simplicity&stress

Oh the woes of a college student.  After a busy day of running errands, reuniting with my Phoenix girl, some speedy cleaning, and, lastly, decorating, I felt sick to my stomach as I crawled into my much-deserved fetal position in my bed.  No, not because my cheese and herb rice with chicken didn't settle well (oh it settled alright...too much is settling inside me and I need to start forward thinking to bikini season).  It was 100% because I realized that I had done NOTHING over the weekend, including turning in an assignment due at midnight on Sunday, study for my French oral exam OR my my French final exam, and hadn't started the book that will require a close-reading essay due next Tuesday.  Then I realized that things had just been so easy and kind to me at the beginning of the semester, and now it's time to get my priorities straight.  This week, aside from the deliciousyetshort celebration that is in order tonight, I am going to be such a good student!  I promise.     

Often, I find myself caught up in these perfect moments of happiness and somewhere deep down I think this for sure won't last.  It's the calm - before - the - storm stigma, and I am all too aware of how true it holds to my life.  And right now, although it's only a small drizzle of rain, it is certainly not calm.  That's not so say things aren't going well.  I just have these fleeting thoughts of sadness and lingering moments of homesickness.  So I'm ready to start making myself happy.  And in a way I've never approached it, yet the most fool-proof and sure way: through prioritizing.  So what if my clothes look like they all belong at DI, or the boy I think is cute is eyeing one of the millions of models walking around campus, or I ate too much chocolate (sure you think it's a blessing...but it's seriously a curse).  

Every day, I sit in my fishbowl office and I am unfortunately given the opportunity of loathing every perfectly-ensembled girl that walks by in her Tory Burch flats.  At that moment, I am given a choice.  And while it's a struggle to not choose to feel bad about myself and want to go home and change, it's better for me to choose to see me the way my Heavenly Father would see me.  And in that life-changing second, I feel better about myself.  If I continued to focus on the outside world and what it defined as beautiful, then I would always find someone more beautiful, more stylish, more rich, more funny, more everything than me.  So there. 

ox/c