My Weekend

My dad introduced me to  TV show called Orphan Black over the vacation. It’s about clones and I’m totally hooked. I watch it while running on our elliptical, which motivates me to exercise. Sometimes it motivates me too much. After our DI meeting on Friday I watched one hour-long episode before dinner, which was no big deal. However, I decided that, since I didn’t have to do homework, I could watch another episode after dinner. I ended up running for three more hours. Every episode kept ending in a cliffhanger and I’m REALLY bad with cliffhangers. I just couldn’t stop! I had to know what happened! Every time it buffered between episodes I would scream at the TV, and I just kept running even after my legs started hurting. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just watch without running, but that would have been cheating! I just couldn’t do that! After running for 4 hours, I stumbled into our living room and collapsed on the couch while my parents gave me are-you-crazy looks. It was strangely fun, though, and it makes a great story.

On Saturday evening we went to a play that my parents’ friend is in. It’s an Agatha Christi mystery called Black Coffee. It was really good. On the way home we were discussing how the culprit managed to hide the formula in a vase across the room while in pitch darkness. We decided that if I had been the culprit, everyone would have heard a duda-duda-duda-SLAM as I ran directly into a wall. We then realized that I would have done this whether I was the culprit or not, and that I might have run into the culprit and solved the mystery right then. Thus, I discovered my superhero (or villain, not sure) identity: Kaos, who runs around in circles randomly and destroys things. I am strangely proud of this.

On Sunday morning Mom’s new barbershop quartet came over to practice. They sounded really good, but it got really annoying after a while to listen to the same section of the same song over and over. Dad, Bryce, and I went out to lunch at the Blackbird Cafe to escape, and had great food. I love their guacamole BLT sandwiches. When we got home I did my homework in the lying in the sun on our driveway. It was great.

Pretty much all the rest of my weekend was devoted to DI. The tournament is a week away, and we are not ready. We had to rewrite our script a few days ago because one of our team members can’t make it to the tournament (it’s not her fault) and we needed to incorporate a required element. None of us know our lines, and we’re still finishing making our props and costumes. DI is very stressful right now for all of us because we are in the middle of our crazy tech week with everyday meetings at my house. I’m beginning to wish DI was over so I could have my home back. I love my team, but this is too much for introvert me.

That was my weekend! Now you know what happens when I’m not given a prompt.

Traditions

It’s hard to identify my family’s traditions. They are so ingrained in me that I just think of most of them as the way things are, not as a family thing. I can’t identify what traditions others might find strange, because to me they are perfectly normal. Most of the ones I can identify have to do with holidays. Every year, I have 3 Thanksgivings, 2 Christmases, and 2 Easters. I’ve always done this, for as long as I can remember. The funny thing is, I don’t even like Thanksgiving that much. I don’t eat turkey (I’m not vegetarian or anything, I just hate poultry), so while everyone else is becoming incredibly full I’m staring at a table of things I’m not that interested in eating over a plate of mashed potatoes and rolls. Luckily, my dad makes really good mashed potatoes. We have so many repetitions of holidays because we celebrate them with both sides of my family, as well as celebrating Thanksgiving with my parents’ friends. On the actual day of the holiday, we celebrate with Mom’s side of the family, who I call the Colawashes (it’s a mix of Colassacco and Walsh, their last names). Then on the next Saturday we celebrate the McKinley version with Dad’s side of the family. We call the Colawalsh version the name of the holiday (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter) and the McKinley version the name with McKinley in front (McKinley Thanksgiving, McKinley Christmas, McKinley Easter). The third Thanksgiving is called Friends’ Thanksgiving, and happens the weekend before Thanksgiving. Each of these celebrations has its own traditions.

I’ll start with the Thanksgivings. Friends’ Thanksgiving is always at the house of the same friends. There are lots of people – enough to fill 3 tables when we all sit down. My brother and I hang out with the other kids on the trampoline or my friend’s room, talking and wrestling, while I feel incredibly un-nerdy in comparison to all these D&D playing people. We have dinner at 2:00, but it’s always late so we rewind the clock to 2 from whatever time it actually is. We eat dessert at 5:00, then go home at some point after that.

