So, now I am sitting at the architecture firm where B used to work and am surrounded by Macs. There are so many Apple products here, I feel as if I've died and gone to heaven. I've decided that I'm going to budget a Time Capsule into my student loans for next year - wireless base station + external hard drive = happy Sarah B. That means that I can archive every class I take ever while also creating my own alternative for the spotty wireless Internet at school. What more could I want, really? I had thought previously that my next big technological purchase would be a new iPod (I have a first generation nano, and I'm kind of tired of having to change out music - two gigs is not enough for someone with a week's worth of music in her iTunes), but I think that the Time Capsule is a bigger priority. Plus, I can actually justify spending school money on something like that. A 30 GB iPod? Not so much, ha ha.
In other news, I've already reached the point in the summer when I'm ready for school to start again. Despite the fact that last year was pretty much an academic bust (as in, I'm on academic probation), I feel like the extreme change of environment has already made a positive impact on me. I definitely don't feel as depressed as I did last semester. And the way I'm living here is forcing me to create structure and self-discipline for myself, which was something that I never learned how to do. I'm learning how to navigate public transportation, I'm being given rather free-form tasks that for which I have to set deadlines and orchestrate myself, and best of all, I've been given the opportunity to live in a place that is pretty much free of familial pressures and obligations. For most of my life, I've been living through my family, comparing every aspect of my person and abilities to someone else akin to me. This has allowed me the safety of never having had to define who I am apart from them. And now I get to do that. I'm reading good books, eating well, exercising, and basically centering myself to figure out who I am. I was always taught to look to others' needs before my own, to make other people feel comfortable; and unfortunately I realize now that I have always been attracted to friends with strong personalities from which I could sponge. My personality is a patchwork quilt of all the people to whom I have ever been close. This needs to change.
However much I want school to begin, I know that I need more time to fully be ready for that next semester. There are still parts of me that need untangling and bolstering; still areas of my personality that need to coaxed out and dusted after ten or more years of dormancy. In the meantime, though, when it comes to school things: B saved all of her psychology textbooks from the University of Houston! I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm majoring in psychology at the University of Kentucky with a minor (I might switch to a double major, I haven't quite decided yet) in Spanish. I love psychology so much, and I'm very excited about sinking my teeth into those books! I think we're also going to make a trip to the farmer's market in B's neighborhood where Spanish is primarily spoken, so I'll get a chance to practice my speaking skills. So, agenda for the summer: 1. Find myself (ha ha, I know it sounds utterly cliché). 2. Practice Spanish. 3. Study up on psychology. Sounds like a good time to me.
Hope everyone's having a good day. I'll try to, as well :)
It's been around a week and a half since my last post (I apologize for the delay - I'm sure you'll understand when you're finished reading), and I already feel like I've been in Texas for months. This has sometimes been a negative - like when I realize that I have expended all patience allotted for the day and am plagued with visions of strangling children who are meant to be in my care, some of whom are related to me. In this house ("this" being my Texas home), these fits of irritability are chalked up to an ailment known by one succinct adjective: "hangry." This is, of course, an amalgam of "hungry" and "angry," a condition that comes over me quite often, I have noticed. However, it is easily remedied - eat something, you silly! You would think that a person as short as I am (4' 10 3/4" at the last trip to the doctor) wouldn't require as many calories as I consume, but I manage to eat whenever I am hungry (which is often) and avoid looking like a whale. This is nice. [author's note: I do have a tendency to go off on tangents, don't I? You might want to get used to that. I write in a style that is basically an embellished version of the way I speak - so I think much or a lot might sum that up nicely.]
But of course, there is a positive! Due to that sensation of having been here for a while, I feel very comfortable. Except for the heat (more on that later) and the fact that I am not at all used to living with children, I feel like I could probably stay here for much longer than this summer. And with everything into which I have stuck my eager little fingers already, this summer is probably not enough time. It seems like every time I give myself an opportunity to simply think, I am barraged with amazing ideas that would each require about two years, a college degree, and funds that I do not have. I don't have those other two, either, looking back.
Anyway [what'd I say?], it has proved harder than previously expected to organize people for It's Cool 2 Care projects. I understand that the teenagers with whom we are working are very busy with extracurricular activities and school itself, but is texting someone back really that taxing? Does it sap every bit of their energy to respond to someone's e-mail? I even started a group on Facebook to try to engage the high schoolers, but so far the only members in said group are my aunt (founder of It's Cool 2 Care), my mother (my aunt's sister), my little brother, and me. It's definitely not the outpouring of shared ideas and compassionate community that I expected. I'm a little disappointed, really. I expected the technology to be a conduit for ideas and information - I know that it is capable of this. Perhaps it is a user error. I need to brainstorm other ways to engage my peers.
In the here and now, my aunt (from here on known as B - typing "my aunt" is going to be redundant very soon) and I are working on a project to recycle plastic shopping bags. They're quite versatile, which is why it's so puzzling that landfills are full of them. Our first batch of bags (our own collection) is going to be used to make reusable shopping bags - we're going to fuse them together with an iron and sew or duct tape the panels to make tote bags. If you're interested, a great bag-fusing tutorial can be found here. We have a lot of other stuff in the works, as well. Stick around for more links to cool stuff and ramblings about my life in Texas (if you don't get the As Time Goes By reference, I guess I forgive you).
Hello, everyone! If you're reading this, I'm Sarah B, and welcome! If you're not reading this, well, there's just not much I can do for you, is there?
As you can read in my profile, I'm a college sophomore from Kentucky who is spending the summer in Houston, Texas. I'm living with my aunt, who is currently working on a non-profit organization called It's Cool 2 Care (more on that later), and her family. Last year was very difficult for me - I did not transition well to college life and am therefore dealing with the consequences of that - so I'm excited about my new environment and using it and the new opportunities afforded me to revitalize myself this summer. I hope that this summer can be one of soul-searching, growth, and renewal.
I have had very positive experiences with blogging in the past, and as my primary blog is mostly used for venting and a very intimate description of my personal life, I decided that that was not the outlet that would be appropriate for this project - I wanted this to be available to the general public. I would like to use this resource to chronicle what I do this summer, partly as a way to organize my life in words for my own benefit, and partly as a way to inform my family and friends as to my whereabouts and doings. I also would like to think that my writing could be entertaining: and the projects I am involved in, inspiring.
So, if you are still here, welcome again! Maybe you're just checking in, maybe you're along for the ride - but this promises to be an interesting summer. I hope you'll share it with me.
