May 26th

It was a good Sunday. A simple one but a good one, a day where I found a few solutions.

Audience I've been experiencing what my mother calls mild depression and what Study Abroad at Iowa calls   "bittersweet realization". Call it what you like but it essentially boils down to me sleeping restlessly and for longer lengths of time. Not to mention the dreams that I'd like to lock away. So being a semi-responsible adult-child I decided that something had to be done to stop all the nonsense. My solution was tea and history.

I finished a Spot of Bother which was a great book but a somewhat unnerving one as well. It's a realistic fiction with fascinating characters but also some nagging plots that dug at a few areas. Anyhow it didn't relax me as I had hoped.

Revising for lexicology proved useless as well. I read pages of vocabulary but couldn't seem to focus at all. That blew. I was restless yet bored at the same time. Gah first world problems. Didn't give up.

I ended up looking at my small collection of books (I sent my precious Tolken novels home) and spotted my Brief History of the United States. It was an act of desperation audience. I grabbed the book and started reading about Christopher Columbus (who until death kept thinking the Caribbean was Asia) and a few of the Indian (sorry Amerindian) tribes. The book was surprising decent. Fun fact, the Sioux Indians called themselves Dakota which means "allies" whereas everyone else called them Sioux which means "enemies". Eye of the beholder.

Tea was then brewed as I reviewed the first few chapters of my young country's history. The book includes several immigration maps and overviews of simultaneous events. I think I actually rehashed lessons that have been drilled into my brain ever since I could distinguish Quakers from a tube of oatmeal. In any case I knew more than I realized.

It did the trick. The brilliant combination of tea and history killed the stress my mind had been weaving and burying in my subconscious and appearing as terrifyingly realistic images during my sleep cycles. Flipside, though I didn't have nightmares I didn't fall asleep until after six in the morning. No I was not addicted to my book, no I was not on youtube. I was lying in my bed trying to sleep with no avail. Sigh, well it's better than snakes falling from the ceiling.

It's called a compass dude!