At normal Thanksgiving, we celebrate both Thanksgiving and my grandfather’s birthday. We celebrate his birthday with Italian food and cake on Wednesday night, then have Thanksgiving the next day. We always have raspberry pie, because my grandparents have raspberry bushes and Bryce loves that pie more than anything else in the world. We also have pumpkin pie, because that is my favorite kind of pie.

McKinley Thanksgiving only has a few traditions. We all gather together at one house to eat, and we play football in the yard. This is the only time my family ever has a football related tradition. Most of the time we don’t care. We used to do all McKinley events at my grandparents’, but now that they have moved and sold their giant mansion of a house we have to switch between houses.

Christmas is always preluded by the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve, when we have a huge meal of seafood. It’s my favorite meal of the year because of the delicious pasta dish Grandma makes. My grandmother is an amazing cook. Bryce and I the open our presents to each other. On Christmas Day, Bryce and I open our stockings as soon as we wake up. We then go to my aunt’s house to have brunch and open the rest of our presents. The rest of the day is filled with appetizers and food.

At McKinley Christmas all the men plan and make the food. The kids draw the name of one other kid beforehand, and buy a present for that kid. The adults do a Yankee Swap. We have this system because my family is so big that we would all go broke if we bought presents for everyone.  I love McKinley Christmas.

We don’t have very many Easter traditions. At normal Easter we make dyed eggs and Italian Easter bread. My parents used to give me a basket from the Easter Bunny when I was little, but we don’t get those anymore. McKinley Easter doesn’t really have any traditions. We just eat food and find Easter eggs.

My family also has other traditions on holidays, like giving candy gifts on Valentine’s Day and celebrating my dad’s, grandfather’s, and uncle’s birthdays on 4th of July, but those are the only ones that we celebrate repetitively.

Being 16-Year-Old Me

I mostly enjoy being my age. My main problem with it is that I’m too old. I know I’m still young, but I’m sitting right on an edge, and I hate it. Unlike most people my age who want to go rushing into the future, I wish I were 10, or maybe 5, so I could play all day and give all the worries to someone else. All my friends are excited about going to college and getting jobs, but to me it just sounds scary. Why would I want to live somewhere far away when I could be at home, safe? I always expect this view to change, to at some point become as ready to leave the nest as everyone else, but every time I hit one of those turning point ages, I stay the same. I cling to childhood like a lifeline, because I’m sure that if I ever let go I’ll get swept away in a sea of decisions that I just don’t know how to make. Sometimes it feels like everyone is trying to cut that line, though. I do want to do things, to grow up, but I don’t want to have to deal with all the details of life that I’ve been able to ignore until now. Money, taxes, decisions, new people, it’s all too much for me. I’d rather stay home, reading and pretending none of it exists. At the same time, I’m excited for the things the future might hold. This confusing back and forth just makes it all so much harder, because I don’t now what I want or what to do, just that I’m scared of the change that I know is coming.

That’s the other problem I have with being 16. You have to figure yourself out. Right now I don’t know who I am, other than a contradiction. I’m the athlete who’s also a drama kid, I love the outdoors but also to curl up and read a book, and I’m good at every subject in school but don’t like any of them. There are things that I want to do with my life, but I can’t figure out how the world works enough to do any of them. I have no idea who I want to be or any clear idea of what I want to do for a career. Whenever I express my doubts to anyone else they tell me that its OK, that I don’t need to know everything right now, while at the same time reminding me that next year I have to start looking at colleges and deciding what direction my life should take. It seems to me that knowing myself is the first and most important step, but despite years of analyzing everything I do, who I am is still a mystery to me. I can’t take anything lightly, so while everyone else moves on I’m here, wading through my own heart and mind, trying to understand exactly why I am the way I am, and what I’ll do when everything changes. Deep down, I don’t think I even trust myself. And that scares me most of all.

I’m Not Just A Deeply Introverted Weirdo. I’m Also a Book Nerd! (And Proud of It)

Thus far in this blog I have been writing mostly about the deep, dark feelings that are hidden in my soul. Although I could go on about this for a very long time, I’m just not in the mood today. Right now, I will be talking about my greatest love – books!

