This is What You Do When You're a Senior

Hey there! I haven't written in a while, but don't worry... I haven't given up on the blog. ;) (It'd be quitting to give up before I even get my first comment! I'm going to need to significantly improve my blog-writing skills before I can justify giving up this here project.)

In any case, I've been busy getting ready for graduation. Picinics, breakfasts, awards ceremonies, volleyball in the park... it's a lot of work being a senior. You've got to live it up when you only have two more days of being a carefree highschooler. I could swear that I'm still in middle school half the time, but apparently adulthood advances a bit faster than that.

I'm still working on cleaning out my room... not that it's overly messy but I'm a lot more easily distracted than I thought I was when I started this project. The biggest issue is that I have so many books, and only one bookshelf to put them on. I know that being a minimalist entails letting go of things, but... not... books...

The good news is that I got a job callback today, so with any luck I'll end up with a summer job. ;) And... I have a few more prospective French students. So as of right now I think I'll label today a Good Day.

Oh... and I should be studying for exams right now. Sorry. Bye.

Spring Cleaning

There are eight days left until graduation and I'm still cleaning my bedroom (I've been cleaning it for about a week now). I wouldn't say that it's clutter-free yet but I've thrown away a lot of junk and I've got another pile that I'll be donating or selling. Converting to minimalism is a lot harder than I thought it would be, since I keep discovering how emotionally attached I am to my things. There are some things, like old stuffed animals, that I'm just not ready to get rid of. And there are other things that I'd kind of like to save in case I have children in the future (old porcelain dolls, books, childhood toys, etc.).

Getting rid of things is kind of like pulling off a band-aid (for lack of better imagery ;-) ). You have to make sure you're ready, then hold your breath and don't think about it.

It's kind of refreshing to be able to create space. I'm coming to realize that emptiness is kind of like silence: restorative and necessary.

Being a Little Bit Amazing

(As opposed to being very amazing which takes considerably more time and effort. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.)

Clarity and persistence are the keys to accomplishing big goals.

First, you have to know what you want. What are you good at? What do you like to do? Can you turn it into a project? Will you feel amazing if this project is completed? Do you care enough to keep working at it until it's finished?

In my case I like to write. That's easy enough to turn into a project: write a book. The harder part is staying dedicated. I've written two (crappy) novellas in my life and I can tell you that perseverance is difficult. I wrote the first novella when I was ~13 and I remember that I just wanted it to be done, although I can't recall why this was such a big deal at the time. Finishing the book was my motivation for finishing the book. (That's right.) The second one was written last year thanks to the prompting of my French teacher who decided that my final project for the year would be to write a novel in French. So in this case my motivation was just to finish the hundred or so pages so that I wouldn't get an "F" in the class. I didn't think about it. I just sat down and did my daily quota.

Granted, I wouldn't feel comfortable publishing either of these books. But the point is that they're done and even if I'm not Jane Austen, at least I've proven to myself that I have the capability to write these things.

You can do amazing things. What do you want to want to start with?

Becoming an Adult

With graduation ahead, some of my friends and I have been joking that we're going to have to become adults soon. We're entering the "real world" (as opposed to the "fake world?") and before we know it our childish antics will be taboo. Skipping down hallways, meowing like cats (it's a form of greeting at my school), having group conversations with imaginary classmates, perfecting our ninja skills... it's all part of the high school experience and none of it belongs in a professional work environment. As far as I know.

Plus there is the sudden onslaught of life skills that we have to learn to manage. Driving, cooking, laundry, jobs, taxes, manners, independence, studying, money management... some of us are more prepared than others but I don't think that any of my classmates have lived alone before, and everybody I've talked to is a bit nervous about going to college. Some of us are afraid that we won't make friends. Some of us can't tell our insurance card apart from our drivers' license. Some of us have never had a job before... A lot of my classmates are far more mature than I am but we're all still facing something new.

Growing up takes a really long time. Some days I feel like I could take on the world and other days I feel like I'm still in middle school. In our society, graduation is a rite of passage into adulthood. People seem to expect that a graduate will suddenly develop a grasp of the "real world" and conform to the image of the working adult or the energetic college student. In reality, however, I doubt that getting my diploma will make me feel any older.

My peers and I will have to just do our best to get jobs, to try to learn to cook, to try to improve our social skills and business skills -- I think that's how a person learns to grow up. And then there are the parts where we have to step outside our comfort zones: moving out of the house, traveling, taking responsibility for the effects of our actions, making important decisions... One day we might actually become the responsible adults that we're all pretending to be.

