insane. Hopefully that will work, since I'm going to run out by the end of the week.

I'm up to ten pages on my paper, so if I can just write another five to-morrow, I will be done! I finished the section on Teresa of Avila, so now I just need to make the one on Catherine of Sienna come out nice. Although Belle (the professor) told me yesterday that I may be overthinking this paper, and possibly I should just narrow it down to Teresa. Except if I do that I have to bullshit five more pages about Teresa's stupid complex, and that means I'll probably have to talk about her book about Song of Songs, which I was hoping to avoid. IT DEPENDS. It has to be done by Friday, though, because a) that's when Belle said she would look over the rough draft for me, and b) that's when Dr. Wang assigns TWO NEW PAPERS for philosophy. I kind of hate him right now.

Actually, full disclosure, I kind of hate everyone right now. Especially Heinrich Kramer. THE WITCHES DON'T WANT YOUR STUPID PENIS ANYWAY, IT'S PROBABLY ALL GROSS.
psalm_onethirtyone: (Mine has SPACE PRIESTS)
Pages written: 6 full.

Pages to go: 9 max.

Amount I currently hate Teresa of Avila: OVER NINE THOUSAND.

Amount I wish Jesus would come to me in visions and tell me what to do: A lot.
psalm_onethirtyone: (This is My Way out of This)
Christos anesti!

Good: it is Easter, and I'm so glad. I think Holy Week is my very favourite liturgical holiday. I mean, Christmas is good, and important, but Easter just feels so immediate, and without Easter Christmas wouldn't mean anything. Plus I love everything about it, from Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesdays to the forty-seven days of Lent that just about KILL YOU but bring you so much closer to God because you remember WHY you're dying. And then Palm Sunday, with the procession of palms, and Maundy Thursday when we get together and wash each other's feet and eat a passover kind of meal--bread and lamb and wine--and then go quietly, shrouding the church in black veils and stripping the altar because Jesus has been taken away.

Then on Good Friday we fast and mourn in the empty church, and on Holy Saturday we prepare, we are so full of the anticipation of relief, we fill the church with lillies and white roses and daffodils, and get all the food ready for the Easter feasting, and we know it's only a little while until the sorrow time is over and Jesus comes back to us--

And then we wake up on Easter Sunday and everything is joyful again. In my house, we still hide eggs, and we write clues for each other and hide our Easter baskets, so we have to go hunting all over for them. Then we go to service and the church is stuffed, and I was eucharistic minister to-day, so I wore my long black robe and my little alb and served wine to my elders and all the children (which is difficult, because I can't see their little mouths, and half the time I miss. >_> but they help out a bit). Then we rush home so we can pile all the food into the car and drive to my aunt's. That's not the fun part, because nobody really likes my Dad's side of the family that much, but Maria and I spent two hours on the cookies last night, decorating them in our usual obsessive-compulsive fashion, and Mama made a beautiful lamb cake that I stole the head off for Charlie.

And I borrowed a hymnal, because the Easter hymns are my favourites, and I wanted to be able to hum them and know the lyrics; and also because I am writing a Galahad/Percy fic for Easter and wanted reference materials.

And now I'm back at school with my bounty of food (enough to kill someone, I think), and the fasting is over, and I got to wear my beautiful Easter skirt. We took the Quaker out on Holy Saturday and he didn't even embarrass us in front of the Mennonites, and I learned to cook the rosemary solution for my shampoo by myself. Also we started the incubator with fourteen turkey eggs in it!

Now I have an essay to write, but I feel--reasonably hopeful about it? Less stressed out. It feels doable. I'll start to-morrow when I get the rest of the materials for it. It's due Thursday. I'll manage. I'm skipping Anthro to-morrow so I can be well-rested for my other classes that I like better. I'm back with my friends and I like that.

Bad: Mama's work insurance changed, and my meds are no longer covered.
psalm_onethirtyone: (This is My Way out of This)
Am watching a film about Hildegard von Bingen for history class--have to say, it seems to be mostly an excuse to show off how pretty her music was.

Fair enough, really. Wow.

Edit: Just got my religion reading from Dr. Prill. It is a 17-page pdf. Goddammit.*

*I am not charmed by reading text online.
psalm_onethirtyone: (Not Me! Erro ero)
To-day's funtimes project: try to find a synonym for "squicky" for an academic paper.*

(On the plus side, I've decided the topics for my two big research papers of the semester: for Cultural Anthropology I am going to write about different cultures' approaches to mental illness and how emotions are described by different cultures. For Women's Lives in Medieval Europe I am going to write about religious women whose relationship with God was sexual. I am excited! It's going to be cool. Now I just have to figure out which female historian I will write about for my historiographical report.)

*it's a paper about Australian colonialism in New Guinea. Squick squick squick.
psalm_onethirtyone: (Stella Potens et Mira)
A sentence I love, and which I am about to chop out of my essay because it doesn't fit in:

"And is that salvation, or its allegorical rendering, really a kind of cosmic security blanket to reassure us that we won’t just vanish like spent stars when we die?"
psalm_onethirtyone: (Lovey & Me)
I am getting this done on the nineteenth. I am kind of delighted and amazed.

(It's for a class. But hey. She's going to try to heal the sadness in my tissues. Possibly there will be tuning forks! She also invited me to a thing with a medium who will channel spiritual energy and give us messages from higher powers. I would SO GO if I had twenty-five dollars to drop on something that would be solely for my own personal fascination with human nature and the spirituality of others (especially in a small town like Huntingdon where most of the people are extremely conservative). Maaaan.)

Only two doctors left to get shadowing appts with, and of course they're both CAM. One I'm calling to-morrow because she was away last week, and the other is just trying to stress me out by not existing but I'll track her down anyway. >:D

I really need to get started with my journalling for this class. Oi.

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Soujin

January 2012

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