Summer Goals Revisited

As today marks the Open House for my Senior year, I figure now's an appropriate time to evaluate myself on my summer goals, which are here.

1. Read. This was generally a fail. I only read two books all summer, one the required reading project and "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" by David Sedaris (which I recommend). Both were enjoyable, but I wish I'd been able to get to the library more.

2. Get my license. Another fail, but not completely. I've made much improvement in my driving and drove a lot this summer, more than I've driven previously. I should be able to get my license fairly soon if I keep it up.

3. Exercise. Yet another fail, and there's no redeeming points on this one. Just fail.

4. Room clean. Semi-win. I did alright. It's never going to be effortlessly perfectly beautiful, but it's not that bad. It's been that way for a few weeks. Still not a complete success.

5. Be more social. Semi-win. I did a few things, but not much.

Well, in conclusion, I didn't complete anything I want to this summer. Yet, I'm not really all that discouraged. Maybe I'm growing apathetic to failure on my self-made goals, which is probably not good. I would make a goal to work on that, but that seems a little counter-productive.

I think I'll take a new approach to this fall and see how it goes.

"If I could write a letter to me...

and send it back in time to myself at seventeen..."

What would it say?

Brad Paisley already knows because he's 40something and successful and has plenty of evidence to reassure his young self.

What would reassure me? After all, I'm seventeen and in need of some reassurance. So if I got a letter tomorrow from my adult self, what words would I want to hear?

I would want to hear, first and foremost, that everything worked out decently and I'm not living at home with my parents. I want to know I got into college and got a job I like or love, and am not struggling to merely survive. My worst fear in all the world is being a failure, in my own eyes and the eyes of the rest of the world. I don't want to wake up when I'm 40, hating my life, myself, and everything else. I'm afraid I'm already on a road that's leading in that direction and I'm only seventeen years old.

Second, I'd like to hear that I didn't really waste my youth like I'm always convinced I'm doing. My fatal flaw is that I criticize myself constantly but never take any real action. I want reassurance that one day I do take action.

"Have no fear, these are nowhere near the best years of your life..." sings Mr. Millionaire Brad Paisley. I hope he's right, though. I truly hope these are nowhere near the best years of my life. I know there's no letter coming in the mail telling me it all worked out. I know it's up to me to make sure it works out.

But a letter wouldn't hurt...

You would not believe your eyes...

if ten million fireflies lit up the world as I fell asleep, cause they'd fill the open air and leave teardrops everywhere. You'd think me rude but I'd just stand and stare.
(Stolen from Owl City...)

Fireflies are so cool. What other living thing can light up? (Okay, there's probably some obscure creature I'm not aware of, but let's ignore that for the sake of my musings.)

I always liked sitting on the deck and watch them put on a show in my backyard. They light up the edge of the woods, making it look all Christmas in July. It's so simple and pretty.

More fun than watching them is catching them, however. I spent many nights catching them at my grandma's house and temporarily imprisoning them. Imprisonment for being pretty? That kinda sucks. I remember my cousin and I forgot to poke holes in the jar once and they all died and we felt horribly guilty. We had a firefly funeral and everything.

At bible school this summer, one of the mascots of the day was a firefly. When the preacher asked all the little kids if they'd ever seen fireflies, their little faces lit up like the bugs in question. They must've been remembering all the nights like the ones I was just thinking of. One of the other teachers corrected the preacher, "we call them lightning bugs around here." I guess she was right; that seems to be the regional term. But I much prefer the term firefly. It just sounds prettier, cooler (haha cooler, fire!) and does the little creature more justice.

On a blog I read, the post mentioned catching fireflies. One of the commenters remarked that she lived on the West Coast and had never seen real fireflies. I'd never thought about that before. I kind of assumed they were just everywhere, but apparently not. Which does make more sense. I never really consider the benefits of living the country very much, but I finally found one in my firefly-filled backyard.

