12/12/12 (with 12 Days ’till Christmas)

In spirit of the day, here’s 12 things I… well, just 12 things.

1. It looks like I can start working through the application process to go to London next fall to study for a semester!

2. I swear the Thought Catalog knows my life and publishes pieces that are eerily applicable to my life all the time.

3. Parenthood, the TV show, is perfect and gives me all sorts of feelings and I think everyone should be friends with my friends who are the characters on the show.

4. I don’t think I’m the only one who can say this, but I really wish I still thought Christmas is magic and that it brings miracles and that everything is magically okay and easy and no one feels out of place anywhere including me.

5. I really hope 2013 beings better and more promising that 2012 did. I am looking forward to that.

6. Random fact: I need to get back to focusing my health after exam week. New Year’s resolutions to jump start and all that.

7. Oh yeah! EXAMS ARE OVER. I made it. I don’t know my grades just yet but I’m done with this semester and I’m so very much enjoying having no responsibilities when I’m not at work and being able to sleep in until unreasonable hours.

8. Should I be done with my Christmas shopping? Are normal people done with their Christmas shopping yet?

9. I want more money but I don’t want to work more. Hrmm.

10. There’s a play I want to audition for and the role that I am best suited for as far as description, but… “she is age 18-40: Very pretty, kooky, with large horn-rimmed glasses. Quick to strip down to her underwear, and then runs around wrapped only in a sheet.” Yeahhhhh. That last part won’t fly. Shame.

11. It’s time for bed right now but I have to finish this list.

12. Today was rough. This week/month/semester has been rough. Time for a sleep coma.

And goodnight.

The post that was harder to write than I thought, and is a little more personal than I’d like.

My sister has got it figured out. Her first job was a summer internship at the place my dad works at. In the Fall, they asked her to stay with them, and soon offered her to be full-time. She never had to put in applications all over town, or go job hunting on a rainy day, running into every store in strip malls asking if they’re hiring. She moved out as soon as she turned eighteen. Like I could ever imagine affording that. She just got married at age twenty in March of 2010. She never had to go through a post-graduation, pre-anything-meaningful-in-life, quarter-life crisis or anything. Not only is her life fulfilling, simplistic, and everything she’d always wished it would be, it’s everything I wished my life would be.

There she is, happily married, has always had an enjoyable and rewarding job, loving being a wife and cooking and working out and trying new things, driven, and being exactly where she feels she is meant to be. And here I am. I graduated High School last summer, and then went away to a wonderful school that I loved, only to be flipped on my head. My Vocal Performance major, which had been all I had known, ended up not being what I loved or thrived doing. Linguistics, my new focus, was not offered as a degree at that school. Also, it turned out that I actually felt limited and trapped on campus rather than the “Go, be free and independent!” that freshman year of college is supposed to promise.

So I came home. I transferred to my local community college, taking some courses that will work towards my degree (nothing specialized, unfortunately – just Spanish, film, English Comp, etc.). Now, I NEVER imagined myself being here. I still kind of can’t believe I’m here. Unlike my sister, I am exactly where I never hoped or thought or imagined I would be. I’m going to community college. I’m working a part-time job, to make money, to buy gas, to drive to my part-time job. I then come home, where I live with my parents, and put up with three obnoxious, past-their-cute-prime, eat-my-favorite-articles-of-clothing dogs. I have a car that thinks going into the shop once a week is a spa treatment – seriously, it’s been in the shop three or four times in one month.  I didn’t just come back home to figure out what to do next, or to work and get my degree, I came home to an unfriendly not-so-welcome into the grown-up world of court dates, used car shopping, boss issues, and realizing just how unaffordable and tedious being a grown up is.

