I am turning into an old lady

-i have to take stairs one at a time.
-i keep falling over because my dad says that i some kind of cold virus in my ear. this means that when i move my head too fast, i get really dizzy because my inner ears are too busy fighting a virus to keep me balanced. this happens every time i switch cheeks on my pillow when i am asleep. doesn't that sound like an old lady problem? all of the sudden i am sympathetic to old people who loose their balance, it's actually a lot easier than you think. i fell over today while i was bending down trying to pet my dog.
-i put all of my letters in a pretty box/tiny trunk old-looking thing that rachel gave to me.
-i had fun cleaning my room.
-i started trying to learn how to play the ukulele like this old man in my home ward who plays every guitar-y type instrument.

I'm one year older. or maybe forty.

so happy new year everyone! glad i could read about most of your lives. (not trying to sound creepy.)

the three week rule.

have you ever noticed that the best time of any blocked, extended period of time is the last three weeks? i mean, there are good things the whole way through, and maybe it is just me because i am some psycho pessimistic, ungrateful, not fun person, but seriously, it is always the last three weeks of anything where life all of the sudden becomes absolutely wonderful, and you feel nostalgic for everything you have done. i think it's because the end is finally in sight. at a month, it's still far away. you can't see the last day in your mind's eye calendar. but, at three weeks, you can see the weeks panning out, you can see that last monday, those three tuesdays, and you remember how quickly the last three fridays have passed by. it is when your brain finally is able to see clearly exactly how much you love everything, how much you are loving your life, and while you enjoyed it before, and maybe at the beginning you couldn't fully appreciate it because the end was out of sight, but when there is three weeks, you are fully aware. and social barriers come down, and everyone talks to everyone, and all is forgotten of earlier drama, and for some reason it doesn't really matter what you say when you're talking to people, because everyone is just really happy and they all can see that the end is in sight as well.

the last three weeks of anything is the best part of life. something happens somewhere between the beginning of something, and the last three weeks, and it is really great. and at the risk of sounding incredibly cheesy, it's just really beautiful. I'm trying to figure out how to make that beautiful time come earlier. any suggestions?

examples from my own life.

high school:

when awkwardness and worrying about who your friends are, the people you want to be friends with and the best approach to being their friend, how to avoid the people you want to avoid, and every other stress just melts into this:

freshman year beginning (pretty cute, whatever, but...for my limited vocabulary...stiff):

and end:



at liberty square beginning:



and end:

in england:

where we were all trying so hard to have the time of our lives, and we knew that we should be best friends, or at least we would be, so we took pictures like this:

and jumped into freaking freezing lakes together to prove how epic we were, how we were having the time of our lives. and we did it when I couldn't yet distinguish some of these people in the dark. (which i think i could do by the end.)

and then with less than three weeks left, these kind of pictures were real and fun and great:

and Paris.

beginning:
where we sort of knew each other. at least enough to take dumb pictures.

and now, when it is not a decision as to whether or not we make faces like this.

i am almost crying because three weeks is here. it is always the happiest/most depressing/most fun/most pre-nostalgic/the part you remember the most because it was so wonderful.

i know some of you have superb social skills, so this probably doesn't even apply to you, so i hope you don't think i am a horrible person. i am trying to work on it. we'll see.

happy last three weeks of fall semester!