Today… I got a job

Shout out to Nicky for this one, because today I got my very first, fairly legit, job. A pretty carefree gig babysitting once or twice a week for the same family Nic babysits for, reeling me in a good $50 a day. Not bad for some summer cash huh?

They have chickens though… and ducks oh no. I’m like mortally scared of both (if you’ve read the Infernal Devices you’d know why) for reasons I’d rather not explained.

If you wanna hear a horror story in the future, look for the hashtag ducks on my page, cause there sure as hell will be some terrifying event to take place in the future.

More to come on this one… but today I opened a door.

Let’s see where it takes me.

Last Day of Freshman Year.

There were like 200 people there. Not even kidding- out of the 1600 somethin kids at my school, only about 200 showed up. I was pissed.

“Hey you sign my… oh wait there’s no one here.”

My yearbook has like 5 signatures. I expected it to be a fun day, so I woke up without an alarm and was so pumped and I dressed all cute and attempted to curl by uber straight hair (fail as always). Then I got there and walked into first period and literally everyone around me spent fifteen straight minutes just playing on their phones, and I just kept huffing and puffing from the seat over.

I’m gonna be stuck at home all summer, probably same with you. Could you not just talk to me about useless shit for the next 10 minutes and then go on your merry way?

I mean the kid who sat next to me had been in my class for three freaking years and he was moving the next year. It got better though once I asked the teacher for a deck of cards (getting dominoes instead) and actually socializing with another human for like 5 minutes.

The second I left that class, my routine was changed, and that shit don’t fly with me. I walked up the stairs to meet with my like 10 friends that always gossip there between period and you want to know how many there were? Two. I mean I love em both to death but two lousy friends? That whole group was supposed to sign my yearbook and were they there? No. They weren’t.

So Nicky and I walked to first period where we did freaking presentations.

That’s how my school day was.

OH! Okay so before school, a girl who had been my friend date to Tolo called me up, all pissed that I hadn’t brought her poster home. I told her I would grab it school, which I totally planned on doing and everything. Ya, I was walking out of 6th period with Keaton and we just kinda kept walking and I didn’t even think about it. Then I met up with Nicky, who I was going home with, and we just got in the car and pulled out of the parking lot.

5 minutes later she texts me, asking me if I grabbed it. I lied. Hopefully Beard just throws it away so that Lexi doesn’t walk in next year and beat me.

After getting to Nicole’s house, we literally were just sitting there cuddling on the couch like best friends do… and we passed out. When we woke up it was like 3 and her mom had woken us up so I was just sitting there staring at those cream walls hoping and wishing that the next time my heavy eyelids shut, they would stay that way.

Not a chance.

We were both too tired to move and literally just sat there until like 5 when we got up to get ready to go bowling.

Okay, so we didn’t even know who was coming with us. We were those girls who posted a hot pic on snap chat welcoming anyone who feels like it to be there at 8, and texted all the people we had already been texting. Keaton, Maddy, and Emilie all showed up and it was fun…

I lost every game by like 100 points and Collette and Lenny, Nicole’s parents, were so disappointed in me when they walked in to pick us up and saw the score.

It was embarrassing. I literally had a gutter ball every round… except for the 2 rounds I got strikes, don’t ask how. One time, I gutterballed four times in a row.

Keaton literally goes, “Does she no it’s not golf?”

My score would have been a helluva lot better if it was.

But it was fun, and then we went back to Nicky’s and made banana boats (I pretty much feel sick still writing this the next morning) and then crashed. But I realized something that day.

People don’t care. And I have always been one of those to be like – why did you come to school on a half day when we’re not doing anything anyway.

But I was feeling sentimental today, ya know? I wanted to do something fun and adventurous because it was our last day as freshman. It was just another day to everyone else, and by that night, it was just another day to me too. The fun days come and go, the fun moments appear or they don’t, but spontaneous fun doesn’t have a calendar.

My Memories

So I was thinking about it last night while bowling with some of my friends, and we had just briefly brought up the fact of something that happened like last year and I had pretty much no recollection of it. Then I was thinking that Anderson said I should blog about something that meant something to me, rather than give it up completely. These blogs may not mean anything to you, but they will all mean something to me. I’m going to start journaling my life on here.

