This extraordinarily random thought process was prompted by my voice lesson on Wednesday.  I haven’t had a voice lesson in about 3 years, so I was very excited.  We spent the whole lesson breathing (well, the teacher was breathing and I was discovering something I thought I had been doing my whole life somehow was incorrect…) and vocalizing.  There came a point when she looked at me and kept telling me to relax my face, first my eyebrows then my jaw then my lips etc.  Confusion burst out in my mind because I was simply vocalizing with my singer face – the one where your eyebrows are slightly lifted, you’re smiling just a touch and singing five notes on the vowel “eh” is the most sincere thing you’ve ever done (slightly CelticWoman esque).

In instructing me to practice without said face I came upon a conundrum. (not sure that’s the appropriate word, but I like how it sounds…)  What would it be like if I sang as me?  Stop.  What?  But I don’t sing?  Part of what I like about musical theater is that I’m someone else when I sing.  Vocalizing fits into the category of being someone else, too – um, somehow.  I stood in the mirror trying to figure out how on earth to  sing up and down the scales without my singer face; not being a pretend person was entirely difficult.  So I came up with a plan.  I simply need to pretend to be someone who doesn’t make faces when they sing.  But that didn’t quite work.

So now I’m in the process of discovering who Melody the singer is, while trying to breathe silently :-/  Thankfully warming up won’t always take up the whole lesson and I can get back to being the me who heartily enjoys being someone else :)

~Ellie

In order to follow my steps, you must have frozen long grain brown rice and have taken it out of the freezer and let it soak in water for about 8 hours.  Then you empty the soaking rice and water (non measured, of course) into a pot.  Turn the burner on HI and then walk out of the room.  It is imperative that you take no note of what time you started cooking – or else you’d actually know what time it should be done. (if you know how long it is supposed to cook for that is, and the truly ignorant cook, doesn’t…)

After spending about 15 minutes on the computer you decide it will be a good idea to check the rice and make sure nothing is going wrong.  You see, if you are cooking the correct way, by this point it would have boiled over if you were out of the room.  Recalling that you haven’t heard any singing coming from the burner, you look in the kitchen and discover that you forgot to put the lid on the pot.  So now, most of your water is boiled away, and the rice really hasn’t cooked too much.  Immediately you should reach for the lid (if you can find it) and cover the pot to help the rice cook the rest of the time.  Only, because it has been cooking without the lid for so long, the water immediately revolts and starts bubbling twice as much and trying to escape from the pot.  Turning the burner off of Hi and down to Low at this point would be a good idea.

Because of the violence with which the water is boiling, you’ll need to stay watching the pot and constantly lifting the lid up so the bubbles die down a bit.  Taste testing the rice is quite silly because it won’t be done.  Just let the water finish boiling out which should take about 3 minutes.  (Timing suddenly must become important because you’ve washed too many burnt pots.)  Then you’ll take the pot off the burner, put the lid in the sink, grab a spoon, and enjoy.  The rice will taste unique.  It isn’t uncooked, but it’s not quite fully cooked either…

And that, my friends, is how not to make rice.
~Ellie

Shortly after getting settled in the waiting area, a plane landed and the people started exiting.  It must have been from the Netherlands, or the like, because the only person who came off speaking English was wearing a PSU sweatshirt.  Everyone else was dressed very Europeanesque and spoke what sounded like Dutch.

Aside from the distraction of the people getting off the plane, there really isn’t too much to do while you’re waiting to catch your flight, except maybe people watch.  There aren’t nearly as many unique characters this time, most people seem to be quite normal.  Except there’s one girl who is quite unique.  She’s got two bags, one purple bookbag, and one purple medium size suitcase.  Both of these bags look like their completely stuffed and would explode were they to be opened.  I got an image of when Lucy is trying to pack everything for a trip and she sits on the case while Ethel tried to shut it.

Anyhow, this girl is wearing dangly earrings that match her sweater and then extremely fancy spoke earrings in her second hole that really doesn’t match the lower earrings.  Accompanying earrings in the jewelry department are two mismatching bracelets – one on each arm – and three non-coordinating necklaces – a key, a long/big heart/a short locket.  She’s wearing a cream jacket/sweatshirt over a regular green sweater, over another green shirt.  I do believe were she to have found a way, she’d have worn several pairs of shoes.

