God's provision for Carrie the Casual Camel

Today I ate a strawberry.
No, I'm just kidding - but that's the sentence I always think of whenever I find myself wanting to start a post with "Today,..." cause I don't want my blog to be about wee little things that happen to me each day that people don't want to read about. I mean personally, I love reading those kinds of posts, too, and there's definitely merit in the realizations that exist in the little "Today I ate a strawberry" moments that may have lead you to think of how many little seeds exist in this tiny body of a fruit and what if all those seeds could've become strawberries but nope cause you ate them all, probably in one chomp oops sorry try again...you know?! And I mean you gotta have these realizations during some "Today," so I guess I'm really making no sense, but that's not what this post is about anyways.

It's just that...
Today,
for some reason (alright, not "some" reason - there's actually a concrete reason, but I just don't wanna tell you), I just felt God's provision for me so much. Keeping with the vague theme, here's the generalized story: I've just been really scared about lots of things lately, and God keeps proving himself faithful. A faithful God. A good God. Today especially. I keep trekking through literal and figurative uncharted lands these days and it's scary and weird because I just never know what to do or expect or think or feel about all this. But today, for some concrete, abstract reason, I just felt that all was right with me. Alllllllll iiiiiiis riiiiiiiight wiiiiiith meeeee hmmmmmm - just reassured in the most mysterious, wonderfully unreassuring way, because it's not that the scary things are gone, I just know that whatever happens with whatever I have or don't have, it's all in God's freakishly awe-inspiring plan. But the thing is, that it's like . . . DUH. Why so silly, Jaehee Madison  Lee? All these things my brain knows, my heart and mind need to be reminded of so often, in the weirdest ways (how demanding).

I mean even camels are provided for in this wonderful design. Did you know they have three eyelids? Apparently "the third lid is extra thin and see-through, so the camel can pull it down in sandstorms" according to a very credible source (MMR, text message 9:24 pm 2/24/11). SWEEET, right? And so amazingly created - so wonderfully provided for. And this isn't even about their humps...wutttt!

Carrie the Casual Camel

So...Today,
I'm just rejoicing in God's provision, and in camels, for their humps and their tri-eyelids, and in blogging about the insanely mundane, and the beauty of the fact that God's love is sometimes simply insanely mundane. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Insane, insane, insane. How can I keep from singing?

Did you know that earbuds are magnetized? If you try to push them together, they will repel each other gently.

eugene the mean writin' machine

Eugene is my favorite 5th grader. During our tutoring sessions, I make him write poetry under the guise of "fostering his imagination" haha... But really, he is the smartest, funniest, most unwittingly romantic fifth grader I know. He always protests when I demand love poetry out of him as the next week's homework assignment, but I think he secretly enjoys it...maybe. Haha anyways here are some of his best bits of literary genius. 

Oh, also, we enjoy madlibs quite a bit.

"In fact, in about 38 years, the air will be eighty percet sunshine because we are cutting down all of the kisses in the Brazilian rain forest." These are not such bad prospects for the Earth, huh?

yeah, your group project partners are people, too. don't be mean.

Eugene's preferred writing utensils...obviously.

Um. Swoon. Haha lucky Jennygirl.

Learning about metaphors i.e. "Her fingers on the piano keyboard were lost ducklings...like they didn't know where to go!"

What a guy, this Eugene. He totally makes my Saturday afternoons.

vday thang

Love closes the door suuuuuper softly at night because someone is sleeping inside.
Love is my dad "tucking" us into bed aka actually just fluffing out the blanket cause he's kinda bad at tucking.
Love <==> understanding. knowing (noun, not verb).
Love forsakes sleep (varying degrees).
Love has magic conversations in circles with its loved ones.
Love squeals; is stoic.
Love exists wayyy out of the comfort bubble.
Love is like zomgmindexplode (?)
Love exists all over your sleeve and stuff.
Love makes lumps in your throat, headaches in your heart, smiles...on your face haha.

Dear world,
Happy Valentine's Day. woah funny how the word "love" hasn't started looking like a non-word yet. love love love love love.

to know, know, know her is to love, love, love her

S O R R Y

"désolé" - français

- desolate

- disconsolate

- bleak

- stark

- woebegone

- sorry

"mi dispiace" - italiano

verb: dispiacere

- to displease

- to mind

- to hate

- to be sorry

"lo siento" - español

verb: sentir

- to feel

- to sense

- to regret

- to be sorry

These are three ways to say "I'm sorry." In every day usage and found in conversational French/Italian/Spanish phrases books as, simply, "I'm sorry." But if you really think about the literal meanings of the words composing these different translations of this little sentence, each is really unique and impressively more sorry-seeming than its English counterpart.

