It's Tough On a Dog

One of the saddest poems I've ever heard...heard this on the radio one night as we were coming up on Speedy's gas station, never knew who wrote it until I just looked it up on a dog website; the listed author there was a Jean W. Sawtell. Reminds me of "The Giving Tree", one of my favorite picture books in all history. Mimi would have enjoyed this, I think.

"It's tough on a dog,
When his boy grows up,
When he no longer romps and frolics like a pup;

"It's tough on a dog,
When his boy gets old,
When they no longer cuddle on his bed when it gets cold;

"It's tough on a dog,
When his boy gets tall,
When he's off with the boys playing soccer and baseball;

"They no longer paddle through the mud and the bog,
Hoping to find a stray turtle or frog;
They no longer run through the grass up to their knees,
Or roll in piles of fresh fallen leaves;

"It's tough on a dog,
When his boy gets tall,
When he's off to school, and looking at girls in the hall;

"It's tough on a dog,
When he has work to do,
And forgets to play as he used to do;

"It's tough on a dog when
Instead of the woods or the fields or the pond,
His boy becomes a man -
And the man is gone."

It's tough on the boy, too.

Freshman Year Playlist

Well, I made a playlist of songs that went with graduations last year, and there was a lot of songs that seemed to scream for being included in a "Welcome to college" playlist. (Ones that I specially thought of, or were often stuck in my head, or both.) There could have been many more on this list, but I was tired of researching them all.

Track One - "Never Grow Up", Taylor Swift - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1YGmOit8G0 

Sometimes you just wanna be a little kid again...

Track Two - "Don't Forget to Remember Me", Carrie Underwood - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmAi_qJoPbU
This second verse, especially, fits the transition to college well. 

Track Three - "Speechless", Steven Curtis Chapman - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH-1wj7_Q6k

God is So GOOD!!! 

Track Four - "I'm in a Hurry", Alabama - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6slibTD9MF0

Students always are...it isn't much fun.

Track Five - Great is Thy Faithfulness - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k1WhFtVp0o

Yes. Yes. Yesyesyesyes. And yes. And thank you, Lord.

Track Six - In Christ Alone - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnWw24s5gG8

Very good reminder.

Track Seven - Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwFHsX6omvI

One of my favorite hymns of all time.

Track Eight - "Temporary Home", Carrie Underwood - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LraOiHUltak

Completely fits college; completely fits this whole life we live.

Track Nine - "King of the Jungle", Steven Curtis Chapman - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZFwLYvPi4c

I very often feel this way, and have to slow down and remind myself who is the King of the Jungle.

Track Ten - "It's a Good Day", FFH - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S-KdxH848I

And in his goodness, God puts rare surprises of blessings in rough times to keep us going. Those are good days.

Track Eleven - The Lord Is - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qkMs06XKaA

Another great, sound theological, song.

Track Twelve - "Where the Blacktop Ends", Keith Urban - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhsO7LnwyBI
My "Crank it up, I lived through another week!" Friday afternoon solo jam session.

Track Thirteen - "Supernatural", DC Talk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1BM07BKNQk
Yup. A fantastic song to play, by the way.

Track Fourteen - "She's in Love With the Boy", Trisha Yearwood - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUFObCZtGWQ
"There ain't a whole lot goin' on tonight/In this one-horse town" is a great description of campus on weekends...and so the rest of this song often glued itself into my mind way too often. Good song, but when it won't leave...

Track Fifteen - "Something Like That", Tim McGraw - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSThNgur0m4
That bridge....(!!!!!!!) It's wonderfully-written, and very true, but when it refuses to leave after dropping in unexpectedly...well, it's not pleasant.

Track Sixteen - "In The Light", DC Talk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWq1XYxtlRs
What we should always be seeking to do...and this pretty well sums up our journeys on the way there.

Track Seventeen - "Life Ain't Always Beautiful", Gary Allan - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VDNMtn0t2A
It isn't. Sometimes it just sucks. But it's worth it, the hard times will eventually lead to greener pastures at some point.

Track Eighteen - "Anyway", Martina McBride - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uLtyzRgmyI
Even if things seem to be going all wrong, keep your faith as strong as you can. God won't give you any more than He knows you can deal with.

Track Nineteen - "If You're Going Through Hell", Rodney Atkins - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBKybUusyP8
Hang on, things will get better at some point.

Track Twenty - That incredibly sad song from "The Fox and the Hound" -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3oZ0Il4QH
I watched this too many times to count...

