The Things I do During Biology Tests Amaze Me.

So today during my biology test, in which I was epically failing so it’s no surprise that my mind began to stray.  For example, I began to think about what exactly it is that I want to do with the rest of my life.  Not exactly biology test sort of topic, but when it comes to my life, it does include biology, so I guess it was somewhat time appropriate.

I’ve known for awhile that I really want to work with birds, but as this biology class I am in has passed I’ve started to find out what about ecological research I am interested in and what I am not interested in.  Whereas I always pictured myself being really interested in interactions between birds and other species, while we were learning about that in class, I really wasn’t interested. 

Maybe this is my NaNoWriMo talking since it has a lot to do with genetics and evolution and such, but I have found myself really interested in genetics and evolution.  I truly enjoyed that topic, and I did really well in the part that we learned about it.   So its gotten me thinking lately that I might actually be interested in studying birds and their evolutionary changes and their genetic code if I could find a grad school doing research like that or if the research was even available to do it.

 It surprises me daily how much I can learn about myself in one day.  How one biology class can affect my life forever.  I get to realize daily that I have so many options for life and what I am going to do outside school.   

So maybe I bombed my biology test today, I still did decent, and at the same time I discovered something about myself.  In the end, I guess I had a very productive morning without even realizing it.

But what am I doing here posting a blog. It’s November! I have a novel that needs writing and I should be doing that.

I glimps into the mind of a 17 year old me

Since NaNoWriMo is quickly approaching I have been going through some past novels.  I guess this sort of goes along with the finding myself thing because back when I was 17 it wasn't so much that I knew who I was, it was that I knew who I wasn't.  My novel that year focused around the story of me finding who I didn't want to be.  Back then I was facing a lot of changes in my life, and I bore through it all with minimal damage. 

This is an excert from my 2008 novel.  It's probably one of my favorite pieces of my writing thus far.  I am actually really proud of it and I just wanted to post something here since Tuesday starts the crazy life of a NaNoWriMo novelist.

(Note that this is fully unedited.  Hey, come on, it was Novemeber, who edits!!!)

Taken from NaNoWriMo 2008 "The Italian Bracelet" (unedited)

I would sit and watch as the children at the house next door played. They would jump on their trampoline and they would laugh and sing and be happy together. I learned a hood could hide someone for a short amount of time. My hoods hid my insecurities for some time and I would sit every day and watch the little kids jump around on their trampolines while I sat outside on my deck cold. They were carefree. I longed to be carefree. I longed to be able to jump with them, my hair down catching the wind as I coming plummeting back down to the springy surface of the trampoline. The neighbor girl was maybe eight her brother was a year younger than me in age and six years younger than me in maturity. He still went outside and played and had fun with his friends. I never did that. I hadn’t done that since I was in the fifth grade. Whether it was because I had grown up or because people decided they no longer liked me was suddenly in question every day I watched them bounce. The never knew I watched, they were too caught up in their laughing and fooling. I was jealous. I wish I could be my age, and like the neighbor boy have no cares in the world even when there was homework to be done and papers to be written.

Realizations can happen at the weirdest time. We talk about society every day in history class, and on some days, I actually do take in what my crazy teacher is telling me. I actually go home and think about it. As I watch the neighbor girl jump I watch as she grows tired. The same way I had grown tired dealing with the world around me. The way I grew tired jumping through hoops to be with my best friend when she had other interests. The neighbor girl would then proceed to sit down on the spring surface and spread herself out. She was hot from jumping all that time and she tired. It was time for a break. Was that what was going on in my life? Was I just on a break from my old clique? Was I going to get back up and continue jumping again and go on like nothing happened? That’s what everyone would tell me. They would say we were just petty girls. That was true. We were petty. We were girls. But I never believed for a second that we were petty girls fighting. This time was different we were fighting over more than just a boy. And maybe we weren’t fighting at all. Maybe we were disagreeing. I think there is a fine line between fighting and disagreeing. Disagreements can lead to unseen points. I did not see her point and she did not see mine. We no longer saw eye to eye, we saw heads butting heads. I didn’t think this was going to be one of those times that I could get up and continue to bounce as if nothing happened. I think the trampoline broke under the pressure of our disputing and unstable ideas of one another.

The trampoline could be taken other ways as well. Laziness maybe. Was it that I was possibly too lazy to fix my relationship with my “best friend” and so I just laid down and gave up? I don’t think I ever gave up. I just stopped trying. There was little point to it. But maybe that is how all of society is. We work for so long and we push ourselves to the limit and then all we have to be lazy and take a break. Too lazy to fix out problems, too lazy to make dinner, too lazy to do our homework, that was society, and that was how we all functioned. The working class was being laid off left and right and we were becoming lazy because we didn’t want to work to find a new job. So we sit in front of our televisions everyday and watch reruns of old shows from the 90s. That is one exciting way to live life. I wasn’t lazy or I tried not to be. I tried to do my work, I tried to do my chores, I tried to fix my problems, but sometime those problems either didn’t want to be fixed or couldn’t be fixed. I wasn’t lazy. I worked my ass off instead of sitting on it all day. Society blames the world for it’s problems. I know better than that. When I have a problem, I know it is my problem. I try to put in on myself. I try to fix it. I’m not lazy. I should still be on that trampoline jumping up and down like a little child. I want to be like a little child.

