Too many Skittles will make your tongue burn. Too many ideas will...do the same thing to your brain.

They're really good at first: the tangy, tart coating dissolves all over your tastebuds causing chaos and a few peculiar facial expressions.  You bite into the candy and ahh, sweetness.  It's a little candy medley in your mouth.  It's like dissonance in your mouth (you know, the kind Stravinsky used in "Sacrifical Dance" from The Rite of Spring) followed by sweet, sweet harmony.  But only if you eat the right amount.. if you eat too many you get that awful sugar fire on your tongue that tells you "you should have stopped a long time ago, fool". 

I feel like that's how it goes with my ideas sometimes.  I have an idea-brilliant!  I fantasize about the prospects of that idea, spinning web after web of creative genius (ya, right) in my brain until I've set quite the trap for myself, unknowingly.  Guh!!  So I stand there, helpless and stuck, waiting for the spider (otherwise known as the death of creativity and motivation) to snatch me up for din-din. 

Daaaaang.  I hate it when that happens.  The worst part is that I can't even really decipher what my original idea was in the first place.  Was it to bake cookies for all of my neighbours?  Was I going to write a heart-felt letter to all of my former teachers?  What was it?! 

Today I woke up late (because it's Saturday kids, that's what you're supposed to do).  I ate a bowl of Reese's Puffs cereal because I'm a twelve year old and went back to bed for a nap.  Seriously?!  Well, I mostly just daydreamed about my future and all of the little creative projects I want to throw myself into-big and small. 

Big-make every girl on the planet realize how beautiful she is!
Small-Redo my bedroom.. it's pretty blah.

And so I scheme and I oggle and I think that I should probably do something nice for my coworkers, oh and how about setting up chats with all of my aunts so that I can get to know them better (ps. I have about 20) and on and on and on.  And yes, of course I want to accomplish all of it but then I find myself stumbling upon a rather vulgar (but hilaiously true) blog which of course leads me to her Twitter account (I'm pretty sure I hate Twitter) where she has posted a link to a quirky little gourmet mac n cheese restaurant called "homeroom". 

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!  That sounds like a fantasyland dream where everybody wins!

And the spin cycle starts all over again.  There are far too many things on this planet that I love.  Best of times.  Worst of times.  Plus, my friend just told me yesterday during our Skype date that he's about to embark on a whirlwind tour of Mexico-Kenya-England and planning on going to bible school in Chicago in the fall (which happens to be a pretty grand city if you ask me) and after that a two year stint in South America running bible camps.  Guhhhhh... 

It's really never-ending.  And it's actually a miracle that I'm content to be where I am and that God is giving me gracious amounts of patience to let him work through me.

So that's where I'm at as I sit in bed writing this, eating sour Skittles, and wishing that I had multiple bodies so that I could use at least one of them to completely ink myself in tattoos galore and get dreadlocks and a little hoop in my nose.  I want to really badly, but I know I won't because I'm not a fan of turtleneck sweaters and I know that to do what I want to do I'm probably going to have to forgo scripture verses in gangster cursive on my collar bone and an olive tree on my left side of my lower back and a mexican day of the dead skull on my neck.  Stupid.  But with a little foresight I can probably see that I wouldn't want any of that on my body when I'm 75 anyway, or 45 for that matter. 

So I'll stop eating Skittles before I burn my tongue and try not to race God with all of my "super cool" ideas.  There's a time and place.
...something about setting a good pace.
Slow and steady wins the race?   

Spring cleaning doesn't have to happen just once a year.

There's something so great about scrubbing the grease off the floors, walls, shelves,etc. at my job.  When the people leave and stop ordering food (which sometimes feels like never) and when it gets quiet in the kitchen I love to take out some de-greaser or floor cleaner and some steel wool and go to town.  There's something so fantastic about finding some hideously disgusting surface area and crouching on my hands and knees until it's finally clean.  I even take chopsticks and use them to get the dirt out from in between the tiles.  It's a weird quirk that I have.

But I absolutely hate cleaning.

You read the last post about my room, right?  I quite dislike to wash dishes or vacuum or mop or dust anything, but when it comes to hardcore intensive harsh chemical cleaning, sign me up.  I was helping my friend move out of his apartment last night and I was actually a little disappointed when he said that I didn't have to clean his oven after all.  I like a challenge.

