WHAT'S UP WEDNESDAY #2

                                                        
What I’m Reading: Right now, I'm reading Earthbound by Aprilynne Pike. I picked this book up on a whim, not knowing what to expect. I absolutely loved her book Wings back in middle school, so I was really REALLY hopeful for it. I haven't picked up a quality fantasy that's pulled me in from the first line in a long time, and I'm so happy because this one did. I can't even tell you what the book is about yet because it's so mysterious right now. I just really recommend it as of right now.
What I’m Writing: Well, as of right now I've only been writing a paper for one of my classes, so I haven't even touched my manuscript; I haven't even had time to update my blog in the last couple of days. So hello, college workload, thanks for creeping up on me like that.
What Inspires Me Right Now: Well, I would love to say that the beautiful city I'm living in right now is inspiring me, but I've yet to go out and see any of the sights of this beautiful place, besides the campus. But I have been meeting SO many different kinds of people here, so many different majors and lifestyles and personalities. I just really like it. I wanted to come here and find people that were just like my friends at home, but I'm starting to realize that that's not what I should be doing. I should be wanting to meet people that I would never have talked to if I hadn't come and lived here. I like that I'm surprising myself with the people I'm surrounding myself with. I feel like I'm unwrapping all these little packages as I meet and get to know new people. Maybe that sounds weird but when you go to school with the same people for so long, even just through high school, you forget what it's like to make a million different friends. It's exciting to not know who I'll be best friends with by the end of this year. I like that a lot.
What Else Is New: I've just been studying a lot. And not writing a lot. And I joined the newspaper. That's pretty exciting, but other than that I've just been living life and going day by day.

a simple life update

I'm sure you're all DYING to know what's going on in my life right now (just kidding, i highly doubt any of you are that curious) so I figured I'd give you a quick update on what I'm up to.

So as I've mentioned before, I'm venturing into my first year of university! I'm about 4 weeks into the school year, and things have been going really well.

I will admit, in the beginning, I had a really hard time adjusting. I'm far from home, had no friends, and felt exceptionally lonely. With that being said, I obviously am doing a lot better. I'm not as lonely (thanks to my awesome new friends) and although I miss home a lot sometimes, and mostly miss the people back home, I'm still happy here. I love my room, my friends, and being independent for the most part. My class are alright, but I'd love a writing course next semester.
I know this blog post is painfully boring, but I figured I'd throw this into my daily posting just so you all know how I'm doing and what I'm up to.
I guess all I'm saying is I'd doing really well, and I think college is such a great time to find yourself and create yourself. I don't think you should go to college and feel like you NEED to change into some super cool outgoing show stopper person, but you can be anything, you can change your habits, you can try new things; these people don't know you the way everyone in your home town does, and that means a clean slate. I think that's awesome. It feels refreshing and scary and exhilarating all at the same time.
Hopefully I'll be coming up with a book review or a writing post soon, so stay tuned for that! If you've been reading my blog at all, thank you so much for even caring, you all rock. 

strengths

I haven't felt very comfortable trying to give advice here, because I am deeply unqualified to be advising ANYONE on anything, but I thought it would at least be okay to talk about my strengths as a writer.
I think the hardest part of being a writer is the fact that we are so critical of ourselves, so that 90% of the time we aren't even aware what we're good at. I think it's important you sit down, especially if you're doubting your writing abilities, and put your strengths on paper. If you're feeling REALLY shitty, ask an honest friend what it is that makes your writing so "you". So here's a list of what I (and good friends) consider my strengths:

• Prose
• I've been told I'm particularly good at this, or at least attempt to be good at it. I feel like I base this solely on the fact that I read a lot of prose, and learn from what I read.
• One-liners
• A creative writing teacher once wrote on a draft of mine that I was exceptional at one-liners. This brought me immense joy, and I'm still proud of this compliment to this day. 
• Beginnings
• I always find my beginnings to be my strongest part of my writing, and also the easiest for me to pick up. They hold the most passion in my story.
• Dialogue
• My high school creative writing teacher once shared with me that my dialogue was realistic and real. Yay! 
• Evoking emotion
• I asked my friend just now what I'm good at writing wise, and she said, "I don't know, it just makes me feel."