I know I already did a post about how much I love stories. All the deep, life changing effects that books have had on me are important, but there is something else that I missed in that last post, and that is this. I LOVE BOOKS!!!!!!! You have probably figured that out by now, but the extent of my obsession might surprise you. Over vacation my family and I hiked to Zealand Falls Hut in the White Mountains, and the whole way there (and back) I babbled about The Lord of the Rings and how much I love it. I express this by making fun of the writing. I’m currently rereading The Lord of the Rings, which I haven’t done since seventh grade. I’d forgotten how amazing that book is. Even as I make fun of practically everything the characters say, I just can’t get it out of my head! I already know what’s going to happen – I read it, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, then watched all the movies, including the Hobbit ones – but I still love the book. It may even be better this time around, because I’m noticing things I didn’t notice before. This same thing happened when I reread The Way of Kings, my other favorite book. Truly good books are complicated things, and there are often hints that you miss the first time through. This does not mean that I reread books a lot. In fact, I avoid rereading as much as possible. I refuse to reread something too soon after first reading it, normally holding out for at least a year. The Way of Kings is an exception, because that book is just amazing. I read it at the beginning of one summer and then reread it at the end because I wanted to write my summer reading assignment about it. Anyway, I normally avoid rereading because there are so many books out there. Why would I reread when I could read something new? Sometimes, though, I just can’t help myself. That’s what this rereading of The Lord of the Rings is. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but when I had a snow day the week before last week I had no reason not to pick up The Fellowship of the Ring and snuggle under a blanket. Or so I thought. Now I’m trapped in this reread – not to say I’m not enjoying it, because I am – while Dad reads the new Brandon Sanderson book, Calamity. I love Sanderson books, and I’m annoyed at the timing of the release of this one. I just want to read The Lord of the Rings in peace, but it appears that won’t be happening. I hate pressure when reading a book. It makes the reading so much less fun and forces you to speed read, missing a lot of the details. It’s very annoying.

Thank you, all readers of this blog, for putting up with my rant on books. I should get back on track tomorrow.

Vacation!

This will hopefully be a more happy post than most so far. It’s the Friday before February Break! Yay! It doesn’t seem real yet, especially because snow days have made this into a four day week. I have a lot planned this week, although I’m not going on any big trips like I have some years.

As you might be aware, my birthday was on Wednesday. I’m now 16. My birthday party is this weekend, a sleepover from Saturday into Sunday. I’m really excited! I’d been stressed about this party, because every year I invite my friends to do something really cool that I like, such as rock climbing, cross-country skiing, or puzzle solving challenges. This year, though, I’d run out of ideas. I didn’t want to repeat anything, but I had no idea what to do this year. It looked like I was just going to hang out with my friends, which would have been fun, but I wanted to do something spectacular, as 16 is an important birthday. Then on Tuesday, Mom came up with a solution. She found plans for a murder-mystery party with fairy tale characters. I don’t know if you’ve heard of murder-mystery parties before, but they are dinner parties where each guest is playing a character. They are given their character beforehand and dress the part. During the party one of the guests is “murdered”, and they have to figure out who did it. At first I was skeptical – did I really want to have a party where all my friends weren’t acting as themselves? – but Mom clarified that the acting would only be part of the party, and that the rest we would hang out and have a sleepover. She sent out the invitations, and all my friends are really excited about it, even more than I thought they’d be. Three days later I have a dress (I’m Snow White) and I can’t wait! Mom is being amazing about it. She considers all my ideas, no matter how crazy, and she’s willing to do so much work to make it perfect. (I love you Mom! Thank you!)

The weekdays of my vacation will be only OK. I’m going to be taking drivers’ ed all week, which takes most of the day. I’ll have evenings to do something, but it’ll probably be mostly just classes. I’ll be able to get my permit right away, though. Then I can start to learn to drive!

On the last weekend of vacation, I’ll be cross-country skiing/hiking to Zealand Hut in the White Mountains with my family. We’ve been planning it for weeks. We’ll hike or ski depending on the conditions, stay overnight at the hut, then come back. I’m looking forward to it, although I hope it won’t be too cold. The first weekend of vacation is predicted to have low temperatures and strong winds. With wind chill, it’ll be around -10° Fahrenheit. One of the weather alerts I’ve received said that exposed skin will be frostbitten after ten minutes! I’m glad I’m not going to be in the mountains for that weather. Hopefully our skiing weekend will have better conditions.

