List of Things To Do Before I Die

- See earth from outer space

- Watch a summer sunrise in Europe at least one more time

- Get something, anything, published

- Live in another country

- Learn how to really dance, like ballroom dancing

- Go to the Kentucky Derby and wear a great big, bright hat

- Go on an African safari

- Learn how to windsurf, or sail a sailboat. Or both.

- Buy my parents two/three weeks to wherever they want

- Roadtrip from coast to coast

- Own a pair of designer shoes, just once

- Play hookey

- Make a difference

The Secret of Life

I know it sounds pretentious for an 18-year-old to say that she knows the secret of life. But I have spent two years discovering this secret, and I have spent about a month putting my finger on it, and now I'm ready to let it go. Posting the secret on a blog almost feels demeaning, like I should be saving this up for something bigger. Then again, this secret is not the fine china that you keep in the glass cupboard waiting for company good enough to use it.

Here it is.

Love. Not the noun, not the thing that we call love, but the verb. The act of loving. It's easy to love when life is good and you're happy and everything is going exactly the way you want it to go. But that is not when you need to love. You have to love when you're too tired and you're scared, and even when it hurts you. Find things to love and places to love and people to love.

Wake up in the morning and love it, the sun and the clean air and the fresh start, even if you're afraid of what the day might bring. Love the human beings in your life that aren't perfect, that sometimes frustrate you or hurt you, or leave you for another life. Love God, even though you can't touch him or see him and sometimes you're not sure how much you believe anymore. Find the one thing that makes the universe click into place and love it, no matter how much it doesn't pay, or how impossible it is. Love yourself, when you do things you're proud of and also when you do things that you wish you didn't have to live up to.

Every opportunity you have, love. If there is a beautiful sunrise, love it. Make a wonderful lunch and look foward to it all day. Laugh until you cry whether it's appropriate or not. Learn something new and revel in it. Make plans with friends and go ahead and count on them. Spend a half hour on your bike and enjoy it. Have the diligence to love every little thing, and have the courage to love every big thing.

Sometimes, when life just plain sucks, it seems easier to close up and stop loving, stop feeling. But it's not any better. Slowly, over time, you begin to lose yourself. You just have to let it hurt, ride out waves of terror and love no matter what. Don't ask me how it works, but I can tell you what love can do. Loving in the face of weakness produces strength. Loving in spite of fear makes courage. Loving when it hurts brings joy, and loving when you're not sure brings faith. Loving when the end of something is eminent is really, truly living. As long as you love you will not lose, you will not die.

It is not the secret to an easy life. It isn't the magic word that protects you from all of the bad stuff. But love does make life beautiful. It makes life worth living. Love is the only thing that means anything, it's our only chance, our only hope. It would take a lifetime to find the right words to explain how important this is. Just trust me, fall in love with life. Just love.

the smell of SPF 15

The second I got home this afternoon, I rushed upstairs for my bathing suit and a beach towel. I put ice water in my giant coffee mug, grabbed a book, and hit my brand new patio. I spent two glorious hours stretched out in the sun and the 95 degree heat.

Finally succumbing to the nap that had been nipping at my heels all day, I put my head down on the towel and turned my face to the sun. The humidity, the blazing heat, the summer haze, the sweat rolling down my back and making me itch brought Europe back. I remembered laying exactly like this on a rooftop in Sorrento, poolside in Nice, on my balcony in Barcelona. I missed it so much. I wanted to hear mopeds and strange languages, I wanted to be surrounded by mountains and beach instead of suburbia. I would have given anything just to smell it again, the baking asphalt, the cigarette smoke, the cooking food.

I turned my head to face away from the sun. My dog was passed out in the shade a few feet from me. I listened to the kid neighboors playing with their german shepard a few doors down. Another neighboor was mowing his lawn, and the droning hum and smell of freshly-cut grass was soothing and comfortable. I watched the wind play with the new tree leaves through the first summer haze of the year. Little helicopters were raining down around my head. I could hear my brother and my dad moving around inside of the house. And I realized that someday, probably someday soon, I would miss this, too.

how am I grumpy? let me count the ways...

