Hurrah for Statehood Day! I think the university's nuts for letting us off, but then again I'm looking forward so much to sleeping in (much as I love classes) that I really am not going to complain about the education system letting us off for a rather unworthy reason.

Crazy for feeling so blue - I'm not feeling particularly blue at the moment, and whether or not I am actually crazy is a subject I'd rather not delve into at the moment - but life is crazy at the moment, and this blog is blue, so I guess it's a bunch of half-truths thrown together.

Two questions arise from the title:

Why is life crazy?

Well... I have a paper assigned on Sophocles, which I think I'll be able to work through better than my Homer paper--I've got to start writing that. I started my job a couple of days ago, and so far it hasn't been terribly strenuous, but it's just one more thing to think about. This Monday, I have a math exam to study for over the weekend (thankfully we have Friday off). My sisters and I have been roped into doing a special dance performance with about nine other dancers from our three branches; it's a 4-minute choreography for halftime at an OU Women's Basketball game. o_O (I joked about wearing an orange cape (our dresses are black), but I didn't do it in the end. Orange isn't my favorite color, and I'd rather not be stuck with that color of cape. =P) That means we're going down to OKC twice a week for rather intensive practices; this on top of the four hours of dance I have this Friday. I am completely loving the extra dance time, but again: it's tiring and one more thing to work on. I'm rather behind on my at-home work. At some point, I've got to start driving. I need to schedule an appointment with my advisor so I can enroll in classes for the spring (I don't even remember my advisor's name--but I don't think it matters...much). I've got Sunday School to prepare for each week; nothing so hard core as Logan's, but again--another thing to think about.

I'm pretty sure there's something I'm forgetting here.

Anyway, it's quite hard to get everything done and go through the day in the right mindset. I still haven't figured out how to meditate on God's Word day and night when algebra seems a much more pressing issue.... and the fact that I find algebra more urgent than time with my maker is extremely distressing.

Why is the blog blue?

I ... don't know. It's dark and neutral and the other colors stand out fairly well against it. If that wasn't deep or philosophical enough for you, you shouldn't ask such silly questions.

Cheers.

There is a blessing to having a head cold.

(Note: blessing, singular.)

There is one, and I'm very thankful for it. Having a head cold means that when your little sister gets sick at four a.m. and you realize that you are going to have to get up and clean up the (ahem) mess that is now spread delightfully all over the bathroom (later you will be deeply grateful that she at least made it to the bathroom, but for now you are not), at least you can't smell anything.

It also causes you to do strange things like sitting up at 4:30 am and eating a cucumber-and-ham sandwich before going back to bed half an hour later.

Oh, yes, and thanks to this lovely affliction, I am considering removing one letter from the blog address/title and calling it:

Inanity Comes Naturally.

Because right now, it does.

My mother and I had Chinese for lunch this afternoon, and of course we received the traditional fortune cookie after the meal. I had a lot of fun trying to peek into the two cookies to read the fortunes before I chose one. Alas, I only deciphered "The" on one of them, which told me a lot, so of course I picked that one.

Mama had something rather ridiculous along the lines of "Abandon business and try to nurture your love life." Mine was (more or less): "The biggest lies you tell are those you tell to yourself."

Yeah, I can totally see where my life is going now.

Anyway, the laughable part of all of this was the other side of the cookie, which contained the lucky numbers and a "Learn Chinese!" Word of the Day (which is absolutely worthless because they don't really tell you where the emphases and such go in a word and that is essential to Chinese).

My word?

Boyfriend.

I read it aloud, and I seriously thought Mama was joking when she followed up with her word (phrase...):

Already married.

I'm not going to become an education major or anything, but I've been doing a fair bit of grading for my mother this semester--looking over all my siblings' work and calling them on mistakes and such--and I have to say, I am really enjoying it.

Grading math is by far easiest. It's fairly straightforward: you're right, or you're wrong, and you dock the appropriate amount of points if it's wrong.

Grading math is also pretty boring...most of the time. To be fair, I will say that it's pretty amusing to giggle with the girl doing Algebra when she's been blonde about something, or to be exasperated with my lawyer-wannabe brother as he grumbles about decimals and finds a loophole for every rule.

My favorite, though, is my brothers' English homework.

They've been going through abbreviations recently--Jan., Wed., cm., tsp., etc. and one particular exercise was to write the full version of at least thirty abbreviated terms.

Well, both boys have trouble with 'kg', 'km,' and 'kw'. One boy - I won't say who - has a pretty stereotypical misspelling: "kilagrams," "kilameters," "kilawats."

The other boy...man, he cracked me up. First, understand, this is spelled like a hick-pronunciation of the word, and that coming from this brother, who has enunciation issues...ironic genius at its finest. Secondly, it was probably the most creative misspelling I'd ever seen. Ever. And I've seen a lot from these two.

Ladies and gentlemen, coming to a horror movie show near you, I give you:

killergrams!

killermeters!

aaaand

killerwates!

While my parents are paying me a small fee for the grading work, this is the real reason I'm doing it. The things you find in their schoolwork that throw you for a loop and make you laugh with disbelief...well, they're pretty much irreplaceable. And absolutely hilarious.

I thought the stories about the giant spider, boy and dog were pretty funny: in one of them, the spider eats the boy and dog; in the other, all three get nailed by a steamroller. But maybe I need to re-evaluate my definition of funny...and maybe I'm learning more from those boys' schoolwork than they are. Meep.

Picture this to yourself, if you will.

One girl, picture of innocence and bliss, tripping blissfully across a crackly brown lawn in her bare feet, revelling in the fall weather, clutching a warm mug of apple cider in one hand.

Two boys, pictures of trouble and nefarious doings, digging a pit industriously just beyond the hill, pick-ax and shovel widening their fox-hole and creating piles of dirt clods. Heads go up, blissful girl is spotted. Mischievous grins slide over brown-streaked faces.

Now!

Dirt clods go flying! Cider goes sloshing! Guns a'blazing! Shovels brandished! Terrified shrieking!

...terrified shrieking coming from the boys, that is.

Now: Two boys, working industriously, somewhat the more sober, vowing never to invite their sister down into the gully again feigning innocence only to incur her wrath with flying lumps of dirt. One girl, striding breezily up the lawn into the house to refill her cider mug.

And life is good.

(Pictures of The Pit forthcoming.)