every time it rains it rains pennies from heaven.

Thanksgiving was perfect. I love my family. I love playing Clue, seeing Dad get so excited over frying a turkey, and cooking with Mom. I love day-long road-trips and hours upon hours spent in a Sonic parking lot in Alexander City, Alabama. I love peeking over to-go bags with Will for a solid four minutes at Outback. I love sharing Icees with Emily at the movie theater and making it awkward by always going in for the straw at the exact time she does. I love how we always buy our Christmas tree all together. I love my siblings, especially because they give in and finally allow such a picture to happen:

oh, how I love them.

eternity is set in my heart.

It's funny, how this works. It seems the more "educated" I become-- (what does this word educated even mean? A lot of different things, a lot of contradictory things...)--the more I realize that I have so many things to learn. That there is so much out there that I know nothing about and so much that I want to know, to see, to read. I read about these ideas-- distributive justice, social compact, cosmopolitanism--ideas that I didn't even realize, or maybe I didn't acknowledge, existed, manifested themselves in others' genious minds, brains, seeming to work at a million miles per hour. A million miles to go, a million hours to do it. A million ways to get there, a million steps, or maybe like five million as a thru-hiker, a two-thousand miler on the Appalachian Trail. I wish it was me, I want it to be me, taking those five million steps, up peaks and down slopes, climbing and crevicing. My soul cleaving just as rock and then being fused again. But I wonder, somehow, if I am capable. If these five million steps, two thousand miles, were meant for me or meant only for my classroom reveries, for my wandering mind, for my lack of concentration on a book, on a novel I do care about but do not wish to discuss. Instead I take these fifty minutes to write a million words (or not, I wish), to try to make sense of a sense of adventure deep in the wells of my soul's desire that seems so real yet so strongly at odds with a fear. Less a fear of the wild, less a fear of the elements than a fear of man. A fear of failure, a fear of incompletion, a fear that at the end of my life I will have done things, I will have done the Lord's will, but that all of these things will remain vastly unfinished. Unrefined, not beautiful at all. God makes all things beautiful in His time, and I so want my life to be one of these things, and even though I'm sure that my wanderings will be made beautiful, I fear that only God will see this beauty and that no one else will get that, and even though that's all that really matters, God glorified, I still fear ugliness. I fear the lack of the aesthetic. I fear that my adventure will not be pleasing to the eye, I want five million beautiful steps, not just some dirt under my shoes. I know the Lord has this for me. He knows I want dirt under my toenails.

note to self, regarding vegan cheese...

investigate before purchasing. do not buy the one i bought at kroger. here are some crucial reasons why:

(1) taste: it tastes like nothing. nothing at all.
(2) form: it may melt like cheese, but it doesn't stay melted. it hardens quickly.
(3) consistency: it is rubbery and chewy. bleh.
(4) capability: it bounces. yes, it bounces when it hits the floor.

needless to say, i hear there are some very good vegan cheeses out there. apparently just not the kind i purchased.