Growing up is a hard thing to do. I never wanted to do it. Who would really want to? It’s a lot to take on. And I don’t mean growing up physically and by age, I mean mentally. I always wanted to stay in that childhood world where we could fly and where we could be anything that we wanted to be. But truth be told, we can’t be what we want. I will never be the president of the United States, nor will I ever want to be. I will never be an actress even though I’ve always dreamed of it. But I wanted to remain as a child. There was something about that dream land that made life seem …less depressing. But truth had to come out eventually, and we all have to grow up at some point. Well, most of us. Some of us cling as long as we possibly can to the little last bit of a dream we have. The world that was created for ourselves. A world of green skies and blue grass, or a world of magic and magicians where nothing in the world came over come the strongest of warriors. Or my favorite, our own fairy tales. Everyone had a prince in mind, and every dreamed of having that prince whisk them off their feet someday. I, myself, had a fair share of people I imagined to be prince charming, but after years of heartbreak and disappointment, I learned that there was little to no point in trying to have a prince charming. Things like that, fairy tales, didn’t exist. It was pointless of me to pretend that they did. We all had to grow up at some point and come with realization that things weren’t what we wanted them to be. I found myself having troubles with those facts. I wanted things to go back to normal. I wished that I could travel back in time and change what happened with our fight. I wished that our fight had never happened, but it did and that was reality and I had to live with it.

I liked to think I was different from the general society. I wasn’t lazy in the fact that the fight happened and I couldn’t change it. I wasn’t really lazy about it at all. I just didn’t want to get up and fix what couldn’t be fixed. Like the rest of society, I grew tired of jumping on the trampoline at one point or another, and I knew that getting up was almost pointless. I knew that I had fallen hard enough that getting up would take more energy than falling down and staying down.

Somewhere along the journey I’ve lost myself

This to say the least has been one of the worst and most confusing semesters of my entire life.  I have really been struggling lately with figuring out who I am and what I want to be, and along the line I really fear that I have only become what I never wanted to be.  I fear that I have lost myself along this journey.  That in this process of finding who I am, I’ve gone astray and gotten lost on some side road I never should have gone down in the first place.

I’ve always prided myself on the fact that I am different from the crowd.  I’m not a hipster by any means, but it could be argued that I am very close to it.  I don’t want to be like the popular crowd.  I take the road less traveled by.  Now it’s no surprise that along with college comes clubs and organizations and sports and sororities and fraternities.  Every girl that I had known from high school who joined a sorority changed for the worse.  I always promised myself I was never going to join a sorority.  There were better ways to meet people, cheaper ways, and with sororities came too many rules, and I am far from being one for rules.  Freshmen year my mom actually wanted me to join a sorority.  I told her no, and I was adamant about that choice. 

This year I think I became possessed by some strange virus that caused my brain to turn to mush and all the things I was so headstrong about to go flying out the window.  It started with just one requirement event.  One little meet and greet.  Which turned into a week of social events, which lead to “pledging” which led to a member in training class, which, in about two weeks, is going to lead to a full on membership.  Now, it’s not like anyone forced me to join.  No one held a knife to my throat and demanded that I join; I did it on my own.  Obviously I liked something about it.  It’s a service sorority, and I do miss my old days of Girl Scouts, but it really does make me wonder. 

Any of my friends that I have told about the fact that I joined a sorority tell me that its unlike me.  They never pictured me as a sorority girl.  And often at social events and get togethers, I see it myself.  I’m not the same as most of the girls, I like them, but the things we have in common are small and I act like the shy one who sits in the corner a lot.  Then again, that’s just me in any social setting really.  But one thing is for sure: it really isn’t like me.

Maybe it’s part of growing.  Maybe I am not who I always thought I am.  Maybe expanding my horizons is what I need to help me on this journey.  Some nights I am okay with the fact that I joined, other nights I question why.  I have fun with the girls.  We get along, most of us. (I’m not a people person after all).  I’m not sure what things will happen in the future with this sorority thing.  It’s a road I certainly never intended to take.

But that’s not the least of my struggles currently. 

I never intend on getting married, and for the longest time I never intended on dating.  I didn’t want to waste my time about it.  And back when I thought that, I was 100% happy with myself.  I felt independent and in control of my life.  I was me and I didn’t need anyone to tell me otherwise. 

