Tonight I’ll Dream of You

This song, Beautiful, has been in my mind since early this evening. The past few days have been difficult to get through… between being stressed about school related things and relationship up & downs, I’m not sure how I continue to manage to make it through. But I do because of the people in my life who are there for me, from my boyfriend to my close friends, they help me through it all. I’ll write more over break, but I needed to just put some thoughts down before I attempt to sleep. Beautiful is a song by Aztek Trip which reminds me of my feelings for my boyfriend and right now those feelings are getting me through a lot of things (which I might go into at a later time) I have so much faith right now and I believe that everything will work out in it’s own time… this gives me peace. Yes, I may worry from time to time, but it’s because I care so much. Someone helped me realize today that there are little things that cloud over the bigger/deeper picture – that things are really going great and my life right now isn’t as troubled as I sometimes think it is. All these little things which seem to put up walls and cause issues are in fact bringing us closer together, I trust this is true. So, tonight, and every night, I’ll dream of you.

~ JenJen ~

I Love Cake… and Headcrabs?!

It’s almost been a month, at times it feels much shorter and other times it feels so much longer. We’ve continued to have our ups and downs, but we get through it all one way or another. If conversations about cake and Half Life headcrabs are what is able to bring us out of weird moods then I’m glad we are able to snap out of it like that. It’s really funny now that I look back on those conversations, it’s amazing to think that a conversation about dessert can change the mood in the room so drastically. Regardless of what it was, I’m glad we are able to change subjects when need be and that we know how to get ourselves out of the strange moods.

A major topic of conversation lately has been time and the differences between high school relationships and college relationships.  It’s hard to describe in words, but it seems that things move faster when in a relationship in college than they did during high school. I’ve decided that the main reasons for this is that now that we are in college, we are not only older and more mature, but we are on our own. We control our time, with no parents present to tell us what we can and can not do. There are no restrictions as to when we can see each other and hang out. No car rides to the other person’s house, just a short walk to the other’s room, with the only thing preventing us from doing anything being classes and homework and the occasional side activity. I’m not sure what more I wanted to say about this except that it has come up in conversation a lot and I find the whole concept intriguing and interesting. I definitely plan to continue to try and compare and understand the differences, as well as to possibly figure out why a month in a college relationship covers more ground than that of a high school relationship.

What I really wanted to write about tonight though was in regards to thoughts of the future that I’ve been having lately.  These thoughts are kind of along the same line as the concept of time discussed above regarding relationships, but this I feel is a little more in depth than just the length of a relationship. I’m almost done with my second year of college, meaning that in about two months I will be half way through my college career. In about two years I will be graduating with a physics bachelor’s degree and hopefully a computer science minor. Then, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be enrolling in a 2 year graduate program to get my masters degree in medical physics. So theoretically, I have to survive through 4 more years of school to achieve the goals that I want to achieve. Hopefully I don’t get sick of school before then. Anyways, at the end of this year I will be turning 21… life is moving fast. For some reason, I’ve had thoughts, some dreams even (day dreams mostly), about me getting married and having kids. I’ve always thought about my wedding and having kids, as I’m sure everyone has had at some point or another, but lately these thoughts have been recurring more frequently. I am kind of enjoying them. It’s exciting to think about the future, but scary at the same time. My mom was 26 when she had me, 29 when she had my brother. Theoretically I’d like to have kids before I’m thirty, or at least before I reach my mid thirties, I want to be around when my kids have kids. To think that I could be married and have kids of my own within ten years is exciting and down right scary at the same time.          I’m not sure where I was going with this topic or if I was even trying to get to a point. Simply writing this out is enough for me right now. Life is so exciting and I’m really getting to realize this now. I’m so thankful for that.

Spring break starts on Friday, I’ll be glad to go home for a week and see my family and dogs, and sleep in my big bed! And the break from classes and work is very much needed. The hiatus from my friends and my boyfriend is not welcoming, but I (we) will manage just fine… stupid conversations can make such a big difference! 
~ JenJen ~

Life Update!

