24 days later...

So, I'm really still alive, I promise. I just wanted to post something that's been going on lately. This all started in Boise since I got home from North Carolina, but it really grew to frightening proportions since I've been in Provo. Almost every night I dream about my teeth falling out. Almost without fail. Last night I dreamed that I was at some kind of party, and there were all sorts of people there that I vaguely recognized but couldn't recall where I knew them from. I don't know how it happened, but by the end of the dream I had lost my two front teeth (not just halves anymore either, this time they got cut off at the gumline) and I lost another half tooth and chipped one more. It's so weird. Why would I dream about this over and over again? My teeth have never really been a sensitive subject to me, I'm not consciously afraid of anything happening to them. My roommate says that dreaming about your teeth falling out or breaking usually has something to do with stress. It seems odd that the same thing keeps happening to me in my dreams, but in different ways every night. And it's seriously almost every single night, I would even say that every night when I actually remember my dreams, losing teeth is always involved somehow, and I keep losing more and more of them. It started with just one, last night the count reached four for the first time. Creepy? Yes, I think so.

The most ultimate time of the year

I seem to have taken an internet vacation this last week. I suppose that's what vacation is for, even though I wasn't on vacation FROM anything, since I haven't been back to school yet. It wasn't a genuine internet vacation either, I've just been spending more time on Facebook than I have on Blogger. Facebook looks like it could potentially waste a lot of time, but it has been pretty entertaining at the same time. It's a good thing I'm so excited to go back to school and do homework, or I might waste a whole semester again. I hope they assign me lots of reading. I read more when I have to. Sometimes even when I have a good book of my choice I stop reading in the middle just because I find something else to read and distract myself. When it's homework, I can usually discipline myself enough to stick it out and finish the reading, which is usually interesting enough to keep my attention as well as the next book. I have started four books in the last six weeks and have finished only one. It's hard to get sick of a book that you don't read past page ninety.
It's also hard to sit down and read when I have my two nephews and my two brothers here. It's so much fun to have a family again. Reading will always be a lower priority than my family. My nephews are so cute, it will be a sad day when they leave for Utah, and onward to Minnesota again.

Major Overhaul

This afternoon I started reading my book by Otto Jespersen, and I decided that there's no way I could not study linguistics and still be entirely happy. So I pretty much decided in a period of about twenty minutes that I am not going to major in Spanish Teaching after all, but I will major in Linguistics instead, like I had originally planned. I still may end up teaching Spanish, who knows, but I think that it will be more enjoyable and more intrinsically motivational to study Linguistics than it would be to focus all my time on Spanish. I don't know exactly what I want to do with a degree in linguistics, but I don't have to know that right now. I might teach English as a second language, I might teach Spanish, I might go work for the CIA or be a sports column writer in Florida, I don't know. And right this minute, I don't care either. What I would really like to do more than anything is study and research and conduct so many surveys and studies that my name comes up on Google when you type in "Linguistics." Call me crazy, but I'd rather be a professor of Linguistics than a middle school Spanish teacher. And if I go to graduate school, which I hope to be able to do, it won't really matter what my Bachelor's degree is in anyway. So I'm going to study what I want to study most, and leave the rest unsettled for now. So I just scrapped my whole plan for the next four years, and I'm starting over, again, and I think it will be much better for me in the end. In twenty minutes I decided something that may have a huge impact on the rest of my life, and at the very least will have an impact on my happiness while at BYU. I am so excited to start school again, I can't even explain how much I've missed studying there. In the past week, I've made so many major life decisions that if I continue at this rate, I will probably be living in Ukraine by the end of January working in a hospital or something. Well, maybe not, but that's the best way I can relate how I feel. I feel so inadequate with words sometimes. I was wondering today how many words I actually know, and would I be able to communicate my thoughts more clearly with a larger vocabulary, or do I just need to work on organizing my thoughts better using the words I have already learned. What am I missing here? Why can't we all just be telepathic? That would be so nice, but I guess then there wouldn't be a linguistics program at any university, and that would dash all of my hopes and dreams too. I just can't win.

Oh dear...

My brother Michael had a spot on his blog saying what kind of animal he was. Here's mine.

You Are A: Monkey!

Monkeys are intelligent and agile, well-adapted for jungle life as they swing happily from tree to tree. As a monkey, you are a social animal who prefers a warm climate, eats a wide range of food and is quick to learn new things. A monkey's tiny primate features are irresistable, as is his gregarious personality!

You were almost a: Puppy or a Frog
You are least like a: Groundhog or a LambDiscover What Cute Animal You Are!

So... It looks like I'm a monkey. Fitting, I suppose. I guess that means that I like stealing small fruits and I become emotionally attached to whatever people I'm not busy throwing poop at. This doesn't mean much to me, because most people that take this quiz end up being monkeys, and are least like groundhogs, which is exactly what it told me I was. Hmm... maybe I'm just exactly like everyone else. That was a good exchange though, I'd say, being called a monkey for only two minutes of my afternoon that it cost me to take the quiz.