Clean dishes and a cloudy Wednesday

Sometimes when you're 20 and summertime hours are your own, dinner consists of a bag of popcorn, dried mango strips you strategically placed in 10 separate bags of trail mix to avoid eating all of them at once (Ha! Thwarted. Take that past me), and more coffee just because it sounds good. I do not advertise such habits, nor do I regret my decision. I only wish mango strips came in larger quantities, they really are swoon-worthy. Apart from all of this, I am grateful to be in Lincoln for the next few months. No, this is not a post consisting of the challenges I will face and an adolescent list of things I hope to overcome with a large portion of Jack Johnson and a heaping side of nostalgia. I've told and retold that cheesy story several times already. I'm done with it.

I do miss home. I do. But to be quite honest with you, I'm tired of missing home. I'm tired of longing for the view of my backyard from my bed. It's time to embrace looking out my Lincoln window means encountering a shabby brick wall courtesy of my next-door-never-bringing-over-a-bunt-cake-because-you're-sketchy neighbors. I'm exhausted from trying to recreate the stillness that can only be found in my Minnesota kitchen on a weekday morning. My current kitchen holds the echos of young hispanic cries that rent out the basement. It's not that I can't tune out the noise, I definitely can after living here 9 (almost 10) months, but I cannot expect the quiet breeze of suburbia. I am done holding my Nebraska home to Minnesota standards, it will always lose. Not because where I am now is 'less than,' but because the present will always lose to the past. It all seems silly, nostalgia. This is the life I want. The one The Lord has so graciously given me, and yet there's always a more enjoyable walk, crisper air, more joy lingering in the subdivisions of memory lane. It's time now. It's time to relinquish my grasp on where my family has always been and make wherever I am my home. I've become pretty good at that, thanks to the sovereignty of my Heavenly Father who has built a home amongst valuable Nebraskan faces, eager international students, and dusty wood paneling. I cannot bring myself to utter the phrases "over the past three years" or "since coming to college" because, well, for one thing I'm a stubborn snob when it comes to cliched phrases, and two, there is a time and place for reflection, but there also is something to be said for sitting in your pajamas, reading this book, and embracing traditions of summer no matter which state you reside it.

Just to be ironic, black and white photos of summer and this song seemed appropriate:

Or if that's too dark and melancholy, there's always this alternative

Happy lazy Wednesday, folks.