The literal meaning of a French person's "désolé (sorry)" to your sorry-inducing story is: "(I am) desolate." "I'm hungry!" "My cat is overweight :(" "The state of the world economy today makes me worried..." whatever your woes, I am desolate for you. What a show of sympathy - &what an adjective, right?! Thanks for being so expressive, Frenchmen.

so desolate.

In Italian, to say "I am sorry," is actually a bit of a grammar feat. "Mi dispiace," though it is one of the first phrases anyone learning the language will learn, involves indirect object pronouns and third person conjugation of verbs in the present tense. wowzas!! Haha anyway, the verb from which this phrase derives is "dispiacere" - the antonym of "piacere," I guess, which means "to please." So dispiacere means "to displease." And the little "mi" means "to me," so all in all the whole thing says to you, "(Something, it, that, the fact that your toe is stubbed, etc.) displeases me." Ultimately, empathizing with your worries. Dang yo, I really hate that this bad thing happened to you. That really bothers, bugs, irks me, like it does you. I'm really sorry.

empathy, according to google images

Spanish speakers are feeeeeeeeling you when you're down in the dumps - "lo siento" is similar to the Italian one in the grammar feat department, except it literally means "I feel it." So it's not exactly the same as the Italians' saying that empathizes with you, but this one still expresses that the speaker knows what you're feeling and feels the same way about it. This is like AH I put my figurative hand over my figurative heart and literally say I am so sorry - I feel your pain. 

YOU WHAT?! WOW THAT SUCKS; YOUR PAIN MY PAIN

I know all this makes the English "I'm sorry" seem boring, too normal, whatever, but sorry derives from "sorrow" which is pretty dramatic and sorrowful, too. Haha so no need to hate on English.

hey man i'm really sorry

All of this I will mean the next time I tell you "I'm sorry."


P.S. Koreans on the other hand...

to the lefties of the world:

First of all, a special hello to you!
Secondly, are you even there? Is anyone even reading this? Because I realize the viewer population of my blog is probably pretty small and I'm not sure that any of you will be left-handed enough to be intrigued by the title of this post. I would probably read a post entitled "to the lefties of the world" even though I'm definitely a righty, but that's only because I really just enjoy reading blogs.

But okay - if you're there, HULLO. I've been thinking about this for a while, so let me know if you have an answer or resonating feelings or thoughts:

Dear left-handed people, do you feel slighted by this righty-dominated world? Turning the knob left to make the volume go down and to the right to make it go up (something seeming inherently bigger and better and greater about turning the knob to the right), looking for the "before" picture on the left side of the TV and the "after" on the right (they always have them "before"-->"after" if they're side to side, resulting in sort of an "uhhhgg..hh."-->"ooohhwoahhh" reaction), when talking with your hands flailing in sync, having to use the left side of your airspace as the "yesterday" and the right side as "today" and "the next day" and "the future" just in general, having to take extra care to write un-smudgily because our society demands that you read and write from left to right?...being bombarded by a bunch of buffoons thrusting out their right hand when you introduce yourself and wanna shake hands to make the meeting official??...sitting uncomfortably in those tiny right-handedness-adjusted seats with the mini desks attached???

Woah here's some more stuff from wikipedia:

Many technological devices are made primarily for right-handed people...refrigerators, scissors, microwaves, cameras (ARGH that must be annoying!), can-openers, computer mice, padded kitchen mittens (padded only on one side ARGH), many musical instruments, military rifles (many injuries have resulted from spent cartridge casings hitting left-handed users in the eye and head!!!!). 

We right-handed are righteous, moving right along, going right ahead and getting things done right away so that everything is right as rain, you guys always seem to be being left behind, left in the dust, popping up out of the left field and throwing salt over all your left shoulders and eating leftovers...sigh!!

And WOAH look at the wiki page for left-handedness (the above link was for righthandedness)!

The  Latin word for sinistra originally meant "left" but took on meanings of "evil" or "unlucky" by the classical Latin era and its double meaning survives in European derivatives of Latin, and in the English word "sinister." ... The right hand has historically been associated with skill: the Latin word for right-handed is dexter, as in "dexterity," meaning manual skill. Even the word "ambidexterity" reflects the bias. Its intended meaning is "skillful on both sides." However, since it keeps the Latin root dexter, which means "right," it ends up conveying the idea of being "right-handed at both sides." ... In Chinese culture, the adjective "left" sometimes means "improper" or "out of accord" and in Korean, the word for "right" (오른) and the word meaning "morally proper" (옳은) share the same pronunciation.

?!WUHHH!!!!!


But maybe it's not this way - maybe you don't feel jibbed at all. Though the world is, in fact, dominated in number by right-handed people, you have - even if unwittingly - put on a brave face and endured and adjusted. Maybe you have become stronger of character and pleasant-er of disposition because you have been put through all these extra troubles and are surviving, pushing through, livin yo life anyways. I just don't know...I'm only a young right-handed girl!

awkward left handshakes by some cartoon characters - not real people