Summer

It is already August and I haven't written a word on this blog all summer! I am so embarrassed at the amount of time I spend scrolling through pictures and posts on Tumblr, causing me to neglect my blog! I miss writing, I miss reading other blogs, and I miss being able to look back at all of my old posts! (I can still do that, of course, but a year or so from now, I'll find that I had basically fallen off the face of the earth for the past year due to my extreme lack of posting.)
As I've been brainstorming about my college essay, I've discovered that my creative writing juices have been clogged by an increased intake in pictures. As much as I love to look at pretty pictures, and as inspiring as they can be, it seems I've gotten into a lazy funk, scrolling through pictures rather than words because it's just, simply, easier.
I've decided, though, to vow to write more. I love staying up late on a random night, letting my fingers graze the keyboard, spilling out stupid stories and underdeveloped characters. I can spend hours scrolling through pictures that I will never remember, pressing one simple button to put them on my blog, and as convenient that is, I feel as if I am becoming increasingly lazy, finding it easier to reblog someone else's post rather than post something myself. I've started to find my own pictures from Flickr pages I've discovered myself, but even that has become somewhat routine.
In short, I've found myself in simple routine that, from the outside, seems creative and educational, due to the photographers, websites, and cultures I have learned about through constantly reblogging, but it is time I spend less time being inspired from hundreds of other people, and start inspiring myself. Of course, I might never stop using tumblr, because the website makes it so easy to learn about things that I find most interesting, but I need to devote more time to my own blog, where I can search for myself, and write, and ponder, and comment on life rather than just look at it for a second or two and never really go beyond the surface.
This is the last year that I will be living in my house, seeing all of my friends every single day, knowing every single person in my class and my school, and have comfort in knowing that people know who I am. I need to start reaching out and relying more on myself rather than other people and things, because I'm leaving for college soon and I have no other choice but to grow up.

Prompt

Oliver walked briskly through the crowd, until he reached the sidewalk. Once out of the chaos, he was able to catch his breath and slow his pace. He adjusted the straps of his backpack and patted his pockets, obsessively making sure his wallet was still in its place. Ever since he lost his last wallet last week, which contained his food money and ID cards, he had been extra careful about keeping this one in his sight at all times.

As he turned the corner and moved further and further away from the crowd, his pace became slower and slower, and his posture became more relaxed. He walked until the sky turned from a bright blue to a light purple. When he reached the view of the lake, he stopped moving for a moment, took in a large breath of fresh air, and walked around to sit on a park bench facing the picturesque scenery. He pulled his backpack around onto his lap, pulled out his iPod, and set music to the landscape, watching as the waves and the trees seemed to dance to his music.

Natalie ran through the park, laughing loudly. Her hair was flying behind her, pushed back by the wind. She looked back towards the forest and noticed that no one was following her, but she could hear their laughter. She looked around quickly and saw a park bench facing the lake. She turned around again quickly just in time to see her friends coming out of the woods. She quickly turned around and jetted behind the park bench, looking for safety. She didn’t notice until then that the bench was occupied. The boy there looked startled as her briskness and laughter awoke him.

He shot her a confused look as she crouched by his legs. She put her finger to her lips, hoping to keep him quiet. He looked at her again and turned around just as three other girls sprinted by the bench, laughing. As they passed the bench, the girl let out a huge sigh and sat on the bench next to the boy.

“Thanks,” she said, gratefully.

He didn’t reply. He was too tired and lax to process what was occurring. Natalie stood up and sat on the bench next to the boy. He hadn’t put back in his headphones, and she wasn’t sure if he was going to talk to her or not. For what felt like an eternity, she sat on the opposite side of the bench, looking across to the lake.

Oliver sat in silence for a moment, formulating words in his head.

“So, uh, what were you doing?” he asked the girl after a few seconds.

She laughed at him without taking her eyes off of the scenery in front of her. “I’m a member of this group where we play extreme games. They’re basically just games we all played when we were kids, but we play without boundaries. This week it has been extreme tag!”

He honestly didn’t know how to reply. He had never heard of anything so ridiculous, but spontaneous in his life. “That sounds… interesting.”

“Oh, it is! One week we did extreme hide-and-seek, and I think my favorite so far has been extreme Ping-Pong.”

He could help but chuckle. “Extreme Ping-Pong?”

She laughed with him. “It’s great! It just like regular Ping-Pong except you’re allowed to hit it off the floor and walls and stuff. It’s actually quite a work out!”