Maybe I have more strengths, but as of right now I'm not really aware of them. I'm proud of what I'm good at, and I'm not ashamed of the things I'm not so good at! 

**what are some of your strengths??**

you are a sunset

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, “Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.” I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” - Carl R. Rogers

When I read this quote, I feel a sense of peace. We are just as beautiful as sunsets, and I think we forget that a lot. We forget that people are beautiful and stunning and special and one-of-a-kind and breath-taking. We forget that we're all these things, and we look in the mirror and pick at things we hate, and we walk past girls on the street and pick at things we hate about them, and it's a never ending circle of over-analyzing everyone.

I try and go every day with noticing one thing I love about myself. I was never self-conscious as a little girl, or into my pre-teen years. I wasn't really that self-conscious throughout high school either, but I was acutely more aware of how a shirt fit me, or if my smile looked good in a selfie or not. And I never want to be one of those people who rant about social media and how it's ruining our youth or whatever, but I do see how selfies and taking pictures of myself affect the way I see myself. 

I think as I get older I get more frustrated with how I feel about myself. Which is normal, and I just have to pull myself back and remember that I am who I am for a million reasons, and that's just fine.

And when you look at someone, and feel the need to  pick apart their image, you're doing it all wrong. 

My favorite part of this quote is, "I watch with awe as it unfolds", because I think we forget to look at people, and the way their eyes light up when they talk about something they love, or when they cry at movies, or how someone's laugh can make them the most beautiful human being on earth. I think we forget to stop and watch the beauty of someone being THEM. Personally, I don't think there's anything beautiful than getting to know someone, and as I go through this time in my life where I am meeting so many new people, it feels like watching sunsets, getting to see people become more themselves the longer I get to know them. 

So appreciate sunsets and appreciate people and realize how similar the two are, and watch in awe at just how beautiful it all is. 

MUSIC MONDAYS #2

So, fitting in perfectly with the schedule, I attended a concert last night, so it only seem fitting I do my music monday on my concert experience!

The concert I went to was Twenty One Pilots, they're a band, well, more like a duet. Their music is VERY different. They're kind of new age, rape, electronic, alternative indie, punk I-dont-even-know. Just look them up, they're awesome and a category of their own.

Now, this is not my first concert to say the least, but MAN this one was different. I guess since it was an electric/dance/rap concert thing, it wasn't the atmosphere I was used to. But regardless of that, I really liked the crowd and the vibe they were giving off. If there's one thing I learned from this concert, it's that Twenty One Pilot fans are DIE HARD.

Now onto how the actual concert went. We were pretty far back at first, but as the excitement rose, people started pushing around (which was slightly irritating but whatever) and somehow we got pushed to almost the front, which I'm not complaining about. After the opening acts (I didn't find them very interesting, sorry) the guys FINALLY came on, and I swear the crowd packed together like a can of sardines. I was okay at this point, because I was expecting that. But when the guys came out with their starting song (Guns For Hands, my FAVORITE) everything went insane. There was a lot of jumping and pushing and overall craziness. I loved every second. I loved watching the stage through all the hands, I loved seeing people being lifted into the air and screaming out the words, I loved it all. Maybe not the sweaty backs and stuffy air, but hey we all have to make sacrifices.

I'll admit, I had to bounce out before the last couple songs, I thought I was going to vomit. (I hadn't eaten before when I REALLY should have) So we watched the encore from the back, and I'm a little upset we didn't stay in because the crowd held the guys up on these boards and they performed from the crowd and that was AWESOME to see. But regardless I loved watching it.

These guys are honestly full of so much talent, and their lyrics are revolutionary. They can speak to so many people on so many levels, and I love that. The lyrics are everything to me when it comes to music, and Twenty One Pilots don't even come close to falling short lyrics wise. I'm so happy I got the chance to see them, especially in a small intimate setting.

Everyone go check them out right now!

growing into love

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new."- Ursula K. Le Guin

I think that people often think that once a couple is happy, it's so easy to keep it that way. The way I look at it is this: People are always changing, and this doesn't exclude people who are in love. I think that especially young love is the most difficult kind of love, because from the age of 14 to 20-something, you don't have a damn clue what you're doing. If you do, you're lying to yourself.