I’ve become broken.  I’m not as strong as I once was.  I wish I was.  I find myself falling into crushes these days, two boys particularly that I go in-between, one of which who doesn’t know I like him (and I’d like to keep it that way) and the other that is too dumb to ask me out (which actually might be okay).  So what’s the problem right?  I obviously don’t have to worry about dating these days so just get over it and move on with life: be strong again.  It’s not that simple really. 

When the opportunity to go on a date comes around I can’t help but think to myself that I’m lonely and I have to say yes because if I don’t give someone a chance maybe I’ll miss out on something.  But really if it’s not something I want in the first place, what am I really going to miss out on?  I still don’t have a plan to get married.  I don’t have time to date.  I don’t have the energy to put into myself let alone someone else.  Yet I can’t seem to say no because something pulls on my heart every time. 

I don’t believe in love.  I don’t believe in a lot of things actually.  Mostly these days I don’t believe in myself.  I don’t believe that I have the strength to be me anymore.  I feel lost in my own world.  I feel like I don’t control myself anymore.  I feel like everything is out of my control and that I have to give into the world around me.  I don’t want that.  I want to stand tall and by myself.  I want to be that independent woman that I used to be.  Because without that person I have nothing to search for.

I have this semester, tried too many times to just lie down and give up because I have lost my own strength.  I’m certainly not who I used to be, and I would give anything to be able to go back to those old days. 

I feel like I need to give myself another promise like I did in my last entry oh so many months ago.  So here I go.   I promise myself that I will be strong.  I will not let any man, any women, or any object stand in the way of who I am and the journey to find what I want.  This journey thus far is about me, myself and I, and those who want to come along can come along as journeyers next to me, not as part of me.   I promise to be an independent woman with original ideas and world changing thoughts.  I will not be pulled down.  I promise I will not forget who my true friends are.  I promise I will not get lost again.  I will take the path less followed but I will not take it blindfolded.  This is my battle. 

Making the choice- Dry

To make a long rant short, I just want to talk about how certain choices we make effect us in ways that don’t even make sense right away,

I am a rare case college student.  I don’t drink.  I don’t smoke.  I don’t do any sort of drug.  That stuff just doesn’t interest me in the least.  I have proved to myself that I can have an amazing time without having to lose control or even get buzzed. Yet it put me in a weird position in my life.

I definitely don’t socialize as well as I should with other college students.  I don’t go out drinking at parties.  I don’t even spend too much time at someone’s dorm just in case there is a chance that some kind of alcohol will appear.  I just don’t see the point in it.  So basically I only have a few friends in college so far because I don’t fit in with other students.

What is it that makes drinking such an important aspect of college life?  The social drinkers need it to be able to loosen up and talk to people?  People need it to actually withstand what clubs are like?  To be perfectly honest I don’t see what is so amazing.  It can’t be the taste.  I could just drink a Mountain Dew or a Cherry Coke and get just as much satisfaction with flavor, if not more.  What is so special about “getting buzzed.”  It can’t feel that good.  And a hangover certainly can’t be worth it.  Puking in the toilet certainly isn’t attractive to anyone.  So what part of drinking is so attractive to people? 

And why does that make me such a little misfit because I don’t want to take part in it?  Why can’t people understand that some people just don’t see the flattering life of drinking?   To most people I just don’t know how to have a good time.  I know perfectly well that I know how to have a great time with my friends, no alcohol included.   

So for now does that just mean that I am never going to fit in at college?  And if that’s the case than does it really matter if I fit in?  Do I need to conform to what everyone else thinks is a good time just to have a few friends who will only be my friends for a year or two?  In that order…yes, no and no.  I at lease know who I am right now, and I know where I stand with my life.  I don’t need to be drinking every night to have a good time.  I can just go over to my friends house and believe me, it’s a blast. 

So this is my promise.  I will not underage drink.  I will not consider underage drinking.  (My cousin’s wedding aside) I will not pick up any alcoholic beverage until I am 21 and even then I will not be going out drinking.  I will maybe have a drink at a special event, but there is no reason for anything beside that.  I control my life and with every drink people risk not having control again.  That’s their choice.  I will not make it.  I choose to be dry.

Surviving the Hurricane

I have been racking my brain for a week thinking about topics to write about.  Since school let out there have been a lot of things to write about.  I finished my freshman year.  I have started looking into study abroad programs.  I have been in a lot of drama lately with both girls and guys.  And I have been looking into quitting my jobs more and more lately, one more than another.  But today is the anniversary of a major day in my life and I think it would be unfair of me to over look a day that could have potentially changed everyone around me forever.  Now, I don’t want a tell all, so a lot of details are going to be skipped out on, but I want to get a point across and I am hoping I am able to do so.

We live in a world of expectations.  People expect us to be able to perform at work the way they want us to.  People expect us to be able to bend over backwards for them.  People expect us to be able to live up to what others did even though we aren’t them.  That’s life and it’s sadly what we have to learn to live with.  And in living in a world where so many people expect things from us, it’s pretty easy to start to expect those things from ourselves.  So now, not only do other people have high expectations, but we set sky high expectations for ourselves that, let’s be honest, can’t in a million years be reached.  And if they can be reached, they are at such a low probability to happen that we really should never be disappointed that it didn’t work out. 