By the interesting array of clothes, it would seem to me that perhaps she simply could not fit another thing into her bags, and therefore settled for wearing whatever else she could.  In an effort to remain slightly hidden, she’s wearing a black hat pulled quite over her eyes.  Were she not so silly looking, one might think she’d be a suspicious character.  I can only imagine the looks she got while going through security…

And now I’d better get my computer back in my bag; if it’ll fit.  My stuff just might explode if I’m not careful.  Yes, I am the crazy girl with the layers that didn’t fit in the exploding luggage :-P

~Ellie

My living room has been in a crazy array of clothes all day today.  For part of my senior project, I’m putting together dances to a few songs from Les Miserables.  While I’m home where there is a car, my mom and I figured we’d do some costume shopping.  After hitting four thrift stores yesterday, I got most of what I needed.  However, I came to the discovery that it’s not good enough to find rags, they have to be rags that can be danced in.  And it would be nice if they all coordinated in some way.  Then there’s the process of trying to compare everyone’s figure to mine or my mom’s to see if the costume will fit.  Considering most people are tinier then I am, my mom very graciously tried on most everything at the thrift stores to determine if it would work or not and we went from there.

I, however, was the raggedy scarf and shawl tryer-on-er.  You see, in “At The End Of The Day” there’s this pose that is quite linked with the song of people struggling with their life and reaching forward as if for help.  Like this:

So, I made sure that every scarf and shawl were able to aid the wearer in looking desperate for a better life.  While singing at the top of my lungs :-)

Deciding it’d be best to lay out everything together to see what I still needed to get, we got the thrift store costumes, the costumes from our attic, and the costumes from our dress-up closet and laid everything that could be considered on the living room floor.  Several of the skirts were too narrow to dance in, and a slit wouldn’t work, so that helped eliminate some options.  Eventually we got most of the outfits together and came to the conclusion that it was actually a pretty nice pile of raggedy clothes.  I made a list of the few things missing and then we put all the costumes back into bags.

After such a successful time with the first dance, I was hoping subsequent costuming would go equally as smoothly.  Dumb assumption…  Now there’s about 8 1950′s style dresses gracing the living room floor trying to be sorted into color, size, and dance piles.

But I suppose that will just have to wait until tomorrow, as my brain needs a break!
~Ellie

I finally got around to reading the book Counterfeit Gods!  I’m about half way through it and don’t want to put it down.  It’d be good if I could read slower, because I’d like to remember most of what I’m reading, but it’s so good I just want to read it as fast as I can.  So I’ll probably try to read it a second time, once I finish it the first time around, that is.  I mentioned in my post about Family Time how my mom was telling me about how Tim Keller (the author) reveals just how many things become idols in our lives.

He goes into detail about several areas that can easily become gods – money, success, love – and writes with such common sense, I wonder why I don’t think that way.  Needless to say, I don’t…  Anyhow, last night I was reading the chapter called “The Seduction of Success” and very briefly, he talks about the notion of trouble and pain faced in the world.  Though it’s really not a main focus point of the chapter, it stopped me dead in my tracks and looked me right in the eye.  Before going further, let me give you part of the passage:

“One sign that you have made success an idol is the false sense of security it brings.  The poor and the marginalized expect suffering, they know that life on this earth is “nasty, brutish, and short.”  Successful people are much more shocked and overwhelmed by troubles. …I’ve often heard people from the upper echelons say, “Life isn’t supposed to be this way,” when they face tragedy.  I have never heard such language in my years as a pastor among the working class and the poor…”

Keller adds on about how we believe success will bring security, but before I continued reading, I stopped and mulled over the above for a few minutes.  Often when tragedy occurs here in North America, people will cry out to God asking Him where he was and why something like that happened.  Growing up in this culture, I’d been asking God for an answer to that very question.  When I read how it was only the more wealthy people who feel slighted because they experienced pain, it was as though I had a revelation: this life isn’t heaven.  I am blessed to live in a place that has relatively few cataclysmic occurrences and is free of religious terror.  But in much of the rest of the world, the opposite is true.  Their life is in the balance every day and they are surrounded by people in the same situation.  It’s people in those “horrendous” situations that have a better grasp on life.  It’s short.  It’s not all about me.

After seeing the documentary Nefarious: Merchant of Souls, I signed up to receive monthly e-mails from Exodus Cry.  They deal with the issue of Human Trafficking around the globe and what’s being done to save the trafficked girls.  Just a few days ago they updated their blog with information about a country in Africa where people are consistently moving to new places in search of a safe home.  Their very lives are in danger no matter where they go and their life is what we would see as in shambles.  But these people aren’t shocked and asking where God is for what’s happening, because it’s happening all around them to everyone they see.

