going...going...gone.

Apparently school is really stressful. So stressful, in fact, that two kids that I know withdrew in the last week. Just up and left. No explanation at all. 

This is very strange. 

Today I went to see the mens' lacrosse team's final home game. They won, so they get to go to playoffs in Michigan next weekend, which they're really excited about. I don't blame them. It must be very exciting to go to playoffs. 

This is the last full week of school that I have this year. How strange is that? This is still April. I mean, I have about 19 days left here total, but only seven days of class. I don't feel ready to leave just yet. Maybe once finals roll around, I'll feel differently. Who knows.

Right now I have my last project and last paper to work on. Adios and have a great weekend.

two more weeks

Cool things happened today. My Spanish professor told me after Phonetics that I was the only kid in class to get a perfect score on my last homework assignment. Later on, it rained and thundered - and was brilliantly sunny at the same time. Then I laughed so hard that - ironically - my headache went away for an hour or so. Then Jenn and I had a dance party. Then, after an IM soccer game, I went out with Stephen and looked at stars from flat on our backs in the grass for a couple minutes.

Two weeks from today, class is finished for the year. Three weeks from exactly this time, I will be back in Erie. It's amazing how quickly this year went. At the same time, it's amazing how long this year was. It seems like a lifetime ago that it was Christmas. Seems like a whole nother year that I was in BibRev or cracking up with Paul and Haena and Lissa in Bio Lab so hard that there were tears running down my face just about every week. I remember, in October, standing barefoot in my red dress on the soccer field with Stephen after homecoming. In September, I remember the very first time I stood in goal. 

This was a good year. This was a year much better than last year. First of all, I'm leaving school this year with friends. I'm leaving with my personality intact. I'm leaving with far more of a sense of direction than I did last year. I'm leaving with the experience of having tried something new, leaving with an idea of how next year will be. I'm leaving with people I know without a shadow of a doubt will still be here in August when I come back. I'm leaving with the knowledge that there is a person here who loves me and who has my back no matter what.

Would I say that I love this place? Nah. I feel that saying that I love Grove City would be a bit of a stretch. But I have caught myself a couple of times in the past few weeks saying to Stephen or Jenn, "If we lived in the city, we wouldn't be able to ________." See these amazing stars. Look at this sweet creek. Walk this road to the playground. This place is okay.

Last January, I couldn't wait to get out of Erie. Last school year, I couldn't wait to get out of GCC. At the end of the summer, I couldn't wait to get out of the house. It's been a while since I've been reluctant to leave a place. 

This is more abstract and less informational. But I guess the idea of writing to you is to let you understand what it's like for me here. And this is what it's like right now.

It's been quite the year. 

so cool.

For some reason, I keep starting a post today and then I'm unable to finish it. I feel bad, because sometimes when cool stuff happens I just call and tell you about it (which is logical, I suppose), but at the same time I wish I could just write it all down too, because I like to go back and see what was going on. So forgive me if you've heard something before.

This was the best weekend I've ever had at this school. On Friday it was gorgeous and I got to go outside and play soccer (and swing on swings at the playground!) and found this really cool park place by the creek down the road. So cool. 

On Saturday (and I don't think I've told you this yet), I went to a reception for that scholarship that I got when I wrote to financial aid and asked them for more money. The people who actually gave the scholarship are dead, so representatives of the family came to meet us, which was cool, but there were about 200 kids so it wasn't quite the same as that time I went to the Class of 1962's high school reunion and had dinner with them. Not quite the same. Saturday afternoon, as you know, Stephen and I and various other random people tried - in vain - for several hours to catch the escaped bird. Whoever owns said bird is really stupid for not having clipped its wings. It would have been a hundred million times easier to catch if it couldn't fly. Or if it was stupider. Patches totally would have crashed into a wall in the first ten seconds.

Saturday night was awesome. So so so cool. I loved everything about it, especially the little things. For example, that Stephen wore a tux. I'm not sure why I thought that was so cool. Maybe I thought it was cool that he thought it was cool. Most guys dress up grudgingly because they know their dates will be disgusted with them otherwise. But I was really tickled that he thought it was that neat. Also I can't get over the flowers. They're sitting right here on my desk and every time I look at them I get the biggest, stupidest grin on my face.