Now to be fair, sometimes we have real goals.  Things that we can reach, if we work hard enough, they exist.  But luck sometimes has to be playing on your side, and we all know how often that happens.   What ends up happening is that we put in countless hours and out blood and tears into something, only to be highly disappointed when it all ends and we end up not doing as well or not being in the spot we want to be at.  If you can sit here and read this and say you have never experienced the feeling of getting a B- on a test or a paper that you worked for hours and hours to get prepared for, you are simply not human.  We all know the feeling.  The feeling of our stomachs dropping, our hearts literally stopping for a quarter of a second.  The feeling when the world comes crashing down around you and all you can do is watching the pieces shatter down around you.  It happens.  We have all been there in one way or another.    The worst part of that is working so hard to reach your goals and not being able to do it.

But that’s because we reach our expectations too high.  It happens, and as a human race, I think it’s too hard for us NOT to do that because it’s what we’ve been taught.  It is what we have learned to know. 

When those things happen there are a few things that happen consequently depending on who you are.  For me it usually goes like this.  World shatters around me.   Cry.  Scream.  Cry again.  Tell myself I am giving up and never trying again.  Call my dad.  Feel a little better.  Still kick myself down for a couple of days.  Convince myself I am going to turn things around.  But that’s in the best case scenario.  As much as I would like to say that I always have my father at my side on things, sometimes there are certain situations that I know he would not understand because I hardly understand them myself.  Those are the times were I literally stop the process at “tell myself I am giving up and never trying again.” 

Because the thing is we know the people around us.  We know how they are going to react in certain situations.  We know what they are going to say, the words they are going to use, and exactly how they are going to say it.  We only talk to them in certain situations for the reinforcement of what we want to hear, what we need to hear.  And sometimes we don’t want to hear those things because we think that we can’t get up from where we are.  That everything literally everything crashed down.  And of course it’s mostly not that case.

We put ourselves on these pedestals to be the best and not let anyone get ahead of us.  So when we come in second, it feels like everything we have worked towards is over, and so we fall into depression and sometimes we fall into such horrible depression that we really think it’s the end.  We think there is no where to go.  That there is no up and no forward, so we might as well go back.  We might as well just stop where we are and end it.  We don’t want to wait out the storm to see what the sunshine brings.  And honestly, it usually has a lot more to offer.

Not everyone can be saved from these sorts of feelings.  That is why we lose loved ones.  Sometimes people come to their own senses.  In my case, I had amazing friends that told me that I had nothing to be fighting against.  They told me that I was an amazing person even if I wasn’t number one.  They reminded me that it was only me who led me up to these insane expectations of myself.  And with that knowledge and their support I was able to push through my low and conquer the hurricane and save myself.

Now have I found a smooth silky ride since that?  If I had I probably wouldn’t have this blog and I probably wouldn’t have the crazy thoughts that fill my head to date.  But I take it now, and I use it differently.  I still make expectations for myself.  I still set myself on such high standards that it’s hard to ever get there.  But I realize now that with each step I take and every two steps I take back, it’s not the end.  It’s the journey.  With every bump, I learn something new.  With every curve, I find a new reason to live.  And with every road block, I meet someone knew.  These storms, sometimes these hurricanes, they make us who we are.  They make us unique yet they make us all one because we all experience similar situations in different ways.  We’ll never have the strength to conquer each storm head on.  Some of them will get us down.  Sometimes for a few hours and sometimes for days.  But what really makes the difference is going into it knowing that there is a light somewhere and we just need to ride it out. 

As much as I wish I had not done what I did one year ago, I am glad to have been able to learn from the event.  I am glad to have been able to find out how honest and caring my friends are.  And more importantly I am glad that I have been able to become a stronger person because of it.  I always thought I would give up by now.  I haven’t yet.  And now, more than ever, I have a reason to strive to keep going.  Because even if my life doesn’t end up the way that I have expected it to, I have so many dreams and so many different plans that some of them are bound to happen sometime.  I just can’t wait to see where this world takes me and who I meet along the way.  Bring on the storms.  I can take them now.

The Many Faces of We

I have this theory that makes no sense, but at the same time makes as much sense as a fictional theory really can.  I have a theory that by the time a person turns 19 they have already been three different versions of themselves and are on their way to become at least two more.  Now, keep in mind I am not the entire world, I don’t know about your situation, I don’t know about your best friend’s situation, I don’t know about your neighbor, and I certainly don’t know about you six cousin  twice removed.  I am just generalizing here.  It’s not necessarily the theory that makes the difference; it’s the ideas behind it.