Track Twenty-one - "Bring It On", Steven Curtis Chapman - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYJMG1bts0c

For finals week. Or whatever else is thrown in our paths. 

Freshman Year Down

     Well, somehow or another I got through it. The semester ended last Thursday, and this online course I'm taking began Monday, so I won't really get a break until June. I kind of stumbled through finals, but did just well enough to squeak by with all A's again, so that's kind of nice. And crazy. (I got an A in math?)

     Had a lot of sleepless nights and stressful days, but God guided me through it all, and he provided the aid I needed just when it was needed most, over and over again. Phone call here, email there, letter or card occasionally...

     Far too many hymns to list were often remembered and their truth savored; and country music again proved why it's the greatest genre of all, since it's about life, and everything that happens in it.

     Besides people, the other things that got me through the school year were a bakery; Chick-Fil-A; a blog run by a Mormon lawyer; reruns of "MacGyver", "Full House", and "Boy Meets World"; a YouTube channel run by a trio of homeschool graduates; my guitar Abby Lee and mandolin; and long walks through rain-coated streets. Many long walks.

     Thankful for the prayers and encouragement of my GBC family, especially Dylan and Steven. Samara was helpful as well with getting through those first couple months. The large camp network was invaluable; prayers of Brother Larry and Miss Kathy; the advice and laughter, muddling through this mess of life alongside Daniel, Jessica, Amanda, Jon, Ash and Matt, just to name a few. And most of the YT gang was going through some of the same experiences I was, so we could compare notes and complaints. Staying in touch with Aubrey, Adam, Tauri, Ryan W., Chance, Lorene and Lisbeth, mainly.
     And my family, of course. Nice to have relatives you can spend the weekends with; or drop in once in a while for dominoes, music and ping pong.
     It was really cool getting to know Ryan and Shelly and their family, felt a lot like home.

     "Home"...that's a hard concept to exactly understand. Where exactly is it? What defines somewhere as a "home" base? Why can multiple places feel that way at the same time? And what on earth is it that I've been searching for over the last few months? Something to do with this concept...

     Tried going to the CCF meetings, it was the group that Mom, Dad and Ryan had all been a part of when they were in school, but that didn't work out so well. A big question I've been dealing with lately-ish is "When is no teaching more beneficial than poor teaching?" So it was an off-and-on type of thing, went occasionally out of guilt, but nearly always felt much more depressed leaving than when I came, and that was at a pretty good level already.
     Found a pretty-good church within walking distance to attend when possible, Grace Baptist is about a fifteen-to-twenty minute walk from my dorm, depending on the weather, how much a hurry I'm in, and other things that come up.
     Ran into my old neighbor Katie and her husband Trevor, who was on my basketball team a long time ago, one day during lunch, it was good to catch up with them. They tried to get me to come to the BCM meetings weekly, and I knew a couple other people who were part of that group, so I thought for a while about checking it out one night. (My classmate Mallory, Trevor's cousin Bree, my neighbor Stephen two doors down, and this dude named Andrew, a Media Studies major fixing to graduate.) So one night in early February, I think, I poked my nose tentatively in the BCM building, unsure of what to expect. It was good, and people were friendly. Good teaching would probably be nearby with some more in-depth sniffing, still need to check on that. But anyway, these people actually seemed like they were seeking to grow in Christ and encourage others in their spiritual walks, which was very appealing. Slowly getting to know some of those people, Stephen, Mallory, Daniel P., and the Samanthas(known to everyone as Blonde and Redhead).

     Actually going to classes was an adjustment, for the most part I didn't learn much from fall semester. Enjoyed my psychology course, our teacher was this entertaining, common-sense-filled old man, and the community feel was interesting. A tight-knit group, with a lot of characters. The same could be said for Intro to Media Studies, lots of crazy things happened in that classroom. Comp I was a disaster, but we had one interesting day where we talked about Star Wars  the entire time. Being homeschooled was slightly a disadvantage, as I had to quickly learn a crash-course in "How to Write an Essay". Thankfully, Jess was happy to explain how MLA format worked. My history class was fantastic, since my teacher loved the subject and wanted us to find out as many new things as we could.
     This spring I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, but Basic Writing was challenging and good; not completely relying solely on instinct in journalism any longer, have most of the rules down now. Comp II was a trial at times, but really stretched my writing and research capabilities, which was good. And like Dr. Fuller or Mr. Carlisle or Cassie, Jason wanted us to really learn our subject. Mr. Shamblin was a lot like Brother Larry, which made for an interesting experience, seeing him every day in two classes. Computers was required, but I learned some useful stuff, and I was able to understand most of the stuff we went over in math. There wasn't really anyone to compare myself to in any of these classes, so that was disappointing and frustrating, always having to race myself, instead of a friendlyish rival to compete with.

