Before I start, I realize it has been a long time since my last post and because of that I can't get the intro to Aaliyah's Try Again out of my head...sorry to leave you without a dope beat to step to.
I got a job at a local restaurant/bakery as a waitress/barista and I work there between 30-40 hours a week. I just started the summer workout program I wrote for our team, so I'm making it a habit to workout 5 days a week. I moved into a new house in the middle of April and I spend my Saturdays mowing the grass and trying to make it look halfway decent so that our neighbors (who for the most part maintain nice yards) don't have to walk out the door and stare at the dandelion forest.
All of these new things have been good for me, they keep me busy and keep my mind off of missing my family, friends, and Duke. I really enjoy working at the bakery, it makes me feel useful. It's helped me a lot with my patience, it think it's making me slightly nicer, and I'm learning how to converse with people I don't know at all (when I usually just stay silent). Plus, I like when I get to occasionally help with pie crusts or glaze sugar cookies.
Anyways, today is my birthday, I'm 24. Birthdays have never really been a big deal to me, my parents only let us have parties every 4 years, so I don't get too excited. I am not really sure if they didn't let us have parties every year because they wanted to save money or what the reason was, but I like to think they were teaching us some big life lesson. Something along the lines of no matter what day it is, you're still just like everyone else (wah wah). I kind of like it that way for two reasons: 1) nobody likes that person who has to have a birthday week, get over yourself , and 2) you don't have expectations of how the day should go so when people remember it's your birthday it actually makes you feel special versus expecting everyone to magically remember it's your birthday and being repeatedly let down. The Seagraves' tradition on birthdays is that you can pick out your birthday cereal at the store; growing up my go-to was ALWAYS Lucky Charms, this year it's Frosted Shredded Wheat (Wal-Mart Brand, they pack the wheat together really nicely so it doesn't fall apart in the milk).
I was really compelled to write a blog last week about how much humans were letting me down. I was really upset with human nature in general, I saw people being rude and selfish all week and I couldn't handle it. It made me just feel like there was no hope to change it. On top of everything, I was listening to this two-part podcast on Harper High School in Chicago that made me angry and eventually led me to be so upset that I cried...
...I'm 24 today and there are three things I haven't experienced yet that I wish or thought I would have experienced by now: 1) I've never been in love, but that's a discussion for another blog post, 2) I wish I would have been to Europe, particularly Ireland, Scotland, and England, and 3) I don't know what I'm good at and because of that, I don't know what I want to do.
I'm a person with a lot of interests, I have a lot of hobbies that I try and balance out as much as I can. I like to cook, play guitar, read, go outside, write, workout, music, sports, watch TV shows, and I listen to podcasts (My current subscriptions are: Bobby Bones Show, Dan Patrick Show, NPR: Radio Diaries, This American Life, NPR: TED Radio Hour, and The Rich Eisen Show). Those are the things that I spend most of my time doing, just sometimes I feel like I get so spread out that I haven't really found anything I'm particularly good at. I say "good" loosely, I mean I know I'm pretty "good" at a few things but that doesn't necessarily mean it's something I can shape my life around. I want to be great at something. For instance, my professor told me at the end of my last paper that I was a very good writer. The only problem is that I don't wish to write papers on educational theory and curriculum all the time. Plus, I don't really even find that to be true, writing is just something I like to do. I don't even sit down and put pen to paper or type things out, I just write things in my head. I make up stories (my favorite is The Adventures of Long-Legs and Short-Tail: The story of a girl and her dog), I make visual diary entries when I get upset in order to work issues out in my brain, and I write sections of essay type papers about themes in the book I'm reading. But that's not writing, that's just thinking.
I listen to podcasts when I workout, they take my mind off of what I'm doing and I just go into a different mindset. I like the podcasts I listen to because all of them tell a story in some form or another. I've listened to every Bobby Bones Show podcast since high school and it's become a part of my life so I feel like I'm listening to my friends talk. Dan Patrick might only talk about sports, but he highlights the story lines of the players, the motives of the administration, and constantly reminds me of why I love sports, everything is a story. The NPR podcasts I listen to simply because I like them, they're actually my favorite thing to listen to working out. I feel like I learn something brand new when I listen to the TED Radio Hour (if you follow the link, the last episode is actually on stories) it's such a neat show.
The Harper High podcast I was talking about earlier came from This American Life it was about a two hour show on the inner-city Chicago high school where 29 current and recent students had recently been shot. It hits on gang-violence, gun-violence, and tells the stories of the students and administration living through this. I was listening to this in the midst of people around me (including myself) just upsetting me. People just being mean. So, like I said, I was already angry and I'm listening to these podcasts over about 3 days and my anger just keeps growing. Now when I say I get angry I don't get mad, it's more that I get anxious; I get a feeling that I'll never be able to correct a problem, my stomach is in knots, I feel nauseous, extremely overwhelmed, and in this particular case I felt that all of humanity was screwed. And I felt this way for days. I got really sad. The last section of the podcast the narrator introduces multiple principals and superintendents from some of the most violent schools and school districts across America, he ends with the Miami School District Superintendent who last year alone visited the funerals of 44 students. That's when I cried.
I want to do something that makes a difference, I want to be useful. I have a few things in mind for the next step in my life, but what I'm leaning towards is something that I could very easily suck at. I'm not trying to end world hunger or anything crazy, I just want to be good at something.
***I wrote this blog about 5 hours ago, saved it, and then came back to it. It's slightly (and unexpectedly) depressing and a little bit disjointed; connecting the dots from here to there and back around again, but it's how my brain works. Listening to the podcast about Harper High made me think about my own life and how I want to do something to make a difference like their principal does, I think her last name was Sanders, she was amazing. But, I think she has a gift of working to help others, she can communicate with them on a level of understanding that others can't always reach. I'm frustrated I can't even express my train of thought on the idea and connect it to how I'm feeling in a way I think would make sense to everyone...I guess I'm not too good of a writer after all.***
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