The irony, considering my history, is not lost on me.

Many parents like to consider the meaning of a name when they're deciding on one for a child they're expecting. While I don't think choosing a certain name will have some almighty power in determining that child's future, I do think that they can be fun and interesting to learn. Which is why I crack jokes about the meaning of my name whenever an appropriate opportunity arises.

Because do you know what Mallory means?

Ill-omened.

Oh, how I wish I was kidding.

But it does make sense since "Mal" means bad in both Spanish and French.

The reason I'm talking about this is because the only remotely interesting thing that happened today was I went to Bingo again with Mommom and Hilda and just like Tuesday, none of us won anything. So I jokingly told them they could blame it on me and my "ill-omened" nature.

In frustrating news, I'm getting sicker again. This is going to be very hard over the next few days since the nebulizer I've been using here in Swansboro is Blake's so I can't take it with me to Campbell because I'll have no way to get it back here. Which means I have 3.5 days of relying on nothing but my inhaler and cough drops. I sure hope this inhaler can last me until I get back. I did just get it today, but I will be using it more than usual without a nebulizer around. I'm back on Prednisone and Mucinex and hopefully that will at least help tide me over.

Needless to say, I will be calling the Student Health Center tomorrow to get an appointment for as soon as possible after I get back to New York. Hopefully Thursday.

This signature seems even funnier considering the beginning of this post, but...

Unbroken

I don't do a lot of reviews on here. It's just not really my thing, but also a lot of it is because there's just not been a lot out there that has elicited a strong enough reaction in me to warrant it (unless I was on the launch/street team for it and a review is what I agreed to do).

Well, today is a rare exception.

Tonight, Mom, Mommom, and I went to eat Japanese food (I was craving it, Mom always loves it as long as her stomach is cooperating, and Mommom said it was fine - a win for me!) and to the movies. Mom listed several movies that she was interested in, two of which were Selma and Unbroken. I knew the gist of Selma, but all I knew about Unbroken was that it was about an Olympian who because a bombardier in World War II. I figured that Unbroken would anger me less than Selma would, so we went with that (again, Mommom had no preference).

I could sum up this review in two words: SEE IT.

But that really wouldn't be very informative, now would it? ;)

Seriously, though, this is one of the best movies I have ever seen in my life. Jack O'Connell, who plays the central character Louie Zamperini, gave the best performance I've seen in anything in years. There is one scene where he's forced to hold this giant log over his shoulders and after a while he's getting tired and weak but then screams and lifts it all the way over his head just to basically show the monster torturing him that he couldn't break him, and it made me gasp and gave me chills all over my body. The guy who plays the head of the prison camp made him into the creepiest thing I have seen in recent memory. You will walk out of there absolutely hating him. We wanted to beat the crap out of him. (And turns out in his regular life, this actor is a singer-songwriter in Japan. A man of many talents.)

The cinematography is beautiful.

The cast around Louie is strong.

I laughed, I cried, I wanted to scream.

I can't think of anything I didn't like about this movie.

Go see it. I hate to say "I promise you won't regret it" because I try to avoid promising things that I have no control over and I can't control people's opinions, but I cannot for the life of me imagine someone walking out of a theater after seeing this movie and saying "Wow, that was awful." I'm serious.

Unbroken. Go. See it. Now.

1/8/15: aka the day I missed my dream because of vacation.

So you know what is a perk of living in a big city like New York that I had never really considered until today?

TV shows and movies, sometimes they film on location instead of on sets and sound stages.

You know what one of my favorite TV shows of all time is? Law & Order: SVU. I'm not 100% sure, but I think I've seen every episode, and there are more than 350.

So imagine my utter devastation (okay that might be a little hyperbolic) when Holly called me tonight and said "Hey guess what. Law and Order is setting up in the street outside our apartment right now."

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

Yeah.

She did some investigating and found out that they are shooting in Spiegel. AKA the restaurant I go to like three times a week. And apparently the episode will be airing February 4th, so at least I can see it and point it out and be like "Hey, I know that!"

