11:54AM On Vacation
My family and I are flying out of the country for a short vacation. I'm really excited since I've never flown internationally before. Guess where we're going? Clue: shopping, food, skyscrapers and harbors.

09:20AM Sportsmanship
The difficult thing about learning a sport is that sometimes your body plays tricks on you. Unlike purely academic, mental endeavors where you can call up facts and analysis by brainpower, muscle memory is partly on the subconscious or instinctive level. This means if you learn the wrong moves, it's much harder to correct them than if you learned it right the first time.

This, my friends, is why I'm having a really hard time with my tennis game. My forehand for some reason wasn't working last Monday and I got really frustrated over it. My trainer didn't notice until I finally blew up at myself, and the anger and frustration stayed with me even past the sour end of the lesson. Today at my hitting session, my opponent just loved hitting slices to my forehand, which has put me in a bad mood again.

I know that I shouldn't be so hard on myself, and that it's bad sportsmanship to feel ill will towards my opponent for playing a good game, but I'm a perfectionist by nature. So, instead of beating up the other player/my trainer, I beat myself up for not doing well. This is bad because my gameplay starts to deteriorate when I get mad. I see it on TV in professional players as well; when they can't shake off being upset over losing a point, everything else goes downhill.

What I feel I need, though, is a ball machine that can keep feeding balls to my forehand so I can practice the basic motion with some consistency without worrying where to anticipate the ball. Once my muscles have got that down, I may be able to adjust it to hit balls coming from other angles.

More importantly, though, I need more positive self-talk. I keep telling myself, "Oh, why did you miss that shot, you loser?" It's like bullying, only it's directed at myself, and that's supposedly bad for my game and my self-esteem. I wish I had more confidence in my groundstrokes, though.

I had to ask God the question, "If You had brought me to learn this game, shouldn't I try to excel at it?" But then God reminded me, "Who are you doing this for? Yourself, or Me?"

I know I have to keep re-dedicating this to God every time I play.

10:26PM The Results Are In
After months of stressing and slacking off, sleeping late and waking late, I took my comprehensive exam for my master's degree two weeks ago. A few hours after I submitted it to the compre panel, I started worrying about whether I had been good enough. I'd ended early and made two attribution errors. I scared myself.

Something my mom said encouraged me, though. She said she knew that God had me in the palm of His hand. This image of a loving God protecting me sustained me through the weeks before I finally learned that I passed.

I passed, people! I still cannot believe I did. I was already thinking that if I didn't pass this exam, I'd have to repeat one of my subjects, all of which I got good grades on. Thank God I don't have to go through that.

Now, it's just a thesis I'll have to worry about. But first, the sembreak. Ü

10:40AM Labor of Love
It's two weeks into the month of October. If you'll notice from my archives, last year there were no October entries. I don't know if it's coincidence or it's just a pattern that my life follows, but every October something happens that takes up all my energy and time. Last year, it was me trying to recover from exhaustion. This year, it's an increased workload within the house.

It seems that no matter what we do, we always have issues with the household help. We tried to tolerate their behavior, but two weeks ago it became unbearable. They were brazenly stealing food and leaving the house untended without asking permission. Until now I still don't understand why they thought they had to deceive us. They didn't lack anything to eat, so what were they doing with the rest of the food? And if they had asked, we'd have allowed them to take some days off. So we asked them to leave.

Now, it was kind of a relief to have them finally gone, but the new situation had its own burden of problems. My mother, who works full-time (and then some), had no time to prepare breakfast every day. My sister was undergoing hell because it was her finals. My father is kind of helpless with cooking and cleaning.

Who has lots of time on her hands? Noelle! Who doesn't have an excuse for not doing anything around the house? Noelle! Who has to learn how to cook now? Noelle!

It's not really work for me, though. It's like playing house, only I get to do it for real. Thankfully, after two weeks, I no longer burn the eggs (though the yolks still break sometimes), and I can cook up a decent batch of munggo stew, or fried chicken, or pakbet.

What really killed me at first were the hours. I hadn't gotten up at 5:30AM since we moved here to a place near UP, so I had the bad habit of going to bed at midnight. Then, because I had tennis lessons twice a week at 7AM, I'd have to wake up even earlier on those days to make breakfast and still make it in time for the lesson.

I haven't gotten ill from all this, though. I don't think it's because I have a terrific immune system; in April I was down with the flu for two weeks just for vacuuming the house. I think I'm drawing my strength from God because, funny enough, I enjoy doing all this. Normally, I'm a lazy bum, so to keep at this is out of the ordinary.

So, I've kind of put myself in the shoes of our former maids. They had to wake up early every morning to cook breakfast, then clean house, then start on the laundry and lunch, then wash the dishes, then clear the yard of any debris, then start on dinner. I tell you, if you don't love who you're doing it for, it takes a paycheck to keep you at it--but only for so long.