Journey to Glam

Hiiii everyone! I’M BACK! and I’ve genuinely missed you guys; I’ve felt like I’ve been gone a long long time, perhaps because you were always on my mind I kept telling myself that I was going to write a blog entry TODAY! then too many days passed and I didn’t know what to do a blog entry on and pretty soon, I had so many real people come into my life (i.e. HUGE groups of family and friends for graduation and festivities) that I didn’t have time to sit at my computer for a whole five minutes let alone time for virtual friends.

So here’s a few thing that were true about my life when I went away, CSI style in bullet format and a false bullet thrown in for good measure.

• I took my MCATs; the scores aren’t in yet but man alive did I have some up and down moments in the days leading up to it. Thank you God for getting me through it..and thank you friends, family, birds, bees and everyone that has heard me whine and moan for the past century about it.
• I actually cried a little when the janitor who was cleaning up puke inside an elevator at 2 am gave me a pitying look when he saw all the books I was carrying for my night session before the MCAT.
• I made it through 3 finals, 2 projects and the MCATS in 100 hours after that last post you guys have been staring at for weeks.
• I fed grilled cheese to a dog with a french pedicure better than mine ever will be.
• I walked the stage…3 times for graduation and once for the Award I mentioned.
• I wanted to poke my eyes out if anyone every told me again how valuable my degree is or how many opportunities I had open before me. Death by a stapler to anyone that mentions again 5 life lessons they wish they had known at graduation. You learn life lessons people, no matter how many times you tell me…I’m gonna have to go through it to learn.
  
• Listening does not equal learning.
  
• I have officially tried on every. single. dress. in Dallas in pursuit of a decent graduation dress (I have no idea why it mattered so much! …It didn’t at first and then I was so frustrated that I had spent all this time on a graduation dress that I spent more time looking for a good one!) So all that to say, if you need to find a particular type of dress — I would so be the person to ask; clearly I know the selections at every store from Dallas to Waco.
• The Hilton Anatole is a good place to go for rich men and cheap drinks.
• If you must go to a nightclub called “Purgatory” you need to do it right before you graduate…if not, you may not be able to call yourself a self respecting human.
• I contemplated stealing a string of pearls off a persnikty looking chiwawa this weekend. Sadly this is not my false bullet.
• I set sail for Alaska tomm and won’t be blogging for ten days, we have no internet (well, free internet) on the cruise and I can’t afford $0.55 a min internet.
• I had to pull a friend away from licking vodka off a man’s nipples when he started to show more than just his chest.
• I was thankful for family, friends and everyone that came out to support me this weekend.
• $1 margaritas will show their true colors eventually.
• I made about 30 lbs of hummus this weekend. Some people have vodka seeping out their pores after graduation. Me…well I eat my weight in hummus at a party with more Egyptians than I will ever know in my life.
• I couldn’t really come up with an outrageously false bullet.

Everyone has a moment in their lives that lives just under their skin, etched forever like a lightly fading scar. Its during this infamous moment that time seems to slow and both confusion and clarity hit with such strength that they knock you right off your feet. The clarity seems so crystal clear and the confusion about why it didn’t make sense any earlier than now is clear too. If you haven’t had this sort of moment yet, I promise you will; you’ll know it when you see it.

To say that I enjoy these moments of clarity would be an understatment…no,  no, I don’t just enjoy them…they feed my soul and juice up the deepest parts of my being.  You know why? Its because I have always enjoyed power; No I’m not talking about being the ruler of the free world kind of power but I enjoy feeling powerful. I enjoy being in control of my life, my thoughts, my abilities. I enjoy knowing where the bread crumbs lead.

And luckily up until now, it was easy to live in that enjoyment because these past two decades of my life, it was easy to know. There was a right and a wrong to every decision that I made; there was a “good” way to be and a “bad” way to be and as long as I followed the path that others had set out before me, I would be fine. Go to school, keep good company, say no to drugs, stay focused on the good things, graduate from college. Check, check, check, check and check. Okay, done! what now?

Well somewhere along that path, somewhere between backstreet boys and coldplay,  between monopoly money and my first american express, the black and white in my life turned into a mushy, opaque gray. I’m realizing now how lucky I was to have good and bad decisions to choose from because those don’t seem to exist anymore…everything is just a variable that can go one way or another and theres no one to tell you what to do anymore. It liberating, promising, hopeful and paralyzing all at the same time. Every moment that is yet to pass has the promise of being molded into something better and greater than I can imagine all the while terrifying me as I step into unknown horizons.

But then, that power that comes with feeling in control, the power that comes with knowing that the crazy mismatched pieces of my life were fit together by me…well that moment of clarity and self conviction makes all that agonizing and scrutiny worthwhile. And if I fall in a wrong decision, if I die in a lion’s fight, well choosing to do so is the difference between walking onto the battlefield and walking onto the battlefield with your head held high. At least then, the slightly fading scars you bear are authentic and vintage.

And then, just like that, somewhere in between learning to dot my i’s and writing a thesis,  somewhere in between a school playground and the real world, somewhere in between britney spears…and a more psychotic britney spears, I stand knee deep in opaque, gray muck finally ready to be labeled an adult.