Please don’t misunderstand me.  There is evil around the world that is incomprehensible and I do consistently ask God why.  Why is suffering so prominent?  Why don’t You stop bad things from happening?  Why, why, why…  But my ‘why did God let this happen’ perspective got ripped away by those few sentences Tim Keller wrote.  Our life on earth is borrowed.  There is sin and evil in this world that breaks God’s heart.  The world isn’t in the state He created it to be in.  It’s as though suffering occurs to remind us of how much we need a savior, and how wonderful heaven will be.  There’s still more thinking I want to do about this, so it’s not a washed up topic in my mind.  I’m asking God for more clarity because I still am not sure I completely understand what I’m thinking, but my perspective is most definitely formulating that life is all about Jesus and we simply need to be thankful no mater what.

So next time something upsetting happens, pause and think.  There is atrociousness all over the globe; God is “the only hope that matters.”

~Ellie

With an all star cast filling the character list, it sounded pretty good, and from Laura’s description of the movie, I was quite excited to get to see it.  After 18 minutes of previews it finally started.  There were several plotlines going throughout the film.  Considering it’d take a while to explain them all, I’ll just highlight a few.

First plot was a woman who decided to quit her job and New Year’s Eve day, do everything on her resolution list before the new year.  To help, she employed a jumpstart young delivery boy [the ever so dreamy Zac Efron] telling him she’d give him her masquerade tickets if he could figure out how to make everything on her list come true.  To give you an idea of the task before him, two of the items included Go to Bali, and Save a Live…

Next plot is that of a single mom and her 15 year old daughter.  The mom is planning a nice evening at home with her daughter (who was with the father the previous new years), but the daughter wants to be at Times Square to kiss her new boyfriend at midnight.  Being the protective mother, no was the answer given to that, so the daughter decides to sneak off and won’t answer her phone, leaving the mother to try and locate her somewhere in Times Square.  [As a side note, I happened to agree with the mom that a 15 year old girl shouldn't go into Times Square on New Year's Eve by herself.  I didn't see anything wrong with the mom taking her, and giving space for the ever so romantic midnight kiss, but that's besides the point...  Oh, also, having been in NYC for a large event, I realized half of what happened wouldn't have actually happened, because once there's so many people in a fenced in area, the police won't let anyone else in - and yet in the movie people were going in and out of these highly guarded areas...  Ok, back to the plot.]

The third plot consists of a woman who is running her own catering business, and she is booked at a very ritzy nye party.  This being her first big gig, she wants everything to go well, and is keeping the kitchen running under her very watchful eye.  Problem arrises when the musical guest of the evening – who happens to be her ex-fiance – shows up and is trying to apologize to her.  She’s then faced with the never before thought of idea that maybe she could forgive him.  As the night progresses, he has to go perform in Times Square, so she thinks it’s once again over between them. Or is it?

Perhaps one of the funniest plots concerns two married couples who are about to become parents.  After a casual comment by one of the women that they’re hoping to have the first baby in the hospital on New Year’s Day because of a $25,000 prize, the second couple then tries to have their baby first.  Seeing as baby’s don’t quite follow a prescribed time clock for their delivery, they resort to eating anchovies and doing yoga to try to help the process along.

Finally (and there are more plots…) one 20something guy, who is quite bah humbug about New Year’s and a 20something girl who is on her way to work get stuck in their apartment buildings rackety old elevator for hours.  They were strangers upon meeting, but begin to develop a relationship after first ratting each other out about their assumed lifestyles.  These scenes were perhaps my favorite part of the movie :) [Besides, who wouldn't want to be stuck in an elevator with Ashton Kutcher???]

By the end of the movie, all these plots have tied together in a charming way.  I laughed out loud neumerous times throughout the movie, and if it didn’t cost $11, I’d definitely go see it again.

And that. was my first movie of 2012!
~Ellie

You see, it all started in that I wanted to accent my New Year’s outfit with gold.  One quick look at my jewelry box will give you the impression that I mostly wear silver, and therefore, my nail polish tones reflect that.  So when I went to paint my nails a rich golden blue to match my outfit, I went in my shoe box that holds the few colors of organic nail polish I own and discovered I didn’t have a deep blue.  My sister went in there and found that I had a gold polish that is supposed to be used for decorative elements.  Why not paint my whole nail with that?  Sure it’ll take twice as long to coat the nail because of the ultra skinny brush, but it would look better then any other color I had.