A Brief History of My Parents

My parents grew up in different worlds, but somehow ended up being amazingly similar people. They both love the outdoors, travel, and books, and they have passed those loves onto me and my brother, as well as the fact that they love each other. They have never been super obvious about the last one – they don’t make lovey faces at each other all the time, or anything like that – but I have never doubted it. They are connected to each other, and totally comfortable with their relationship. I f they have arguments, they are small ones, and they each let the other balance them. I hope to have someone like that someday.

My dad grew up in Canterbury, Connecticut. We call the place where he grew up the “Canterbury House” (we’re so creative). I don’t remember it very well, because when I was very little my Grandparents sold it and moved so that they could be closer to dad and his brothers and sisters, who almost all live in Massachusetts. Although I might not have any real memory of the house, I’ve heard enough stories about it from my dad for it to have a special place in my heart.

The Canterbury House was next to a farm, and it had a ton of land stretching back to the Quinebaug River. My dad grew up running through the woods, canoeing on the river, building dams in streams, and sledding under barbed wire fences into cow pastures with his siblings (he’s second oldest of 6). The house itself was old and under constant renovation by my grandfather. He was always calling his kids in to help with the various projects. My dad has described crawling under the kitchen floor to help with wiring and stepping on rusty nails after leaving bed to hold something in the attic. On rainy days they slid down a laundry shoot, just for the fun of it. They were wild kids, having mud fights on summer days and playing in a rusty tractor. Dad’s childhood makes for some great stories.

My dad was short. Really short. Freshman year he was around 5 ft tall. Possibly less. He didn’t have his growth spurt until college, but during high school he milked it for all it was worth. He played Bilbo Baggins in his school’s production of The Hobbit, sat on someones knee and played a ventriloquist’s dummy, and was the Young Man in a talent show acting out of YMCA. He definitely didn’t always like it – it drove him crazy that his younger sister was taller than him – but he made the best of it, and it sounds like a lot of fun. I hope my brother, who has the same problem, can enjoy it as much as my dad did.

My dad went to college at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and became friends with people who he is still close to today. We call him Mr. Fix-it because he always knows how to make anything broken work again. He knew even when he was little that he wanted to be an engineer, a path he started down by taking everything apart. In his WPI days he once disassembled his roommate’s project with his toes without realizing it. WPI is also when he became the storyteller that he is today, a skill developed over countless hours of Dungeons & Dragons. My dad and many of his friends shared a love of hiking, and would go on long backpacking trips in many different places.

My mom spent her early childhood in Hartford, Connecticut. Although Hartford has gone downhill over time, when Mom lived there it was a good place. She’d explore and play with her various cousins, walking and riding bikes everywhere. When she was still pretty little, her parents and all her relatives bought homes in Wethersfield, a suburb that was being built at the time. My grandparents and aunt still live there today. My mom’s childhood was spent surrounded by her big Italian family. While Dad had his brothers and sisters, Mom had her cousins. She also had one sister, five years older, and there are a ton of stories about their exploits.  My aunt was not a very watchful caretaker for her baby sister, and her neglect would sometimes end with my mom falling down flights of stairs. As they got older they would get into all kinds of trouble together. My mom’s stories are funny ones of childhood mistakes, and although less spectacular than my dad’s they are just as fun to listen to.

My mom went to Trinity College in Hartford, and became an engineer. While at Trinity, she also made life-long friends, and she had a lot of adventures with them. My mom loved to travel, and she went all over, to Singapore, New Zealand, Japan, (etc.). Her friends went with her. They would also go hiking and backpacking. I don’t know how she got her spirit of exploration, but it was strong.

My parents met when they worked at the same company. My mom’s best friend knew my dad’s sister, and they decided that my parents had to meet. They avoided it for a while, but finally did. Their first date was hiking up Mt. Monadnock. My dad brought a camp stove and made soup at the summit. Their first kiss was on a beach in the middle of a storm. My parents are amazing people, and I love them so much. Hopefully I will have stories as interesting as theirs to tell to my kids!

