treasure

today we went to grandma's house to prepare for the sale on saturday.
what a task to sort through someone else's stuff...

stuff that he probably didn't even realize he had
stuff that he had multiples of
stuff that is now covered in dust, dirt and bugs

i think my favorite phrase from the night was the answer to the question, "why does poppop have [blank]?"
"i don't know!"
this applied to everything from the unopened gas mask to the multiple smoke detectors.

i must say it has given new meaning to the importance of storing treasure up in heaven. i wonder if people in heaven get a view of anything that goes on earth after they are gone. i wonder if poppop is watching us go through his workshop packed with his belongings and deals from many years and wishing he could have done things differently. i am continuely reminded, with no disrespect to poppop, of the futility of earthly collections.

stuff. we can't take it with us, and so often it distracts us from what God would have us do. help me to store treasure where it will truly count. help me not be distracted by the desires of the moment. please give me an eternal perspective.

celebration

we finally were able to celebrate my birthday. yay for pumpkin pie and chocolate drizzled strawberries! yay for chinese rice and strawberry lemonade! yay for beautiful weather and sweet peas! and yay for my family!

save me from myself

where do i come up with some of my ideas? sometimes i wonder...does God just laugh at what i come up with? how silly i can be?

when i pray for protection and safety, i almost always picture physical safety-but usually in the form of protection from a car crash, not always health or the use of my different senses. yet, i have been coming to realize that this is only one aspect of the protection God offers. he can protect more than just my physical body from harm. he is capable of guarding my emotions, my heart. he is able to save my spirit, my soul. but even with all this different kinds of protection, i usually think of them as protection from outside sources. yet i've come to realize something else...

i think sometimes he protects me from myself.

this last year, i had a crush on a guy. although i prayed for God's will if something were to happen, in my heart i hoped that my prayers would be for God's will when not just if something were to happen. maybe this isn't the best example, but it was important to me at the time. i know that God was protecting me, whether i liked it or not. this guy didn't pursue me, but if he had, i'm not entirely sure if i would have been as concerned with God's will as i would have been that what i wanted was actually happening. i know that i wouldn't have appreciated someone telling me that "God knows best" at the time, but now i am able to see his protection over me...even from myself.

this past week, i've been laying in bed, sicker than i've been in quite some time. i've been pushing myself at work, doing my best to finish well. i know that is what i was supposed to do, but i wonder if God is saving me from myself? armed with good intentions, i have been running for over 8-hour-shifts, wanting to end my job with the knowledge that i gave all that i could. yet, i've been exhausted and maybe even made myself sick because of it. i've missed 2 days of work, and could potentially miss my last day on the job if i don't regain my energy/strength/ability to run soon. while i'm not especially thrilled to have a pounding headache, the need to blow my nose every few minutes and barely enough energy to walk to the bathroom and back, it seems as though God does have a purpose in even this.

i guess my realization isn't so new. really, i'm just re-visiting the trust issue.
the struggle between what i think is best and what God knows to be best.
not merely trusting him with words,
but with my actions, my prayers and my thoughts.
trusting him to save me

even from myself.

al-is-on

when i was in fifth grade i made a marvelous discovery. although i probably should have been paying attention to something that was pertaining to my education in the classroom, i was finding out something pertaining to myself that i found to be quite important. although it seemed quite unusual, i was very pleased with my finding.

my name is a sentence. al-is-on.

my discovery has proved to be very useful throughout the years. i have often used it to help people remember how to spell my name. for instance, this last year, scott made the error of spelling my name with 2 "l"s (which is a quite common mistake...almost as common as spelling my last name with only one "t" or my favorite, adding an "e" to the end.) i informed him (along with my entire staff, thanks to the "reply all" key) of my name's dual ability-to serve as my name and as a sentence. kevin tried to convince me that "all-is-on" could also be a sentence, but i refuse to acknowledge that. =) since then, my sentence has become almost another nick-name. al-is-on.

and martha shared her first thoughts about my sentence revelation:
al-is-on drugs. =)

since then there have been others...
al-is-on edge
al-is-on the clock
al-is-on time
al-is-on the way
al-is-on fire
al-is-on the ball
al-is-on the verge of tears
al-is-on tv
al-is-on the fence
al-is-on board
with more to come, i'm sure...

my name is a sentence. al-is-on.

happy birthday to me

i've celebrated my 20th birthday by laying feverish in bed, sleeping until 1 pm because i was too delirious to do anything else. but even in spite of my sickness, i've been able to be thankful for a few things:

-birthday messages waiting on-line
-my family checking in on me and being more sad than me about my sick state on my birthday
-being taken care of
-phone calls from some of my dearest friends

so, even though this is definitely the grossest i've ever felt on a birthday before, it hasn't been completely bad.

i've felt very loved.

teenager for one last day

julianne told me to do something stupid and impulsive on my last day of teenager-hood, since i would still have an excuse. so i proceeded to get sick and spend the day in bed. the only thing that slightly resembled irresponsibility (is that a word?) was me calling in sick and spending the day in bed. a real exciting way to enter adulthood. not working because all i have the energy for is laying here. =) not that i'm complaining...sometimes i think God saves me from myself. i was actually thinking about forcing myself to go to work, when i still had some energy. but all of it has been taken away, so working wasn't even an option anymore. time for a nap...

potc 3-seriously?!?

let's make a movie, ok?
let's take a popular film with good actors and no plot and randomly strung together events which don't even make sense...
let's call it, pirates of the caribbean 3: at world's end...

i walked to the theater with john this afternoon to see a film i anticipated to be:
-somewhat funny with quotable lines
-slightly ridiculous
-slightly unsatisfactory

however, i found pirates to be:
-utterly unsatisfactory
-completely ridiculous and random
-mildly funny, but not enough to make up for the lack of conclusive anything, random events or the fate of will turner!

as the film started, i thought it was a bit strange, but it began to reach the half-way mark and nothing was changing with how the movie was progressing. soon i was laughing at all the wrong parts, because i was using laughter as my outlet for the ridiculousness of what i was viewing. i kept turning to john in disbelief, to whisper, "what in the world?" "what is going on?" "seriously?!?"

i felt like they asked a bunch of crazies what should be put in the movie and they threw it all in the film wherever it somewhat fit. this theory was somewhat confirmed when john and i returned home to read on the internet that the script hadn't even been completed when filming started. seriously!

as i think about all the random things that were put in this film, i can barely recognize its roots from the first film. (the following list is pretty much all spoilers...in case you still care to see this film)
-elizabeth as not merely a pirate lord, but the pirate king
-governor swann not merely dying, but floating around in a boat and talking to elizabeth
-tia dalma turns out to be not merely davy jones' lover (as if that weren't enough!) but the goddess, calypso who eventually is released from her human body and turns into crabs! (as john and i questioned later, "why did she turn into crabs?")

-the only explanation for barbossa being raised to life again was due to the fact that he was only dead
-multiple jack sparrows rule the screen and all of him-selves seem obsessed with eating peanuts, so much so that they are willing to kill the other jack sparrows to eat the single peanut (i wish i were joking!)
-norrington has a change of heart, right before he is stabbed by the only "good", but delusional character on davy jones' boat, will's daddy, and right after he kisses elizabeth. i guess its hard to be mad at him for this when he dies seconds later.
-the pirate council is crashed by jack sparrow's father, the keeper of the code. yes, it really exists in book form. and the dog arrives with the keys to the book, with the explanation that he escaped the cannibal island using sea turtles.
-we also learn that all that is left of jack's mother is her dead head which jack's father produces when jack asks about his mommy.
-will and elizabeth marry in the middle of a battle scene and manage to enjoy a looooong kiss without getting killed. but not for long...
-will is stabbed by davy jones. to keep him from dying completely, jack "valiantly" gives up his dream of living forever and helps will stab davy jones' heart, preventing his death...
-will must cut out his own heart and is destined to live 10 years at sea in exchange for one day on land.
-jack doesn't want elizabeth to witness the cutting of the heart, so he grabs hold of a rope to swing off the ship, which is attached to sails and part of the mast which floats them to the black pearl. talk about realistic.
-will spends 24 hours with elizabeth before heading out for his ten years...apparently they produce a son, which will meets for the first time ten years later. pathetic.

i liked what pluggedinonline.com had to say:
http://www.pluggedinonline.com/movies/movies/a0003236.cfm
(emphasis is my own.)
"it's clear that...[the movie's creators] want this film to have more heroes, more villains and a bigger, splashier pirate sea battle than ever a bunch of landlubbing moviegoers saw before.
But as it's said onscreen, "There's a cost for what we want most." To set up all those special effects, the story gets pulverized."
"And as the messiness mounts, we begin to care less and less about where this aimless projectile of a movie is heading."

i also liked several of jack sparrow's lines as they applied to the film itself:
as it relates to the producers of this film:
"permit me to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket."
"...shoot him, cut out his tongue, then shoot his tongue! "
and my favorite:
"Up is down"? Well, that's just maddeningly unhelpful." this whole film was maddening and very unhelpful in concluding any of the plot from the previous film.

