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Observations on a Wednesday Night

It was pretty warm today, and the typical Rexburg breeze was oddly absent as I walked to the Romney this morning; listening to The Veronica's and worrying about back sweat that would most definitely be present when I took my back pack off when I arrived in the lecture hall of my Origins of Life class. I woke up early this morning to finish some History homework and then threw my hair up in a messy bun before swallowing a bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats; knowing full well I wouldn't eat anything until 5:00 that night. I tried to keep my schedule at the front of my mind as my feet hit the pavement in time with the violins playing "Untouched" through my hot pink ear buds. Science, Church History, Math, U.S. History. I went through assignments and tests; mentally checking them off while I tried to ignore the grinding in my left knee and I pushed up through the stairs. I don't like complaining about my knee; because people don't understand how serious the problem is and honestly; I get tired of it myself. I don't like complaining at all; actually. I know I do it, but when I hear myself; I get angry. I know that there are many of my friends who have it ten times worse than me; who are still fighting for their lives right now and for some; faced with death.

But my knee has been acting up lately and it's just irritating. The cartilage feels like it is wearing down between my joint; like a pencil that has been sharpened so frequently it is merely a stub. I am constantly accompanied with the sound of cinderblocks being dragged on pavement and the occasional tendon getting stuck in between the space where the cartilage should be.

And it's frustrating to feel so disabled.

I'm trying really hard to move forward and I'm trying really hard to stay focused in school right now. I love my classes and I love learning and I love staying busy. I love talking to my roommate every night; hours after the lights have been turned off and the sun has set. I love seeing other friends; going on Jamba runs and playing my flute again.

But long walks from the Ricks building to The Pines #3 at the end of a four class day without eating lunch and Dashboard Confessional ringing in my ear, watching memories flash through my eyes of walks from previous semesters with friends who were supposed to be solid but disappeared over time make my heart hurt and my mind fuzzy. I think about all of the great times I've had with people who have left my heart slightly bruised and how different things are now. I second guess myself and I have a list of unanswered questions that doubles in size everyday.

The shadow of Cottonwood almost reaches our parking lot and I always wonder what life would have been like if we lived in this location when we had our friends still in number 9; not even a two minute walk away from our living room window.

I have been looking forward to being back at school all summer. I thought that being back in the Burg with my roommates and friends would have put my heart in higher spirits and my mind at ease. I thought I had pieced myself together enough that I could handle this. I know I look like I do. I talk about stories with fondness and about heartbreak without tears. I think that is my wall being built back up. I am so used to not showing weakness, and so I don't. But; being here has been ten times harder then I imagined. Things are not only different with the absence of fall 2009 friends; but I feel more alone then I ever have while being here. I'm not sure why that is, because I hang out with my friends and go on adventures frequently; staying busy and staying focused. But I feel it, and it can not be denied.

Maybe some of it is because I am just getting irritated too easily. The stupidest things set me off as of late. Habits of people that I either ignored before or have gotten more pronounced as time has gone on. Maybe I just need a chill pill.

Maybe I am just having an off night. It's been busy this week with school work and classes. I need to go back to my center and remember everything that I worked on this summer. This is MY life and only I can decide where I go and what I do. MY choices; my accountability. I can't let the actions or opinions of others sway what I need to do to accomplish my goals and dreams. I can't let the eight engagement rings in my history class drag me down or the girl in my science class scolding her husband for taking the batteries out of her iClicker weigh down my heart. My path has changed; along with my plans and my future and I am no longer going down that road. I can't let it get to me.

I can't.

I love Idaho and I love being with my roommates. But tonight, I just want to be in New England, where nothing can touch me and the comfort of my family keeps my heart full and my soul safe.

and yet, as I long for home, I realize that I am here. And in the back of my head, I hear a voice repeating, repeating:

Life is beautiful. Life is beautiful. No matter what happens, it will continue to be beautiful.

I believe in this.

I know this.

It will be okay.

This too shall pass.

hearts and humming birds

I love having a best friend who; when inspired by the simplest things, shares that with me. I love having a best friend who is comfortable enough with sharing random essays from class with me; thinking that I would enjoy it as well. I love having a best friend who knows me better then I know myself.

Today, my best friend shared this with me and I loved it.

so now, I'm sharing it with you.

Joyas Voladoras

By: Brian Doyle

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

How amazing it is to me to think about the tiny heart of a humming bird, or the giant heart of a whale and all of the events that happen during the life of one of these animals. It is amazing to me to think about each heart beat, each moment that happens during each beat, and how they all build up to create a beautiful life. Every living thing has interior motion. "We all churn inside". What an interesting and beautiful way to connect everything to each other. We are all connected; we are all churning.

What I thought was most interesting and thought provoking is the last paragraph. No matter how much we build up our hearts or protect them or patch them up, we will forever have soft spots for certain things. We are human, and specific events can tug on our hearts, no matter how protected our hearts are. For me; my heartstrings are tugged on when I think about my Black Labrador, the smell of the White Mountains, the sound of my grandmother's laugh, and the constant beep of the IV pump. These are memories that make me realize how precious life is, and how fast time flies. My heart only has so many beats left, and I want to enjoy every moment I have left and not take anything for granted. I try to live my life with no regrets. This is another reminder to appreciate my life; my heart and my second chance. Life is beautiful.

