It All Ends.

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You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be. - Albus Dumbledore

I was sitting in the hallway of my high school, waiting for driver's ed to start and sneaking glances at the boy in my group who I thought was cute. He was sitting against the industrial brick wall, deeply buried in his book. And I felt a little pang of jealousy.

He was reading "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

I had just come off a summer working my first real job. It was a very demanding position: part-time summer school receptionist at my junior high school. My favorite part of the job? Since there was a lot of downtime, I was allowed to read a book when I had nothing else to do - which was often because I was efficient. My mother had bought books 1-3 in the Harry Potter series, hoping my brother would give them a try and discover he loved reading.

Instead, her voracious reader of a daughter quite literally stole them all and devoured them in a matter of days, savoring every last word of this new, magical world she had stumbled into. I never wanted it to end, and I couldn't wait for more.

With a little help from my friends...

April 2008

What is going swimmingly in your life at the moment?

After all my mopey life posts this week, it's nice to finally have a prompt I have a good, solid answer for. The thing that is going swimmingly in my life right now? My friends.

Living in Oklahoma, I made friends but the ones I was closest to were in OKC. My friends in Tulsa were usually busy with work or school when I had free time. Suffice it to say, I spent a lot of lonely weekends cleaning my apartment, grocery shopping and generally being bored. It wasn't fun.

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Do you consider yourself a strong swimmer?

(Note: too much coffee and over-thinking went into this post.)

This post could very easily be one word: no.

In the metaphorical sense, no I don't think I'm a strong swimmer, and I never have been. I'm too indecisive. It takes me forever to make a decision and when I do, I worry it wasn't the best decision to make. I'm slowly learning to let go and just live. I'm way too hard on myself for decisions I made three years ago, still. This is the time in my life when it's okay to make mistakes, to make changes and figure it all out. As long as I reach some stability and eventually stay there, it's okay.

YA Saves

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For as long as I can remember, I have been an avid reader. Some of my best summer memories are from staying up late under the covers with my flashlight, flying through page after page of a good book. As I grew older, I began devouring young adult novels left and right, expanding my horizons and discovering more about the world around me through the pages of a book than life itself.

Open waters

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Are you scared of being in open water?

In a word, terrified. 

I learned how to swim at an early age. (Physically swim, that is, since many of my 'swim' posts have been a metaphorical swim.) I swam in the pool and we went to the beach open enough that I wasn't scared of the ocean. My grandparents own a lake house in Wisconsin, and I spent many summers swimming and tubing/boating on a lake where I couldn't see the bottom. As I got older and attended Girl Scout camps, I learned more advanced swimming strokes and techniques, like treading water. To pass a swim test one year, we had to tread water for three minutes without our heads going under while singing camp songs.

So to say the least, I have a very good grasp on how to keep my head above water.