What Even Is This?

“When you experience uncertainty, you are on the right path – so don’t give it up. You don’t need to have a complete and rigid idea of what you’ll be doing next week or next year, because if you have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen and you get rigidly attached to it, then you shut out the whole range of possibilities.”

– Deepak Chopra

  My world is shifting in so many ways. This isn’t a complaint, just a statement of fact. I’m a senior in high school AND in my second year of college.  Dynamics with old friends are completely different. There are new friends I never saw coming. And I doubt freshman me with her Jane Austen, braids, and mousy demeanor would even recognize senior me with her brazen attitude, pixie cut, and Walt Whitman.

I’m working through the agonizing process of deciding where to transfer. There’s one school in particular that interests me…and it’s on the other side of the country. Part of me feels like that’s a good thing. I feel ready to severe my old ties and start new ones, to find myself, to go in pursuit of my Great Perhaps. But quite recently, there have been some changes that have made me consider whether leaving is such a good idea. There’s an opportunity to share a house with friends, a good scholarship from a local school, and yes, there is a boy.

I’m at the point where movies like Lost in Translation and Reality Bites seem surprisingly relevant and watching the prom and graduation episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer make me cry. There are moments when I surprise myself with my maturity and others where I behave like a child. I think this is what they call growing up.

Hope you’ve had a great summer and good luck to those of you headed back to school (or already in classes!).

10 Things I Love: Summer Edition

Yeah, it’s really not different from any other 10 Things I Love, but whatever! 😉

1. Watching the extended editions of LoTR with actors commentary is a really fun experience. It sounds boring, but no. It’s hilarious! I laugh every time I watch this. My friends so would do this!

2. My hair is really long. I plan to get a pixie cut, but before I do, I have to try this! It’s so adorable. It reminds me of being 5 years old.

3.

4. I really want to see this! It looks really fun.  And I feel bad, because I’ve never seen a Woody Allen flick. It’s weird. I’m rarely interested in “romantic” movies.

5. I recently saw Source Code. It was much, much better than I was expecting. I’m still sorting out my opinions on it, but when I get a handle on it, I’ll post a review.

6. This.

7. The poetry of Elizabeth Barret Browning. The woman was a genius! She is so inspiring. Along with Emily Dickinson, Basho, and Walt Whitman, she is probably my favorite poet. Here’s a sampling:

“Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand,
Whence harmonies, we cannot understand,
Of God; will in his worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad-perplexed minors: deathly colds
Fall on us while we hear, and countermand
Our sanguine heart back from the fancyland
With nightingales in visionary wolds.
We murmur ‘Where is any certain tune
Or measured music in such notes as these ?
But angels, leaning from the golden seat,
Are not so minded their fine ear hath won
The issue of completed cadences,
And, smiling down the stars, they whisper –
Sweet.”

“When I attain to utter forth in verse
Some inward thought, my soul throbs audibly
Along my pulses, yearning to be free”

“Each creature holds an insular point in space;
Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound,
But all the multitudinous beings round
In all the countless worlds, with time and place
For their conditions, down to the central base,
Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound,
Life answering life across the vast profound,
In full antiphony, by a common grace!”

8. This is nowhere close to my favorite Regina Spektor song, and it’s nowhere close to the most summer-y, but it’s the one that’s stuck in my head. Ne me quitte pas! ( meaning, “Don’t leave me”, for all the non-French-speaking readers!)

9. I’m really into hugs right now. It’s such a simple thing, but it can mean so much.

10.  Straight No Chaser. Amazing. Listen for yourself

Things I don’t like:

1. Colds. It’s summer after all!
2. World history.

On that note, have a Happy Father’s Day! I’ll see you soon!