Announcing the Arrival of Spring!

We had two warm days in a row and all the snow is finally melted, so I think that it's safe to say that spring has arrived up here in the Great Northern Woods. Well, the residential part anyway. I can't speak for the actual North-Northern Woods...

My mom planted a bunch of tulips to celebrate but apparently the wildlife finds them delectable. The squirrels ate the tulips with the shorter stems and buried the tops in the dirt (presumably to save them for later). Then the deer came and ate the tulips that had managed to evade the squirrels. The deer eat her hostas as well. Some summer nights when the full moon is out and I can't sleep I look out the window to see a herd of deer in the front lawn, bathed in moonlight, munching on hostas and tulip petals. In winter they get to our house by walking across the frozen Bear Lake, but I'm not sure how they get here in the summer. Same with the foxes and the coyotes... I just don't know where they come from. I don't remember having a lot of wildlife around here in the past and now all of a sudden there are bobcats frolicking on the streets.

Environmentally speaking, I'm not sure if this is a good thing. I'm pretty sure that when animals show up in residential areas (even ones with lots of trees :-) ) it means that they're being pushed out of their natural habitats. But at least we don't have bears here. I wouldn't want to wake up and see a bear snacking on the tulips in the garden.

Things I Don't Remember Owning

First step to becoming a minimalist: getting rid of stuff I can't remember I had. Boxes in the basement, boxes in the attic, boxes in the closet...

The tricky part is that as soon as I open the boxes, I remember what's inside. :/ Yesterday I spent a good part of the evening cleaning out old papers and toys that I had saved from my childhood. I saved literally everything from the age of about 9-14, and stashed it all in boxes in the basement. With no organization whatsoever. So yesterday I ended up picking through boxes of random school assignments, rocks, key chains, dolls, my brother's school assignments, pieces of thread, fabric scraps, some candy, broken pencils... and now I'm wondering what was wrong with me when I was younger because normal people don't stash candy and stolen school assignments in hidden corners of the basement closet... (The good news is that I don't do that anymore.)

I cleaned out the attic, too, with the help of my mom. The attic was, of course, worse than the basement because the attic is attached to my bedroom and it has the added benefit of being the room that nobody will enter. It was more of a personal trash and junk receptacle than anything... but now it's clean. And it's going to stay that way because I've deemed it illegal to open the attic door in the future. The mice might escape.

Just kidding. They're too full to go anywhere. (I didn't limit my candy-stashing to the basement, apparently.)

(The mice are gone, actually. Don't worry. ;) )

Now I just have to move on to my bedroom closets. Scary.

The Etiquette of Awareness

Amy Vanderbilt never wrote about the internet. She never wrote about cell phones. Unless she was a psychic, I'm pretty sure she never heard the terms "twitter" and "texting."

Well birds twittered back then, but...

The point is that Amy Vanderbilt's etiquette book never contained a chapter about the etiquette of technology in a hyper-unfocused world. She never told us that it's impolite to text during a conversation, so we have to figure it out ourselves. And it's taking a long time, since the world is a lot more distracting than it was in the 1950s.

I think that my generation has to learn to look at the logic of etiquette before we start memorizing how it works in individual applications. The point of etiquette is to put people at ease. This is accomplished by establishing common rules for behavior, and by acting in a way that's generally predictable (that is, one would expect a visitor to sit on a couch as opposed to jumping on the couch and yelling profanities). Based on personal observations, my generation is sometimes confused about what it means to put people at ease.

So I'll use the example of texting during a conversation. The reason it's bad etiquette to pick up a cell phone and start texting while your friend is in the middle of a sentence is that it will make the speaker feel unimportant. Obviously, you like whoever is texting you more than you like the person who's speaking to you in person. ;) If you've ever been in a situation where one of your friends abandons you to go talk to another friend, you'll know how uncomfortable it is to be given the message that you're the "gamma" friend. Abandoning a friend for a cellphone is pretty similar.

Granted, we all have a hard time breaking ourselves away from technology. It's addictive, and it's almost a pavlovian response that we experience when we hear our phones beeping. We have to keep reminding ourselves: people. Pay attention to people. Be aware of what they're saying. Cell phones can usually wait. People, however, don't enjoy spending their time watching others compose text messages.