Melilyn.com

This is so frustrating, trying to find scholarships. This is why I gave up last semester and look where it’s gotten me. Nowhere.

I’m stuck in scholarship limbo. I graduated last spring, so I can’t apply for any scholarships targeted at high school seniors. I’m enrolled in college, so I can check the “undergraduate” box on all of these databases, but I haven’t started taking classes yet, so I can’t tell them what my college GPA is yet!

To top it off, these scholarship searches stink. I go through a half hour of filling out this ridiculous form, asking me if there’s a Papa John’s within delivery range, if I’m left handed, if I know the number of the closest Walmart, and if I’m over five feet ten… a half hour of this, only to get scholarship results that don’t match me one bit. Like, scholarships that only apply if my great grandfather on my mothers side was in a world war, or if I had an uncle who was blind, or if I submit forty-eight pages of poetry for a measly hundred dollar drawing.

I don’t understand this.

I had quite a mind-boggling dream last night. It took place in Ann’s classroom… it was Ann, Becky, Lisa, Jynnika, Jessyca and I… and we were practicing “The Watchman” (opening night dance from Chandler Sukkot last week). Strange because there was six of us and there’s only five in the main section of the dance. I left B’nai (in real life) in the middle of the choreography process, and so for just me dancing it, I choreographed the rest until I can see what they actually did with it. In this dream, everyone was doing my version, and I kept telling Ann, Becky, and Lisa, “No! Show me the way you guys choreographed it!” And they kept on doing it my way. Pretty frustrating. Oh, and Jessyca knew it better than I did. That was frustrating too.

I spent a lot of my day in my room… working on scholarship applications and such, and also putting my BED together. I’m getting quite good at putting together beds. I mean, I can actually tell you the name of the tools I used instead of saying “the twisty grogger-y thing” and “the nails with *makes hand motions* twirly things”… I can now say “rachet” and “screw.” I’m even more tool inept than I am kitchen inept. It’s so bad. I still don’t know the real names for the plus and minus screwdrivers.

But I have a real bed now. Yay.

Pray for both of my adopted brothers. One is off in la-la-land, not thinking straight because the love-bug bit him… and the other is in the depths of despair (and I’m NOT exaggerating) because the love bug bit him too hard and now he can’t decide.

It’s all Becky’s fault, it really is. Around Yom Kippur, she decided that she was going to burn all of her old journals because she didn’t want to read them any more. And of course, I thought why?? I keep mine around because then I am sure that I remember the stupid mistakes I’ve made and I’ll never make them again. But I guess she doesn’t want to be reminded of other stuff, so I can respect that.

I’ve been keeping a journal regularly since eighth grade (though I somehow lost that very first one in the last move), and just within the last couple weeks, going through one or two of them kept me from making a very big mistake, and when, just a few days ago, the bottom fell out of that situation, I didn’t freak out. It was no big deal. At all.

But on the other hand… I was bored out of my brains right before Sukkot, and ended up pulling a couple of notebooks off my bookshelf. I had been rearranging a few things (I’m becoming this crazy organizational person…) and these four notebooks caught my eyes.

A thick yellow notebook with all kinds of fading graffiti on the front. “Stuffbook” and more plus one symbols than I care to think about. A “secret code” in the back and a section written in bright orange.

A smaller, fifty cent notebook with a coke bear on the front and Plus One autographs from the one concert we went to. Oh, and the pages started falling out long ago, so now it’s in a tattered teal binder.

A little blue sketchbook with no lines and various marker-ed up pages and so forth. Oh, and in the back, there are pages partially torn out because of a game of Mastermind.

And a red notebook with the little sign taken off of the front that proclaimed “Purple Three.” It’s half filled with shallowness and whining… at least on my part. And then it just fizzled out.

Translation for those of you that are lucky enough to have not lived through that part of my life with me, it’s basically my non-journal writings from eighth and ninth grade. Basically what kind of person I was as a friend back then, what I was to other people and not to myself. And since I lost my eighth grade journal, sort of a replacement journal.

My gosh. I don’t ever… EVER want to be that person again. I was shallow, I was obsessive, I was selfish, I whined and complained, I was always jealous and never happy with what I had, I over-reacted, I was moody, I was fakely hyper… basically I made a fool out of myself every time I opened my mouth.

How could I have not seen that back then?

I mean, it’s no wonder that people steered clear of me those years. Why every time Caleb Bone came by us he looked like he had spotted the plague. Why I never “had a chance” with any of them. And I can’t speak for anyone else involved, but thank God I am not that person anymore.

And now I’m going to burn them. I was thinking at first that I’d send them to the other girls, since I’m sure they have the missing pieces in their stacks of notebooks, rotting away in a closet somewhere, but then I thought, why? Why remind them of what we all were? A bunch of stupid kids. And so I’m going to burn them. Anyone care to join me?

I realized during Sukkot and soon after that I’m NOT that person anymore. Praise God! And I think it occurred to me when I was sitting in the Murphy’s van on Sunday out at sukkot. I don’t know what led up to this particular train of thought, but it ended up being, I’m genuinely happy for them. This is so different, because not too long ago, I’d be a little jealous and bitter and ‘why won’t this ever happen to me?’ But I was truly happy, and I realized, it could!! Someday! Besides, my time of tithing isn’t over yet… what I originally said was thirteen to nineteen, that’s seven years. It’s not over yet.