I was surprised by how many of these postcards I relate to. It's comforting in a strange way to know you're not the only one... PostSecret

so this is my mid-morning break before i make the final push to finish my work. Or pseudo finish my work. It baffels my mind to consider what my grades would be like if I didn't procrastinate. I've finally accepted the fact that I can't really do work in my room though. Hellooooo Library for the rest of my time here at Tufts.

So sad thing, I had to cancel the philly trip this weekend because everyone bailed on me. I guess it sorta works out for the best because I do have my IOP paper due on monday that I have... well, a paragraph done on. That'll be fun. I just hope I get to see all of the wonderful FVMs before they all depart from the Inn. I'm hoping to make it down sometime before i start summer classes. Just for a day trip at least.

Speaking of classes, I think I'll be taking classes at UMass Boston. Yes, I'll have no life during the month of June, But I'll be getting more for my money. I think I'll be okay if I have a new music thingy to accompany me on the T. I'll just add that to my list of things to save up for. Okayokay, back to my projects...

so here are the two choices for my summer class

UMass Boston
Bio 207: Gross Anatomy & Physiology I
May 31 - June 30
lecture - MTWRF, 8-10 am
lab - MTF, 10:15-1:15
total fees: $1271 (including transfer of credit fee and all of these extra fees that UMB wants to charge me, not including T money and extra time it takes to get there)

Tufts
Bio 04: Gross Anatomy
May 25 - July 1
lecture - MTR 9am-12noon
lab - ???
total fees: $1460

hmmm....

Impulse purchases as 3 o'clock in the morning are probably not a good idea. Oh well, the CD was only $6.50 inlcuding shipping... it'll be my reward for hopefully getting through the week.

My goal for the week is to get to friday without having a nervous breakdown. Almost went over the edge tonight... thank the Lord for music that has the power to calm, namely "All I Can Say" by David Crowder Band. I think I need to have headphone permenently attached to my head for this week. We shall see...

I went to a gathering at West tonight with Dani and Julie. It was quite interesting. Well, maybe not so interesting. It was pretty much like all the other parties that I've been to at West (all two of them, oh no wait, this makes three...) The weird/interesting thing was how many people I saw that I knew. I saw people from both of my jobs, a heck of a lot of FOCUS people (who are hilarious tipsy btw), including people from my frosh FOCUS group, someone from my IO psycho class... and the list goes on. Maybe I'm just not used to seeing people that I know outside of their respective activites since I hardly ever go to parties. Towards the end though, that "observer" feeling came over me. You know the one. Like you're not really there... you're just looking in at all that is happening and not involved in anyway. Maybe thats just because I was one of the few sober people there...

Now I don't usually go out, but considering the amount of work I did, I thought I should get out of my room tonight. Here was my day pretty much: woke up at 11, ate at 11:45, went to the library at 12:45, left to eat dinner at 6:15, went to the CC to do more studying at 7:30, stayed at the CC until 10:45, at which time I walked back uphill with dani.... All in all, thats about 9ish hours of solid work today, well give or take... I started to lose my concentration around 9pm and slacked off a bit. I'm pretty impressed with myself if in general if I must say so. I've come to the realization that I just can't do work in my room. There's too many distractions. That and I think the internet is my downfall. But I did get about 8 pages of my History of Women in Music class paper fleshed out, and I'm pretty much set with my ASL presentation (I just have to make a poster or something now).

So here's the plan for tomorrow: eat brunch around 11, work at the music library from 12 to 1:30, work on my music theory take-home-quiz and composition until 4:45ish, leadership at 5, dinner at 6, church at 7, essaying from 9pm on... I think I can do it. Man, the next week is going to be fun! But one happy thing is that I'm going to SFI next weekend. Yay!!!

Yay for retreats! The annual PSF spring retreat was this past weekend at Toah Nippi in Rindge, NH. As usual, it was really good. Way to short, but good none-the-less. So I've come to a few realizations in the past few days. But there is one in particular that really hit home.

I've decided that one of the reasons why I get sad so often is that I feel like I have to be perfect. Isn't that the American way after all? To strive to perfection? But no one can be perfect, I'm certainly not. This was really reinforced when I started college and promptly got shot down in everything that I excelled in at THS. But that's real life for you. For some reason I have this mentality if it's not perfect, or really really good, then it's just absolutely terrible. Or if its not perfect, then it's not worth doing. Like singing, or soccer, or guitar, or being a Christian... which is absolutely silly I realized, but something I still can't help from feeling.

