*insert creative title here*

Well, I'm an adult now. I bought a machete. Because adults can buy machetes, and as previously stated, I am an adult now. I figured I would get a lot more use out of it than I would out of a lottery ticket or cigarettes or going to jail or any of the other things adults can accomplish, because you can throw fruit in the air and chop it. Like in Fruit Ninja, aka the best app ever. Right now Reina's dad has it because he's going to sharpen it and put on a leather hilt and make it even more awesome and stuff, but I'll take a picture and put it up when I get it back. I'm still trying to think of a name for him anyway.
Sooo yeah, so far being 18 is just like being 17 except I have a lot more freedom to screw up! It's great!.....
But I do like being able to say things like, "Pfffft, curfew? Pfffft I'm 18, what's a curfew? Pfffttt." and such.

So anyway, I have literally been listening to the Tarzan soundtrack nonstop for at least a week now. And if you've seen Tarzan, you might know that the soundtrack consists of four songs by Phil Collins. Everywhere I go I find myself singing things under my breath like, "I wanna know, can you show meee, I wanna know about the strangers like meee!" and "Put your faith in what you most believe in - two worlds, one familyyy!" I am also developing hand motions. I got Shawn to watch the movie with me last night and it was soo great. It reminded me why exactly I always pretended to be Tarzan when I was little. Nothing makes me happier than Disney movies. And I'm not ashamed by that in the least. Everyone tells me they would never expect me to like Disney movies... I mean, I understand that I tend to radiate animosity and find slight satisfaction in crushing other people's joy at times, but that doesn't mean I'm so heartless that I don't like Disney movies. Or that I don't know every word to every song in nearly every single one.

In other news, I have a condition. Scolionophobia. I have it. It's the fear of school, and it is a serious matter. Now I just have to find out what the technical term for "fear of homework" is, because that one might even be more prominent in my life. I mean it. I can't do it. Homework, I mean. I just can't. I'm taking one class, people. You'd think the less homework you have, the easier it would be to get done. This is false. I find that as my level of needed educational responsibility decreases, my level of laziness - I mean, fear - increases. Even if I enjoy the subject, if it is labeled as homework or any other thing people say I "have" to do... I just can't do it. I stare at it and I want to do it, but I can't. Every single week I go home from class on Monday and sit down and say I'm going to get it done on the first day and not save it for the weekend... and every Monday I just sit there and stare at it. Then the rest of the week I forget about it until the weekend comes, when I stare at it some more and eventually decide that there's no point in starting it now that I'll have to rush it and do a crappy job, so I'll just start over fresh next week. And then I'm back where I started. It's awful, it really is.

Oh, here's a funny story. It has to do with me and education. So, there's this thing for homeschoolers called KAT. It stands for Kalamazoo Area Tutors. It's basically school for homeschoolers every Monday... we sign up for different classes for up to five blocks and we go to real classrooms with real teachers and yes, real kids our age. Moms love it because then they don't have to teach us stuff themselves, thus turning the idea of *home*schooling into a total myth. Kids hate it because it is pretty much hell on earth. However, when I was in 8th grade, it was a party. That was when I met Kaitlyn - we became friends by sitting across the room from each other in science class and seeing how many times we could throw a pen back and forth while the teacher's back was turned. I could go on forever about stories from that science class, but those aren't the stories I'm trying to tell right now.

