Unbelievable.

Dear Mama,

Today started out in a dream.

I was battling the opinions of a few certain people and in the middle of it all an alarm clock went off. It interrupted my ranting, so I immediately turned it off and continued my verbal battle. I was winning and I didn’t want to lose my edge.

This dream drifted into a different one where I missed my 8:00am class and Professor Bowtie morphed from his normal friendly self to a critical, harsh man with blazing red eyes who towered over me as he ranted about my irresponsibility.

This is a horrible fear of mine, that I will sleep through one of my classes. So, this is a dream that I actually have relatively frequently. I mean, normally the professors are just disappointed in me, but nevertheless these dreams always make me feel a little sick, very stressed, and I normally have a headache for half an hour afterward.

I woke up from this dream, grabbed my phone, and for the first time since I had the flu last fall, I realized that this nightmare was about to come true…

My 8:00am class was going to start in 4 minutes. To make it worse, today’s attendance was mandatory. 

I jumped out of bed, threw on my jeans, put on the first shirt I could grab, picked up my flip flops and backpack, and ran across campus barefooted, makeup-less with unbrushed hair, in the most unattractive shirt I own. I was halfway to class before I realized I still had my retainer in.

My lack of deodorant, plus the several minute long run, going down the three flights of stairs to get to The Ark, and going up another three flights of stairs to get to the right floor left me smelly.

I abhor body odor.

I arrived 5 minutes after class had started. Thankfully, three people came in after me, so I only the rudest person in the room for about 30 seconds.

I sat in the chair closest to the door and tried very hard to not breathe like a person fighting off a heart attack.

Professor Bowtie hadn’t begun the devotion for the day, so I assumed he had started a minute or two later than normal, which made my interruption a little less horrible.

After a few minutes, my breathing calmed and I managed to take out my retainer very quickly without anyone noticing. I folded it in a piece of paper and (thanks to you), I had gum with me.

Within a few moments minty freshness took the place of morning breath.

Professor Bowtie’s lecture took up about half of the class time. We are going over excel spreadsheets, the stock market, and all of that intimidating stuff that seems to suck all the light from a room and cause death to all who possess laughter and joy.

After the lecture, we had to work with our assigned groups.

Um…

My group pretty much hates me.

I think I smiled one too many times or something, because I’m relatively positive that they’re all convinced I’m the stupidest person on the face of the planet.

There are five of us, but one girl never shows up, so it’s me and the other three. These three always manage to lean in together and mumble just loud enough for each other understand what’s being said. I’m always on the outside and I have no idea what plans are being made.

You see, this shouldn’t be a problem because the instructions on our project are pretty cut and dry, but it turned out that we all had to submit the exact same file.

So our stupid projects had to be identical.

Which means when the Three decide to add a subtitle to our project, I have to know that decision was made so I can implement that change to my file as well. This causes a bit of a problem when they don’t directly speak to me unless I first ask to be spoken to.

As you know, two days ago I had an appointment with Professor Bowtie about skipping class on Easter weekend so I can come home. At the end of this appointment I asked him about a few things that the Three had decided about our project, to make sure these were okay changes.

You see, we all had to pick a company and “invest” imaginary money in those companies, and track how well the stocks did, whether we got a profit, all that junk. We were supposed to track the stocks every week and add the weekly changes to our spreadsheet… my group wanted to check every other week. This is one example of the changes I asked Professor Bowtie about, because they didn’t follow the instructions exactly, so I wasn’t sure if we would be counted off for those changes.

Professor Bowtie told me we would definitely be counted off if we didn’t follow the instructions.

… I know… shocker…

I e-mailed everyone in my group that day and told them what Professor Bowtie had said so they could all make the necessary changes. I then changed my own spreadsheet and submitted the assignment.

Well, today in class I realized that no one in my group had done the extra work to correct the mistakes. Professor Bowtie kindly allowed us to submit the assignment late so we could work on them in class. Since I was the one who had done the extra work, I emailed my file to everyone else.

