On Blogs

I love blogs. Call me a creeper, but if you post your blog posts on Facebook and if I know you at least semi-reasonably well, then I read your blog. I love seeing into a little window of your life. However, I do not feel like I contribute as much as I take from the blogging world. I never comment on other people’s blogs, and I don’t write nearly enough blog posts. So in order to remedy this unbalanced relationship, I am writing a blog to say that I love blogs, and this is my general comment on all of your blog posts that I have read. Thank you for letting me step into your life even if it only for a few short paragraphs. Also please do not take this blog post as a sign that you should block me or unfriend me on Facebook. :)

The Other Buzz Word

The more I live here the more I like the metaphor of a rock tumbler. That's what we are a bunch of rocks being thrown into this machine and being spun round and round. We run into each other and sometimes it hurts. Yet what we get in the end is something more beautiful than what we could be if we were on our own. Yes of course I am talking about…community. Yes, it sounds incredibly cheesy, but I do think that it’s true. I started this blog post about a month ago, and now I have forgotten where I was going with it.* However, it has really been on my heart for a while. Several things happened all at once that brought this topic so close to my face that I had to smack into it. Anyways, I guess that I just wanted to say that I thankful for the community that I had in Qingdao. Now I am acclimating myself to a new community, and while things are going well, change is hard.

*I know that’s not how blogs are supposed to work. You are supposed to write one in one sitting and then publish it. None of this begin one, stop, revise it, rewrite it, then publish it nonsense. I think that I am just too much of an English teacher to sit and write one in one sitting and be satisfied enough with it. I might also be too ADD to write everything in one sitting.

On Transition

This past weekend, a friend asked me how I was doing, and I started crying. I have heard of other people doing that, but never in a million years did I expect to do that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I am not normally this emotional, but this semester I have been on the brink of tears more times than I can count.

Transition is so hard, and I don’t know how other people make it look so easy. I feel like I am such an emotional mess, and I don’t know why I am so upset. The truth is I have not had that many transitions in my life. I lived in the same house until I was 19. My entire life up till last year, I went to the same fellowship. While I had the normal transitions that come with growing up, I have not had earth-shattering changes in my life. This is not to say that I wish that I had moved or had more instability, but I think that it might make coping with this situation much easier if I had. This is the first transition that I have ever made that has not been a natural and joyous one (such as the ones from High School to College or from College to working a.k.a. China). I have had no control over this transition, and it is not the logical next step in life.

           At the same time, I feel like I don’t even have a right be upset; I mean I barely made it through my first school year. People who have become much more settled than I have are leaving and going to a different country, so how dare I be upset that I am moving to a different city that is only a five hour train ride away.

On top of this, I am also dealing with this sense of homelessness. Where is my home? In a way Munroe Falls will always be home because I lived there for almost 19 years of my life. But in a way Qingdao is my home, but I don’t actually have a home in Qingdao because we moved out of our apartment this weekend. Now, Amy has made it very clear that her home is my home while I am here, but it is just not the same. Also, I was reminded that I do have a home in Tianjin, but since I am not currently living there, it is hard to consider it home. I have also been told that I have a home in Heaven, but once again it is hard for me to focus on that when I can’t see it. Before I moved to China someone who has been in China for a long time told me that the longer she lives in China the more she realizes that her real home is not on this earth. She has learned to focus on that fact and take comfort in it. I think that I need to do the same.

             I actually have been in the process of writing this particular blog post for the past two weeks or so. I have just have had a lot to mull-over in my mind, and I have gotten to the point that I really want to move onto a new topic. However, I don’t feel like I can move on until I have finished this one. Right now, I am doing better with this whole idea of transition, but ask me tomorrow, and I might burst into tears. (This reminds me of a Relient K song. I kinda feel like my life is a Relient K song.)