I’ve been feeling a heck of a lack of drive. There’s no diploma I’m working for, or a career I can’t wait to start and do things with, or anything like that. The next thing in life I’m really looking forward to or excited about is getting married, starting a family, being a good housewife and mom and cooking and laughing. But it’ll be quite some time until I (or my significant other) can afford a wedding and place to live. And so it’s turned to myself. The only thing I can think to set goals with is to work out X many times a week, or tone up this or that part of my body. But even that gets old and tiring and discouraging.

My mom’s been bugging me about getting back into extracurricular activities that I loved in high school, which are not as easy or simple to get involved with or that have a point as when they’re run by your school (for example, working towards a recital or concert or opening night of the Spring musical). There is an audition for a play I’m going to do, but that’s in June (and as I’m writing this, it just hit me that maybe my week away in Georgia to see my best friend in July might hinder that involvement. I know a lot of times, they want some one who will be at every rehearsal – especially for any role bigger than “Chorus Dancer #6” or “Frightened Inmate #3”). I’ve been encouraged to call my high school voice teacher to begin lessons again – which I probably will, and I’ll enjoy it, but it’ll just be to pass the time. I know now that I don’t want a vocal arts career and so I don’t know if I’ll see much reason to it other than to just further improve my skills for… what, exactly?

When I put in a lot of job applications around town when I first transferred back home, two places were interested: a sandwich shop in the town right down the road, and the Cafe I work at now, which offered me an interview and job sooner than the former had. That being said, the sandwich shop did call me twice about an interview, but I had to tell them I just couldn’t add on another job with being in school and already working part time. However, now that school is over, I called them and asked about an interview to possibly add it on as a second job. But they seemed hesitant about reconciling my current sporadic schedule and about the number of people they already have that will discontinue their employment there in the fall when school starts up again (I’ll probably just go on with my current job and school schedule, like I did last semester), and that they would call me back. And I don’t know if I really want them to ask me to come in. I don’t know if I want a second job because I might as well make money if I have time on my hands, or if I think it could be fun or if I actually don’t want it but for some reason think it might be enough of a change in my life to make things interesting. I might have a new goal of learning how things worked and the recipes and the menu. I just don’t know.

So this is where I’m left. To all of you who have it figured out and are happy and fulfilled with your lives, congratulations. You’re very fortunate to be in your position and I hope it continues to give you many years of contentment. And for all those like me, I’m sure we’ll get through and something exciting and meaningful will happen to us eventually.

And I’m just trying to figure out where to go from here.

Facebook lies to us all.

   So, as I have said in previous posts, I’m Maria in The Sound of Music at my school.  Well. The cast was chillin and the idea came up that we should make Facebook profiles of our characters and all join a group of us.  I was on my way to do just that, but you have to enter your birthday in order to sign up. Hm, well, if I’m twentyish in the 1920’s…..

Facebook didn’t like that.         

“…Anyone can join!” my hindquarters.  What a lie.

So if I really was 105 years old? They wouldn’t let me sign up as myself?  I find that insulting.

 

 Update:   Just kidding.  The Sound of Music is in the 1940s.  But Facebook still didn’t let me make an account.

Solipsism

sol·ip·sism   [sol-ip-siz-uhm]

–noun 

1.	Philosophy. the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.

 

 

Solipsism syndrome is a state of mind in which a person begins to feel that everything is a dream and, therefore, is not real.

Solipsism is a philosophical theory that all activity takes place within the mind, and therefore there is no reality outside one’s own mind. As a philosophical theory it is interesting because it is said to be internally consistent and, therefore, cannot be disproven. But as a psychological state, it is highly uncomfortable. The whole of life becomes a long dream from which an individual can never wake up. Even friends are not real, they are a part of the dream and are his own fantasies. A person may feel very lonely and detached, and eventually becomes apathetic and indifferent.

Some environments are conducive to producing solipsism syndrome. This state of mind can be easily produced in an environment where everything is artificial, where everything is like a theatre stage, where every wish can be fulfilled by a push-button, and where there is nothing beyond the theater stage and beyond an individual’s control.