I am grumpy because although I am enrolled as a Penn State student, I still have to show up to school. I still have to do fitness tests, I still have to do millions of busywork packets for French class, I still have to get written permission to use the bathroom that is right down the hall. I am still eating 5 hour old peanut butter sandwhiches out of a brown paper lunch bag.

I am grumpy because I need a second job and I cannot find one. I may be 18, but since all I can get is a summer job, I'm in the pile with a bunch of 16-year olds. Whenever I walk into a place and hear "Oh, sorry, our positions are filled," I finish the rest of the sentance in my head. "...filled with kids that need to fund their CD collection and buy lots of new clothes instead of helping to pay for a higher education."

I am grumpy because although I am old enough to go to North Carolina this summer with my friends, I am not old enough to drive. The fact that one of the safest, most reliable cars ever cranked out is sitting in my driveway, and I have a 100% clean driving record, and am a legal adult means nothing. I will spend 18 expensive hours on a crowded passenger train while my friends get the ever-elusive roadtrip that I have been waiting for.

I'm grumpy because I am 18 and a legal adult, but it all means nothing. I still have to ask my parents for permission for just about everything. I have no interest in buying lottery tickets or cigarettes, or products from an infomercial. There are no good 18 and up clubs in this city, and I don't plan on having sex with other consenting adults anytime soon. I don't want to gamble, I don't want to buy my own apartment. I could have voted on my high school budget, but isn't that ironic, voting on something that no longer applies to me?

I'm grumpy because it feels like I'm already losing my friends. One of my best friends left for a few days (I think) without saying "Hey, see ya next week." My other best friend is running out of time for all of the the things we planned to do before she went. For the first time we have different priorities. Conversations are no longer "we should do this," or "let's do that." It's more of a notification of our own seperate plans to each other. I'm grumpy because I haven't celebrated my 18th birthday with my friends yet and I don't think I will. Because the senior banquet is messing with the soccer game that I waited all winter for. Because I still have not seen Spiderman 3, and I really wanted to.

I'm grumpy because my house feels so small, and my family drives me up a wall a lot of the time and part of me just wants to go. But then I love my home and my family too much to really want to leave. I don't want to leave my family, but I can't stay, either.

I don't belong in high school anymore and I don't belong in college yet. I am definitely not a child, but I am also not an adult. My life is not my friends' lives anymore even though I see them almost every day and love them just as much. I don't belong at home, but I don't belong on my own, either.

You know when you're going for a boat ride and it comes time to actually jump into the boat? Usually the dock and the boat are more than one step apart, and you have to jump a little to make it in. There comes that split second when your feet are no longer touching the dock, but you're not in the boat yet- you are just suspended in air. That is the split second where I look down into the green harbor water and wonder if I'll make it. I always make it, but just the same, I wonder every time.

I just thought I had some more time before that split second of my life came.

my blogging muscle is weak. sorry.

The girls in our party, after hours of prep time.

Our entire party, 10 in all.

Our limo alternative. Free, and just as much fun. Less dignified, though.

My best friends.

Senior Ball of 2007 was amazing. Or "maz," as some would say. 24 straight hours of nothing but fun, which was a beautiful thing after 3 straight weeks of nothing but studying.

Usually I don't like living in a little town. But getting ready for prom in a small town is great. I ran to Eckerds during the primping process to pick up bobby pins and kept running into people. There were kids also on last minute errands, picking up flowers across the street, playing basketball in driveways. It kind of made me wish I hadn't gone out with my head covered in neon curlers. Ah well, such is the price of beauty.

So, preparation took from 12 pm to 4 pm. (My brother, who is of the play basketball all afternoon, shower and slap on a tux in 22 minutes gender, still cannot believe how it could take that long to get ready.) I actually managed to get my hair to curl and stay curled, having kept my hair in curlers for 6 hours, going over the curls with a curling iron, drowning in hairspray, and receiving lots and lots of help. Sometimes I really like being a girl; eating all afternoon and putting hair up and putting on make up and generally getting pretty is a lot of fun.

