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You should have warned me how time consuming art classes are after I told you I was going to minor in it.

Or maybe you forgot I told you that.

...Or maybe I didn't tell you that. Although I could have sworn I did.

Bond, Dainger Bond

(If you're dreadfully bewildered by all of this newness, go read this post, which will hopefully acclimate you to the changes I've made.)

I was pretty angry with you for a while, there.  I've been frustrated for the past two weeks or so because you guys never comment and I was starting to feel like I was blogging for absolutely no reason, to absolutely no one.

Mona

I've been completely bugged about how awful my last blog post was, and it's bothering me so much that I'm writing another one.

MONA.

Mona is the little woman that sits on my wrist all day long.  When she's not there I still push back my sleeve to check on her.  It's instinctive.

She's a heartbeat that follows me everywhere I go, counting away my seconds and minutes tirelessly.  When I slow down and lift her up to my ear, I can hear the time ticking as it retreats.  

Mona's been dunked in a tank full of sting rays, drenched in a sudden downpour on the W&L campus, constantly knocked against table edges and chair backs.  She's got some scratches and a thread is loose on her leather band.  She's not perfect.  I've had to reset her a few times because she's gotten off-time, but for some reason that makes me love her more.  We're both ladies just trying to do the best that we can at our task.

My little woman is a classy one, instantly recognizable.  People are always telling her how pretty she is.  She keeps smiling her enigmatic smile, giving away nothing.  

Let me tell you about her smile.  Boy, it's a wonderful smile.  I wrote a little poem, just a stanza, thinking about the gentle curve of her minuscule lips.  Bear with it.

I know a girl with a Mona Lisa mouth
boy she looks so scared most of the time
bracing against braces
as they cut her up
but when she smiles, she seems so satisfied.

She knows that she's not perfect, and she's accepted it.  She's satisfied with her scratched face and her fading buckle.  She's still beautiful.

That's why I always have a space on my wrist for Mona.  She's a pretty little thing, sure, but she's more than that.  She's a mystery, she's a legend, she's shared in my adventures and my mundane tasks.  I feel like a girl with braces that are rubbing against the inside of my mouth, but when I can get past the pain and manage a smile...  I just hope it's Mona's smile.  

In fact, I want more than Mona's smile.  I want a Mona Lisa heart.  I want a big heart that keeps ticking and trying.  I want a Mona Lisa attitude that keeps me smiling no matter what.

Right now, I'm about to zonk out, so I'll just go to bed before my words start running together.  Hopefully this post is a wee bit better than that shoddy last one I scraped together.

Night-o, all. 

Facebook Fast and My Life As A Bookworm

Now that I've returned from my Facebook hiatus, and I'm currently procrastinating a history paper (die, America and the Enlightenment, die!) I think it's high time that I update you.

Side note: I think I'm going to name my first little dog лапушка.  Lapushka.  Little Paw.  Isn't Russian just adorable sometimes?

This week was so wonderful, at least in the beginning.  I went outside all of the time so I couldn't hear Facebook's siren call, and I adventured.  I read books, which I'll tell you about later, I wrote things, I watched Anna Karenina.  I returned all of my library books and checked out six new ones.  I wrote letters, picked flowers, got hit on by ten year olds, which is a true story.  I can still hear their pre-pubescent voices from down the street.  "Hey, what's your name?  He likes you!  He wants to kiss you!" the kid on the bike is shouting, ratting out his friend on the bike next to him.  They had Southern accents and it was really funny.

It was hard, not going on Facebook.  I'm not going to pretend like it wasn't.  It seems ridiculous, having an addiction to a social networking site, especially since I'm not one of those avid Farmvillers and I don't have eleventy-billion friends to stalk.  Clicking on the Facebook link in my favorites bar has become compulsive, though, and it kind of scares me how often I go to the internet when I so much as pause in my homework.

cont'd...

Goodnight At Last

The most obvious thing to talk about now is Christmas, but I don't have anything to say about it.  It's been like the rest of the days that I've been spending at home; a little out of place, completely uneventful.  I'm finding myself saying "back home"


and not for the first time, I'm realizing that New Jersey isn't completely home anymore.  It's really a hard thing to wrap my head around, that the house I grew up in, the place where my family is, isn't necessarily my home.  That I could even feel at home anywhere but here is odd.  I s'pose it's a part of becoming an adult.  I'm experiencing all sorts of conflicting feelings and I DON'T LIKE IT.

I'm not saying that I hate being home and that I don't feel welcomed.  Almost the opposite; I'm falling easily back into place, like I never left.  And that's part of the problem.

I know it seems crazy and I'm probably going to sound just like every other suburban kid that goes off to college, the road paved and paid for by their parents.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that I'm getting the heads shaking, wry smiles of any adults that are reading this.  Sorry; you guys have already been through this.

The problem is that I'm not who I was three months ago.  And this is where I start to sound like a melodramatic teenager (which I still am, mind you).  I know that three months is not a long time ago.  I know that, in the grand scheme of a human life, three months is nothing.  Almost insignificant.  But the last three months have not felt insignificant to me.  I've gained the freedom to finally be the me that I've been trying to become, and I feel so good about it.

So, I'm falling back into the place that 18-year-old, pre-college me left behind, and I don't want to.  I don't like it.  I want to be able to be the new me wherever I go, but New Jersey is holding onto things that I shed.  It's as simple as a name.  It's as simple as coming back and being called something that I don't like, that feels just a little foreign to me.  A niggling reminder in my ears that I'm still not home yet.

I'm sorry, home, if I've offended you at all.  I still love you, I still appreciate you.  I wouldn't trade you for anything.  But I'm moving on, now, and every time I come back, it gets harder.  I feel less at home.  I'm starting to make myself my own, and I wish you could understand that.  I know it's hard, that it means breaking some habits that you maybe feel like you shouldn't have to break.  But I promise that I'll appreciate it .

I love you guys.  Thanks for reading my late-night rants and the silly things that I think about.  Goodnight at last.