     Also kept in touch with Alton, it's been kind of fun to listen to his take on life as a married person. Occasionally heard from Maddie as well. Mark Twain said once that "I can live for a week on a good compliment; sometimes even a month, if it's a specially-good one." At one point, she told me this: "To be honest, you're a lot stronger than you think." That echoed through my mind often over the months, helped a lot, in some odd way.
     One of the biggest things I learned this year was how weak I am, how much I need God to guide me and keep me on the right path. And also that no matter how much we wish we could change others' lives, we can only control our own, and not too well at that.

     Over the last year, I have graduated from high school; attended two weddings; hiked six miles through a dry river; observed with horror the apathy of college sports crowds; written about peanut butter, fairy tales, thunderstorms, goat milk and a beauty pageant; lost a couple of friends; choked down terrible food; X-rayed a cat; practiced songwriting; been invited to join a band and generally survived with most of my personality quirks intact.

The blog I mentioned is http://www.itjustgetsstranger.com, you must check out the Snuggie Texts first, and then proceed to whatever else of Eli's highly-entertaining posts you wish to peruse. You're welcome.

And the YouTube channel is the group called Blimey Cow, their videos can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/user/blimeycow Highly hilarious, with heavy doses of snarky commentary on the oddities of life and culture.

Mom's Favorite Poem

     This is my mom's all-time favorite poem, no idea where she found it or who the author was. But it just seemed to fit life this week, comes in handy pretty often as a motivational tool.

"Somebody once said that it couldn't be done,
But he with a chuckle replied,
That maybe it couldn't;
But he would be one
Who wouldn't say so till he tried.

"So he buckled right in
With the trace of a grin
On his face.
(If he worried, he hid it.)

"He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn't be done
AND HE DID IT!"

Bloodlines

     Been thinking on our mortality a lot recently...
     Strange topic, I know. And slightly depressing and scary.

      Went to visit Nano yesterday, which was nice. There's just something good about talking with her, because you know in the back of your mind, most people don't have their great-grandmas as long as I've had mine. And old people just have such a completely different mindset on life than we do now...

     Meg the cat had kittens a few weeks ago, and they're just now old enough to be adopted. One of Mom's cousins wanted one, so she drove east to Tahlequah to drop off the kitten before going to Westville to see Nano. Since the track is about a ten-minute walk from my dorm, I walked down there and rode with her.

     It was a good visit, we went grocery shopping and organized the medicine and looked through old picture albums. And also got a lamp from her neighbor's house and set it in the back room to await repairs.

     Nano just seemed so frail. It's incredibly sad to see elderly relatives you enjoy being around getting older. Her spirit is well, but beginning to wear down and out. Her eyesight is failing, and she can't move aroud quite as well as she once could. Still very healthy for a 92-year-old, but on the other hand...
     Seems like a lot of relatives' health are all crashing downhill at the same time...it's sort of scary, it'll be such a huge change, life will, when they're no longer here.

     Anyway, like I was saying, we were looking through old pictures, extremely old photographs, most of them. From the '20s and '30s, slowly increasing to nine years ago. A lot of characters from the early old stories are there: Charlie the train engineer, Nano's dad; her brothers Marvin and Leo, her sisters Lois and Ina, this unusual neighbor named Aint Sairy... Then later, pictures of everyone and their various beaux, which go with stories of dates to church and not marrying a man because of his rough hands... And then pictures of Nano and Dado, and Mimi, my grandma, as a little girl, in all the various places that they lived. Seeing what these locations of the tales Mimi would tell actually looked like, brings a whole new demension to the stories.
     Got me to thinking about the sort of people I came from.

     I've never been able to keep most anybody very straight, unfortunately; the really great historians are all very distantly related, so I don't know much. Through my mom's side, the Morrises, Cagles and Lankfords, were mostly farmers and such, a blend of English, Scotch and Cherokee that originally started out somewhere in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, gradually moving west into Oklahoma. One of Mom's cousins is a congressman. The Lankfords were mostly the same; from Virginia into Tennessee, then to Oklahoma at some later point. Most of them were farmers or ranchers, and when electricity came in; they all jumped on that. Switching back to Mom's mom's side, Dado single-handedly wired the entire town of Westville for electricity in 1946. Back to Mom's dad's side, Papa Lankford was a preacher and carpenter, and fourteen generations back in our family forest you can find Thomas Jefferson.

