Literature

Currently in one of my English classes, we are studying Romantic poetry. I enjoy poerty greatly, it is one of the few things I can analyze very well. In our study, though, we spent a little time on discussing the connotation of "Romantic" today.

In our modern society, we see Romantic to man a few, very wrong, things. The most popular is something relation to love or lust. You go on a date, the boy brings you flowers, there's your romance. You woo someone with candy, how romantic. Wrong. Second, we associate it with someone who is foolishly hopeful. "She's got this romantic notion that they will win this ball game." Or, maybe, just someone who aspires for a greatness they will likely never achieve. I have a friend who desires to be president one day (that's Mr. President to you) and many think him "foolishly romantic" for it. The other way we percieve romance is through $.99 paper backs you can buy at the gas station. These raunchy novels, full of sex and lust, are the closest thing we have to understanding "Romantic Literature".

But really, Romantic literature is so much more than that. It does more than these cheap paperbacks do. It aspired to change something. They desired to change the world they lived in, from the poor inner city living conditions to the overthrowing of the monarchies of the time. They imagined a new world, one with a free spirit and a happy population, and wrote about it. They didn't use their logic to make people see the errors of their way. They used their imagination to smile and see the world as it should be, not as it was. They weren't foolish, they weren't naive, they were just optimistic. They used what they had to change the world.

In the end, that is what literature is. It is someone, with a pen and paper, trying to change their society. From what they feel and what the imagine, they want to make a difference in the world around them.This is what literature, true literature, does. It changes things.

Nicaragua

I am often found at a loss for words when I have to speak of Nicaragua. I do not know where to begin, there is just too much. In September I spent a week in the village of El Carmen, Nicaragua, helping a team of missionaries conduct a medical clinic. This village had nothing but the school compound and a small church in it, though I heard rumors there was a small family restaurant somewhere close by. I did not realize how much one week could change someone’s life, until I spent a week with these people.

The first thing that people always ask is about the conditions that we stayed in, and I’m going to be frank about this: They were awful. Plain and simple. We crammed about 25 women into this little church, mattresses, suitcases and all, and attempted to live for a week. I was told by some of the veteran missionaries that this was the worst they had ever had it. The whole bathing thing was also a little difficult. They don’t have running water out in the jungle (I don’t know why people are surprised when I say that), so they always have to improvise. What they do is get some barrels, attach a few water hoses and drape them over a metal box. Presto, you have a shower. For whatever reason, though, they decided the morning that everyone wanted a shower, to stop working. I had already been two days without a shower, and I had another one to go before I would get one. Let me tell you something, though. That was the best shower I have ever taken. Hands down. After 3 days of sweating a dirt and people who have nothing but dirt floors and leaves for roofs, that shower was the best thing I had ever done.

Another thing people are often curious about is the food. What did I eat while I was there? Well, I want to first inform you that I did NOT eat any of the food from Nicaragua, unless it was factory made. It is a third-world country, nothing is safe to eat. We brought our own cooking team and water and prepared all of our own meals. Actually, I ate so much that week that I gained weight. Which, looking back on it, is astounding. There is no way I was able to eat that much all in one week. The food was delicious, and I was burning so many calories from the heat and the mud that I needed the extra ones.

Speaking of which, I have never experienced such mud in my entire life. It started raining when we got there and did not stop until sometime much after we left. In fact, I'm pretty sure it will never stop raining there for any reason what-so-ever. It will continue to rain for the rest of eternity. Judging the amount of mud that was there when we arrived, it had already been raining that long. At one point, I stepped on a spot that looked solid and sank through up to the very top of my rain boot. I was very lucky water did not start rushing into my boot at that point, I probably would have grown some sort of foot fungus.

I think, at this point, I will end this post as well. It has given you some idea of the conditions of that week, and I will continue to speak of it in the months to come, I am sure.

Friends

There comes a time in every person’s life when they have to realize that just people someone was your friend once, doesn’t mean they will always be there. Just because you spent hours on end laughing and talking and enjoying one another, they will one day probably move on. As a high schooler, I am faced with that reality on an all-too-frequent basis. The people my age have no concept of the future; they have no idea that the choices they make today will affect them for the rest of their life. They just see the here and now, not what is to come.

