Today has been quite the frustrating day, beginning with the horrible weather that left me awake at 3:30 and fretting about Joey getting to Wake Forest safely, followed by the roads not having been salted at all and not being safe, to my needing to take a personal day due to the weather, to feeling guilty because I had to do such.

So, Joey is fine; he got to work safely. The roads have just started to clear out here. And I had the day to use, so I really shouldn’t feel guilty for using it. I’ve been trying to do schoolwork so that I’m making the best use of my time. I watched a documentary on the indigenous people of Hawai’i and their building a canoe out of traditional materials and using it to sail to Alaska and along the western coast of Alaska, meeting with indigenous people of those areas and sharing their cultures together. It was incredible. Watching things like that really bring home to me that I’m right in the center of God’s will with this program. Cultures must be preserved and respected, not discarded and discouraged. Surely we don’t want the rest of the world to be lazy, obese, lacking self-motivation, and unhealthy like we are?

So, anyway….thus brings me back to my feeling of restlessness today….whenever I get to sit at home and have time to think to myself, especially when I’m already dealing with a negative emotion (guilt today), it makes me think about things in my life that I’m disliking and seeking to change…I guess you could say that it tosses me right back into my identity crisis, honestly.

My professor for my cultural studies class included an interesting quote from Frost when he was reacting to our papers:

“My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation”

How do we do this? I think that everyone can agree that this is true; we spend our lives searching for a livelihood that will let us do what we love to do all day. I feel like, the longer we go without being able to do that, the sadder we become. That emotion exudes from us and can make us difficult people to befriend. I’ve seen the people who struggle through each day hating what they do; they are unhappy people, they’re unfulfilled. Obviously, God intended for us to work (and I mean that in more loose terms than the “corporate, white-suit, 9-5 kind of thing…in my opinion, stay at home moms are probably some of the hardest workers out there), but I don’t believe that it was part of God’s divine “punishment” that we are to hate every moment of what we do. He’s given us joys and desires, talents and natural bents toward certain things. I have to believe that all of these things are providential and that He intends for us to enjoy our every day life.

Is all of this some diatribe to how much I hate my job? Absolutely not. I love where I work, I love the people I work with, and I enjoy getting to make a difference in the small way that I can. However, it’s no secret that I’m going to graduate school so that I can teach on a college level eventually because literature is where my heart really is. Learning is where my heart is. I can’t change that. I’m disappointed in how little I embrace it, however. Yesterday, I intended to cut the tv off and spend the whole evening reading, but I ended up piled up in front of the tv with my dinner and the laptop until I went to bed. I guess I’m angry with myself for not taking greater advantage of what I’m being allowed to do by going to school. I should be more grateful for it.

Which, of course, brings me to the identity crisis of becoming the person that I want to be. I always feel like that person is fighting with the person I’ve let myself become…the lazy person, the ungrateful person, the person who can’t handle more than one or two responsibilities per week. I’ve been a busy person before; I was super-busy in college, going to school full-time, working part-time, and still staying active at church. Now, it seems like I’m a zombie the moment I hit the door, further numbing my mind with endless amounts of reruns. Who really wants to live that way when they think about it honestly?

One of my goals for the year was to figure out a way to sell my craft. I love to knit. I love what I create. I love it enough that I wrote a cultural studies paper on the knitting culture. That’s a goal that I’m very serious about achieving.

Ah, for days of idle thought;).