Welcome to life in New York. I can get used to this.

Je suis Charlie.

I could write about many things for today's post...the amazing crab legs we had for dinner...the State game against Virginia...my hair cut (I was looking shaggy, just got it all shaped up as I continue to grow it out but it's a cute bob now)...spending an hour on the phone with Time Warner Cable trying to get the Duke game for my grandma only for them to tell me they couldn't get it...but all of that just seems stupid and pointless in light of what happened in Paris today.

Attacks like that, senseless massacres, they remind you what is important.

Love is important.

Tolerance is important.

Understanding and equality are important.

Just as the French stood with the US after 9/11, today, in honor of the lives lost, the world is standing with the French.

Sometimes I am a senior citizen on the inside.

I’ve been sleeping in my grandmother’s sun room this week (with the blinds pulled down) because that’s where her recliners are and I started sleeping here when I needed to sleep upright. It’s been fine. 

But the one bad thing about sleeping here and on the first floor in this house in general is that when one person is up, EVERYONE is up. And my grandmother gets up between 8 and 8:30 every morning. Which is way earlier than I am used to when I don’t have to be up that early. (Surprisingly, I haven’t taken a single nap this week.)

So all of that is to say that between the early wake up and the lack of wifi, I’ve seen a lot of television at hours when I’ve generally never even though to watch tv. And since my grandmother is, well, my grandmother, I’ve generally been watching whatever she wants. And it’s the same thing every day. Lots of game shows mixed in with a little bit of news. I had no idea Alfonso Ribeiro (Carlton from The Fresh Prince) even hosted a game show but he does. I actually really like Let’s Make a Deal and The Price is Right, I just hadn’t watched The Price is Right in a very, very long time before this week and now I like it. After the game shows we watch Steve Harvey at 3, Ellen at 4 (I got her to give in on the Ellen, I like her). And at night, we watch the news, Family Feud, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, more Family Feud, and then the news. I’m actually really good at Wheel of Fortune, I always have been. It’s weird.

But we actually missed our TV ritual tonight because I went with her to the other cliché senior citizen event: Bingo! And it was fun. It was loud and neither of us won anything but we went with my grandma’s best friend who is the funniest old lady you will ever meet in your life. She is just as sarcastic as I am and dishes out as much as I do and I seriously just hope that I am as awesome as she is when I’m in my 70s. And my grandma gets even funnier and more sarcastic when she’s with her best friend; she frequently refers to she and her as “Frick and Frack.” And it’s so accurate.

The only bad news is that my migraine has been out of control since I was on the back from Raleigh Saturday evening and I had got it back down to manageable this afternoon but the lights and all the noise made me sick again tonight. Totally worth it, though. I needed to get out of this house and do something that didn’t involve my grandma being snappy and she’s happy when she plays Bingo even when she doesn’t win.

Let’s play ‘You know you need a new suitcase when…’

Correct answers could include…

The metal snaps in half on the bottom and is and poking through…

You cut your leg on said metal…

The pull-out handle breaks and won’t extend anymore…

And if THAT wasn’t enough for you, how about when the fabric handle completely rips off when you try to pick it up?

Yep. That should do it.

But hey, I got that suitcase before I went to Europe with my grandmother in June 2005, so I’d say we got our money’s worth out of it.

Anyway, my grandma agreed to take me to Belk today because my mom said they were having a big sale, and she was right. I got a new giant suitcase that has four wheels instead of two and thus will be infinitely easier to move and is even bigger and deeper than my old one for $100 instead of the $200 tag, a new tote bag because the one that matched my old suitcase was pretty ripped and ratty for $40 instead of $100, and a new wallet just because mine was super old and nasty for $27 instead of $45, plus I got a discount for applying for a Belk card (even though I told them I knew I’d be denied). That means I got $345 of stuff for $142.60. Woo! Who doesn’t love a good bargain?

I don’t know why a new suitcase is so exciting to me, but I really love this new suitcase. It’s okay, you can call me weird. I’ve accepted it. Normal is overrated.

