The Evolution of a {Wo}man

On the promise that I would love this class from one of my oldest friends, I happily signed up for an anthropology class. Now, with the midterm only one day away, I'm beginning to wonder how my friend could've been so wrong.

It's evolution. It's all about evolution.

I can have spoken by mind, stated my peace to my class and teacher, but I get ridiculed for my beliefs, and points taken off on exams. I hate this class.

You can only hear the words "65 million years ago" so many times in your lifetime.

I'm about to calm all your fears, I do NOT beleive in evoluion (nor will I ever!), but I'm running out of ways to convince everyone else. They have really good reasons for believing in what they do, and only the small, but ever present warm glow in my heart telling me that God invented the world about 6,000 years ago keeps me from beleiving it too.

Currently, I'm sitting in Panera Bread in the same booth I've been at for the past two hours trying to cram all this nonsense into my head for the midtem tomorrow. It's been an internal struggle with myself, because 1/2 of me wants to get a good grade but the other 1/2 doesn't want to remember all this garbage. This has been one of the hardest semesters of my life, and I'm not only talking about classes and homework.

There's this Mamma Mia song called "Our Last Summer", and a line in the song says, "I can still recall our last summer". Well, if we're recalling summer, I had an extra twin hanging around the house, backing me up with Mom and Dad and reinforcing my beliefs about evolution and Obama and that kind of crap. I had a best friend at my beck and call, and was in almost constant contact with three other friends.

Fast forward 213 days (how long my twin has been out of the house), I'm currently friendless. I sit at home alone most nights, with only myself and Wilbur (my stuffed pig) to keep me company. My "Best" friend is a three year old drool monster, who calls me his sweetheart and sings Michael Frante's "(Say Hey) I Love You" to me. :) I'm his babysitter. There is a good side to all this, his parents are basically putting me through college with extra to go around. But I wouldn't call it a fair trade for my friends being gone. I still don't understand what happened there, all of a sudden it seemed I didn't deserve decent, "Hi, I miss you" text message.

But these past few months I've done more things than I knew I was capable of. I wrote paper in an hour and a half at midnight, I racked up my bank account to a respectable number, smiled more than I ever thought possible when my nieces and nephews come over, basically learned how to keep a house running in absence of my mom's walking ability, and heard the phrase "You're going to be a great wife and mother" over and over agian. But most of all I've learned I can depend on myself for most stuff. I learned to grow up (OK, maybe not all the way. I still have a Disney Princess room...), and now I'm learning that the things I can not do, I have to have to have to give that to Jesus. It's a long, tiresome, lonely process, but hopefully in the long run I'll be proud of myself and better off for it.

*If my professor read this, he would probably say that I have evolved into higher evolutionary thinking, then I would probably look at him and laugh. But truth be told, I have evolved. I have "developed or achieved" a new sense of looking at the world, and the lonesome circumstances around me. I have evolved a new woman {for myself}.

"If so many are lonely that seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone". -- Tennessee Williams.