I’m Sick

Thankfully, this horrible, face-aching cold came two days after finals, unlike last year when I guzzled tea for a solid nine days to preserve my voice.

Unfortunately, I have a searing headache.

And I realize how much I complain. About every.single.thing.ever. Like seriously, I wish the words that came out of my mouth were uplifting. Instead, they’re all “poor me.”

 

Suicide

So this one kid who was in my sister’s fifth grade class died on Monday. The amount of support for his family from the school is astounding. Students, friends, and families raised $14,000 for the family in the first twenty-four hours.

And I have no idea how the kid died. No one, in the hundreds of posts on social media, has specified the cause of death.

Which almost always means suicide.

What a sad, fallen world we live in.

Finals, Calculus, Snow

So yeah, it’s over. My last fall semester of high school.

Can you tell I’m getting a little emotional about the graduating thing? And it’s only December. Five more months to go!

That picture up top? It’s the sum total of my three semesters of Calculus (with a 4.0 GPA thank goodness).

I’m officially done with Calculus One through Three! Like, what? It’s a real thing. I seriously cannot believe it. I’m kinda sad.

It dumped snow last night, almost a foot. School was delayed to start, so Calc III was canceled. I went to school for Microeconomics at 1:00, but when I was finished, the campus declared a school closure at 3:30, so my 4:00 Physics class was also canceled.

My teachers for Calc and Physics basically said, “If you need the final to improve your grade, you can take it in the testing center tomorrow. If not, keep your current grade.”

Since my Calc III and Physics grades were 100% and 99% respectively, I felt no need to take the finals.

So the semester doesn’t really feel done. I only took two finals, and one of them was last Wednesday.

What a weird semester!

After Microeconomics, I went to Panera with Kate and Katherine, my fellow concurrent enrollment students. We stayed at Panera for three and a half hours and it was really nice to talk and celebrate the end of finals.

I’m excited to hang out with them more next semester!

xoxo

Joy

3D Glass Painting DIY

In 2013, my grandma and I spent two weeks in Italy. I splurged on two items in Italy. One was a sliver and crystal cross necklace from the Vatican. The other was a piece of glass artwork from a street vendor in Florence.

I loved the idea of 3D glass design, which (although difficult to to see in this flat image) is created by painting on two layers of glass staked on top of each other.

When we got home, I decided I must learn how to create 3D glass art. Unfortunately, Pinterest let me down. I couldn’t find any good tutorials.

So I made stuff up (my specialty).

And here’s the result!

Supplies

1. Glass (I found mine on sale at Michaels for $0.99 a piece because it had been sitting on sale for SO long, they kept bringing the price down):
2. A glass cutter (I ordered this one from Amazon. It works great so far):
3. Paints and Brushes (mine are plain old acrylics from our garage):
4. Foam Card Boosters (a.k.a. I have no idea what these are called, but they should be at Michaels or something where people buy scrapbooking supplies):

So I had never cut glass before, and I desperately wanted to avoid learning. Glass cutting strikes me as a dangerous activity. I tried several hardware and frame stores, but they either told me they wouldn’t cut the glass or they charged outrageously high prices. The general cost seemed to be about $5.00 per piece, which I flatly refused to pay since I bought the pieces for $0.99.

The glass cutter I bought on Amazon only cost $5.27. It was a no-brainer.

So I donned a ridiculous mix of winter clothing, batting gloves, and sunglasses in case of shattering glass and got to work.

Another One on Death

“Joy,” you say (and I do hope you all [hah — this blog is private, so I’m the only one to read it] know that Joy is not in fact my real first name, but rather my middle name), “Can’t we be done obsessing over death and persecution?”

Well excuse me.

Paul says, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (1 Corinthians 15:26)

Call me a forward looking thinker.

But I have three stimulating thoughts on death today, plus another I’m sure I’ll make up on the spot once I finish three, so here we go.

1. I cram-read Slaughterhouse-5 in 2.5 hours this morning, and one thought particular struck me. Billy Pilgrim met aliens who could see in the forth dimension of time (this throws me back to my other task this morning: parameterizing vector valued functions in terms of t). The aliens say, essentially, that the human perception of death is foolish because humans always exist in their allotted slot of time. Throughout the book, the narrator acknowledges death with this: “So it goes.” (Which I unknowingly used in this rather sad post.)
2. I for some random reason decided to look up John Green’s video in response to Esther Earl’s death at age 16. John Green quotes Esther as saying something along the lines of “you never truly die because you live in the memories of those whose lives you touched.”
3. I also watched Katie Gregoire’s account of a near-death experience in a bus crash. Personally, I didn’t get emotional or anything, but I found interesting her perspective change of needing to live every day completely and thoroughly for Jesus.
4. My new, random thought: I wonder if it disrespects my faith in Heaven to like the idea of living in your allotted time (1) and in the memories of others (2). One thing I know: To live is Christ and to die is gain. Neither life nor death…will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I Need a Mental Break

That is what I’m doing right now. That lovely stuff above. I truly do appreciate it. It’s a picture from Latifa’s solutions manual to Physics homework, helpful when the homework is due in class today and I’ve done none of it.

But I’m frustrated. I don’t understand what we’re doing in Physics, and I’m just done. I don’t know what I want to do right now.

I’m upset and lonely and unmotivated.

My feelings are on a middle school roller coaster. Can’t wait for break.

Actually, I can’t wait to learn how to find peace in God’s word. Because I’m never really truly going to be on break. Even when school ends, I need to apply to colleges and learn Chinese. And that’s how life will be. Always more stuff to do.

The only resolution I see is finding peace in God.