Crackers and Cowboys

One of the (many) perks of staying at my grandma’s house is that she has an overabundance of food here, specifically snack food. And like the cliché grandmother, she will ask you approximately every twelve minutes if you’re hungry and if you would like (insert almost certainly unhealthy snack here) to eat.

Well, tonight I needed to eat a snack because I was getting lightheaded, so I decided to try this box of crackers that has been sitting on her kitchen counter since I first showed up here last weekend.

Best cracker decision of my life.

Cranberry and Sage Triscuits, if you were not specifically labeled “Limited Edition”, I would buy you in bulk from now until the end of time. You are the perfect cracker. I’ve never bought food off the internet before, but for a good bit, I seriously considered finding you on Amazon and buying as much of you as I could find. This I promise you now: if you appeared because of this Christmas season, I will be on high alert for you next December so we can continue this love affair.

Okay, cheese over.

(Get it? Cheese? Because I’m talking about crackers? Ba dum shh.)

In other grandmother related news, despite the fact that I’ve been alive for 22.5 years, today I learned two very interesting things: my grandmother actually likes and cares about the NFL, and my grandmother REALLY hates the Cowboys. Granted, the second thing isn’t too surprising because my grandmother has a deep prejudice against anything relating to Texas (don’t ask), but it was still a little weird when I turned on the Lions/Cowboys game because nothing else was on tv on this Sunday afternoon and she spent the next 3.5 hours ranting about every little thing that went in the Cowboys’ favor. And on the rare occasion when she wasn’t complaining about the Cowboys, she was asking me about the playoffs and what teams were set up to play who next and all that. I legitimately had no idea she would care. 

Complexities run deep in this family, I know.

These are two of my favorite things.

What two things, you may ask?

Well, that would be the Wolfpack and time with my friends, of course. 

I got out of the hospital on Wednesday and Mom had a tooth extraction yesterday, but do you think that would stop us from driving to a Wolfpack basketball game when we already had the tickets bought? Heck no!

It was a very early morning, but so worth it. And for once, I didn’t have trouble staying awake on the long drive, which was really good because Mom was hurting and needed the company. I brought my nebulizer with me in case my breathing got really bad, but thankfully I never had to stop to use it. 

The good news is the Wolfpack absolutely killed Pittsburgh, and a conference win is always a good thing. The bad news is we next play 3 nationally ranked teams, Virginia then Duke then UNC, and none of those are going to be easy. But we’ll take them as they come, and thus far, our young team is still doing much better than just about anyone expected.

After the game, we went over to the bookstore. What was supposed to be a quick run-in to get one shirt Mom wanted that she thought she could get away with wearing to work turned into an almost hour long trip because Mom kept seeing things she wanted and couldn’t make up her mind between shirts. Because that’s what happens when Mom goes shopping for anything whatsoever. When we left she still said, “I feel like I rushed the decision!” and I simply looked at her and said, “You went in for one shirt and came out with four. That’s the opposite of rushing!” Because really. On the upside to the physical pain I got in from following her around the store all that time, I did find a very cute and very cheap shirt for myself. 

But after that was the best part of the day, one of the very few things more fun to me than a Wolfpack game: a reunion with Clayton! We tried and tried to find a time when he could come down to the coast for a visit but couldn’t work it out, so thankfully he was able to drive up to Raleigh from his family’s house for a meal today before he flies back to Atlanta on Monday. I was practically jumping with excitement by the time we pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant and found out he pulled in at almost the exact same time. Let’s just say there was a very cheesy run across part of the parking lot because I was just so excited to hug him. :)

The meal was great. I actually didn’t get much of a word in, because Clayton and Mom spent the entire time talking about theology and various denominations and their varying levels of progressiveness. Mom, despite being in massive amounts of pain, still had us both cracking up and she said she understood why I call him one of my best friends. The three of us are all incredibly sarcastic and weird so it was just so much fun and I was so, so, so freaking happy to get to spend time with him and hug him and just be with him in person again. 

