Just need to get through tonight, tomorrow, and this week....  Almost certainly not sleeping until tomorrow evening...

Need to get these things done and out of the way so I can plan my road trip with my brother in a month!!!!

Let me tell you about pterosaur poop!

My senior thesis project is consuming my post-grad-school-admissions life, and I do not mind!  In fact, I'd rather be working on this research than anything else related to school this semester.  It's just frustrating because I wish I had more time to delve into all my questions, master the geochemistry, etc., but how often do we not wish we had more time?  I have to remember that my goal is to write a thesis and graduate so I can move onto bigger and better things and address even more interesting questions.  The thing is, I honestly didn't expect this question to become so interesting to me.  What is this indoctrination of insatiable curiosity for such random and obscure things?  I guess that's academia... and science.

Anyway, I started writing this because my UGA CURO Symposium talk is tomorrow, and I am updating a talk for the second time.  I haven't even started writing my thesis (!!!!!!!!!!!), and I am already giving a talk on this project for the third time.  By the end of May, I will have orally disseminated information about the Venezuelan island of Gran Roque (where I now am determined to visit one day) and the hypothetical pterosaur poop there at these occasions:

1. UGA Geology Club Brown Bag Talk
2. Oregon State University Open House for prospectives
3. UGA CURO Symposium
4. GSA Cordilleran Section Meeting in Fresno, CA

And in the next several months, I will have disseminated the same info in writing through:

1. My senior thesis
2. A paper (hopefully!!)

That is six outlets total, big and small, poster/oral presentation and papers, for this thing that I thought I might get to present a poster on at the Southeastern GSA Meeting.  Hard work?  Yes.  Am I going to be sleeping much in the next two months?  No.  Awesome?  Yes.  Exciting?  Yes.

The more I learn about my project, the more I learn how much I have yet to learn... and despite feeling inexperienced, stupid, rushed, and inadequate much of the time, I am enjoying this so far.

Also, I'm realizing just how truly nerdy I am becoming, and it blows my mind that, should I choose to continue in academia, I won't stop getting more and more nerdy until I retire.  I think my professors are nerdy, of course, but I can't even begin to fathom how nerdy they really are!!!  Is such level of nerdiness even healthy??  Scientists are crazy!  Every real scientist has to be a mad scientist...

Anywhere But Here

I have a make-up midterm tomorrow.  A real legit one.  In a hard class.  Worth 20% of my grade.

But my mind is on graduation, Tennessee, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon.  On what to put on my office walls.  On what kind of furniture I want in my next year's dwelling.  On what I will spend my summer paychecks on.  On what kind of groceries I will be able to afford next year.  On potential advisors.  What will keep me warm in Minneapolis this week.  My future Tumblr account.

All this traveling has been mentally and physically exhausting enough without make-up work.  I'm ready for spring break.

I've always been mildly in favor of memorization, mostly because I'm pretty good at cramming info into my brain.  But not tonight.  I am not interested in memorizing details about different types of copper deposits...

Or am I...?

Soul CD / Oregon in "Retrospect"

A friend told me about soul CDs last night.  You choose twelve songs that define you at the core and put them on a CD.  You can keep one as a memorabilia, trade them with friends, or just gift them.  People rarely make CDs anymore, but I think it would be cool to make one for myself.  I've made special CDs for people before, but more for the recipient, and never with the intention to define myself.  I think as a college graduation gift to myself I will make one.  It will be challenging -- twelve songs aren't a lot!

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The Oregon visit was good.  Good.  The beautiful, dynamic landscape was everything I had imagined. The people were even kinder and happier than I had imagined.  To feel like the most Southern person in a crowd was a new experience...  In that regard, I am definitely more comfortable back in Athens where half the people talk more Southern than I do.  But other than that, I almost felt like I knew I belonged there.  The active tectonic landscape -- the landscape!  Lush mountains and hills all around with giant evergreens, the Pacific coast with the white waves throwing themselves at jutting cliffs, valleys shrouded in fog, crystal-clear blue streams, and snow-capped Cascade volcanoes, all neighboring each other.  All the people there seemed to be outdoors(wo)men, whether their outlet of choice be snowboarding, skiing, surfing, hiking, paddling, or mountain biking.  Plastic bags are banned, you can literally subscribe to local agriculture for fresh seasonal produce, people bike everywhere -- refreshing things like these simply made sense.

Headed to Knoxville, TN and Minneapolis, MN this coming week.  I am forgetting to feel thankful for these opportunities but rather constantly fearing feeling too smug.  Thankfulness...  That's really where it all needs to go.  I can't lose that.

On another note, I'm thinking of making a new blog for grad school.  Should I stay on Blogger or move onto Tumblr or something else?

No Weekends

Things are just toppling down off my plate!

Last night (a Friday), I stayed up til 3am writing my first real abstract of my own ever.  I'll be submitting it to both the CURO Symposium in April and the Geological Society of America Cordilleran Section Meeting in May.  I still didn't finish, and I was supposed to email it to my advisor last night!  That aside, I am going to school today (a Saturday) for an extra-credit PE class, again after dinner tonight to work on my economic geology lab, and tomorrow afternoon (a Sunday) for a meeting with my advisor and more economic geology lab.  Not to mention a phone call with a professor at Kansas this afternoon.  I have not been able to unwind at all.  It's Saturday and I feel like it's Tuesday... and last night I felt like it was a Monday.

Weeks have been going by faster than ever.  They are just disappearing in front of my eyes.  Every time I actually get to think about what day it is, it's already another Friday (haha, so it could be worse).  "Oh wow, I feel like last Friday was yesterday."  And that has happened for the last several weeks.

Okay, I have to go to school now.  Peace.

Oregon Bound (For Now)

Unbelievable.

I will be on the West Coast in two weeks.

Corvallis, OR, overlooking Oregon State campus

This is crazy.  And awesome.

Ran around the building today.  Did silent screams and foot claps.

If my mom has been watching over me today, I know she must be having a happy birthday.

City of Roses, see you soon.

Admissions! / Microscopy Woes

Unlike on Facebook, I won't feel guilty of boasting if I post this stuff here.  Well, I guess it is technically boasting, too, but so few people read this blog -- and they do it voluntarily, I think -- that I think of it as just sharing the exciting things in my life like any other time I write on here.

Okay, so I just wrote some stuff about where I've been accepted to, but suddenly the slim possibility of people related to these schools somehow reaching my blog and reading my frank thoughts about each school dawned upon me, and I shouldn't risk that.  Darn!

Well, I'll say I am going to grad school next fall and leave it at that!  Okay, and that I am visiting Minnesota in March.  Very thankful for this.

I think it's also safe to say that, while I haven't been accepted to Oregon State, I have high hopes that I will be.

I am learning that grad school applications didn't end when I sent in all my stuff and money.  Most schools are on tight budgets, and they are very careful about whom they decide to offer admission to.  I have had lengthy phone calls and many email exchanges with prospective advisors at two schools since they reviewed my file, and neither have a definite answer for me yet.  Those interactions were just as important and nerve-wracking as the actual applications.  One has sent me a paper and former students' contacts.  I am excited to read the paper and hear the deal-io about working with him, but it's like... "Man, I thought I was done with this!" "Let me do some homework now!"... kind of, haha.  Ah, rarely is life so simple.

Yes, it is much better to be not done and potentially be in a have-to-make-decisions position than have five rejection letters (or emails -- I feel like nobody mails things anymore) in my hand and be done that way.  I do feel very fortunate, and I would be excited to go to any school I applied to.  Some more than others, of course.

Overall this is a very exciting (word of the day, y'all) time for me, and I really don't know whom to thank other than a supreme being who is in control of all that happens.  Thank you God, for giving me a direction for my path, paving that path, and giving me a light so I can walk on it.  Happily.