Think back to elementary school.  In elementary school, we’re all sweet, innocent, naïve children whose minds have yet to be corrupted by the real world.  We’re all basically friends, because to be honest, we don’t know what enemies are.  I mean, we do know from TV what the means girls are and what dating is, but we have all yet to really experience it.  We all still play on the same playground together, and dating involves a girl being chased around the playground by a guy- then bam they’re dating.  In elementary school the world has two factions: popular and nonpopular, and to be honest there isn’t much difference between them besides who sits where at lunch.   The biggest news that shakes up the school is when the popular girls want to make over one of the non popular girls.  Of course, this “makeover” usually consists of introducing her to makeup and then letting her sit at the “popular” table for a week.  And then after that, things usual go back to normal.  But honestly, in elementary school we’re all equal to one another.  We all give each other valentines on Valentine’s day after all.  Of course there was always that someone a girl was crushing on and the most embarrassing thing to ever happen would be if they found out.  Which really couldn’t have been that hard since we would scribble their name in a heart and play name games to see how compatible we were.   Basically, back then we were at our best and our sweetest.

But middle school brings a different world.  Those are the transition years.  We learn then what materialism is.  Cell phones are a big thing and everyone wants one so they are “cool.”  By middle school we define what cool is.  Well, at least we think we define what cool is because it’s still a mystery to me.  (I always thought it had to do with whoever had the most gum).   But for the middle school definition cool is basically having everything and everyone around you.  Being on top of the social ladder and staying there is the main goal.  And thus the climb begins.  We gain our personalities by middle school.  Whether that is because of the influence of maturity and puberty or if it’s because of the influence of television and movies, we become the first image of who we are.  But personality isn’t the only thing that forms.  We find our best friends, we find the people we want to stay away from, and we form our first cliques.  All we want at this stage in life is acceptance from our peers.  We are most impressionable in our middle school years.  And although we are still images of our elementary school selves nothing about us is the same as we become teenagers. 

But middle school isn’t even the start of the changes.  When high school begins the entire world changes.  Whereas cliques still exist, the true factions form.  You see the distinct formation of an upper, middle and lower class.  Popularity is actually a real thing now, and what you own, what you can afford, or at least what you can pretend you can afford is all that really matters.   The popular crowd usually includes a few different cliques.  The jocks, the cheerleaders, the rich kids, the pretty ones, it’s a pretty typical stereotypical society.  The middle class is made up of people who could be either upper class or lower class, but stick to middle.  These are the cliquiest of the cliques, at least in the girls.  It’s the climb.  Everyone wants to be on top and in the middle class, you can actually push your way up the ladder.  They would hate each other for their weaknesses, or sometimes even for their strengths.  Jealousy was high.  Of course why wouldn’t it be?  The middle class was full of fenemies when it came to the girls.  The lower class fills your geeks and your freaks and your anime lovers and your gamers.  In other words, the lower class is the outsider’s class.  But to be honest, the lower class is filled with the people who know who they are, even if they do at times want to change that because of the pressure society pushes on them to do so.

We tend to discover how mean the human race is at this point.  How there are truly actually mean people in the world and how some people are actually nice.  Whereas bullying happened in middle school, it was mostly just physical.  Bullying in high school tends to be much more verbal and much more abusive.  If you aren’t the way someone thinks you should be, they are either going to let you know, or they are going to talk about it behind your back and let everyone else know all about it.  That is the worst kind of bullying because it will follow wherever you go.  We also learn that there are some truly annoying people in the world.  And also some actually nice people.  But the question is which of those people are we?

High school is the time of discovery.  Although we mostly think that we know who our friends are, there is really too much happening in life for us to be really sure.  We’re still trying to figure out what sports we like, what we like to do in our free time, what after school activities and clubs we want to join.  So naturally we join things with our friends so we can stay close and we can spend time together, but things in high school don’t stay the same.  After all, we have become our own individuals by this time.  We can think on our own, instead of in middle school where we thought the same way our entire group thought, and we have our own interests and our own goals.  Things change throughout high school as we discover who we are and what we want.  We start thinking about what careers we want, colleges we want, and where we want to go someday.  It’s only natural that we fall away from the people who don’t want the same things as we do.  We find ourselves wondering who the real us is.  And at that point, we have to start being around the people we can be real around.  Whether that means leaving our clique or staying there, the journey begins there.  If the strength is there, we can stay with our high school clique, but if it’s not the friendship was never there and changes need to be made.

By the end of high school we don’t necessarily know who we are, but we know who we don’t want to be.  The upper class doesn’t want to be the lower class.  The middle class still wants to be on top, and the lower class wants to be real.  (Well at least in my experience don’t hate on me if I’m wrong).  We know what we dream about from life and we have those first formulations of our goals.  But in reality our journey has just begun and now we need to discover who we can be, not just who we want to be.  That’s where the journey begins.  That’s how we got to the journey.   By 16 we can drive, and around 16 we can take the steering wheels our lives and we can start to become who we want to be. 

This is where I am on my journey.  Where are you?

