So, in an effort to clean up my act...

...I have made 13 mistakes this week, and the counting of them is probably not healthy.  I will be pushing a deadline on myself to blog every 3 days come hell or high water. Whether or not I close at work or get assigned a load of homework, this will happen.  I recently checked the dates on all my posts and it's wonky looking; they're mostly Wednesdays or random weekends.

Right, so my thirteen mistakes.  In list form, so they're slightly easier to read.

1) I wore a green lace dress and the slip covering my butt kept riding up.  Walking home with headphones in my ear, I didn't really realize it was happening and that everyone could see my flesh and panties.  At least, not until a weird guy asked me for directions and asked if it was purposely see through, and as I turned the corner and tried to fix my slip he told me it looked good either way.  Then I hightailed my hide toward the street where I live and never looked back.

2) Accepted extra responsibility at work without fully understanding the new task.  Dressing the bottom bun versus what goes on the top bun, because though I work at a burger joint I don't flip them.  I'm not even that dumb working teenager cliche.  I'm like, in the sub basement of cliches.

3) I got to school on time.  Which, I know, doesn't seem like a mistake, but I only got there on time, which meant the walk to school comprised of an awkward run in with a...person who is less than pleased with my general existence in his neighborhood.  Thank God I had a fedora on and stared holes into the damn sidewalk.  This is my fabulous burgundy fedora:

4) I have decided to eat at work for the rest of the week, and whenever I'm there.  My parents don't want to feed me when I get home after closing, and I don't like paying for food.  However, I'm going to have a heart attack by the time I'm 22 if I keep eating double patty bacon burgers with mayo everyday.  I'm not getting any younger, as the impending commencement would imply.

5) Thinking I'd still be working at the burger joint by the time I'm 22.  Unless I'm managing or owning the place.

6) Not doing my homework this whole week in favor of hours and sleep.  I want to blame senioritis, but I feel like all I'm doing is trading work and numbers received for a different kind.  One place involves me sitting in a classroom on the same level as monkeys and receiving a number grade for being less monkey like (though by no means not a monkey.  I'm seventeen.  Flinging poop is part of the job description), and the other involves getting treated like a monkey and cleaning bathrooms for money.  So either way, poop seems to be a common theme.

7) I did a bad coping thing. In an attempt to take my friend's advice and forget all about a boy, I went out with a different one who turned out to be an insert-expletive-of-choice. I got stuck in South Queens and didn't know how to get back.  I'm just glad the bus driver was nice.  I was literally running around an intersection for a bit in a skirt, completely pissed off and frightened.

8) I missed first period today because I overslept.  Almost missed second period too, but it felt excessive to miss a class where we were watching a movie that day.

9) I still haven't completed my FAFSA.  My dad's none too pleased with anything I do, so he wasn't the nicest about helping me out with the whole taxes part which is basically the entire application.

10) I'm not be supportive of a friend despite her rough issues and because she was being annoying.  If there's one thing that makes me feel like a bad person, it's being intentionally mean to people I like.  I don't care about my hedonistic impulses or trading work for school or homework for sleep, but I know I'm doing something wrong if I'm hurting others.

11) I'm avoiding necessary confrontations.  One is with a missed test, one is with a senior pictures issue, and one is with the boy I attempted to get over and failed, because in comparison the dipwad I wanted to move on with was a dipwad.

12) Another inaction-type mistake.  I have a To Do List that has not been touched.  In a month.  Or so.

13) I had a social anxiety attack because my teacher asked me to present notes on the fly and I wasn't prepared.  So I was crying in the stairwell because I stuttered a little.  Drama queen? Maybe.  Diagnosed? Not yet.

In an attempt to be less depressing, the next post will also be in list form. Though it will  not be a rap sheet of my weekly character again.

Countdown on an "experience"

Today is the penultimate day of March.  The month after is April, then there's May, and then June.

Then I won't be in high school anymore.

I won't ever don a uniform again.  I won't fight to get into the crawlspace that is the small hall of lockers for senior girls.  I won't write or edit for my school newspaper anymore.  My teachers will become memories, memories will become names, names will become blurs.  And these people that I call friends, will they still be my friends come fall?  Will they miss me?  Will I miss them?

My mother once told me that life is a series of leaving people and people leaving you. My father constantly tells me that high school is the easy part, that it won't even be important or memorable or acknowledgeable at his age.