--------------

I did not anticipate economic geology to take such a toll on my body.  Economic geology is also known as "ore deposits class."  We look at polished slivers of rocks from all kinds of mines under a ginormous microscope that I can barely lift out of the cabinet.  For a three-hour lab period.  Except I came in an hour early and made it four hours today.  And I came in Sunday night and spent three hours... examining three rock samples!

First, the eyes.  The different light switches in the microscope keep making me blind myself accidentally.  A rock microscope has a circular stage you rotate, which means you are constantly staring down into something either way too bright or too dim -- depending on your polarizer setting -- that is spinning. So, after blinding myself four times with sudden floods of light and watching spinning crystals intently for hours, the words in my textbook looked hazy for a few moments.  Second, I am convinced this terrible crick in my neck is from craning it to look into this really tall microscope... despite that I had been sitting on a 980-page book on my chair.  Also I've been sleep deprived, but that may or may not be because of this class.  I love geology, I promise... just not microscopes...

A view through the scope... This is the kind of rock we get our copper and nickel from.

Arts & Sciences

The Fraklin College of Arts & Sciences at UGA always seemed like an unlikely combination to me.  Why were we lab nerds lumped with the artsy fartsy people with nose piercings?

I've recently realized that art and science are the same in a way.  They both involve something only inherent (I think) to humans -- delving into what is unnecessary for immediate survival needs.  I struggled with the "frivolity" of geologic research last year.  Why was I trying so hard, why was the government giving money out, to figure out how the Caribbean islands got where they are now, when there are sick and starving people in the world?  Yet, I never questioned the purpose and worth of a piece of music or painting.  Science for science's sake, discovery for discovery's sake is no more frivolous than expression for expression's sake.  Whether it is exercising our intellect to figure out why the land we live on stands here today or why that rock looks the way it does, or it is expressing our complex emotions and thoughts through a sculpture, we are celebrating and taking full advantage of our God-given gifts.

I also used to wonder why I thought Wegener's groundbreaking -- no pun intended -- theory of plate tectonics was significant to humanity, but not what happened to some Caribbean islands 70 million years ago.  Well, not every artist paints a Sistine Chapel or the Starry Night.  Not every painter is Picasso or Dali.  But are not our lesser-known local artists talented and important?  Don't their works also contribute to the expressions of humanity and influence other works in some way?  Likewise, whether it's landing a man on the Moon or finding out how a sea biscuit skeleton grows (actually went to such a talk and learned the true meaning of "excruciating detail"), a discovery is a discovery.  They each form a part of our knowledge base and influence other discoveries in some way.

A friend asked if I really wanted to be in school for the rest of my life.  I enjoy research, I really do so far.

Musings in Myers

This morning, I refused to take the bus to school.  Instead, I slept that extra hour and drove to the Tate deck.  As a consequence I just rode the bus back to campus, so I can drive back home after 11:00 PM without paying for parking.

On the bus, thinking of where in the SLC I would situate myself and read new class syllabi, I saw Myers Hall outside and felt compelled to get off.  I felt like I owed this building a visit as a last-semester senior.

Well, it smells exactly the same as it did three years ago.  This smell of... woody cleanliness.  Everything looks so unchanged that I feel like I could walk up the ramp, scan my hand, and the door would still swing open for me.  Although I can only reminisce in the first floor common areas, this is enough for reflection.

In this building, Students of AMF started.  Our card-making, support group meetings, officer meetings. We met here for my very first InterVarsity small groups with the fifth-year senior Elizabeth (who I thought was so old).  For almost a year, I called this place home.  I would run into this building on a rainy day, shake off my umbrella, and end a long day of classes.  I would walk into the lobby from my end of the hall and meet up with my lover, coming from his end, so that we could set out for a run around campus or a concert at the Performing Arts Center.