Tonight was really cool too. The moon was out - and huge - and there were stars and kind of wispy clouds and it looked just exactly like a painting. And Stephen and I went out on the field to see and were there just talking and laughing for a while. It was a great end to the weekend. So beautiful, so cool.

I love it.

see the cucumber. he can't dance.

Just a quick post to show a picture of me and Stephen from the dance - I'll show you these pictures anyways, but Emily P. reads my blog too and I thought she might like to see.

churchdating

I don't usually talk to you about what I'm learning in school, which is kind of a shame, because what I learn now is infinitely more interesting than anything I learned in grade school or high school, and that's when I was living with you and had to tell you what I was doing.

Today in Spec Mind, we were talking about Christian approaches to marriage, which I happened to think was going to be a hideous waste of time since this is that stupid nondenominational "courtship" crap. This lecture ended up being one of those times like when I was taking sociology and I left the room with a literal smile on my face because I'd felt like I'd actually learned something applicable to real life. I didn't agree with everything people were saying, but I definitely feel like I benefited from it. 

There are just some bits and pieces that I thought were so cool. For example, my professor was telling us how one of her friends is a missionary in Africa and he once went to an African wedding. During part of the ceremony, the pastor gave a small bowl of water to the bride and one to the groom. He then got a bigger bowl and told each of them, in turn, to pour their water into it. "Now," he said to the bride, "take your water back." She couldn't. He told the man the same thing, "Take your water back." He couldn't either. The water, explained my professor, was still just as much theirs individually as it had been before it was mixed, but not it was completely inextricable and perfectly mixed. The pastor took a third bowl of water and poured it in. "This is Christ." He said. 

My professor said that a marriage has to be like that - a complete and total sacrifice and mixture of your whole lives - not just your "love", but your emotions and faith and intellect and possessions. 

The next story she told was just as interesting. Once, she said, when she was in grad school, she was having dinner with her pastor and his wife. They were a pretty young couple - maybe in their early 30s - and they were at the dinner table, when all of a sudden, they began to have an argument. And after a couple minutes of this argument, the husband turned to my professor and said, "Could you excuse us for a second, we need to go upstairs." And they did. And fifteen minutes later, they came back down and they were fine after talking through everything. My professor said that this astounded her in two ways. First, that Christian couples will fight. ("Just get used to the idea," she said. "It's going to happen.") Secondly, she was completely taken aback that they would completely abandon their duties as host and hostess to fix the problem. Nothing was more important to them than each other and they weren't willing to let the problem fester or get worse. I love that.

This is something that's been talked about a lot lately. A lot of things I've been reading for school and a lot of lectures are about love and marriage and good ways to approach this. So it's been something I've been thinking about a lot. 

I don't think I'm very much like a lot of other girls. I've come to this conclusion slowly, mostly because I just thought it was taking me a long time to find them, but I've realized that most other girls were told, very explicitly, by their parents growing up how they were to approach dating and relationships and the like. And I wasn't. And I like it, because they're all messed up and I'm not.  

i dunno

You know what's funny? I very distinctly remember (among a whole lot of other things that aren't so distinct) on Saturday night, laying in the CT scan machine and thinking to myself 'I wonder if I'll be like Caiti and leave the ER never wanting to go into medicine'. I remember, in my fairly confused state of mind, that this was the thing I was worried about. Not the fact that I had a head injury, not the fact that this was the first time I'd ever had something go physically wrong when one of my parents wasn't there with me, not that I felt horrible, but that I didn't want to let this experience make me want to quit. 

It didn't, by the way. I still want to be a PA. Maybe even more so now, since I had that horrific doctor who was the opposite of compassion, and how the nurses were just all business. I think sometimes after all that school, maybe people forget why they started doing this in the first place - because they wanted to help people, and because they thought fixing people was just the coolest concept in the world. 

The last couple of days have been really strange. First, I've been feeling really weird. I have a headache, yeah, and a pretty good one at that. But it's more a continually spaced-out feeling. And I have a hard time remembering what happened on Saturday. If I sit and think about it for a minute, I remember playing the game, I remember getting hit, I remember going to lunch with Stephen's family. I remember taking a nap (probably the most dangerous thing I did all day) and I remember most of the hospital visit and the night after. But I have to really concentrate to draw it all up, as if it happened a really long time ago, not this past weekend. Plus I still get a little dizzy-nauseous on occasion. And I haven't really had an appetite since Saturday either. 