But what they might refer to, or I might refer to later, as an experience, is my life.  The average high schooler, even if they work all the time like me, has no idea what the outside world is like.  We have a ton of preconceived notions of being adults, but we have no reality to attach the cliches to yet.  This is still happening though.  I still force my way to my locker, I still eat the cafeteria food, and I'm still a kid. And if I'm anything like my parents, it appears as if these four last years won't mean in anything in the next ten.

I find it to be inaccurate, honestly. Events from middle school and elementary are still fixed in my brain, are still a part of the sum of the experiences that make me who I am.  Next year, high school will be lumped in with those.  Four years after, college will get lumped in too.  And in the autobiographical memories, I think they'll still be important.

The spelling bee I won at 10 is still important, as well as the first poem I wrote at 8.  Creating a writing compilation as a tear jerking thank-you gesture to a teacher at 12, performing in the church choir and in the school dance team--maybe my memory for good things goes a little farther back than my parents. In my freshman year of high school, I asked out my first boyfriend. I was so nervous, I shook and asked him to repeat himself because I couldn't believe he said yes.  I learned that I wasn't perfect--that despite being exceptionally smart, I still needed to work for what I wanted.  I figured out that repression and coping could be evil to my mental health, and that my own judgement wasn't as trustworthy as it was before all these new teenager questions got asked.  I nearly overcame my perpetual shyness, and now my quietness is more selective than ubiquitous.  High school wasn't a major catalyst.  There was no epiphany, nothing that might make my parents remember it.  It's just part of my growth.  And I think my progress, and I think everyone's progress is at least worth the acknowledgment, if not the memory.

My best friend told me last night that I work like a psycho, but I found someone else who's a psycho too

There's a plate of salad not eaten.  There's bits of chicken that were left alone.  The plate is bigger than a human head, and the orange juice is half gone.  The chocolate chip pancakes are in ruins; they're in bits and pieces.  The lighting is cheap, as well as the booth.  The service is mediocre.  The food itself--well, chain restaurants.  It's not even.  It's a chain diner.  The company I'm keeping is engaging but loquacious, and perhaps a little too much like myself.

This is the sad night out that is the break from this crazy, awful tailspin of a senior year.  I mean, the company I was with was great but the concept was skewed.  I just recently found out that Queens College doesn't e-mail; they send physical letters through the post office.  I don't know why Queens College is stuck in the 1950's, but I've been obsessively checking my e-mail for news from them every second of every day and now it seems the point was moot.  Now I have to search through the mail in my house, and HOORAY for that, because my mother is actually more disorganized than I am.

I'm exhausted and I was a horrible, horrible person to be out with last night. I almost fell asleep like three times, and to make things worse I took work phone calls during the meal.  I've been so sick lately, and so stressed.  I'm waiting for the point this post should be making to just get blurted out as not Rita types beside me, but a blue eyed blonde who doesn't give a rip about my existence types beside me carelessly.

So I guess the point I'm making is, the only way to get through this horrible thing called senior year is to remember the good parts.  As pathetic as the concept of the night out may be, it reminds you that you are working so that one day, hopefully soon, you will have a life where you can smile at the person across from you instead of squint at them and wonder about the work you have to do when you get home.

I want what I want.

It's really bad that I have no idea what I'm doing.

I just...I can't.  I haven't gotten zilch for acceptances OR rejections.  I have all these crazy worries that something didn't go through or my application got lost or something ridiculous that's just not supposed to happen and I have nowhere to put these worries. It's getting to the point where I'm wondering, what if I don't get in?  What then?

And what if getting in isn't what I really want?  What if I don't know what I want?  I don't know a ton about any of the colleges I applied to, just that those colleges would be okay with money and with what my parents want.

Seriously, the only thing I want is out of my house.  I want my independence, my freedom, my career.  But further than that, what if my career is wrong?  What if I change it 9 times? What if I get some weird literature degree that doesn't qualify me for any job?