Stress

Stress is everywhere. Always. I stress over everything, and those small patches of stress can add up.

Strangely, school isn’t that stressful to me most of the time. The actual doing of work isn’t something worrisome to me. I can do well on tests and quizzes without studying, and I don’t worry about them (often to the point of forgetting about them entirely). What really stresses me out about school is time. Time is my enemy in all things. I am a procrastinator, but not a laid back one. I delay things as long as I can, while at the same time panicking about how I will get them done. Days never have enough hours, but I can’t seem to figure out how to make those hours free to do the things I want. Between after-school activities (like track and field and plays), homework, and long-term projects (which are the bane of my existence), I don’t have time to relax and de-stress. Whenever I do find a spare moment to curl up with a book, I discover that I have inadvertently caused a backlog of work that will crush me later. OK, maybe school is stressful, but more in its repercussions than by itself. Trying to plan for every moment of my day is hard, and worrying about getting everything done is one of the most stressful things in my life.

Out of school things add to my stress, too. The two worst of these are Girl Scouts and Destination ImagiNation (DI). Girl Scouts adds to my stress just by thinking about it. I  don’t really know why, but it panics me. I feel like I’m trapped and I can’t get out, even though nothing is wrong. For most of the meetings we’ve had I have been pessimistic and scared, unwilling to put my voice forward in the face of people who care so strongly about everything. At our last meeting I relaxed and engaged, and it was a lot more fun. I can’t seem to recapture that feeling, though, so I can’t seem to wrap my head around doing the work I’ve been assigned without my stress level spiking. DI is fun, and I love my team, but we never seem to have enough time to do all the things we need to. It always gets pushed to the side by homework and I end up doing things last minute. Besides time stress, DI can also add to my stress during meetings. We’re people, and we don’t always agree. I always feel like I have to balance the team, especially because the meetings are at my house and my mom is the manager. Whenever there is a disagreement or roadblock, I stress out over it. I also stress in social situations, as I mentioned in my last post. I won’t get into that again, but it’s related to how DI meetings stress me out sometimes.

All that is bad stress. The kind that hollows out my chest and leaves a gaping hole if there’s too much of it. There is, however, good stress. I’ll call this books, although it can be movies, TV shows, or web comics, too. Books can add stress to my life, but it’s not my stress. It’s the stress of the character I’m reading about, and it helps with my bad stress, weird as that seems. When my life seems out of hand, books help put it into context. Yeah, I have to finish a project tonight, but at least I’m not dying on the slopes of Mt. Doom or being enslaved by an evil warlord. Besides a bit of context, books also give me distraction. When I read, I travel into another world and my problems can’t follow me. It doesn’t solve them, just helps me calm down enough to deal. Stress is awful, but I can deal with it, as long as I don’t let too much  build up at once.

Why I Don’t Play Well With Others

I don’t have great social skills. I never know what to say to get my point across, and I always seem to be doing the wrong thing. Even when I am doing the right thing I’m sure that I have somehow messed up, and I feel awkward and uncomfortable. This leads to me sometimes being rather rude and antisocial. People I’ve done this to – I’m sorry. Most of the time it’s not on purpose. I’m just not comfortable in social situations. Even among my friends, I never relax. There’s a constant background voice in my head speculating about what they think of me and of what I’m saying or doing. Am I too loud? Too quiet? Am I talking too much or not enough? Has this silence stretched on too long? Am I making this too much about me? A part of me is constantly afraid that if I don’t get all these things right all the time they’ll leave. I’m scared that if anyone really understands the insecure scared little girl inside they won’t want to be my friends anymore. Almost every conversation is a little bit of stress wedged up inside me. Consciously I know that my friends are good people, and that I can trust them. I know that they probably don’t care if I’m not a good conversationalist, and that if they did they would have left by now. A deep little part of me, though, can’t accept that. It’s terrified that if they did know about my problems they would pity me, and my friends being there only because they felt they had to would be far worse by far than them leaving. So I put up a facade. I pretend to be strong and sure of myself when I’m not, and I over-compensate for my quiet side, filling up the terrifying silences with words. Unfortunately, I’ve never been a very good liar. I always break down, and when that happens I have a tendency to turn my back on the world, or say random things without really meaning anything, or becoming so incredibly sad and quiet that I’m almost not there. Especially in new situations, I hide in a corner, or follow a friend around like a lost puppy. I don’t know how to make new friends. I know now that walking up to someone and asking “Will you be my friend?” like I did in kindergarten doesn’t work, but I’ve never figure out what does. Maybe that’s why I’m so protective of the friendships I do have – they’re all I’ve got, and if I lose them I don’t know what I’ll do.

