Some days just call for ice cream.

And days that include waiting 20 minutes for a metro to show up

and then it being so packed you can't even try to force yourself to smash in there,

spending the next 20 minutes trying to hail a cab with one bad arm and another that you can't hold up for very long,

finding out your brand new ID doesn't work,

almost being late to class,

having a seizure,

spending the rest of the day with a killer migraine,

and your mother insisting on taking $300 out of your account so she can buy herself a birthday present even though you're barely going to have enough to make it to the end of January when your next set of loans comes in

are pretty much the prime example of ice cream kind of days.

This was really not my day.

Well, I got my work done.

But that's all I got done today.

Well, that and shaving, which I was very much in need of.

My shoulder is so messed up. And the painkillers are making me tired but not really doing anything for the pain. But the doctor already said he won't give me anything else until we get the results from the CT scan, so I just have to suck it up and deal with it.

At least my only work for Thursday is reading, and it's online so I don't have to hold a book or anything like that.

And now I'm going to bed because yeah, I was up until 3 reading last night and made myself get up at 10:15 so I didn't sleep all day and totally ruin myself for tonight, but yeah, exhaustion from the painkillers and muscle relaxers and nausea meds is making me almost fall asleep at the computer.

Gnight. Hopefully I make it to class and back tomorrow okay. Even walking is harder with my arm in this sling because I have to hold my purse with my right arm, which I don't normally do, and so it throws off the alignment of my spine and thus hurts my whole lower back and hips thanks to all my stupid nerve damage. Ugh. If this had happened to my right arm, it wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal.

Okay, enough whining. Help is coming, and for that I am grateful.

Five days in and I'm already behind.

Because when the first week of graduate school classes coincides with your period (even though it was supposed to be here a week and a half before this) and a bad shoulder injury, the period leaves you curled up on the bathroom floor for hours with a fan blowing directly on you praying to God you don't start throwing up, and the shoulder injury is to the shoulder of your good arm aka the arm that doesn't have severe nerve damage aka the arm you do everything with and it leaves you taking painkillers around the clock to cope, reading boring textbooks for a class you're not all that excited about to begin with is not really high on your list of things to remember.

I have approximately 182 pages to read, two discussion questions to think of, and a 250-600 word response to write by 9 pm tomorrow. Technically, I'm allowed to skip 3 of the weekly response papers, so I could take that off my list, but it'd be good if I could skip the last 3 at the end of the semester when all my big papers are due.

I better just suck it up and get to reading.  Hopefully I can get about half of it done before I crash. I read pretty quickly so it's possible.

It would help if I didn't get sucked into Criminal Minds, huh?  Ha!

Today I went to class, took a nap because I felt nauseous and was exhausted, and went to Kmart in the grocery store with Holly, and yeah, yeah, watched Criminal Minds.

Okay, here we go. I need to not be behind this early on in the semester.

The best kind of love.

So as I've mentioned, I've been binge-watching Criminal Minds lately. God bless 2014 and all the websites that upload free episodes of TV shows that you can't access on network websites.

Well, in one of the episodes I watched yesterday, a group of teens were trapped in a metal cage and forced to participate in this bizarre battle-to-the-death by two creepy obsessed gamers. It involved shock collars and was just so creepy. In one scene, one of the gamers called one of the girls, Wendy, forward because it was her turn to go into a round, and she started panicking and sobbing even harder. One of the gamers shocked her hard, and so she was going to go forward, but suddenly, the boy who had a longstanding crush on her, Billy, jumped in front of her and shouted, "I'll take her place! I'll go in her place!"

It didn't mean much to me at the time, it seemed like an expected turn in a TV show (what came next wasn't, but that's for another time), but then, this morning at church, we sang the song "This is Amazing Grace," and since then, I've been thinking about this scene.  You probably know the song, but in case you don't, the chorus goes like this:

This is amazing grace
This is unfailing love
That you would take my place
That you would bear my cross
You would lay down your life
So I could be set free
Jesus, I sing for
All that you've done for me

And those words got me thinking about Billy and Wendy and that scene. Yes, it was just two teenagers, a stupid crush, a deathly video game brought to life, and on a TV show, no less, but what Billy did, it was such a vivid picture to me of what Jesus did.  Billy's love for Wendy, whatever form it may have been in as a high school boy, caused him to step forward, thinking he could save her from harm by offering himself instead. Billy offered to take Wendy's place in the gun battle. He knew it wasn't going to end well for him, but he knew that he would rather save her than watch her die.