Contrary to what many seniors told me when I was a freshman, I do not want to be a freshman again -- I don't want to have to re-learn about myself, I don't want to take freshman classes again, and I definitely don't want to be broke for an extra four years.  But I do dearly miss the memories from Myers.  In fact, I'm going to dearly miss college.  This is something I doubted for a while that I would ever say.  In freshman year, I felt like everybody else was having a funner college experience, making more friends, and finding their places better than I was.  But I found my own fun, friends, and "place" at just the right times and have had an amazing experience as an undergrad.  Oh my gosh, how wonderful college has been.  Of course, all good things must come to an end.  And the end is near.  I can't yet think of a brilliantly different way to spend this last semester.  I guess take time to savor each moment, not get too caught up in the little things to see the bigger picture, and take it easy and put high priority on loving my friends (= other students, professors, bosses...) here.

We should not dwell on the past, they say.  But I find happiness and inspiration for the future through occasional nostalgia.  Hello, Spring 2013.

---------

Excited for this semester's classes, too.  It's fun to walk into a class and learn about concepts you never knew existed, but it's even more exciting and satisfying to glance through a syllabus and think, "Oh my gosh I've been dying to learn about all of these!"  One of the perks of being far along in your major, I guess...

"Crazy College Night"

So here it is, finally, my first all-nighter of the semester, it would seem.  Impressed that it took me all the way until the last night of finals week.  I'm realizing that all nighters can't happen when you merely know you've got a lot to do.  They only happen when you're genuinely stressed out.  When so much stuff is commanding your attention that you can't possibly relax and fall asleep:

• Hydrogeology cumulative final tomorrow at noon, worth 45% of total grade -- I've only begun to study for it this evening
• Half-done take-home tectonics test due tomorrow afternoon
• Graduate school applications
• Not sure if my transcript order will go through this month, don't know what to do if it won't.  Have to check on that tomorrow morning.
• Not sure how I will be able to afford all these applications, but I just added another school to the list (which is final now, by the way. DONE LOOKING).
• Gotta call University of Nevada, Reno, tomorrow morning before I leave for the final and get app materials straight.
• I've suddenly got only two weeks to write and submit my applications.  Need to get the letter-writing material to professors tomorrow, possibly.
• Seriously serious university drama situation I've gotten myself into.  That is all I'm going to say.

Hahaha I feel like I'm in high school again!  Except with serious-er stuff on mind.

Oh man...  I can't wait until Thursday.

A Tribute to Honors Projects

Darn Honors Option projects!!!!!!!!  Each one of them have been such a pain in the butt.  I mean, how much does graduating with Honors mean anyway?  They have been responsible for all of my college all-nighters, shortened winter breaks, late start of summers, general intense stress, etc., and this semester is no different.  This time, I am about to go to school to wrestle with computer programs I have never laid my eyes upon until the wee hours of the morning.  But the most frustrating thing is that this semester, it has been cutting into time I could be using for grad school applications.  I am over classes!!!  I need to apply to schools!!!  Darn Honors projects!!!

Okay, granted, I usually feel very grateful for these projects.  They are how I got close with all of my best faculty mentors.  And how I got really interested in geology.  And how I learned the most interesting things.  

But still!!!

Fine, it's actually all because of my poor prioritization this semester.  I have no one to blame but myself.  It's the last full week of classes this semester -- I'll sleep when I'm dead.  Or when finals are over.  All with the faith that everything will be worth it in the end.  That whatever's supposed to happen will happen.  That I just need to focus.  

Did somebody say "break"?

This hydrogeology lab is taking an unacceptable amount of time...

The Pre-Thanksgiving Crunch

Inevitable every year since ninth grade has been the pre-Thanksgiving-break crunch.  This year I've got summer plans and grad schools to worry about on top of schoolwork -- much more long-term than previous years!  As important and complicated as these things are, I don't dread doing them nearly as much as physics homework, which is what I have been bogged down with in the past few years.

Well, that's really all I've got to say about it.  Got lots on my mind and got lots to do.

Hodgepodge Month in a Hodgepodge Retrospect

What wouldn't I do for a peaceful weekend where I can sit and watch a movie...