All of this lack of social skills contributes to why I don’t play well with others. I have an innate distrust of other human beings. I have no reason for this. There is no sad backstory where I was betrayed and learned that humanity is untrustworthy. I just don’t trust people. This is evident in my fear of my own friends, but even more so in my hatred of group projects. Teachers assign group projects as if they are easier than working on your own. There is an idea that students can get so much more done when they work with a partner. Most of the time, though, working with others just makes a relatively simple project complicated and difficult. I don’t trust another person enough to truly split up work, and most of the time my cynical view is proven correct. From my point of view, the other person never does their work as well as I do mine (I don’t know, they might think the same of me), so I end up doing twice as much work – doing my part of the project as well as checking and editing the other person’s. I know this tendency to take over is a bad thing, but every time I scale it back and leave the other person to their own devices they in some way mess up the whole thing. This just enhances my distrust, making me ever less of a team player. I don’t play well with others, but that stems mostly from the fact that I don’t play well with anyone – myself included.

My Obsession with Brandon Sanderson – a Haiku

Favorite author

Creator of many worlds

And loved characters

 

Systems of magic

Countries, cultures, religions

All fully thought out

 

Stories that grab me

Make me feel for the people

Good and evil, both

 

Tension and plot twists

Unpredictability

Excited always

 

And the best of all:

Fabulous writing – with speed!

Don’t need to wait long

 

Thank you, Sanderson

For amazing adventures

Flying on your words

The One Who Refuses to Fit In

I admire people who refuse to fit in. I wish I could be that strong, that sure of myself, but I’m not. There are things that I believe in, unquestioningly and completely. I will argue about why I’m right about those topics for hours. There are things I care about deeply, and if you mess with those things I will most definitely not comply. However, the majority of things in my life fit in neither of those categories. They are there, floating around in my brain, forming connections and breaking them. Some of these pick a spot and stay there,  becoming one of those deep core ideas that I really care about, but the majority shift and slide and change all the time. This annoys me, because I tend to let these connections slide with the opinions of those around me, even when I really shouldn’t. Example: Mrs. Gartland, my eighth grade math teacher. I didn’t really mind her. In fact, I learned a lot from her. She could be harsh, but she knew her subject and taught it well. Unfortunately, my friends hated her. Seriously, honestly, hated her. I just kind of went with it. She’d never really bothered me, but if she was so bad to my friends, I must have just missed it. Surely she bothered me as much as she bothered them. Surely the majority were right. At first I just let them complain to me, but the farther into the year we got the more my opinion shifted to match theirs. Their negative opinions leaked in and scrambled my own until I lost track of my feelings about her. It was only months into the year that I realized that this had happened, and by then it was too late to present my own, much less angry thoughts. I was trapped in the role I had built, and I felt really bad about it. I was lying to my friends, pretending to agree with them when I really didn’t, and I was giving a different face to my teacher than I gave to them, talking behind her back in a way I had hoped to never do.

The worst part is, I didn’t learn my lesson. I just became aware of the problem. I still have trouble holding my own point of view in opposition to someone else’s. When my friends are all agreed on something, and I don’t agree, I have trouble holding on to my reasons. My own opinion seems silly when compared to theirs. I go along with the majority, and most of the time my original idea ends up having been the better option. If I only trusted myself more and voiced my thoughts more clearly, I would be better off. My lack of confidence drives me crazy, but I can’t seem to figure out how to get around it. It’s embedded deep down, and no matter how many times I think I’ve conquered it, it always comes flying back in all its face-hiding, quiet-speaking glory. So yes, I wish I could be the one who refuses to fit in, but to do that I would have to be a different person, and a part of me is scared of who that person would be.