Oliver just laughed. When he looked over at her, she was still looking ahead at the lake, giggling to herself.

“I’m Oliver, by the way,” he said.

She turned her head and her eyes met his. “Hello Oliver, I’m Natalie.” She stuck out her hand, and he took it in his, shaking it.

I don't know if this is finished. Or if I will ever finish it. But it was inspired by this, so here you go :)

p.s. I copied this from a Word document and it won't let me fix the formatting so it doesn't look very attractive...

Why must you act that way? Like the world revolves around you, like everything I say is wrong, like it is my mission in life to make you miserable. The world does not revolve around you. In case you don't remember anything from earth science, the world revolves around the sun. Last time I checked you are not the sun. The world will not revolve around you. People will not change their plans to fit around your needs. This night is not all about you. It is about us. It is about our entire class, about our friends, and the people we care about. Why don't you want to capture memories with all of our friends? Why must you complain about me to my best friend? Why is it such a big deal that I want to get as much done as possible?
I am sick of you. I am done dealing with you. I am sick of you complaining when others make a suggestion. I am sick of you blaming other people for something they didn't do. I'm sick of you expecting people to give you the work they worked hard on so that you can copy it. I'm sick of you thinking that you are the sun. You are not the sun; you are not even a star. You are an asteroid, creating craters in relationships and contentedness.

Friends Forever

Today in church, I sat behind two little old women who reminded me vaguely of you and me. They looked extremely elegant in their pea coats and light white hair. Their makeup was done perfectly, colorfully complementing their skin. They whispered to each other at appropriate times during mass and quietly giggled to each other. They acted like they had been friends forever; like sisters that looked nothing alike, except for their mutual smiles and the twinkle in their eyes. They laughed at the same things, and seemed to be able to read each other's minds. When they turned around and I wished them peace, I looked at them, quietly thinking of you, hoping that that would be us in 70 years. I hope that we still know each other in 70 years as we do now. I hope that we can still laugh and go to church together and be as close we were sophomore year.
Seeing them made me miss you. I miss talking to you everyday and going to church with you after volleyball. I miss us being able to read each other's minds. I miss talking to you about anything and everything and going to your house for a sleepover or downtown to eat crepes. I miss you.
I want us to be the little old ladies who go to church together with smiles on our faces and twinkles in our eyes.

I hate high school. I hate bratty, selfish, spoiled, immature people. I hate having to ride the bus home everyday and having to deal with stupid little 7th and 8th graders. I hate that I'm letting it bug me this much. I hate all the stuff I have to do and that I'm overwhelmed so I can't get anything done. I hate that my mom won't let me drive even though I've had my license for almost 2 months. I hate being so angry. I hate that I can't enjoy anything anymore. I hate being the friend that everyone forgets about. The one that is always left alone. I hate being a pessimist and hating everything. I hate SATs and SAT prep. I hate AP classes. I hate how my entire future relies on how successful I am in the next three months and how I haven't been doing my best because I'm so busy. I hate dealing with obnoxious people. I hate dealing with immature people. I hate dealing with everyone. I hate when people don't understand, and then I hate myself for expecting them to understand. I hate expecting so much from people. I hate not being inspired or even motivated to do anything. I hate how nothing works when I want it to. Ever. I hate that a girl in my school is pregnant, and a girl at my mom's school is pregnant and my aunt lost her babies.

I hate that I'm so sad all the time.

I hope you thought about what I said. I hope what I said meant something to you. I respect your decision and your motivation, but I don't want your presumed failure to motivate you. You will not fail; you cannot fail, and that I promise. To quote the cliche, you will never know until you try. Just try. Apply. Just do it. Listen to what I told you. You are not stupid. You are not a failure. You can make it. If they can, you can. You have something in you that sets you apart from the rest. You just have to find it. Please, just think about it, before you regret not taking the risk to prove it to yourself.

