Volcanoes are AWESOME.

awe·some(adj); \ˈȯ-səm\

1 : expressive of awe
2 a : inspiring awe

I watched a show on Discovery last night about volcanoes. It was soooo cool!

My friend Laura Ihry spent the year in Iceland. This is a image she took of the eruption at Eyjafjallajökull. It is truly awe-inspiring..

BBBbbbbbbbb

It's been two weeks since Rachel left Decorah and one week since she flew out of the country. I'm holding up, to say the least. I do find that I've been bored more often and feel like I have less to look forward to on a weekly basis though. I've had to force myself to be more creative with my time, otherwise I feel like a worthless sack of meat.

I went to Milwaukee and Madison this weekend. I am the trip planner for LAC(luther artists' collective) so I had to plan the wholeeee trip by myself. It turned out to be a success.

The drive down was a little stressful because it was pretty stormy and windy for the majority of it... but at least when we drove past my favourite tree on highway 18 it wasn't raining so I could get this cool shot of it.



The Milwaukee art museum is one of my favourites in the midwest.

It TOTALLY trumps the Walker. For one, they have a pretty good selection of art, and a pretty good variety in artists/genres. Probably the biggest letdown there was seeing the Raphael "Woman with the Veil." It was cool, but the entire mezzanine floor was devoted to this one painting. B0ring.




We also walked around the historic third ward for a while on Saturday... And that was cool because we went to a lot of smaller galleries.

Sunday in Madison was kind of silly and maybe a waste of time because nothing opened up until 10 and we had to leave by 1... but it was still fun to walk around State Street and people watch.

The only problem with the trip was that I didn't get a lot of school work done.... AND I just got accepted into the program at Griffith University in Brisbane and have a shit-ton of paperwork to still fill-out before I can actually fly over. I'm in the process of making up a portfolio to submit to the art college! If I get in to that my housing situation and finances will change AGAIN... Ssosooo... although I'm accepted into Griffith, a lot of my future plans still hang in the air. It's frustrating, but I should have everything solidly planned soon.

That's all for now I guess!
Z

Uh oh.

Recently I've been having really realistic dreams.  It's becoming a problem because I've mistaken my dreams for reality a couple times now... Y'know, like I refer to some conversation I had had in my dream(not remembering it was a dream), and being completely off about a certain situation.

Thankfully it hasn't had anything to do with romantic life, like in the movie science of sleep....It's been pretty mundane things I've mistaken thus far, BUT I wish my dream world would go back to really obscure obvious dreamscapes. Things are getting confusing over here and it's making me edgy. 

Rats Holding Things

Rats holding things is just about the cutest thing I have ever seen.

Take a look:

especially holding teddy bears...

self sabotage

I'm pretty sure I've been sabotaging myself since I came to college.  It's not that I don't want to do well, because I really do, but I'm afraid of what will happen if I actually apply myself.  That is to say, I'm more accepting of doing well when I'm not trying than I am of failing when I'm doing my best. 

It's really screwed up. And I don't know how to stop myself. I'm skipping class right now. No particular reason, I just didn't feel like going. WHY DO I CONTINUE TO DO THIS? I don't have an answer.  All I know is I'm never going to get anywhere in life if I continue this bad habit.  I'm probably depressed... but I do such a good job of hiding it from everyone including myself that I have a hard time figuring out when I'm depressed. 

Maybe I need to read this book. Maybe I just need to get my shit together.

Dreams/Nighmares

A month or so ago I watched David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. I've always been fascinated by the dream world, but that movie really pointed out just how fucked up dreams can be sometimes. 

A couple nights ago I had one of the most horribly vivid dreams.  

It started off with me and some friends playing around with samurai swords.  A friend and I were pretending to fight each other, but he accidentally decapitated me and sliced my torso away from my bottom half so I was lying on the ground in three pieces. I was begging people to help me and I thought that I needed a doctor, but no one seemed to really think it was that big of a deal. Eventually they put me back together, but throughout the rest of my dream I had problems with my head falling of my shoulders.  Every time my head fell off I felt this cold achy sensation in my neck.  I never made it to the doctor. The most interesting part was that I wasn't really bleeding. It wasn't THAT  gory actually. Just miserable.

This morning I had a lucid dream.

That was fun... I didn't notice I was dreaming until about halfway through the dream.. but when I came to the realization, I changed the whole plot to the dream and time travelled and brought people back from the dead.  I love lucid dreaming.

There's not really a point to this post besides me stating that I love dreams and hearing about dreams... even when they're more like nightmares.

January

January is always the crummiest month of the year...

• It's the coldest month.
• It's the greyest month.
• It's the loneliest month at Luther College.

Here at Luther College we have a transition term between our semesters. It's called J-term. Typically, this is a time for people to get gen-eds out of the way or study away or abroad. So most people are either super stressed out by their single class that meets every day and is very crammed OR they are off campus. The campus is very dead over J-term. The students that ARE on campus avoid going outdoors as much as possible because the windchill is 20 below.

I'm taking a snowboarding class this January. I needed a break from learning. My brain needed to cool down. The snowboarding class meets once a week (Tuesdays, from 3-10:30ish PM). It's nice that I have some time to rearrange my life and focus on filling out my study abroad application paperwork, but it sucks at the same time. I sit in my room until dinnertime almost every day of the week. IT'S NOT HEALTHYYY like I had hoped J-term would be. Thankfully, it is almost over... but it's scary at the same time. I had made a goal to study chinese over J-term, and completely overlooked it. I START CHINESE AGAIN IN ONE WEEK. I HAVEN'T SPOKEN/WRITTEN CHINESE IN 8 MONTHS. yikes.

I have at least 7 friends that are studying abroad this spring, including 3 of my 4 future housemates. I'm not going to see them for an entire year. I'm really sad about this.

I'm going home this wednesday and I hope that I will be able to get together with my old friends that I really didn't get to see/talk to much over winter break. That should be good.

TIME IS GOING TOO FAST. I'm going to be in Australia in less than 6 months.

My mind is all over the place this evening.