Thanks and a farewell to Career Services!

There are so many thanks to give!!

Thank you to our Aunt Paula for her donation and for helping to spread the word! We miss you! Every time we finally see each other, we say we won't wait that long again to get together but life seems to take over. We need to get better at it! :) We love you!

And a great deal of thanks to the friends I've made at Career Services at LSU. I have worked there for three years and, with Thursday being my last day, I found I was really going to miss it. They have made Career Services such a warm place to walk into and I appreciate them all for it.

Courtney, my dear, I will honestly miss you and getting to see you almost everyday. You have always been so sweet and caring to me. And motivational. You are an amazing woman! Thank you for all the strength you've shown and all you have done!

Thank you to Courtney and Joyce for supporting Chanel and I. Your donations help us more than you know!

 I wish so much love to you and your growing family!

Infallibility

With the final days of my final semester at LSU coming to hand and life continuing outside of campus, regardless of its finality to me, I've found myself fairly mentally preoccupied lately.

The trip and its implications are a constant whirlwind of words and notions in my mind. But, as I've stated before, that reality can be hard to keep a grip on. You find this clarity and acceptance and, true to clarity's nature, everything is clear. Easy. Calm. Anddd then it's gone. And you don't even notice it wave its little hand farewell and exiting, talking its calm with it.

Like for us gals...when you see that shirt. That shirt you haven't seen in 3 years plus change. And then one day you find it in the back of the closet, or stuffed in a shoe in a box in the attic with a picture of your cat and what might be a dried kiwi, or (more likely for me) the back of the trunk of your car. And ya never even knew it was gone. But suddenly, now knowing you've been without it, you feel that you've missed it desperately.

That's how the clarity of this impending occurrence hits me.

I was taking a study-break the other evening, and I opened the calender on my phone. Just meaning to play around...put some useless dates in there. I scrolled through the months, making my way to September. I counted 21 weeks. 149 days.

Seriously. There are 147 days now, existing between me sitting at this table. In this apartment that I've lived for three years. This apartment that I've become so comfortable with. The stability of it. The stability of exams. Knowing that 8/10 of the time, I can predictably find myself sitting right where I am now. With the same lights on, the same headphones in, same trees in my window view.

147 days between this moment and the absence of almost, almost everything I have known to be safe, predictable, and comfortable. Besides Chanel.

For toddlers, first starting to explore and to crawl, novelty can be frightening. So, they grow attachments with a "secure base".  Someone they find to be a predictable source of comfort. Seeing them, means they're still safe. Because that person, will not let her stumble away into a darkness that would hurt her. While crawling, they look back to their caregiver for assurance of survival. Chanel will be my secure base. She is and will embody infallibility. She is home. We have each other and we will not falter. 

Not that this phenomena ends with childhood. Change is hard, because change is unknown but, I must remember, change is necessary.

"I will bend like a reed in the wind."  Thanks poppa :)