All I Can Do

You can't change people, but you can change the future.

I promise I will try to understand you. If I can't, I will try to accept you anyway.

I promise I will love you and tell you so.

I promise if you do something differently than me I won't act like it's wrong.

I promise I'll call you, even when you don't answer.

I promise I'll think about you all the time.

I promise I will teach you everything I know and how to learn stuff I don't. I hope this gives you a little preparation for life.

I promise I want you to be who you are, not who you think you should be.

I promise to express my feelings and allow you to express yours and this may be very hard. We can work at it together. We will allow time and space for when we need it. We'll never let ourselves down.

I promise to support you in everything you do. You will always make me proud, even when you feel like you've failed.

I promise I can't protect you from everything, but I will help you learn how to protect yourself and what to do when protection doesn't work.

I promise to be there for you. You will always come first.

When you are grown up and you have your own life, I promise I will still worry about you and try to take care of you. I hope this doesn't piss you off too much.

I promise there is good in every member of our family, and they all love in their own special way. That doesn't mean they are better than you. Most likely they are more lost and scared as adults than you ever were as a child. This doesn't make you better than them.

I promise not to make you eat food you just don't like, but you will not get away with cheese sandwiches every day.

I promise you will die. But before you do, you have a lot of stuff to do here first. No one gets to leave without doing something.

I promise I'm not perfect, but I know I'm the best mommy out there for you. I hope you agree at least sometimes.

The Latest Craze

OK, so recently I've been thinking about this whole myspace thing. I understand that it's a great way to keep in touch with random people you don't really care about, and possibly meet new people that you may grow to not care about, but what scares me the most about it is how time-consuming it is. A very respected and loved friend of mine, someone who until last night I thought had a pretty good head on his shoulders, actually admitted to me that he spent an hour a day on myspace. Not on the internet, not on instant messager, not checking email, but just on myspace. And whats worse, according to my mom who's the boss of a lot of 18-25 year olds, people sometimes spend more than that!! She actually had to FIRE someone because they spent more time on myspace than on their job. Nobody should blame her, of course, because this person's job is handling large amounts of everyman's money. Do you want someone who is in charge of your money goofing off on myspace? Exactly.

So far, I have only met one other person who agrees with me on the horror of myspace. I dread asking L.'s opinion. Honestly, a false hope that L. will agree with me is all that's keeping me away from myspace. Anyone who knows me well knows that I don't do well with any kind of internet/computer addiction (see The Sims, Dynomite, blogging/blog reading, Mugglenet, CL, etc.) If I start using myspace, it won't be long until I'm one of those faceless drones who obsesses over updating their profile and keeping tabs on third grade playmates. Also, in the past few months I have spent a great deal of energy rallying against myspace and well, nobody likes a hypocrite.

But if I find out L.'s been using it... all hope is lost. So if you see me on myspace, blame peer pressure.

I'd like to say I've been busy....

...but I really haven't been, at least not enough to justify ignoring my blog for almost a month. I thought about it, I even thought about it while in the vicinity of a computer, with time to write, but I just didn't have a subject. When the Oscar nominations came out, I was prepared to make a post but... I'm actually rather satisifed with them this year. New episodes of "Lost" have been on for weeks and I haven't commented on any of them because... well... I actually don't have a lot to say about them. Why my sudden loss of opinion?

Well I've been going through an emotional rollercoaster recently, which hasn't beeen all that bad. I'm starting to realize that even though I thought I was all "grown up" this whole time (meaning, since I finished high school), that I actually haven't been officially thrusted into adulthood- not until this year. It got me thinking about college and what it means. Now that I'm officially out in the adult world, I feel like college almost didn't happen.