Jesus knew it wasn't going to end well for him, either. He knew as he carried that cross up the hill exactly what kind of pain and torture waited for him, but he walked forward anyway. He offered himself up so that I, you, every one of us could be saved. He gave his life for us. Plain and simple. And anyone who has come to know Jesus knows that his love was, is, and will always be the perfect love that all broken souls long for. He took wrath upon himself so that we didn't have to.

John 15:13 Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

Billy cared for Wendy so deeply that he was willing to literally lay down his life to protect her.  The Bible says right there in that verse that that is the strongest, best, ultimate kind of love we could ever ask for.  And the important thing is that in the game, Wendy hadn't done anything to deserve to die, it was all at the whim of her kidnappers, but we did. We deserved to die and God made a way, anyway, so that we didn't have to.

People throw around the phrase "I would take a bullet for you" or the like as a way of showing their closeness with or adoration for someone else, but I think a lot of us, if it came down to it, would probably pick ourselves over other people. Even me. There is only a select group of people that I would even think about giving my life for, but in the moment, I'm not sure how I would react. That's the honest truth, my selfish nature at its best. I like living too much.

I want to be like Jesus, though. Like Billy. To love everyone around me so deeply that I would give anything to save their lives. Even myself. Because that's the best kind of love, that sacrificial love, and I've been the recipient of it too many times to not pay it forward.

Mistakes in pushing myself.

Pushing yourself to your limits can be a good thing. I push myself to work when my head pain makes me want to just sleep. I get outside when my mind tells me I should just stay in my room. Oftentimes, it can show you that you're capable of more than you thought you were.

But sometimes, I push myself for things that aren't always worth it. I made myself do the Anima video that got released last night. I told myself that the new videos get looked at more, and I wanted anyone who saw this new video being released to have captions if they needed them.

Bad idea. Bad bad idea.  My shoulder did not like that at all.  Looks like I really will have to put my Anima work on hold for a while. That makes me sad.

You know, I never realized how many muscles a simple act like typing actually required before this. Random thought.

I spent most of today sleeping hard as a rock. I didn't even get up to eat until 5:00. Then I watched my soccer boys get another solid win via the livestream and followed along on Twitter to see Wolfpack football get another win, too, so that was a good evening.

I'm excited to go back to church tomorrow. So thankful that I already have that family.

Also, binge watching Criminal Minds continues. Tomorrow I will have to buckle down and work on the reading assignments, but for now, I will enjoy my show.

Come on Thursday.

The doctor thinks that either my labrum or my rotator cuff is torn.

In my left arm.

So that arm is in a sling.

My good arm.

The arm that doesn't have nerve damage.

Thursday morning I have a CT with a dye injection straight in my shoulder to see what is what.

I would like that to hurry up because I have to stay in the sling basically all the time until I get the results.

My life is a never ending drama, huh?  Of course this would happen to the arm that I do basically everything with right at the beginning of grad school.

My Art

Ever since my interview with Jon this past Saturday, there's been one specific thing that's been stuck in my head. And it actually is something that wasn't in the interview. It was something Jon said as we were leaving, him to go back to the theater and me to go find dinner. He mentioned something about how he loves getting to talk to other artists. I said, "I've never really called myself an artist before," and very matter-of-factly, he responded,

"Well, I just did. So get used to it." 

I remember thinking to myself as I headed back towards the subway, He thinks I'm an artist. Jon thinks I'm an artist. I was in a little bit of shock that this guy that everybody who knows him knows he is an artist, he's on Broadway for Pete's sake, called me an artist and said it like he was sure of it.  It's not that his opinion is some magnificent thing that is ultra special, but I really admire and respect him, even more so after that interview, and so to have him be the first person to tell me I, too, am an artist was a surprise.