When our whole row opened my file, Professor Bowtie made a big deal about one of the graphs I’d done. He said he loved the way it was presented and that he had never seen information laid out that way. He called the whole class over to look at this chart. I was really surprised, excited, and pleased! He said he was going to take it and use it as an example for his future classes! One of the Three blew it up on his screen so everyone could see, but did not say a word about how the graph was actually all my work.  

Now, I’m not in kindergarten. I don’t need the Professor to know whenever I’ve done something great. I don’t need his affirmation, especially not in front of the whole class. The thing that bothered me was that everyone in my group had literally just opened my file less than 2 minutes before the professor walked by, and they all just sat there like it was a big communal project. Now, even that would have been almost okay, except that after all this happened, and everyone had returned to their seats, I was still left out of the Mumbling-Three-Ways and the changes were still explained to me only when I asked for them.

At the end of it all, one of the Three sent out his modified version of my file to everyone so we could all submit the same thing. When he did, I opened it and realized that he had invested about $150 more in company shares than we were allowed to invest. I brought this up, and the group didn’t really care. They wanted to go, class was technically over, everyone else had left a few minutes before, and the points we would lose by doing it incorrectly didn’t really bother them.

Now, I probably shouldn’t have cared as much as I did, but I want to do well. It wasn’t a difficult assignment, and we easily could have gotten full credit. But, because we all had to submit the same thing and the group didn’t want to change the amounts, I had to just submit the assignment knowing that there was something wrong with it.

This was the moment that I decided I hate group projects.   

It was about 20 minutes before chapel, and I texted The Ap’s, asking if she could bring my make up bag with her; and because she is wonderful, she did so.

It’d been a rough morning.

The Ap’s showed up with my bag, and I went into the gross over-used public restroom. As I washed my face in the sink of the nearly abandoned room, I heard the beginning of some of the worship songs.

I could finally breathe. It was going to be okay. Class was over.

I applied my make up, fluffed my hair, and came out of the bathroom feeling refreshed and a little more put together.

As I stood in the Giant Golfball, singing along to the songs that spoke of my Savior, I began to feel grateful.

You know, we serve a really great God.

All the little positive things I’d been trying to think of throughout the morning became easier to grasp. As I sang, I began to thank God for things in my morning…

Yeah, I’d woken up four minutes before class, but I’d woken up! (That’s not the cliché “I could have been dead” thing. It’s just that I’m aware that I basically sleep like a log. The fact that I woke up in time to make it to class without an alarm clock was purely by His Grace.)

I have a retainer to keep that one stupid tooth from getting crooked, and I only have to wear it twice a week! So yeah, it came on a field trip with me to class, but I’m really glad I have it.

Thanks to your package coming in the mail just a couple days ago, I had gum in my bag to get rid of my nasty breath.

Professor Bowtie liked my graph so much that he’s going to use it to teach other students after I leave this school! So yeah, even if I didn’t get the credit, knowing that he liked it that much made me feel less like the stumbling child that I always feel like when working with my group. That was encouraging.

And yeah, I’m going to miss some points on this assignment. But because of the faithfulness of God, I’ve been able to submit assignments on time, remember and apply the work in class, and do it to a point that I have 97% of the possible points in that class. Computers and I don’t mix well! Excel is scary! Yet, because of how great God is, He’s kept the information in my mind and I’ve been able to succeed.

And what’s neat is, once I thanked God for all of those things, the day seemed a lot brighter than it had before.

And I’m actually kind of glad today started out so roughly, because if it hadn’t then I wouldn’t have even thought to thank God for all of those little things.

I’m glad that God knows me well enough to allow rough things to happen so I’m reminded of how Great He is. It’s really easy for me to forget to be thankful when everything is going smoothly.  

And now, it’s 1 in the morning.

It’s Saturday.

I’m about to have read my Bible and have a little more one-on-One time with the Creator of the Universe.

And that’s unbelievable.

But that’s my life.

And I just wanted to tell you all of that, because it all ended up being really exciting to me. And I like to tell you exciting stuff.

So anyway…

I’ll talk to you soon,

With Love,

Me