Imagine if you just visiting the East Coast or something and nobody ever told you about fireflies and all the sudden little balls of light come flying out of the grass around you. How would you react to that? I imagine I might jump a little. I sort of wish I hadn't grown up taking the bugs for granted just to experience that small moment of wonder.

I'm not one to talk about miracles and the splendor of nature and all that kind of thing, but I have to be a little sentimental when I see those little buggers zooming around the yard. I just need to find me a mason jar with a lid and a companion willing to go bug hunting with me. =]

Singing to Turn Back the Time

Sometimes, songs are like mini-time machines.

When I, as most people do, hear certain songs, it instantly zips me back in time. I experienced this very vividly last night.

As usual, I couldn't sleep, so I turned to my trusty ipod to entertain my restless brain until it decided to let me sleep. The first song that came pouring from the headphones to flood my weary head was "I'm Still Breathing" by Katy Perry. Instantly, it was last summer, and I was lying in approximately the same position in my bed, but my headphones were plugged up to side of my cd player.

I'd just spent the day with my dad and grandmother in her town, shopping. It had been an above-average day. It had been a long time since the three of us, a multigenerational group, had been together without the pressures of the rest of the family. These two are perhaps my two favorite people in the world, and if you add them up, you get roughly myself. We laughed and had more fun in a Sam's, a pool store, and a furniture place than anybody ever should. At the furniture store, a distant acquaintance of my grandma's attacked us, desperate for a sale. Dad and I laughed, sipping on the free Cokes in glass bottles that you get upon entering the store, as Grandma tried to keep the persistent sales lady at bay.

At Sam's, we impulsively purchased a gigantic jar of pickles that still remains in our fridge. Mom gawked at it for weeks, cursing our sillyness and love of pickles.

At Target, we inconvenienced the sales people to the point where we thought we'd have to make a great escape before they tied us up in the back with packing tape and price stickers and leave us for dead because Grandma tried on every knee brace in the store, leaving a trail of open packages and frustrated employees in her wake. She didn't even buy one. One girl ran the length of the store in pursuit of a tape measure that turned out unnecessary. We only found this abundantly funny, but she probably didn't.

After that long day of shopping and bonding, I couldn't sleep when I got home. Eager to listen to the new CD I'd gotten at Target, I popped it into my CD player since I didn't want to go through the trouble of turning on my computer to put it on my ipod. I used the headphones as not to awake the rest of the household.

Now every time I hear any Katy Perry song, I remember that day with my grandma and father. The events that took place probably seem mundane to anyone else, but to me it meant a lot. I'm glad I have this sort of mental soundtrack to take me back whenever I wish to relive it.

Here's To You, Mrs. White

Isn't it weird how just one class can change the direction of your life so easily? I always stress the importance of school, to the annoyance of my family and friends, I'm sure. A lot of school is just crap, busy work, and state-mandated fluff designed to make it look like they really care.

The important stuff in school isn't the schoolwork. There's so much else we learn there that we carry with us for the rest of our lives. One college class can end up becoming a major, a career, a life. Just that single three credit hours can mean so much to one person. Why would you want to miss out on that possibility?

What got me thinking about all this is that I found my 7th grade Science and Social Studies notebook. You would think your 7th grade class would be pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and I did, until I read through that notebook and started thinking about that class.

In it, we learned more than about the structure of cells and the history of the Constitution. My teacher, Mrs. White, was determined to make us interested in politics, current events, and the general world outside of our middle school lives. I'd never really paid attention until that class. Every day, she would have us write an inspirational quote beside the date, followed by a few current events. I was surprised that I actually grew to look forward to this daily ritual.

A lot of times, teachers start the year out with aspirations of daily rituals, and they usually only last a few weeks. Not Mrs. White. Not a single day of class is without a quote or event. She really, truly wanted us to think, not just pass our EOG's. This is admirable.