I'm just really worried and anxious.  I thought I always knew what I wanted.  I've been certain since the third grade I would write for a living, and it was decided for me that I would go to college and move out and stay in New York.  I don't reject any of these things that my parents want for me; none of them are bad.  But when I look in the mirror I don't see what they want.  I know what they want.  My mother wants me to be happy.  But my father, well.  He's already seen his ideal daughter.  It was some intern at a company he worked at.  3.7 GPA and a double major who wants to work in his field.  That is absolutely not me.  My grades are up and down. I don't prioritize school or success  I prioritize doing what I love.  But that attitude has never made me popular at the dinner table or at any family gathering because my dad's parents, my grandparents, are just like him and I know they're not happy that all their kids didn't turn out the way my dad did. I'm not my dad and I have no interest in being anything like him, or my mother for that matter, or my grandparents.

But my peace of mind is contingent on my pleasing the parents I live with.  I can't be what he wants and I can't stop being me.  And I won't.

There aren't a lot of options for me in that house.

Big and Shiny and Not On Display in Your Living Room

It's easy to forget why you're doing all this. You're retaking SAT's, killing yourself over AP's, working 40 hours a week, and you're letting yourself go to the point where fingerless gloves actually seem like extra and not a prerequisite for your daily ensemble.

Even if you do everything right and get straight A's (Obviously this example is this IDEAL student, not me) and you get into the college you've been dreaming about, what if at the finish line you can't go?  What if money becomes a large, overwhelming issue?  It'd be like getting to the finish line and getting to stare at the first place trophy, but not being able to take it home with you.

As the spring begins to bear down on us all, summer seems short and fall seems like it's already here.  Some kids drop their studies at this point with one foot in the door.  Spring is going to be a few more months, summer's going to be two months, and then we have the fall.

The autumn, the mighty fall, that first semester, the beginning of that first year, where it seems like everyone drops out.  What the hell was any of it for then?

All of my friends who are of college age dropped out in the first year or didn't go.  All four years of high school leading to up to a huge, disappointing, anticlimactic crapshoot.

You know, you just have to wonder if that's going to be you and if you're okay with that.

I know nothing but not knowing

Remembering someone who isn't there anymore. A hand held, a straight stare for miles into their eyes--it all rushes back to you, a feeling of flight into the past and happiness for what was. 

Sometimes the tease of a good memory can be like the tease of a girlfriend: an annoying little bitch. Sometimes it's more like a gamble you always lose. And at horrible times the memory perpetuates itself as something real because we let it. Gatsby let it ruin him. Porcelain let it erode  her will. The father in "Pretty In Pink" let it come between him and his daughter.

And what do these people have to show for it? A bullet to the heart? Wounds that don't heal? A ghost?

But it's not always death or trauma that makes these memories so painful to have. It's a rejection, someone who said no a long time ago. Someone who teased you with the idea that life was better with them and that home was with them. That they could save you from yourself. But nope. There's someone else to save, someone else to better, someone else to make a home with.

Ghosts of superheroes who didn't really exist. The angel who fell. The memories you can't be sure are memories, because they're so good they're fantastical. The ones you knew if they hadn't happened, you'd be better off because you can't miss someone that you don't know. But you do, because you think you used to know them.

I can be so blindly certain.

My principal likes to tell us, "The world is run by those who show up, on time."

I come in late a lot to school.  Sometimes purposely, sometimes just as an effect of waiting until one in the morning to start sleeping.  In college, we all imagine it's going to be different and we'll change our ways.

I think to some degree that's true.  Paying thousands of dollars a year for the crap you used to get for free could definitely change your mindset.  Especially for some of my friends, who worked overly and extremely hard to win scholarship money--but those are the kids who will arrive early and leave late because they want to chat up the professor and ask as many questions as possible. I mean, they do that now.  They've done it for the past four years.  But it's not like change is such a hurtle, so unheard of.  I've changed my opinions, religious views, and work ethics so many times and I'm only seventeen.  Perspective changes with both time and just what's happening.

But here's the thing: what student doesn't love to miss class? So many kids cut now, so many will in college, but so many of those kids will probably be part of the college-dropout-after-the-first-year statistic.  It may be cliche to say, but I don't want to be another statistic.  I seriously doubt I will; getting the money to go to college is such a hurtle in itself.  It'd be a complete waste of my time and energy if I was going to skip class or not do well.

What my real problem is, is my own personal apathy toward lateness and ditching.  I worry some of my friends won't graduate because they have that same apathy and that we're all watching our attendance rate to make sure it doesn't go below 90%.  I know I'll graduate; I'm a total expert at getting by at this point, even though I think this year's grades will prove that's not the only thing I want.

I don't know what I'm going to do in a real college class yet.  I want to graduate high school first.