It’s been a while since I last posted anything, let alone about my present day life. A lot has changed in the past few weeks, but life in general is good and getting better every day. The first week back proved to be mind opening and made me realize I wasn’t lying to myself for the past few months in regards to my feelings. I found out at the end of the week that all my stress and emotional pain wasn’t for nothing. I gave someone a second chance and its the best thing I’ve done in my life in a while. The past three weeks have been absolutely amazing. Sure, there have been the downsides, like last weekend; but we’ve been able to work through the issues all while maintaining the connection that we had at the beginning that brought us so close together. I’ve been so happy lately and everything is just so natural and comfortable… This weekend, tomorrow, I’m going to his house for the weekend to meet his family. I’m more excited than nervous and feel like it will be a good time. Plus I get to see a tiny school and some crazy pictures of him! What can be better than embarrassing pictures? Finally I’ll be able to put faces to names and buildings to stories – that is something I’m excited about.

Well, here’s to hoping for a good weekend… and maybe even a Nova win?!

Oh yeah, the semester is going well, just a few more weeks until mid-terms… and then spring break! I miss my dogs… and my mom… I can’t wait to go home for a week and spend time with them! Look for an interesting post about ‘time’ in the next few weeks!

~ JenJen ~

The Story of My Life – Part Seven

In continuing the story, this part is a combination of two major topics which I originally planned on writing as two separate posts, but I think combining them will make more sense. As stated before in a previous part, I spent a great deal of the summers from 4th to 11th grade in Las Vegas. Yes, 8 summers in a row I traveled across the country to spend my summer out of school, the time normally meant to relax, be a bum and spend with friends in a place where my only friends were my three cousins who the youngest is 3 years(?) older than me. Needless to say, once they started to get in serious relationships and started families of their own, my only friend became my brother. Don’t get me wrong, I love my brother and this definitely brought us closer than most siblings are. But there is a point you reach in your life where the friendship bonds you form with people are necessary to grow, and spending my summers away from my friends (in addition to the constant moving around) hindered the forming of these friendship bonds. It hasn’t been until I reached college that I’ve really been able to form and keep any sort of friendship bond.

Not only was this time spent away from my home and friends and mom, this time was supposed to be spent with my dad. I can tell you for certain that I spent more time either at camp (the first few years) or with extended family members. Sure, my dad had to work and yeah, he’d take a week or two off to go on the ‘family’ vacation to San Diego and/or Utah. In general though, my time in Las Vegas was spent with other family members. Unfortunately this is not what I went there to do. I enjoyed the time I spent with them, but when that isn’t my purpose it is frustrating. I find the exact feelings hard to portray to anyone, because like a lot of things in my life, unless you’ve experienced something even remotely similar you aren’t going to fully understand what I am trying to explain. The feelings are just better felt than told.

As for the move to NY, this occurred the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. Two separate things happened with this move regarding the men in my life: the turning point with my relationship with my father and the beginning of a series of events involving Jared leading to his eventual leaving. I’ll cover the initial turning point with my dad in this part and leave the rest of the story with him, what I often refer to as the summers in Hell, for the next part of this story. The series of events involving Jared will come up later on. These two things in general are entire stories in themselves.

So, to begin – the first summer in Hell. I’ll most likely bring details up more when I go into the other summers, but here is the general idea of my first trip to Hell. As a high school student, moving to a new place and a new school (again) my interest in the internet was beginning and talking online was a favorite/enjoyable past time. After living in the same house for almost 4 years in Chicago, I made some decent friends for the first time and leaving them was painfully difficult. Having to go out to Las Vegas for a month made the entire situation that much worse. When we first arrived in Vegas, my brother and I discovered that our dad was dating someone. (I have forgotten her name, because I do not care, so she is known to my brother, mom and I as the ‘witch’ and I will thus call her that in this story.) So, in typical summer fashion, my brother and I would spend the evenings with our dad and the witch, unfortunately, and most of the day was spent with our extended family. Now, on a normal summer my brother and I would do a lot of things when our dad wasn’t working with just him. We did so much with the entire family, that as the years went on, my brother and I looked forward to the few times the three of us went and did stuff together.

