On Cinderella's Life Lessons

Now, I can go on and on in these blogs about the little things I've been doing this summer like playing video games, or knitting, or reading Harry Potter on the treadmill, or doing whatever else I fill my time up with these days, but it all boils down to me trying really really really hard to ignore the fact I'm no longer a teenager and that I have to do grown-up things. This task has been made much easier by the fact that I couldn't find a job anywhere near-by that didn't mind hiring a girl who has never used a cash register in her life for only three months, and that I decided not to take any summer classes (due to the fact I wanted to find a full-time job).

However, today I did have to do some grown-up things like accepting financial aid so I can go to school this year (they should really change the "accept all" button to "click here to add thousands of dollars to your already sizable debt!") and registering for tests I need to take to get into the teaching program at Western.

This got me thinking about a few things, mostly concerning becoming an adult. Well, at least in age anyway. With my Disney obsession, dressing up in costumes, playing with toys , and making up imaginary worlds to write about points something different. But my point is that it does seem like the reasons little kids want to be grown-ups aren't really good reasons at all. With every additional bit of freedom you get as an adult, you get a multiple amount of that of responsibility attached to it. It's like an equation. With F=freedoms and R=responsibilities F*10=OMG R?! Like, yay! I get to drive! But oh yeah, you get to deal with running errands, putting in gas, thinking about car insurance, and the odd car accident here and there. Or, yay! I get to go to college and live on my own! But, oh yeah, you have to come up with want you want to do with your life, deal with mounting debt and/or getting a job to pay for college, finding a place to live, and everything else that comes with college and living on your own.

Then again, there is one other thing I thought about. As a kid, it seems like we're bombarded with this notion of having dreams. Adults always ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up (and mostly you get answers like princesses or ballerinas. Or maybe those are the answers I got because I always asked the four-year-olds in the ballet class I helped with). Cinderella teaches us that a "dream is a wish your heart makes" and whatnot. However, what's interesting about becoming an adult is that those dreams can become goals. Since I've been a little kid, I've wanted to travel and explore the world, and live somewhere completely different for a while. Now that I'm older, I've got a plan in place and a goal I'm working towards to get that dream. So maybe we have to deal with paying bills and college loans, but to think back to that little girl and her dreams being able to tell her that as an adult you can make that happen? Well, maybe this grown-up thing isn't so bad after all.

On Cityscapes and Straightening Up

Hello again internet! I come to you anew, back from the great beyond! Or, you know, Bellingham. I left last Thursday to spend a few days with Chelsea, and then my family came up on Saturday so we could spend a few days in these house/cabin things on Mt.Baker. For some odd reason I straightened my hair twice during this trip, and I took a picture of the second time when I was at the house/cabin thing. So you get this odd myspace-esque picture of me taking a photo in a bathroom mirror XD (and don't ask me what I'm doing with my face because I do not know).

Thursday was mostly me getting to Bellingham, and then going out for Thai food once I got there. Although when we got back to her apartment, Chelsea and I were approached by these two somewhat shady guys who kept telling bad jokes and then tried to get us to buy magazines from them. In the parking lot. Because the intelligent thing to do with your credit card number is to give it to random guys in the parking lot. Of course Chelsea was no help whatsoever in trying to get away, so I had to tell this weird (but mostly true) story about how my Grandfather sells Kirby vacuum cleaners in Montana after they said something about how other salesmen sell crap like Kirby vacuums. Then we watched North and South which is ten kinds of awesome, and nine of them have to do with the fact Richard Armitage is gorgeous.

Friday we walked around Fairhaven which resulted in us painting pottery, and eating gelato, cupcakes, and gluten free pizza. At the pottery place I painted one of those tea-for-one sets with a cityscape in front of a sun set on the tea cup, the night sky on the tea pot, then the moon on the knob of the top of the pot. I'm pretty excited to see how it turned out, but since they said it wouldn't be ready until after I left Bellingham Chelsea said she would pick it up and bring it to me later.

When I was with my family I read a lot in between the family games, walking on easy forest trails by really pretty rivers, and trips to used bookstores in Bellingham. I brought two books with me, but I also ended up buying eight books (five of them were used!). Out of those ten books I read three of them (Will Grayson Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan, City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, and Little Brother by Cory Doctorow).

As a side note I've also been trying to write more lately. For the past few nights I've just been writing whatever I feel like in this notebook. I've (poorly) translated random quotes into Japanese, wrote down my own thoughts about myself and life in general, and wrote random bits of stories I've been working on and bits of ones I hadn't thought of until I started writing it down in that notebook. It's been nice to just write again.

Also, I think I might start a craft blog. I created one here on blogger ages ago, and I thought it might be nice to chronicle the things I've been making (mostly crochet and my attempts to learn how to knit). I might post a link to that if I ever actually do it. As a parting gift, here's a crappy webcam photo of an elf I started today. I'm quite proud of the ears.

Thoughts on School and Summer

Well, here we are again. It's been... three months since I've posted last? Awesome.

In the past three months I've done a ridiculous number of things that I really should have blogged about while they happened but now I don't know where to start on any of it. I finished my first year of college, got an A in a class I thought I would barely get a B in, went on a few trips with friends, climbed through a forest of trees and fallen down logs, experienced more car trouble in the month of May than I have since I've started driving (although, it wasn't my car), learned to knit, turned 20...

See? Too many things. However, last year young adult author Maureen Johnson started this thing called BEDA (Blog Every Day in April), but for 2010 she's moved it to August. I didn't participate last year, but I have decided I'm going to do it this year so I'm sure I'll have a chance to catch up on some of these stories. Until then, know that in the past month I've really done nothing but play video games, knit, read, write, and watch Avatar:The Last Airbender.

To make up for lack of "interestingness" in this post, here's some pretty pictures of fireworks from the 4th of July: