i'm not a good person. i'm leaving.

i think i'm gonna be a teacher. i'm a pretty weak person. but it's nice to know that there are people out there who think i'm cool. even though it sucks when there are people who think it's cool to pick me up and drop me, and exploit that weakness. 'cause i get lonely, and i get sad, and i'm likely to reach out to you. maybe someday it'll be for real. i could fall for you again. your doppelganger is not you. i'm glad we talk again but this could be perilous, and the last thing i need. i'm in a position to fall. ps - it's nice outside.

it matches my sheets, my hoodie, my walls at home, countless shirts and scarves etc. i had a really great weekend. and like, when i say that, i mean, it's one of those weekends that i never want to stop talking about. because i spent it at Jesus Ranch and it was spectacular. here's a story that i can't stop telling: i was raised catholic but that means almost nothing. catholics still have to be saved, because catholicism has left in most of us (at least all i've met) a void when it comes to an actual knowlege of Jesus Christ and an actual idea of what it is to be a christian. i came to school catholic, but just barely. i figured that i would stop going to church once i got here because i wouldn't be going with my family and i wouldn't care enough to go by myself. then i met my roommate, and her friends, and my friends from the internet, and my friends from their friends and their friends and so on, and you know what? they were all christians. everyone for the first two months of my being here was a christian. and they brought me with them to campus ministries, and invited me to their bible studies, and i went because i had no other friends. but i was really pretty terrified of christianity. i don't know why really. i wanted nothing to do with their worship, but i wanted to be their friend, so i tagged along a few more times. peer pressure. and little by little the word of God started getting lodged in my mind until i couldn't think about anything else. it was awful. absolutely horrible. i was miserably depressed. i remember thinking that God was calling me to join Him and His servants, and i could do was cry about it. i was too frightened. too insecure. no way that Jesus would ever care that much about me. why? there's no reason for that. i don't deserve that. the weekend that i finally accepted Christ into my heart i remember just bawling all the time. sobbing into the phone, or crying all over my journal, or just sitting there staring out the window and thinking. but there was no way i couldn't accept the call, and i knew that. that was me giving up. i was holding out because i was scared. i was scared because i'm insecure. i'm insecure because my entire life my shield, my backup, my safety blanket has been self-deprecation, as odd as that sounds. and while it had sheltered me from outside it had left me so empty and messed up inside that i didn't know what to do with the idea that i might be worth something. it made me feel better to beat myself up harder than anyone else could. i guess like i was still in control of me. and that's a very hard thing to give up, when that's all you've got. i've never been happier since. i've written about this before, that feeling of realizing that God made you the way you are and that that's a glorious thing. i'm fantastically awkward, i'm horrible at math, and i'm afraid of the dark, and that's great because that's me and Jesus loves me. i pretty much can't stop talking about Jesus lately. Jesus Ranch was good to me. God is good to me. there aren't even words. even before i was a christian He was there, all along, watching over me and guiding me and blessing me and i had no idea. i am so incredibly blessed to be surrounded by the people that i am and i just pray that God will use me to be to others as they have been to me. last week there were cru (campus crusade for Christ) events every day, and they will continue till wednesday of this coming week, and i am beyond thrilled. God is good, people. and we don't deserve it but it's there and that was the hardest part for me. bethany calls this color the green of my life. it matches my hoodie and my sheets and my walls at home, and so many shirts and scarves and everything i own. i get a new favorite color about every 6 months to a year. the last couple years have given us: blue yellow pink red and now, green. my friend becca's favorite has been purple since she was a little girl. that baffles me.

i feel like i'm not being fair to you and i'm sorry for that. know that i'm not avoiding you, and that i do still want to be friends. i keep telling myself i'll make time for talking again, but there's more on my plate lately. i just feel like i should apologize. what i'm doing is not cool. i'm sorry. i'll talk to you sometime soon. cheerio for now, lindsey

nick wants me to write, but what's there to write about? it's funny how i can't find anything to write about. i guess i don't mind keeping it all inside anymore. or maybe i just grew out of that. i don't know. sorry nick. you're probably the only one who misses it.

8===============================D *edit: i'm too lazy to change the rest of them to 8's so you'll just have to deal with subpar digital penes i'm afraid.

my throat hurts. the only upside to this whole thing is that if the only thing you ingest for a week is tea, you lose some weight. and i'm just shallow enough to think that's pretty awesome.

yesterday was my birthday. yahoo, me!

i've always been slightly unsettled by his works. even as a child, "cat in the hat" never sat well with me. and that's that. why? why should i harbor ill feelings for the nation's most beloved author of children's books? dr. seuss has no respect for authority. or conventional rhyme structure. or words at all. "what rhymes with hurfelpurfel? hmm... oh well, i made that up, i'll just make up something else too!" GENIUS! 95% of those suckers are just random gibberish that only makes sense with the illustrations, and they're kind of scary. speaking of scary, might i add that a lot of those crazy chimeras he's calling into being are destructive, or rowdy, or otherwise not overly friendly? yes. take for instance, the cat in the hat. that guy is trouble waaaaaaaaaaiting to happen. no respect for authority or conventions! he doesn't care about the giant mess he's making. and mom is gonna be home soon, and oh no this is going to be terrible!!!! does he not care about the awful anguish he's putting me through???? geez. i mean, geez. if i just made up a bunch of words and drew some creepy pictures and sold them to kids, do you think i'd be a bazigillionaire? no, no i wouldn't. they'd just call me crazy. i hate you "dr. seuss" if that is your real name and i suspect that it is not!