     I don't know much at all about Dad's side of the family; nobody else does, either. Irish blood is in there for sure somewhere, legend has it from a band of pirates. Cherokee and Creek blood came in there, too; the earliest I know of, those ancestors came from eastern Colorado, western Kansas and somewhere east, like North Carolina or Georgia. My dad's uncle is a senator, my great-grandpa (who I was named after) was a successful businessman in the optical field, and Dad's mom was a DJ.

     But mostly, there's just ordinary people, who had to work extremely hard for whatever they got in life. The storytelling gene has been passed down through the years, I seemed to have picked up an extra-strength dose of that one. Humor has been passed along as well, which is a fantastic legacy, although one that doesn't mesh as well with the intense drive to succeed.

     Whatever collection of personality quirks and histories go into making a person, well, here I am. It's impossible to tell exactly how much heredity and natural disposition vs. environment and circumstances go into making a person who they are, and even harder to assess your own personality and understand it, to accept both the strengths and weaknesses in their actual porportions in order to go through this life.

     I like looking through old pictures.

Dead Week

     They call this time of the semester "Dead Week", because everyone either dies or becomes a zombie. (That'd make a good plot for a pre-summer-blockbuster movie...) There are a few reasons for this. One, students are exhausted and completely out of all fuel. They ran out of energy three months ago, they ran out of will six-ish weeks ago, and they ran out of caffiene last weekend. Teachers are sick of grading papers. There are numerous presentations that have to be delivered and listened to attentively, and then there are those finals the next week.

     Besides the zombies staggering around, there are those cramming the info they should have been studying the last four months into one week. And the frantic panicking they're all in, and only too ready to talk to everyone they meet about it.

     Well, that pretty much explains that. How has my week gone? Let me think...

     Monday morning we had a style quiz in Basic Writing, and that was it. We got our final stories of the year back, I scored a 95, which was all right, considering we couldn't go back and fix our errors afterwards. Then I had to give a PowerPoint presentation. It was on peanut butter sandwiches. (I was hungry and it was the first interesting topic that came to mind when we picked them on choosing day.) Most of the people laughed, pretty sure I included all the required elements, and Mr. Shamblin said it was good. Went for a run afterwards, then went to the last BCM meeting of the school year. That was good, it was held outside by the fountain since the weather was nice. Talked to Amanda, and that was pretty much all the day's news. Fell asleep about one in the morning.

     Tuesday was a very long day. Of course, just about any day when you get three hours of sleep is going to be a long one. So I woke up at 4:30 a.m. with a horrible headache, pretty sure I had a fever, and I felt like I was going to throw up. And I had a math test later that morning. Another cause of the zombie thing is that being so tired and stressed, even more so than usual, your body just can't handle it and it just forces you to collapse, thereby through the enforced resting, it starts to repair itself. And that's great, but it doesn't really help when you can barely sit up and have important things to do. And it's cloudy and looks like it's going to rain, which also doesn't help. But, anyway, I drag myself downstairs and across campus to the science building to take the test, on geometry-like things, dealing with right triangles. I stumbled through it, relatively positive I completely bombed, but...I tried to finish it as best I could. Then it was time to go to the library, because I hadn't printed off my essay on social media that was due in less than two hours.
     Over to Seminary Hall, I pass the time waiting for class by finishing G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and reviewing my AP Stylebook. Jason had our second essays back, so I was a little worried about that. But the fairy-tale paper(See previous post) turned out pretty well. The rough draft scored a 90, and the final a 96. I missed one in--text citation in the first paragraph. In the comments, he wrote: "Great job! Your writing is direct and stylish." Which I guess is a good thing. Anyway, his comments are much more helpful than Mr. Deiter's were. Because he actually wants to make us better writers, to more clearly present our arguments, in order to improve our powers of persuasion. Since he wants to improve our writing, he's ruthless in searching for errors, as all good editors ought to be. This is why I've enjoyed his class. And he's funny. Strange at times, but a good teacher.
     Thought about going to CCF, but it was canceled, so I walked back to the dorm, read Agatha Christie's biography, and then went to bed pretty early, hoping I would feel better tomorrow.