It was the year that Devos was running for some something or other and a bunch of us homeschoolers volunteered to make phone calls for his campaign on voting day. Then that night we got to go to a big party at the Radisson where we all watched Devos lose the election on a big tv screen. But while I was sitting there watching all the politicians, I got thinking about the Government. I thought, "Man, the government can do whatever it wants... they tell everyone what to do and we don't have a choice but to do it. Talk about being at the top of the food chain. Talk about power." And that's when I turned to my friend, Dan, and said, "KAT should have a student council." Knowing that Dan was set on going into politics at the time and knew a bunch about that type of thing, and all I knew was that I wanted to have more power than the average KAT student, I told him that he could be the President and I could be Vice. I also had a crush on him at the time and thought that maybe conceding a small portion of power to him before myself would help win him over or something, I don't really know. Anyway, we got all our plans together and went before the KAT board with the idea. They loved it. They asked us why we thought we would make a good President and Vice President and we delivered answers like pros. We made a sign-up sheet for anyone interested in being our secretary or one of six representatives. We interviewed them, narrowed it down to who would complete the job description best, and then made the phone calls that would change their lives. Yeah, it was a pretty big deal. If you could hear the dramatic soundtrack to my life that is playing through my head as I recall these memories, you'd understand.
Before long, we had our complete, nine person student council. It was announced at lunch and that day I looked out over the 300 students and thought to myself, "This land is mine, all mine!" I don't actually remember what I thought, but I do remember feeling pretty dang important.
For a couple weeks everything was great. I got to make rules and force my opinion on everyone else. But after a little while, things went south for me. See, before the birth of the student council, I had been apart of the "trouble table" which was my group of friends that sat in study hall and rather than studying, we liked to play games... card games, truth or dare (mostly dare), all sorts of things. We always got yelled at by the Nazi hall monitors for being too loud. Now, after the student council, all the monitors expected me to be an "example." But I didn't want to give up my friends or my games! It started to seem like no matter how loud everyone else was being, if I said one word, I was the only one that got in trouble (foreshadow for the rest of my life). The monitors began swarming me like vultures. Pretty soon I was almost sure that there was some conspiracy that all the homeschool moms wanted me out of office! At first I tried to fight back by actually being quiet in study hall and following all the rules. But that became indescribably boring, and not even my position of power was worth throwing away the rest of my year of fun. Besides, the hall monitors were crazy. Halfway through my term, they issued a dress code that was simply outrageous. Girls were getting sent home for having holes in the knees of their jeans.
One day I mad a fake list of rules with one of my friends and put it on the bulletin board. I don't remember every single rule we wrote, but they ranged from things like, "If you have a hole in your jeans, you are a pagan and must shave your head," and "If you are wearing anything tighter than a potato sack for a shirt, you will be sacrificed to the heathen gods."
The list was confiscated and I was cornered. Literally, I remember being in the corner by a fake tree when the leader of the KAT board approached me, asking if I'd written the list. "The list," they would say, as if saying it was the same thing as talking about a cereal killer. All I could do was laugh. That's all I can ever do in situations where normal people might either cry or apologize... when I don't know what to do with my face, I smile nervously and when I just don't know what to say, I laugh. It's a problem I struggle with to this day, and it's gotten me in worse trouble on several occasions. I also am the absolute queen of inappropriately-timed jokes, but that's a whole different issue.
Anyway, that was pretty much the end of my student council career. It's not like I got fired or something, I still ran meetings and completed tasks, but from that point on it was pretty much understood by everyone that I wasn't going to take it seriously anymore. Still, as much annoyance as I might have caused the Nazis, they owe me for coming up with the idea in the first place, seeing how it's grown and now is actually a pretty legitimate big deal.

Yep, I'm pretty sure that was the year I found out that school and I just had clashing personalities and would probably never get along. Not just due to that particular incident... my entire 8th grade year in general convinced me that school is just not for me. Not because it was bad - but because it was really, really good. On a social level, I mean. I'm pretty sure that was when I started realizing how much more there was to life than sitting in a class room and doing homework.
And now here I am, suffering from scolionophobia.

Eh.

I don't know what I'm about to say, it just feels like I haven't said anything on here for a while.
Let's seeeee.
I suppose I'll just start at the beginning of this week and work forward, and maybe something at least semi-interesting will come out of it.

Monday: ....was all a blur because I pulled an all-nighter Sunday night to finish reading a book for a test on Monday morning that turned out to be a take home test anyway. That was just super awesome.

