Not Dead

Hello friends and family!  First of all, I want to take a moment and assure you,

I AM NOT DEAD.

Secondly, I apologize for the gigantic pause I took between posts.  There are a few reasons.  Wait wait - here, lists are more impressive:

• I took a vacation.  For a month.  Worth every second.
• We started a new term of school, and working legitimately eats up a fair amount of time.
• God and I had a couple things to talk through.
• I had to decide whether or not to return to China, and my thoughts were all over the board.  It was consuming a lot of my thinking, and I decided that it was a private process.
• I still haven't settled on what my plan for next year is.  I feel like a high school senior who hasn't picked a college or made a plan yet - in that awkward phase when every friendly person asks you what you're going to do next year, and you struggle to come up with something more eloquent than, "Uhhh...."
• During my vacation, I met a friend who loves writing as much as I do.  Correspondence became my primary writing outlet.  Basically I've been cheating on my blog with my pen-pal. I apologize.  It's nothing personal.
• I felt guilty about my failure to blog, so I avoided it even more.  Then my mom told me that my Papa put in a personal request that I start writing again.  (Sorry Papa!!)
• Expressing 'in-the-moment' feelings of culture shock isn't always constructive.
• I've been lazy.

If you were to flip through a lifetime of my journals (please don't) you'd see that every time I stop writing for a few months, I have to explain why.  This is the first time that OTHER people have cared! I have to admit, the fact that people read this still feels a little unreal.  If you bother to follow my life and times,* send me a comment every once in a while so I know you're real!  It's so encouraging when I hear from you.

I have so many stories to tell, stories about my vacation, about students, pollution storms, acupuncture, haggling wars...  I'm sorry for being a lame blogger lately.  More to come soon!

*I was typing fast when I wrote this sentence, and my typos read 'lies and ties,' which is really funny!!  ...and not at all reflective of a secret agenda. =)