Weekend thoughts

Some beautiful things from the weekend:

• The horses got out on Saturday night; they were like giant furry shadows clopping around in the moonlight. We stood out for almost an hour trying to wrangle them in our pjs and my skinny white ankles got pretty frozen. My favorite thing was watching the rancher, Dax, run after the horses when he was helping us get them corralled. People who are competent at their jobs are pretty cool, people who sacrifice sleep to help some city folks in 7 degree weather at 12:30 AM are pretty cool. (Turns out they weren’t even his horses. His live in the field next door, not the pasture out back, but he was the only one we knew to call. Dax is a good man.)

• I met a few girls at church that were really nice. Destiny sat in front of me in sacrament and ended up saying hi. Our conversation was just awkward enough that I think we could probably be friends, she was really sweet. I also met Jessica who told me that “I think you’re just really going to elevate our ward.” This is the second time she’s told me that, which is really kind of her. She invited me to lunch. I also met Meghan who has the prettiest red hair and green eyes. She was super fun and easy to talk to, she invited me to FHE. It’s cool to be on the receiving end of the work I’ve been doing the last 3 years of talking to new people at church.

• I’ve been watching walking videos on Youtube and I watched one walking around a park in Seoul from back in August and it was so lovely to see a warm summer sunset in the middle of the winter.

• I watched Howl’s Moving Castle with my friends over Discord. Studio Ghibli always knows what’s up.

• I got some new clothes and have been liking my outfits so much more lately.

• BTS covered Coldplay’s Fix You. That wasn’t strictly over the weekend but I’ve watched it 6 times including twice on Saturday soooooo.

Lonely girls

I saw a post the other day about the beauty of women who own up to their loneliness and move through life anyway. I'm lonely. I don't know how we can be so lonely while surrounded by people, but we are and I am. I don't know if it really is a beautiful thing to be lonely, but I do think that there is always beauty to be found in people who are striving. We strive to be kind, to be soft, to work hard for ourselves, to fill our soul-voids in healthy ways even though there are so many detrimental traps to fall into right there as soon as loneliness strikes. That's why I'm writing a blog tonight instead of crying into a bag of chips and reading empty romance novels. It's why I'm trying to be creative instead of destructive. Loneliness leads to self-destruction because we wonder why we're not good enough to be loved like everyone else seems to be, so we harm ourselves. It's hard to learn that you have to work away loneliness, realizing that adds another level of it. No one here to take care of me but me. I think that's where the beauty comes from though because there you are, no one to take care of you but you, and you've chosen to do it. You build up instead of dig down and that takes strength. Strength is the source of many of life's most profound beauties.