Choices and Change

Five years ago I started a blog to document my college experience. True to form I let my enthusiasm peter out rather quickly (although looking back at the several months I managed to keep this thing going, I am rather impressed by my 18-year-old self.)

Also, true to form, some shit happened over the last five years that I certainly would not have dared to predict. For just a taste of it though:

Family and Reality

College life! It's amazing! I have awesome new friends, hanging out with my movie buddy is a breeze, and I get along great with my roommate. It's one of the best experiences ever, and I'm so grateful that I have gotten this opportunity.

But that doesn't stop the homesickness.

Terminal Realizations

I'm sitting in an almost empty terminal waiting to board a plane alone for the first time in my life. It's nerve-wracking. All I can think is what if I board the wrong plane? What if I get on the wrong shuttle and instead of ending up in Fort Collins, I end up in Boulder? What if I go to this college preview and discover that I hate the college I've been dreaming about since I was a sophomore?

My brain keeps telling my beating heart that there is no way I can board the wrong plane, and with the detailed instructions on how to get to the shuttle I'll be fine. But what about my college? I've been a California girl my entire life, and now I'm suddenly packing up everything I think I can't live without, and shipping off to an entirely new time zone not to mention state. And how on earth am I supposed to afford the out of state tuition, even with the scholarships I've already received?

The only thing I can think of is all the advice I got while filling out college applications. My family, my friends, and even my favorite teacher all told me the same thing: stay in California.

Living for the Details

So I started my first legitimate job this summer. Terrifying with a capital T! Sure I've had the odd babysitting and housecleaning job since I turned twelve, but for the first time ever I found myself answering to a supervisor and being responsible for my own actions. Or almost the first time.

You see, as I was organizing invoice receipts, I realized that this was exactly the kind of work I did for Peer Counseling. Sure, Peer Counseling revolved around counting pencils and organizing index cards rather than alphabetizing fire marshal licenses and organizing invoices. However, there is one common link here; all of these activities are dull, monotonous, and time-consuming.


And I love it.

In A Box in My Bookshelf There Lives A Memory

When removed from its green cover with the fading yellow title sticker, the title is only legible on the binding, except to someone who’s looked at it as often as I have. I can make out two words among the jumble of dwarven runes along the edge: The Hobbit. It’s one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classics, and a personal favorite, but not for the story. It is seventeen years old, and the book handled the most, yet the pages are not weatherworn or bent, its most battered component being a torn paper bookmark on page 104. When I leaf through its stiff, off-white pages, the first words I see are the handwritten ones before the title page: “Michael, Christmas 1993”. I’m well acquainted with the black print on each page, but when I read the words, I hear not the voices of Gandalf or Bilbo but the voice of my dad. Its slightly sticky picture pages have become a storage bin of memories. When removed from its green cover with the fading yellow title sticker, a little piece of my Dad escapes from its home in The Hobbit.

The Tyranny of Self-Loathing

When, in the course of human life, it becomes not only necessary but essential for all of humanity to renounce their ties to negativity and to assume among the powers of the mind that which grants them new confidence and a heightened self-esteem, a simple respect for their mental health demands that they explain the tyranny of mental self-mutilation and the events which impel them to separate from this way of life.

An Unchanging Foundation and the Landscape it Sits On

Twenty-two years ago, in a sophomore English class, two very different people met. One was a fifteen-year-old girl with the largest smile, the loudest laugh, and the most beautiful green eyes. The other was a young athletic boy on the swim team with a quirky grin, an infectious chuckle, and one half-brown, half-blue eye. Twenty-one years ago they shared their first date at a Sadie Hawkins Dance, and, on November 28, 2012, they will have been married twenty years. Katie Hatter and Michael Hatter were, and remain, two people with seemingly little in common. Yet despite their varied quirks, personalities, and pasts, my parents remain the unaltered foundation of a steadfast family.