We who are young think that we can rule the world

A little over a year ago I wrote a list of ten things I would like to do before I die.  I am now going to share that list with you and tell you what I think about these things now, a year later.

10. to finally get the respect I deserve at work.

To be honest the job I had (it was really two of them) was in food service.  It was terrible and I never had the chance to get a raise or get treated well.  The one I was complaining about here was my catering job.  I wasn’t getting any good hours or any good positions, and to be honest I was getting tired of it.  Since, I have basically quit that job (I am no longer picking up hours) and am keeping my job at another food service place on campus.  I still hate my job, and I sometimes I hate the people I work with and the customers I served, but it’s helping me pay my bills and I am trying to save money for a big trip in a year.

9. To work a summer at the Harry Potter Park.

Although this would be the most amazing summer job ever, I have to be realistic.  There are so many things that I want to do with my summers, most of which involve internships now, that I don’t think I am going to have time to work at the Harry Potter theme Park.  I would still love to go there with some friends, and maybe spend a week at Disney JUST to go there every day.  Because come on, to get to go to Hogwarts everyday for a week? Sounds like a good deal to me.  Although I would probably cry the entire time I was there. 

8. To finally launch my idea for “Breaking High School”.

What Breaking High School was supposed to be was a vlog series on Youtube.  I had a girl who was my best best friend in high school.  We literally did EVERYTHING together.  Halfway through High Schol we had this big falling out and we stopped talking to each other completely and we hung out with different people, and eventually we both moved on from one another, and we still don’t talk to this day.  I not necessarily regret what happened between us, I regret HOW it happened because it really sucked, but it did need to happen.  Breaking High School was supposed to be a vlog series that would reconnect us to one another through a series of video blogs on one youtube site.  We could break down what happened, why it happened, and then kind of generalize it to the way high school is for everyone and how you don’t have to let that be your life. 

Granit, I never got the courage to ask her to do it, so it never happened.  We’re still only freshman in college, so there would be a chance that we could get it to happen, but I highly doubt that a. she would ever want to do it and b. that I would ever have the guts to ask her about it let alone talk to her again.

7.  To find Charlie

This one still applies to my life.  Finding Charlie would apply going to London and other places in England and getting to see the cities.  Hopefully I would find Charlie along the way (Charlie is the guy I imaged as my perfect dream guy in my last blog).  It could definitely still happen, and I definitely want it to still happen.

6. To get one of my books published.

Yes. Yes. Yes.  Despite any career decision I make, I still want to get one of my books published.  It would be a dream come true.  Even if it doesn’t sell, even if everyone hates it, I feel like it would be a huge accomplishment in my life.  Writing is something I have enjoyed since the 3^rd grade.  It’s what I’ve always loved, and I want to share that with the world.  I have all these ideas floating in my head, and I want other people, other teens, to read about it.

5. to have said book put on the best seller list.

It would be cool, I won’t lie, but I don’t think I want to make that a priority because in the end I think I’d get lost in the WANT instead of the love for writing.  I don’t want that.  I don’t want to lose why I am writing.  I had an English teacher in high school that said the only reason people write is for fame and fortune that they hope to get.  Safe to say, I dropped his class the next day, and I actually think I told him that that was why I was dropping his class.  I really, really want to prove him wrong.  I don’t care if my book is a best seller.  I don’t care if the entire world reads it.  I really care that a few people who read it honestly, truly like it.  And I hope that along the way I could inspire other people to write as well.

4. Also to sell the screenplay rights to said book and hopefully help work on the writing team as well.

It’s a dream. I know that won’t happen.  Maybe I could sell the rights. Maybe.  But I’m not going to force the happening of it.  I’m not going to force little kids on the side of the road to read my book so its popular enough to be turned into a movie.  I’m not going to go to every movie producer out there and beg for them to buy my screenplay rights.   Whatever happens after I publish my book (if it happens) happens.  I’m not going to push anything any further.  Would I go on a book tour? Probably.  Would I do interviews about my book? Yes? But not because I want to sell the book, but because hopefully I would love the book enough that I would just want to talk about with everyone who wanted to.

3. To spend a semester abroad in either London or New Zealand. 

This one I still think is absolutely possible. In fact, I plan to take some time this summer to learn more about summer abroad and what it is going to take to get me to New Zealand to study animals there.  I am really excited about it.  It will be so different for me to go to a new place for such a long amount of time.  Part of me thinks that I am so dependent on my parent’s still that I won’t be able to do it, but most of me thinks that it will be really good for me to be living on or near a college campus by myself or with other students.  I’ll actually get to experience what it’s like to not be at home and to be somewhere completely different.  I’ll get to feel that sense of freedom that I haven’t had in so long.

Honestly I think that will help me get over my fear of needing my parents’ permission for absolutely everything that I do.  I’ll have to make my own decisions for once.  It will be good for me.  And I will actually be able to figure myself out and find out who I am and what I want without having to worry if my parents approve or not, because what they hear from me will only be through emails.  I think it will work out well.