Hell, you could be 68 and still have no clue. But that's beside the point. What I'm saying is that growing up is hard enough, but being in love and growing up at the same time changes the game. Guin compares love to bread, which seems weird at first, but it's so true. Love can go bad. It happens all the time, but it's the people that know that love involves constant changing, on both partners side, that love each other unconditionally and forever. 
Sometimes bread goes stale, or rots, but that doesn't call for the end of everything. You toss out the loaf, and you bake some new bread. I may be someone who forgives easily, but I also believe that starting over can make a hell of a difference when it comes to love. When you grow, you mess up, ALL the time. As a teenager, I always felt like relationships we're given enough slack. That sounds awful, but I mean, we're teenagers. When aren't we going to screw things up? So I learn to bake a new loaf of bread. I learn to make new of my love, and remember why I'm here in the first place. 
I'm a hopeful romantic, I always have been. I was before I was in a serious relationship, and I am one while currently in a serious relationship. 
I've always been a person who chooses not to talk about my relationship, because no one needs to hear about it. I don't mind, I don't feel the need to tell anyone anything about my partner and I's "problems", because it feels wrong sharing those things with someone who's not him, it's between the two of us and in the end someone else's opinion shouldn't help make a decision that involves only him and me. Maybe people disagree with this style of handling it, but I like it better this way. It's a lot less messy in my opinion. 
I'm straying from my original point, though. From the 3 1/2 years that I've be growing up and falling in love, I feel like I know a thing or two about how to make new of my love as my boyfriend and I change. And with the amount of change that happens from my freshman year of high school to my freshman year of college, we're champs in my eyes.
I don't know how we do it, I don't have some nifty pocket book or something like that. We just keep going, and that's harder than it sounds. So many times you want to give up, but it's just not that simple when you love someone. 
This quote means something to me just for the fact that when I read it, I felt it. I felt like whenever someone asks me, "How do you stay together for so long?" that's what I needed to be saying. And it will be what I say from now on, because I don't know if I've read a truer statement regarding love. 
You cannot just BE in love. You have to GROW in love, together. 

mattering

During my senior year of high school, my AP Literature teacher assigned us the "This I Believe.." assignment (link to the website: http://thisibelieve.org/). I was immediately excited about it, because it was one of the first "creative" assignments we had all year. This was the outcome.

Mattering

This I believe is true: “What matters to you defines your mattering.”

It is the belief that someone or something has the power to change you, the power to move you, and the power to define you. I have spent the last 18 years of my life trying to define my mattering. Who am I? What makes me me? I’m still not sure who I am, and that’s okay. It’s okay to not know where I’m going, or what I’m going to do, because I know what matters to me and I know that I matter. I used to struggle with the idea of being “average”. I struggled with the idea that I didn’t have a right to struggle. I thought my life was too “good” to have a right to complain about anything.

“There are kids in Africa dying, you know?”

“Be grateful.”

“You’re lucky.”

“Your family is perfect, I’m so jealous.”

This is what I defined my mattering as. I believed I didn’t have the right to be sad, angry, or feel like life isn’t fair. I let these things define me, I let them tell me who I could and could not be. I let them dull my feelings and deemed them less important. I let them lessen my mattering.

This was wrong.

I can move mountains with my words; my words can start revolutions, move people, and make someone feel something. One day I will see my name on the cover of a Bestseller. One day I will change at least one person’s life. This matters to me.

Words, music, and the people I surround myself with; these define my mattering. It is the way a pencil felt against the thick journal pages when I first started writing when I was 9 and the stories I’ve carried with me to this day. It is the books I read when I was 10 and it is the books I read now. It is the songs that make me cry and the songs I can’t help singing in the car (no matter how much I hate them). It is the friends I had in second grade, and it is the friends I have now. It is the best friends I don’t talk to anymore, the ones I still love, even if I avoid them in the halls. It is the boy I’ve grown up with for the last 3 years, and it is the boy who I will spend the rest of my life with one day. It is the image I have of myself; that I can do what I love and love who I am.

These are the things that define me. These are the things that matter. It is not their opinions of me; it is not my struggles or my successes or how others define these struggles and successes. I define myself.

And this I believe

 is me.