     Woke up pretty early Wednesday morning, the new janitors(who are neither as good or as friendly as Darrell, the previous janitor) came through about 6:30, making enough noise as they clomped through the hall to wake me up. The sun was shining brightly, and I thought about going for a run before getting ready for class. Didn't think that would be such a good idea, though, since I wasn't feeling completely 100 percent yet, so I did math homework, raising my total score on that, which will count as a test-grade, by one point. And then I got into one of those classic comment chain conversations with Jon and Amanda on Nintendo games we played growing up. And there was a new Stranger post to read, which was an especially good one.
     Two more style quizzes in Basic Writing, and we found out that this week's news blogs were optional for extra credit, because Cassie had a ton of assignments from her photography class to grade and needed time for those. More presentations to listen to in Computers, there was a very good one on gun control by a guy I'd never seen before, a large sweeping look covering nearly all aspects of the topic before coming around to blasting its' deficiencies in his conclusion. (Most people in this class I have no idea who they are. Same with my math class.)
      Practiced volleyball for a while, then thought I might watch a movie. Finally remembered Mom's Netflix password, so I watched "Captain America" for the second time. It's a very good movie, full of good quotes and with a great story and characters.
     Then I went over to Louise and Harry's, which was great, as nearly all times spent with Lankfords are. We watched TV for a while, a show on specialty hamburgers, and then played hymns on the mandolins. It was a good day. Kind of a strange happiness, of the rare intentional forced "I'm going to do things that sound relaxing and interesting" variety, as opposed to the "Random events that turn out in a nicely surprising way" type.  But it was a nice day. It was really hot, though, not used to 84-degree temperatures for a while.

     This morning had a kind of odd-but-fitting symmerty to the first day of math class. In January I woke up at 10:34 and galloped my ten-minute commute through a cold windy rain to get to class by the starting time of 11, and on the final day in May I woke up at 10:37, galloped my ten-minute communte through a windy, cold morning that was threatening to rain. We went over Tuesday's test, which turned out to not be as bad as I'd feared. Mr. Shamblin, as exhausted of teaching as his students are of being taught, messed up the grading for the tests, realized it on the second-to-last one, and was too tired to regrade them all over again. So though I earned a 78, it goes down as an 89 in the gradebook, and I pretty much just need to score higher than 72(if our final is above our lowest test, that lowest is replaced by our final score, which will then count double) to get an A, I think. My math could be off there, but I think I have an ouside chance of sneaking by somehow with all A's again. Don't think it's likely, but there is a chance. Just need to try to do the best I can on the finals, and then see what happens.
     Stopped by Morgan's, it was pretty crowded this afternoon. This guy in his early forties with his three young daughters asked me for advice on what to get. After his daughters ordered, he asked Emily the clerk, "Are you guys out of cherry turnovers?" She nods dejectedly. "We just sold the last one like fifteen minutes ago." He frowns. "Can I beat that guy up?" Everyone within hearing distance cracks up.
     I had to give a presentation on my last essay in Comp II, which I survived, more or less. Still not feeling great, but at least I didn't throw up. We found out several interesting things about our class: We are very much pro-spanking, very much pro-hunting, and very much anti-child beauty pageants. There was a lot of writing on my rough draft of the social media essay...and then I get to the last page, where I find a score of 98, and a note saying this would be acceptable as-is for the final if I wished. There are a few words that I'll rearrange for my own liking, the only thing Jason could find fault with was the title. "I was trying to find something to improve in here...the only thing I could think of was to make the title more interesting," he told me after class let out. He described it as a "perfect academic-style paper, the kind that these fifty-year-old guys wish they could write."
     The Internet was out for most of the afternoon, which pretty much killed the idea of getting one last news blog in. And I couldn't get started writing this post until a lot later than I would have liked. But I did get to read Agatha Christie, so that was good. As I've been typing this, I've been watching the Los Angeles-St. Louis hockey game, and there have been snowflakes landing on my window. In May. SNOWFLAKES????? REALLY???? The Blues have just won, like I was hoping, and that's basically all the news that's happened this week.

     Up next is finals, which I'm strangely unconcerned about. They're important tests, but the world won't end if I do badly. I'll just do the best I can, and see what happens. Not really that worried about two of them, the other two I'll need to do a little more studying for. And then I'll get to move out(Yay!) and have most of the summer off to rest and learn before the third round of this war, er, I mean, this third semester of this college chapter in my life, begins.