 

 

 

 

(information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism_syndrome)

9-15-08

 

       All things considered, today has turned out to be really great! Well, kind of.  I feel really good today.  I got a lot of reading done in choir (shh!).  Right now I’m reading The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve read it about… a fourth of the way through (if that) about three of four times, but this time I’m farther into the book than I’ve gotten previously and I’m excited.

       In second hour, Intro to Statistics, we had a test. I asked for the date of today to write at he top. “It’s the fifteenth,” some one told me. At first, I wrote it without a thought. Then I realized:  Tomorrow’s my birthday!  I can’t believe it slipped my mind!

       Anyway, I feel pretty good about the test. I’ll be knocked off my feet if I get 100% or even 99%, but I think I did pretty well. The test made that class period feel really short. And I managed to sneak a Quaker Oats bar. (And I so almost spelled “Quaker” as “quacker”.)  I hope no one’s allergic to peanuts in that class….

       In Honors Chemistry, we got the test we took on Friday back. I got eight wrong out of fifty-five total questions. Sounds okay, right? It’s an 85%. I left class last Friday feeling really good about it!  GR.   But I did get moved to the front which will, hopefully, help me do better on the next test.  And what I hate the most is that this test is the first I ever checked my answers for! You know how you’re always told that “if you finish your test early, you should go over your answers again and check them before turning it in”? I’ve never done that! Friday was the first time I ever actually went over the answers for each problem.

       Forth hour was pretty fun. We read Alice Watson’s essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,” for most of the time and my teacher read some excerpts from a journals we turned in on Friday, including an entry about hunting and a twelve-point buck with a “wide rack.” Yeah, the whole class burst out laughing but my teacher couldn’t figure it out.

 

       Dear Reader, I love you and I think you are the cat’s pajamas.

 

       Yeah, that was Izzy’s reaction, too. I told her that after reading it in my book. I showed her that line and she found just as much amusement as I did. I decided to steal her planner and write this newly discovered phrase all over the pages. It’s not uncommon for us to do that (last week, she screwed me over by writing “I just lost the game” on several pages). So I wrote all over it. On dates that are important to me and holidays and in the weekends. 

“Izzy, I think you are the cat’s pajamas!”
“You are THE cats pajamas!!”
“Cat + Pajamas = IZ!”
I even drew a picture of a cat and of pajamas.  

       Later in class, I took her planner again. I flipped through the pages to this week. My birthday is tomorrow and I was gonna write it in there. But, wait. I already wrote something about it in that week.  I flipped to the front…

       It wasn’t her planner. It wasn’t any one’s who was in the class. It was a guy I know of and really, really, really can’t stand. J.G. He is (I haven’t seen him around lately, though) a tall, rather large boy with a chubby face who took choir in eighth grade to have a blow-off class. The last I knew of him, he was immature, obnoxious, disrespectful, annoying, and just drove me up a wall!  But he left his planner in a class before mine, and now will find a humorous, nonsensical phrase repeated numerous times to some one he doesn’t know, anonymously.

       And, as evidenced by this nice, lenghty-ish post of actual writing, I had TIME! I had absolutely NO homework! None! Zilch!   Yay!

 

———-

 

       And I just got back from a surprise birthday party thrown for me! I’m so glad I didn’t have any homework at all today. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. It was very, very fun. Although, I must admit, very emotionally draining. There were people there from several different groups of mine. My drama group, and old drama group, kids I met through my mom, my ex boyfriend (but current best friend – still. Yay), and my sister and her boyfriend. The thing is, I act differently around each group. Well, no, not differently. But I have different walls still standing with each different person and there were people that intimidated me, not matter how much I didn’t show it.

       It was an emotionally draining night, filled with more than its fair share of embarrassing moments that caused me to want to crawl under a rock until I could turn back time, laughing, awkwardness, and – naturally – surprises. All in all, though, a good night.

 

 

 

     Thing to smile about #11: Having a birthday party for the first time since I turned ten.