It's already the end of October.  Where did October go?  To Arizona, to many beers, to much confusion about future and people, to campfires.  To the desert, forests, mountaintops, caves.  To hurried grad school research and cramming for midterms.  What a hodgepodge of a month.

Maybe I should change my attitude from "must apply to as many schools as reasonably possible, must get into somewhere and start grad school next fall" to "eh, I'll apply to 2 or 3 I really like, and if I don't get into any, I'll just look for a job for a gap year."  The only problem is, if I don't secure a job early, either, I can't get permission to stay in the US for a gap year.  I guess in that case, I'll just spend a year in Korea and apply for US grad schools from there.  So either attitude is cumbersome...  Well, I've already started investing a lot of time into looking at grad programs, so I'll just keep chugging along the best I can.  It's just stressful with GSA beginning this weekend; I feel pressured to prepare to meet everyone who might could be a potential advisor.

Feeling this lack of free time, always feeling obligated to do something related to school, and finding myself longing for off hours sometimes make me wonder if I really want to be in school (either as student or faculty) forever.  But, we always long for what we don't have, right?  (Why is that?  That's kind of cruel.)  And I wonder if I will get the same satisfaction with a 9-5 job.  Guess it would depend on what it is...  Okay, enough far-future thinking, back to the present.

It got really cold all of a sudden over the weekend.  To think that, in the beginning of the month, I was enjoying(?) 97-degree afternoons in Tucson.  Now it's in the 30s at night in Athens.

I've been going out a bit too much this semester.  Not sure when exactly it started or if I should be concerned...  I would like a peaceful weekend to figure this stuff out, also.

Well, here's to a late night of productivity (please!!) so I can celebrate a college Halloween properly for the first and last time tomorrow.

Grad Schools and Camping

Since I started contacting professors and hearing back from them, the graduate school search/application process has become considerably more fun.  About infinity times as fun as WIP (this lame Writing Intensive Program for a core class... we have a mini-paper due every week) that I'm supposed to be working on also.

I am 98% sure I am applying to:

• University of Minnesota

I might apply to:

• UW-Madison

I would like to apply to:

• UC-Santa Barbara

I plan on looking into:

• Stanford
• Penn State
• University of Colorado-Boulder
• Oregon State

These are all really good schools.  I need some safeties, darnit!

Well, slowly but surely, I'm making progress...

And I'm going camping tomorrow for fall break.  Although I could really use a long, relaxing weekend at home filled with productivity.  I haven't stayed in town for a single weekend in October (Arizona, Arizona, Lawrenceville, NW Georgia), and I won't get to until the second weekend of November (first week being spent in Charlotte, NC).  So crazy!  Nevertheless, I'm excited to camp.  Camping seemed like somewhat of an ordeal at field school, at least to me, in that we always had a 6:00-ish wake-up time and days filled with note-taking, driving, and hectic (albeit wonderful) sight-seeing.  But now, in the middle of a busy semester in a city, the idea of a camping trip is exotic and fun.  And almost completely stress-free.  So, I'm excited to go.

And of course, I have not started packing and won't until tomorrow!

I now know what "mind-numbing" means

Studying geology does give me such special experiences.

Today, I sat in a lab for twelve hours straight (save for bathroom breaks and a 20-minute lunch break) and shot a total of ~400 zircon crystals with laser.  Zoom, pan, aim, focus, fire, record, repeat.  "Shoot laser beams"... ha!  You mean clicking my mouse..........................................

I am jet lagged and incredibly sleepy, my head is sleepy.  I mean spinning.

I really didn't think I would say this, but I wish I were back in Athens.  Tomorrow, I get up at 7, get to the lab by 8, and repeat.  And then Wednesday, repeat.  Thursday, repeat.  Friday, repeat.  Not that what we do in the lab is miserable, but it really isn't that stimulating.