After starting with my toes, I came to the conclusion that it didn’t quite look just right.  So I figured for my fingers, I’d put the blue polish I did have – that clashed with my dress – on first and then coat it with the gold in hopes the gold would pop out more.  That’s just what I did.  But as I sat there looking at my wet nails, it still seemed like something was missing.  As they kept not drying (because I applied the second and third coat impatiently before the previous was completely dry) I realized what was missing: sparkles.  I sat there pondering what I could use for sparkles and game up with the perfect remedy:

Glue.

Yes, I seriously thought glue was the perfect remedy.  I had this non toxic gold sparkly glue I used to decorate my mask and so not only would it add the extra touch I thought my nails needed, but it also would tie in my nails with my mask.  Great idea, no?  I skipped downstairs to the dining room where the glue sat waiting to be put away and brought it back up to my room.  With my nails still being slightly tacky to the touch, I carefully tried to open the lid.  Success came at a slight cost to the perfectness of my nails; only a few got smudged.  Carefully I got some of the glue and spread it over my nail: it looked fantastic!  Why had I never thought of using decorative glue before?  I wondered.

Angela just gazed at me in disbelief.  Glue.  Really?  Anyway, my nails just never quite dried having two coats of blue polish, one gloppy coat of gold, and then glitter glue to seal it off.  But it was ok, because they looked good; they matched my outfit and made me feel just that much more accomplished.

Knowing that it probably wasn’t a good idea to keep the glue on my fingers for too long, New Year’s morning when I got up, I decided to take off the polish right away.  Besides it still smelled because it had never quite dried.  I went in the bathroom and got a cotton ball from the cabinet, put some polish remover on it and started swashing away at the nail.  Funny thing though, nothing was coming off.  After momentarily attributing this as a vision from my lack of sleep, it dawned on me that the nail polish actually wasn’t coming off.  I pressed harder to no avail…  Now my fingers smelt like nail polish a.n.d. nail polish remover – and the polish was still intact.  Perfectly intact.

I went down to the kitchen befuddled as to why on earth the polish remover didn’t work.  It only took half of my explanation to my sister and mom for me to realize the obvious: Glue was covering the polish, and nail polish remover is not designed to be glue remover.  Deciding to leave the problem until after breakfast, I toasted a left over waffle and tried to ignore the stench coming from my hands.  Waffle being eaten, I figured I’d try the old-fashioned way of removing nail polish.  I’m quite adept at this fashion of polish removal as for many years I’d show up at dance performances wearing neon green (and the like) polish and have to scrape it off with my other nails.  So I knew just what to do.  I set to manually scraping off the gold glue and got surprising results.  It didn’t take too much time at all for the color to come off my nails and they were back to normal.  I was also quite relieved that it didn’t become a permanent part of my nail.

So if you were ever wondering or considering giving it a try, be forewarned: glue does not equal nail polish.

~Ellie

New Year’s Eve I went to a masquerade party with my sister at her church.  While a lot of people didn’t take it seriously, I thoroughly enjoyed being dressed up in a full length evening gown and wore my mask until the clock struck midnight.  The party was pretty typical of any New Year’s celebration, except after the countdown and the celebratory hollers, the whole group spent an hour in a worship/prayer time.  It was the perfect way to bring in the new year.  Jokingly I’d said earlier in the evening that my New Year’s Resolution was to make a resolution, but I really had no intention of coming up with something that I’d keep for the whole year. (Has that even ever happened? Has anyone ever kept their resolution the whole year?)

Anyway, during the worship, my ever wandering brain started mulling over the night and the very idea of a masquerade in general.  I was starting to chide myself for not being able to focus all my attention on Jesus when God kind of took over my thoughts.  He brought a tie into my thoughts about the party and Him: don’t live in a masquerade.  Yes, it’s fun to dress up and hide behind a mask for a party, but it shouldn’t be that way in real life.  And I don’t mean that we hide behind make-up or false personalities, but we put our identity in temporal things.  I went to the party as the Midnight Sky and the whole night I wanted to be elegant and sophisticated and had a blast playing the part.  In my life though, I don’t want to just play a part.  I want to be a unique woman who has her identity in Christ.  I don’t want my mask to be whatever phase I’m going through in life, be it a college student, a dancer, or even a “Christian.”  Who I am and what I do should not be defined by ever changing life circumstances, instead my face should reflect what God is doing in my life.

