Acid Wash Purple

It's so easy to visualize his blonde fohawk weaving among the piles of students wobbling around in the hallways. Always easy to spot with his acid wash purple sweatshirt, receiving eye rolls from most who heard his obnoxious chatter.

Regardless, I admired him. He was who I aspired to be.  In my eyes he was a god.

In contrast, I was a speck of dust.

I smiled when I needed to, I searched my brain to make sure the comment I was about to make would coincide with the opinions of those around me, and I made sure to not move a finger out of place unless I was positive it would be approved by every living being. I didn't comprehend that what I was doing was out of place. That there were people out there whose words spoke their own personal truth. That the key to happiness was not to ensure everyone else's happiness with you, but instead to reflect within oneself and be content.

That's the type of person he was. He was the obnoxious drummer in the back of band class, each tap reigning with confidence. His lips only spoke of the theories determined by his own mind. He wore the cool checkered vans and a multitude of hats, always running his mouth and being a total badass. He didn't care. He was content with himself, and he wore it proudly. He naturally seeped sureness, never stopping to rethink  his statements or  be bothered by others looking down at him.

I glorified him. I yearned to be like him. Sure, I thought he was a total James Dean and would do anything to replace his girlfriend, but my infatuation with him went past that. He was my muse. In moments of doubt I would think, "What would he do?" He lit the flame inside me that let me become a independent being.

The combat boots I wear, the obsessive darkness in all my paintings, and most importantly the ability to form grounded opinions and remembering to keep myself from thinking I'm below others all stems from the obnoxious man I looked up to. Even though saying I owe my life to him is a stretch, I defiantly owe him the transformation from the speck of dust that I was into the band t-shirt wearing blonde that I am.

Sadly, now he dresses like an old man and is a complete unrefined ignorant crude.

But I still regard him as the most influential individual in my life thus far.

Adulthood

Living in one of the rundown districts in New Jersey, my classmates and I were given the opportunity to apply to public academies and technical schools that were above the standards of the high schools in our area. That taste of freedom of getting to choose your future, choosing a  major and starting with a clean slate, starting a new chapter in a new environment with people who don't know your name was enticing. My future was bright.

As I walked into the stark white halls of the brand new school building I knew that I wasn't going to taste any of that freedom. The universe wanted me to be unhappy, take all my aspirations and dreams from me and throw them away. I looked all  the new classmates I met straight in the eyes with the deepest poison knowing that I would be taken away from this paradise and thrown into the halls of a school in a small farmer town in New York state. My new sense of adulthood was taken away from me.

I made it my goal to show distaste to everything and everyone in my own personal hell. I sat at lunch brooding over the stupidity of my new acquired friends and refused to take any sympathy from my parents. I glared at my room's ceiling blasting heavy metal music, the only thing able to feed my hatred. There was no mercy spared for even a blade of grass in the new town I was stuck in.

After living in New Paltz for almost three years I can now fully appreciate smiling at the people in my life. After being left with just my raw being, my friends, dreams, and goals left in the abyss of New Jersey, it became clear the person I was and how not content I was with myself. Days and nights spent recollecting my memories and befriending the lyrics coming from my ear buds became my source for renewal. I took advantage of the clean slate I was presented with.

Getting the ability to start my life over,write a different story for myself, create a new person gave my all the necessities to become an adult.  Now on my eighteenth birthday I can truly call myself an adult, not because I can buy cigarettes or lottery tickets but because I am truly proud of the person I chose to be.

I am so sappy.

Warm Bodies

Art is the one area that I will actually permit myself to say that I am  decent at. Of course, that is only a opinion, like all art forms, some will hate and others will love the way you express your ideas.

