I am thankful. It may not always show, but I am.

I'm back.

Thanksgiving Break was not bad. I had five whole days without thinking about school for more than 30 minutes total. I am glad of that. However, with the looming stress of finals week from both the giving and receiving end, it was hard to destress. I'll enjoy Christmas break much more, I think.

To sum up this Thanksgiving: lots of food, seriously, lots; lots of family as well; ridiculous heat for the end of November; UF vs FSU (w00t!); UW vs WSU (boo!); visits with friends; kid cousins; cousins growing up; ridiculous amount of travelling on I-275; SceneIt (I am awesome); and Fort De Soto Park.

And now I have returned to my nice clean house. I didn't really want to do it at the time, but I'm glad that I got all of my clothes clean and the house tidied up before I left. It's nice to come home to a clean house.

There have been loads of things going through my mind recently. I sometimes wish I thought more slowly or had an awesome memory so I could eventually write all my thoughts down. Right now if I were to write it all down I'd run out of paper and couldn't get all my thoughts out before I was gone and moving on to a different thought.

And now I'm sounding senseless.

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There are a lot of people here in Gainesville that I've met in the past few months. Some of them I really would like to get to know better. I think I'm going to try and make more of an effort in the next few months to hang out and get to know these people more.

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One thing I miss about college life is hanging out at midnight, 2 am, whenever, and suddenly having conversations about anything and everything, musing, philosophizing, throwing out ideas, etc....

I think that's it for tonight. This week is going to be a doozy.

When do you stop caring?

OK, so I know that you never really should stop caring, but I can't think of a better way to put it briefly. As we all know, I'm not really a brief person, but the title kind of requires all of my skills in brevity to come alive and work to bring you such masterpeices as "I hate titles" and "Do I have to put a title" and "...".

Anyway, I'm getting off-topic (Can you get off-topic if you haven't even started?). I was thinking about this for a bit and I really don't know the answer. I hear people talking about having "different seasons" in life (which, honestly, I understand and believe, in some extent, the phrase...but it kinda makes me want to gag on a spoon full of cliché every time I hear it...but I'll live) and how sometimes people are in your lives for very short seasons and some for not-so-short seasons.

Well what if you are season-blind? (Or, live in Florida, where you can't tell what season it is?) I'm never really sure when to just give up on a friendship and let the inevitable pull between us take us on our seperate paths or fight for the friendship and keep it alive. Is it worth fighting to get nothing in return when you could have been putting that effort into other friendships that would continue to last and be fruitful? Is it mean/bad/immoral to stop being friends with someone if the relationship bears no fruit? At what point do you give up adding more fertilizer and just let it die on it's own? (Work with me here, I'm a metaphor-type person).

Hurm.

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Addendum:

I never used to be bad at making friends. I've moved so much in my life and had to forcefully give up friendships before out of sheer inability to contact. I was good at making friends. My family thinks so, my friends think so, I think so.

What has happened? I never used to be afraid of sharing myself and just being who I was in front of people? What am I afraid of? Rejection? Maybe a little, but not really.

I shouldn't be afraid to be open and honest and who I am. Something must have happened to cause me to change and be afraid. What happened to me?

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If five-year-old Matt were to see me now, he'd be confused and disappointed.

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I hate having two varied points in a post that I want to hear feedback on because I generally will only hear a response to one part, if any.

I shouldn't write late at night. Way too honest and way too contemplative.