A Timeless Reality

I'm not one of those people who wants to bring home every poor little animal I see. I've never asked my parents for an animal to be just MINE before (except for my horse, but I bought her so that was different). But this is different.

Every aspiring vet needs their own dog. I've always dreamed of becoming a vet and living in a big empty house with just my dog for company. You know, I never expected to find my dog before I actually make it into vet school, but I did. I found my dog. The kind of dog I want to have around for 15+ years.

He is a very good-looking dog. Tall, dark, and handsome. He's black and tan, looks like a Reese cup, and thus his name is Reece. He's a doberman, lab, german shepherd mix so he has a really well-rounded personality. Reece is a superb watchdog, loves to play, and is so sweet and well-behaved.

I get to see Reece a few times a week because he's up for adoption at the animal hospital I work at. I didn't get the whole story, but for some reason his old owners had to give him up. He has now been living at the hospital for nearly 2 months, and he still doesn't have a home. Over Thanksgiving break, I brought Reece home and he fit in so well here! He slept on the floor next to my bed and would stick his face in mine several times throughout the night to check on me. Once he noticed I was still breathing, he would promptly lay back down and go to sleep. We have this game where I jump around and shuffle my feet and he grabs my shoes with his mouth and doesnt let go until I tell him to. It's simply heart-warming. :D

Ok so what's the problem? My parents! They don't want another dog. So my sister, co-workers, and I have all been working on them for a month now, and I think we're slowly convincing them. I just don't see why we can't have another dog. We have a home. Reece needs a home. It's as simple as that! Reece is on the top of my Christmas list, as well as my sisters' lists. So fingers crossed that I get my dog for Christmas! Even if I never get to adopt him, he'll always be my dog. :)

Everyday I drive on this certain highway to get to school. There are 2 northbound lanes and 2 southbound lanes, divided by a grassy median. For the past few weeks, the paving company has been in the process of re-paving some of it. Needless to say, morning traffic+paving=pain-in-the-derriere. Anywho, last week they painted the stripes on. Of course, those gorgeous little diatoms make the new paint stand out like a neon sign, so I noticed them. Now, what the heck is there to notice about road stripes? This leads to the blogs title.

As I was driving along with the new stripes screaming at me, I started to laugh. The painter truck had messed up the lines!!! The line along the median was yellow, the stripes between the lanes were white, and the line along the "shoulder" (we don't have actual shoulders here) was white as well! Now, think about that... that is some more-than-slightly skewed symmetry. And skewed symmetry really bothers me. So I keep driving as I smile and shake my head...

Then *climax* I hit the old pavement. Guess what? The lines there are yellow-white-white as well!!! What the heck??? What kind of sense does that make?!? Now I can't drive without being distracted by the dis-symmetry! So if anyone has a logical explanation, please share!! :)

This is a picture I found of a Virginia highway.

Some bummer things have happened to me this week, but despite these things, I've had a great week! I don't really know how to put this week into a pretty sounding, nice flowing blog post, so I'm just going to write.


The Election Bad...

Anyone who knows me semi-well knows that I am a conservative (although the people in my Lit class think I'm a left-wing nutjob who encourages suicide... yeah...it's a long story). Because of this, I wasn't terribly excited about how things went Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. Yet, I wasn't upset like many people were. I decided weeks ago not to worry about the election. I knew that it was all under control and everything was going to work out how it was supposed to.

At Rhythm last night, Craig was talking about how he was embarrassed by his fellow Christians this past week. I agree with him wholeheartedly. It doesn't matter who is in office, Christians have been commanded to love and respect them. Sending ugly texts and emails containing mean jokes and racial slurs is NOT loving or respectful. It's terrible. I have to admit, I laughed at one of the jokes, and I feel horrible about that. But as far as I can recall, when discussing the elections, I never made any ad hominem statements about President-Elect Obama.

I'm not saying that I'm better than everyone else, because I'm not. This just happens to be something that I don't struggle with. I've never enjoyed the radio talk shows with the conservatives slamming the liberals and the liberals shredding the conservatives. I've never enjoyed people belittling our head-of-state. I've never understood how people who call themselves Christians can be so full of malice and slander towards others. It doesn't matter which side of the aisle a Christian is on. If he/she claims to be a Christian, we should be able to see it in their actions.


The Election Good...

In the past I have taken part in an AMAZING program called Teenpact. Teenpacters are the most awesome people that you will ever meet. If every teenager was like these teens, then our country's future would be so bright that we would be blinded.

I'm always greatly encouraged when I hear about some Teenpact alumnus running for political office. This year, I got a Teenpact newsletter email about this 19-year-old guy named Kirk Lundby. Kirk was running for a state representative seat in Great Falls, Montana. My mom, of course, has her links in the MT political scene, and one of her friends actually knows Kirk fairly well. So she emailed Kirk to let him know that we were excited about what he was doing.

Kirk ended up losing his race, but I think what he did is amazing. If I wasn't moving away from my town next year to go to another college, I would LOVE to run for some local office.

Our country's future is not in a whole bunch of stuffy old people sitting in plush chairs. It is about my generation. It's about the young, bright minds who are being molded into America's new leaders. I don't know why people think that politicians have to be old. I don't have anything against "old" politicians, but let's face it--- they're rather boring. Young politicians bring an incredible, vibrant energy to a crumbling system of rules and hierarchies. Their excitement gets me excited. I feel more alive than I've felt in months. Kirk Lundby and other young people like him inspire me. They're making a difference in this world, and it makes me hope, that someday, in some little way, I might be able to make a difference too.

In my American Lit class we've been asked several times what we thought was literature. Some people have said anything that was written down, others said writings that give us a glimpse into the past. I've been thinking about my answer for a few weeks, and the other day in class I decided to voice my opinion on the matter.