Tuesday: Oh! I'm in a homeschool co-op at my church on Tuesdays, and right now we're studying (I like to use the word "studying" in reference to co-op because it makes it sound like we're actually doing real school-type things) astronomy. We watched this video about the universe and ya know what, typically when I think about the "universe," I'm really just picturing our solar system. And I mean, just our solar system alone is pretty massive. It's got a lot of big planets and some little ones and a crap load of stars. But when you zoom out to our whole galaxy, you can't even pick out our solar system. It's microscopic in comparison to the whole Milky Way. So then I thought, "Dang, the Milky Way is freaking enormous." But THEN the video zoomed out again, and as the camera slowly pans out, the Milky Way disappears within the first like two seconds of the panning. By the time we're looking at the entire universe, we're seeing trillions and trillions of little glowing specks that are all of our galaxies. And that's only what we can see with our telescopes or whatever. Who knows how much is actually out there beyond that. So basically, here I am, one person out of billions on the planet, which is just one planet out of hundreds in the solar systems, which is just one solar system out of trillions in the galaxy, which is just one galaxy out of the gazillions in the universe. Needless to say, I left co-op feeling outrageously insignificant.

But then I got thinking, I mean, okay, there's literally an infinite amount of stuff out there that we can't even see. Why would God create something so incredibly boundless if it all revolved around tiny Earth? Was He just bored? I mean, I suppose it's possible that He just did it so we could marvel and all that... but my brain wanted to have a little more fun than that, so it started sparking ideas that what iffffff.... IFFFF... life did exist on other planets? Not that I believe in little, green martians or anything, but what if there's another, or even several other planets on which humans live? I used to think that idea was ridiculous, purely because I figured God would tell us in the Bible if He had made a bunch more life-bearing planets or not. Buuut I mean, the Bible is the history of the earth, right? So what IF there is another planet with their own Bible about their own story and God's unique work there, too? And THEN my brain got thinking that IF this were the case, how crazy would those worlds look? I mean, God's so creative that I don't feel like He'd make a bunch of identical worlds. Like, we have mountains and rivers and jungles and all that, but what kinds of terrain could exist on other worlds that we can't even wrap our puny minds around? The options are literally endless.

I've done quite a bit of pondering on this idea. I promise I'm really not a freak or anything, but I like to think that it's at least a possibility.

Wednesday: One of my best friends, Kaitlyn, spent the night (go here if you wanna read about the last time she and I hung out). I accidentally almost broke her up with her boyfriend all night. But it's really not my fault that he couldn't take a joke. We also tried to make pancakes....

As you can see, it turned out really well. We did get it mostly right by the third try, though.

Thursday: It was mine and Shawn's sixth month anniversary of dating (aka 18 years and/or INFINITY in Bri-dating time). He wouldn't tell me where we were going, just that it was about an hour and a half away. So we drove to Indiana, and low and behold....

 

You might not understand the significance of Chick-fil-A, but to me it is pretty much a little chunk of Colorado/Heaven, and this was the closest one within 150 miles of Kalamazoo. Basically I have the best boyfriend ever. He also bought me a Star Wars shirt that I've been begging for for like a thousand centuries. Then I got home and my mom gave me my laptop for an early birthday present. It was a good day.

Friday: Oh hey, that's today. At my church, we do this annual Spaghetti Dinner/Variety Show as a fund raiser for mission trips. That was tonight. Nothing particularly blog-worthy happened there. I mean I dropped the punch ladle in the punch and had to fish it out with tiny coffee-stirrers, but that was pretty much the peak of excitement.

In two days (well, tomorrow, if you count right now as Saturday) I will be an adult. I can't wait to buy lottery tickets and get tattoos and smoke and go to jail and get into events without needing a parent or guardian's signature!

That was my way of saying that I'm pretty sure the only significance of turning 18 is that you are granted a lot more freedom to screw up. Not that that fact takes any ounce of excitement out of my system, though.

In other news, here is a picture chart (pictures and charts are two of my favorite things in the whole wide world) off of Hyperboleandahalf that describes the system of my life perfectly.

I need to blow this picture up and tape it to my whole ceiling so when I'm laying in bed at night thinking about how pathetic my attempts at a "normal life" are, I can at least laugh. This picture is from the hyperboleandahalf post titled, "This Is Why I'll Never Be An Adult." Yeah. Refer to my pie charts in the last post if you want to know how I'm still feeling about thaat.

Well, I suppose that's all.

I am mildly disappointed with this post, because I really don't feel that it lived up to the whole "Shenanigan" theme whatsoever. So, I'm sorry that this is so real-life-ish and not very funny or interesting. Mehhh.