2. To get the hell out of Erie and finally get back to Alaska.

Yes please!  I am actually trying to plan a trip back to Alaska for next summer.  I am hoping that everything will work out and I can get back to Cordova without any problems.  I am trying to save up as much money as I can now so I won’t have any issues getting there and having a place to stay for awhile.  The biggest problem is going to be convincing my parents to let me go.  I think that if I get it all planned out they’ll be a little more willing to let me go.  At least I can hope they will.

But that’s not really it.  I also would love to live in Alaska someday.  Even if it’s only for a few years, I just want to spend a portion of my life there.  My hearts belonged there for awhile now.  If you say Alaska to me, I will also answer with how much I want to go back there, or how much I love it there, or how beautiful it is there.  Basically, I have nothing bad to say about that place.  When I’m there, I don’t even mind that it’s cold.  You sort of forget about it at first because you are so taken by what you see, and then once you get used to what you see, you get used to the cold as well. 

I could imagine myself living in a lot of places other than Alaska, but the image of me living in Alaska is certainly my favorite to date.

1. To get accepted into and go to Virginia Tech Veterinary School.

Honestly, not so much anymore.  I don’t have much of a desire to go to a veterinary school now.  I don’t honestly think I would be happy doing that with the rest of my life, and that’s not just because I dislike my job as a vet tech.   I want to be able to travel.  I think this bucket list proved really well that one of my greatest interests is travel.  So settling down and having a vet clinic wouldn’t really work well for me.  And if I still did become a vet, I would be a traveling vet who worked with exotics, and to be honest if I was going to be traveling around the world like that, I think I would rather be studying the animals and seeing them as happy and in their natural environment, not when they were dying or extremely hurt. 

I still want to go to a grad school.  I am not sure what one yet.  I mean, I am just starting this process over again; I still have a lot of time to figure out what I want to do.  I am not at this point counting anything out, but there are things that I am not really counting in anymore either.  I am starting to figure things out more and more every day, which is good.  But I know for sure that I still have a long road in front of me, and it’s going to be a fun, but long, journey.

Life Coach = Fight Coach

So, I have this extreme issue with writing the word Coach because I am always afraid I am going to mistake it for the word couch considering I might be one of the world’s worst college level spellers.  This has been an issue for me ever since I read a Beverly Cleary book where Ramona would mix up the words coach and couch.  Anyway, point being: I’m sorry in advanced. 

So a little over a week ago I went to a life coach.  Not exactly something I needed, considering the only thing in my life that I need “coaching” in is my career options.  I mean, I’m not trying to quit smoking (which I don’t do), and I’m not thinking about getting married or anything, but I felt like I needed a little guidance with what to do about school and my current job situation and what not.  So the councilor that I am already seeing (for reason much different, and reasons that will more than likely show up some point in a blog) suggest I go to this life coach on campus to figure out which direction to go in life.

When I hear the words “life coach,” my mind automatically wonders to “Gilmore Girls” and Paris Geller.  You know, the crazy, need-to-be-in-control girl who wanted, no needed, to be on top of everything?  She ended up going to a life coach and ended up with a craft table.  Maybe it’s the influence of modern media on my life, but that was fully what I was expecting when I walked into the personal counseling office that day.

So naturally when this life coach asks me what I am expecting from a life couch.  I answer, sitting down across from her (because I am not one for the therapy couches), “Please don’t give me a craft table,”  Granted, she looked at me like I was crazy, but really I was probably the most sane person in the entire counseling office at that point.  

She went on to ask to about my life and where on a scale from one to ten I stood on things like family, school, friends, recreation, and other things like that.  Not too hard.  THEN she wanted to tell me what a ten would be on my scale. Okay, that’s not hard either.  My typical answers would be things like more acceptances for things, more free time, things like that.  But no.  She didn’t like those answers.  I wasn’t thinking big enough.  I needed to be thinking of what I would like my life to be like if I had an infinite amount of money and resources and could go anywhere in the world. 

Maybe this wouldn’t be a problem for most.  But I’m a writer, she knew this, I don’t think in the  box when it comes to dreaming.  I go way above and beyond.  So basically here’s the scenario I ended up with by the end of the hour:

My life with my family would be absolutely perfect.  They would accept every decision I ever had, but would give me their honest input in the situation.  My brother would break up with his current girlfriend and get a backbone again. I would have moved to L.A. to go to school at UCLA for writing and screenplay.  This would mean leaving all my friends at home (which were the only thing on the list that I originally rated as a 10) and starting new on the other side of the country.  After graduation I would be a published author and move to London, England for a bit of time.  There I would fall in love with the man I would marry.  He would obviously be British, cute, and very intelligent.  He would also be a nerd preferably a nerdfighter and someone who likes Dr. Who and Harry Potter.   He wouldn’t be afraid to be an open nerd, and would actually flaunt his love for all things nerdy with ease.  He’d be educated and have a successful career.  Also, he would be very independent so I would be able to travel the world without him because screw traveling with him. (Does this sound oddly like a certain British youtuber to anyone?  Because I know sure as hell who I was picturing when talking about this “dream guy” and no his username is not a digimon).  After marrying said dream boy, I would return to LA where I would be working on writing screenplays, and slowly I would make a good name for myself and my work- in fact, I would become famous. 

