New Chapters. Cedar City.

I read my entire blog last night and it inspired me to keep writing.  Im an avid journal writer, but sometimes a blog can capture a few thoughts that a journal cant. Maybe because typing is so much faster than writing. Anywho.
My Alaskan adventure has ended, along with my relationship with Aaron, and also any hope of traveling in the near future. Not traveling is something I find very hard to accept, but I know that getting this degree is going to be worth it.  Its only been a week of me feeling like i can actually handle getting a masters degree. Its HARD. I didnt understand half the jargon and everyone seems to know so much more than I do. They all got their undergraduate degrees in political science or business. And im like "oh hey guys! I like people from other countries and stuff!!!"  I got so overwhelmed with everything that I went straight to the dean and asked to be taken out of the program. I was contemplating joining the peace corps or trying to find an anthropology job in some other country for a while. Ive got major wander lust right now. After talking with her for 2 hours, she convinced me to stay in the program and went over all the classes that I would be taking and showed me all the great things I could do with such a diverse degree as public administration. So Im still here. Pretty thankful that I didnt give up completely.

Things have been difficult nonetheless. No matter how hard I try, I cant seem to find a job. I have never had THIS much trouble finding a job. In fact, this is week 5 in Cedar and I still dont have a job. I have had 3 interviews for really good jobs, but have yet to actually get one. I have another interview on Friday and am hoping and praying that this can be the job for me. Honestly, if I dont get this one, Im going to have to move back home and commute up to school. No one wants that... except my mom. She is lonely.
I guess while im writing I can extrapolate a little about what happened with Aaron. This will be short. I started to feel differently about him and really got tired of the same old thing happening. Yo yo after yo yo with zero progression in the right direction. I felt like life had become a record player with the needle skipping over the same exact part over and over. So I told him exactly how i was feeling, and since moving to cedar i have told him that he needs to let me go and work on being ok with himself. Because really, you cant honestly be happy with another person if you are not happy with just yourself first. And thats really his biggest problem. Self esteem. I know he will find happiness one day, and I love him I really do and I wish him the best. But its time for me to move on to other things. I dont really want to date for a while. I quite enjoy being alone. No telling anyone where Im going, no worrying about communicating with someone regularly, and a generally simple life. Perfect. Wow. this is a long post.

My Alaskan Adventures

 Beautiful Alaska. I have been waiting to come to this place for many many years to work a summer job and when I got home from my mission, I decided I was finally going to make it happen. I applied for a summer internship at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage AK.  Though I didnt get accepted to the internship, they DID offer me a job working at the gift shop and ticket booth which I readily accepted. So here I have been, looking at some beautiful views, going on some amazing trips, meeting really cool animals, and most of all, meeting some really wonderful and amazing people and learning a lot of good life lessons a long the way.

 This is Jade, our fox kit that was found by a jogger in Anchorage. We believed he was a girl for the first few months of his life, so now he kind of has a girly name. But he is still so cute. Here at the center, we take in any animals that are orphaned or injured and we try to rehabilitate them and re-release. Some of my favorite animals are the musk oxen, the bison, and Jade.

 This is my roommate Stefanie.  She left early after one of her good friends died in a tragic accident.  This is us on the glacier quest tour that leaves out of Whittier. We got to see goats, eagles, whales, otters, seals, and of course some really cool glaciers and glacier capping action.

 This is my "days off crew" that I spend most of my days off with.  We have gone on a lot of adventures together. Mostly hikes, but others ones too, like gold panning, road trips, shopping and movies, and everything in between. Its not so much about what we did, but that we had such a great group of people to do it with. We all bonded on these trips and I feel like we became best friends.  These people get me and I love each and every one of them.

 This picture is from our "White Trash Bash" party at the "crack den" where some of the interns live.  We all dressed as trashy as we could and had a real good time.  This is my friend and fellow worker Pete Corkey on the gator and one of the maintenance workers posing as a white trash family.  Pete has been such a good friend to me because he really helped me get over a lot of the sadness I was feeling when I was trying to get over Aaron.

 This is Grace the baby beaver. By far my favorite baby animal we had at the center... she died shortly after we got her. We still cant figure out what happened to her, but thats just how things go sometimes.

 This is me, pete, and Erin at a restaurant called the Salmon Bake.  We were on the best road trip ever to go up to Fairbanks and Denali National Park.  It was seriously the funnest road trip I have ever been on.  There were so many inside jokes had and pranks played.  The group that went on this trip became very tight knit.  We went camping in Talkeetna, then stayed in a dry cabin in Fairbanks where we met cute huskys and new friends. We swam in rivers and camped in Denali. After we ate at the Salmon Bake, I drove everyone (drunk as skunks) through Denali to look for moose and bears.  We ended up singing "Rock me mama like a wagon wheel" as loud as we could and peeing in the bushes.  We laughed so hard and even caught some of it on film.