Renaissance

So, last night I was reading some of my old posts, looking back on my year. I smiled as I remembered the good times and sighed at the not so good times. All in all, I noticed how much I've neglected my blog. With over a year of posting and over 100 posts, I have changed a lot. And so have my posts. Though, I noticed that as this year progressed, my posts became shorter and more boring. I began to take away the actual substance of my posts and simply post pictures with random little thoughts, or no thoughts at all. I realized that I had forgotten why I started my blog in the first place- to have a place to express my feeling to anyone who would listen, and to hopefully inspire people like other blogs have inspired me.
In addition, I have recently noticed that my entire Bloglovin' feed consists of pictures. My thoughts were further proven when I decided to download Picasa and realized that I have over 13,000 pictures saved onto my laptop. Not only is that awful for my harddrive, but my obsession with pictures and neglect of words caused my blog to become a screen, rather than a person. With my increase in reading blogs with simply pictures, my own blog morphed into the thousands of others that just reblog every new outfit trend and editorial. I forgot about my personality.
The way I've been treating my blog can also be paralleled to my current state of living. As I've gotten older, I've had a lot more responsibilities. Since getting my first job in April, my childhood has been quickly swirling down the drain. With my entrance into my junior year of high school, I have seemed to lose sense of who I actually am. Granted, many amazing things that I will hold with me for the rest of my life will stay with me, but I have seemed to lose those good things in all the stress of my life. All the pressure.
I started this blog to vent about my life and to share my thoughts. As my responsibilities grew, my creativity shrank. As the school work was piled on, my stories became pushed to the side. I always feel like I have to do things to please other people: my teachers, my coach, my parents, my friends, and I lose myself.
As I looked through my posts from the year, I noticed the loss of myself. The posts became shorter with less words, and my personality dwindled. There was no substance, nothing to separate me from the rest. I was just there, barely hanging on, with nothing to hold me back from falling over the edge.
That is why I believe I need to have a blog Renaissance. I will not create a new blog to start over, because I don't want to start over. I want to grow. I want to remember how I used to be, how the words rolled out of my brain into my fingers and onto a keyboard or a sheet of paper. I want to change, but I don't want to forget. I can not forget because if I forget how I feel, I will forget how to save myself from slipping off the edge.

What is your purpose in life?

I am only sixteen years old. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do in life; I barely know what I want to do. Through my experiences, I've learned things that inspire me, things that have helped me, things that have hurt me, and others.
One three-day-long experience that I think of everyday is a leadership seminar called HOBY. In my life as my "pre-HOBY" self, I knew right from wrong, I had done some community service, valued my family and friends, and knew exactly what I wanted to do in life to make sure that I was happy. During HOBY, though, I learned to open my eyes, mind, and heart. I was taught not only to do community service, but how to. I was given so many opportunities to make other people smile, whether it was delivering gifts to the elderly at a nursing home, or cheering extra loud to show your appreciation for someone. My groups that I spent the whole three days with became my family. After the last meeting, my dad walked with me back to my dorm as tears rolled down my face because of the realization that I would not see my HOBY family the next morning and that the best weekend of my life was ending.
I cried all the way home and again when I got home, knowing that it was over. These intense emotions, though, inspired me. I stopped stressing out about school and remembered how great I felt by making other people smile. I signed the HOBY commitment to doing 100 hours of community service by the next seminar, not because I had to, but because I wanted to.
I think my "pre-HOBY" self would answer the proposed question with something along the lines of "write for a fashion magazine," or "become a mom," but now I look at the question and actually think about it. What is the thing I want to accomplish most? My answer: I want everyone to feel at some point in their lives the way I felt that weekend. I want to be someone's cheerleader (another thing I learned at HOBY: you can't be sad when cheering as loud as possible!). I want to help someone remember love and happiness who has lost those feelings along the way.
So what is my purpose in life? I don't know exactly, but what I do know is that every time I see a glow stick, meet someone named Bob, eat a burrito, or hear "Don't Stop Believing," I will be reminded of my commitment and desire to make other people feel true happiness.

The End [1]

x

This was the end. Not the beginning or even the beginning of the end, but the end. This was the end of the end. This was the end of a life, the end of a body, of a mind, a heart. This was the end, and Jenna knew it. She knew it well. Too well, even. Jenna knew too much. She knew too much sadness, too much heartache, too much anger. She was so informed about these that it became dangerous. It became unhealthy. It was unhealthy for her to be so sad, to be so familiar with heartache, to be able to hold so much anger. But it was all going to end now. Right now.
It was very early Monday morning. Her house was so quiet that every move she made, with every squeak of her bed, she feared waking her parents, her brother, or even her dog. Her house was so dark that she could barely see her hands resting lightly in her lap, or even the small plastic baggie she was moving between her fingers and thumb. She closed her eyes, completely blinding herself. All she could think about, all that she could see on the back of her eyelids was the end. Not the beginning of the end, but the end of the end. She was finally ready to end this.