I get all kinds of excited and my eyes go a little googly when I think about doing the impossible.  Dishes are possible.  People wash them every day.  But how often do people get into all the cracks and hard to reach areas to give it a good deep clean?  Rarely!  Things build up and become miniature monsters, something that we try to hide with a new flower arrangement or by dimming the lights.  They're not really there if we don't pay any attention to them.  That kind of thing. 

What if we stopped hiding these things and started purifying them?  What if we took all of those corners that seem to hard to reach and we got on our knees and faced them, scrubber in hand?  What if we devoted time to dealing with them on a more regular basis so that instead of being monsters they were just part of our house? 

What if all of life's uncomfortable and disturbing parts were confronted with the best spiritual cleaning agent on the planet? 

Maybe if we got down on our knees and openly showed God our areas of unspeakable uncleanliness he would be right there beside us. 

Almost can be good enough.

I finally did it!  My room is on its way to having a visible floor again!  This might not sound like a big accomplishment, but considering that I arrived home from university on December 16th and my suitcase has been sitting open and full on my floor since then... well, I think some kind of award is in order.  Speeeeech. "I'd like to thank..." My mom should probably get all the credit.  I could live in a mess like that for a lot longer if I knew that she didn't care.  It's kind of the way my brain likes things sometimes.  Organized chaos.  It's a beautiful thing.

Anyways, my day was almost the best day ever because I almost reunited with my long lost love: Treadmill.  Ah, but I said almost.  I diligently brought my socks and my iPod to the treadmill (where my shoes have been sitting since I came home for the holidays).  I even put my sports bra on (the truest sign of committment) but alas, while eating my open-faced chicken breast-pesto and mozzarella with spinach-sandwich I noticed Celine Dion on Oprah... CELINE DION... (did you know that she's been on that show 27 times?!) and one sandwich turned into half a bag of chips and a few handfuls of Nibs and by that time my mom had stolen my moment and was walking on the treadmill.  I was defenseless. 

How did that happen?! 

Perhaps tomorrow will be the day.  It better be, because I'm supposed to run a half marathon on Father's Day and uh...well.. five months is going to sneak by very quickly whether or not I'm ready for it.  The romance between me and Treadmill needs to be rekindled immediately.  Unfortunately work beckons me like a stranger with candy so today is not the day.

Earlier today I read a blog (or something like that) that gets sent to my email.  Unfortunately I don't know how to share the link without allowing my email to be public property so I'll just mention that it was about making lists in our heads for reasons why we can't be loved by God.  We feel that if this, this, and this isn't checked off, we don't make the cut.  That's completely wrong.  Thank goodness God loves us despite our flaws, our misses, our mistakes.  He knew that we could not save ourselves, that we were imperfect and helpless, so he came to die for us.  His love for us has nothing to do with how good we are, but how great he is.  So encouraging!  So if you're feeling a little unloved because maybe you didn't get on the treadmill today, or something like that, please know that you're endlessly loved every single day and it's never based on your performance.

My first time.

Eeeeep. Blogs make me inherently nervous. So why exactly am I doing this?  Frankly, because I think maybe I was made for something like this.  I love to speak.  Oooooh gooodness.  Communicating with people is my dream come true.  Some people want to go to outer space and see the world, but I just want to share it.  I feel as though my thoughts come together nicely when I type them out.  I've wanted to write a blog for a long time but the fear of being unread has kept me from it for a few years.  At the suggestion of my dear cousin-creative genius in the stationery world-(http://www.kateandbirdie.com/), I have finally bit the blog. 

So far, so sweet.

My life full (the cute little title of this cute little blog) is about living to my full potential.  I'm back at home, living with my parents at the age of twenty, so initially you might believe that there's not really a lot of potential going on in my life.  Well, I sincerely hope that if you do think that, that you are dead wrong.  I'm finally doing things that I've always wanted to do (like make my first pie crust from scratch!) without any major committments to tie me down.  School?  Noooo ma'am.  Boyfriend?  Uh, no.  Rent?  Don't tell my parents that I told you but... Nope!

God has taken me down some crazy path and I'm pretty happy just to be walking on it at this point.  I'm excited about what is in store (hopefully more pies!) and maybe you are too.  Maybe you're not.  Either way, you're here and I appreciate that. 

I hope that I can inspire, encourage, or at least (or maybe mostly) entertain you with whatever my life has up its sleeves.  As far as first times go, this wasn't so bad.  I think I'm going to make myself a chicken breast sandwich and think about what I've just done.