I just write a blog, after all. This thing started out as a diary that Chelsea couldn't find and ended up chronicling the best journey I could ever have imagined, but still, was it really art?  But then, I remembered Dr. Thornton telling me something after I handed in a book review at the end of this last fall semester: "You say writing comes naturally to you, but writing is an art you have to craft. It's something you have to work at."  I'm the kid that filled journals with stories because words had to be let out. I would write out scenarios of things I wanted to say to people in my life that I never could. I know that I write better now than when I was in high school, when I started this blog. This has taken time and effort, though, and I know that I wouldn't be where I am now if I hadn't spent so much time throughout my life jotting down whatever popped into my head, whether it be stories or blog posts.

This is how I tell my story. I say what I need to say here on this website. It is my safe haven to share pieces of myself that I can't always say out loud. I write letters to people when I don't know how to voice what is in my heart. I can't believe I never realized that this little old blog is art, too. The greatest art is authentic, I think, the stuff where you can see and feel the artist's soul in it and know that it really is a piece of them. I don't just write on this blog every day out of habit. I write here because it's something I crave. I write because my day doesn't feel complete if I don't put something up. I write because things come more easily to me here.

Maybe one day, my platform will turn into something else, and I'll write that book I've been dreaming of doing for years now. I've got a story to tell the world, I know that much. But for now, it's this little old blog.

So yeah, I'm an artist. Who knew?

Thanks, Jon.

Glad today's over.

Class today was, fine, I guess. It was a typical introduction to the course class and we had to do those cheesy interviews to get to know each other or whatever. Mostly the material he talked about today makes me think that this class is going to bore me with way too much reading and not enough things I'll actually be interested in, but we'll see.

And this afternoon I was supposed to go to the hospital and see a neurologist about the 4 seizures I've had in the 3.5 weeks I've been here, but NYU's health insurance rules say that I have to be seen by an on-campus doctor first to get a referral to go somewhere off campus. So I wasted an hour out of my afternoon and $20 on cab fare to be yelled at by an obnoxious woman at the hospital's business office. So that was fun.

The good news is that the student health center can fit me in tomorrow.  The bad news is that I didn't tell them I would also like to be seen about my shoulder, because I hadn't decided on that yet when I set up the appointment. I hurt it when I fell in the seizure in my room two weeks ago and figured it was just sore, but the pain never totally went away, and then it came back strong when I fell on Sunday and it hurts all the way down my shoulder blade in my back, like I've got a seriously pulled muscle or something. I hope that's just all it is. This is my left arm, and I'm left handed.

Said shoulder pain is making it very difficult to work on Anima videos, because I feel it even worse in my shoulder blade, a stabbing pain, when I'm typing. Better to slowly chip away at the list than not do it at all, I guess. As of right now, I have 15 videos left (out of 62) on the list, and I plan on getting one more done and then going to bed. Not too bad for how I've been feeling and I just got the project on the 25th.

I'm so tired. I got almost eight full hours of sleep and I'm just so out of it. Good night.

Jitters of the night before.

Twelve hours from now, I'll be sitting in my first grad school class in a program that I've dedicated the next two years of my life to.

You'd think after sixteen years of education, this wouldn't be so hard for me, but nerves are still running rampant through my body. I'm still scared I can't do this. I'm still scared my body isn't going to hold up. I'm still scared I'm not going to make it here and that everything I've worked so hard for will be for nothing.

But what I do know is that I believe that God has brought me here for a reason. It may not be the reason I planned on, but it's a reason. And I know that He promises to be with me every second of every day. And I know that I always fail to see the ability in me that everyone else is so far from shy about pointing out.

God tells us in the Bible THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE TIMES (depending on the translation) not to be afraid. I don't think it'd be in there that many times if it wasn't a lesson He really wanted to get across. He's bigger than fear.

Whatever happens, whatever tomorrow brings, I will sing of the God whose goodness I trust in with every fiber of my being.

Soli Gloria Deo.

Here we go.

Girl Talk

My period is a week late.

Now, the good news is that pregnancy is obviously not a concern.

But the bad news is that I feel like I've been PMSing for the past two weeks.  And that blows.

I feel like I've been on the verge of tears all day and I have absolutely zero clue as to why.

I'm so tired of my energy being drained when I have so much coming up and I have this beautiful city to explore.

If I didn't know that my thyroid levels were just checked so recently, I'd think something was up there.

Blah. One more day of nothing.

And then classes start.