PIctures took an hour because there were 8 people in our party. How many combinations of 10 people can you have? We did it. We even threw in parents and siblings. Since Mel and I were dateless, we were in about half of the pictures, so we got some swinging in, wearing formal gowns. We're like 6. At least I managed to stay on my swing and not stain my gown, Mel.

Then we loaded into our two vans (my van was decorated in window paint and had twinkle lights with stars on the inside.) On the way to ball, the wheel off the second van completely came off, right on Manitou road. Not the tire, the entre wheel fell off the axle. So we had two vans pulled over, one of them gimpy, and 8 people in formal wear standing on the side of the road. That's a good story if you had just witnessed it, never mind it actually happening to you. We got another ride and were only 30 mintues late, and when we ran out of the "You clean up so nice, your dress looks great, let me see your hair," kind of conversation with aquaintances, we had a really good story.

Our table got to go up and get food first, which I was guess was pay-back since we went dead last at junior prom and all of the good food was picked over. After eating, which is one of my very favorite things to do with friends, we danced for almost three straight hours. I love dancing. I haven't been dancing since the club in Florence. My calves are really sore today. There were three songs from Grease, two people came thrillingly close to a fight, and I got a purple glow bracelet.

We went to Java's for a bit to get some caffine. Delicious caffine in the form of a chocolatey, espresso-y, icey drink. Then I got to shower at Kristen's before bonfiring. Getting nasty hairspray out of your hair and make-up off your face, and washing off other people's sweat from dancing with 430 people on one dance floor easily feels like 4 hours of sleep. We spent a couple of hours around a massive fire. We talked and laughed and the boys burned everything that wasn't nailed down or alive. We even sang. Back to Ange's house at 4:00 for a little bit of didn't-turn-out-so-good-eggless-cookie-dough and sleep. I got 5 whole hours, which is a really good deal.

Then we got breakfast at Chach's. Holy crap. Bagels and sausage and eggs and fluffy, cripsy, beautiful pancakes and this french toast souffle thing. We just sat and ate and ate and ate and ate. Like I said, eating good food with good friends is one of my all-time favorite things. I wasn't really hungry until dinner. Then again, I wasn't fully concsious until dinner, either.

I was home around noon and can't remember much after that. But Ball 2007 was definately some of the most fun I've had all year.

I know I haven't updated since the dawn of time.; blame the AP exams. I haven't had one spare minute for three weeks. But I do think I may have college credit for every single one of my college-level classes. This means that study abroad is still an option, and I have a buffer for the 3.3 GPA that I need to get into my major sophomore year. So I won't graduate early, but I will most definately graduate on time.

Ugh. Senior year is so weird. For the fall and winter, it's dark and cold out, and you're sitting and waiting to hear from colleges. Everything feels slow and all you want to do is getting moving and get out. And then spring comes, and you choose a school, and APs start picking up, and everything just starts to go so fast. It's like you're waiting for the plane to take off and you discover that you're actually attached to a rocket. Now I'm just hanging on by my fingernails, hoping I can survive all of the changes that are suddenly very close, and very real.

There's a lot of things that I really don't want to do. Saying godbye to my friends, watching my family walk out of the dorm, spending weeks and weeks in a strange place with no one I know.

But it's still something I need to do. I know that the friendships I care about the most won't end, even though they will change a lot. I know that if I stayed home much longer it wouldn't be so pleasant for anyone anymore. And I would rather be a nameless face in a foriegn land than going back to high school for another year.

I have a month before graduation, without any classwork. It's spring and it's warm and sunny, and I plan on having fun all of the time. But it's all going so fast, and it's hard to not be thinking about the end.

A Series of Haikus

Not AP exams!
They're taking over my life.
Oh, how I hate them...


Last day of 17...
Tomorrow I'm an adult?
This is really strange.

Now I'm hungry;
I'm going to get breakfast.
Have a good weekend.