*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.