I guess that's enough, I hope it is.

Today I want more than anything to write deep and artistic words to describe the pattern of life I currently reside in. But no, today is a blunt, rough, to the point sort of deal, so take it or leave it! I mostly write this for my own forgetful mind anyhow, so who cares if it's beautiful or not? Never mind. I can't pretend I don't love to read beautifully scripted words. I really, really, sincerely do. Yesterday I finished the last few hours of my 20 hour practicum for TEFL. The teacher signed my forms and I biked through the misty rain to the post this morning and sent it away to Illinois. I'm remembering now that I've never mentioned I was doing a TEFL course. Well, turns out I am! August 13th was the day I began my online certification course to learn how to teach English as a second language. I'm working on my final exams and will be finished in a few weeks time. (Thank the Lord! I've never studied so intensely and written so many essays in my LIFE!!! AND on top of German homework!!!) It was really just a whim that developed over about a month and after a few phone calls and some research, I started the course. It has been challenging me more than I'd expected, but the skills I've learned are already so much vaster than I expected. The certification allows me to teach English throughout so many different countries. My dream is to one day teach in Asia somewhere, but I'm interested in Germany as well, simply because I love being here and because I understand their language, it's much easier for me to teach Germans. I can analyze mistakes based on what I know about their own language. The children I did my practicum with were so fun! Once I spoke German with them so they saw I was learning their language, they opened up so much to me and began speaking more English. Helping them learn is one of the most rewarding experiences that I've had and planning lessons (although very time consuming) is a rather joyful experience at the same time! I feel quite accomplished by the end if my work. I have to say, I will miss my 40 minute bike rides to Wassenberg with my English flash cards in my backpack and good music in my ears. Thankfully, the biking and good music part is still possible since my German school started last week. I'm in a class above my level which is intimidating but also pushes me. I think back to when I first started school here and sat through an hour and half class of "gibberish" to my ears. Now I can sit in a class and give feedback and state my opinion. I'm not sure how my brain managed it, but I am grateful. Somedays my brain explodes though. I'd bike to German school where I only speak German, then I'd bike to my practicum where I only speak English, then I bike home where I speak German to the parents and English to the kids, so every turn I take or conversation I have is constantly switched between languages. Good but also damaging to my brain at times. I'm drinking a giant glass of iced green tea in an attempt to appease the guilt and literal nausea I feel from the amount of chips I ate. There's something scary in the ease of reaching for more and more and more and then some more. And now this tea is really just forcing me to get up and use the bathroom more often than I'd like. Sometimes life really shoves it in my face how very human I am. A week or so ago, Jojo asked me to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks with her and I obliged, even though we'd been watching it every few days for the past week. We stood in front of the tv, chose a chipmunk and acted out their character. We were dancing and singing and miming the entire movie while we ate ice cream bars, and at one point when Christoph walked in I just had to swallow a laugh and soak in the glorious shame of how utterly ridiculous I looked. Oh the joy of taking care of children. Never a dull or un-humiliating moment to be spoken of. Usually when I put Jojo to bed, I read her stories. She always wants me to be ticklish but thankfully children aren't capable of properly tickling so I've lucked out. But a few nights ago, she somehow discovered what blurpies were and unfortunately for me, I am extremely ticklish from that. She yanked up my shirt and gave me a huge one on my tummy that made me burst into uncontrolled laughter. After that, she had me. It was dark, and all I'd hear was a huge inhale of breath, then 3 seconds later I was dying with more laughter. So much for making her sleepy. My laughs made her laugh and we literally laid in her bed laughing our heads off. Then we would put our heads really close and she'd switch on the light really fast so we could watch each other's pupils get bigger and smaller. At long last, she got sleepy and I laid in the dark thinking about how real I had laughed with her, just like I would with Boogie or Katie when we were hyper and couldn't sleep. It was good for my soul to laugh like that again. Autumn has truly and fully hit Germany and I am loving it. The air is the greatest gift to my skin and the smell of leaves and rain envelop my clothes when I take walks. Somehow the gray skies make me feel light and joyful. I had a gloomy sort of day last week and when it started pouring rain I was very happy to be sad because it was such a complete and perfect sadness. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of things I could be saying that are of importance concerning what I'm doing with my life here, new things that have happened, new things I've learned, and other me-related things but somehow I just want to let the letters keep flying across the page without direction and just get the thoughts out of my head so I can be filled up with new ones. Kind of like a pensieve right? Right. There's been a knot of stress building between my shoulder blades and creeping into my neck and when my eyes open to the dreadful beeping of my alarm, it's the first part of myself I become aware of as I attempt to relax it which only tenses it more. I could stress about my stress but then I think of the redundancy of that action and also of the months earlier when my supposedly unstressed self would start each waking moment with a sharp, long ache that droned eternally through me as I prayed myself to start a day. I'm certainly not homesick for homesickness. As long as that no longer takes over my physical being, stress can take me over any day. Stress doesn't seep into bones, into the soul, into the very heart of self. Stress can be taken off like your make-up after a party. Maybe there's remnants that make you look a little bit like death, but you're clean and you're you again. Did you know sometimes I hide my thoughts even from myself? In order to block my heart from what I am, I suppose. Every human feels this, I know it. But maybe they don't think about it that much. Odd, isn't it? We don't think much about thoughts we don't think about because they sicken us to the core. And the core isn't pretty either. None of it is. None of us are. But we like to pretend and stupidly, we somehow believe each other's prettiness even though we know none of us come close to what pretty is, what beauty is. Only one can portray that. So in a way we're all thieves. We take the idea of beauty and wrap it around our warped selves and glide through life as though we have something no one else has. We all don't have what no one else has. Only one has that what we all ache and long for. My act has grown weary of enveloping me and I looked down one day and saw myself instead of the array of beauty that I tried to steal. I hate looking at it. I want to have the pretend beauty back and love myself even though I'm only loving a thin and wispy ideal that is swept away and leaves me cold and ashamed. If I can't look at me, who could? One does. Just One.