All Hallow's Eve throughout the years: A lookbook of shame

All Hallow's Eve. The one day of the year it's socially acceptable to play dress-up. The only question is, who do you want to be? -xoxo Gossip Girl

The cheetah posed and ready to attack

If you're a bird, I'm a bird... right?

The winged liner was a nice dramatic flair

Things got feisty in the cheetah costume. Fighting over a glow stick? Sword??

Reality, sometimes it's not all it's cracked up to be

Some day, I'll be living in this big ole city....

One of the saddest moments in life is realizing that everything that made up the dimensions of your universe is gone. Sometimes I forget I have a support system at all. I feel like there is just me, and I am all by my lonesome. The truth is that's how it is. I don't have my sister here to brush my wet hair, so I work out the snarls all by myself. I don't have a mother to walk with me and listen to me talk about my problems, so I don't talk about them. I don't have a father to eat breakfast with me, so now I just eat my muffin alone. I don't have a golden retriever to cuddle with me when I'm alone, so now I don't cuddle. I don't even have my best friends to be with, so I constantly feel like I am walking through my life having experiences that are entirely worthless because I'm alone. Of course I'm not alone, but what's the difference really if you don't feel supported or loved? All I have are these overpriced textbooks to love me, and they don't. That's the problem with putting all of your investments in one place, when it fails you are left with nothing.
I'm not scared of being alone in a big city. Most of my childhoods fears don't plague me any longer. I'm not scared of flying by myself, or talking to people on the phone. I'm comfortable arguing with adults when it is justified, and taking cabs by myself. I know how to cook basic meals, and I can successfully take care of myself. I have so much to be grateful for. I was given the privilege of being offered a wide open space to try and make a new life for myself. For this I was always grateful, until the day my parents moved the last of the furniture into the room and said it was time to go. In that moment I realized that space was highly overrated. The one lesson I have managed to grasp in Economics is the concept of opportunity cost, that with every decision you give up the next best option. The opportunity cost of going away for college was much, much, higher than I anticipated. So high that I have a feeling if I had known it would have been nearly impossible to force me to go. I suppose that is why no one tells you the truth about these things. The only thing that I really am truly afraid of anymore is never being happy. What if this is as good as it gets? What if this is the "good life?" Me standing awkwardly at clubs watching other people drink and be merry, and all the while wishing I was at home watching Downton Abbey with my parents. Obviously most people will think I'm lame. But I don't think anyone can really understand until you find yourself alone in a 12 by 12 room and realize that you live in a building of 300 eighteen year old kids who have no idea what the hell they are doing with their life, and are all making ridiculous mistakes in the process of finding out. Some nights are better than others. Sometimes I look out at the city lights of Dallas and I feel so free and liberated, like I'm living out what Taylor Swift sang in Mean-   Some day  I'll be living in a big ole city, and all you're ever going to be is mean. Now that it is fall and all the leaves are changing I find myself thinking:

Now I know why all the trees change in the fall, I know you were on my side even when I was wrong, and I love you for giving me your eyes and standing back and watching me shine.

Rain

 

           If I had to pick reoccurring symbols in my life aside from tea, fish, and hair, one of them would for sure be rain.  I’d like to think that if I were a type of weather I’d be rain. I like the way rain is multi dimensional, it is cold and wet, yet soft and sweet, and raw and refreshing. I love the way it renews the earth, and how after a good downpour life glistens in a sort of foggy dew of reaffirmed peace. I like the way the world gets really quiet while it rains, and how no matter where I am or what is going on, when it rains I feel a little more special, like that particular day is something out of a good movie. All good movies have one dramatic in the rain scene. I just like the smell of the rain, and the way it sends the wind blowing, and the big dramatic clouds roll in and make the world a little darker. I love the way flowers look when they are covered in raindrops, and I love the way it feels when I walk through the streets holding an umbrella.

            Some of my fondest childhood memories are running around in the pouring rain out on the golf course, sliding down the wet hills on bogey boards, or playing games with my sister about who could wade the furthest out in the ditch without getting pulled away in the current. I remember the time I walked the dog all the way out to the edge of the bayou and I was watching someone’s boat bob around out on the water, when all of a sudden the skies opened up and I got dumped on. I remember how within seconds I was drenched down to my underwear, and how my matted hair had snarled as I’d run home to get back to a warm dry house. I don’t like being wet, but I adore the feeling of raindrops on my face. I remember the cozy days when it would rain for weeks on end, with only a slight pause in between the storms and how I’d take residence in our formal living room  that allegedly had a ghost, with the big double doors shut, and I’d nestle in the armchair with the curtains around me as a blanket and read book after book without end. I love the way thunder sounds when I am falling asleep, like a gentle giant as I snuggle into my duvet.

Happiness project Commandment #12- Get out of your head.

            Greetings from the most boring Discernment & Discourse class of all eternity. My professor is currently sitting in the front of the room lecturing about this ridiculous book about Vietnam and telling these incredibly graphic stories about how people shot themselves to get out of the war. In the meanwhile, I just drank an entire soymilk cappuccino and I’m feeling great even though I slept for five hours. Feeling like a winner.  Today’s inspiration comes from one of the author’s of my Discernment reading, Herman Melville. He writes,  “I try all things, I achieve what I can.” There is no shame in attempting a feat and learning that it is something you cannot follow through. We aren’t built to be perfectly capable of accomplishing everything. Some things are also out of your realm of control. Accept that, and be at peace. I feel like a broken record sometimes, but I find myself repeating constantly in my head, Rome was not built in a day. If one of the finest cities ever constructed on Earth took years to build, then my little universe is going to take some time to fall into place.