seriously?!?

in the film, jack offers the advice, "pretend it's all a bad dream, that's how I survive."

maybe i'll do just that...

my job

every day that i'm still here, i am so thankful for the countdown that is going on. i'm continually reminded of God's goodness in telling me to quit. trust is such a difficult, hard but rewarding experience. i hate the idea of quitting from any job or task, but somehow the impossibility, the exhaustion and unrealistic expectations attached to my current job makes my two-weeks-notice not as horrible. last night, when some people called in and no one came to take their place, it fell to me to have double the work! after several attempts to do what was asked of me, i found a nurse and told her that it was not physically possible for me to care for all the people that had fallen to me. i've found that no night is ever the same, but it never seems to be good. it is okay on the best of nights, but mostly i feel like i'm behind with people waiting on me and no amounts of effort on my part will ever let me catch up. by the time for my dinner break (which usually falls between 7-8 lately) i feel like running away. but i am sticking it out. even though i don't feel like it, i'll do what i said i would do.

but the evening was not without its moments of humor.

i was told that my scrubs looked like maternity clothes. then i was asked if i was pregnant. oh goodness.

i was also told, after asking the resident sitting on the toliet if she desired privacy, that i was welcome to stay "if i enjoyed smelling those smellies."

more confirmation

i just climbed into my bed...after putting so many others to bed.

today i discovered that the very day after i gave my two-weeks-notice, my boss, who had only been there a few weeks prior to my hiring had resigned, effective and immediately! i could scarcely believe it! after she had tried so hard to convince me to stay, she was leaving herself. i found it to be quite ironic and at the same time, confirming of my decision. it seems that she wanted to take a different direction, according to one of the nurses tonight. this just wasn't what she was looking for and it wasn't working out. hmmm...same here.

as i prepare for sleep, i can't help but laugh at some of the comments throughout the evening...

today i went in to help a woman to bed at the usual time, much to her amazement. "bed-time! who would have thought? huh. bed-time."

i was also told that alison is a very pretty name. in fact, the woman who told me this explained that she had a family member with that name. however, it was her cousin who was a boy. i asked if it was his last name, but was assured that it was most definitely not his last name!

when i asked a man for his hearing aids, he told me that he didn't care for any coffee or tea, but he appreciated me asking. after all, according to him, i am such a sweet girl. he could tell because of my light brown hair. =)

memory lane-dear jovan

yesterday i came across a play that lucy and i wrote around 7th grade. all of our characters are under the age of 20, with the exception of the villian...and in 4 days, i will be 20. somehow 20 sounds so much more ominous than 19. and we apparently thought so even at age 12...

anyway, back to the play. with some of the cheesiest lines (that we thought were poetic, romantic or touching, at the time) i spent several moments reading our great work, laughing to myself. how silly and innocent we were.

for starters, the cast is as follows:
narrator
adelisa, the heroine, 17
casimir, the hero, 19
ignacio, the villain, 23
hadrien, casimir's best friend, 18
katriel, ignacio's younger sister, 13
jovan, a peasant boy, 14
namir, a good guard
henchmen

i remember the agonizing time we spent pouring over a name book, searching for the perfect names for our cast. apparently, we were completely satisfied with the results of our search.

my favorite scene is the final scene: the underground passage, scene nine. after they have made the daring escape from ignacio's castle, jovan was wounded with a flying dagger. we thought it would be more realistic if we killed off one of characters. we were near tears when we wrote this scene and thought the best lines in the whole play were found in this final scene. i remember reading jovan's last words to each other and being full of sadness for the sacrifice of this noble boy. =)

scene nine:
katriel: (crying) jovan, how badly are you hurt?
jovan: (gasping for breath) leave me. i don't want to slow you down.
casimir: no! i'll carry him.
narrator: after rejoining adelisa, they all rode back home on horses namir had provided. it was only later that they heard ignacio's henchmen had revolted and killed him. Meanwhile, jovan was taking his last breaths in adelisa's little cottage.
jovan: (gasping for air) don't be sad when i am gone. i would do it again in a second, for friends like you. (he dies)
(they stand around sadly; the ladies cry. casimir is comforting adelisa.)
narrator: soon, casimir and adelisa were married, and they lived very happily. but they never forgot jovan and the great sacrifice he made.

even as i type this, i can't help but laugh, especially when jovan dies. how melodramatic we were! =)

and perhaps, just maybe, turning 20 isn't so bad after all.