College doesn't prepare you for the real world. If it did, then the following things would be true:

1) You'd have constant access to free high speed internet 24 hours a day;
2) There'd be a free newspaper at your fingertips created just for you with everything you found important, also sharing 90% of your personal views;
3) At any given moment, you'd have at least 4 people within 5 feet of you that you could, in theory, strike up a conversation with and it wouldn't be weird;
4) Bibles would always be constantly handed to you;
5) If you wanted drugs or alcohol all you had to do was walk down your hallway and knock on someone's door;
6) If you wanted sex, all you'd have to do is walk down your hallway and knock on someone's door and see if anyone was drunk and flirty;
7) you'd always have something constructive to do: reading, homework, protest, jumping into the river at 3am in the morning with nothing but your undies on;
8) Getting pizza and/or sandwitches would be as easy as snapping your fingers or walking around the corner;
9) Nobody would stare at you if you wore your pajamas for three days straight;
and lastly, 10) Nobody would expect any real work from you, as long as you made sure they knew you were a "student".

Now, some of those things can transfer to the real world, but not in an absolute sense. I went from an environment of almost all people my age, doing exactly what I was doing, always willing to have conversations, to an environment of predominately 4-year-olds, relying on me with their education, future, and safety, always willing to have conversations about their dogs or the time they ate something totally disgusting, like licorice laced with glue. The only stimulation through human contact I get is the 5 seconds I talk to my roommate, aka my ex-boyfriend, which usually ends up in a place hwere we have to separate OR the 5 seconds I talk on the phone to N. or L. when they aren't busy. Through college, my parents were supportive, endearing, and trustworthy, now they either hound me with questions about where I'm going with my life, or unload all of their problems on to me.

Needless to say, I'm having a little trouble adjusting.

I went a little crazy...

... and dyed my hair red with purple streaks. They're subtle streaks though, and J. didn't notice them right off the bat. So far he's the only one who's seen it. I'm about to leave for work so we'll see how many of the kids pick up on it.

I'm not really looking forward to later tonight. I have to do something that I've been dreading doing, but it's the "right thing to do". I just got myself into a situation I knew I shouldn't have, but I did anyway, and now I need to put an end to it before it gets to hurtful. I'm not one of those people who believes irony runs the world, but it is a little strange how every awesome person I meet, who's totally my type and completely datable, turns out to have one fatal flaw that ruins the whole thing. Maybe I'm the one who's flawed, who knows. In a way it's good though, I'll be given another clean slate to try to make it work again. And I'll have free time again and can call my mother. She's been very patient with me.

Notice how I didn't write a review of this week's Lost. Well... it sucked a little too much for me to care, honestly. And did anyone else know that Michael and Susan were never married? This makes me giddy. I am the president of the I Hate Susan Club.

Australia is My Soulmate

Tomorrow is Australia Day. I don't quite understand it but to the best of wikepedia's knowledge, this is a celebration of when the first British ships landed on Australian soil. There are a couple things about this that don't really make sense to me... first off, obviously this is a blatant racist holiday since why they hell would the Aborigines be celebrating the arrival of their oppressors, and second, weren't the original white inhabitants of Australia all British criminals? So either they liked being exhiled from their home in a god-forsaken wasteland (which is was back then, not now) or there's some serious propaganda going on.

I know a few Aussies and honestly they're some of the most laid-back people I've ever met, especially when it comes to their history. They all know it and will patiently recount it for you (since God forbid American education teaches us about anything other than bloody America) but they do so almost robotically, yet good-naturedly. Imagine the voice of the computer on Star Trek attached to the body of Mandy Moore and you'll get the idea of what it's like. They know what's going on but it's really hard to judge if they care or not.

Because of all this I've been debating about whether or not to celebrate Australia Day. One on hand, it'd be really cool to get decked out and try talking in the accent all day, but some people might just be offended. I'll probably end up lookin like a jackass. But I love Australia and always have. Even though I've never been there (sidenote: I've decided that Australia is the #1 Place People Want to Go but Never Actually Do) I imagine it's a lot like here, except with far less bullshit. Ahhh, less bullshit... what a fantastic dream.

Plus they probably have decent health care there and by decent I mean... existing.