This was the most peaceful picture I could find. I love to walk back from class and watch the way the light flitters in from the oak trees. 

Flying Playlist

Flying west into an everlasting sunset... Magical. 

I've been flying a fair amount this year and while I have not perfected my "hot mess minus the mess" look that I tend to sport in the airports, I must say my flying playlist is flawless. Nothing is quite like cold coffee,  music, and baggy sweaters as you stare out into the endless sky. Or the reality where you listen to your iPod to drown out the screaming children. God bless their little hearts.

1) Cold Coffee-Ed Sheeran
2) Stay Young, Go Dancing- Death Cab for Cutie
3) Never Gonna Leave this Bed {Acoustic}-Maroon 5
4) Tightrope {Acoustic}- Walk the Moon
5) Summertime Sadness- Lana del Ray
6) I've Got this Friend- The Civil Wars
7) Everything Has Changed- Taylor Swift & Ed Sheeran
8) Little Bird- Imogene Heap
9) 12 Fingers- Young the Giant
10) Next Year RAC remix- Two Door Cinema Club
11) Stay- MNDR
12) We Are in Love- Cider Sky
13) Strings Reprise- Young the Giant
14) Love Lost- The Temper Trap
15) Drops of Jupiter live- Taylor Swift
16) Step- Vampire Weekend
17) Sleeps Alone- Two Door Cinema Club
18) Dark Paradise- Lana Del Rey

19. Team- Lorde

20. Heart Out- The 1975

21. Changing of the Seasons- Two Door Cinema Club

It's A Funny Thing Coming Home

"It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what's changed is you."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Last October....

Life moves pretty fast, and if you don't stop and look around you might miss it. One of the main reasons I love my journal is that I love going back to this date a year ago in history and laughing at myself and my life problems. Or at least the ridiculous schemes I was plotting. I would like it to be known that every singe one of these issues has now been resolved, and I am still alive and breathing to tell the story of how I dropped my iPhone 4 in a concrete parking lot. So whenever you feel you can't go on, just remember- I wore a slutty cheetah costume for Halloween last year and got asked if I was wearing lingerie five times, and here I am living to see another October. (And to dress as a slutty cat for another year!)

Dear Me of the future and whoever else reads all of this,

My life and hard times or my life in the time of making the single most critical decisions I have ever been asked to make my whole life long. No one ever as sat down with me so many times and just asked me “What do you want?” “ Where do you want to be?” Maybe the truth is I couldn’t really tell you because it is all just one big giant mind block to me. I don’t know what I want and that’s about all I do know. I’ve never found an area of my life that brings me enough joy for me to have a revelation that it was exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It could happen, but it hasn’t, and that leaves me in the awkward position of trying to force a fit for myself when it just flat out doesn’t. The part of college life that excites me is the part about living in a new place with new smells and new opinions and new faces that want to know me. I like the idea of libraries when it’s raining and the idea of decorating a dorm room in a cozy manner and having a roommate who is my best friend. I just like a lot of the finer details of college living minus the idea of not being to handle my classes or hating it or everyone there. It makes no sense to me that I’m being forced to move out of my house. I just feel like I’m way too small to be out in the real world alone. Not to mention I lack most essential skills necessary to function out in the real world, like the ability to cook, or do laundry, or balance a balance sheet. (I got a 53% on that quiz in business class.)

I also broke my phone this week, even though it’s not totally broken, I mean it still functions.... just not one of the two buttons on the phone, the lock button, meaning the phone is permanently in the "on" position. Could be an extended metaphor for the position of my brain. 

What else has been going on? The new Taylor Swift album came out, so I’ve been listening to that a lot. Then the IB Halloween party is this evening and I plan on attending that in a slutty cheetah costume…. It’s always part of a scheme I assure you. 

All that Glitters is Not Gold

 I’m beginning to realize that Kenny Chesney as a wiser man than any of us could have ever known. I say this because I find myself singing his lyrics repeatedly in my mind- “The more things change, the more they stay the same, don’t matter how old you are…” I always thought that college was just this drastic break from your life where everything in the past became entirely irrelevant. I don’t think it’s so much like that now. I think that like Kenny sings, you can’t just drop the people in the past. You can wish that it no longer mattered, and you can try your hardest to pretend this is your new beginning, but no matter how many thousands miles separate you from high school, you can never get far enough away. Maybe reality isn’t even the right word. You can never get far enough to escape the truth. You can lie every day for ten years, but finally one day, the inconceivable truth reveals itself like an underground blackhead breaking free to the surface. Then the ugly is exposed to us all.

            My point is that perception is deceptive in nature. You can think something for years, and then with one single sentence there is that paradigm shift that shows you that everything was a lie. So don’t base your life values on what you believe to be true, base your values on what you know to be certain. Often enough we judge because we feel we know the whole story. As someone told me last night, the more we find out, the less we really know.   J.R.R Tolkien was able to put what I’m saying more eloquently in words.

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

So It's Over

And when you say you won't forget me, I can tell you that's untrue. Because every day since I've left you I've thought less and less of you. And I've worn out all the reasons to keep on knocking at your door, could be the changing of the seasons but I don't love you anymore.

Someday you'll be looking back on your life, at the memories, this is gonna be one of those nights.

Arizona, dancing across the desert. In my heart I will always see you everywhere. 

You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes, it brought me back to life.

As long as I live, whatever I do-As great as it is, you know what's a bummer, I'm never gonna beat this summer with you.

And nothing seems as strange as when the leaves begin to change, how we thought those days would never end. Sometimes I hear that song and I start to sing along...