But I want ALL the figs

I just finished reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath after ordering it off of Amazon earlier this week! I loved it. One of my new faves. Tracing the psychological journey of young girl coming of age in the mid-twentieth century, The Bell Jar is rich in colorful descriptions and capturing prose. Esther, the protagonist, struggles to make life decisions that ultimately cripple her and send her into a downward spiral of psychosis.

Ahhh, the beauty of a well-crafted metaphor:

"...I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

Plath's insights into life are disturbingly real.

You have no idea how many times I have considered the same concept in choosing a life-path. If choose to be professor, how can I be an artist? If I choose to be a writer, how can I be a international peace worker? If I choose to be a designer, how can I be a translator? Sigh. We have to choose. We have to be specialists. We can't let the figs plop off the tree.

Fortunately, most are able to grapple with this reality a little better than Plath and her fictional counterpart. Ultimately, I think we find that the figs we do select tend to be quite appealing in their own right. Thank goodness for that.

The 3 Best Things

In times of hardship, in times of pain, in times struggle, I find there to be three things that mean the most to me.

1. God
2. Friends
3. Art

They are life.

For now the noonday quiet holds the hill:
The grasshopper is silent in the grass:
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.
The purple flower droops: the golden bee
Is lily-cradled: I alone awake.
My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,
My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,
And I am all aweary of my life.

-Lord Alfred Tennyson, Oenone

Hallllooooooo

Hello, all lovely blog readers!
I have been gone for so long, but no fear, I am back, and therefore I can update my blog again.

Oh my, where do I begin? So I've been in Europe. I had an AMAZING experience with Mirable Inventu, the 2007 SSHE Summer Honors Study Abroad Program. I suppose I'll do an entry for each of the cities we visited. That should take a few weeks.

Today I went for a bike ride with my dad. The weather here is freakishly hot and humid. The past week I've been going through a mini-depression. Let's just say I am sick of making friends, becoming attached to places and then having to leave them all behind. I'm not complaining at all, I've been extremely blessed in my life, but I guess that I fear normalcy. I hate that life has to trudge on, and yet I hate the thought of life staying the same. As the days and years go by, do we ever really get closer to where "we are supposed to be" or who "we are supposed to be?" If everyone and everything is always in motion, than how does anyone ever find their rightful place? A question I ask myself all the time is, "when does life really begin?" I think the answer is that it never really does. We are eternally living in a sub-reality that coexists with everyone else's reality. From my perspective, life consists of a million fragments somehow waiting to be jammed into a pretty, comprehensive mosaic.

Yeah, so I've had a lot of time to myself and my whirling mind in the past week. I haven't been writing for a long while either; hence my overflow of my pent-up anxiety, creativity, and philosophy. ha.