It’s kind of funny, though, the people you meet at certain points in your life, and the people who you grow closest too. This semester I have been taking my prerequisites for the nursing program at our local community college, while also taking my high school classes, and have grown very close to two of the girls that have all the same classes as me. I love these girls dearly, and we have been through a lot together this semester. Neither one of these girls are people who would have been part of my group of friends. Not because I had something against them or anything, they just weren’t the type of people that would fit with my friends. Because of the circumstances, though, we have all created friendships that I hope will last us for years to come.

Because of these classes, though, I have not been able to hang out with some of the friends that I love the most. I have been swept away by the current, while they remain there in the past, and it is very hard to swim upstream. I try hard to retrieve the things that I have lost, try to maintain those stretched friendships, but it is just so hard. If I’m not in class, I’m working. If I’m not working, I’m at church. If I’m not at church, I’m at home, studying. If I’m not studying, I’m sleeping. There is just very little time for anything else in my daily life. So, the people that I don’t see on a daily basis end up being abandoned, and I end up with very few friends.

As my first semester of my last year in high school draws to a close, I know that I will very soon be losing a lot of what I hold dear. I will no longer be seeing these people on a regular basis, I will not be walking from class to class anymore. I will not have 'school friends' anymore. The people I see at work will become basically the only nonfmaily members I will see on regular basis. And, this saddens me.

Ryan Clark, who I am currently looking at, wishes it to be known that he is awesome and a wonderful potato farmer. He is one of the people that I will miss dearly, with his randomness and always-drumming-on-my-deskness.

Daddy

This past January, my dad was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer. I tried to start this post many different ways, but there’s really no good way to tell someone that your father has cancer. Like, think about it. You walk up to someone you haven’t seen in a while, and you start talking with them. You talk for a while, asking how things are going and how their family is. Then, they ask the same things of you. What do you say? “Oh, pretty good. Except for the whole cancer thing. That kind of sucks.” Yeah… no. There’s really no good way. Dropping the cancer hammer is hard, and sometimes almost impossible.

After a surgery to remove 6 or 7 inches of his colon, Dad started chemo therapy to rid him of the many tumors on his liver and lungs. The kind of chemo he was on is a rough one, causing a lot of pain and nausea. He actually only lost very little of his hair, mostly on his arms and legs and chest, while retaining most of the hair on his head and face. He then went through 12 rounds of that chemo, with very little results. The doctors we were seeing gave us very little hope, and we had gotten to the “focused-on-time-and-quality-of-it” phase, away from the treatment one. God intervened at this time and sent us to Louisville, to a wonderful surgeon there, who was able to completely irradiate the cancer in his liver. At this point we did not believe the spot on his lung was actually cancer, just a spot on his lung, since he smoked for 20+ years. In the recent weeks, though, we have discovered that he does have cancerous activity in his lungs, and he will soon be starting chemo again for that.

It is impossible to know what it is like to have a family member with cancer, until you actually have one. Daily life is strange, and very rarely constant. At one point, while Dad was on chemo, we were to a point where we did have a sort of schedule. One weekend, Dad would feel good and be doing great, and then the next weekend, after his chemo, he would not be doing as well. It was to the point where we would ask, “If Dad feels okay…” before we would speak to Mom. It was a hard time, a time that I don’t like to speak about much, because I really don’t know what to say. We were still a family. We still laughed together, we still cried together, we still watched TV together. Our lives went on, they were just riddled with cancer.

I have returned, with open arms.

It has been a long time since I have written a blog post. It has been a long time since I’ve been able to put all of my thoughts into one coherent place. The past year has been a hectic one, to say the very least. I have experienced things I never thought I would experience. I have lost people I thought I would never lose. I have made friendships that I never thought possible. Everything that could have possible gone wrong went wrong. And yet, I am happier right now than I have been in a long time. It has been a long, hard road. But, somehow, I have made it.

It’s hard to know even where to begin. I last posted here over a year ago. At that time, there was very little going on in my life. I had an awesome home life, filled with much fun and laughter. I had an awesome boyfriend, who I loved more than should be allowed. I had an awesome group of friends, who I loved hanging out with. I had an awesome youth group, who I thought would be together through everything. There is no way for me to post about everything all at once. So, I have prepared a few posts for the next few days, to update you on my life. I know I will begin with a very small reader base, but I hope to increase it as time goes on. Share it with your friends: Sarah is back.

I have been broken. That is the only way I could ever describe what has gone on in my life for the past year. I have been shattered completely; broken in a way I wasn’t aware that I could be broken. So many things have gone on, I could never even being to accurately describe what is has been. If it was possible, I would recap every day for the past year for you, but I just cannot. It is not even a feasible thought, too much has happened. I will attempt to give you a taste, though.

