It's my mind and I'll think emo if I want to!

My mind keeps drifting back to things I've supposedly already thought about.  It's like the whiplash that comes the morning after the car crash; I check my thoughts out and then they check right back in.  On a less emo note, I graduate from Biola University in three weeks!  Only two of those three weeks will be spent on homework and class time, considering that I thankfully do not have any finals during finals week. I'm excited, but the idea of "moving on with life" only leaves me apprehensive.  I'm doing the whole application thing, applying for organizations that I would actually like to be a part of and not merely employed.  I don't want to cringe when I tell people where I work or what exactly it is I do... I want to be PROUD of what I do!  If my occupation is what enables me to live my life and thrive, then I want that occupation to add to my life's blood, not take away from it.
I guess my current emo thought-pattern makes sense.  It's hard to focus on one of the few undergrad assignments I have left when the weight of my future weighs on my mind.  I'm supposed to be making a powerpoint for a presentation in class tomorrow...but who cares about such things when caps and gowns coat my mind?  In honor of such chaos, I'm not even going to proof-read this post.

It's my birthday...but it's also Tuesday.

Today is my 21st birthday.  I'm at Biola University for summer school right now, which means I'm again spending my birthday away from home.  I really should be used to it by now though.  I've spent my birthdays away from home almost every year since I was eleven.  I went to Awana Scholarship camp every summer, and it always fell on the last week of June.  At the time, I kind of like it.  Having my birthday at camp meant spending my special day with a lot of my friends (about 300 of them, actually).  I'd grown up with these kids, and was used to not only seeing them during the summer for camp, but also throughout the school year for other Awana events.  This made having my birthday away from home pretty nice!

One major damper surrounding this happy setup, though, was my knowing how much my parents were sad not to be with me on those days.  Eleven years old was a young age for me to start depriving my parents of their right to share in my birthday celebrations.  I feel that even now.  I've deprived my parents of exactly half of my life's birthdays, and my only excuses are camp and summer school.

Maybe I'm just being sentimental.  Either way though, I hope I can one day make it up to my parents.  For now though, I'm going to be happy knowing that as long as I'm happy on this day, they will be happy too.  I know this to be true because I heard that happiness in my momma's voice on the phone this morning.

Personally, I don't find birthdays to be the big deal that my parents were both raised to believe they are, but that's alright.  As long as they feel birthdays are important, I will too.

hmm.

One of these days, I'm going to finally know what my life was meant for. I don't mean that in an emo sort of way either, I mean I legitimately look forward to when I can look back and go "uh hah!". Knowing what's going on in life is something a lot of people do not come to realize until late in life, or never at all. I can suffer this, but my thoughts are ever focused on obtaining that relinquishment of when I finally come into understanding of what God meant by all this, what my life was meant for. As Switchfoot would say, "we were meant to live for so much more, but we lost ourselves."