Ah! Life.

i'm back at mba now.

with a little inspiration from a few good "men" and the joy of the Lord, i'm back with full force. I've been thinking lately, life is often missed out on.

life is more or less made up of relationships and moments. and relationships within the moments. all we have is this moment and the people around us. i'll tell you what i mean. there was a time a couple of years ago when i looked back at life and said, "agh! i'm almost an adult and i don't know where my life went!" i'm not sure what the stimuli was, but i realized i'd missed out large portions of my life wishing i was somewhere else or in some other time. for example, the whole time i was homeschooled, i constantly wished i was in school with my friends. so i spent all my time and my mind attempting to live somewhere else which is impossible, and as a result, i missed out on what was happening in the "here and now". case and case kept coming to mind of times when i wished i was older or younger, or in another state, or hanging out with different people, and so on. it all added up to a staggering amount of life that i more or less missed out on. i determined at that point to live right now! but still i found myself this year wishing i was somewhere else with different people a lot of the time. you know how it goes, constantly surrounded with people that get on your nerves for this reason or that reason. last weekend i discovered what i was missing and up came that resolve again! i realized, these people are who God has given me for this part of my life! they're what i've got. why not make the most of it? i don't want to get to the end of this year and think to myself, "what a waste!". I WANT TO LIVE! i don't want to come to the end of the road and realized i never truly lived. there's so much waiting for me in every moment, and in every interaction with the people around me. for me, this is how to truly live.

now, life pretty much rocks! god is teaching me more and more to experience life to the fullest to his glory. from what i can tell this comes from living here and living now! as of february 24th, my new life's resolution is to live life, and love it! there's a song i want to sing but i can't sing through type, so i'll write the lyrics, it's by one of my all time favorite artists chris rice and it goes like this (except with a tune and stuff):

Everyday is a journal page
Every man holds a quill and ink
And there’s plenty of room for writing in
All we do and believe and think
So will you compose a curse
Or will today bring the blessings
Fill the page with rhyming verse
Or some random sketchings

Teach us to count the days
Teach us to make the days count
Lead us in better ways
Somehow our souls forgot
Life means so much

Everyday is a bank account
And time is our currency
So no one’s rich, nobody’s poor
We get twenty-four hours each
So how are you gonna spend
Will you invest or squander
Try to get ahead
Or help someone who’s under

Teach us to count the days
Teach us to make the days count
Lead us in better ways
Somehow our souls forgot
Life means so much

Has anybody lived who knew the value of a life?
And don’t you think giving his own
Would prove the worth of yours and mine?

Teach us to count the days
Teach us to make the days count
Lead us in better ways
Somehow our souls forgot
Life means so much!

staples. "that was easy!"

i totally stapled my finger on wednesday! i mean i fully jammed a staple completely into my finger! here's what happened:

i was talking with "the team" and, me being me, found something to fiddle with while talking. it was a stapler. not just any stapler though, it was a stapler from the STAPLES, and i found out in a slightly painful way that their catch phrase thing, "that was easy!" is all too true.

i was squeezing the thing trying to figure out exactly how it worked, because it obviously wasn't a normal stapler. it had two little protrusions on the underside, just in front of where the staple would hypothetically come out. i figured that these things must be like some kind of "safety" (what's that?) device, kind of like the sleeve thing on a nail gun that has to be depressed before the gun can fire. so i was holding these down while gently squeezing the stapler waiting to feel if the staple was going to come out. i kept squeezing and squeezing, slowly but surely, when suddenly, SNAP!! the thing exploded like a nail gun. i jerked my had out violently, only to see a staple lodged in my index finger, completely flush with the surface of the skin.
amazed and sufficiently surprised/startled, i pulled that puppy out, threw it in the trash, squeezed some blood out, walked to the bathroom clutching my pierced finger, washed it off, then stopped the bleeding with a paper towel. now, three days later, it's almost completely better. amazing!

i learned two things from this experience.
1. there's still some 6th grader in me.
2. stapling one's self is a good way to end a conversation politely.