Life. is so beautiful.

sticky-note notes

my computer has a program called sticky-notes, where you can have digital sticky notes for your desktop. It is my favorite thing ever, but i don't use it as much as I wish I did , and I forget about it a lot. 

I opened them up today to jot something down, and read a sticky note that I had written that was titled "Blog Ideas"

one of the bullets said:

"Fairy tales end when they do for a reason"

I don't know why or when I wrote it down, or where it came from.

But I needed to read that today. 

A Million Hooks and Jamba Juice

On a whim, I asked my dad to pick some of these hooks up for me the other day, thinking I might be in need of some extra hanging apparatus. 

these hooks are so strong and sticky and  I seriously could buy a million more to hang up everything. I want to hang everything up on them.

Funny how little sticky hooks can make one so happy.

I guess I should mention I am back in Idaho. Finally.

I love my new apartment, I love being back with my roommates and I love the West. 

I start classes tomorrow. Let the crack down begin. 

Books were 370 dollars this semester. Plus I had to buy another I-clicker. so. 400 dollars.

I also love discount cards that give out 20% off Jamba Juice for the next year. My life is complete.

baby blessings:

because Hamilton is not coming out to school I:

1. Have enough room to pack my Napolien Dynamite Poster

2. Have enough room to pack my brown boots

3. Emptied out the change cubby and have a million quarters for laundry

4. Have 200 dollars more in my bank account because I don't have to pay for insurance

5. Could give dad my seat cushion to help his back for Izzy (dad's car)

6. Got to go to my high schools football game

7. Saw a few more friends before I left 

8. Got to see my old marching band preform for the first time in over a year

9. Had one last family dinner all together

10. Got to spend a few more nights in the comfort of my beautiful bed.

11. Get to see Symone earlier then expected.

seeing my baby blessings help the sun to stay shinning and my hopes up.

Continues to be beautiful

A letter from the mother of a dear friend of mine who lost her fight to Osteosarcoma:

Meghan was so thrilled when she got to "hang" with Val and Chelsie - like she was part of the big girl posse and despite the age difference - she was part of the gang.  The girls ALWAYS made her feel so special and Val and Chelsie should know what a difference that made in Meghan's life.  I know that feeling like she was part of the gang made her feel so much more comfortable during treatment at Children's.

God knows how to give me a reality check.

I am reminded after a particular disappointing day that there are far more important things in life than having a car or the money to fix a tired one. There are much more meaningful and beautiful things in life then the material things that I sometimes lose my focus on. I had a bit of a meltdown tonight, following a rough ride to do errands today in my tired little car. I had lost a lot of faith and was so discouraged by my circumstances. But now, I remember what is truly important in life and I am so thankful for my many blessings. I know that this is part of my plan and that the man upstairs knows what he is doing. I have faith that things will work out.

To my girls Meg and Maddie. I miss you more then words can describe and there isn't a day that goes by when I do not think of you. Thank you for sharing your beautiful spirits with me and for encouraging me to keep on pressing forward. I love you, my little sisters.

And tonight I will sleep soundly knowing that no matter what happens, life continues to be beautiful.

unreliable but reliable

Dear Hamilton,

First, let me tell you how much I adore you. Even though things did not work out at all the way we planned, you still are and always will be my favorite car.

You have gotten me through this summer, and gave me the drive to work hard and save my money.

Hamilton therapy was and still is the best therapy.

I am sorry we tried to drag you across the country when you clearly told me that you didn't want to go. I am sorry that daddy put so much money into you when you clearly were tired and ready to be done. It just happens that dad knew how much I loved you and he wanted to give me the car that I loved. I guess we just were never meant to be.

You are back in New Hampshire now, and you can rest. We won't be asking much more from you from now on. Thank you for the last 8 years and for the 164,000 miles that you putted around for dad and for me. Thank you for being patient with me when I was learning how to drive. 

For a being very unreliable the last three days, you were very reliable getting us home. Thank you. I will miss you terribly. You were great.

Thank you, my little one, for reminding me that I am blessed, for opening my eyes to how wonderful and generous my parents are, and for continuing to show me that no matter what happens, life continues to be beautiful.

Know that you are loved.

always,

Chelsie

oh hey stress

STRESSED OUT TO THE MAX AND I HAVEN'T EVEN LEFT NEW ENGLAND YET!

seriously.

Hamilton stalling out + grumpy daddy + who wants to drive with the car as is anyways=stressed out Chelsabelle.

Please pray for my little car, that things will work out and that we will make it to Idaho in one piece.

please don't do this to me...

Dear Hamilton,

I know you have a lot of miles on you. I understand you are tired. But here is the deal. We just put over 3 grand into making you feel better and you've been driving great all summer. We've gone to Dublin, the beach, Boston, EVERYWHERE and you have been FINE! so there is NO reason for you to be freaking out like you did today. 

We are supposed to leave tomorrow and I really want things to go smoothly as possible. 

Please, don't do this to me. I've been looking forward to having a car at school ALL summer and I have been working as hard as possible to save up to pay for you. I bought you. I registered you. I cleaned you and I bought you new floor mats and a seat cushion. I love you and I take care of you.

Please. 

I'm counting on you.

Love your fond owner,

Chelsie