This is the gist of the odd dream world where I live in, although a lot of the details vary a lot.  But to be honest, as much as I would love to be a published author some day, this is my dream world and in no way could I ever see it being a reality.

But evidently life coaches don’t believe in the separation of dream and reality because the last thing my life coach said to me was, “These things are dreams for a reason, we don’t just make them up.  This could be your life.” 

At that point, there were numerous things that I wanted to scream like “Yes we do make these things up!” and “It is a dream! Shut up!” but at that point I was in so much shock that I couldn’t even process what had happened.  It wasn’t until the next day that things really started to sink in and the truth of the matter hit me.

As much as I would like that to be my life, and as much as I regret not applying to UCLA and going into writing, to really stop and try to picture that as my entire life- I can’t.  I can’t picture myself being happy having other people edit and critic the scripts I work hard on. In fact, directors always change like 80% of the script and the scriptwriter’s ideas.  In my fantasy world- it’s not like that and I am the best in the business.  So let’s be honest, that isn’t going to happen.  I just don’t have the raw talent that you already need to be a great writer. (I think if anything this blog post proves that).  And while we’re thinking reality, I don’t have the means to make that my life.  I don’t have infinite amounts of money to put myself through college in LA, and certainly my parents wouldn’t accept the fact that I would want to try to make a living in a “you either make it or you don’t” type of society.  That’s that really.  There’s the reality of the situation.  The same reality this life coach decided that I could easily ignore if I only trusted that the means would somehow be there.

Now, I’m a somewhat religious girl.  I do believe in God, I believe in religion, but I’ll be honest I fight with it a lot.  But one thing I do know is that when we want to put trust in the means of survival being there, we turn to God for help.  Honestly, I don’t think God is going to support my selfish little utopia and provide me the means to make it there.  To make it in Hollywood, you have to either be born talented or born rich.  I was born neither. 

Not that I am trying to be a total downer on myself, but that wasn’t even the reason that I was going to the life coach.  I wanted help deciding between if I wanted to go into a field biology field or go into Veterinary practice.  That is something completely different than what this life coach got me on a tangent of.  Although tangent implies that we are still on the same graph, just touching the on a similar point.  I don’t think we were even on a tangent- she had me talking on a completely new graph. 

I want to be realistic here, but I also want to be truthful.

This life coach said we don’t make these things up, our dreams could be reality.  This is in fact true. Plenty of people dream of being writers and end up doing it.  People dream of being actors and become very good at it. But I could also tell her that I dreamed of becoming an evil dictator and taking over the world and spreading communism everywhere.  But truth be told, that is certainly a dream- and a fake dream at that.  You can’t do that.  I have worked with a potential terrorist before and you don’t tell them that just because they dream of someday making bombs and mailing them to people, that you can make that happen if you just believe.  We’re adults now, we know that we won’t all be president someday so you can stop telling us that we will be.

My truth is a lot different than most case scenarios.  I feel like as a writer, who is potentially a little more crazy than most but slightly less crazy than Lewis Carroll, I have to be able to have a dream world separated from reality.  Which is why being able to have my biology degree and at the same time being able to have a dream world that isn’t made up completely of fictional characters, but in fact has me in it, is what keeps me sane.  If I took that away by suddenly making my dream world come true, what would I have? I would always be searching for that new dream world- that new utopia.  I would never be fully at a ten in every aspect in my life because no matter what we have- when everything is too good to be true, there’s usually a way for it to be slightly better.  So instead I come up with this elaborate dream world where I can place myself and I can live out my fantasies of the time.  I can separate myself from what I have from what I “want” without the what ifs because I knew that there was never going to be a way for me to actually have that world.  But if I get that world even in the most slight of ways, I would wonder what would have happened if I took the more realistic route in my life- and that’s not a dream that’s a regret. 

This is what the life coach through a curve ball in by making me think about what I could have as a future.  This is the stuff she made me consider.

Safe to say, I will not be returning to my life coach.  I have deemed her crazy and I have actually moved onto going to the career planning center for help.  They actually know what I want and are helping me decide between being a vet or a biologist in a different field. 

But this is my basic journey, and I want to take you along for the ride.  I don’t know all the answers.  I want input.  I want thoughts.  I have a lot of trouble taking the thoughts from in my head and putting them out there on a blog post unless I am ‘in the moment.’ So I hope that I am going to have some good ‘in the moment’ blogs, because this one is certainly an afterthought.

Welcome to the journey.  We’re taking off the blindfold and we are seeing what’s in front of us.