you know how little kid minds work. sometimes the lines between reality and fantasy are a little blurry. when my parents told us that we were moving, i was maybe 5. i probably dreamt this, and then believed it to be true, which has happened on several occasions afterwards in the not-too-distant past. well. either way, i thought that when you moved, a moving van came to your house, and the movers opened up the back doors, and this blue sparkly dust poured out. it somehow lifted up your house and moved it to wherever you were going to live. i don't know how. when i was about 7-ish i guess, i thought i made up the word "itch". as it turns out, no i didn't. one of the popular pastimes at the lakehouse was always fishing. well, my brothers had set up a seine (our seines were always ghetto-rigged. like everything we have. it was leftover kite string tied to the ends of old window screens) underneath the boat dock, and my mother and i were in charge of checking it while they were out on the boat. i was maybe 12. we dutifully went outside, grabbed the strings, and pulled up to see what awaited us. as my memory goes, inside the seine was a big yellow fish with large purple polka dots! it looked like a handkerchief, but turned out to be a festively-colored gar! i found out some years later, after still holding on to that memory, that it was not yellow and purple, it was that murky greeny brown mildew color that all lakefish are. i don't know where i got that. one of my earliest memories is of me, perhaps 3 or 4, sitting on the windowsill in our dining room at our first house, just looking outside. i would do that for pretty long periods of time. i remember looking through the gauzy curtains and how i was kind of too big for a windowsill. i remember the gently sloping green yard, and the street, and our neighbor's house, and i remember how it looked from far away, like in another room looking in. how that whole thing looked, i mean. how i looked. i don't know, a lot of the things i remember have weird camera angles to them. the fish one i remember from slightly above and behind me.

there are certain memories that are just swirling around in my brain. they refuse to sink to the bottom and be lost in that mess of discarded moments, i guess. most of them don't mean anything, i'm sure. but they just won't go away. i think about them at weird times. stoplights. taking tests. listening to people. maybe someday i'll tell you about them. they probably won't be that interesting and they probably won't be that deep. just the weird stuff you remember from growing up.

c-h-a-m-e-l-e-o-n you can't see me! now i'm bored. now i'm dumb. now i'm hiding again.

diet mug root beer is not as good as diet a&w root beer. in my humble opinion. so i've had this thing for over a year and it's funny 'cause i can remember clearly what happened a year ago. that's kind of weird to me. everything that i said was true as the flashes blinded us in the photobooth. ps - if you don't know www.lickmyjesus.com, get to know www.lickmyjesus.com. it made me giggle.

my birthday is coming up. i am going to be 19. i guess that's not a big deal really, but it seems kind of weird to me. i guess it's true, i am getting older. imagine that. i'll never be able to sing soco amaretto lime with the same meaning, you know? i felt the same way about dancin' queen last year.

for a second i was really tempted to answer each comment in a new entry, and to title my diary "dear dan" and then it would just be that. but i didn't. as you may or may not have noticed. maybe someday, dan, if you keep being awesome, i'll name my diary after our correspondence. ps - okay pps - i think we should be sd friends right now. i'm not looking for an e-mail relationship. pardon my skepticism.

i don't know. i'm just like that. i never got over it. simple things are better than the most complex things because i guess they're just more honest. and... better. and i like that. and, thank you. sincerely, lindsey ps - i guess so. i don't really sit down and think about life or anything. it just kinda comes out that way, i suppose. i'm glad you like it. pps - word up, dan. you're the best anonymous commentator ever.

i just keep watching the trailer for garden state over and over again. it seems to me to be quite beautiful. i think i'm getting over this whole business.

i'm hoooooome. i been home. it's nice, i'm liking it. i've taken up knitting and sewing and jogging and looking for a job as my summer hobbies. it's going pretty well so far, except for that last one. thaaaaaat one's proving kinda tricky. i'm hungry, and i want to go to the gym. ra ra ra, life is pretty good. i want to redo my room, though. i just don't know what to do with it. i had a funny dream last night. there were too-small cotton balls and a castle made of sandstone owned by houdini's great grandniece or something. she was pretty nice. she could pass through screens and stuff like that x-men guy. nightcrawler. yeah. and then it turns out when we couldn't break into this one room in the castle, we just kind of slunk away so that the administration of the high school we were attending wouldn't find out we'd been snooping. then it was off to class, because i was attending high school in california. but i hadn't read any of the prerequisite books because i went to high school in texas and i guess we have different books. actually, out of the list of books i was looking at, i think only two were real books. and then i woke up 'cause my cat was licking my feet.

i can't believe it's taken me this long to try removing the screen from my window. windows without screens are awesome. this weather is so effing incredible it makes me want to die. i'm going home tomorrow. yeah.

i can't wait to stretch my body out in the enveloping heat of texas sun and drink in the shape of every leaf.