glory days

all of the stress and worry that comes with making change eventually subsides and brings out some of the best experiences you can get out of life. towards the end of the summer i successfully managed to:

+ question my ability to return to school
+ lose a good handful of hair worrying over finances
+ withstand the insanity associated with living at home
+ drive 300 miles with a mattress set attached to my car with virtually nothing but dental floss at a speed of 60mh on the highway along with 3 tons of miscellaneous items shoved into my trunk
+ get settled into my very first apartment that has a considerably low rape + theft rate for the city of savannah
+ score regular hours at my mundane lifeguarding job
+ return to school a much happier, self-fulfilled person than i was at the beginning of the summer.

as you can easily see, the tasks of the summer went from painstaking to progressively better conditions. if you were to bust the microscope out and read between the lines of those aforementioned bullet points, you would also discover the tiny things i've learned about myself and this so-called wondrous world of reality that i've been forced to be acquainted with within the past few months. some of these tiny bits of wisdom are as follows:

+ strawberry jelly is more expensive than grape. (i was a devout fan of strawberry but now i've switched to the dark side.)

+ the heavier your car weighs the worse your gas mileage (compare one tank of gas and 4 hours getting to savannah to 2 and a half tanks and 6...)

+ when choosing an apartment, make sure the previous tenant didn't let their pet bunny roam around and play the shit-pellets-in-random-places game. (it took some good creeping to find out who the culprit was.)

making the big move into independence has been humorous nonetheless. even though i could write a whole book about the challenges of maintaining a stocked fridge on a college budget, i will say that my meals have never been close to poverty. thanks to a certain someone and her countless generosities (and i did help in some cases too, mind you) i've actually been eating well beyond the expected par.

we both discovered that with the right mix of leftover ingredients and a little bit of intuition, a gourmet meal can be created out of practically nothing. i've been so amazed at the outcome of our little experiments that i'm even considering starting a separate blog to show college students the world beyond Ramen noodles - and trust me, young grasshoppers, it is a large and expansive one.

other than the many discoveries of youth and young adulthood, school has been occupying my time as expected. hope all is well with you and your place in life.

cheers,
erica