This summer was a bit different. I was saddened by moving and spent a lot of time online talking to my friends from Chicago, I was truly afraid of losing the only friends I had ever had. (turns out that it actually happened, but that’s another story) It was our last week in Las Vegas and we were leaving soon to return to Chicago for 4 days and then off to our new home in New York. Throughout the three weeks we had been there so far, my brother and I had been talking to our Grandma and Aunt about the entire situation of not being able to spend any time with our dad and they told us to tell him that we wanted to go out to dinner with just him, not the witch. So we did. We told him exactly what we wanted and he agreed to it. One afternoon, I was on the computer and the three of them (my dad, brother and the witch) were heading out to the pool. I didn’t want to go swimming and wanted to stay online talking to my friends. The witch (and my dad for that matter) didn’t understand why I was having such a difficult time with the move since I had moved so much before and so they were having a discussion in my dad’s room. Apparently he told her what my brother and I wanted – for the three of us to just go out one night before we left – and she came bursting out my dad’s room and yelled at me. I don’t remember the exact words, but basically what she said was that I had all the time in the world to spend with my dad while I was there in Vegas and if I really wanted to spend time with him I shouldn’t be on the computer all of the time talking to my friends. I was selfish and my dad barely got to see us, so I should be spending as much time with him as I could and she was part of his life so that meant she was part of my life. She continued a little bit more, before I lost it and ran out of my dad’s house and into the pool area where I sat for almost an hour before my dad came outside to talk to me. He didn’t have much to say, actually he didn’t really say anything meaningful to me because I don’t remember it. I eventually called my mom and talked to her about it all, she obviously got extremely mad and that didn’t help anything. The subject was left alone and needless to say, my brother and I never got our night out with our dad.

The summer still wasn’t over yet. Yes, things got worse. I believe I’ve mentioned briefly in a previous part of the story about the tradition that developed for my brother’s and my last night in Las Vegas – the entire family would go out to dinner. It was just something we always did. Talked about what my brother and I had planned for the school year and what not and talked about possible plans for the next summer. Selfish as it may sound, but the dinner was about my brother and I. This summer however, was different, yet again. My dad and the witch announced their engagement. That’s right. My dad was going to marry her after everything that had happened this summer. I can not begin to describe to you my anger and the overall feelings that went through my head. I couldn’t get onto the plane any faster. I wanted to get the hell out of there.

The next day we boarded the plane to Chicago and left Las Vegas. We got back to our neighbor’s house (where my brother and I were staying for 4 days before heading to NY to meet up with our mom) late that night and normally I always called my dad to let him know we got in. This time however I just called my mom to let her know we made it back. I’m still not sure to this day whether I just forgot to call him or if I purposefully didn’t call because of how angry I was. Regardless, he called an hour or so after we got to our neighbor’s house and I was yelled at for not calling and called inconsiderate and selfish by my dad. This angered me even more, but I had to push it out of my mind so that I could enjoy the time with my friends. My brother however, was the worst he had ever been before. My neighbor’s mom noticed it those four days and said something to my mom about it.

This summer was not only the turning point of my relationship with my dad but the beginning of my brother realizing and understanding the extent of what my dad has done.

~ JenJen ~

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Dreams, Stress and the Unexpected

So the other night, might have even been last night ( I can’t remember) I had this really weird, yet thought provoking dream. I should have wrote about it like as soon as I woke up from it, but anyways – I had a dream in which I just got engaged and was planning out the details for my wedding. (I have no idea what made me have a dream about getting married! haha) Somehow, I don’t remember the chain of events, I was convinced to contact my dad and to tell him about my engagement and to invite him to the wedding. So, I wrote this really long email and was able to tell him everything I’ve felt over the past few years and forgave him for things that I haven’t been able to yet. Oddly, the message I got back from him was just as long and the last line was ‘will you allow me to walk you down the aisle?’ Which caught me off guard, for I had already decided on who was walking me down the aisle. I then sent him a message back saying something to the effect of ‘the person walking me down the aisle will be someone who has been in my life for the past few years, so no, I can’t allow you to walk me down the aisle. but i would greatly appreciate you coming to the wedding, that would mean a lot. And then the dream was over. I just found it weird that I had a dream where I was forgiving my dad for everything when I refuse to talk to him in real life and don’t have any contact with him. I mean, when I think about my wedding right now, my dad isn’t part of it. Maybe he’s attending, but he’s definitely not walking me down the aisle. I guess it was just like hmm… maybe I should think about forgiving him before the issue of my wedding comes up.