 Here, watch this if you want to laugh. Or at least want to know what makes me laugh, if you don't end up laughing.

"So if you care to find me, look to the western sky...."

Well, here I am. Back in Michigan.
Have I ever mentioned my despise for this state?
It's not so much Michigan specifically. Actually, I quite like its unique shape, Great Lakes, greenness (for those three months that aren't a frozen death trap), and definitely the people it contains. I like the grid-shape of the country roads so that everywhere leads everywhere whether you start off knowing where you're going or not, and I like that everyone questions the existence of my town when I say, "I'm from Kalamazoo." And the endless amount of memories I contain from the village of Richland is far too great to deny my affection for the tiny place.
But folks, everyone loves Michigan's Adventure... until you go to Cedar Point. Or Disneyland. Or Universal Studios. It's a comparison thing. When you take green trees and put them next to mile-high mountains, it puts things into perspective.

Something I've noticed lately about other people's blogs is they have a lot more pictures than I do. I'm feeling a little incompetent in that area, so here are some edited (I'm addicted to editing pictures lately) pictures from Colorado for your viewing pleasure. There would be a ton more if any of the other trillion people that took pictures there would put theirs up on facebook already....

 

So, I'm moving to this place in approximately four months and it's freaking me out. I'm excited beyond belief but also, as previously stated, extremely freaked out. Why? Well let me tell you.
I'm moving into a house with four small children and am being forced to go to college and work.
Sounds like a normal life, you say? Doesn't sound scary at all, hm? Well, let me explain via pie charts:

 Do you see where this could be slightly (mind-blowingly) intimidating (paralyzing) to me?
I've never freaked out on any of my four trips to Colorado until this time. Probably because every other time it's seemed really, really far away still. But not anymore. I also had to go visit the community college I have to go to and all schools just smell like failure to me, so that probably contributed. Failure tends to freak me out. Even just the prospect of failure. I mean really don't get me wrong here, I am totally, completely pumped to move and live in Colorado and all that. It's more the practical areas of life like work and the aforementioned college that have suddenly hit me with a massive load of petrifying terror.
But anyway.

Oh, here's a funny story. I puked while I was there. Yeah, there were like a thousand of us Michiganders there this time and one of them puked the day he arrived. And you know how it goes, when one person pukes, the rest of the people tend to start scurrying about like ants, trying to ready their defenses and put up their magical disease-deflecting barriers. I'm no different. Of course, if I'm going to get sick, I'd prefer it to be sooner rather than later. And that's what I got. I'd had a stomach ache all day already but blamed it on the seven cookies I'd eaten the night before. But then like an hour after Peter puked, I reaaallly started feeling it. And you know what, other than my drastically fluctuating temperature, painful regurgitation, passing out, and feeling like I was about to disintegrate into a horrible pile of death, it wasn't that bad. You know why? Because I found out that there's a certain level of invincibility that comes along with being sick first. I mean, I can't think of a much worse feeling than the anticipation of sickness. Like, when one person who you've been around and who you'll continue to have to be around for the coming days gets violently ill, you pretty much feel like you're trapped in a house with death itself and it's only a matter of time before it devours you. You're just a tiny, helpless bunny stuck in a cage with an enormous, bloodthirsty tyrannosaurus. But then, once you just come down with the sickness yourself, then you are the T-Rex. You are feared. You are untouchable. Invincible. Powerful.
However, your sense of power becomes very limited when you are trapped in a tiny bathroom for three hours because certain people in the house are beyond psycho when it comes to their phobia of germs. Seriously, I went from a T-Rex to an African-American in the 1950's in a matter of minutes. And I'm really not being racist. Admittedly, I have never been black, nor have I lived in the 50's... but I imagine I now have a slight understanding of what they must have felt. And let me tell ya, being ostracized is not the most fun thing that could ever happen to you.

Well, would you look at that, it's almost 4am. Mmmm goodnight.



P.S. This post sort of sounds like I spent 10 days in Colorado feeling scared out of my mind and sick and ostracized. This is false. It was a great trip.