Warning. Serious blog post, hopefully to be followed by not as serious blog posts.

Today in my internship seminar we talked about the importance of self care.
Social workers, due to the intensity of their work, often experience compassion fatigue. Basically we hear other people's struggles and problems and pains so often that we begin to exhibit signs of depression because we are not properly handling the excess emotions. We use self care to step back and take time for ourselves to ensure we don't fall prey to this phenomenon. This may mean painting if you're a painter, writing if you're a writer, or baking if you're a baker. I however, am a blogger; a blogger becoming fatigued by an annoyingly busy schedule. Due to said busyness I have convinced myself that I don't have time to blog.

But I LOVE blogging, because even if I'm the only one who reads my posts, in the dark, at night... it still brings me joy. So this is my way of saying, I will be blogging more frequently in order to combat the hectic-ness that has become my life.

I'm blogging to slow down. I'm blogging to be creative. I'm blogging to laugh. I'm blogging to keep my roommates from finding me in fetal position whispering to myself that I just want to give up... because, no matter our major, or line of work, don't we all feel like that sometimes? Whether it's organizing an annual Christmas musical, going through the interview process for acceptance into graduate school, traveling every single week, doing all of the miscellaneous jobs in the office that end up on your plate, or juggling school, work, and an internship, we all experience fatigue and we must all find the joy that counters it.

Let this not be my way of saying that true joy comes from the words I spell out on a webpage. Because when I am captured by the world, I have a God who rescues me and holds me in his hands.

"You will seek me and find me when you seek with all your heart. I will be found by you," declares the Lord, "and will bring you back from captivity." Jeremiah 29:13-14

I felt like Doogie Howser the whole time I wrote this. Imagine I was typing it on a blue computer screen and this was playing the whole time (click play button below and reread entire blog post)

Attention society, I've solved all of your problems.

You know when you have those nights when everything in the world is running through your mind and you can't fall asleep and you have amazing thoughts and then you fall asleep and when you wake up you think, "I should have written it down!" because you can't for the life of you remember? Well if you wake up in the middle of the night and remember your dreams, Freud says don't write them down. BUT, if you have an amazing world changing thought before you fall asleep, you should jot it down. And this is the thought I had on the cusp of sleeping a few nights ago.

I've determined how to solve crime. Forget dramatic trials, forget OJ pleading innocent while his isotoners are still warm, forget the blind woman who can't tell if the car is metallic mint green. No need. I've solved it all.

Has anybody played signature bingo? It's one of those awful ice breakers that EVERYBODY hates, but you have to play so you slowly walk around the room pretending like you're participating and hoping one of those weird hyper-competitive or socially uninhibited people finish quickly. The gist is you have a "bingo" card with random things on each square like, "I'm adopted" or "I've been to all 50 states" and you have to walk around and find people who can sign those honestly. Here's an example:

You get the idea?

Great, so I've figured out how to solve crimes. All people are naturally competitive (or at least that's what you believe if you grow up in a family even remotely like mine). So we play off that and we put a whole bunch of likely criminals in a room together and we hand them BINGO cards like this:

I was running out of crimes, hence "loiterer" and "insurance fraud"

So we explain the game to them and say the first one to get a "black out" wins. So naturally, because they all want to win, somebody will say, "can you sign anything on my card?" and another person will be like "yeah! I've totally got weed in my car right now" or, "Yeah, I'm Casey Anthony". And voilà. Crimes. Solved.

I'm a genius. (and by genius I mean I misspelled genius the first time I typed it out)