Anyways – The past week or so has been really stressful, still kind of stressful. I have a paper due tomorrow and then my final paper (8-10 pages) is due on Monday. Then I’ll finally be done with my summer class. I’m very eager to return to school and to my friends there. I miss them so much! I haven’t been working much, the store apparently is over in hours so they’ve been having to cut shifts and limit hours. I’m only getting about 2 shifts a week now, oh well. I’ve typed about 3000 names/addresses and have about another 2000 or so to go. I’ll be able to spend a lot of time on that next week when I’m done with my class. On top of all of this, I got a very interesting/emotional email from my ex on Sunday night. I was completely shocked and was not expecting anything like that email to come my way. Now, I’m waiting for him to have time to talk so that I can tell him that it was too little, too late. Okay, well he said a lot and put out a lot, however, it’s too late. He had his chance back in October and I moved on since then.

Well, that’s enough for now. I always feel like when I’m writing these posts that I’m never really talking about anything worthwhile or seemingly interesting. Oh well… after all, they are just my thoughts.

22 sleeps, as Cait would say, until I’m back at school

~ JenJen ~

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Just bend the pieces until they fit

thoughts – images – reflection – memories – words – stories >> sure they are great, but they can also haunt you until you want to explode.

This weekend, conversations have increased, phone calls have started to become common and text messages are very popular. I don’t know what I feel, I know I don’t want to return to that relationship, not even for the summer. Sure I miss him, as a friend, and sure I still care about him, but as a friend. Maybe I’m reading into the increased conversations a little too much, but I feel like he is hoping for something this summer. Hook ups aren’t my type of thing, I’m definitely a relationship type of girl and I am not willing to participate in friends-with-benefits. I don’t think he understands this… and like the other issue is that I don’t want to just quit talking with him and I’d like to hang out with him this summer, but I’m not sure if he will get the hint that I’m not willing to do anything with him. bah

Learning to start over – although this seems like a new revelation to me, in reality I’ve been trying to do this ever since coming to college. It hasn’t worked very well. From this point on, however, I swear I am going to really work at this…

Three weeks from today I will be back in Fairport. I have mixed feelings about leaving school, part of me wants to stay for senior week, the other part is saying, ‘ you haven’t been home since January’. I feel separated and distanced from my friends at home and I am going to miss my Nova friends desperately. I am excited to go find a job and make some money though and to enjoy the summer off from school, even though I’m taking a summer course :-/ I am looking forward to spending days with Jess and just spending time with my dogs and mom and brother… but family is going to get old really fast especially because I am so used to not dealing with them.

Quick comment on the weekend – the weather is beautiful, I’m in a great mood, enjoyed my Friday night watching a movie with my friends, spent some time outside yesterday and hung out with my BF3E last night and watched tv and ate a ton of junk food, and today I should be writing a paper and doing some other work, but I am procrastinating! Anyways, overall it was an enjoyable/relaxing weekend and I hope next weekend is just as fun

~ JenJen ~

Just some rambles…

Last night was just a bad night overall – I was extremely stressed and just had some weird thoughts throughout the night. School is stressing me out, but then again, that isn’t anything new. I really need to learn how to relax and accept things. I mean I am not superwoman… I can’t expect to get 100s in everything I do… As I was studying for Spanish and working on calculus homework I was chatting online with a few people, I hadn’t eaten dinner, and all I really wanted to do was go get food and sit and relax and hang out. I pushed myself to finish every calculus problem, even if I didn’t get the correct answer and I pushed myself to memorize stuff for Spanish. I almost pushed myself to finish a lab report that is due on Friday, but I stopped myself and crawled into bed and started a movie on the laptop. Why do I push myself to the edge? (haha… that just reminded me of the movie Happy Feet, ” Don’t push me ’cause I am close to the edge. I’m trying not to lose my head. ” Excellent movie, which I finally finished over Easter break)

So anyways, like I said, I convinced myself to start a movie, however I realized that this movie was 2 hours long and it was almost 12:30. Around 1:30, I forced myself to stop watching and to go to bed. Now, I was still hungry, so I’m not sure if that is why I remained awake for most of the night, or if it was other things, but regardless, I didn’t sleep last night. I am extremely exhausted right now and just want to crawl into bed and sleep for hours. However, I have a class in about half an hour, then dinner around 6, after class, then I must go back to my room and get a good amount of homework done. It’s going to be a long night again.