On top of physically feeling funny, there's been the whole fiasco with my team. We'd told them what happened and then asked for volunteers (perhaps girls with previous goalie experience) to just try it out and see how they felt about it. Yesterday afternoon, we took one of the girls into the gym and suited her up and I talked her through everything and a third girl shot on her and she was doing okay until people started moving around, and then she panicked. 

We were invited to represent our section in playoffs and the captains declined the invite. They gave our team a whole lot of reasons why not, all of which were suspiciously flimsy and most of which were to make me feel better about the real reason why we're not going: you can't go to playoffs with a fake goalie. You'd lose in the very first game, and it's just not worth it. They won't even let me say I'm sorry. 

So I don't know how I feel about that. Tired, maybe. Too tired and partially disoriented to sort through how I feel right now. On the plus side, I guess, I can go to the formal on Saturday. I just feel like I let down the seniors, because really, I have two more years to go to playoffs and they don't.

It's just a bummer. 

Saturday

Last home games were today. Okay, game. Singular. CMU never showed up to play, which we think is a win in our favor and we think means we get to go to playoffs next weekend. Slippery Rock was a great game. They actually played okay today, but we were better. We shut them out 12-0. It was awesome. I had seven saves in the game. Nothing that they shot on me went in - that's like the best feeling ever - to earn that shutout. Stephen came, of course, at 9:00 in the morning, to cheer us on. 

Also today I went to lunch with Stephen's parents, which was cool. They were really easy to talk to. I like them both very much and Stephen says that they both "absolutely loved" me, so I must be doing something right. His dad is really funny (so is his mom, actually), but what's so interesting to me is that they are such outgoing, dynamic people and I'm not sure how two such boisterous people can have a son who is so shy. I always think it's interesting to meet peoples' families because I think people make more sense when you get to see where they come from (not necessarily their actual hometown - although that helps). 

So it's been a good Saturday so far. I'm at work now, and I need to get some studying done (I have a Phonetics test this Wednesday) before I go to hang out with Stephen for a while afterward. 

goings-on

This was a good weekend. No, really. I came away with a couple new bruises (nothing new there), a really nasty sunburn (due to sitting in the soccer field, in the sun, reading a book for my Lit class), and a lost voice (remedied by fruity cough drops and the eight - no, literally eight - different kinds of tea that Stephen brought to me this morning before my 9:00 class), but it was a great weekend.

Friday night I had conditioning practice with my team, which was great, and then I had the night off. I hung out with Stephen and we watched a scary movie and then I got to go to bed at a decent hour since we had two games on Saturday. 

Saturday games were good. We tied one and won one. The tied game we should have won. We were a better team than the team we played but our defense was lazy starting off. I had a couple of really good saves in that game and also a couple of really close, really frustrating misses. We killed the second team we played 11-0. Ridiculous. We played them two men down, left-handed, and made our offense play defense and vice versa. And STILL we shut them out. 

We came back and had dinner as a team and then went down to the football field to cheer on the boys' team. They're doing okay. In past seasons they've been pretty bad but they're actually doing alright now.

Sunday was church of course (Father only asked for money once yesterday - I think he's learning) and then brunch. And because it was so incredibly beautiful outside, Jenn, Stephen, and I all went down to the bleachers on the soccer field and sat there studying all day long (thus the sunburn). Then I had to work from 5-7:30 and then I watched some of a movie and took a break to go play some soccer before bed. So yeah...good weekend.

Today we FINALLY have our Spanish professor back. Apparently she's been cleared to teach her morning classes but not her afternoon ones, so I'll be having her for Phonetics but not Verbs. Ironically, the lesson she taught in Phonetics today was information that was not taught but included on the LAST exam. Grr. My friend Austin was sitting next to me shaking his head nearly the whole class. I'll admit it was pretty frustrating. 

We have our last two lacrosse games this week. We play CMU tomorrow (hopefully), which is a really big game, since if we lose we don't get to go to the playoffs. If we DO win, we're seeded first in the league. Then on Saturday we play Slippery Rock again. We'll win. Slippery Rock is really pretty bad, plus even in the off chance that we don't win, we've already played Slippery Rock and the league officials only count the first game you play against a team. 

So things are going okay around here. Last week was incredibly frustrating, but things are looking up, mostly because of the sunshine and such. 

Hopefully we'll get to do lots of outside-ish things this week. Also hopefully, I'll remember sunscreen this time. :)