This also happen to be 2004, the Bush and Kerry Presidential election. She had us keep an election journal, not just of the Presidential race, but of many of the local ones, too. She even had Harrell and Virginia Foxx have a small debate at our school. They even answered one of my questions. That single project opened my eyes to a world of politics of which I'd previously been blissfully unaware. I started to understand the parties and what they stood for (eventually aligning myself with one), the issues, the jobs these people did. No other teacher had ever thought to even try to teach us such things, real things. It instilled in me a political awareness I still value today. I might still be living in a bubble if not for that class.

I can attribute so many things to Mrs. White when I think back about it. I never realized how much of me I found in there until I started reading that notebook again. The strongest memory I have, besides the election journal, is how she encouraged me to enter this essay contest that I ended up winning. Another part of me she helped me discover.

Who ever said school was useless definitely wasn't in Mrs. White's seventh grade Social Studies and Science class.

(Ha, this is the most boring blog entry ever. I apologize, but not enough to delete it. =] )

The empty and the hopeless

I was watching the movie Revolutionary Road tonight, and there's this clinically insane character. Throughout the whole movie, he's the only one telling anything remotely like it is. I could write a whole entry on just that, but the thing that sticks out in my head is this one line:

"Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness."

I missed the next five or ten minutes of the movie because I was stuck pondering that line. Even my mother, who usually doesn't care to ponder the deep and philosophical, gave a realizing, appreciative "oh".

It's just so blindingly true. A lot of people claim their lives are empty. That's easy. People throw around how their lives have no meaning all the time. But rarely do they add "and it's always going to be that way." Such complaints about the futility of one's life are typically punctuated by
by the making of goals and resolutions, pacts and contracts with yourself to make your life better. We're trained to end on a high note, so we hold onto the hope that now we've realized our mistakes and can fix them with a new mental attitude and a montage of impulse buys like on the movies.

We don't think "oh well, I've maxed out my potential. I just suck." But that has got to be the case sometimes. Maybe more often that not. We usually fall right back into our old routines, living the same ole life that we consider substandard. Empty.

So is all that hope completely false? That's the most depressing thing I've heard in a long time.

So that crazy movie guy was right. It doesn't take any guts at all to realize your life sucks. To admit it's hopeless, however, takes serious guts.

The question I'm asking myself now is, are my guts serious enough?

TV, Internet, or Cell Phone?

I recently read an article in Reader's Digest about this world-wide poll somebody conducted. It asked the citizens of a bunch of different countries which they'd sooner give up- television, internet, or their cell phones.

The results were really interesting. If I remember correctly, only one country voted to give up the internet, Brazil. Apparently, only 44% or so of the people even use it in the first place. I also saw a study somewhere that said Brazil has one of the fitter, more attractive populations in the world. Correlation, maybe?

I can't even remember which one the U.S. gave up, but I'm thinking cell phones. What would all those texting drivers do instead to avoid looking at the road??

All of this got me thinking about which one I'd give up. It seemed pretty simple at first. The cell. It's definitely the one I use the least. I could easily live without the handful of text messages I send a month, and you'd still have the home phone for any necessary calls.

But then I remembered that the cell phone is how I notify my parents to come get me. What if I were in trouble and needed to contact somebody? The cell phone is pretty good safety measure. Maybe it wouldn't be the smartest to give up.

The thing I use next least, but not exactly sparingly, is television. If I gave that up, I could still watch several of my regular tv shows on the Internet, no problem. But then again, watching tv sort of brings my family together. We've watched the Thursday night comedy block on NBC together for as long as I can remember. I wouldn't want to give up that family tradition. TV also plays a big part in our pop culture, which brings pretty much everybody together. It's like a universal language. That seems pretty important as well.

And so we have the internet. I spend way too much time on it. But it helps me keep in touch with people, and it's basically where I get my news. And I just like it. There's so many useful things on the internet, stuff that's not possible anywhere else. I really wouldn't want to give that up either, but it's the most plausible. The least consequential, anyway.

That was a much harder decision than I ever thought it would be. It amazes me how interwoven these technologies are in our lives, when they didn't even exist not an incredibly long time ago.

I don't really know what the point of all that was, but there it is! Food for thought, I hope.