sorry in advance.

I should just make that thumbs up motivational thing my blog header... I really feel as if I need the self-encouragement!

Quite a few of my friends are going into their senior/junior year of college this year, or have already graduated (those would be the friends that are older than I am, but still!) and I've been feeling increasingly like an aimless freeloader with no real plans for life!

Which is mostly true.
And it's killing me!

I've been trying to figure out what I want to do, and there are SO MANY OPTIONS it is legitimately terrifying. I'm like a deer in the headlights, with the headlights metaphorically being the huge amount of advice that I've been receiving. It's been great advice! If I had written all of that advice down, I probably could have made a really great book or pamphlet or something that would have been extremely helpful to other people in similar situations! Wow I'm pretty dumb for not doing that.
The thing is, though, a lot of this advice has been conflicting.

"You'd be a great teacher!"
"The teacher's environment outside of the classroom can be caustic. Have you thought about counseling or social work?"
"Pffft, don't be a school counselor! Let me tell you what I think of MY school's counselor! [unkind things]"
"Look at this! You have incredible talent! Have you thought about going into art?"
"Don't go into the art field, you won't find any jobs!"
"People who say that there are no jobs in the art field don't know what they're talking about! You just have to know where to look."
"If you're going into art, pair it with something marketable, like something relating to technology! If you can code and have art skills, you're golden."
"Go into the medical field! You can do whatever you want as a hobby, and be well paid in the mean time!"
"Medical students have incredible amounts of debt, work odd hours, and have to pay ridiculous insurance just to cover their butts. Maybe you should rethink that."
"How about business?"


It just goes ON and ON, my head is spinning and I have even less of a clue than I did before!

This is just getting ridiculous.

Most of my friends seem to know what they want to do and where they're going in life, and here I am on the sidelines kicking my heels around the country. One of my friends mentioned a long time ago that I travel to escape my problems, and at the time I thought that he was totally out of line in saying that but now I think that he may have a point and I'm beginning to doubt everything!

So.

What's the solution here?

The only thing that comes to mind is "JUST KEEP SWIMMING."

All I can think to do is just work through all of this. I've signed up for part-time classes at my community college this coming winter, I'm going to find a job, I'm going to move out of my parents' house, I'm going to just slowly figure things out from there. Baby steps.
In 2010 I ended the year knowing for a fact that I wanted to be a teacher- things have changed so drastically since then! I've learned so much. I'm continuing to learn! Hopefully, the learning never stops, and ideally I'll figure out what I want to do with my life and where on earth I want to do it.

Until then...
I'm just gonna...
sit in the sun for a bit.

Yeah, that sounds nice.

[[later- it was nice for about five minutes and then I realized that it was much too hot and muggy and I have relocated back to my spot in a nice air-conditioned patch of sunlight.]]

BELIEVE IN THE ME THAT BELIEVES IN YOU!

(anime references aside...)

(I'm just gonna bring this back...)

SO
I woke up at 7:30 am cursing my coherence, and after a long argument with myself I eventually succeeded in FINALLY getting out of bed with the intention of GOING ON A WALK! YEAH! up a hill.
That turned out pretty well, actually.
We have this hill with a bunch of steps and from the top you have this gorgeous view of the Mississippi river, and it was a nice cool morning and the birds were chirping and I passed this really beautiful garden that looked really difficult to maintain, and generally I just felt great about the world!
So I ate breakfast and went back to my room and putzed around a bit, until I thought, "Hey, you know what would be great? If I followed up that walk with a WORKOUT SESSION, YEAH!"

Things were going well until I got to the ab excercises.
Wow.
Okay, I need to workout more often because that was just sad!


In other news, have some Janelle Monae because she is STILL really great.

tick tick tick tick

My work area is slowly starting to fill up with origami cranes, because I've forgotten how to make anything else and I like to be busy with something.
I'll just choose an album on my album and putter onward.
Before I left I got a bunch of artists that I hadn't listened to often enough, and I'm in love with Marina & the Diamonds and Laura Marling. I have a weakness for female singers...

(PS when this song first started playing my first thought was, "TARDIS WHOOSHING?!?" and it would have been funnier if I hadn't been so excited.)

(on a totally unrelated note, I keep thinking about this dream I had where there was this disease spreading, it was new and fatal and there was no cure. vines. vines would sprout on you somewhere, and then you'd know that your time is coming soon because they were in your body and slowly eating you alive, they'd spread inside and outside your body- it looked beautiful except people were dying. I remember staring at my palms and up to this point in the dream I'd been trying to help find a cure and to ease peoples' passing, and there were these tiny shoots coming out of the center of my palms and I showed them to the other council members and they started crying. my palms itch just thinking about it.)

People can be silly sometimes, the end.

Grape Juice City is a great song, too.

SO


I donated blood today! Usually I feel nauseous or at least a little dizzy, but today I felt fantastic! Until I had to go run a bunch of errands with my father, which is when I started to feel so incredibly tired that I was fighting sleep while trying to pick out conditioner! I took a nap & felt better, and there's really no point to this story except
DONATING BLOOD IS GREAT,
I always feel super-awesome afterwards because I have O neg and I know at least one of my friends is also O neg so if either of us is ever in an accident I sincerely hope that our hard work will come in handy! Not that I ever want to be in an accident, nor would I ever wish that on anyone I know, but still. O neg is the universal donor, but we can only receive O neg blood.
Enough about blood.

 

The thing I'm most proud of here is that I chose the colors myself...? Usually I pick out a color palette that's already been made, so I feel accomplished in this one small step.

dose of optimism

I couldn't decide whether or not to load these separately, but they fit so well together! I think so, at least. It's fun to look at these when I'm feeling down, because sometimes it's hard to remember that life is actually really fantastic! These are like doses of instant optimism. Yeah!!! I'm going to try really hard to be cheerful!
In other news-
UGH THIS SONG IS MY FAVORITE EVER,
whenever I hear it I'm reminded of these small golden moments where I'd lay in a patch of sunlight and listen to one of my friends play piano,
it's just
really beautiful.

Also,
WOW I REALLY WANT TO SEE THE AVENGERS AGAIN,
and also
LEGEND OF KORRA IS PERFECT (mostly Bolin, he is the most perfect perfect person on the entire fictional perfect planet).

I don't know if you've noticed, but I really like cool colors when it comes to these things.
Also I'm kinda proud of myself because I've been drawing more often and I can actually see improvement in some things? Like that previous post, I kinda just stared at that drawing for a while because I am still blown away by how proud I am of that hand. Like, the colors and the lines and just everything about it, I think I'll always be happy when I draw hands that look like how I actually imagined them looking. These hands up there don't really count because (shh don't tell) I kinda traced them from a photo that I took for reference but gosh darnit I learned a few things about hands in the process, right? I'll just keep telling myself that!
In other news,
I've been having problems sleeping again, and it's really annoying because I'm starting to notice these dark half circles under my eyes and they aren't that great! Also the nightmares, those are getting more strange and vague and I don't really know what's going on there but it's not good.
In more optimistic news!
Um!
I'm still really excited about summer!
My friend DJ will be in Ohio for a few days before he goes to Italy for a month & I leave for Missouri, so we're totally going to hang out then! And HEY DJ if you're reading this I had a dream the other night where I saw you drive up in the parking lot and I gave you the best sneak-attack-hug ever! And that's basically where the dream ended, because I woke up, but still!
Also my friend Kristy is hopefully visiting before I leave, and I haven't seen her for a really long time so that should be really fun also! Yay! So many cool people and adventures!