Things I Need To Tell You About But Will Not Go Into Detail About, At Least Not In This Blog:
- i got a major scholarship that finished off paying for my school!
- i bought an incredible prom dress.
- i wore said dress to an incredibly awesome party, aka Military Ball
- my ukulele skills have skyrocketed. on sunny warm days, i play outdoor concerts. (mainly for myself, but i truly enjoy bystanders.)
days have been spent between my house and the school for rehearsal. I NEVER LEAVE.
i mean, i have. a little bit.
but it's been one heck of a week. or two. or five.
i can't really blame anyone but myself, so i don't complain too much. i chose to do the musical, take three ap courses, keep up a social life, learn to play ukulele, begin co-leading a small group at church, and try to constantly add commitments on top of my already crazy schedule.
i choose to do everything i do. i must be a nutjob.
on a slightly unrelated (but will later be related) note, i'm starting to think that twitter is a more efficient way to keep up with people than actual face-to-face contact. in all seriousness, when i ask someone what's going on in their life, i get way less than a 140 character blip.
however, i'm not convinced its 100% better. i've had some pretty incredible encounters with people over the last couple weeks.
i was with my friend kirby downtown one night. we honestly just planned to walk around in the park, which is honestly not that big. we spent close to 5 hours there. i was happy to just walk and play my uke and not have anyone reminding me what i haven't done yet.
this is an exciting saturday night to me.
after a long time, we decided to just lie down on this outdoor stage and watch the stars.
this would have been an excellent idea if the stage wasn't covered in an unidentifyable grainy substance. so we sat on it instead.
it took about 7.5 minutes for two girls to run, and i mean RUN up to us and break the quiet of the moment.
girl in yellow sweatshirt: hey, what are you doing?
me: ahh umm we are--
girl: can we stargaze with you?
(i need a tattoo on my forehead that reads ALL DISTRACTIONS WELCOME.)
me: yes.
the other girl didn't really say too much. she just txted on her phone and ate twizzlers that i swear she made out of thin air.
girl in the yellow shirt's name was alexis*, i think. i'm not sure. but basically she started off the conversation by saying she didn't have a place to sleep that night.
yeah, it sounded pretty sketch to me, too.
so we asked her about her story, what brought her to this point.
she ended up telling us several unrelated stories before she got to why she was there. she told us about the floors in the school she went to (which was right down the road) and how they were incredibly thin. in her words -- "one time i dropped a pot of coffee on my friend's bed. not only did it go through the bed, but it leaked all the way through the floor, which was the ceiling of the room below us, and onto a girl's Mac."
she also told us about how she got kicked out of walmart, and that's why she subsequently got kicked out of school. she was staying with another friend, who accidentally locked them out of the apartment.
also, that she was from ohio. and apparently no one likes ohio.
all this extra information, and i still don't really know her name. i have the most selective memory ever.
then we decided to approach the unapprochable girl with twizzlers. her name was hope.
and when we asked her about her story, she blew my mind.
her story started out something like this --
when i was little, i lived in this neighborhood that didn't have a lot going on. we basically played hide-and-seek all the time. i was eight years old and maybe fifty pounds, so i would climb trees and fit into tight places, and basically defy gravity. i was never the seeker. if i was, i wasn't any good at it. i don't like going out to find people. i'd rather people search for me. which is ironic, i guess, because i'm so good at hiding.
my mind is already whirring with the depth of that little bit of information. of course i see it all as a metaphor for her life, and my life too, and how it almost relates to everyone. in the .324 seconds it took me to process this, she was moving on.
this is a story of how i'm good at hiding.
oh man. here we go.
i went to the same school as alexis.* and there was this one girl with bright red hair that basically got on everyone's nerves. i mean, she was crazy. she was also notorious for partying. not the cool kind. like the kind that people aren't ever really okay afterwards. being let loose by her parents didn't do her any good at all. anyway, no one really knows why she got kicked out, but one day her mom was in the office, and she wasn't there anymore. i'm guessing she caught wind of what her daughter was up to. there's this big rule that if someone gets kicked out, they are pretty much banned from the property. this is a pretty big deal.
one day, she just shows up on campus. everyone knew she was there, or at least everyone was spreading the rumors. i went into one of my friend's rooms a few hours later, and there she was, with a few other girls. they had trashed this room. i mean, they threw some sort of party. there were bottles and pills and all sorts of crazy stuff there. i just shut the door and went downstairs. my friend josh was down there, so i told him what happened. i had seen her, so now i was involved. it kind of freaked me out. i didn't know what to do. josh told me to go back to my room and chill. i called my roommate and told her to lock the door, and not let anyone in. anyone. she said "oh, okay. but a girl from down the hall and some chick with red hair just came in. should i ask them to leave?" craaaaaaap.
at this point, i don't know what to do. i'm already involved, and no matter what i do, they're gonna think i'm a part of it. so the security guards start looking for her, and me too, since i didn't check into my floor. i decide i'm not going to get caught. when they came to the suites, i hid inside or behind their mini fridge. it was pretty nuts. they'd come in the room, i'd be in or behind the fridge, they'd move into the next room of the suite, and i'd run into the next suite's fridge while they were looking. i did this for three whole floors. this search went on till about 4 in the morning. the room they finally caught me in was actually full of people. when they grabbed me, and everyone did this, but i was the only one that got in trouble, i shouted, "Heil Hitler!" in retrospect, it was probably a dumb thing to do. they asked me why i did that later, and i went into a fully launched story about the history of WWII, and the night raids, and how it kind of felt like a night raid to me. i even went into the story of this guy dmitri schostakovich, and how he wrote music during WWII, and how a lot of schostakovich's music was incredibly angry. when my class had to rehearse playing it in orchestra, everyone left rehearsal and thought, "why is everyone so angry at me?" ...aaaaaand that's about the time that they kicked me out. and i guess i'm not so good at hiding after all.
i kind of sat there with my jaw open a little bit. out of the two hours we spent with these girls, she spoke about 20 minutes and made a bigger impression than alexis*.
it kind of got me thinking about people.
i had this incredible realization all over again that everyone i meet has a backstory, an added depth that we can't see. i make the argument frequently that we’re overstuffed with information. there’s just too much, period. but i'm starting to think that maybe we are so desensitized with information that we miss the incredibly human aspect of what we don't know.
so the next time i go to compose a tweet, i'm going to consider how many times i've genuinely gotten someone in conversation and appreciated their story.
have you ever thought about this?
i'm really curious.
and if you haven't thought about it... why not?
i'm going to get off of this soap box before my raging hormones get the better of me and i start crying again.
i love people. i love you.
xoxoxoxoxoxo
T
p.s. my friend kirby that i mentioned earlier is now producing music! more to come on that. he has a few songs out, but when his ep comes out, i'll let you know.
p.p.s. alexis* = i'm not sure that's really her name. not that she would have lied. i just can't remember.
Song of the Day: "
Someone Like You" by Adele