I enjoy tedious things when they don't require much focus and I can go at a leisurely pace and use it as an excuse to listen to some good music.  But this takes concentration and speed and judgments really fast for a really long period of time this is really wearing out my brain not to mention the jet lag.  Good night.

Oh yeah Tucson has some really good food, I'll tell you that.  I haven't had a single meal that wasn't delicious.  First day (yesterday), had the best wrap ever that had quinoa, feta, edamame hummus, among other wonderful wonderful veggies.  And had the best Mexican food I've ever had, I'll go into more detail about that sometime, maybe.  The kind of deliciousness that makes you glaze over and smile as you chew.  And today had some really good these uh... sonora hotdog.  Yummy.

Good night for real.

Enough Productivity for the Day

What a day.  Got four hours of sleep, took a big midterm, came home around 4:00, then in a strange sleep-deprived burst of focus and motivation, I finished and submitted an internship application I have been "working on" for three months.  On top of that, after a satisfying evening nap, I began to continue my graduate-program searching journey.  But of course that would be too good -- I soon stumbled into the magnetic field of Facebook and found myself going through field school pictures, reminiscing those mountain hikes.  And thinking about how EXCITING (!!!!!!!!!!!) it is that I will be leaving for Arizona on Sunday!!!  To be honest, I don't know what the heck is in Tucson.  Cactus, I imagine -- my excitement just momentarily shriveled -- and sand, and dust?  Plus, I will be indoors almost all of the time.  But the thought of just going back out West does it for me.  If it's out there, it's gotta be cool.  Thinking about merely breathing in some dry air is literally making my palms sweat with excitement.

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Last night, as I was looking over the definition of "precipitation" in my Surficial Processes notes, I was reminded of a little picture book I really loved as a kid.  My hazy memory says it was titled 무지개는 왜 생길까요? or Why Do Rainbows Form?  And it had a tiger explaining various elements of precipitation, including snowflakes, raindrops, and rainbows.  It was from that book I learned that when water vapor condenses and gets heavy, it falls to the ground as rain.  And here I was in college, learning the same concept.  But building on that to learn so much more about precipitation... how to measure it, how it travels through the ground, how it affects weathering of the Earth, how that is related to tectonics.  Now, I have grown up and come so far in education as to help produce new knowledge about nature as a scientist.  When I reached that thought, the sudden recall of the memory of that book became so precious.  I wanted to find it on Amazon (from the illustrations, I could tell even as a child that it was a foreign book) or Google Images and post a picture of it on here.  But I couldn't find it.  I wanted to ask someone who may know the exact title.  I wanted to talk to someone and confirm that this book wasn't a figment of my imagination.  I wanted to call and thank the person who got me that book.  I wanted to call the person who got me all these great science picture books and encyclopedias and encouraged me to learn as much as I can, because I grew up in a family that could afford it, unlike hers.  I wanted to let her in on all the exciting research I am learning about and talk to her about how hard it is to believe that I am already finishing up college.  I want to reminisce with her about the day that she dressed me and patted my head, saying, "You're now already a third grader."

This is where it becomes extremely difficult to not believe in an afterlife.  How to deal with this?  (I need to go to an AMF meeting.)

This... this is what happens whenever I decide I am not obligated to work for the rest of the night that I am home and awake alone.  There.  Possibly one of my most stream-of-consciousness ramble of a post to date.

Learning Music, Not Violin

Today's jazz class was the best we've had so far, which says a lot.  We did the most improvisation (rather than learning chords and scales) to date:  We did multiple rounds of three different tunes -- "Cherokee," "Now's the Time," and "Sonnymoon for Two" -- and had our drummer do solos for the first time!  It was marvelous.  I keep forgetting to take recordings to show friends and family.  But I will next time I get a chance!