I’ve never felt so identity-less then when I spend all my time in a group of people who have completely different visions for their life then mine.  It’s been difficult to feel like I don’t fit in and I’ve often stopped myself in the mirror realizing that I’m doing things I didn’t before in order for my personality to meld better with my circumstances.  That’s not what I want, and that’s definitely not what God wants.  He was showing me so strongly that people go through their life living behind a mask of identity in life situations instead of being consistently real.  At midnight when I took my mask off I could see so much more clearly and was no longer something pretend; I turned into me.

So this year, I don’t have a resolution, I’ve had a revelation.  Take off the mask of identifying with things other then God.  Take off the mask and enjoy the freedom of being uniquely you.

I also learned that it’s not necessarily a bad thing if my mind starts to wander during worship :)
~Ellie

Once we got our dresses, we went to the fabric store to get material to make our masks with.  Me being Ms. Hatetocraft, I wasn’t quite sure how this would turn out.  But, we got some decorations that seemed to look good and then picked fabric to cover the cheep white mask, went to the check out and then headed home.

With the dining room table cloth safely placed out of glitter and hot glue gun range, we spread out some newspaper on the table and set to work.  Aware that it was actually up to me to create this mask and that I couldn’t ask someone else to make it, cause “someone else” was creating her own mask, I set to work gluing the thing together.  Considering I never got past drawing like a preschooler, I knew it would have been a frivolous effort to try and draw my “midnight sky” mask, so I was creating this 3D thing based off a vague image in my head.  As I began, I realized it’d been quite a long time since I’ve dealt with hot glue, so I’d forgotten about all the spider web like strings that go everywhere.  Mix that with gold glitter glue and scrap fabric/decorations/newspaper/feathers/fingers, I was creating a bigger and bigger mess on my corner of the table.  However, that being said, my mask kept looking better as I went along!

I figured out how to make the moon pop off the mask some and then tried to add glitter to the feathers coming out of the side and then covered the three gold stars with gold glitter.  Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that I’d added the glitter, so when I went to pick them up I got my hot glued fingers extra decorated with gold glue.  It was as though I had the Midas Touch because everything I touched turned to gold!  Well, gold glitter anyhow…

Nevertheless, despite the sticky fingers and the historic record of extremely rotten craft outcomes, I am quite pleased with how my mask turned out!

It’s sitting on the table and hopefully will be ready for me to put the string on by morning.  But considering the amount of glue that’s holding it together, it might just take all weekend to dry…

~Ellie

“What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

A counterfeit god [idol] is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.

An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought.

The true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention. What do you enjoy daydreaming about? What occupies your mind when you have nothing else to think about?”

Ouch.  I’d always thought movie stars, money, fame, and the like were apt to become idols, but not a family.  While it’s good to have a strong relationship and love for your family, I’ve just discovered my admiration has gone a step too far.  What to do now?  To be honest, I’m not completely sure what path to take on this.  But as every ‘self help’ book says, knowledge of the problem is the first step.  I suppose the steps that will follow will be started off with some serious God time to put Him back in 1st place and then go from there.

But, on the happier side of things, all of us spent some time together tonight having a family game night!  My sister got a new game for Christmas called Buzzword and so it was Sisters against Parents.  None of us had played it before, so it was a toss up as to which of the four of us would find the game the easiest to play.  It started off with my sister and I.  I took the card and told her the buzzword: “ring.”  Then we flipped the timer and I listed the clues to which she had to guess answers containing the buzzword.  Sounds simple?  Not quite.  Under the pressure of time, common phrases containing simple words find it fitting to play hide and seek in your mind.  The most amount of questions we were able to answer was 8 out of 10; more often we got 3 or 4 answers right.  My parents took their turn and they didn’t realize how fast the timer went, so they didn’t get too many.  We all got the hang of it, Ang and I getting it a little better, and had plenty of laughs as looking at the card, the answers seemed obvious and yet quite elusive to our teammate.  After a bunch more rounds Angie and I took the win with 51 points to their 38.  Next time we’re going to try to switch it up and have a parent/kid on each team.  A Red Skelton show was next on the list, so we all had several hearty laughs watching that.

All in all, it was a very relaxing evening spent with my family.  It’s evenings like this, I’m realizing, that spark the realization for why I idolize my family.  We’re just wonderful :-P  In all seriousness though, I’m glad to have a family that I have to figure out how to not idolize instead of one I can’t stand.  So in that, I am truly blessed.

~Ellie