Doodling

RUFUS

Once upon a time, Hayley was sitting upstairs, blogging away when she looked out the window to make sure her puppy hadn't run away. As she looked out the window, she saw something dark run across her lawn. Confused at first, she did a double-take on the strange creature before identifying it.

"MEGAN!" she called, loudly.

"MEGAN! MEGAN, COME HERE, QUICK!"
Megan, Hayley's younger sister, ran upstairs to see what the commotion was. "A CAT!" Hayley exclaimed.
"RUFUS!" Megan exclaimed back, earning a confused glance from Hayley.


"RUFUS!" Megan said again before explaining. "I saw that cat a few days ago, and he keeps coming back. I named him Rufus!"
Hayley looked at Megan and they both rushed downstairs. After bringing Reilly inside, (because he was being a huge ruckus, seeing the cat) Megan went over and petted the kitten gently.


"Father said that we can keep him, but Mother said that he and Reilly won't get along." Megan explained. "Rufus doesn't have a collar, and I asked neighbors and nobody knows who he is. I want to keep him!" If only Mother and Father were home at the moment, so the two could plead with them, but they were off at a dinner.
"Oh, I want to keep him, too!" Hayley exclaimed excitedly, but with a hint of disappointment in her voice, knowing that the dream will never be true.

As the sisters talked, Rufus decided it was time to go back into the woods. Deeply saddened, the two girls said their goodbyes and prayed that Rufus would come back and he would soon be a part of their family.

"Goodbye, Rufus!"

"We'll miss you...!"

I Can't Stop

I can't stop thinking about you
you've taken over my thoughts.
I can't stop feeling you.
you've taken over my feelings.

I can't stop remembering that night
you've taken over my memories.
I can't stop remembering your sight.
you've taken over my eyes.

I can't stop wondering what could have been
you've taken over my wonder.
I can't stop thinking of what that silence could have meant
you've taken over my curiosity.

I can't stop writing about you
you've taken over my creativity.
I can't stop stopping what i want to do
you've taken over my desires
I can't stop wanting you
you've taken over my heart.
I can't stop melting into you
you've taken over my soul.



Today was a good day.
Tennis practice was canceled though, boo!
Julie and I have become very good friends. We always say hello and laugh whenever we see each other in the hallway. It feels good to finally befriend people from out of my class.

Mary: Church school was great until the obnoxious girls from my last session joined my class from this session. Although, this week's class was good because nobody paid any attention to them even as much as they wanted the attention. It was great (:
and do you know what i mean by being obnoxious attention obsessive girls?
I'll give you a few examples...
quote from last session:
Mr. W: ...and he choked on a fish bone...
Cassie: HE CHOKED ON A FISH BONE?
Mr. W: Yes, cassie... he choked on a fish bone...
cassie: how'd he do that?
mr. W: well, sometimes when you buy fish, the bones are still in them and you just swallow them...
cassie: wait, FISH HAVE BONES?
...honestly? after i told my friend, she's like, "That's like asking if there's milk in chocolate milk."
hahah.

and a quote from a two classes ago:
cassie and gracie: we should become nuns!
gracie: mrs? do you have to be a virgin to become a nun?
mrs: yes...
gracie: oh, well then i guess i can't become one!
mind you, we're in NINTH grade in CHURCH school which is in a CHURCH.
we're all like WTF!?
and she's like GOD, I WAS JUST KIDDING, TAKE A JOKE.

seriously, i am so done with them, haha. buuuuut, the boys ignored them and talked to me during last class (: haha there this kid, josh who is amazing. he's freaking hilariousssssss. hhah.

Rough Day.

i am beautiful.
you are beautiful.
we are all beautiful.
we all deserve love.
we all deserve friends.
we all deserve freedom.
we all deserve equality.
we all deserve loyalty.

we all need to cry.
we all need to smile.
we all need someone who will make us smile when we cry,
and we can do without the people who make us cry when we smile.

we all need to learn
to love ourselves.
and to love others.

we all need to learn
that we are all in this together.
and that we're all the same
and we all need and deserve the same things.

we should "never look down on someone
unless we are helping them up."
we should never compare ourselves to someone better
and make ourselves feel bad,
and we should never compare ourselves to someone less fortunate
to make the other feel bad.

we all need to learn
that sometimes,
the person who deserves the least respect,
the least kindness,
the least love,
the least loyalty,
really needs it the most.

we all need to learn to love others
and love ourselves.

i love you all.
<3h
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all pictures from Anti-Pati-ya