Anyway, I left class today with the realization that I have never really learned music before.  I thought I was so "musical," having played the violin for x years, the piano for y years, played in an orchestra for z years...  But what I learned (or strived to learn) in all those years was how to play the violin well.  How to vibrato, how to move my bow, how to place my fingers, how to produce a clean tone and a perfect pitch.  How to pay attention to the conductor, how to quiet down when the cellos have the melody, how to count rests, how to help out a hopelessly lost standpartner, and, of course, how to find my way back while hopelessly lost but expertly faking.  I was trained to take the notes on a page and reproduce them exactly, to make it sound good without knowing why it sounded good.

Now I am learning how to create music, and create it instantly.  To let an idea flow directly from the jukebox and ears inside my head to my fingers and violin.  And in that process, how to shuffle a deck of notes and pull out the right cards.  How to shuffle the right deck of cards, when to pull out the cards.  It is as if I have been in Russia for years, cluelessly listening to everyone talk in Russian, and suddenly I can speak and understand it.  I am learning to actually own and use my musical instrument, instead of the other way around.

With every jazz class I attend, I get more inclined to ditch all of my other schoolwork and just practice improv all day every day.  I know that's not really what I want to do with my life, but man, how I love this!  After this semester, I will have to get some regular jam buddies from somewhere.

JAZZ IMPROV CLASS

Now four classes in.  Omgah yes.
I improvise jazz.  It's miraculous.

Enough said.

Summer in Review

What a summer it was...  As I sit here looking at my desktop wallpaper of the Great Sand Dunes while listening to my Field School playlist (consisting of a Nickel Creek album and some radio songs we heard at least 50 times each on vans), I can't help but think that this summer deserves a proper farewell.

This summer was a whirlwind.  A few days after finishing up finals, I pulled an all-nighter at school submitting an Honors optional project two days before field school.  Then away we went, on a seemingly endless 3-day journey to the West, only to realize that it was only the beginning of the beginning.

Then six weeks of sun, sweat, mountains, rocks, dust, cactus, and all kinds of beautiful things and experiences that make my eyes glaze over and my chest swell to think of...  Sunrises, sunsets, glaciers, summits, elk herds, butterflies, shooting stars, horizons...

Then unbelievably, I was back in Georgia -- with body, mind, and soul changed, with habits, perspective, tastes, hopes, dreams newly acquired.  With inevitably permanent scars on my limbs, with an armful of photographs and videos that I now cannot believe I took.  The weekend before field school, I was home showing my family the Google Image-d photographs of places I would visit.  I thought to myself, "These probably look more impressive than what I'm really going to see, but I'll give them the impressive versions, why not."  But of course, it was so much more impressive in person.  I remember trying over and over to capture a place with my camera and being disappointed that it wasn't turning out as good as the real thing.  Now, all I can do is look back at these photographs and marvel at the fact that they were what I was seeing, except what I was seeing was even better.

And to think that the beauty that I saw was only a part of the experience...

Trying to get up at 4 in the morning for the first fourteener climb, I asked myself, "Why the heck am I doing this?"  On the way down from the mountain, I could not stop talking to Chris, one of our instructors and mountain guru, about how it was the coolest/best experience of my life and and how inexplicable its goodness was.  How do you explain to someone who has never ridden a roller coaster why dropping and flipping in a metal box is fun?  Likewise, you can't explain to someone why climbing up four thousand feet with the thin air robbing you of oxygen and the freezing wind howling and whistling in your ear is so darn fulfilling.  Even if you can sort of get that across, you still won't be able to convey just how fulfilling.  It's just something you have to try to know...

Anyway, back in Georgia, I spent the first few weeks adjusting back to the humidly mundane and the latter few weeks moving out and into my new place.  Even after a month and a half, all I can think of is the West, how I can get myself back there as soon as possible, and how I can take my family and friends there.

Which is too bad because tomorrow, classes start, and the last year of college (da-dun) will dawn upon me.  With GRE, research, applications, and work, it may be the busiest semester of my life (but Heaven forbid it be as miserable as that semester I took Math Methods in Physics).  Hopefully, that everything I will be doing is what I am interested in (except for the GRE) will help.

Father, I pray that I will stay with and listen for you...