Oh joy. I can’t really find the words to describe the beauty of Iron & Wine. Perhaps Amy went into more detail. I will, however, share with you all a beautiful photo that she did not, as well as the photo that she shared, uncropped* and in its entirety.

I apologize for the blurriness of the first photo. It’s a fact that I’m sure many other lower-end digital camera* owners must face occasionally: the too-far-from-the-stage problem. With the flash turned on, the photo is too dark because the flash catches the backs of the heads in front of you. With the flash off, the shutter-speed is longer, and it makes it look a little blurry. Now, those of you with the new sleek shiny cameras are probably laughing at this, but there’s little I can do. In a way, I think it’s kind of artistic.

Anyway, I just felt the need to update with a few photos. I’ve got plenty of nice ones that I’ve been meaning to share with you all, just haven’t found the time. Good news is that next week should be a little less crazy than this one has, and if not, it’s almost summer!

On with the photos.

Sam Beam.

Corey, Mandy, Amy, Sam Beam.

*For the sake of complete honesty, I did crop it a teeny tiny bit, just because there was a lot of black space around the edge that had nothing to do with Sam Beam.

**When I got my camera, it was top-notch, and I mean it no disrespect by putting it in the low-end category. It’s not a low-end camera, but it certainly has a couple of years on most others.

Sorry to have to do this to you all. The moderation was working great, as far as keeping that spam off the site, but it was a different story entirely every time I checked my email.

The system was set up to notify me every time a comment was blocked, and it placed it in the moderation queue where I had to go in and delete each comment manually. Not a huge problem, until I started getting hundreds at a time. That’s a lot of comments to have to delete manually. So, I’m really sorry, but I had to install one of those little verification thingies that you see all over the place these days. So you’ll have to type in 5 little numbers before you can comment on my blogs.

Now, if this slight inconvenience discourages any of you from commenting, then you’re just a bunch of lazy readers, and I might as well quit blogging now, while I’m ahead.

I woke up this morning at 8:03 from a most interesting dream. It was one those dreams that, even though you know it was a beautiful story with vivid details and plenty of beautiful characters, when you wake up all you can remember are bits and pieces that are only enough to form the skeleton of the dream. And with none of the details or characters or vibrancy, you wake up feeling that same kind of lonely that you feel after an exciting week with friends you haven’t seen in a long time, and then you have to return home to the same old everyday routine.

So after having spent a good five minutes trying desperately to conjure up as much of the dream that I could, my consciousness slowly adjusted itself to the present, and I realized that it was 8:08, and I had no hope of waking the family up in time enough to make it to my 9:00 programming class. I could have easily made it to my 10:00 Spanish class, but… why? In a way, it was a huge step forward for me, it was an accomplishment to take such a terrible thing as not waking up for class in such stride. I tend to feel intensely guilty when I don’t do something that I feel obligated to do, but this morning I somehow managed to conquer that guilt. Or perhaps it was more that I felt I deserved to have the day off, after the week I’ve had.

Yeah. Speaking of that feeling of having to get everything done, even though I so easily swept it aside this morning, it managed to absolutely own me for the vast majority of the week. I was absolutely tired, didn’t sleep, didn’t really eat, and I spent each evening this week with pretty intense headaches. All because I’m an overachiever. I give myself to much to do, or I let other people give me too much to do.

I’ve always been an overachiever, and usually I’ve managed to handle it, more or less. I’ve dealt with school, work (when I can), church, service groups, designing websites for people, and of course trying to keep the family from kicking me out and my friends from forgetting who I am. Usually, when things get really busy or hectic or stressful, I just sleep a little less, drink a little more coffee, and wait for things to settle.

But this week I’ve realized that, even if I never sleep or eat or sit down to watch a TV show, even if I drink coffee by the pot-full and as many Red Bulls as my friends’ charity will provide, there still comes a point in which it becomes physically impossible to accomplish everything on the to-do list. This is the point at which, even if I spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (excepting, of course, Thursday evenings) working or studying or designing or having meetings, I still couldn’t get it all done. This week I realized that I’ve officially reached that point, at about 3:00 Monday morning, to be exact.

While it was certainly a startling realization, it was also kind of refreshing.. kind of like I’d found an out. It was like, I knew that I couldn’t finish the week having done everything I wanted to do, so essentially and in just as good faith, I could just not do anything. Being such an overachiever, one failure is just about as bad as 300 failures. So I just went to bed.

Of course, I woke up at 6:30 Monday right back at that startling realization, only this time I’d had my nightly sleep ration, and my senses had returned, and I was completely overwhelmed again. I pulled out the to-do list, determined that it would not have me, that I could deal with it the same way I always dealt with my to-do lists. Later in the evening, I got kind of gutsy, and started scratching things off the list that I hadn’t really done. Email Advisor, Raid coffee-aisle at Food Lion, Laundry. Then things like writing English papers and listening to music in the car and even hanging out with friends, I couldn’t enjoy because I was stressing out over everything else I had to do. Creativity? Haven’t had any room for that in a very long time. I haven’t had time for writing, or for drawing or painting. Even if I did, it wouldn’t be any fun.

So naturally, after I finished up mi tarea de español and settled in for my 3 hours of sleep, my body decided that it wasn’t going to take anymore of this overachieving never sleeping business, and it just didn’t wake up on time.

Now, if you’ve read this far already, I’m going to tell you the real moral of the story, the real reason you had to read all my ramblings. I’m cutting back my to-do list. Even if it means not doing things that I feel are productive, or good, or would make good blogs. Even if it means I don’t make perfect grades, or don’t finish college with a degree in every field. I mean.. I miss Hopewood, I miss friends, I miss writing poetry and enjoying reading it. Also, I really do need to stop putting off the laundry. The clothes at the bottom of my dresser are far from being cool.. they’re not even passé.

So. I suppose this was far longer than I intended, but I haven’t written anything here in quite some time, as someone pointed out to me today.

I hope you all didn’t suffer too much from reading this, and that you have a marvelous weekend.