Sometimes your soul smiles.

Life is a little crazy right now, but I love it all the same.

Outline for today?
School until 4.
Student Alumni until almost five.
Jessica picked me up from school.
Malawi's pizza and salad for dinner.
Home for five minutes then homework at Jessica's house.
Birthday party for friend from last year.
More homework.
Swimming for 20 minutes with Kathryn.
[practiced our kick-flip skills in a major way]
Roommate prayer and scripture study.
Now it's 1:30 am and I'm preparing a talk for Sunday.
Wanna come to my ward? Feel free.
Somehow I have spoken within the first 3 weeks of being in a new ward.
Every single year since I started here in 2009.
That's three years of speaking to a crowd you don't know yet.
Three consecutive years of slight extra panic at the start of the school year.

Also, I met a new friend today. She sat down next to me and we kindly exchanged "hello"s but not much else. Then [this was political science] the arguing [or "debating"] started and we realized that we were both no longer attentive in any way shape or form. I leaned over and said, "this is the part where I tune out". She said "I literally don't feel like this is beneficial to my life at all". She was already stealing words from my mouth. I then shared with her my secret talent of remembering people. Maybe it's creepy, and maybe we have been through this before, but it's no joke. I told her about the boy on the balcony who was in my math lab freshman year. I told her about the boy who married a girl from my Book of Mormon class and has a child. I told her about the boy who competed in the "Mr. BYU" competition last year. He had longer hair then, and a broken arm. None of these people know me in the least. But by then she was thoroughly enjoying my creep-stalking skills and we laughed and laughed and laughed. Not just about that: we laughed about a lot of things.

I love when you just like people. I mean really, really like them without having to force it. Instafriends are like a breath of fresh air in a world where sometimes it seems like there are so many hoops to jump through before you get underneath the surface of a friendship [especially prevalent at the beginning of fall when you know nobody]. This summer I was talking to some people [mostly they were moms, and they were reminiscing on having the whole family together] and we were discussing how there's just a different feel when your whole family can be together: it's like your soul is happy that you are all together again, like it can sense it. And I fully believe that. I think your spirit inside of you can just sense things sometimes. You can call it instinct, you can call it intuition, you can call it whatever you want, but I call it your spirit. And how the spirit inside of you feels is a good indicator of a lot of things. And sometimes when you meet a new friend or spend time with an old friend, your soul just smiles, and I love that feeling.

....it almost like you've known them forever :)