There's a crowd of people harbored in every person

For a while now, I've been meaning to start backing up my blog entries in a word document, on the off chance the various untrusting, apocalyptically Orwellian-minded internet critics are right, and someday the World Wide Web will crash, taking every cached file, facebook profile, and semblance of human sanity along with it. Considering that I rely on the internet heavily for my banking and bill pay and financial aid repayment, of course the one thing that I immediately seek to save is my blog.

Last night I sat down to finally complete this project. Which, of course, required that I delve back to the recesses of my teenagedom, seven years ago, to late 2003, when I was newly sixteen years old. I distinctly remember the afternoon I started this blog, sitting on our lumpy, old, gray couch, feet up on the coffee table in the family room of my mom's house, my then-new HP laptop warming my legs. Now, I find myself sitting on another lumpy couch, my feet on another coffee table, in a living room 50 miles away, my now-new HP laptop resting in my lap. It wasn't lost on me that, visually, the lack of progress is astounding.

But that impression of stasis is obviously an illusion. This blog was started by a goodie-two-shoes teenager without a driver's license, who'd never had a job and whose longest relationship lasted three months. Now it's being accessed by a twenty-two year old "woman" working full-time for a publishing company near the city. Semi-unwittingly, it turns out that I created a pretty detailed compendium of, essentially, my entire adolescence. All the supposedly significant coming-of-age events of an upper-middle class white girl are in here, in one form or another.

Naturally, I made a narcissistic compilation of representative excerpts from this timeline.

------------------------------

01/27/04: On getting my driver's license
Well, I got my license, and in the process defied about every DMV stereotype there is. 1) I was in and out in less than an hour, 2) everyone was pleasant and/or humorous, and 3) my picture was one of the better ones I've taken in quite a while. The best part: After 2:30, I was able to go to the DMV, get something to eat, play a game of chess, and still make it back to tech before 4. If that isn't time well managed I don't know what is.

02/05/04: On my dominant extracurricular, NVHS theater crew
I'm always amused by how so many of us are so rabidly devoted to tech. For all intents and purposes, tech injures us, fatigues us, keeps us up late and gets us up early, works us for over 12 hours at a time, frustrates us, and is always the source of complaint. Yet, like moths to a lantern, we all draw to the shop day after day. Is it for the personal satisfaction of a hard day's work? The pride felt in a well constructed staircase? Or maybe just the fact that carrying around a handheld circular saw, walking next to a kid who knows how to explode things with dry ice, makes you feel at least a little bit badass?

03/16/04: On getting my first job
Well, I'm finally employed. Turning my application into Colonial yielded me a job in less than a week. And besides the comparatively extensive commute and near-minimum wage pay, I can't really complain about it, either. Yet. I officially start tomorrow, so we'll see if there's anyone I want to kill then.

04/10/04: ....
After just 3 weeks of working at Colonial, I decided to quit for Dairy Queen, which will provide me with better pay for less effort and better hours. I was pretty nervous about how I would go about the quitting process, due to a combination of a new experience and a great fear of people getting angry at me. Luckily, it went well. And I got my first paycheck.

08/31/04: On being in high school
As I've entered another year of productivity and education among my fellow school-spirited Wildcats, I can't help but notice how much my life doesn't resemble a teen movie. As things are, I'm getting increasingly closer to my own cap and gown ceremony, and not ONCE have I been part of a poppy dance routine. In fact, I've never even been wooed by the token Hot But Egotistical Jerk only to be rescued by the Possibly Less Hot But Charming Loner when the Jerk shows his true colors. Come to think of it, the last time I was rescued in any manner was probably when my age consisted of one digit and I decided that wandering off alone in a large store was a pretty good idea. Similarly, my mortal enemy has never been vengefully humiliated in front of cheering peers, nor do I have an Obnoxious Blond Counterpart to fulfill the role of said enemy.

06/26/05: On how I feel about English/writing
...It seems like a weird thing for me to complain about, but I found [a writer's] use of words like "suppositions," "afoot," "query," and "contradistictive" for every other word really obnoxious. Words were created in order for people to express themselves clearly, accurately, and if possible, wittily, and I guarantee you that the word "pulchritudinous" will never, ever aid in clearly proving a point. There's a difference between using the English language appropriately and engulfing people in ridiculous vocabulary like a monkey with a mishandled blowtorch. I'm sure with a good thesaurus and dictionary, everyone anywhere could articulate their online desideratum with abstruse lexicon in order to apportion themselves from the feeble-minded ignoramuses on the globe. But we don't. 'Cause it's irritating.
Point being, if my affection for English ever turns into that kind of pseudointellectual BS, I invite you, my adoring public, to hit me with the nearest available blunt object. Not in the face, though, my family spent a lot of money on dental care.

