God has been showing me just how much he is involved in my life. I realized at the end of the last year that as much as I believed, I didn't have my identity in Christ and there were parts of my life that I wasn't giving up to him. I had been having a really hard time for the year leading up to that and I so desperately wanted things to change and I wanted to be His completely. I prayed for God to radically change my life, and I prayed for him to open my eyes to the ways he was working in my life, as well as praying for specific areas of my life that I knew I needed Him to be in. And he gave me very clear answers. Answers about my romantic relationship, my family, and my school life and career. Currently, I am single, I probably have ADD, I'm closer to my family than I've ever been, and I'm still working on my identity but I'm not so worried about it anymore. God is giving me the ability to love again but to love from His ever flowing fountain, not from my own.

What can I say?

So much can change in a year

Most of these photos are actually from my good friend Michael Vo. I took mostly film shots that weekend, but there are a couple shots of mine that I'll mark.

I can't believe it's been a year since I left this place. It was a true cosmos amongst the chaos for me.

A small group of my home town friends decided to go beach camping together at a place called Camp Merryeland. People usually hear me saying that I hate the beach, sometimes I even trick myself into thinking that too. But what I actually hate, is the noise and crowded cacophony that comes with the vacationers that flock there. That, plus the constant awareness of beer cans and toxic trash embedded into the sand, the attacking seagulls.... you can see why people think I hate it. But I actually love the sea; I used to want to be a marine biologist. Though I was never a strong swimmer (or a swimmer at all) so I never actually got to spend much time in the water. There's something so enthralling life underwater, where flight loses it's meaning because everything is already flying.

Anyhow, being there was all so surreal to me, mostly because I usually never get to go to these types of outings because financials or protective parents were always in the way. A few of us arrived a day later than the others because of work, but lucky for us we missed out on all the chaos that ensued that night before. We arrived right after a huge storm passed through the camp, the heavy rain flooded the tents and the winds threatened to blow the tents away. By the time we got there the others had already set and cleaned everything up and gotten deep into the sixpacks and jungle juice. Most of them drank enough that night to have mellowed out in their party urges for the rest of the week haha.

We spent the days

I want to know why something is good, not because I want to analyze it. But because I want to be able to then use that information to recognize the beauty in other things. --0

I'm here to reopen the case of the effects and implications of negative knee-jerk reactions as it is applied to other people. Recently, I've developed the theory that many of these reactions often stem from developed biases and can plant a seed of prejudice slowly creep into our beliefs and actions. While typical and generally benign, I think it can often choke our ability to reach our full potential for love and respect and thus induce significant losses of respect that would be otherwise unwarranted.  In the process, I'll have to define an understanding of the negativity that term "ew" here, represents, as well as discuss the distinctions between human and natural knee jerk reactions.

In this specific instance, the situation is of thinking "ew" as an internal reaction to a girl wearing too much makeup because it could be a sign of little confidence.