There is one subject, though, I will not touch. That is my relationship with The Boy. We dated for a year. It ended. I was crushed, to the point that it was harmful to my health. That, in essence, is all you need to know. Do not hate him, as I know my long time readers will, because I do not. That is all I will say on the subject, because it is old news, and I don’t really feel like upsetting myself over it again. I have recovered, and have let other guys into my life. I am okay.

I will end this post for now, but you will have another tomorrow, and another a day or two after that. I do hope you will add me to your favorites list once again, and will come back to visit with me soon. I have dearly missed my readers, almost as much as I have missed writing. I beg of you right now, let me back into your routine, as I hope you have missed me as well.

Writing

I'm not particularly witty, but I can be if I try. My sense of humor is very dry, leaving most people to shake their head in disgust. Smart humor, British humor, whatever you want to call it, that's what I enjoy. I'm not good at recreating it for laughs, but I enjoy it just the same. I don't write to be funny.
My life has been hard. I've learned many things, and have often been told I'm wise beyond my years. My life has not been about waiting for the storm to pass, but learning to dance in the rain. This leaves many people feeling inspired. I don't write to be inspirational.
Jonah was born with Down Syndrome, and since his birth 12 years ago has had over 40 sedated procedures. This includes 3 open heart surgeries, 2 tonsillectomies, multiple sets of tubes in each ear, heart caths, chest cts, some funky procedure where they scraped excess tissue off his tongue... the list goes on and on. This often makes people sad. I don't write to be sad.
Expression is key in life, doubly so when your life is particularly hard. There are many ways to express ones self, most of them being ways people wouldn't normally consider. Sure, there are the basics, like drawing and painting and singing, but then there are others. Some people play video games all the time, some people read, some people work on their car, some in their lawns. They do what they can dig into to forget about the world, to escape for a while. They can do their thing, get into their groove and free themselves. I write to be free.

Totally raw, I just wrote it.
I hope you all are enjoying your summers.

Summer.

Summer is coming.
I can taste it, I can smell it,
I can hear it, I can feel it,
I can see it coming down the way.
It's coming to bring us great joy,
Coming to brighten our days,
Coming to relieve us of our pain.
Hot summer afternoons,
Popsicles melting in the sun,
The smell of chlorine overwhelming.
Cool summer evenings,
Sitting under the stars,
Life just perfectly right.
Days spent at the beach,
Outside in the swing,
Laying out in the sun.
New summer movies to see,
Sleep overs to enjoy,
Camp outs to anticipate.
A time to see the world,
See your own back yard.
Imagine what your future holds.
Through all of the laughs and the fun and the sun,
The baseball games and afternoons at the park,
We don't have one complaint, not one
Our summer has finally come.

I wrote this earlier and kind of liked it. Not my best work, but I think it effectively represents my feelings for this upcoming summer. I am so excited for this summer, you all have no idea. It's going to be an amazing one.
I'm spending a week on the beach with my youth group. We have an exciting week of Vacation Bible School to look forward to. I have an amazing boyfriend, who I plan to spend quite a bit of time with. I just lost a significant amount of weight and feel pretty good about myself. Mom, Kaitlyn and I are to take a mini-road trip to Cincinnati for the weekend; while mom attends a conference Kaitlyn and I get to play in the indoor water park all day. At some point in time I'm going to have a "I haven't seen Sarah since Christmas" party and have some friends I don't ever get to see anymore over. At some point Kaitlyn is supposed to take me camping with her.
My summer is packed, and I couldn't be more excited. If you throw in a couple days here or there with my family that lives the next county over and all of the summery things we like to do (spending afternoons in the park, barbecues, some sort of Fourth of July celebration) this summer can barely contain it. I couldn't be more ecstatic.
I walked around our yard yesterday with my camera and took some pictures of different things. (all of the good pictures can be seen on my Flickr page, and there is a link in my sidebar.) It was so nice just to get outside and it not be cold or raining. To stretch my legs and my photographing skills a little bit... you all can't even imagine. It was so wonderful. And yesterday evening as I was swinging out back I could smell honey suckle in the evening air. Nothing lifts the spirit more than the smell of honey suckle, I think. It's the sweetest, most pure, most summer-like smell there is. (And sucking on it, oh boy. Who doesn't love to suck on honey suckle? :D) It was wonderful.
Have I mentioned that I'm excited for summer?