Literature is anything that makes you think. It can be a novel, a newspaper article, a poem, the "literature" in the doctor's office, a textbook, or even song lyrics. I don't mean those Boxcar Children books we read when we were kids. I don't mean those trivial emails you get that have been forwarded a billion times. I mean stuff that you don't forget about 2 seconds after you read it. I mean the stuff that makes your brain form a thought, and then form another thought, and then another and another and another. If it makes you think, then it's making you better.
People these days don't read anymore. At least not like they used to. Now we get everything we know from tv, from politicians, from talk radio, from anywhere except for printed material. That's not necessarily bad, but it scares me. Why? Because if people are getting all their information from CNN or FOX news, they don't think for themselves. They accept what the tv tells them and they don't question it!

If people don't read, all their thoughts are not really theirs. They have been hugely influenced by the newscaster. The media is supposed to be un-biased, but that is far from true anymore. Everyone has opinions and they aren't afraid to share them.

Authors share their opinions too, but if you are reading it, you have time to stop and think about it. If you're just listening to someone, you don't have a chance to digest the material and decide your opinion on the matter, so you just take what that person says as your opinion. That's sad. That's scary.

So please, think for yourself. Please, read.

So I don't know if anyone has noticed this besides me.... College is stressful!!! Especially when you have 4 super hard classes (+ one easy one)! Add to that work, driving siblings places, etc, and soon everything in your life has to be in your datebook, or else it will never happen.
The other week I had to schedule dinner with my dad just so I could see him!! And even then it was an eat-and-run kind of thing because I had to go to class! Hanging out with my friends also now has to be scheduled. :(
Last night some of us went to see High School Musical 3 and I was planning to leave right after it was over to go finish an online chemistry assignment. I had worked for several hours on the assignment and I had a bit left to do before the 11pm deadline. But sometime during watching Vanessa and Zach gaze into each others' eyes, I decided that I was having fun! (*gasp*) So I then decided that I wanted to hang out with my friends after the movie too. I decided to basically throw away the hours that I had already done on the assignment and do an alternate assigment instead(*bigger gasp*). I hope my professor allows me to do so...
Anyways, I am SO glad that I chose to hang out my friends last night. We went to McDonalds and it was like all those Sunday and Wednesday nights back in high school.
I actually laughed last night. I can't remember the last time when I laughed that hard. Anyone who knows me knows that I cry if I'm truly laughing, and let's just say... it's a good thing that I didn't have mascara on!!
So you know how they say that laughter's good medicine? Take their advice. Put your "life" on hold and enjoy the life that matters. Spend time with the people you love. Laugh as if you have no cares in the world. It won't make your busy "life" go away, but it will make it seem not as bad! :)

For the past two class meetings, my English professor has been sick. Because of this, we haven't had class, but instead we are required to post on an online discussion board. Today I decided to sit down and read the poems and post my thoughts so I could move on to studying for my Econ test. Here are some of my thoughts:

The poetry we read was four poems by William Cullen Bryant: Thanatopsis; The Yellow Violet; To Cole, The Painter, Departing For Europe; and The Prairies. These are good poems, some better than the rest. My favorite is Yellow Violet, then Thanatopsis, and the other two are tied for last (or third if you're an optimist).

In all of these poems, Bryant displays an amazing gift of description. The beginning of Prairies makes me feel as if I'm in Montana watching the clouds cast shadows on the plains below. When I read Thanatopsis, I could easily imagine Bryant walking on a path through the woods.

Thanatopsis is a Greek word meaning a meditation on death. Bryant's poem by this name is the most philosophical out of the four. He uses personification with regards to nature, and his reverance towards nature makes me think he had Pantheistic leanings. I find Bryant's tone throughout the poem interesting. At first he's thoughtful and melancholy, and at the end he sounds like a motivational speaker. The interesting thing is that the end-- the motivational part-- was written a few years after the rest. So that makes me wonder what happened in those years that so changed his attitude towards death?

Yellow Violet is my idea of a wonderful poem. It has beautiful description of a spring scene and Bryant uses this to draw a parallel between flowers and people. He describes how the violet is the first flower to come up in the spring, sometimes even when snow is still on the ground. This makes me think of how resilient people can be. Just like a flower blooming in the snow, people can thrive in the midst of strife.

Bryant more specifically discusses how the violet seems so beautiful at first, but it's beauty is quickly surpassed when the other larger flowers bloom. He draws a harsh contrast to how when people become rich and/or famous, they quickly forget their old friends. Bryant confesses that he has done this, but he now regrets it. The bitterness that can be heard in Bryant's voice at this point made me actually stop and read back to see how he so swiftly got from an innocent flower to the cold world we live in. (And this was written in the 19th century!) Bryant then just as quickly switches back to talking about a flower. I find it amazing that Bryant could so masterfully use a yellow violet to make a point.

And yes, there really is such a thing as a yellow violet.

So... this post might seem random, but it's something I've been thinking about today. It's about something (that I find) interesting that my physics professor said in class last night.
He told us a question posed to him when he was a young engineer working on an oil rig. The question is this: If you have a piece of radioactive material about the size of a piece of chalk (this is the size that he was using on the rig for some unknown reason...) and you don't have a lead box, how do you trasnsport it without killing yourself?
Answer: Well what makes something radioactive is the fact that a whole bunch of neutrons are coming off the substance (not exactly but w/e), and these neutrons are what are harmful to people. So you want to transport it in something that has a lot of protons. Something that has a lot of protons is hydrogen. So... you want to transport it in something that has a lot of hydrogen. One common substance would be water (H2O).
So if you ever need to transport some radioactive material, and you don't have a lead container, just use a bucket of water. I'm sure that would save your internal organs from frying. Or maybe not. :\