08/16/05: On visiting colleges
Well, I visited Northwestern today. Overall, it struck me as the Neuqua of colleges: Big, expensive, tons of activities, a trendy but ambitious population, and surrounded by a pleasant and severely groomed suburb. I think that may be why I liked it so much; it reminds me of home but on a larger scale. Of course, the price for that good old fashioned homey feeling is about $40,000 and a 7/8 probability of rejection. But hey, I could always sell a kidney to cover the former and my soul for the latter.

08/28/05: On my second job
Speaking of kids, I've decided, as predicted, to quit Build-A-Bear due to my various other more enjoyable and therefore more important commitments. Which is a bit of a shame, since my 90 day "performance evaluation" today concluded that I am, in fact, an effective bearmaker.

12/04/05: On my eighteenth birthday
The fact that it snowed significantly for the first time on my birthday made me disproportionately happy, considering it resulted in me sliding into a curb and being late for school.

03/04/06: On filling out FAFSA for the first time
A family of procrastinators is a bad combination. You really need to have at least that one tenacious, anal, go-getting future stock market analyst of the family that harps on everyone to meet their deadlines. Or else the result is these nice, sitcom-esque evenings with a mother and daughter tag-teaming their way through FAFSA the night before the deadline.

03/22/06: On my third job
I started work at the pizza place the other day. It's made me re-notice the fact that, subconsciously, I always assume that when I meet people, they automatically know who I am and what I'm like. I end up getting put off when managers treat me like Average High School Kid and not Linda. It also, then, makes me superconscious of the fact that my chances of proving that I'm Not So Much Average High School Kid might've been set back when I accidentally called sausage "pepperoni" for the better part of an hour.

05/30/06: On high school graduation
I gotta say, out of all the festivities of Graduation Week--the last day of school, the awards assembly, the brunch, practice, etc--actually graduating was probably my least favorite part. It was hot, the speeches were adequate but not overtly memorable, and I spent the hour or so it took to read all 900 names half-staring with mind numbing blankness at the stage and half trying to keep myself from being irritated with my esteemed fellow graduates snickering and chair-kicking. Maybe it was the sight of the girl standing next to me catching the corner of a violently pitched cap in the eye that finally did it in for me.

08/31/06: On my first impressions of college
5 Good Things About College:
- Having a roommate who shares in the pride and delight of successfully assembling a chair for our 5x10 "living room"
- Living on a campus small enough that I didn't actually have to make an effort to learn the whereabouts of anything.
- 12 varieties of cereal
- I appear to suffer homesickness about 84% less than the average freshman.
- An astonishingly stellar cafeteria selection has allowed my store of Ramen to remain unperturbed.

12/23/06: On thinking about my future
It occurred to me at that point that, while I will presumably someday have a "real" job (unless I pull a Beverly Hillbilly or, if I'm lucky and discover a penchant for respirators, an Anna Nicole Smith), I'll never fully live in the same kind of utilitarian real world that people like, say, Donald Trump do. Whatever career I decide on will likely in no way ever involve real estate, finances, or anything that insinuates that I make any money. I'll never fully understand the stock market, worry about the intricacies of owning a small business, or have my mind totally wrapped around immediate concerns. I'll always care more about Shakespeare than standard deviation, and as such my life will never be entirely practical.

06/28/07: On my fourth job
Sales Associate at the Dress Barn is not an ideal job. It's not even an ideal summer part-time job, though it fights comfortably in the weight class of "fine." This was made all the more evident to me when, during my 20th hour at the 'Barn in three days, I found myself excited to realize that there was one more rack of shirts that I had yet to organize by sleeve length, and as a result I had one more dangling carrot of activity to distract me from the boredom.

06/14/08: On getting an internship
Optimism®, for example, has in my own life recently transferred "unpaid internship 45 miles from my house" into "invaluable opportunity to have a trial adult life." For the majority of the summer, I'll be living in a one-bedroom condo and commuting daily to a steady, 9-5, cubicled job. Which means I get an opportunity to get a taste of what living alone and having an Office Space job would be like--minus actually really supporting myself and plus having the luxury of coming back home on weekends to curl up in my room.

11/13/08: On turning 21
Realistically, I'm probably as much of an adult as I'll ever be; I'll just hopefully get a little wiser or something over the next half century. Enough aged-30+ parents, teachers, customers, acquaintances, and strangers have told me "when I look in the mirror, I still see my 20-year-old self" for me to believe that right now, or any other arbitrary time, is about as real as it's going to get. So while I'm still open to the possibility of a Grown-Up Book Of Knowledge falling on my head at exactly 7:11 p.m. on December 1st, I'm not going to be broken hearted if the only thing that falls on me is snow. Or presents.

------------------------------

Well, okay, I guess it's a compendium of my adolescence minus any discussion of emotion, friends, or boys. You can blame that on the fact that RoboLinda has always been my copy editor.