It's good to be alive. Summer days. Breezes blowing through the screen door on June nights. Friends and sisters and people to do life with. People you once thought might not fulfill you suddenly being the people you find at your side. Work all day. Student Financial Servies, I'd love to help you as long as you promise to be understanding that I am only the messenger and there are state laws and regulations that are actually good especially when it means managing 27,000 people all at once. So, sir, please don't use that word and no, unfortunately there are no supervisors available at this time, but if I could take your number, I promise I will refer your question to someone who really does care and who really will call you back. Soon. Time to think. Time to contemplate. Time to consider why it is so hard to make a decision about what I want and what I don't want and how my plans will turn out tomorrow when I am actually somewhere else. And having the thought that it would be so nice to throw it all to the wind and just make my yes yes. To choose and to know and be okay with my own choice. To have my own washing machine. Something strangely beautiful and comforting about it. To know that at any moment I could walk downstairs and put all of my towels in the washing machine. And then put them in the dryer. Without having to dig up all of my spare change and hope that the change machine won't eat my cash this time. Ah, the simple luxuries. And to appreciate that I have this becuase some people don't. And to realize how lucky I am. To walk on the ancient tree-lined paths on the way to psychology 101 and to realize how affluent I am at 19. And how for some people waking up in the morning and staying alive and safe until night is an accomplishment. And thinking nothing of it to be a citizen of a country that is excluded from nothing. To realize how abnormal that is and yet how privledged and what an honor it is just to be born this way. Having done nothing to earn it. Sounds a bit like amazing, grace, wouldn't you say? And so I sit in my cool, breezy room, unworthy of the desk I sit before. Unworthy of the $7.99 director's chair from the ARC that I sit upon. Unworthy of the sandals I bought today. Unworthy of the pile of clothes I look upon just now. These things that we tell ourselves we need, these things we use to tell others we are more lucky and important and beautiful and worthy than they are. When we are really dying inside of our whitewashed homes. When there are people in a ramshackled community center who really get it. People like me who have found just enough of thier fragile security in this wood hay straw that joining these child-souls would be a little too risky. And I often fear that I have put a little too much of my faith in these things. Or at least I I find a little too much pleasure in them. Enough pleasure to forget what the point really is. And that tomorrow all could be gone with one wash of the sea. This could be my life. Washed away. And I am forced to ask myself if this would be okay with me. If I could handle it. If my entire life would be gone without all of these things. No. I say with a resounding wind, or at least with all the wind my little lungs can afford NO!! My life will not be washed away with the shoes I paid my money for and my books and my computer and even this caladar beside my desk. I would still have my life. Maybe even a little more of it. And that is good to know. A good assessment to make sometimes. Every once in a while to look around at the castles and barns that I've built and realize that if they all burnt tomorrow, I would be okay with that. Life is good. And I am blessed to be breathing air in this beautiful country in this beautiful world. A world I hope to see one day outside of this little bubble of an unreal world. To really know and see and understand. To experience the true beauty of the world outside of my plastic bubble of shrink-wrapped-processed-food. Someday, I will break free, I will come out to see life as it is and how it was intended. And that will be a beautiful day.