We were doing this exercise at the retreat that focused on self-love. The entire idea of this was that you can't love others if you don't first love yourself, loving your neighbors being God's great commandment (in conjuction with loving God with all your might, and all your strength...). The exercise involved writing self-affirming statements on the right side of the paper, and then on the left side write down what your raw response to this statement was. The self-affirming statement was supposed to take something that you didn't like about yourself and turn it into a positive statement. (ex: People don't like me --> I, Tara, have a great personality and people love me... you get the idea). Another thing we had to do was look at ourselves in the mirror and talk to ourselves as if we were trying to cheer up our best friends (I know it sounds cheezy, but whatever). As I was doing the latter part of this exercise, I realized that I really had nothing positive to say about myself. I don't think I'm a good singer, I'm not good enough to make it on the soccer team, I screw up so much when I play guitar in church, and I am struggling so much right now in my walk as a Christian. Sometimes I even feel like all of the cheerfulness that I exude sometimes is just fake and a cover up for what's really inside of me.

Before this becomes a complete sob story, I'll just skip ahead. The only thing that helped me calm down was repeating, "God loves me just the way I am, and that's all that matters," over and over again. And it's true. God doesn't love us because we're perfect beings. God loves us as we are with all of our faults and misgivings. I know all of this, but what I'm struggling with is really accepting it. In accepting this fact, I have to accept my own imperfections, and love myself as I am. Something that I have a really hard time doing, for one reason or another. If God can love me how I am, then I can love myself how I am, and others will love me how I am... perfections and imperfections.

Here are my faults. I don't have a lot to offer, but here I am.

Sorry for lack of postings... I have not dropped off the face of the planet, I merely just have too many things to do. I think most collegiates will agree when I say that the month of April sucks in terms of final papers, projects, and exams. So take all of that, and then consider that a lot of concerts are in April... six of which I am working in the 2 1/2 weeks. Plus FOCUS, and PSF and yadda yadda, blah blah blah... I should really stop complaining, but it good to blow off some steam, right?

Here's an announcement for all of my fellow Teaneckians... I regret to inform that I will not be in NJ this summer. I'm coordinating FOCUS this year, and that requires me to be in Bosotn starting in mid-June/early-July. I really need to have a job this summer, which is not really possible if I divide my time between two different cities, so therefore I am staying in Boston. I should be home for a week or two after finals are over, and I'll try to get home as much as possible, but besides that... no heavy-duty NJ time this summer. Ah well, what can you do?

Italy: Monday

We arrived in Naples, aka Napoli, around 11:30am. We boarded our two busses and drove to our hotel in Sorrento, which took about one-and-a-half-hours. We were all awestruck by the scenery the the drive really didn't feel that long. Italy is really unlike any other country that I have visited. You can at least say that it is unlike any part of the United States. They have this gorgeous species of trees there that people call umbrella trees because, well, they look like umbrellas. I feel like they would fit right in in the african grasslands, but that's just me and my imagination. Anyway, we got to the the Hotel Parco del Sol and settled in. I of course had to be in the room that was the farthest away from everything.

By this time we were all really hungry, and decided to look for a place to eat, but first we had to find bank, because of course, none of us had any Euros. (The exchange rate really sucked by the way.) It took us about 45 minutes to actually get money and find a place to eat, but a group of eight of us ended up at this small pizzaria where we all got some very yummy pizza. The pizza, which is served individual style, only cost like 4 or 6 euro, but in Italy you have to pay for water, because they don't really do the tap water thing. There's also this "sitting fee," but don't ask me to explain that one to you because I think it's dumb.

At 4:15, a walking tour of Sorrento was supposed to leave from our hotel. We didn't have time to make it back to the hotel, but we figured that we were almost to the center of town, so we could just walk the rest of the way there and just meet up with everyone. We walked a few more block to what we thought was the "center of town," and 4:30 comes and goes, and still no busload of American college students. After a while we figured out that we weren't actually in the middle of town, and just walked back to the hotel.

Our last arranged activity for the night was a group dinner in the hotel restaurant, which was really nice. I sat with Ivan, Diana and Laura, and we had a nice convo over a good bottle of wine and dinner. It's nice to be able to do that by the way. To drink tastefully without people making a big deal of it.

I ended the night by taking a walk around our part of Sorrento with Steve, Maggie and Becca. We ended up finding this little terrace on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the sea. It was absolutely gorgeous. Of course it was night, and a litte hazy (it was hazy our entire stay in Italy), but the weather was so nice, and what we could see was beautiful, so I'm not complaining.

End of day one.