This last picture is of Aaron and I up in a small town called Willow which is about 2 hours north of Anchorage.  We were at a YSA camp.  He decided that he simply could not live without me in Hawaii and flew to Anchorage and surprised me.  I definitely was surprised!  We have spent a lot of time up at his lake house going tubing, jet skiing, and wake boarding, shooting guns, going four wheeling, and riding around on his motorcycle.  I have had a great time getting to know him better as a friend and having time to really understand how he thinks and also getting to know his little quirks.  I leave in a week and a half (and im sooooo sad about it) to go to graduate school at Southern Utah University, so I dont know what will happen to us.  I have been praying a lot to know if we should stick together, and honestly have not felt one way or the other what is right.  So I guess I will update on that later.  I have learned so much from the people I have met here.  I have learned how to love deeper.  I learned to NEVER judge anyone for their actions.  I learned how to stand my ground on my beliefs and what I will and will not do.  And I learned how important it is to share the love of God with others in the form of the gospel.  I have tried my hardest to plant these seeds in the hearts of my friends and I can only hope that one day I might be able to see those seeds grow.

sigh.

I feel you move nervously and I can tell youre lost again
I know I promised to always understand, I promised not to judge what I cannot comprehend
What are you going to say? What price am I going to pay?
Will you tell me you love me with tears in your eyes?
And tell me how it cant work, which I feel are all lies?
I might never forgive you for what you have done
You gave up on me, it seems your fears have won
Told me to snuff out the flame in my heart
To forget your name and tear it apart
But my dear I do love you and cant complete the task
But for you my dear, this pain I will carry and mask
Now I'm far and pretending I'm fine
Somewhere between love and depression I walk the line
Though were not talking I think of you everyday
Remember your face and how you loved me in every way
Im really sorry it all ended this way
But I hope you'll be happy and I want to say
That I'll never find someone who loves like you did
Or knew me to my core or who was the pot to my lid
I love you love to the moon and back
And a piece of me is missing, everyday adds a crack
If I could carry you I would, I would could carry on if i could
But everyday Im slipping as I try to hold up
And my poor heart is bleeding in a small gold cup
I wish that I could tell you, I wish that I could scream
That my love for you is forever, and Im splitting at the seams..

But it would be a lie.

OOOoooh HEY!  I forgot I even had a blog. But uhhh.. i suppose i should fill in a bit. a ton has happened that i dont even think its possible to fill things in completely. so. I guess this blog will just have to be about my failed relationships since thats all i ever write about!  I fell in love again. surprise surprise. it was awesome. then for a lot of legitimate reasons he said that it just cant go anywhere but that he is still madly in love with me. its all very confusing and i cried about it for like a week. but now im okay and im learning how to be friends with him again... which really is so hard. And im still hurting pretty bad... but we just try to stay out of each others way to avoid causing anymore pain. its dumb. I feel like screaming in his face "I may not be able to fix your problems, but i can make sure you never face them alone" which is all i wanna do. just be there for him.  But he has chosen to be alone. (literally forever) and even said "I will never get married, so at least i can say i had one great true love" and what would usually make me feel all twitterpated inside made me want to poke him in the eye. anyway. im ranting more for myself than for anyone who might read my blog. but i guess you guys are on the in now! congrats!

A new song... i havent written one in so long!!

This song is about my dad and how i struggled with his death


Cant hold me back
the desert makes me wild
and im on a fast track
to conjuring your ghost

I know i cant
shouldnt think such childish things
but i let a thought
conjure your ghost now

And all that i thought was ours,
really belonged to God and dont we know it?
But we shared it with him in the hour
oh how he lets us love oh how he shows it
we never could compare
though try we dare
the stuff out there to whats right here
whats right here?

watch my wanderings
over endless desert landscape without life
and all my ponderings
bout what it all means

how ghosts are just ghosts
and dont come back unless they have reason
though i miss you most
guess im not reason enough

Just a weird thought thats not really very profound

You know when youre listening to a song thats SO good to you at that moment that you can hardly do anything else because you are so enthralled just listening to that song? well thats how I feel about 40 day dream by Edward Sharpe and the magnetic zeros. Anyway, thats not why i suddenly felt inclined to write in my long neglected blog.
The real reason is that I was thinking a lot about the law of attraction and how funny it is... like... really really really quiet weird boys tend to just go so well with complicated girls... who are kinda weird too, but theyre loud. and then i was thinking about myself and tried to picture the opposite of myself as a boy... Im okay with what i saw.

(okay for real, im in love with this song!)

And then I started thinking about what i am REALLY... because you cant really define what your opposite is until you know what you are first... so what am i?  I like to think that im not really a romantic person... but i know that if a person i really liked did something romantic... i would melt. but other peoples romance makes me very uncomfortable. And im not a huge fan of romantic movies. (okay so maybe i dont want the opposite of those qualities in a man) okay next. I enjoy being alone but also always feel like im dying of loneliness.. conundrum.  I dont need a man to make me happy... yet I blog about the possible existence of one perfect for me (which i know doesnt exist). ew. This blog is not working out the way I had planned it to!

Nah heres the thing. I just want a zebra who has stripes like mine. :)  (preferably with a beard) i can be white with black stripes and he can be white with black stripes.

my future

 WILDLIFE BIOLOGY!!

Well,  I think I have made all the major decisions that I can make right now in regards to my future.... and im sooo excited about it! I just love planning things! well, Im going to finish my degree in Anthropology at BYU Hawaii and hopefully I will be able to work with a science professor ex bishop friend on some volunteer experience working with animals and doing research type stuff... then im going to do an animal conservation internship in Alaska in a little town thats just south of anchorage working with injured alaskan wildlife and learning how to work with data and how to educate people about the animals... then I will hopefully be accepted into grad school at Utah State University where I hope to work with a professor named Doctor Frey in the field of human-wildlife conflict management!  And thats about as far as i have gotten... but dang am i excited!!!