I didn't even know that I was able to compose the space on a canvas or use color theory to bring to life the thin pencil outlines I create on paper until last year. Ever since I applied to a technical school as a commercial art major, in my old town in New Jersey, I guess fate has been pushing me towards paint brushes and charcoal. After moving to New Paltz, a cute little hippy town with gorgeous street art, where I was placed in  a stupid creative crafts class I took a step back to see that my life was heading in an artistic direction. I decided to drop out of the boredom and humidity of band class and join a drawing and painting class. I decided my life was going in an artistic direction anyway so I might as well go along with it. I was set on dropping all my other goals, and move towards an artist's life.

It is now May 23 and I wish I would have taken physics instead of computer graphics this year. My hardwood floor is covered with deep blue paint and there are stacks of 18 by 24 inch unfinished canvases piled in the corner, like I need anything else to remind me that my art portfolio is due next week.

I keep flipping through the pages of my journal to figure out just when I turned into the girl that barley shows up to school, is missing work in AP Lit, and no longer finds joy in the grainy texture of charcoal on her fingers.

Yesterday, was the first time I read a book not assigned for school. It's Warm Bodies. I finished it.


I just want to go back to the blonde who willingly stays up until four  in the morning to perfect her chiaroscuro art piece and has a panic attack about every quiz in history class which she does well on anyway. I want to look forward to Calc class and spend my Saturday mornings studying for the next AP test or SATs. I want to stop suffocating under unfinished essays, tests I haven't taken, and blank watercolor paper. I want to breathe.

I want to blame my state on the fact that I've been fighting the urge to sleep for fourteen hours a day due to mononucleosis. Sadly, when I apply to a Boston school they won't care. I will just be another number, one lower than the one I set up in my preceding years. I guess I might as well be an artist at this point, because medical school is a dream lost in my 96 GPA of sophomore year.






btw: this is the book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm_Bodies

Wildfire

My mother always complains that I was the most restless of her children. I had the ability to turn the daily five minute walk from our apartment to my grandma’s house into a forty minute struggle, complaining that I didn’t want to go and being more interested in climbing every fence along the way. Even though I cried while sitting on the marble window sill, seeing the back of my mother’s head as she rushed to catch the train to work I was always up and ready not long after for another adventure.

The peace and serenity of my solace was the only thing that allowed me to put my energy to good use. These  memories of lying on a blanket amongst the cherry trees pretending to be on a first date with a boy, cutting up earthworms on the buckets scattered around, or being responsible for the death of a baby frog eaten by chickens are my closest friends.  Being able to pick strawberries and gooseberries (which are apparently illegal in the US) when ever I wanted and playing in the broken down sandbox with my chickens were the highpoints of my every day.

The charm of the leafy lettuce, tulip buds, and potato stalks  blazing  like wildfire, the whole world turning to bright orange casting long shadows, was the only time that the hyper child inside me took a moment to just look. Stopping myself near the fence where I injured too many butterflies to look through the collection of walnut branches at the one place that I haven’t seen in ten years.

Anybody else feel like all of their entries are really sappy?

Solace

Whenever my younger sister forces me to read her a bedtime story I always seem to go back to one of my favorites. When I was younger I would force myself to memorize the rhyming poem of my favorite book Słon Trombalski. I just enjoyed getting the attention of my whole family as I recited it at any family gathering. The contents of the poem were well known among polish people and it was a comedy about an elephant that forgets everything, the perfect crowd pleaser.

The mere contrast between the little blonde girl with the gap between her teeth with a love for attention and the quiet blonde listening to metal music writing a blog entry in AP Lit that starts stuttering and having her chest tighten every time she has to read out loud in class is uncanny.

I guess it was my parent’s constant reassurance that I was better than all the other kids that made me wave my nose in the air as I walked down the sidewalk. Sadly, not everyone in the whole world shared the same idea.

It’s that childhood naïveté that makes the earth seem like a possession to take. Your parents seem like the gods of truth, the only source for vital information. The phrase “But my mom said” was always a sure win in an argument with your friends. However, the world your parents created for you, the only solace you knew of up until then, is drastically different than the real world.