But you know what? It wasn’t nearly as surreal and exciting as it could have been because of how much time we’ve spent on FaceTime in the past few months, and I think that’s a really good thing. It’s really special to have a friendship that can grow even stronger when you move hundreds of miles apart, but he’s far more important to me now than he was when we left Campbell in May. And I just think that’s amazing because 850 miles is a lot to overcome.

I’m just really lucky in the love department in general, but with him in particular. When you’ve been burned a lot by people, as I have in the past, it can make it very difficult to feel 100% safe with anyone. At least that’s the way it is for me. There’s almost always this little voice in the back of my head that is telling me I’m doing something wrong or someone’s mad at me or some crazy thing like that and so I’m always afraid of saying the wrong thing and scaring someone away. Even though I know it’s crazy. Even though I trust my friends when they tell me they love me. I still haven’t learned how to make that voice, that negativity, go away. 

But with my friendship with Clayton, I have that safety. At the very least, I am safe in being insecure. I can ask him things rooted simply in the fact that I’ve gotten in my own head again and he says things like “glad you checked! no sense in letting things worry you!” and “that’s what open communication is about!” Even though I know that I could probably have that open communication with more of my friends, I don’t trust that or myself yet, so it just means the world to me that I do have it here. 

Hopefully it won’t be another eight months before we get to see each other again.

One Word: 2015

When I was writing my Year in Review post, I kept thinking about the worry I had felt over paying for school, and how silly I feel now that, once again, God showed up and worked everything out. That got me thinking about Jon and the Anima Series' video "What Are You Afraid Of?" I wrote a post about it at the beginning of 2014, so I was also thinking about that, as well as my interview with Jon in August and what he said was the inspiration for that poem.

What room does fear have when I make room for love? That is the central question in Jon's poem. God is love. So what room do I have for fear if I am completely consumed by the love of my Father? And as he said in his interview, every good and positive thing that you could think might be the opposite of fear, Scripture tells us either that God is it or God provides it. So seriously, why bother being afraid? We have the ultimate, unbeatable weapon against it.

And then there's the fact that "do not be afraid" is in the Bible somewhere in the neighborhood of 365 times. Like any good parent, God seems to like repeating things when it's a lesson He really wants His kids to get. So, I'm just guessing, but perhaps maybe I need to stop being so afraid every time I think the plans I had for myself aren't going to work out. Because God's plan really is way better, and I know that if things don't go the way I wanted, like if I had ended up having to take this semester off,  there has to be something so incredibly awesome in store that I can't see. It certainly turned out that way when I ended up at Campbell instead of William & Mary, my original first choice for college, didn't it?

I can only see the step right in front of me. God has all of eternity laid out before Him. I want to remember that in this new year.

I want to grow in my trust that God's plans are greater and better than mine and not be so caught up in thinking that I have to know what's going to happen.

I want to relinquish the death grip I tend to have on the planning and the details and accept the fact that I can't plan everything.

When I don't know what's going to come next, I want to step forward in faith that the God who has never left me nor forsaken me isn't going to leave my side now.

I want to stop being afraid of the unknown and rest in what is known: My Father is in control. He is good. He is faithful. And He loves me more than I could ever begin to picture.

I'm tired of fear. I'm tired of worry. I'm taking my peace of mind back. That's why my One Word for 2015 is

button made by Traci

Hello, 2015.

You know what's a pretty sweet New Year's gift?

Busting outta that joint they call a hospital hours before the ball drop.

I'm back at my grandma's house now. Relaxing. Still getting better.

10 more days until I leave Swansboro. 13 until I'm back home in New York.

I'm trying to mentally prepare myself for knowing that this year is going to go by even more quickly than last year did, but let's face it, there is no preparing for that. I've just gotta buckle up and get ready for the ride.

You know what's crazy? A year from now, I'll be preparing for my last semester at NYU and graduation. Perspective.

I'm nervously excited to see what this year has in store. I think that's a good feeling to have.

Before I know it, I'll be writing another year in review post, so I'm going to make it my mission to enjoy every moment of this year.

So 2015? Nice to meet ya. Let's hang out.