Conclusion

I didn’t finish one thing on my blog before I finished my project, and I don’t plan on forcing any of these things before I turn 16. I actually learned so much already. I know now that you can’t force things like this to happen. You can’t force growth as a person, and you sure as hell can’t do it for a school project, where you have to sensor everything you write. It’s hard to do something revolving around self-revelation, when I have to sensor my whole self. Not to mention you can’t put a time constraint on change, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. But that wasn’t even the issue. The real issue was, you can’t write a list of things to do and expect it to change you, that’s not how life works. You can’t say your going to change a freaking tire and expect that to make you a whole different person. And you cant expect to change as a person at all. It just happens. All the fun moments in life, all the moments worth living in and putting in the books, are spontaneous, at least to some extent. The fun in baking a cake isn’t the actual physical act of baking a cake, it’s the getting flour down your bra and up your nose and in your hair. It’s cracking the egg and shattering the shell, playing that cat and mouse game as you try to pick them out with a fork. It’s the war you have with your friend while frosting it. But it’s never actually the baking of the cake. I didn’t realize that until this project. I didn’t even have to do any of the tasks to realize it.

I realized it when my family went to Hood River, first. It wasn’t on any list. But we went, and it was blast. I did fun things without even thinking about it, but they were the kind of things you would put on a list… just not mine. I went to Top Golf, total bucket-list worthy experience, and I went through awkward situations all by myself. I drove on a freaking busy road and I didn’t even hit any thing. And no list told me to.

Plus, I’m in high school. High school is not the time for bucket lists, i can do that when I’m on my death bed. But right now, I don’t have time to go completing items on some stupid list or I’m going to miss out on what’s right in front of me. “Sorry you super hot senior, can’t go out with you tonight because I have to go home and change a tire instead.” Ya, no. That’s not how life works. You can’t force life’s best moments to come to you when there are already some staring you right in the face.

I like the idea of blogging, I always have. However, I feel like it takes a specific level of put-together-ness, like you have to really have your life together to be able to maintain a blog. Unfortunately for me, that’s not me by any means. I am a mess. But all high school students are. I plan on coming back to blogging with my new found knowledge of how to run them, how to get followers, etc., after I learn how to make my life a lot less messy.

Meet Me

My name is Brooklyn.  I’m not gonna share my location or tell you all where I go to school, cause I’ve sure seen enough stories in the news to know that that might not be the smartest decision. Not that my location really matters, this blog has nothing to do with that. I’m a freshman this year, and my English final is for me to learn anything, to create my own project on something I’ve always wanted to do. Genius Hour, in case any of you have heard of it. I have always wanted to start a blog, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity, and maybe a chance to find a new hobby. But the real point of this is the idea of “16 til 16”. I wanted a project that would get me out of my comfort zone, a project that I don’t learn something really physically, like how to make a quilt, but the main point being that I learn something about myself that will help me to grow as a person. I don’t know for sure that that will be how this project in the end, after all I only have 2 weeks to really get all of this done. Nonetheless, after getting the assignment, my mom was talking about how one of her friends from high school was doing a 30 til 30 kind of bucket list blog- 30 things to complete before she turns 30. I was inspired. I thought that it would be good for me, to get me to be more adventurous. I crave spontaneity, but I have a really hard time taking that tiny little hop of faith to do  a little insignificant thing that might just propel me in the right direction. I’m hoping this will change that, and be a little fun along the way. I don’t really know what I’m going to learn through this project. Maybe it will be about me personally, how to step out of my comfort zone, discovering things I never thought I would like. At the very least though, I’m going to learn how to run a blog! 😉

16 til 16 List

1. Go to the GUM wall.
2. Bake a cake from scratch.
3. Go somewhere public by myself.
4. Commit a random act of kindness.
5.  Go paint-balling.
6. Hang out with my brother.
7. Go on a hike.
8. Change a tire.
9. Uncover a new hobby/ passion.
10. Read a classic.
11. Change my appearance.
12. Do a color run, 5k, something along those lines.
13.  Go camping.
14. Support a cause or volunteer somewhere.
15. Make a new friend/ become better friends with someone I’m not currently that close with.
16. Go on a bike ride.