I am still not sure why I couldn’t sleep last night, but I had really weird dreams/thoughts… While I was doing work, I was talking to some people online, one of those people was my ex. We talked about school, about the summer, about the weather – about us – how is it that after spending 9 intimate months with someone, no matter what they do, what they say, how they act, or anything there is still that feeling that is indescribable… Images and memories from our time together flooded my mind last night as I talked to him and discussed the more intimate aspects of our relationship. No, I don’t regret anything from that relationship; maybe I wish that I had acted differently during certain situations, but for the most part I miss that sort of relationship with someone. It’s not even the physical aspect that I miss, I miss having someone care about me, someone who I know I could call up at any time and they would go out of their way to help me. Sure, I have some really close friends who I can depend on for a lot of things (yeah, I know you read this bud), but it’s just a different kind of dependence. I don’t know. I talked with my good friend from home last week in regards to the single life and she reassured me that I don’t need anyone, which is a fact that I am well aware of, but honestly, how can any person not want that kind of relationship with someone?

—- the rest of this post is written after dinner, I ran out of time before my class! —-

To finish my rambles regarding being single: As I was walking to my 4:30 class, there was a couple walking in front of me holding hands. I got thinking, the one thing that I don’t notice a lot of around Villanova’s campus is PDA; sure you see the occasional hand holding, or the occasional kiss, but never the making out that was a daily part of life back in high school (or even some colleges). I really like that fact about Villanova – for the most part you can feel that you belong if you are single and not get mad at people for the unnecessary physical contact in a school setting. *sorry this is a really long talk about the single/relationship life, but it seems to be a common theme that keeps coming up lately* Anyways, my final comment on this whole relationship thing – after dinner tonight I was chatting with one of my good friends on campus and we were talking about this guy she is interested and how things were weird with them for a while, but now they seem to be back to where they used to be… and believe me, I am extremely happy for her, but so jealous at the same time. I know, I shouldn’t be jealous or even like sad/upset that I don’t have that, but it is a bit difficult when a good number of your friends are either in a relationship or are pursuing one and it’s just something that I enjoy to be in…..

enough on that – this is really long, and I’m almost done – just one last thing…

I’d like to comment on the VT tragedy…

I know a lot of people have blogged about it and that it is all over the media, but I’d like to first extend my sympathy to all those who lost a dear one on Monday and to all of those directly affected by this tragedy. As a fellow college student I can’t even imagine what any of you are going through. I would say I am praying for you, but I have found it hard lately to pray with things that have been happening lately, but I am thinking about all of you and wish you all the best during this healing process. The second thing I would like to say is that I am ashamed at fellow facebook members who have created groups ‘protesting’ the groups that are supporting those of VT from other colleges, saying something to the effect that they don’t understand why we are wasting our time to support those people and that it is exploiting them and the entire situation. (please note, I am not quoting from any specific group, just generally stating…) My response to these groups was sadness and anger… the events of Monday could have happened on any college campus in this country or throughout the world. As a college student we are all connected through friends from high school. Please do not tell me, or anyone at VT, that other colleges should not be showing their support. I believe that we, as college students, should be bonding together throughout the country to show our support. Sure, we compete against each other in sports and admissions and all that daily stuff…. but we can bond and support one another in times of need.

I know I said that would be the end of this post – but I was just talking to my brother who is a sophomore in high school and he just informed me of a rumor spreading through their school that someone is planning an attack similar to Columbine on Friday… the principal emailed the parents saying that the matter was investigating throughly and there is no truth to the threat… but after Monday, how can anyone be so sure? I hope to God that this is indeed false and that there is never another tragic event such as Columbine or the VT tragedy.

~ JenJen ~